Dying for Christmas (6 page)

I shook my head, all trace of laughter evaporated away. There was a searing pain in my ankle where the sharp edge of the metal cuff had cut into the skin. Looking down, I saw a trickle of blood disappearing into my stripy sock.

‘Now go to sleep, Jessica Gold.’ He snapped the knife shut and slid it into the pocket of his jeans. ‘Tomorrow, as they say, is the first day of the rest of your life.’

I crawled back into the kennel and curled up, my right leg with the cuff on it slightly straighter than the left. The next day I’d behave differently, I promised myself. I’d do everything he said and win back my blanket.

That’s how quickly he broke me.

‘Really? Is that all you’ve got?’ This time, the voice in my head was both mine and not mine, cutting through the fug of self-pity I’d wrapped myself in. ‘Toughen up,
Jessica
.’ And now I imagined it was
her.
Cat Woman. Natalie. Spitting out my name like a term of abuse.

Chapter Ten

They woke her up at 6.30. This was a big improvement on the previous year where Katy was in their bed at five, shaking her awake, desperate to open her presents.

‘Katy wanted to wake you up but I didn’t let her,’ said Rory, and despite her grogginess, Kim felt her heart swell at the pride on his face. He’d grown so much in the last year but underneath the new swagger and slimmed-down physique, he was still the solemn, round-faced baby with the huge brown eyes that followed her around the room as if attached by invisible strings.

She allowed herself to be led out of bed, aware that Sean was watching her, though making no attempt to follow. In the kitchen, she put the kettle on while the kids bounced around from sofa to kitchen chair to floor and back again, never losing sight of the stockings stuffed with presents by the fireplace.

A vat of coffee and she’d feel human again.

‘Now, Mummy? Can we? Can we?’

Katy had flung her arms around Kim’s legs and was looking up at her beseechingly.

‘You’re the best Mummy ever. I love you to the moon and back.’

Kim gazed down at her daughter, trying to commit her to memory. The small pointed chin, the curly brown hair that, even at the age of five, she already resented, the over-brimming energy of her.

If only she could pickle this moment and put it in a jar.

While the children tore open their presents, Sean wandered in and wordlessly took the coffee she held out to him. He wouldn’t go through with it, she realized. Not now he could see how happy they all were. She stood beside him and hooked her arm around his waist. He flinched momentarily with surprise, but then put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. They watched their children with wonder.

When the frenzied opening was over, leaving Katy and Rory half spent with adrenalin, surrounded by a sea of debris, Kim broke away from Sean and headed out of the living room.

‘Wait. Where are you going?’

‘To have a shower and get dressed. I’m due in the office in an hour.’

‘You’re still going then?’ His voice was flat, like someone had ironed all the emotion out of it.

‘Of course I’m going. They’re expecting me.’

She held back from explaining yet again how important it was that she show willing. Sean knew how long she’d dreamed of making Detective Sergeant. She’d passed her OSPRE exam back in March but the selection process was painfully slow and ultimately Robertson’s recommendation was what would count with the promotion board.

Sean’s silence followed her up the stairs like a shadow.

* * *

It’s time I dealt with it. The elephant in the room.

Travis. The boyfriend that, like St Peter, I’d denied.

The truth is, the path of true love was not running smooth for Travis and me. In fact I was starting to wonder if it hadn’t just detoured around us altogether. We’d met at university, where he was studying medicine and I was studying social awkwardness and a catastrophic inability to cope with deadlines. He was part of a group who came to visit my flatmate in our halls of residence, and when it got to the end of the evening and we were the only ones not either partnered off or being sick in the toilet, we drifted together by default.

Travis likes to consider himself as someone who thinks outside the box, unswayed by appearances or conventions or passing trends. In that respect I played to his self-image. I was quirky (‘weird’, my brothers would have said). I didn’t dress up to go out or have girlie nights in or pluck my eyebrows. For three years after graduating, I had a series of badly paid, obscure jobs which supported us both in a shared house while Travis was still racking up debt doing his interminable course. Because I wasn’t an obvious choice, I think Travis felt I made him appear more interesting, like he had hidden depths. He thought he’d ‘discovered’ me like an obscure Indie band.

For my part I liked having a boyfriend. I liked having someone to go to the cinema with at weekends. I liked how people I met would instantly relax when I used the phrase ‘my boyfriend’ as if I’d passed some basic first hurdle. I liked that I was suddenly less of an outsider at home.

There was affection too, of course. We’d watch
University Challenge
with me sitting at the end of the sofa with my feet in his lap, yelling out answers and whooping on the rare occasions we got one right. We did the crossword together (cryptic) and I tried not to mind if he got the clue that had been on the tip of my tongue. I loved Travis’ extravagantly curled upper lip with the perfect teardrop between it and his long, very thin nose. I loved the way his pale grey eyes were rendered practically colourless behind his severe black-framed glasses and how he looked as he bent over his textbooks, twiddling his lanky dirty-blond hair around his finger.

But loving bits about each other isn’t the same as loving each other, is it?

In the last couple of years, since Travis started earning a proper salary as a junior doctor, he’s become more critical. ‘Are you really wearing that?’ he’d asked the week before when we were invited to one of his medic friends’ houses for dinner and I appeared wearing my usual jeans and baggy top. He’d started socializing more, going straight out after a long shift, texting me to tell me not to count him in for dinner as he’d grab something out. He’d always been accepting of my eccentricities, but recently he’s begun snapping at me when he sees me making what he calls my ‘gormless face’ which means I was listening to something that he couldn’t hear.

‘Snap out of it,’ he’ll say, clicking his fingers so close to my face, my cheek will be buzzing. ‘Just think about something else.’

He thought the voices that sometimes crowded my head were an indulgence on my part – something I could curtail with a bit of will-power.

When we sit down together in the evening these days, and it’s not often, conversation is no longer an easy flow, but more something that has to be worked on. We stocked up on Scandinavian box sets so we don’t have to talk. We stopped making plans beyond the following weekend because of the tacit fear that we might not still be together by May Bank Holiday, or the summer. Worse, though, was the fear that we
would
be together, that things weren’t quite bad enough to justify splitting up, that we’d carry on coexisting ad infinitum in this limbo that wasn’t quite loveless but wasn’t love
full
either.

Towards the end of last year, I’d presented him with that little plastic stick with the blue line in the windows like a nervous beau proffering a ring box to his beloved, and he’d taken one look and then made that comment about backstreet abortions, and that had been that. Two weeks later I’d had the procedure – that’s what we called it, so we didn’t have to think about what it actually was. He took two days off work. On the first day he made a fuss of me, but by the evening I could see him getting restless, and the next day he got up at seven to go to the hospital. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he said. ‘There’s something important I have to do.’ We’ve never talked about it again. And I never told him that sometimes I wake in the night with a fluttering inside me like a phantom baby moving around.

So that was the context in which I started up a conversation with a strange man in a department-store café.

When the sound of heavy chain links clinking against each other woke me in the early morning of Christmas Day, catapulting me right back to reality, Travis was on my mind.

I lay very still, my teeth chattering with cold, trying not to make a noise, and imagined him lying in our double bed, the plump duvet pulled up around him. I imagined myself slipping in beside him and curling myself around him for warmth, but it was too painful and I had to stop myself thinking about it. I wondered if he’d have called the police yet and decided probably not.

Not after the airport thing.

Around a year ago I’d gone to work as usual and something odd had happened between leaving the office to come home again, and actually getting home. I’d been having episodes where voices exploded in my head, too many to control, leaving me spent and shaken with a gap in my memory of five minutes or ten. A couple of times it had been an hour or more. But this was different. I left work at the usual time, just after six. I remembered walking out of the building, but then nothing. Until I called Travis at just after midnight.

From Luton airport.

All I know is, one minute I was patting my pockets down as usual to make sure I still had my Oyster card, and the next I was sitting in a padded chair at Luton airport departures hall and six hours had passed. ‘But you must have some recollection of what happened?’ Travis had stood in front of me rattling his car keys, still wearing his innies, as he calls his pyjama bottoms, and looking very cross. Travis just couldn’t get his head around these ‘lapses’, as he’d taken to labelling them, as if they were some kind of character flaw.

It hadn’t happened since, at least on that scale, but he still brought it up from time to time.

So no, on balance I thought he probably hadn’t called the police.

Today was another matter. Today we were due at my parents’ house at 12.30 p.m. My mum would have made blinis with smoked salmon and cream cheese sprinkled with dill for us to wash down with champagne and orange juice. As usual, we’d be the first to arrive – my brothers being given papal dispensation to come and go as they choose on account of their having reproduced.

When Travis woke up and I wasn’t there, he’d be worried. I imagined him putting on his glasses to squint at the phone in that way he does first thing in the morning, frowning as if he couldn’t quite trust his own eyes yet. It was now, I decided, he’d feel the first creeping sense of dread. Maybe he’d call the police then, prefacing his call with an apology. ‘I hope this isn’t wasting your time, but …’ Or maybe he’d decide to wait and go to my parents’ anyway, thinking I might have turned up there. I’m not a child – I could just be at a friend’s house sleeping off a heavy night. Except that I don’t have any friends like that.

That scenario seemed most likely. Travis would get in our old Golf, forgetting as usual that the central locking only works from the passenger-door side, and he’d make his way up to my parents’ house, marshalling his righteous anger in case he found me sitting at their kitchen table, right as rain, while at the same time preparing to flip into worry mode in case there was no sign of me. Travis likes to cover every angle.

I was now convinced Travis would delay calling the police until he’d arrived at my parents’ house. I might turn up there after all, and anyway where else was he going to spend Christmas Day?

Today was Christmas Day. I struggled to believe it.

I’m nearly thirty but this would be the first Christmas Day I’d ever spent away from my family. A tear rolled down my cheek as I thought of my brothers arriving and my niece and nephews and the sisters-in-law I’d never really made enough of an effort to get to know. I imagined the hurried exchange of information as they discovered for the first time I was missing – ‘How long?’ ‘But where?’ – and the creeping urgency as they all agreed such behaviour was completely out of character. I thought of how my mum’s hand would shake and my father would fetch some paper to make a list – something practical to keep his thoughts from racing. I imagined them sitting down to dinner while they waited for the police to arrive, just to keep things normal for the kids, and trying to behave like there was nothing really wrong. I imagined my eighteen-month-old nephew George sitting at the table in his clip-on canvas chair, looking from face to face with his huge brown eyes and knowing there was something wrong but not what it was. Would he ask for me, I wondered? ‘Where Jeska?’ he might say. The thought was a fish barb in my flesh. Without thinking I brought my knees up to my chest. The sudden pain on my ankle was intense, and the noise of the chain clanking grated in the air.

I held my breath.

‘I’m guessing you’re awake. Merry Christmas, sweetheart.’

The voice came from nearby. The bed, I assumed. I tried to picture it from the very rushed impression I’d got last night. Big and iron-framed, covered with a heavy old-fashioned eiderdown.

I heard the creak of bedsprings. Seconds later, there was a tugging on my ankle. And then there he was, squatting in the doorway of the kennel, his head slightly cocked, beaming at me as if I was an honoured guest.

‘Did you sleep all right?’

Dominic seemed in a very good mood as he busied himself around the kitchen making breakfast. I was sitting on a high stool at the central island that divided the cooking area from the space where the dining table was, watching his hands as they opened up cupboards and drawers. Were there sharp knives in there? I wondered. Or other things I could use as a weapon? As he rifled through kitchen implements, my unquiet mind made nonsensical leaps. I could grate him to death. Or batter him senseless with a plastic spatula.