I don’t know if everything’s in the same place that it was when I lived here. I don’t know whether Anna rearranged the cupboards, put the spaghetti in a different jar, moved the weighing scales from bottom left to bottom right. I don’t know. I just hope, as I slip my hand into the drawer behind me, that she didn’t.
‘You could be right, you know,’ I say when the kiss breaks. I tilt my face up to his. ‘Maybe if I hadn’t come to Blenheim Road that night, Megan would still be alive.’
He nods and my right hand closes around a familiar object. I smile and lean in to him, closer, closer, snaking my left hand around his waist. I whisper into his ear, ‘But do you honestly think, given you’re the one who smashed her skull, that I’m responsible?’
He jerks his head away from me and it’s then that I lunge forward, pressing all my weight against him, throwing him off balance so that he stumbles back against the kitchen table. I raise my foot and stamp down on his as hard as I can, and as he pitches forward in pain, I grab a fistful of hair at the back of his head and pull him towards me, while at the same time driving my knee up into his face. I feel a crunch of cartilage as he cries out. I push him to the floor, grab the keys from the kitchen table and am out of the French doors before he’s able to get to his knees.
I head for the fence, but I slip in the mud and lose my footing, and he’s on top of me before I get there, dragging me backwards, pulling my hair, clawing at my face, spitting curses through blood – you stupid, stupid bitch, why can’t you stay away from us? Why can’t you leave me alone? I get away from him again, but there’s nowhere to go. I won’t make it back through the house and I won’t make it over the fence. I cry out, but no one’s going to hear me, not over the rain and the thunder and the sound of the approaching train. I run to the bottom of the garden, down towards the tracks. Dead end. I stand on the spot where, a year or more ago, I stood with his child in my arms. I turn, my back to the fence, and watch him striding purposefully towards me. He wipes his mouth with his forearm, spitting blood to the ground. I can feel the vibrations from the tracks in the fence behind me – the train is almost upon us, its sound like a scream. Tom’s lips are moving, he’s saying something to me, but I can’t hear him. I watch him come, I watch him, and I don’t move until he’s almost upon me, and then I swing. I jam the vicious twist of the corkscrew into his neck.
His eyes widen as he falls without a sound. He raises his hands to his throat, his eyes on mine. He looks as though he’s crying. I watch until I can’t look any longer, then I turn my back on him. As the train goes past I can see faces in brightly lit windows, heads bent over books and phones, travellers warm and safe on their way home.
Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Morning
You can feel it: it’s like the hum of electric lights, the change in atmosphere as the train pulls up to the red signal. I’m not the only one who looks now. I don’t suppose I ever was. I suppose that everyone does it – looks out at the houses they pass – only we all see them differently. All saw them differently. Now, everyone else is seeing the same thing. Sometimes you can hear people talk about it.
‘There, it’s that one. No, no, that one, on the left – there. With the roses by the fence. That’s where it happened.’
The houses themselves are empty, number fifteen and number twenty-three. They don’t look it – the blinds are up and the doors open, but I know that’s because they’re being shown. They’re both on the market now, though it may be a while before either gets a serious buyer. I imagine the estate agents mostly escorting ghouls around those rooms, rubberneckers desperate to see it up close, the place where he fell and his blood soaked the earth.
It hurts to think of them walking through the house – my house, where I once had hope. I try not to think about what came after. I try not to think about that night. I try and I fail.
Side by side, drenched in his blood, we sat on the sofa, Anna and I. The wives, waiting for the ambulance. Anna called them – she called the police, she did everything. She took care of everything. The paramedics arrived, too late for Tom, and on their heels came uniformed police, then the detectives, Gaskill and Riley. Their mouths literally fell open when they saw us. They asked questions but I couldn’t make out their words. I could barely move, barely breathe. Anna spoke, calm and assured.
‘It was self-defence,’ she told them. ‘I saw the whole thing. From the window. He went for her with the corkscrew. He would have killed her. She had no choice. I tried …’ It was the only time she faltered, the only time I saw her cry. ‘I tried to stop the bleeding, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t.’
One of the uniformed police fetched Evie, who miraculously had slept soundly through the whole thing, and they took us all to the police station. They sat Anna and me in separate rooms and asked yet more questions that I don’t remember. I struggled to answer, to concentrate. I struggled to form words at all. I told them he attacked me, hit me with a bottle. I said that he came at me with the corkscrew. I said that I managed to take the weapon from him, that I used it to defend myself. They examined me: they looked at the wound on my head, at my hands, at my fingernails.
‘Not much in the way of defensive wounds,’ Riley said doubtfully. They went away and left me there, with a uniformed officer – the one with the neck acne who came to Cathy’s flat in Ashbury a lifetime ago – standing at the door, avoiding my eye. Later, Riley came back. ‘Mrs Watson confirms your story, Rachel,’ she said. ‘You can go now.’ She couldn’t meet my gaze either. A uniformed policeman took me to the hospital, where they stitched up the wound on my scalp.
There’s been a lot of stuff about Tom in the papers. I found out that he was never in the army. He tried to get in, but he was rejected twice. The story about his father was a lie, too – he’d twisted it all round. He took his parents’ savings and lost it all. They forgave him, but he cut all ties with them when his father declined to remortgage their house in order to lend him more money. He lied all the time, about everything. Even when he didn’t need to, even when there was no point.
I have the clearest memory of Scott talking about Megan, saying I don’t even know who she was, and I feel exactly the same way. Tom’s whole life was constructed on lies – falsehoods and half-truths told to make him look better, stronger, more interesting than he was. And I bought them, I fell for them all. Anna, too. We loved him. I wonder whether we would have loved the weaker, flawed, unembellished version. I think that I would. I would have forgiven his mistakes and his failures. I have committed enough of my own.