The Rose Petal Beach
‘He didn’t choose me,’ I reply. ‘As I said before, he did it because he saw an opportunity and he worked out that I would go along with it.’ He worked out I was a weak person who would put love – or at least the illusion of love – before a friend. ‘I could have been anybody.’
‘That’s a comforting thought.’
Did you notice what she did there? I’ve seen her do it a million times with Cora and Anansy: distract and divert to calm down a tantrum or hysteria. Nine times out of ten it works. Like it’s worked now.
‘You know why I went into a depression?’ I say to her. I want to reach out and trace my fingers over the lines of her face. I want to tell her to take care of herself. That whatever it is that is eating her up is not worth it. Nothing and no one is worth losing your health over.
‘Because Scott called me when he hadn’t called you,’ she says flatly.
‘No, because when he called he sounded nervous. He sounded desperate to speak to you. He said he missed you before I hung up.’ I lick my parched lips, I’ve stopped putting on the lip salve that I’m meant to. I’ve stopped doing a lot of things I’m meant to because I don’t really care any more. It’s not important to look like a woman any more, it’s far more important to feel like a woman, to feel alive. I don’t at the moment. I don’t feel alive. But I don’t feel the other thing, either. ‘I realised what we had wasn’t some big, grand love, it was a grubby little affair. I was a grubby little other woman who thought the scraps of someone else’s husband were all I was worth. Even if that hadn’t been the case, I’d been waiting for the man I was sleeping with to leave his wife. Leave my friend and her children like that was nothing. Those few seconds on the phone made me realise what a terrible person I had become.’ I swallow, my throat sore and dry like my mouth. ‘And then I realised I hadn’t become that person, I was that person. I’ve always been that awful type of woman who would do anything to make someone love me.’
Tami says nothing for a moment or two, digesting what I have said. Then she says, ‘I think we’re all capable of doing terrible things and then telling ourselves it’s OK because it’s for love, me included.’
I turn my head to her. ‘I don’t believe that for a second.’ My smile sends pain shooting through me from the cracks in my lips.
‘Despite what you think, I am not Saint Tami. I have done something terri—I am not Saint Tami.’
‘Now I really don’t believe that.’
She smiles but I can see something is sitting there in her eyes. Something is torturing her and I don’t think it is simply her husband’s affair.
‘Tami, if you ever want to talk about what’s going on with you …’ When she focuses her gaze on me, the distrust she feels for me plain on her face, I look away and stop talking. It’s too late for that. Once upon a time ago, when we were friends, I could have asked her what was hurting her so badly, she could have relied upon me for support. Now … she has to deal with whatever is eating her up on her own. I’m so ashamed about that.
‘I’m dying,’ I say to her after a few minutes.
‘I know,’ she says.
I’ve said those words out loud and it feels OK, actually. Not good, nowhere near the realm of good. Just not bad. Not horrific. I have said those words. I have accepted them for now, because tomorrow I may not be able to handle them. Tomorrow I may be broken by them. Or tomorrow I may be buoyed by them. I may embrace the concept and go about trying to live every single second of my life to its fullest. But in the here and now, I am OK with saying those words to another human being and simply sitting with them.
She reaches out, her fingers briefly touching the edge of the palm of my hand that lies on the bed, before she withdraws again. ‘But we all are in our own ways, so you can be living as hard as you can at the same time, too. You can try everything you can to get well because it doesn’t have to happen right now.’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ she says.
And we spend the next hour in complete silence.
18
Tami
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’
I haven’t heard him sound so humble in years; even when he was regretful – apparently – about being caught cheating he still had the edge of Scott The Arrogant about him.
I nod.
‘As I explained to you on the phone, Mrs Challey, your husband wanted to meet you with me here so it would be a safe space for you both to talk.’
My eyes go to the brown-haired man in his fifties sitting in his comfortable chair.
‘You’re free at any time to stop this meeting and to leave,’ he continues. ‘If Scott says anything you don’t agree with or wish to comment upon, feel free to. If you’re not comfortable saying it yourself, you can ask me to mediate for you. If I see that you are showing any signs of upset or distress, I’ll ask you if you want to carry on or I’ll end the proceedings to protect you.’ He pauses, presumably to allow what he has said to sink in. ‘Does that sound acceptable to you, Mrs Challey?’
‘Tami. Call me Tami,’ I say. ‘And, yes, it sounds fine.’ Obviously I’d rather not be here at all, but those aren’t the choices I have, are they? I opened the door to speaking to Scott when I called the other day about Beatrix. I could have shut it again, but not when we have to discuss him seeing the children and money and divorce in detail.
He didn’t pressure me at all, he simply asked if I’d come along and meet his therapist, and allow him to tell me the truth about what he’d done. I’d gone to say, ‘I don’t want to see you ever again,’ and instead, ‘OK,’ came out. And then I was talking to his therapist about what was going to happen.
The room we are in isn’t small, but it is intimate, comfortable, homely. The sort of place Scott would normally have hated being in. He liked everything shiny, new and minimalist. How he must have hated our house.
‘If it’s OK with you, Scott would like to start talking,’ the therapist says.
‘Fine,’ I utter. I don’t plan on saying much.
I’m avoiding looking at Scott. Since I arrived I’ve kept my gaze towards the window, slightly to the left of him so his shape is in my line of sight, but I can’t make out any of the details of him. If I see those details, I’ll start reshaping and reforming him in my head, visually sculpting him until he is the person I want him to be, the man I thought I’d married, instead of the person he is. The man I married doesn’t exist any more, I’m still not sure he ever did.
‘Thank you, as I said, for agreeing to see me,’ Scott says. ‘I’ve been seeing Dr Bruwood since I left the house and he suggested it might be time for me to try to talk to you. I’ve wanted to speak to you, but have had to stop myself because that would all be for my benefit instead of yours.
‘First of all, I’m not going to try to persuade you to take me back. You did absolutely the right thing in asking me to leave, I would never have started the process of helping myself if you hadn’t done that. It’s probably saved me. I had crossed so many boundaries … I’m sorry, that’s the most important thing I wanted to say. I’m sorry for what I put you through. I’m sorry for lying to you and cheating on you and manipulating you. And for the rest of it.
‘Since I left I’ve signed up for a perpetrator’s programme. It’s hard.’ From the corner of my eye I see him nodding, confirming to himself that it is difficult. Of course it is, accepting what you are. ‘It’s really hard. I’ve only done one session, but I’ve had to accept that I’m no better than men like my father and my brother. I always thought because I didn’t threaten people for money, that I didn’t go on the rob or didn’t beat the children, that I was better than them. I’m not. And I’m doing everything I can to change that.
‘I’ve also been talking a lot to Dr Bruwood about my porn addiction and how it affected me. I’m starting to realise it completely altered how I saw women, how I thought about women. I basically saw all women in terms of what they could do for me, sexually. I stopped seeing women as hu
man beings, just as orifices. I also believed sex was all about how I wanted it, how I thought sex should be, what I was entitled to do …’
He wants me to look at him. He wants me to connect with him, I think.
Scott continues, ‘I thought I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I decided that what I wanted was going to happen no matter what.
‘I’m sorry for how I made our sex life, for the resentment I showed towards you for not wanting to do the porn stuff. I’m sorry for not even contemplating that you have a sexuality that is as important as mine. And I’m … so sorry … for what I did to you that night.’
The memory of the night of yes that felt like a no wells up, and immediately my body becomes rigid with the reverberations of those feelings. The confusion, the horror, the pain. I shut my eyes, trying to hide from what is coursing through my veins, then my eyes jolt open – it’s much more real in the dark. Confusion, horror, pain send shockwaves through me again.
‘Mrs Challey, Tami, are you OK?’ The therapist’s voice is calm and gentle. ‘Would you like to stop?’ The man who I had been lightly mocking in my head sounds so concerned, so sweet. It brings me back to the present, banishes the memory and its feelings back to where it came from. In the past. Firmly, securely in the past. ‘Would you like to stop?’ he repeats even more gently.
‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ I say through my rigid mouth. The memory is gone but my body can’t relax, it can’t immediately let go of the residual emotions.
It’s because he’s said it, admitted it wasn’t right or fair. All this time, the only other person who was there carried on as normal so I had normalised it in my head, convinced myself that I was the one who had misunderstood and overreacted, not him. He is telling me that it wasn’t me, I was right to feel as I did. It was him. He had … It was too complicated to unravel in its entirety but he used my yes, my consent, to brutalise me. He used my love for him and our family to pretend it was nothing out of the ordinary. If I hadn’t stopped sleeping with him after that, he would have carried on and got worse, he would have carried on until … I shudder. I saw the videos, I know where things could have ended up. I remove the thought of that from my mind. I cannot think about it any longer and go back to normal life. Another time I will deal with that, another time I will process it.
‘Would you like a drink of water?’ Dr Bruwood asks. He really is a nice man, I shouldn’t have teased him, even in the privacy of my own head.
‘No. I just want this over with.’ I sound hard now.
‘I’m so sorry, TB. I didn’t think how bringing that up might affect you. I’m such a fool … Look, one of the other things I wanted to tell you was that I went to the police. I told them the truth about Mirabelle. What I did, how I lied.’
I whip around to him. ‘What?’
The shock of what he’s just said is transmuted by the shock of seeing him properly. He looks … like Scott again. He’s lost the polish and sheen that encapsulated the man he has been these past few years. His hair has a gentle, slightly unkempt quality that looks like it was held under the shower for a few minutes then allowed to dry. Gone is the harsh cut, the preened creations he’d progressed to. His face is lined and lived in, he has a few open pores on his cheeks, his skin tone is uneven and healthy-looking instead of fake, smooth and unnaturally glossy from his almost fanatical use of products. His fingernails are scraggly and chewed instead of manicured and perfect. He’s wearing an old T-shirt of his that I’d ‘borrowed’ originally because it smelt of him, and kept after a few washes because it felt of him against my skin. It was a reminder of him, the real him, when I was living with the other him. He’s also wearing jeans he bought for fifteen pounds at Liverpool’s Saturday market when we went up there to see his sister one time when the kids were young. (She’d been surprisingly welcoming but had made it clear we weren’t to tell their parents she’d so much as seen us.)
He’s looking me over, too. Seeing if I have changed, what’s different about me. Trying, I guess, to see if what has been happening has altered me physically. It has, of course it has. The past few weeks have been life-changing, and life changes are always worn on your body – inside or out. ‘You did what?’ I repeat.
‘I went and told the police the truth. What’s the point in doing all this work on myself, trying to change, if I can’t tell the truth about what I’d become?’
‘What did they say?’ I daren’t ask what the truth is in case it is as bad as I fear.
He looks down at his hands, his body now a different shape as he holds it in a different way. Shame. Before he held himself in honesty and openness, now he holds himself in shame. He links his hands and then unlinks them. ‘That policewoman, Harvan, told me that because the statement had been retracted and she’s … gone it was too late now for an attack of the guilts, as she called it. She said she wanted to prosecute me for wasting police time and lying to the police. And they’re very close to uncovering the evidence that will prove you were the murderer, not just there that night, and when she does so, she’s going to do me as accessory before and after the fact.’
My body recoils; they still think they can prove that I did it. That I am capable of that. I still can’t prove that I didn’t.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that they thought you did it?’ he asks quietly. ‘She said you’re their only suspect but wouldn’t say why. Why didn’t you tell me any of this?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were sleeping with my friend?’ I reply, still shaky from the knowledge the police haven’t given up on pinning a murder on me.
He inhales deeply and lets the matter drop by lowering his gaze. When he raises his gaze to me again, I can tell by the colour of his eyes that I am seconds away from hearing terrible news, I can tell by the way he has paused that he’s about to reveal something so atrocious I will want to throw up. ‘I’ve been unfaithful before,’ he says.
I turn away again, my eyes focusing on the window as this latest truck strikes me without slowing; it is a full-force hit, square on the body.
‘More than once but by different degrees,’ he continues. Can’t he see I’m already down here, can’t he see that I was going to struggle to get up, why has he put his foot on the brake to stop and is now reversing to hit me again?
‘I didn’t … just start with a full-blown affair, there were different incidents over the years that allowed me to believe I could do it and get away with it. First it was a couple of flirtations, they weren’t doing any harm so I didn’t think anything of them.’ Wham! He’s hit me again and has now applied the brakes and is coming for me again. ‘Then came a few more flirtations that I took a bit further with texts and emails and naked pictures.’ Wham! Brake. Reverse. ‘Then it was a couple of kisses with one of those people.’ Wham! Brake. Forwards. ‘I always stopped for a while, afterwards, told myself I was being stupid risking everything like that when I loved you and the girls. Often you’d mention something, about one of those women, and I’d convince you that you were being jealous and paranoid.’ Wham! Brake. Reverse. ‘But when you let it go, I guess I thought it can’t have been that bad, I wasn’t going to get found out, so when the opportunity arose I did it again. But then, it was the next step – a couple of one-night stands on business trips.’ Wham! Brake. Forwards. ‘After each of those I swore never again. I didn’t want to hurt you like that. I’d made a legitimate mistake and I needed to pull myself back and recommit to you. Make it up to you even though you never knew.’ Wham! Brake. Reverse. ‘And then, things took another step when I had a three-month thing with …’
‘With the American woman who came over to find out about how the company worked,’ I find myself saying. I knew he fancied her, I knew from the hour I spent with her when she dropped by before they met other work colleagues for dinner, she fancied him. But when I mentioned it he said I was paranoid, a jealous, nagging wife who was putting one and one together and coming up with sixty-nin
e. He’d been really proud of that joke, had chuckled to himself for weeks about it.
‘Yeah,’ he breathes. Wham! Brake. Reverse.
I can picture her, all long auburn hair, perfect white teeth, flawless skin, laughing at me as she sat astride him, fucking him. The little housewife she’d looked down her nose at when she sat in my home. ‘Gee, your house is beautiful. You must be so dedicated to keep it that way,’ she’d said, moving a cushion on the sofa to the position she obviously thought it should be. I can see him, too, guffawing at how pathetic I’d been sitting there after serving them wine and not having a clue what their practically coded conversation was about.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘For all of it. It’s all bad, it’s all terrible. I have behaved appallingly. I have treated you appallingly.’
‘Why did you tell me that?’ I say, unable to look at him. ‘You could have gone the rest of your life without telling me that. I wish you had gone the rest of your life without telling me that.’ I cover my eyes with my hands, pulling air in and pushing air out of my lungs as fast as possible to stop myself breaking down.
‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ he says, his voice weighted with regret. ‘But I had to because I had to let you know all the facts of your life before you make any decisions. I lied to you for so long, I need to be honest even though I know this will be the end. I have hurt you so badly, and you didn’t even know the half of it. I’m sorry. I can’t think of anything else to say except sorry.’
That word. I hate that word. It means nothing – just like anything, if you say it enough times, it loses all sense, all meaning – but people say it all the time. People say it to me all the time. It is a combination of letters that has no meaning attached to it if you are having to repeat it several times over several occasions.
I hate that word with a passion.
‘I love you,’ Scott adds in a whisper. ‘I wanted to say I love you. I never stopped loving you, I just thought what I wanted was more important than anything.’