A Double Life, page 24
After a moment’s hesitation, I lunge forward, making it to the top of the stairs just as the shadow takes its last step through the front door.
Using the full force of my body, I throw myself from the top of the staircase, taking the steps in twos before landing on my heel, which buckles below the weight. As I fall, the last thing I remember is a bolt of pain slicing up my calf and then my head hitting the skirting board before the world turns black.
Chapter 45
Gabriela
The streets of her childhood felt strange as the taxi moved through Kentish Town, the buildings dirtier, their proportions more cramped after the genteel expanse of Richmond upon Thames.
Keeping her thoughts in the past as the car pulled up outside on the street where she had lived for her entire adult life, she was able to briefly stave off the feeling of pure terror that rose up inside her, irrepressible at last, as the house loomed ahead. Inside, she could see the hallway light was on. Even before she placed her key in the lock, she could picture Tom settled on the sofa in his usual position, not so much watching the television as staring through it, his finger absent-mindedly tracing the rim of his glass of wine.
Did he wonder where she’d been all weekend while he and the children were in Scotland; did he imagine where she might sleep on the sojourns for work that apparently kept her away for days at a time? If the tables had been turned she would never not have asked, she decided – and yet, was that true? How easily had she let this thing with him and Harriet grow; this thing that she could not name?
She had intentionally waited until the children would be in bed to come home, not wanting them to witness the fallout, whatever shape it might take. But now she regretted the decision, longing not only for their bodies to press against hers, but for the distraction they would provide, a foil for the conversation they were about to have, the deep, unavoidable well that was about to open up in the centre of her universe, swallowing them whole.
When she moved through the tiny hallway, rendered even smaller by the contrast to Ivan’s wide open entrance, she saw that Tom wasn’t on the sofa, or in the kitchen. It was the flash of amber from his cigarette that led her out through the garden door.
The moment she saw him there, the hatred she’d built up towards him fell away. In the darkness, his features were softened so that he was the Tom she had met all those years ago in the club; the Tom who had held her hand through both labours.
Looking up, he attempted a smile, which was instantly obliterated by a wash of sadness. Looking closer, she saw that he had been crying.
‘Hey,’ he said as she settled on the other chair, the garden light turning off as quickly as it had come on.
‘Hey,’ she replied. Any wind she’d had left in her as she stepped into the house had been pulled from her sails.
He didn’t ask where she had been.
‘There’s wine in the kitchen if you want it,’ he said and she shook her head.
‘I’m OK.’
He sighed. ‘But we’re not, are we?’
His words hung in the air.
‘No, we’re not.’
‘What’s going on, Gabriela?’
There was a moment of silence and then she felt her body clench.
‘You’re asking me?’
His words hardened in response. ‘Well, I’m not sure who else I should ask.’
‘To be honest, Tom, I would have thought it should be me asking you.’
She wasn’t going to be the first to break. She wouldn’t let him have this one so easily.
‘You asking me what’s going on? That doesn’t sound very likely, does it?’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ she snapped without raising her voice, aware of the children’s rooms above their heads, and the neighbours who could hear their every breath.
‘When was the last time you asked what was going on with us, Gabriela? With me and the kids?’
He spread his arms out, gesturing towards the windows where the glow from Callum’s nightlight had dissolved into black.
‘Oh please, what are you even talking about? Don’t make this all about you. That’s such a typical male move. You want me to ask you straight, then OK, I will: how long have you and Harriet been sleeping together?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Oh, come on, Tom. I saw you at the concert … Remember?’
He cackled then. ‘The concert! Of course, the concert you didn’t actually see because you were so late. Is that the concert you’re referring to? The concert you ran off from, to go back to work – to a job that means more to you than your family? That concert?’
‘Oh, fuck off, not all of us get to spend our day lording around between drop-off and pick-up, spending someone’s else’s money …’
He stood up then, leaning into her. ‘No, fuck you, Gabriela.’
He slammed his palm on the table and she saw a curtain twitch in one of the neighbouring houses.
For the first time in her life, she cowered away from him.
‘I mean, wow, you really have no idea why we were talking, do you? Not even an inkling?’
Tom’s eyes glistened and she felt herself lean backwards in her chair.
‘That woman is the mother of the girl who has been bullying our daughter so badly that most afternoons after school she shuts herself in her room and cries.’
He was whispering now, but with an intensity that lit his face. ‘That woman is the person I’ve been having hour-long conversations with on the phone, when I’m not pissing about, trying to work out how to help fix things because you’re so busy, so fucking stressed out, that I’m worried if I share this problem with you that you might break. The reason, Gabriela, that we were so involved in conversation is that our daughter is so stressed that I’m worried she is going to be irrevocably damaged at a time when she is also in mourning for her mother, who might as well be dead for the amount of attention she gives this family!’
His voice hummed with quiet rage, his face pulsing with it.
‘Why do you think I keep whisking the kids away at any given opportunity, subjecting them to endless bloody car journeys to my parents’, to Saoirse and Jim’s, to anywhere where we can actually breathe? You think that woman is the threat to our family, Gabriela? You think some mother from school is what is going to be the end of all this? You, Gabriela – your fucking job—’
He was laughing, his eyes full of rage. ‘You know what, I wish I was so simple! I wish I could go around shagging other women, that it was that easy. But you know the sad truth of all this, Gabriela, is that I could never do that to you. Never.’
He shook his finger in her face, as if his words were a point of terrible regret. ‘And not just because I love you so fucking much it hurts me to even think of my own life without you, but because I know what that would do to our children. All they want is their mother. But you’re too damn selfish to notice, let alone give a shit.’
The night air seemed to crackle with the energy that was rising off him.
‘Tom, I …’ she tried to respond but her words fell away as he stormed into the house, raising his hand against her feeble attempts to defend herself as he walked back through the kitchen and vanished through the hall, leaving a steaming trail of hatred in his wake.
Chapter 46
Isobel
It is still dark when I open my eyes, taking a while to comprehend the throbbing pain in my temples, my head wedged between the bottom stair and the skirting board.
I don’t know how long it takes, with the help of the walls, to pull myself to sitting, to acknowledge the metallic tang in my mouth is the taste of my own blood.
When I finally manage to dig my phone from my pocket and call 999, asking for police, an ambulance arrives too.
‘I must have hit my head when I fell,’ I say.
‘Well, it’s quite a bump, we should take you to the Royal Free,’ the paramedic replies, but I shake my head insistently, triggering another wave of pain.
‘I’m fine. If it gets worse I’ll come in. My boyfriend will be here in half an hour. Honestly …’
When the paramedics finally leave it is just me and two police officers, noting down details of the scene in their notepads, snippets of conversation cutting in and out over their radios.
As I sit watching them, I can’t help but imagine the place through their eyes. No fancy TV, no paintings, no expensive jewellery; nothing apart from a laptop, which I’d had with me when I left the house, to tempt even the most desperate burglar. The closest thing to decoration – a precariously stacked pile of books on the table – had been tossed across the floor.
No wonder they didn’t take anything, I see them thinking, if this is all she has.
I don’t tell them the real reason for the break-in. Not after last time, not after Jess. For a moment, I see her, her eyes fixed on the sky, the blue lights flashing above her head.
My only hope is Oscar. OK, so he let me down the last time I saw him, but if I could just persuade him at least to run the fingerprints, which the officers are taking now, once they’re logged onto the system and then share the results with me, then I can do my own research.
The chances of him agreeing are admittedly slim, but what other option do I have? And after this, something that even he won’t be able to dismiss as a figment of my imagination, he will have to sit up and take note.
Once the police officers leave, placated by my fake phone call to my non-existent boyfriend who confirms he is only a couple of minutes around the corner, I take some painkillers from a drawer and a Xanax and lie on the bed, the blanket mangled around my feet.
My gaze settles on the phone on the side table, and I think for a minute about calling Si. But what message would that send, if I rang him every time I got into trouble? Anyway, it’s his birthday, I can’t drag him into this now.
With that realisation, I close my eyes. There is no one left to call.
If Maureen is surprised to find me on the doorstep of the centre the following morning, she doesn’t show it.
‘What happened to your face?’ she asks, peering at the cut just above my eye, which is swollen and red, exacerbated by the tears of the previous night.
‘Fell down the stairs,’ I say before being met by a disbelieving look.
‘No, I actually did.’
Leaving me to draw hungrily on a cigarette at the kitchen table, Maureen boils the kettle. When she turns back to me, my eyes move to the small window overlooking the garden, and the ghost of a rose bush.
‘I didn’t know where else to go,’ I say distractedly, pushing the plastic sleeve up and down the cigarette packet.
‘That’s OK,’ Maureen replies. ‘Are you all right? Other than the cut … You look …’
‘I can’t stop thinking about Jess …’ I say, suddenly unable to hold it in any longer for fear the force of it growing inside me, festering in every cell of my body, will eventually blow me open. ‘I still see her face, you know? All the time. Like she’s here. I thought that would stop after a while. Not that I’d forget but maybe I’d think about her less.’
I inhale loudly, using my sleeve to wipe at my nose, waiting for Maureen to interrupt me, but she doesn’t. ‘The thing is, though, that it just keeps getting worse. Every day, sometimes twice, sometimes more, I’ll have a moment when I see her. It could be anywhere. In the street, on a bus. And for that moment, however long it lasts, it’s like she’s here. It’s as if none of it ever happened …’
I pause, my face cracking. ‘Her face, the way she looks at me, she blames me. Still she blames me.’
Maureen walks slowly towards the table and draws out a chair. I can feel the tears streaming down my cheeks, hot and angry,
When she speaks her voice is gentle. ‘What exactly are we talking about, Isobel?’
The question takes me by surprise. This event has defined the past year of my life and, despite having first met Maureen a year or so before it happened, I’ve never told her. And she has never asked, never pushed me on the time I was away, choosing to accept my streamlined version of events when I said I’d been spending time with my parents in France.
Other than Oscar, I’ve never told anyone, not even my mum and dad who were happy to write off the weeks I spent with them, largely spent in traumatised silence, as the fallout from the breakdown of my only relationship.
People know – of course they know; everyone seems to know some version of what happened to Jess, and has cast their own judgements accordingly. But it hadn’t come from me. Ben and Si only heard as much from my own mouth as I needed to tell them in order to explain the need for time off. Presumably the rest had filtered through to them via the rumour mill that no self-respecting reporter could have ignored, but even so they have never mentioned what happened to my face, not directly.
And yet, when I finally start to tell the story now, I find I cannot stop. It’s like a purging.
‘It was a year ago …’ I continue, and as I speak, my mind retreats to that summer, London groaning under the relentless heat so that no one knew what to do with themselves. Buses barely moved, consuming the roads like steaming pressure cookers chugging slowly through sluggish streets, the tube system practically melting in on itself.
So much of that time I have since managed to push deep into the recesses of my memory, where it has stagnated, the poison leaking out into my system.
‘I was going through a shitty break-up. Something happened and it all got really nasty and I had to move out of his place. It was a weird time, really dark, and I had nowhere else to go. My parents were living in another country and I was making fuck-all money, and Jess had a place in Parliament Hill and she said I could stay there with her for a while. She worked for this awful production company which was full of total cunts. She was too good for it, she was the smartest person I’ve ever met. Anyway, she was away a lot at the weekends and I was working at the paper in the week and then I guess I was just bored and lonely, and I met this guy …’ I catch my breath. ‘He was awful, I mean I’m not even sure where I found him. Anyway, Jess hated him. She told me she didn’t want him staying at the house … I hadn’t seen him for a while, then one night I went out and he was there and then he came back …’
As I think about it now, my fingers pull at my sleeve and I close my eyes against the pain.
I sniff hard, clearing my throat. ‘Basically, he had a load of pills, and by the time Jess came back we were both completely wasted. She went skits, properly mental. This guy, she hated him, and she had work the next day and I don’t know, I guess the house was in a state, and we had this fight. I don’t remember what I was saying. I was just so angry, I don’t even know why. I’d just fucked everything up and the last thing I wanted to hear was my best friend telling me I’d fucked everything up.’
When I look up I am almost surprised to find Maureen looking back at me. Her face is blank, giving nothing away, and so I carry on.
‘I was horrible to her, nasty. I told her that she didn’t really care about me, that she was just trying to make herself feel better by being nice to me; I told her … Oh fuck, I don’t even want to think what I said. The point is I was a bitch, but I didn’t mean it. She was my best friend, I worshipped her. I was just …’
Maureen pulls out another cigarette, lights it and hands it to me.
I take a long drag and look out towards the window. By now the light outside has started to fade, the room lit only by the glow of a streetlamp dashed with light rain.
‘We had this fight, then I ran off. I was wasted and she was worried what I’d do and so she chased me down the stairs, she was trying to pull me back into the house. We stumbled out onto the street, it was dusk, the sky was this sort of purplish grey, I remember that. It all looked so surreal. She was telling me to come back and she was shouting at this guy to fuck off, and then it got nasty. She wouldn’t stop telling me to come in and I tried to push her away but she just wouldn’t get off. She wouldn’t leave me alone. We kept arguing down the street, and when we got to the corner I ran across the road. I shouted something at her. I don’t know what it was I said … but it must have stunned her because she stopped. Suddenly, in the middle of the street, she just stopped running as if the thing she’d been chasing had just disappeared.’
Saying the words, I feel that same sense, the dread stretching out in front of me, like a cave.
‘Then she looked up, it was like she already knew. As if she’d been given some warning. She turned as if to face it, the car …’
Tears run down my cheeks.
‘He was driving so fast. She was standing just in the bend of the road … I closed my eyes.’
I whisper these final words as if too afraid to say them aloud. ‘I didn’t see the crash, but I heard it. I heard the screech of brakes, a sort of crunching sound. As I turned, I saw her body, it was up in the air …’
‘Isobel …’ Maureen grabs my wrist, her voice shaking with emotion. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘It is.’
There is a pause and then I say it again, ‘It really is. You don’t understand. I heard it. I heard her body hit the floor. It was so loud … It was almost like … I can’t describe … it was like I felt my own body hit the pavement, and I couldn’t move. And then the car, it just drove off. He stopped for a moment, I thought he was going to get out, but he just kept going.’
My voice drops and I look at the floor, my soul drained.
‘I panicked. I wanted to go to her but … I just couldn’t. And then I looked up and I could just see her hand. On the pavement across the street, that’s all I could see of her, her fingers pointing out from behind a parked car. It was so still. She wasn’t moving. I just … I should have gone to her, I should have picked up my phone and called the ambulance, but I couldn’t move. I just lay there on the ground and I put my hands over my ears. If I had called for an ambulance, she might have lived. They never caught him, the guy who hit her.’
With those words, it’s as if I’ve been pulled out of a trance. When I look up at Maureen, I wipe at my cheeks with my sleeve. ‘Sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t know why I—’
