‘Yeah?’
‘Tom, it’s me.’
‘Yes.’
Anna must be there with him, he doesn’t want to say my name. I wait for a moment, to give him time to move to another room, to get away from her. I hear him sigh. ‘What is it?’
‘Um, I wanted to talk to you … As I said in my note, I—’
‘What?’ He sounds irritated.
‘I left you a note a couple of days ago. I thought we should talk …’
‘I didn’t get a note.’ Another heavier sigh. ‘Fuck’s sake. That’s why she’s pissed off with me.’ Anna must have taken it, she didn’t give it him. ‘What do you need?’
I want to hang up, dial again, start over. Tell him how good it was to see him on Monday, when we went to the lake.
‘I just wanted to ask you something.’
‘What?’ he snaps. He sounds really annoyed.
‘Is everything OK?’
‘What do you want, Rachel?’ It’s gone, all the tenderness that was there a week ago. I curse myself for leaving that note, I’ve obviously got him into trouble at home.
‘I wanted to ask you about that night – the night Megan Hipwell went missing.’
‘Oh, Jesus. We’ve talked about this – you can’t have forgotten already.’
‘I just—’
‘You were drunk,’ he says, his voice loud, harsh. ‘I told you to go home. You wouldn’t listen. You wandered off. I drove around looking for you, but I couldn’t find you.’
‘Where was Anna?’
‘She was at home.’
‘With the baby?’
‘With Evie, yes.’
‘She wasn’t in the car with you?’
‘No.’
‘But—’
‘Oh for God’s sake. She was supposed to be going out, I was going to babysit. Then you came along, so she came and cancelled her plans. And I wasted yet more hours of my life running around after you.’
I wish I hadn’t called. To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it’s like cold steel twisting in my gut.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘It’s just, I remember it differently … Tom, when you saw me, was I hurt? Was I … Did I have a cut on my head?’
Another heavy sigh. ‘I’m surprised you remember anything at all, Rachel. You were blind drunk. Filthy, stinking drunk. Staggering all over the place.’ My throat starts to close up, hearing him say these words. I’ve heard him say these sorts of things before, in the bad old days, the very worst days, when he was tired of me, sick of me, disgusted by me. Wearily, he goes on. ‘You’d fallen over in the street, you were crying, you were a total mess. Why is this important?’ I can’t find the words right away, I take too long to answer. He goes on: ‘Look, I have to go. Don’t call any more, please. We’ve been through this. How many times do I have to ask you? Don’t call, don’t leave notes, don’t come here. It upsets Anna. All right?’
The phone goes dead.
Sunday, 18 August 2013
Early morning
I’ve been downstairs in the living room all night, with the television on for company, fear ebbing and flowing. Strength ebbing and flowing. It feels a bit like I’ve gone back in time, the wound he made years ago ripped open again, new and fresh. It’s silly, I know. I was an idiot to think that I had a chance with him again, just on the basis of one conversation, a few moments which I took for tenderness and which were probably nothing more than sentimentality and guilt. Still, it hurts. And I’ve just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don’t, if I keep numbing it, it’ll never really go away.
And I was an idiot to let myself think that there was a connection between me and Scott, that I could help him. So, I’m an idiot. I’m used to that. I don’t have to continue to be one, do I? Not any longer. I lay here all night and I promised myself that I’ll get a handle on things. I’ll move away from here, far away. I’ll get a new job. I’ll go back to my maiden name, sever ties with Tom, make it harder for anyone to find me. Should anyone come looking.
I haven’t had much sleep. Lying here on the sofa, making plans, every time I started drifting off to sleep I heard Tom’s voice in my head, as clear as if he were right there, right next to me, his lips against my ear – You were blind drunk. Filthy, stinking drunk – and I jolted awake, shame washing over me like a wave. Shame, but also the strongest sense of déjà vu, because I’ve heard those words before, those exact words.
And then I couldn’t stop running the scenes through my head: waking with blood on the pillow, the inside of my mouth hurting, as though I’d bitten my cheek, fingernails dirty, terrible head, Tom coming out of the bathroom, that expression he wore – half hurt, half angry – dread rising in me like floodwater.
‘What happened?’
Tom, showing me the bruises on his arm, on his chest, where I’d hit him.
‘I don’t believe it, Tom. I’d never hit you. I’ve never hit anyone in my life.’
‘You were blind drunk, Rachel. Do you remember anything you did last night? Anything you said?’ And then he’d tell me, and I still couldn’t believe it, because nothing he said sounded like me, none of it. And the thing with the golf club, that hole in the plaster, grey and blank like a blinded eye trained on me every time I passed it, and I couldn’t reconcile the violence that he talked about with the fear that I remembered.
Or thought that I remembered. After a while I learned not to ask what I had done, or to argue when he volunteered the information, because I didn’t want to know the details, I didn’t want to hear the worst of it, the things I said and did when I was like that, filthy, stinking drunk. Sometimes he threatened to record me, he told me he’d play it back for me. He never did. Small mercies.
After a while, I learned that when you wake up like that, you don’t ask what happened, you just say that you’re sorry: you’re sorry for what you did and who you are and you’re never, ever going to behave like that again.
And now I’m not, I’m really not. I can be thankful to Scott for this: I’m too afraid, now, to go out in the middle of the night to buy booze. I’m too afraid to let myself slip, because that’s when I make myself vulnerable.
I’m going to have to be strong, that’s all there is to it.
My eyelids start to feel heavy again and my head nods against my chest. I turn the TV down so there’s almost no sound at all, roll over so that I’m facing the sofa back, snuggle down and pull the duvet over me, and I’m drifting off, I can feel it, I’m going to sleep, and then – bang, the ground is rushing up at me and I jerk upright, my heart in my throat. I saw it. I saw it.