Remember Me This Way (22 page)

‘Do you need to buy?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m looking to rent. A short lease. I don’t know when I might be moving on.’

At night, I paint my face carefully with blusher and lipstick and slip into his favourite clothes: the tight jeans, the silky top I’ve mended with a fine thread. I think about the first night I wore them – our sixth-month anniversary. We ate at a restaurant high above the river, on the South Bank, the lights of London twinkling at our feet. We laughed at the poshness of the menu – the food that came in toppled layers, how many of the ingredients listed (‘crispy leek’, ‘blanquette sauce’) hardly figured (a fragment! a dribble!). Zach ordered champagne. In the taxi home, my head on his shoulder, feeling his breath in my hair, I was as happy as I’d ever been.

Now I stand on tiptoe at the bedroom window and stare out across the ravaged garden.

I try not to feel anything too clearly; my body has its own ideas. No single person inhabits my skin, no simple emotion sets up home in my head. I swerve almost hourly. At times, I am crippled, bent over with a sense of self-protection. I want to clutch my arms, curl into a ball, close up. At others, I feel like breaking through brickwork, striding out into the world, screaming to the sky, my arms outstretched, my heart exposed.

I veer between dread at something happening, and disappointment that it hasn’t.

I can’t decide if he wants to love me, or to kill me.

On Sunday, I take the dog for a long walk around Wandsworth Common and through a knot of backstreets all the way to Tooting Common, its wilder sister further south. Both commons are still battered by Thursday night’s storm – many of the paths unpassable. It’s a good five-mile round trip. We’re soaking wet when we get back, footsore. Howard curls up in his basket and I sit at the kitchen table. The room is untidy. Newspapers are piled by the sink. My sewing basket is open on the floor. I left the milk out.

I check my mobile phone.

Onnie hasn’t rung.

I fetch my laptop from underneath my bed and open Facebook. I search ‘Onnie Murphy’. In her photograph, her mouth is pouting, her hair a blurred curtain – any one of a million teenage girls. Her privacy settings won’t let me access her timeline, or her list of friends. My fingers flex. I probably shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t be encouraging her. I don’t need Onnie in my life. Xenia may well be irrelevant. But I just want to
know
. I press ‘Add Friend’.

Friend request sent
.

In the corner of my screen, I have one notification. I click on it.

It’s from Fred Laws. He has written,
Hello stranger
. And left a number for me to ring.

I lean back in the chair.

Fred Laws. My old boss. Zach’s old school friend. It’s years since we last met up. It was an easy progression, letting him slip out of my life. I got my job at the school, and he moved to Durham to take up a post in the university library. Zach had no interest in seeing Fred again and I knew he didn’t want me  to either. He was possessive. Stupidly so. He was threatened by the least likely people. Rob, Peggy’s husband, who I know used to refer to me before I got married as ‘Peggy’s spinster librarian sister’ – he only had to compliment me on my new haircut to convince Zach he was trying to get me into bed. ‘That slimy bastard, his eyes were all over you,’ he said on the way back from their house. I laughed and told him he was silly; it took me a night of kisses to persuade him. Perhaps I should have minded more, made a stand then.

The phone is answered by a very small child. There is a clatter as the small child drops the phone. ‘Dada!’ the small child pipes. ‘
Dadaa
.’

Listening to the muffled clumps of his house, I walk into the garden. The wind feels as if it is holding its breath out here, though in the tops of the trees it is going berserk.

‘Hello. Sorry about that. Fred Laws.’ He was always on the formal side.

‘Hello Fred Laws,’ I say. My voice doesn’t travel as far as I’d hoped it would.

‘Lizzie!’

We each ask how the other one is three times while we are dealing with the embarrassment of speaking to each other after all this time, and finally I say, ‘You’ve got a child!’ and he tells me, his stammer much less noticeable than it used to be, about Penny and how they met in the library three years ago. She was a postgrad, ‘little bit younger’, he says, ‘not that that matters. All good.’ I can just see him poking the air with his finger. Zach’s impression made it seem pompous, but I thought it was sweet. I’d forgotten how he made me feel, too: young and hopeful and on the brink of possibility.

‘God, it’s nice to hear your voice,’ I say.

‘I was so hoping you’d come to the wedding. We sent you an invitation, but I quite understand why you didn’t make it. It’s a long way to lug yourself . . .’

An invitation? ‘Did you? How brilliant, but I never got it!’

‘Buggering Royal Mail. I knew I should have rung to follow it up. Although, actually, didn’t I ring? Didn’t I leave a message?’

‘Gosh, Fred. No.’ A rustle in the viburnum. I can make out Howard’s dark form chewing on the grass. He raises his head, alert. A flurry of wind begins to build. My arms are suddenly very cold. ‘I didn’t get it.’

‘Bugger.’

‘If I had, I would definitely have come. I’m so sad I didn’t.’

‘Bummer.’

I laugh. I’d forgotten how funny I found it when he swore; it was sort of unexpected. ‘You still say bummer and bugger – even though you’re a parent?’

‘Only very quietly.’

I laugh again. Howard darts into the viburnum to investigate.

‘Any kids, Lizzie?’ he adds.

‘No.’ And then, because that sounds too gaping, ‘Not at the moment.’

‘Dare I ask? Any nice man?’

‘Oh Fred . . .’ I lean over the garden table, dip my finger in the raindrops that have collected in inky patterns on the metal top, and explain that, yes, I did meet somebody, and I did get married – just a small wedding – but that sadly, there had been a car accident and . . . Fred is trying to say things, ‘How sor—’ and ‘Oh poor Li—’ and he wishes he had . . . but I keep talking because I want to get to the end. I shiver a bit. I finish with, ‘The thing is, I think you knew him when you were a child.’

‘Oh Lizzie. I’m so sorry. I wish I’d known. What was his name?’

‘Zach. Zach Hopkins.’

A short pause. ‘Jack?’

‘Zach.’

‘Yes.Yes, yes, yes. Of course, I know who you’re talking about.’

I’d been holding my breath, and I let it out in relief. ‘Oh, good.’

‘He lived in the village. Small place.’ I’m waiting for Fred to echo his initial enquiry, to say ‘nice man’ in a confirming tone, but he doesn’t. His voice is strained.

‘Tough childhood, I think,’ I say. ‘His father was impossibly cruel to his mother.’

‘Was he?’ Fred sounds vague. ‘Didn’t know him well. Just from being around, you know.’

‘This is an odd question, but does the name Xenia ring a bell?’

‘Xenia?’ He is quiet for a moment. ‘I didn’t know many of his friends.’

‘Are you in touch with anyone else from your school,’ I say. ‘Who might . . . or who I should tell . . . I don’t know.’

‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

There is something final in his voice, something cold. I shiver. Mottled clouds chase across the sky. I wipe the heel of my palm across the table, scooping the rainwater on to the ground. Then I go back into the house. I tidy up the kitchen while Fred and I put some distance between us and the awkwardness, chat a bit more, agree not to let so much time go by, promise to be in touch, then I hang up.

Later, remorseful and timid, I tidy the house. I put the newspapers into a bag for recycling and close up my sewing basket. I wash the plates and empty out the fridge. I clean it carefully, right into the corners, checking for spilled milk. Zach hates the smell of sour milk – he used to say it infected the air, seeped into his pores. I replace the carrots in neat piles.

Zach

March 2011

She’s back late again tonight. I started drinking early.

Most days I follow her to school. I wait outside – on the common, under the trees. I watch her pulling up the blinds at the library window, taking kids on to the grass at break. I like to know exactly where she is, to keep her face, caught in a half-smile, printed on my memory.

I’ve got that feeling I used to get with Polly. I think she’s lying to me. I still don’t trust her relationship with NQT Angus. I’ve seen her, through the doorway, laughing with him, the silly fucker with his tufts of red hair, his clashing pink cheeks. ‘He’s just a kid,’ she says. She thinks she’s cleverer than me, that that will put me off. All those rooms in that school, all those closed doors. I can’t stop it – the thought of him pushing her up against the wall, her legs wrapped around his waist. I’ll kill him if I catch him. In the meantime, I stay alert. So far her stories have checked out. She did drive that boy home to Earlsfield yesterday, the one who wears slippers to school, and she did have a meeting in Waterloo with that pretty rep from Puffin. But one slip and she knows I won’t be responsible for the consequences. It’s a game we play. I think she likes it.

Tonight, she’s at Peggy’s helping with bedtime. Why would anyone need help with that? Don’t you just chuck them in their cots and throw a bottle at them? I stood behind their poncey ornamental bay trees, looked down into their basement kitchen. Peggy was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through a magazine. Lizzie was reading to the infants on the sofa, an arm around each one. Her expression, eager, loving, when it caught the light almost stopped my breath. What she sees in the grubby little tykes I don’t know. As for Peggy, she’s really let herself go. Of course I tell her every time I see her she looks gorgeous, ‘a real yummy mummy’, giving her waist a squeeze (if I can find it).

At the weekend, I went for a drink with Rob at the Nightingale (or ‘the Gale’ as he so chummily calls it), ‘leaving the girls to it’. He’s such a creep. He wants Lizzie, I can tell. He’s working hard to win me over so I won’t notice his roving eye. Monogamy is beyond him. Over a pint of John Smith’s, he told me he’d found himself enjoying ‘a bit of slap and tickle’ at a class party with one of the other school mums. I congratulated him, ‘You dirty dog, you’, and he preened. Literally. Caught his own eye in the mirror above the bar and smoothed his eyebrows. He has no idea the contempt I hold him in. I’d feel sorry for Peggy if I didn’t know she’d married him for his money. Infidelity – it’s so naff. People’s lack of imagination never fails to amaze me, their crashing mediocrity.

I wonder how to share the news with Lizzie, when to hurl
that
bomb. Of course, she’d be straight on the phone to her sister. They tell each other everything, as Peggy is always saying. It’s a power game. Every private joke, every concerned hug, informs me that Lizzie would choose Peggy over me, just as each flirtatious comment, each casual-fingered brush of my body is a covert message – we all know I’d rather be with her if I could. She came first with their mother, has come first with every man since. It would never occur to Peggy that I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than trade Lizzie in. It amuses me to watch. She thinks she’s in control. How far from the truth, how very far, that is.

This thing from Rob – it’s a useful piece of information. No denying that. A million patronising little cuts; this would salve the tiny stings. It would destroy Peggy. Destroy Lizzie, too, of course. I shall store it up. Use it when I need it. Biding your time, patience: it’s what it’s about. Light the fuse too quickly and you’re too close to appreciate the glory of the firework.

The house is in order – I’ve just checked. Upstairs and downstairs, all done. Surfaces are clear, sockets aligned. I’ve alphabetised all her books. A catastrophe a few months ago, when she arranged for the front door to be painted without telling me. Red. It’s changed now. She cried with disappointment. ‘I give up,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it. You choose. I have crappy taste.’

It’s not her taste that’s the problem. It’s red. I’ve started a thing about the colour red. It’s burning inside me, shifting and setting my nerves on edge. The battle with the kettle is ongoing. She likes it closer to the sink, but the steam crinkles the new paintwork. I move it. She moves it back. It’s a joke. I think. She couldn’t be that stupid. As long as I win in the end.

She’ll be home soon. We wait, the dog and I, his head on my foot. He knows I hate him. It’s creepy the affection I instil. He’s like a battered hound, his life weighed daily in my hands. I’ve done some research. Chicken bones seem the simplest solution. A splinter may become lodged in the animal’s throat, oesophagus or internal organs. A puncture of the intestine could lead to peritonitis and almost certain death. Otherwise drugs. Drugs, if I can personally spare them, are still an option.

I stroke the back of his neck. She loves him, and – loath as I am to admit it – at the moment that keeps him safe.

I’ve upped the Xanax, tried cutting it with a small dose of tramadol I bought online. I’m just looking for something to stop my nerves from jangling, my heart from racing. I’m not there yet.

I was first up this morning. I like to get to the post before Lizzie. Today: a thick white envelope, addressed to her. I ripped it open in the bathroom with the door locked. A wedding invitation. Mr Frederick Percival Laws and Miss Penelope Olivia de Beauvoir. Well, well, well. Who’d have thought he’d have found someone to share his bed? I put it in my bag and brought it with me to work. The very stiffness of the card and the self-importance of the raised Perpetua Italics set my teeth on edge. I poured boiling water over it in the studio kitchen and ground out the etched text with a scourer.

Chapter Thirteen

Lizzie

Wandle Academy hoves into view the other side of the railway bridge, a converted candle factory, large and flaxen-bricked and covered in scaffolding (a new sixth-form block is under construction). If the black edifice of Wandsworth Prison embodies villainy and corruption, the school’s facade, windows gleaming, seems like a physical manifestation of hope.