I loop the wrap over my thumb and then immediately across the back of my hand. It goes over my hand three times, tight, and then around my wrist, three times, tight. There’s a ritual to this. I bring the wrap up from my wrist in between my little and ring finger, and then back down to my wrist. Up again, between ring and middle, and back down. Up again, between middle and index, and then back down. Each time, the wrap forms an X across the back of my hand. I loop it between thumb and index and then across the palm of my hand, to lock it in. I wrap the remainder of the cloth around my wrist, and then Velcro it shut. I flex my hand, open and closed.
You’re in the changing room when I enter. You’re talking on the phone, to a colleague about something to do with your work. I look you directly in the eye, the entire time I’m in the changing room. You barely notice me till I walk into the gym.
I face you in the room, both in our corners. Everyone has left except people coming in for a class. We’re nobodies in the ecosystem of this gym.
I stare into your eyes. I’ve obsessed about every second of this fight. I know how to dodge your arms. I know how to move backwards quickly. I have worked out every scenario in my head.
You made me do this. Maybe this was your plan all along. You flap wings at me. The bell rings. I drop my chin, hold up my fists, and breathe.
THICKER THAN BLOOD
* * *
ERIN KELLY
August
‘IS THAT THE BRAND-NEW iPad?’ Heath was up to his shoulders in the hot tub, one dry arm resting on the side, finger on a screen that was tiled with images of Cat. He had his back to Izzy, but could tell by her tone that she would be twisting the hem of whatever ridiculous garment she was wearing. ‘It’s just, if you drop it in the water, that’s the third one this year.’
‘I paid for it,’ he said through a rigid jaw, ‘and if I do drop it, which I won’t, I’ll pay for a new one.’
‘It’s just, it’s the waste?’
Heath reached for another bottle, the eye tattoo winking with the flex of his bicep, and uncapped it with his teeth. Four beers down and it was still too early to tell whether drinking would make him relax around Izzy or stoke his irritation with her. Either way, he was too busy to be interrupted: on the Instagram phase of his nightly cycle through Cat’s social media accounts. He’d already done Twitter and Facebook, and after Instagram, would have to work his way through what he thought of as the associated accounts, the people she called her friends, and the ‘man’ she called her husband. The associated accounts were in some ways more revealing than Cat’s own, as a friend might catch her dropping her guard, exposing the misery behind her heavily filtered life. When it happened, he could go to her. She could only pretend for so long, even to herself, to be totally jazzed about this life Ed had given her, this life of farmers’ markets, group holidays in Provençal gîtes, charity fundraisers, and strawberries and cream at Centre Court, and fucking golfing holidays.
It was a low-activity evening: Cat had liked a couple of things but hadn’t posted herself. If he was lucky he’d only have to go through the cycle once and he’d be done in under two hours.
‘Oh, why d’you have to—’ began Izzy, but the tablet pinged with a notification, and this time Heath snatched it away from her outstretched hand. A new post, a touching attempt at an arty selfie. She was in the garden, aureole around silhouette on the back wall of the Grange, the tumbling violet moor an invitation, an unmade bed laid out behind her. Heath felt the usual sick stirring deep under his belly. He shifted position, hiding himself under the bubbles in case Izzy thought it was for her, then returned to his study of Cat. Why had she kept her face in shadow? Had she been crying? Tears made most women ugly, but when Cat cried her face bloomed pink and white.
Izzy stopped mouth-breathing on the back of Heath’s neck and appeared in front of him. Christ, she was all done up for seduction. Her hair described the barrel of a curling tong, and she was dressed in an awful chiffon kimono thing she called cruise wear. It was supposed to be floaty and seductive, but it was covered in sequins and getting close to her felt like pressing up against a rose bush.
Another ping. Ed had just made his annual Instagram post. Heath was on it in seconds. It seemed that Ed was doing a life-drawing class in the Scottish borders as part of a stag weekend. The charcoal sketch was crap and the woman they were drawing wasn’t even attractive.
It meant, though, that Cat was on her own at the Grange for the first time in ages. He could be there in forty minutes. Pulse hammering, he got out of the tub just as Izzy sank into the bubbles.
‘You can have it to yerself,’ he said, heaving himself over the edge. He dried himself roughly on a towel, pulled on a tracksuit, took a bottle of Laurent Perrier from the drinks fridge, wrapped it in a towel, and threw it into his sports bag.
‘Where are you going? It’s nearly nine o’clock.’
‘Gym,’ he said. Izzy looked at the green bottles lined up on the edge of the hot tub, but she had learned, at last, not to challenge him.
His feet found their path in the divots and tufts they’d walked for as long as he could remember. He could’ve run the route from the Heights to the Grange in ten minutes, but he didn’t want the champagne to fizz, and anyway, he needed to clear his head and think about how he would say it. Below and to the west was the first estate he’d ever built, shoebox houses whose tiny gardens were mocked by the moor. In front of him, the dipping midsummer sun made a thin gold thread on the horizon. A single dazzling bead shone through a hole in the rocky crag that marked the midpoint between her house and his. He’d kissed her for the first time at the foot of those rocks, when they were both fourteen, kissed her, and that was as far as it had gone, the wanting getting worse over the years, and the conversation grinding in ever-decreasing circles. It had taken him years to realise they were all excuses.
‘Foster siblings still count,’ she’d said at first.
‘Don’t be daft. There’s no law against it.’
‘In the eyes of society, though.’ Since when did she care about society? Though they’d been raised under the same roof, she was not his sister; he was her possessor, not her protector, and they both knew it. Whatever they had, it was something thicker than blood.
Then, as they got older: ‘It would destroy our friendship, Heath, can’t you see that?’
‘Let it!’ he’d roared. ‘Let it … smash this misshapen thing and put it back together a new way, the right way.’
Her head had gone into her hands. ‘Will you listen to yourself? Smashing, misshapen. You’re so bloody intense. It was all right when we were kids, but you can’t want to carry on like this for ever.’
It was all he did want. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t wanted it, from the inseparability of their childhood to the present physical ache for her that was so constant he wore it like an extra body part.
‘I mean, come on,’ she’d laughed. ‘Can you honestly see us pushing a trolley around Waitrose together, going to parents’ evening?’
‘Waitrose?’ This was coming out of nowhere.
‘I suppose not. The rate you’re going, we’ll be lucky to afford Morrisons.’
He’d been horrified. ‘This is about money?’ She knew he was struggling, but he’d never thought it mattered to her. To his shame, tears pricked his eyes and made a stone in his throat. He turned his face away.
‘No. Or – not only. It’s about – a kind of life I want.’
‘A life you think you want.’
She’d rolled her eyes. ‘This is exactly what I’m talking about! You don’t know me as well as you think you do.’
‘I know you better than you know yourself.’
But it had niggled at him for months afterwards, and because she seemed to believe that she meant it, he’d gone off to prove himself, starting as a labourer and going in with a mate, flipping properties from Salford to Harrogate. He’d worked on himself, too: got strong and lean. And while he was watching the money stack up, pi
cturing her face the day he walked back into Cat’s life, Ed had stepped in, all breeding and family money and red chinos – and she’d fallen for it. The image of them together, of Ed’s hands on Cat’s skin, was a film Heath couldn’t stop watching even when he closed his eyes. The sick knot of desire inside him, deep and low, tightened like the balling of a fist.
Heath approached the Grange from the back, took their old path along the side of the house, stopping at the window where he and Cat had spied on Ed and Izzy a lifetime ago, taken the piss out of their wooden toys and their side partings. How had they gone from that to this? He leaned against the stone lintel and closed his eyes, not against the memory, but the present. His longing was so powerful that he could almost smell her.
He opened his eyes to see Cat on the other side of the glass, looking past him, out onto the moor. He took a beat to savour how she looked when she didn’t know she was being watched. Her hair was a mess of waves, she wasn’t wearing any make-up, and she looked closer to her girlhood self than Heath had seen in years. She’d lost weight for her wedding and never put it back on, fallen in with that crowd of skeletal ladies who didn’t lunch, all blow-dries and nails. But there was a blown-rose blowsiness to her tonight, and some meat on her bones again, and her name slipped out before he could announce himself.
‘Cat,’ he breathed. She screamed and leaped away from the window. ‘It’s only me. I’m sorry, I thought it’d be a good surprise.’
He’d expected her to push up the sash and put her arms around him, but instead she glanced over her shoulder, held a hand up in conciliation to someone behind her.
‘It’s all right, Ed,’ she said, throwing up the sash window. Heath felt winded. What about Scotland?
‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ said Ed. Even in his fury, Heath had room for a pulse of satisfaction that he’d been Ed’s first guess. He liked the idea of being at the forefront of Ed’s mind, wandering around in there with mud on his boots.
‘For God’s sake, Heath.’ Ed was still in the same outfit from the Instagram photo, and Heath had the feeling he’d somehow been tricked into visiting the Grange. ‘What is it with you and windows?’ There was something in Ed’s tone Heath hadn’t heard before. Usually he at least managed to feign civility for Cat’s benefit, but now a trembling dimple in one cheek suggested he was trying not to laugh at him.
His fingertips tingled. Something was very wrong.
‘What’re you doing here, Heath?’ said Cat.
The truth – that he had come here to claim her – sounded ridiculous now, even in its diluted version: ‘I had to see you, that’s all.’
She looked – was that pity?
‘All right!’ said Ed. ‘I’ve put up with your Jeremy Kyle crap out of politeness, but enough’s enough. You can’t just keep turning up here. I won’t have you upsetting Cat in her condition.’
In her condition. Cat’s glow: Ed’s newfound confidence. Heath went very cold, then very hot. She had the grace to drop her eyes, at least. ‘Due in February,’ she said. ‘Don’t look like that. I want you to be happy for me.’
But he had dropped his sports bag in the shrubbery. He was back at the Heights in nine minutes, a personal best. Izzy was still awake, after making her own raid on the drinks fridge, so he took her to bed for the first time in months. It was simple mechanics, drainage and release: it had to go somewhere, and Izzy was so grateful she cried.
February
Heath spent Valentine’s eve closing a deal for his next development with a new contractor. They’d be building in Hertfordshire on the edge of a nothingy plain they thought was real countryside. It would be his biggest project yet, and it got him away from women. It was bad enough seeing Cat’s body changing on a screen, without her parading the real thing in front of him. The men celebrated their signatures with dinner in the hotel restaurant. During the meal he’d left his phone charging behind the bar, on silent. After they’d shaken hands and parted, he retrieved his phone, and, in the second it took to register the twenty missed calls from Izzy, her number flashed up again over Cat’s picture.
‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ she started, and he knew. He staggered into a wall as though he’d been shoved. ‘I’m with Ed now,’ sputtered Izzy. ‘Detached placenta. The doctors did what they could, but it was too late. The baby was a little girl. They’re calling her—’ He threw the phone at the far wall. The screen shattered Cat’s face into shards, then went black.
He bypassed denial and went straight to guilt. He should never have left her. He should be with her, holding her hand, catching her soul before it slipped away for ever. The impulse propelled him to his feet, but the vertigo lurch told him he wouldn’t get a mile up the motorway before he lost his licence or worse.
Anyway, he couldn’t trust himself to be in the same county as the child.
‘Triple whisky,’ he said to the barmaid, after she’d picked up the mess of silicone and glass. She bit her lip.
‘I’m not supposed to serve …’
Heath slid a fiver her way. ‘Charge the drink to the room, and that’s for you.’
She was a good listener, Lenka or Lilja, or whatever her name was, keeping the drinks coming, and nodding in all the right places when he talked about Cat.
‘I mean, what kind of hospital lets a woman die like that in 2017? More to the point, what kind of man allows that to happen to his wife? Put another double in there, that’s a good girl.’
He woke himself up the next morning by calling her name. The twist of his mouth opened up a deep scratch from the night before. There was vomit on the floor, and a single artificial fingernail snapped on the bedside table. Everything after Izzy’s phone call was a blur. He remembered the bar, note after note after note changing hands, and then his own slurred apology, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, and a soft accented voice; I don’t want anything to do with this, you’re seriously messed up, you need help.
March
Ed sent a ‘polite request’ that Heath stay away from the funeral. It’s immediate family only, he’d said. I’m sure you’ll understand. A pathetic attempt to have the last word. Immediate family. What else was Heath if not that? They were each other, so where did that leave him now?
She was buried where she’d got married, the pretty, if weather-beaten, little church on the hill. The sky was a glowering pewter that matched the lead on the roof. Heath parked his old site van at an angle on a grass verge, and slung his tool bag on a random overgrown grave. It announced his intentions before he understood them himself.
Wind made murmurs in the heather on the hills. He had the moor to himself except for a couple of ramblers, zipped to the chin in purple Gore-Tex, walking expectantly towards the church. They waved at Heath from a distance, but up close something in his eyes must have warned them off, because they changed tack and went the long way around, on the other side of the dry-stone wall. Good. They could go somewhere else for their brass rubbings.
In the churchyard, the same family names repeated on the headstones, more proof that Cat should’ve chosen him, an injection of fresh blood, over these inbred bastards. Heath ran his tongue over his gold tooth, the only treasure he’d take to his own grave.
Cat was in the wrong place, in Ed’s family plot. Tasteful white lilies banked knee-high, half-obscuring her name in marble. Catherine Linton, beloved wife and mother, and then the days of her, the childhood that had been his, and the short adulthood Ed had stolen from him. If he could have, he would have carved his name next to hers, but he had brought the wrong tools for that.
Heath kicked the lilies into the undergrowth. In the settling dust cloud of yellow pollen, he placed the single red rose he’d bought that morning. The florist had offered to take the thorns off it, but he wasn’t having that. He took one last picture of Cat, bringing the total of her images on his camera roll to 1,259.
He didn’t decide to dig so much as find his foot on the shovel, turning the loose earth. Knowing that he would be her last
as well as her first kept him going even while the graveyard around him began to frost. Sweat loosened the spade in his hands, but it didn’t slow his pace. When dusk drew in, he drove over the graves, let his engine idle and used the dipped headlights as torches. When the earth was at shoulder height, he tore the skin off a knuckle jemmying open the lid, but euphoria hid the pain because then they were together again, even if his was the only breath misting the night. She was cold: she wouldn’t look at him. One hand teased out the soft length of her hair, while the other worked at his zipper, heedless of the blue light strobing on his back, deaf to the car door’s slam and the footsteps, the police officer’s shadow on his back, and only half-hearing the voice that said, ‘Jesus Christ, I thought we’d find him nicking lead off the roof. I thought I’d seen it all, but this …’
But he was down deeper than they could reach him, and by the time backup came he was spent. He’d undone Ed, he had beaten even death and laid the final claim to her. Nobody could take that away from him.
The back of the police car had tinted windows. The moon was bright, and the moor was silver, the way it used to look when they were kids.
September
The hospital was hundreds of miles from home. Fenland, not fells, beyond the perimeter wall: reeds and water instead of heather and gorse. His room had a toilet, a sink, and a tiny window. Other patients had the night terrors, but Heath lived for the small hours, and the scratching at the fortified glass, and the little white hand that reached for him and told him she still wanted him, that she had always wanted him, that he had known her better than she knew herself.
ONE LETTER DIFFERENT
* * *
JOANNA CANNON