Nearest Thing to Crazy (20 page)

‘What sort of thing?’ I asked, keeping my voice as level as I
could.

‘I think I was asking him if he’d ever taken you to Rome. He said he had, but that you wouldn’t ever go back. I just assumed that you weren’t that into galleries and museums.’

‘Oh?’ Too right I hadn’t liked it. But not for cultural reasons. Was that the best he could come up with? An extension of the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ line? A progression to ‘my wife doesn’t “get” culture . . . she’s far too stupid . . .’

We’d arrived at her house. I kept the engine running while she thanked me for the lift. Something in me snapped. ‘Ellie, I know you said you had depression, and I know you told me about a violent boyfriend. If you’re saying that’s not true, then one of us is going bonkers.’

‘Don’t worry, my memory’s like a sieve these days, too. It happens to us all.’ She was about to close the car door and then she leaned in again. ‘I almost forgot. Can you let me have Laura’s mobile number? I said I might pop up to Birmingham and meet her for lunch. Maybe you and I could go together,’ she beamed.

‘Sorry. It’s in my phone. I don’t have it with me . . . forgot to charge it . . . silly me.’

‘Okay,’ she said, brightly. ‘You can let me have it later.’

As the car door slammed, my mobile started to ring. I don’t think she heard it but, frankly, I was past the point of caring. I was too busy worrying about the possibility that I really was going mad.

CHAPTER

10

Okay, that was it. I mean, really
it
. Enough was enough. I was
not
going mad. If anyone was mad here, it wasn’t me. This woman was a complete and utter fruitcake. A total nutter. Weird just didn’t come close. I
know
she told me about the boyfriend, and I
know
she told me about her depression. Without question, absolutely and most definitely. I didn’t imagine her showing me the marks on her neck, or what she said about the involvement of the police. I didn’t imagine the tears in her eyes when she had said how good it was to talk to someone who understood. I know what she had said.

I spent the whole afternoon attacking jobs around the house like some kind of demented lunatic in the hope that I could stop myself from obsessing about that bloody woman. But to be honest I found I could still obsess about her while scrubbing, polishing and vacuuming. She just refused to get out of my head. When I’d tamed the house into domestic submission, I decided I’d make an assault on the garden.

My shed was my special place, a place where I usually found peace: a little sanctuary where I had bags of soil and sand and grit for company; the stacks of old biscuit tins filled with seed packets, plant ties and labels; the old melamine-topped table and high stool where I would sit to prick out my seedlings. Hanging from the walls were my various tools and weapons: rakes, forks, spades, hoes and sharp-bladed shears. I had boxes of rose feed, clematis feed, tomato fertilizer, Growmore and Miracle Gro; mildew and rust sprays and organic slug pellets, all carefully organized and stowed in a way that usually gave me a warm glow of satisfaction. There was normally a sense of stillness in there, and lovely earthy smells, and the dust caking the windows filtered the sunlight like a soft-focus lens. But today there was something very wrong. Flies buzzed all over the windows obscuring the sunlight, more flies lay dead on the floor, crunching beneath my feet, while others buzzed angrily around my head. And there was the foul smell of something rotting; the sort of sickly-sweet stench of decomposition telling me something had died in there. I hunted around, fastidiously shifting stuff, wary of what I was going to uncover. And then I lifted an old, empty plastic sack and found underneath the carcass of Nina – my lovely black Orpington – with her milk-glazed eye, beak in rictus gape, feathers dull and dirty and her ribcage exposed, poor thing. I couldn’t understand how she could have got there. Had she somehow got herself locked into the shed and I hadn’t heard her? Had she gone broody and decided to nest away from the rest of her little flock? But there was no sign of a nest, no obvious place where she would have settled down and quietly got on with her business. And she was feisty enough to make herself heard if she was hungry. Could I have just let her die in my shed? Surely I couldn’t have neglected her like that? And it struck me as strange that she’d been tucked underneath the sack, as though someone had covered her over. I opened up the sack and shovelled the shrunken little body into it and then tied the top and carried it to the wheelie bin. A thought struck me as I was closing the lid. No. She couldn’t be that crazy, surely. Could she?

It was time to talk to Dan. Whatever the outcome, he needed to know what she was doing; he needed to see that she was unhinged, and most of all we needed to unite in order to protect ourselves from her because she might even be dangerous. I mean, one read about stalkers and things like that, but not in rural villages like ours. On the face of it, I could see why people would be inclined not to believe me because it did stretch the boundaries of credibility. Who
would
believe it? The trouble was, I realized, that it was only my word against hers, and I may well not be believed. And then what? Would everyone think it was me who was the crazy one?

I was still out in the garden when Dan got home, and in the middle of mucking out the hens. I was pushing the full wheelbarrow along the track towards the compost heap, and so I answered his wave with a shouted ‘hi’ and then he disappeared into the house. About five minutes later, when I’d moved on to the veggie patch and was busy collecting salad for supper, Dan reappeared dressed in a pair of running shorts and a baggy old T-shirt. ‘Going for a jog?’ I asked, rather unnecessarily.

‘Yeah, I thought . . . as it’s a nice evening. Need to get rid of some of the stress of the day, you know how it is.’ He started doing his stretching while I was bent double over the lettuce. The stress of his day? Just wait until he heard about the stress of
my
day.

‘Won’t be long . . .’ He swung the gate open and broke into an athletic bounce and had soon turned onto the lane and out of my sight.

I picked off the roots from the lettuce, chucked them on the compost heap and then put the basket back in the shed. I left the door open to get rid of the flies and the disgusting smell, and decided I would sweep the floor tomorrow when the light was better and the air fresher. Then I went into the house, scrubbed my hands and poured myself a large glass of wine and contemplated what I would say to Dan. He seemed to have been gone for a long time. In fact it was nearly dark when he walked into the kitchen. I was well into my second glass of wine and was almost finished putting together a vegetable lasagne from the Weight Watchers cookery book and spreading on the low fat fromage frais, which, I don’t care what the book said, tasted nothing like a proper cheese sauce.

‘Hi, babe,’ he said. I thought he looked remarkably fresh for someone who’d just been punishing their body for well over an hour.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi. Did you know you’ve left the door to the shed open?’

‘Yep. It’s to get rid of the smell, and the flies. I found Nina.’

‘Nina?’

‘The hen . . . you know . . .’

‘Oh yeah, Nina. Dead?’

‘Very dead. Poor thing. And I can’t understand how she could have got there. It’s just really, really strange.’

I was surprised when he closed the gap between us and then pulled me towards him.

‘Aw, your poor little hen. Come here,’ he said.

He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into him. His face was damp against my neck, and he smelt musky and masculine and in spite of my aversion to sweat-covered skin, I relaxed into him, instinctively grateful for his attention. Then my nose wrinkled, ‘You smell of alcohol.’

‘I just saw Ellie . . . I stopped by for a drink.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. She was walking Coco in the lane when I went past. She said she wanted to talk to me about the quiz – that it had been suggested she give me a hand with the questions.’

‘Did she?’ He must have felt my body tense, because his arm slipped from my shoulders, but he let his palm hover against the small of my back.

‘She told me you’d had a good meeting this morning. And she said she was going to help you with the flowers. Isn’t that great?’

I moved away from him towards the bottle and topped up my glass, then took a sip. Dan gave me that sort of slow, lingering glance that I read as disapproving.

‘Terrific.’

He bent over to untie his shoelaces and so his voice was slightly muffled, but he was still on the same topic. ‘Must be nice for you all to have someone like her helping out.’

‘Oh yeah. Definitely. A very useful contribution.’ I slipped the dish inside the oven, closed the door, put the plates into the warming oven and generally tried to appear preoccupied.

‘Well that’s good.’

I finished clearing off the surfaces and started to wipe my hands down the front of my apron. ‘Yeah. Nice. Really nice.’ Our eyes met. This was not at all how I wanted the conversation to go. I took a deep breath.

‘Dan, I need to talk to you, about her . . . about Ellie.’

‘Oh please, not again . . .’

‘No, it’s important. Really important.’

He seemed nervous, shifty even. ‘I need a shower.’

‘But . . .’

And he was gone. I had that nagging sense of losing something very precious, and I was carrying out that same forensic revisiting of where I had been when I’d lost it, and punishing myself for being so careless. Only it wasn’t that I had lost it, it was that someone else was stealing it. It was burglary. Ellie was burgling all that was good in my life, and I was just standing by and letting her get away with it. I busied myself with washing, drying and sorting the lettuce. I was almost grateful for the peace which had settled around the empty kitchen. I had time to try and scrape together my shattered nerves; I just needed to be able to turn my feelings over, spread them out in the palms of my hands and hold them up to the light. I needed to scrutinize them from all angles and examine what they were exactly, and maybe having done that I could then work out just what it was that I was supposed to do.

I measured the oil and lemon juice into a jam jar and then I heard Dan’s phone bleep with a new message alert. His jacket was hanging over the back of the chair and he must have left his phone in the pocket. I carried on mixing the dressing, but the echo of the bleep stayed with me. Tomorrow was Tuesday; wasn’t that the day that Laura said they sometimes met for lunch? Maybe that was Laura, now. I wondered what they talked about over lunch. I could guess what they’d talk about this week. It would be all about Ellie, and Laura’s excitement and Dan’s gratitude. Oh yes, I could guess what they’d say. ‘Why was Mum being so peculiar?’ Laura would ask, and Dan would say: ‘I’ve been worried about Mum . . .’ What would he tell her? Is that why he’d kept their lunches secret from me, so that they could discuss me? Oh stop it . . . stop it . . . I told myself, and took another sip of wine.

I wanted to check his phone. I really, really wanted to check it. And why shouldn’t I read a text from my daughter to my husband? Wasn’t Dan the honesty advocate? Taking Laura out to lunch without telling me wasn’t part of an honesty policy. So it didn’t matter if I knew about it, did it? I grabbed the phone before I could change my mind and quickly opened up the new message. But it wasn’t from Laura.

Can meet you at Wagamama’s at 1. Ellie xx

I could hear Dan moving around upstairs and I knew he’d be back down any second. I quickly marked the message ‘unread’, and then slipped it back into his pocket. I refilled my glass and drank half of it straight back. I could feel my cheeks turning pink. I threw the salad leaves into the wooden bowl and slammed the two silly hand-shaped servers down on the top. I had to keep my cool. I was so close to having an explosive confrontation with him, but I wasn’t ready, not yet.

‘Okay?’ I said, as I poured him a glass of wine. ‘Your phone beeped.’

‘Oh?’ He walked over to his jacket and took the phone out. I watched him, noticing his frown as he read the text. Then he put the phone back in his pocket.

‘Anything important?’ I asked.

‘No.’ He picked up his glass and took a long drink from it, then he started sorting through the pile of post, his head turned away from me. All the time I was saying over and over in my head, ‘Just keep cool . . . play it . . .’ I was like some kind of robotic Stepford wife, with my heart replaced by batteries. I dished up the lasagne, carefully placing it on one side of the plate so that he’d have room for the salad. I set it down in front of him, and then helped myself. Then we were both seated at the table. I had no appetite, but I made a good show of pushing my food around the plate. The fromage frais had congealed into a crusty, unappetizing excrescence.

‘Mmm, this looks good,’ Dan said.

‘Are you meeting Laura tomorrow?’ I dived straight in. I had to know whether my husband was a liar or not.

He stalled for time, finishing his mouthful, staring down at his plate and shovelling more fuel on to his fork. ‘Why?’