After the lifetime that is waiting for her to speak again, she turns to me. ‘Oh, Mrs Challey, are you still here? Didn’t you hear me, you can go.’
I get up, pull my cardigan closed around me and pick up my bag. I don’t even say goodbye, because I do not want them to take that the wrong way.
12
Beatrix
I’m getting really worried about you, babe. What’s going on? Are you OK? Let me know what I can do to help. Love you. Bea x
I can’t bear this any longer. I haven’t heard from him in six days. Six days! Even when they’re on holiday and she’s by his side 24/7 he finds a way to message me: he goes to the bathroom with his phone or he sneaks out of bed in the middle of the night. He’ll even send me naked pictures from beside the pool. We once had phone sex while he was in the bedroom and she was showering only a few feet away in their villa in Portugal. This is not a good sign. He’s not been into work either and no one seems to want to tell me why. They say he’s not available and to leave a message which will be passed on to him upon his return.
‘When will he return?’ I always ask.
‘Soon,’ is always the reply.
‘Do you know who I am?’ I want to scream every time I hear that. ‘I’m the next Mrs Challey, I’m the love of his life, and you need to tell me what’s going on.’
I can’t stand it. I’ve barely slept or eaten since I last saw him, I’ve had to call in sick to work because there was no way I could drive all over Kent not knowing what was going on.
That night, when he was meant to come over, I’d sat there, dressed up in killer heels and this red and black Chantilly lace item I’d bought, waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.
While irritating, I do sort of expect it – the waiting. The having to fit in with whatever else crops up in his main life. It’s not great to think of yourself as not part of his main life, but nobody except the seriously obese eats dessert all the time. I’m the treat at the end of a hard day, like the excellent bottle of wine you save for best. I am the pleasure that he craves.
I opened a bottle of champagne – Vintage Veuve, his favourite – at nine pm, intending to have one glass because he wouldn’t like it if he showed up and I was half cut. I finished that bottle over the course of half an hour. So I started on the second one. Then the bottle was gone. I woke up slumped over the kitchen table, a third bottle in front of me, my muscles frozen and a crick in my neck so severe it would take my chiropractor hours to sort out. And I was alone. Had been all night from the look and feel of the place.
When I checked my phone and there were no messages or texts, incandescent fury ignited in me. I fired off an angry text saying he’d better have had an excellent explanation. Nothing. I called and his phone was switched off. No reply to an email. Nothing on FB or Twitter. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Silence and more silence. For six days.
The only explanation for it was that he was dead. There was no way he would not contact me otherwise. And after what happened to Mirabelle, I knew it was a real possibility. The police had no clues as to who really killed her, so Scotty could have been the next victim. That’s when I started to call his wife.
Her. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re absolutely right, I am a bitch for calling my lover’s wife to find out if he was OK, but I needed to know. I love him. I needed to know if something had happened to him. She didn’t answer her mobile after the first two calls, then switched it off. Then when I tried the landline, it had been disconnected. Another pointer to something hideous having happened. I had to find out what was going on, so here I am, walking the long way around the Close to their house because I can’t bear walking past the house where Mirabelle died. I know it’s ridiculous because I live in a flat in a converted house and almost all the houses on this road are old so people are bound to have died in them at some point, but I didn’t know any of them, did I?
She may have done a terrible thing, lying like that to get back at Scott, I may have wanted shot of her the last time I saw her, but she didn’t deserve that. No one deserved that. Strangled and drowned in your own bath. Left there, naked I presume, for someone to find. No one knows who found her, which is even creepier. Or maybe the police know and aren’t telling us because that would cause widespread panic. I shudder. What has happened is already awful, but it comes to mind every time I think about running a bath. I love taking long baths, too. I’ve not been able to since because the thought of dying like that … I shudder again, stronger this time.
At the house I hadn’t planned on visiting, but I’ve been forced to by the comprehensive silence of all communication channels, I knock quietly, forgetting for a minute that I don’t need to. When Cora was first born, I used to ring the doorbell or knock – only for seconds later a cry to rise up from inside the house, followed by the door being snatched open, Tami’s face thunderous and tearful in equal measures, while her arms were full with a tiny, squalling bundle with a smattering of black curls. I learnt my lesson: knock quietly or text to say I was outside. I forget sometimes that the girls are at school.
There’s no answer. I know she’s in because the window to her office is open. She would never go out and leave the window open. I emphasise that because it’s not in her nature, she’s far too conscientious.
Another knock. Louder, this time.
Wait. Wait. Nothing.
Doorbell and knock this time.
Wait. Wait. Nothing.
I know she’s in. I can almost hear her, sitting up there in her turret, ignoring the intrusion because she’s so engrossed in her work. How she can be so unbothered when something has happened to her husband? What kind of callousness is that? Please don’t think I’m deluded, something must have happened to him, because you don’t understand the connection we have – he wouldn’t cut me off with no explanation. He loves me.
I reach out, place the palm of my hand square in the middle of the doorbell and lean forwards. I keep leaning on the doorbell until I hear footsteps descending the flight of stairs to the hall and then approaching to the door and snatching it open.
‘Hi,’ I say brightly, taking my hand away from the doorbell. ‘Got time for coffee, cake and a chat?’ I grin at her. ‘Obviously you’ll have to provide the coffee and cake since I appear to have forgotten both. I’ve got a great line in chat, though.’
Her face relaxes for an instant, then slowly winds itself into a small, bitter-looking smile as she slightly tilts her head to one side. She is quietly incredulous, calmly fascinated.
‘He’s not here,’ she eventually says.
‘Who isn’t?’ I reply. I’m keeping my voice bright, my tone light, but fear is uncurling itself inside the ventricles of my heart: she knows. She knows about me and Scotty. What was it? A stray text? A discovered email? An unlogged out instant message conversation?
‘He’s not here,’ she repeats, more firmly this time. I’ve never experienced this side of her, I don’t think. She doesn’t take any nonsense in shops and restaurants and the like, and she always gets her point across when it comes to complaining about customer service. I’ve never had this tone, this face, directed at me. It’s unnerving. Actually, it’s terrifying. She definitely knows. If she did, though, wouldn’t she have attacked me by now? If I found out Scotty had been with someone else, I would be clawing her eyes out for even glancing at him, ripping her hair out to make sure no one else ever looked at her, and smashing her face in for good measure.
‘You mean Scotty?’
‘It’s always bugged me how you call him that,’ she says. ‘I was never quite sure why the over-familiarity and intimacy of it niggled at me, but I understand now.’
It’s always bugged her? Why? ‘How do you mean?’ I ask, thrown by the direction of the conversation.
‘The whole world calls him Scott, everyone apart from you. Because you’re so special, you’re so close to him. But, you know, whatever. He’s not here.’
‘You said that before,
but why would he be? He’s at work, surely? I was working at home today so I thought I’d come to see you, see how you’re getting on.’
She lowers her gaze to the ground. ‘How am I getting on?’ she says, as if pondering the question. She raises her gaze, inhales heavily, and stares off into the heavens for a moment. ‘How am I getting on?’ she continues to muse.
‘Yes! It’s not a trick question,’ I say jovially, rattled by the conversation about his name. I always do that. I always shorten or in this case lengthen someone’s name in endearment. Don’t most people?
There’s a small inscrutable smile on her face as she finally returns her gaze to me. ‘I’m tired, to tell you the truth. Really, really tired. I’ve been trying these past few weeks to keep my marriage together because my husband was having an affair with my friend and he begged me to give our relationship another chance.’
She hinted before that he’d been the one to beg to stay, and when I asked him, he said he’d had no choice – he couldn’t make a move until he had sorted arrangements properly so he wouldn’t lose contact with the girls.
‘All this has been so hard on you,’ I say sympathetically. It’s genuine, because I do honestly feel for her. The part of me that is her friend kicks in and I want to hold her, tell her it’ll all work out for the best. ‘Look,’ I say, my body relaxing as I realise I need to forget about him for now, be a proper, supportive friend to this woman who has been through so much hurt, ‘why don’t you put the kettle on and we can talk about it?’ I move to come inside but she does not budge – she remains an immoveable object blocking the entrance.
‘Turns out he was screwing you all along,’ she says, staring me straight in the face.
‘What?’ I say, half laughing from the shock of what she said and how she said it. The cold dread starts at the pit of my stomach, spreading quickly and decisively like the tendrils of a fast-growing vine throughout my body.
‘Yeah, fancy that, eh? I suspected the wrong friend.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I manage to choke out through the vines of dread that are rapidly encasing my body.
‘You see, that’s why I’m tired. I’m so exhausted with feeling all that anger and devastation before, and then with trying to make my marriage work and my friend dying, that I never really recovered. So, things can’t get any worse, I think, it’s going to get better, I think, but no, I have to make my husband confess who he was really having an affair with, then I have to cope with realising how I’ve been lied to and manipulated by him and his lover for nearly two years, and then I have to deal with making my husband leave, so I’m pretty much incapable of feeling anything but tired right now.
‘Anyway, if you wouldn’t mind going away and leaving me the fuck alone, I’d be ever so grateful.’ She steps back and shuts the door before I can say anything else.
Standing on the doorstep, the blue door an unfriendly barrier to the Challey home, I’m not sure what to do.
I never thought what it’d be like that when all was revealed. I thought there would be tears and raised voices and attempts to claw my face right off. I thought after the first few times, where she’d be shouting insults and I’d be shouting explanations, the situation would calm down and I would be able to manage it. I’d time the length and regularity of seeing each other until she got used to it. Until I was able to explain to her that I hadn’t set out to hurt her, that what’s done was done and we should all try to move on with our lives.
This hadn’t been how I expected it to pan out at all.
I didn’t think she would be like that, nor that the conversation would be like that. And I thought Scotty – urgh, it feels wrong to call him that now – and me would be together.
If I sift through what she said, it’s clear what happened: she somehow found out about us, confronted Scott, who didn’t admit it straight away. When he did, he told her everything. And then she asked him to leave. He didn’t go quietly, but he did eventually go.
Which begs the question: where is he? Which also begs the other question: why didn’t he come to me? Which also begs the third question: why, when everything was revealed, didn’t he warn me that she knew?
There is only one answer to all these questions, of course, and obviously you know the answer: he’s done a runner, is currently holed up somewhere licking his wounds, having decided it’s every person for themselves as soon as the fan got hit.
That, or she’s killed him. Which isn’t even funny considering what happened down the road.
I turn away from the door, force myself down the path, and pause at the gate. I’m not sure what do now. Where to go, what to do, what to think.
My eyes alight upon their family car, an ordinary car. Scotty – Scott – has a GT-R, a £75,000 car, which he replaces new every year. She has been driving this one for the past five years. She had been planning on buying herself the GT-R at one point because she’d been given an enormous bonus for the way she orchestrated TLITI’s transition from being an in-company department to becoming its own company and making a huge profit in its first year. She’d wanted a sports car, but decided to put the money into savings as a deposit on a family house. Even though they found the perfect house, and it was an amazing place to bring up their children, she still thinks of the black GT-R she wanted to buy.
I don’t know how I know that about her, about her life, but I do. I know lots of tiny, inconsequential details about her that make up her life, make her the person she is.
My mind cycles back to what just happened: she knows.
All things considered, it’s amazing I’m still in one piece.
Tami
I like to think of Mirabelle as being surrounded by flowers, roses of course. I like to think of her lying on that beach of hers, surrounded by rose petals, sleeping. Just sleeping. Maybe she’ll be wearing her white dress from the painting, but her face will be soft, her eyelids resting gently closed, those long, black eyelashes of hers sitting on the rise of her perfect cheekbones. Her hair, shiny and curly, framing her face, pooling on her shoulders.
I have to think of her like that. I have to, and I have to make it a clear image I can hold in my head. I have to see the creases of her dress, each seam, the perfectly turned-out hem; I have to picture the smoothness of her flawless complexion; I have to hold onto the twirls and coils that make up her beautiful hair; I have to cling onto the fluid length of her limbs, conjure up the curve of her stomach, the swell of her chest, the slenderness of her neck and shoulders.
I need to do this every time I think of her because of what that policewoman told me. The details of how she died are scorched into my head and I can’t erase them. Like the extreme pornography I saw on Scott’s computer, it plays on loop in my head.
The images of her being pushed into the bath, the flailing of limbs, the choked, watery screams, the determined violence of hands around her neck, drowning and strangling her at the same time. Those images work their way through my mind, unspooling themselves over and over. Almost every time, the person whose hands are around her neck are mine.
13
Beatrix
Scott, look, call me, text me, IM me. Anything. I need to know you’re ok. Nothing more. Just that you’re OK. Bea x
I hate the fact Scotty – Scott – wasn’t free when we fell in love. If you knew me, you’d know I’m not like that, this isn’t the sort of thing I would normally do. I mean, yes, some might say I have ‘previous’ when it comes to liaisons with unavailable men. But I don’t mean to do stuff like that. I promise. And I double promise I’m not a man-stealing slut. Life simply seems to work out that way.
You see, I’m one of those women who get on better with men than women. I’m certainly no ‘handmaiden’ as Mirabelle said, but it’s been like that since I can remember. I have been through phases where I’d accumulate female friends but the rivalry – the trying to outdo each other in looks and clothes and make-up – would become too intense and we’d have to take a break from each
other. Then, of course, there was the way they were so suspicious of me because I could hold my own in a conversation about the latest Michael Kors collection and about who was going to finish top of the Premier League.
As soon as these ‘friends’ had fellas and I didn’t, it became allout war. As time went on, I was dropped by a lot of my women friends and I saw more of their husbands at the footie or down the pub. I was being friendly, having a laugh, enjoying my life, nothing more. However, when these men’s other halves heard that ‘Beatrix’ had been there too, there’d be a scene and tears and ultimatums, and most of the blokes would ditch me for the quiet life. EVEN THOUGH WE HADN’T DONE ANYTHING.
The ones who didn’t ditch me met up with me in secret. That was when things started to get complicated, the secrecy, the shared worry about being caught … The forbidden nature of it … All of those things often pushed us closer together.
I hated myself for it, truly I did, and I rarely did it more than a handful of times with these men because I knew what was coming – I knew they would fall in love with me, they would want more and I couldn’t give them more because, well, my husband left me for some whore and I would never do that to another woman. I would never let a man leave his wife – and sometimes kids – for me. Screwing them was one thing, breaking up their marriage was another.
After the last one, Craig, a guy I’d got to know first through work and then through going to the footie, did actually leave his wife even though I’d dumped him, I swore to myself no more.
I’ll never forget seeing Craig’s wife in Sainsbury’s a few weeks after he left. She looked like she’d been hit repeatedly by a bus. Her hair was unwashed and hung in greasy clumps around her face, she was gaunt, her skin almost alabaster white, and her clothes were practically hanging off her. In all the time I’d known her before we drifted apart, I’d never seen her without make-up and immaculately turned out clothes.