Copycat (10 page)

I turned pink, gobsmacked. ‘Oh Martha, no! What makes you think that?’

‘He’s done it before, the wanker.’

‘You told me. But nothing serious. And not for years. He’s that sort of man – you accepted that.’ And I’d always considered her laid-back attitude towards his lechery crazy.

‘But I’ve never felt so vulnerable as I feel now,’ Martha said quietly, rubbing her cheek with soft purple felt. ‘Shit. Never so needy or so dependent, and he’s stopped reading the morning papers.’

She could be blaming this on my phone calls – calls I felt impelled to make, no matter how foolish I felt, just to hear her voice and know she was there. When the phone was answered, I put the handset down quickly. No good her trying 1471, our number was withheld.

‘You’re up every night with Lawrence,’ I said. ‘You’re tired and you’ve got post-natal depression. You’ve no cause to think Sam’s cheating again. It’s all going on in your head. You’re a prat.’

‘I’ve got my reasons. Which one d’you want first?’ Martha answered, to my surprise. ‘He’s gone off sex – my fault I suppose. I don’t fancy bonking in the few spare minutes I’ve got. Lawrence is a pain in the arse, I’m shagged out all the time.’

What a selfish, thoughtless husband Sam was. ‘What else?’ Did I want to know?

‘He comes home late.’

‘He’s got that new contract…’

‘I know that,’ she snapped, ‘but then there’s the phone calls.’

‘What?’ My heart sank. The phone calls were mine. I could feel the blood draining…

‘At first I took no notice. I don’t go round looking for trouble, unlike you. But now it’s almost every evening, sometimes three or four times, and when I answer I’m cut off.’

‘If Sam was playing around, why would he risk her behaving like that?’

‘Dunno.’ She shrugged. ‘Unless he’s dumped her.’

I shook my head, avoiding her eyes. ‘It doesn’t make much sense to me. You’re jumping to the worst conclusions.’

‘Maybe I could get the calls traced in case it’s some nutter. I said that to Sam and he agreed.’

‘Well then, you’ve got your answer.’ I got up quickly to make some coffee. ‘Tina says I should tell Telecom.’

I whirled round.
‘You’ve told Tina?

‘Yes. Carl did this to her. Once.’

‘Since when were you that close to Tina?’

‘Oh Jennie, not now, please don’t start…’

I knew how aggravating I was in spite of my craven desire to please. I felt my eyes narrow into slits. But Tina at number three, with the snap-shut handbag, silver shell suit, smutty novels, lacquered hair and Beanie Baby collection? Surely not. I couldn’t find the words. I just couldn’t bear it.
‘But why didn’t you tell me first?’

‘Because you’ve got enough problems.’ I wished I could stop my own voice from speaking. I knew how much I was going to annoy her.
‘But I’m your best friend.’

‘Yes, you are.’ She was cautious. ‘But I’m not like you, I need other people.’

‘Why?’ God, I was pathetic.

‘You know damn well why. Different experiences, different approaches. You can’t get it all from one person…’

‘I can.’

‘And well I know it. So you’re lucky then, sod you, Jennie…’

‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.’

I’d have to tell Martha about the phone calls; one more reason for her to despise me. I had such a horror of exposing myself and yet in this situation I had no pride. I was shameless, without inhibitions for the first time in my life.

I closed my eyes. ‘It was me. The phone calls.’

She’d forgotten what we’d been talking about. She’d picked up her old guitar and was strumming it sadly, some slow blues number. At the end of the chord she looked up, frowning in disbelief.

I said again,
‘It was me.’

‘You are joking, I hope.’ And her laugh was cold.

‘Please don’t look at me like that.’

‘Bloody hell. But you should have spoken. If you’d asked, you could have come over…’

The wretched words were hard to find. ‘I can’t come every night after Sam gets home. What would he think? He’d soon get annoyed…’

How Martha loathed the necessity of tackling this subject again. As soon as one symptom was dealt with, another would rear its lamentable head.

I was desperate for her constant attention. She had to focus on me all the time.

I was taken aback by the frostiness in her voice. ‘I’m losing patience, Jennie, I warn you. You’ve got to ask someone for help. This is getting right out of hand. What if I’d accused Sam to his face? I honestly thought the wanker was up to his old mucky tricks again. Who knows what the outcome might have been if I’d had it out with him like I planned? You know damn well that I’m not feeling strong, what with Lawrence so small and my job applications getting me nowhere.’ Martha’s eyes began to fill with water. ‘I’m sodding well pissed off with it all. I’ve had enough, Jennie. This is it.’

‘It’s not much fun for me either,’ I cried, overwhelmed with misery. ‘Believe me, if I could stop this I would.’

‘I do believe you, Jennie,’ she said, still grappling with that wretched hat, afraid I would lose control and cause a scene if she spoke to me too harshly. She knew my moods so well by then, she was forever watchful. ‘And whatever you think, I do care about you and that’s why I’m saying you must find help, because what’s going to happen next? I mean,
this thing is a bloody medieval possession…
’

Martha was right, it was a possession. But how would my doctor see it when I described my unnatural complaint? Madness was another word for it. I’d be sent straight to a shrink.

Graham might find out.

And in an inexplicable way this germ of madness growing inside me did not want to be cured. It fed off misery, it heightened emotion: the agony and ecstasy were addictive. Weird as it was, the focus of my life was now so enormous that the pressure was off everything else.

Like a greedy louse I sucked and gorged; my brain spun with plots and plans, with my fantasies, with my heightened awareness of music and my yearnings for the ‘Cloths of Heaven’. The sadness and wistfulness of being with Martha sent me dancing on their clouds.

She was my inspiration, my reason for being alive.

So what else could it be but love?

Martha gave me a frown of concern before she dropped the bombshell. ‘If you don’t do something about this, Jennie, I’m not going to see you at all.’

I went cold. I was begging.
‘No no no…
’

‘For your own sake, not mine. I’ve handled this badly as it is and maybe…’

I collapsed. ‘I will get help,
I swear.
The next time I go, I’ll talk to the doctor.
Only don’t ever think of doing that, Martha,
I really couldn’t stand that…’

‘OK, OK. Now help me finish off this old pasta.’ Heavily, distrustfully, Martha left the subject alone, and rummaged in the depths of her fridge. The door knocked off her purple hat.

Ten minutes later, back at my house: ‘Help me, it’s Poppy! She banged her head.
Now she keeps going to sleep.’

As I knew she would, Martha dropped her defences and drove the jeep at breakneck speed to the casualty department at St Margaret’s. I leapt out with the listless Poppy, holding her out to the nurse like a sacrifice. ‘I must stay with her, she’ll be terrified without me…’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait,’ shouted Martha, dishevelled, full of concern. ‘Everything’s going to be OK and I’ll let Graham know where we are.’

‘
Graham?
Oh yes, you tell Graham.’

The acned young doctor stared deeply into Poppy’s eyes. ‘Please tell me what happened, Mrs Gordon, as clearly as you can.’

‘She fell out of her highchair,’ I cried. ‘She’s learned to rock it and before I could stop her I saw it going over in awful slow motion. I tried to reach her in time,
I tried…
’

‘Yes?’ Meanwhile, a nurse was taking her pulse.

‘I always kept my eye on her. I was afraid this might happen one day. And the next thing was she went all woozy and I couldn’t get her attention…’

‘You did the right thing, bringing her in. The actual wound doesn’t look too bad, but I am concerned by this apathetic response.’

‘What d’you mean?’ And my voice was barely audible.

‘She’s not responding as she should and her pupils are dilated,’ said the doctor, turning to face me. ‘She can’t have got hold of anything, can she?’

‘Like what?’

He shook his head. ‘Pills, medicines, some cough mixture that an adult could take but that might have a bad effect on a small child?’

Dear God, dear God, how had he…

I wrung my hands as I hovered over my child, a bad angel.

‘Please don’t worry,’ he went on calmly. ‘You can stay with your daughter, but I think we will keep her in overnight for observation.’

What was the doctor doing now? The studious young man was examining the fresh red mark on Poppy’s forehead. It had been easy and quite painless: it only meant rubbing gently with a sheet of sandpaper, backwards and forwards, and the tender baby skin roughened and tiny blood spots appeared. She didn’t cry – if she’d cried, dear God, I would have stopped. It looked as if she’d had a knock and she was sleepy anyway after three teaspoons of Benylin.

I closed my eyes against the stark lights, feeling sick.

My teeth, I couldn’t stop them from chattering.

To see my baby lying there so sweet and defenceless broke my heart. Poppy whimpered in her sleep and I couldn’t hold back the tears. I sobbed with relief that no real damage was done, but more than that, I wept at the evil act prompted by my obsession. Martha’s threats of total withdrawal had thrown me into a panic. There was no forward planning. The idea had taken hold of me suddenly and before I came to my senses I’d done it.

In just the same impulsive way, I had staged that threatened miscarriage months ago.

Before I knew it, that mark was there on Poppy’s head and the medicine had been given.

The frenzied regret came seconds later. I screamed for Martha, more stricken with horror than I would have been if the highchair story was true.

I had turned into a monster.

God help me.
For my child’s sake I should seek help and confess. NOW NOW NOW. Tell them, my conscience screamed at me. Martha was right – what next? If I could do this hellish thing to Poppy, the one I cared about most in the world – except Martha – then I was capable of anything.

And all this – for what?

Martha’s attention?

The certainty that she would forgive me?

A small measure of her pity?

What was this demon that possessed me? What in God’s name was living inside me?
And this in the name of love.

If only we had been able to talk to somebody wise.

I
F ONLY WE HAD
been able to talk to somebody wise.

Tina Gallagher might not be wise but she was a damn sight wiser than Sam, who wouldn’t have known what I was talking about if I’d turned to him for advice. I confided in Tina Gallagher, the brassy popsie who lived next door, on the day she found me hunched and demoralized, quite overcome in my kitchen. I had confided in Tina before – she was nice – about the times I was suspicious of Sam and the despair I felt at being trapped at home. I’d even told her about small irritations, like when Sam was being deliberately unhelpful and refusing to call at the nearest Spar on his way home.

Feeling particularly ugly and bloated on that fatal day (Lawrence’s birth had played havoc with my weight), I played straight into Jennie’s hands. And the self-contempt caused by my feeble reaction has bugged me ever since. Not so much because of what happened, but because I
allowed
it to happen, knowing how fragile her warped state of mind was.

I let Jennie down. I should have been stronger.

Somebody wrote that to experience the whole spectrum of life’s emotions you must spy on your country, commit murder and make love to someone of your own sex.

Oh yes? A pretty rounded sort of person is what I thought myself to be at the time.

And up until that fateful day, I had missed out on all three of those highly charged activities.

Jennie despised Tina and Carl, the Gallaghers – my neighbours. In the morally superior manner of her mother, she considered them the wrong friends for me. And now, when I think back to the way I allowed her intrusion into my life, I have to wonder at my own sanity. But when you’re marooned at home all day, surrounded either by blubbering kids or women trying to find themselves, deprived of outside diversions, you can lose or confuse your identity.

Jennie’s son, Josh, had arrived in April, and thanks to the epidural his birth was a piece of cake. Mother and baby came home the next day, and we celebrated the day after, raising our glasses to the fact that this time she’d managed to avoid having her bossy mother to stay.

This old swimming-pool thing. She refused to drop it. It was now time, Jennie decided, to press on with the project. A community effort sprang to my mind: if Jennie could be persuaded to make this a shared activity, maybe, just maybe, she would open up, make friends, and this infatuation might die a death in the process. What about time and labour in exchange for reasonable use? I’d read about something similar in a magazine – some village in Essex had tried it and it was working well. In the faint hope that she might agree, I dropped a couple of hints and couldn’t have been more astonished when she agreed without a mega-trauma.

I see now that her reasons were devious. First, she was after approval from me. And secondly – and this seems incredible – she actually believed that worming her way into our neighbours’ affections would make me jealous.

If it wasn’t for me, there’d have been no project. Jennie was not the most popular resident in the Close. On top of her shyness there were these mood swings and nobody wanted to share a pool in the snooty Gordons’ garden. I curse myself now for my misguided decision to influence the opposition – I certainly didn’t want it and Sam didn’t care. Wishful thinking underlay my response; I so hoped this major diversion might cool her ardour.