Sleepwalkers (31 page)

The door shut with a heavy thump, leaving Ben still standing under the light.

Come on, then. Come and get me. Come on, you bastards. Here I am.

He stood there and didn’t bother to move when a car drove past, but the driver was uninterested. He knew she must be making the call now that she was inside and safe. She hadn’t spoken because she knew of the betrayal that was to come. He was a fool and he deserved what was coming.

But half an hour later, the road was still quiet and Ben was standing in the same spot, a suicidal sentry. Now different doubts drifted in on the breeze. Her refusal to speak … maybe it was to protect him? Maybe her actions were a carefully coded
warning. A warning, and a sign that she did still love him and that he could trust her.

Inside the house Ben could hear women laughing.

Slowly, he walked away, casually running the stolen car keys along every car except for Carrie’s. He eventually dropped them down a drain and walked on. It would take him hours to get back to the others, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything at all.

Carrie stared out of the kitchen window, stirring a pot of bolognese sauce on the stove. She knew that no one could see her from here, but she still felt that she needed to maintain this performance. It was nearly time to pick up the kids from school and she’d need to look normal for the other parents. But now that she knew the cameras were trained on her, she found it harder and harder to maintain the artifice. A cold, shivery terror spread through her, and although days had passed since she had met David, the fear didn’t diminish. On the contrary, it grew, burning with an icy fire that made her stare at strangers with mistrust. It turned her bedtime stories with Emma into a husky whisper and would push her into a curled-up ball in the far corner of the kitchen, hidden away, desperate for a moment that she could call her own. She felt she was falling apart.

Once a month, on a Tuesday, Carrie went to her book club. It had been set up by some studious mum with literary pretensions but had soon relaxed into a glass of wine, a bowl of pasta and a jolly good gossip. Carrie had fitted right in and the
Company had encouraged the night out – a small moment of release from her work as well as cementing her ‘normal mum’ facade.

Carrie had never read much as a child. She had scraped through school with no qualifications to speak of and so she found these evenings intoxicating. She listened to the five minutes each woman gave to the book (before the plight of finding a good cleaner took over) and found it easy to give her own version of what everyone else had already said. But after a while she realised she had her own opinions, and when she spoke the others listened and nodded. She really could be a middle-class mother and wife. She could be anything she wanted.

As she drove to Sally’s house that night, she tried to remind herself that she was going to enjoy herself. She liked her friends, she was getting away from it all, just for an evening. But these thoughts couldn’t cut through the cold fear. As she turned on the ignition, she thought about the cameras and mics that must be lurking, hidden in the car. She turned the radio up loud.

She reached Sally’s house about fifteen minutes later and found a space at the far end of the road. She parked badly which annoyed her. She couldn’t think straight and she kept losing things and forgetting others. She got out of the car and grabbed the obligatory bottle of wine. Sally’s place was nicer than hers and no one crossed her threshold without wine or flowers. As she dropped her keys into her handbag, she wondered whether or not there was a bug right there inside it, something she carried around with her. It would be just like them, she thought. She peered into the bag, but couldn’t
see anything obvious. She resolved to check again tomorrow, no, she would buy a new bag and transfer only the bare essentials. But what did it matter? They knew where she was at all times and there was nothing she could do about it.

She pulled her coat closer to her, trying to gather her thoughts, fix a smile for Sally, perform as she was meant to. Then, as she worried about all of this, she looked up and saw Ben.

He was just standing there in the full beam of a street lamp. He looked terrible. He sported a beard, his hair was longer and he wore clothes she didn’t recognise. But his face, his face smiled at her with an open longing that made her want to run to him. She stopped herself and the two opposing instincts made her foot slip for a second. She walked on towards him, not knowing what to do. She wanted to scream, but she was terrified of the noise. She wanted to laugh, she wanted to warn him, to push him away, to grab him and lock him to her. She wanted to take his hand and pull him along the street and run away with him. But the guards might be watching. The prison was working too well.

He smiled at her but didn’t speak, his arms hung uselessly at his sides. He was free but he looked like he’d given up. But he was free! He was standing there and he was free.

Or he was a trap. A different part of the experiment. A new test for her. Maybe she was now the experiment.

His eyes were the same. Whatever had happened to him, his eyes, his beautiful soft eyes were exactly the same.

They were close now. She had to do something, say something that would make him realise that she loved him still. But then the fear reached up from inside and squeezed hard. Her heart roared, but she could not speak.

To her left was the gate and small front garden of Sally’s house. Ahead of her was Ben. If she went to him now, they’d find them. If he really was free, then he needed to be far from her.

But it was him. And he stared at her and she at him. And she remembered the way he’d stare at her from the edge of the bathroom door as she bathed the kids. And she wanted to cry.

She turned left and their eyes finally unlocked. She hurried to the door, rang the bell and allowed Sally to ooh and ahh about something or other as she ushered her inside and took her coat. The door shut behind her and its heavy thump sealed the deal. No, she could turn back now, she could still run to him. But she let Sally lead her further inside and listened as the others chatted around her. A glass of wine was thrust into her hand. It was too late now.

She kept her back to the window so she could not be tempted to look outside. She sat politely on the edge of a sofa, shared with two other pretty mums, clutching her book and a glass of wine, trying to add enough witty comments so no one would notice just how terrible she felt. She’d seen him and now he was gone. He would think that she no longer loved him. He’d think that she’d abandoned him. Her legs were shaking so she played with the hem of her dress in an attempt to hide this. On the other side of the room, a plain woman called Ruth was moaning about a teacher. Something to do with her daughter, very talented, such a waste, seen the headmaster … The words drifted on and Carrie nodded with the appropriate expression. But all she wanted to do was scream. She’d failed.

The evening dragged itself out and she was able to get away relatively early without fuss or interrogation. She pulled on
her coat and stepped outside, walking to the car, knowing that he wasn’t there, but hoping, ever hoping, that he might have left a message, be hiding in the shadows, be about to tap her on the shoulder. But there was no sign of him. As she walked along, she could hear one of the women shouting angrily – someone had scratched her Volvo or something – but she didn’t turn back. She just got inside and started to cry. Even as the tears poured down her face, she hoped that he might knock on the window and shock her out of her misery. But nothing happened beyond her loneliness and her shame.

She composed herself and headed home. As she did so, memories of her husband assaulted her. She remembered the way calls would come in the night, urging her to tell him this or that, and the way he would listen and nod as she fed him lies, trusting her because it never occurred to him not to. She remembered him sitting in the shitty office, worrying about bills that he never really had to pay, planning trips and holidays for the kids that would never happen now. She could imagine him sitting next to her, right there in the car, with his sweet, silly jokes.

Her thoughts were distracted by laughter outside the car; a happy gang of twenty-somethings lurched across the road in front of her at the traffic lights. She hunched down in the car, not wanting them to see her, but they were wrapped up in their own happy dramas.

She got home and dismissed Keira as quickly as she could. Normally they would have a chat before she headed off, but Carrie handed her the cash with few words and she was grateful to the girl for slipping away without any fuss. She checked on the kids, but couldn’t stand the sight of her own empty bed, so headed back downstairs.

She was surprised to find David there. He was holding a bottle of beer from her fridge.

‘You want one? Looks like you need one.’

She stared at him, confused. ‘Hello?’

‘I was worried about you. Well, they were worried about you. You were bawling away in the car so I got the call and came straight over. What’s up?’

She hated him. However scared she was, she hated him more.

‘I’m fine,’ she said and walked to the kitchen to get her own beer.

‘That’s good,’ he called after her and waited for her to re-appear. ‘So what were all those tears about then?’

‘The kids.’

‘Understandable.’

‘Still, they’re not gone yet, are they?’

‘Not yet,’ he agreed. ‘Then again, from what they’re saying back in the office, I don’t think it’ll be long.’

‘Why?’

‘Why were you really crying, Carrie?’

‘I told you.’

‘Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to us.’

He glugged some of the beer as though there were no threats in his words.

‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘You were fine when you left here, but apparently you were subdued and withdrawn at the book thing. So what happened?’

Someone at the book club was watching her. Reporting on her. Even there. ‘Nothing happened. I’m … Jesus, fucking hell, David. I’m not a fucking robot. I do this work well and I find
it hard sometimes. You all talk about it like it’s a project, but, God, can’t you see that it’s not so simple?’

He watched her thoughtfully, then flopped down onto the sofa and patted the seat next to him.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Come and sit here with me.’

‘Stop it. Stop being friendly! Stop screwing with me!’

‘But I like you.’

‘Fuck off!’ And she threw the half-full bottle of beer at him. It missed but some liquid splashed across his chest and neck. He stood up, irritated.

‘Carrie—’

‘I don’t care! I don’t care what you think! What any of you think!’ She screamed at the walls and the ceilings, to anyone listening. ‘What did they do to him? You all talk like everything is straightforward and clean and professional, but you know it’s not. You were meant to scare me last time, in the office, that’s what you were really doing. That’s what you all do. Whatever you say, what I’ve been doing has been … it’s … there’s something evil about it. Fucking horrible. Isn’t there?’

Maybe men would burst in like before. She waited. Nothing.

‘You’ll wake the children, Carrie.’ He went out to the kitchen, returning with a cloth to mop up the beer. ‘It’ll stink otherwise,’ he said when he clocked her bemusement.

‘What does it matter?’

He didn’t reply, just diligently mopped up then went back to the kitchen and returned empty-handed, drying his hands on his trousers.

‘You okay now?’

‘No.’

‘No. But you’re calmer. Now: what made you cry?’

‘I don’t know. Really. Just being a part of that book group, everyone being so normal. I felt so alien to them.’

‘But you’ve always been alien to them.’

‘Yes. That’s true.’

‘You’ve never been a nice little mum. You know what you really are.’

‘Yes.’

‘So, what then?’

‘I don’t know. Am I not allowed to cry?’

‘You were sobbing.’

Maybe they know, she thought. Maybe they put Ben there as a test. Maybe the more I deny seeing him, the worse it will be. Maybe Ben wasn’t free. Maybe he was just like her. She considered this, then looked up at David and shrugged. She was like a naughty kid at school, busted and waiting for expulsion, too truculent to do anything more than shrug.

‘We are all pawns, Carrie. We all feel like little cogs in someone else’s wheel. You mustn’t feel like you’re alone. We are with you all the time.’

‘Whether I want it or not.’

He acknowledged the comment with a tiny nod.

‘I know you’ll never tell me straight,’ she said, ‘but I have to ask. What has happened to Ben?’

He shook his head.

‘Please. The reason I still have the kids is because he might come back. That’s right, isn’t it? He might come back and you don’t know when.’

‘We know everything.’

No, you don’t, she thought. You didn’t know that I saw him tonight. I’m certain.

David ran his hand over the empty beer bottle, as though he was considering a second. ‘I keep thinking about the Second World War,’ he said after a moment. ‘You know those young men in the RAF who were sent out on bombing missions? Terrified on each mission – flying out in those flimsy planes, flying so low, dropping their load, rushing home, chalking off the missions, desperate for the war to end. They were scared witless, but they did it anyway, because it was their duty.’ He shook his head, absorbed in his own story. ‘What do you think it was like for the ones who flew over Dresden, slowly smashing that beautiful city to rubble? I don’t see them laughing or cheering, somehow. I imagine their faces lit red by the flames, staring with those young, innocent eyes at the horror they’d unleashed, wondering how they’d do it again. And again. And again.’

He looked up at her, then checked his watch.

‘I came because I was asked to. And I was glad to because I like you. But I did what I was asked. And I’ll keep on doing it. Again. And Again. And you’ll calm down. And you’ll carry on. And you’ll do what’s asked of you. Again and again.’ His voice softened. ‘Carrie, it will never end. They’re like the tide. I don’t think what you do is evil. I think it’s a stupid word, anyhow. And I don’t think of myself as a bad person. I’m another cog, like you.’