Terry had been trying to persuade me to stay, to work part-time, to not give up work completely – he’d even called in to see me at home yesterday, knowing Scott was out. I couldn’t stay, I missed Cora in a way I didn’t know was possible and wanted to see more of her before the baby was born and afterwards, too.
As I moved to waddle my way to the front to say a few words, Scott’s voice rose again, ‘I know Tami won’t mind me telling you that she’s rather shy at public speaking so she’s decided not to make a speech but instead say goodbye to you all individually if she can.’
I knew why he’d done that – to stop me correcting his reinterpretation of how we ended up in Brighton. I wouldn’t have done, that wasn’t my style, but it was Scott’s and Scott assumed everyone thought like he did.
As people came to talk to me, what Terry said to me yesterday replayed itself in my head: ‘He’s good at his job, I’ll give him that, but we both know he’d stab anyone in the back to get ahead. You’d do well to keep Scott at home while you work, Tami. We both know where the talent lies in your partnership.’
‘Please don’t say that about him,’ I’d said to Terry. ‘He’s a brilliant husband and father. And he’d never do anything to hurt me. That’s what’s important.’
‘Let’s not fight,’ Scott says to me sometime later. I have been pulling up weeds in the garden. I didn’t mean to, I just saw them, peeking out among the flowers that were trying to grow, and they annoyed me. Had induced a blind rage inside that made me throw myself onto my knees and rip at them. Those weeds, those spindly green monstrosities, reminded me of the things in life that came along, muscling in where they weren’t wanted, ruining the things that you knew to be perfect. I went at them by the handful. Tugging and tugging until they gave way in my hands. I know you’re supposed to dig them up to make sure you’ve got all the roots, or use a weed-killer to make sure there’s no trace of them left, but I wanted them gone right that second. Out of my garden, out of my sight, out of my life. They were strangling the life out of the flowers, and I needed them to stop. I needed them to disappear, even for a little while.
‘Please, Tami,’ he says, his hands on my shoulders. ‘Please. I really need you right now. I really need you to tell me you know I didn’t do this thing.’
I say nothing. Because I know I need the same from him. I need him to tell me he didn’t do it. He hasn’t said that. He’s said they have nothing on him, he’s said it didn’t happen, he’s said it will all go away, but at no point has he said, ‘I didn’t do this thing.’
He gently tugs me to my feet, spins me to look at him.
‘We have to be a team now. For us, for the girls. We have to trust and lean on each other. We’ve survived people saying we shouldn’t be together, we’ve been through so much, we can’t let this tear us apart.’
We can’t. He’s right. When I think back over the years, over our lives, I know who he is. I know what he’s capable of. And this is something he is not capable of. I know him, the world out there doesn’t. He would not do this. The boy who gave me the stars would not do this.
‘No,’ I say, slipping my arms around him and letting him draw me in for a hug. ‘We can’t let this tear us apart.’
‘I love you so much, Tami,’ my husband says. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘Me too,’ I say.
I know he would not do this. But why did he go so quietly? Why didn’t the police officer need to tell him what he was being arrested for? It was almost as if, when he saw the police in our living room, he knew what he had been accused of, and by whom. If he was innocent, why would his arrest not have been a surprise?
You know why, is what I say to myself in the quietest whisper the delicate state of my mind can bear. Because he is no longer the boy who gave you the stars. He’s the man who was arrested in front of his children and didn’t even have to ask why.
5
Beatrix
G’day Challeys! Am at Gatwick airport and I’m getting on a plane. Have a last-minute crisis meeting up in Glasgow. Won’t be back till next Monday. Haven’t heard from you all since Thursday so hope all is well? Have met a man at the airport. He is HOT. We’ve been getting on like a house on fire. Sending you hugs and love and big kisses. Bea x
And SEND. Perfect. It’ll let them know I’m thinking of them, but won’t make a big deal of how they haven’t been in touch in four days and that it’s making me really uneasy. Two days without a text message is unheard of, more than half a week is … well, it hasn’t happened in a long time.
I can imagine Tami’s face when she gets that text. She’ll roll her big, black-brown eyes and then use her hand to twirl up her shoulder-length twists – not dreads as I once called them – into a big bun on her head, before letting them fall. She’ll shake her head briefly, then sit and play with her wedding ring while deciding what to reply. Then she’ll text me back a neutral-ish reply wishing me luck and will somehow manage to avoid telling me to be careful while getting her point across.
Tami really does treat me like her little sister sometimes: calling me to see how I am, asking me over to dinner to make sure I’ve eaten properly at least once every two weeks. She even made me godmother to Ansy, the most perfect six-year-old in the universe. She really is. I knew Cora when she was six and she wasn’t perfect. Oh, look, don’t get upset with me and think I’m a snide cow, I didn’t mean it like that. Cora’s beautiful, she’s warm, and funny and has an amazing spirit. Anansy’s so squidgy and humorous and she’s really come into her own as a six-year-old. That’s all I meant: Anansy’s the perfect six-year-old, Cora is the perfect nine-year-old.
I sit up straight as my new travelling companion approaches, rearrange my posture to stick out my chest a bit more, flash my slender waist. I knew wearing the push-up bra and this Lycra top would pay off. ‘Seriously, Beatrix, you’d travel for hours in underwire and what is essentially a giant elastic bandage on the off-chance you get some male attention?’ Tami would say if she could see me now.
For men like this one, I would. This hive of travellers and travelling is messy with people and trolleys and bags, the boom of security announcements and the constant flickering of arrival and departure screens but this man stands out among it all. My travelling companion is carrying a white and green cardboard cup of chai latte in each hand. It’s dreadful stuff, truly, but he drinks it. I’ve only got three hours tops to get him to see he wants to spend the next few days in Glasgow with me, no matter what other plans he thinks he has. To do that, I have to show him he and I are made for each other because our interests and lists of likes are mirrors of each other. If that means drinking spiced warm milk, so be it.
I moisten my lips with the tip of my tongue, giving him a taster of what he could have in store if he plays his cards right.
‘One chai latte,’ he says, handing me the white and green cardboard cup from his left hand.
‘I love this stuff, don’t you?’ I smile at him as he settles himself beside me. Not close enough for me to press my body against him and make my presence felt, remind him I am a warm, welcoming body, though. Despite that, I can feel a connection forming. He talks with confidence and intelligence. He holds himself comfortably and he has a warm smile, with a laugh that could start to tingle my stomach if he does it enough.
‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I can’t stand it. I drank it because my ex liked it. When I got up to the counter I thought, actually, I hate this stuff. I’m drinking it out of habit. I’ll have a chamomile tea instead.’
‘Oh. Right,’ I say. I’m going to have to work at this, and I like that. Actually, I LOVE that. I love the thrill of this particular type of chase.
Tami
I wonder if other people feel like this? If they feel completely removed from the world they are living in.
It’s Monday morning and I am sitting on a bench on the seafront. If I were to turn my head to the right, I would see two large buildings, then the line of beach huts, with the
ir brightly-coloured doors, leading like a string of rainbow beads towards Brighton. I would also see Brighton Pier, and the sweep of beach that makes this part of the UK look like a Mediterranean Riviera. I would see the people who come and go almost like a slow-moving tide on the land. If I were to turn my head to the left, I would see the building that has been rescued from ruin and restored by developers, the back of the public swimming baths, the café that sells homemade ice-cream that people queue around the block for. I would see the little shelter with its smeared windows and peeling paint that looks like something from a movie set in the 1950s. I would see the evenly spaced groynes reaching out into the sea like fingers of the land, and the short platform with its orange and white lifebelt, and I would see the sea in its peaceful, blown-glass state.
I look neither left nor right. I sit on the bench with my legs pulled up to my chest, my eyes fixed on the expanse of water in front of me. There are people in the sea. Even on days when it’s too cold to go out without a few layers, a scarf, and gloves, people seem to brave the icy waters. People only avoid the sea, it seems, when there is snow on the ground.
Do other people feel like I feel? As if they’ve landed in an alien life. As if they are a paper cut-out in the world that is real and whole and three-dimensional. Or is that the other way around? Is the world made of paper since it is so easily re-ordered to not make sense, and I am the three-dimensional dolly that needs to be moulded over time to fit in?
I’ve come here after the school run to escape the atmosphere in the house. I cannot think in the house, I cannot think with Scott around. And he is around. After a weekend where we’ve not talked about The Big Thing That Happened, and instead have focused on the girls and making sure they are OK, Scott has decided to work at home this week. I was hanging on for today, desperate to have some time alone so I could think without feeling guilty or feeling as if I was betraying him. I can’t do that now. Every time I turn around he is there. Even if he isn’t in the same room, there are pictures of him – smiling with the girls, with me – under magnets on the fridge, there are framed photos of him on the surfaces. And even if it’s not his pictures, it’s his mug, his slippers, his newspaper, his phone charger, his letters, his unread books, his socks, his clothes, his imprint in a chair. He is everywhere because it is his home. And I can’t think surrounded by him.
I don’t know what to think. I can admit that to myself out here.
I believe him when he says he didn’t do it.
I believe every woman when she says she’s been attacked.
This is what is frying my brain. I believe them both – when one of them must be lying.
And I can’t see either of them lying about this.
Fifteen months ago
‘Come jogging with me,’ she said to me. We’d been meeting up for chats and coffee for months and I could not get over how similar we were. How we clicked on almost every level. We understood what it was like to live with the constant disapproval of our parents hanging over us, to be happy with who you were even if it wasn’t what you could have been.
‘No!’ I said, affronted.
‘Why not?’ she replied, her usual smile on her face.
‘Why would I is the question you should be asking,’ I replied. ‘Jogging. As. If.’
‘Come jogging with me,’ she repeated. ‘It’ll be fun.’
‘No way!’ I replied. ‘Have you seen me run? This body,’ I indicated to myself, ‘and these lungs were not made for running.’
‘Come jogging with me. I do it every morning before work, but you can just come once a week at first.’
‘At first?’
‘Once you get into it, you’ll want to come out with me every day.’
‘I really won’t. Besides, I’ve got two children to get to school, mornings are a no-no.’
‘Why can’t Scott do it?’
‘Because he’s got work.’
‘So have you.’
‘But …’ I stopped talking as it occurred to me that I did have work. I did work, and I worked very hard. Before Scott’s last three promotions, which all happened in quick succession, and so increased his earnings by a significant amount in a short period of time, it was my earnings and savings that kept us afloat, allowed us to afford the house. I made decent money, and I worked long hours if you took into account the things I did when the girls were asleep. It’d just become a given that I would do the school run every day, that I would pick them up, and I would take time off if they were sick, had doctor’s appointments, needed extra bits for school. Scott had stopped doing those things the more he earned – without either of us noticing it seemed. I simply worked around everyone, keeping the house going and earning money.
Him doing the school run one day a week, or even just getting up with the girls and getting them washed, dressed and making their breakfast, shouldn’t be a big deal.
‘Come running with me,’ Mirabelle said, the grin on her face growing wider with every second.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK.’
Fourteen months ago
‘Come on, girl, you can do it. Keep going.’
Mirabelle was obviously mistaking me for someone who managed to go five minutes without stopping.
‘Come on.’ She was clapping her hands and running backwards, regularly stopping to bounce up and down on the spot to wait for me to catch up, while I dragged myself along the promenade, barely able to keep upright let alone run. I hadn’t realised how unfit I was, now I was feeling it in every cell of my body. My skin hurt, tingled under my clothes like a million needles were pricking me. How did I manage to get talked into this? I’d asked myself many times over the last few runs. I never had a definitive answer: it was something to do with fun, and enjoying being around Mirabelle and her energy. And her belief in me, I suppose. It’d been something I hadn’t had in so long – I hadn’t even noticed that until she encouraged me to run. Putting one foot in front of the other was a challenge that I’d never set myself but was enjoying on many levels – most of them masochistic.
I stopped, placed both palms on my grey jogging-bottom-covered thighs and heaved as much breath into my lungs as I could manage. My running gear was pristine because it was only used once a week, Mirabelle’s running gear was pristine because she had a lot of running clothes.
There were other people around, of course. None of them seemed to be as unfit as me. I would watch them jog, their heads held high, their bodies at ease, and would wonder how they managed to jump from my stage to their stage, and when that transition would happen for me.
‘Come on, just a bit further,’ she cajoled. Sometimes I wanted to take the batteries out of her, she was so exhausting.
‘Nah,’ I replied, and staggered a bit further to collapse on a wooden bench.
Mirabelle came and stood in front of me, a grin on her face, still bouncing so she wouldn’t cool down. ‘You’re doing so well.’
‘Whatevs, as the young people say,’ I replied. ‘Why so early today?’
‘I wanted to show you something,’ she replied, the gold edging on her clothes and her trainers shining clearly in the gloom of the September morning.
‘What’s that?’ I replied.
She turned towards Brighton, to the place we were heading towards, and smiled again, not speaking for long seconds. ‘That,’ she said quietly and full of pride. I followed the line of her long, lithe arm to where, over the sea, over the Pier, the world started to glow. Peach, pink, amber, were rapidly bleeding onto the horizon, paving the way for the sun to make its entrance.
It felt like the world was beginning from scratch and I was there to bear witness to it. I was watching one of life’s miracles I regularly took for granted: the sun rising.
I gasped.
‘You’ve never seen the sun rise like that, have you?’
I hadn’t. I’d never been outside and watched the sun rise, I’d never sat up all night in the open air and watched the breaking of light in the distance. It was dif
ferent than watching it rise behind glass, but I hadn’t even done that very many times. How was it possible that I had never watched a new day being born au naturel?
‘This is how I always think the day starts on the Rose Petal Beach,’ Mirabelle whispered.
‘You’ll have to tell me that story one day,’ I said.
‘One day,’ she said. ‘But not today.’ Instead of offering me the story of the picture that hung in her living room, she held out her hand to me. I took it, her hand was smooth and soft, not at all the hands of a woman who spent her days washing up, cleaning up and forgetting to use hand cream, like me. I was envious of her hands, like I was envious of her hair. She had grown her beautiful, shiny black hair to the middle of her back without chemical straightening because she had time to take care of it properly. I washed and twisted my hair every two weeks and wound it back off my face because that fitted in with my lifestyle. She lavished care and attention on her hair that made it one of her most outstanding features. Mirabelle hauled me to my feet. The strength of the sun seemed to suddenly flow through my bones, tingling my limbs back to life. Upright, I felt strong again, capable of running to Brighton Pier and back. This was what she’d meant, of course. This was the fun part. Not the joking with her, talking with her, the being with her – it was the finding me in all of the daily busy-ness of my life. It was carving out a few precious minutes to be able to be Tamia. I wasn’t mother, wife, self-employed consultant, woman, Hove resident, non-graduate, breaker of my parents’ hearts when I was running. I was Tamia. Unlabelled, unique, complete. Being myself was the most fun I’d had in a long time.