Something to Hide (4 page)

The two of them left the house and walked down the path. The scent of woodsmoke drifted up from Beigou village. It was the scent of her childhood, which was never far from her mind. She remembered lying in bed, her grandmother singing her a lullaby.

Be quiet and don't keep crying

My lovely child,

If you cry your loveliness will fade away.

I hope that you will have an honourable life, and be a good person,

Upholding your parents' name.

Be a patriot.

Don't cry, my child,

Look! The moon is rising

Like a giant's head, so dreadful,

Looking for a crying child.

Much as she loved her grandmother, Jing vowed that she would never sing such gloomy words to
her
baby; she would sing it something cheerful by Britney Spears.

A wave of desolation swept through her. What baby?

They had reached the car park. The woodsmoke was replaced by the smell of exhaust fumes, billowing from the idling coaches. A row of passengers queued at the toilets.

Emboldened by the presence of other people, the revving engines and the voices, she turned to Lei and plucked up courage.

She said: ‘The house does seem a little large for just the two of us.'

‘What do you mean, the two of us?' Lei aimed the car key like a dagger.

‘I mean, the doctor said …' She faltered to a stop.

‘Of course we'll have a child.' Wang Lei pressed the key and the car beeped. ‘I'll see to that.'

THERE'S BEEN ANOTHER
explosion. I'm reading about it in the newspaper. This time it wasn't cows that blew up, it was a Muslim terrorist. Apparently he put a bomb under a car which was parked near an army barracks. When he returned to check why it hadn't detonated it blew up in his face. Police suspect that he had forgotten about the clocks changing to British Summer Time. He miscalculated, they said, and forgot to set his watch forward by an hour.

I burst out laughing but it sounds odd, doesn't it, in an empty kitchen? I should have got used to it by now but I feel like a madwoman. What do I do with all the laughter and all the unsaid words that fill my brain? There's so many things I want to tell someone; where do I put all that stuff? I need some sort of depository so I can store it for later, until I meet someone who might enjoy it. Along the Thames nowadays it's one huge building site – Battersea, Vauxhall. Ugly skyscrapers are rising into the sky. They're not for Londoners; they're pension pots for foreign investors from Malaysia and China and most of them will remain empty. Plenty of space there. I could fill up whole floors with my ideas and observations. Some of them are quite entertaining, though I say so myself. This idea, for instance.

The thing is, I'm lonely. Howlingly, achingly lonely. I can't phone my children because, for them, it's either the middle of the night or six in the morning. Besides, they have their own lives and I don't want to sound needy. Of course I have friends but they'll be at work.
I
should be at work. I'm a picture researcher and should be up in my study by now. It appears to be eleven o'clock, however, and I'm still in my dressing-gown. Hammerings come from the basement where at last a couple of builders are finishing off what Alan started. Did I tell you, by the way, that he slapped me about? On three occasions he hit me when he was drunk. Once is too many; only a true neurotic would hang about for more.

Today I'm feeling particularly depressed. During the past few months I've been meeting men on the internet, something I've been doing off and on for years. After several dismal failures I met somebody I rather liked. His name was Barry and I warmed to him when he asked me about my life – virtually unheard-of, in these situations. Plus he hated golf. And he had a full head of hair. These might seem minor attributes but from them – doggedly, stupidly, like a naive, ageing teenager – I started spinning the man of my dreams. I even imagined our future together, isn't that pathetic? He lived in Billingshurst – direct trains to Victoria – and I live in Pimlico, a few streets from the station. We could live partly in London and partly in what I imagined was his picturesque dwelling deep in the Sussex countryside where we could spend our days gardening and then, with a sigh, sink into our armchairs with a glass of whisky and I could make him laugh by telling him about Muslim terrorists blowing themselves up by mistake.

Then, one day, he stopped replying to my emails, and within a week his profile was back on the website.

And to make things worse, just when I'm feeling at my lowest, my old friend Bev sends one of her round-robins.

Bev has one of the world's happiest marriages, you see, and likes to share this with the large circle of friends and acquaintances to whom she sends her excruciatingly smug blogs. As if we're fucking interested. She's out in West Africa with her adorable husband Jeremy, who works for some big pharmaceutical company. He's a litigation lawyer and I suspect he does something murky, like fighting cases brought by poor people who've been used as guinea pigs for new drugs. In fact I seem to remember something about some slimming pill, a couple of years ago. There's a touch of the con man about Jeremy, though I do have to admit he's fun.

Bev certainly thinks so.
He's so funny I'm laughing all day. He's my lover and my best friend
doesn't that make you puke?
He also has a wonderful rapport with the local people and is even learning their language – good on you, Jem!
According to Bev their life together is one long adventure, travelling round the world and living in various exotic climes.
Being such vagabonds has brought us even closer
.

There's an etiquette to happiness. Shut up. It's like haemorrhoids – you wouldn't talk about
them,
would you? Those upon whom the gods smile bear a certain responsibility not to make the rest of us feel even more wretched, our hearts shrivelled to walnuts.

Now I accept that I'm not the easiest person to live with. My relationship with my children has been somewhat rocky – no doubt a factor in their present whereabouts. I've had periods of severe depression. I've been told by my therapist that I have both trust and abandonment issues – duh, as if normal people
enjoy
being dumped and betrayed.

But I've also made some disastrous choices. I married young – in those days people did. I used to take loads of drugs and in the early years my boyfriends tended to be sweet and spineless stoners. The turning-point came when I was twenty-one and had a boyfriend called Brendan. He used to wear a badge saying
Wrong Place. Wrong Time. Be There.
I remember seeing him struggling to open a can of lager. As I gazed at his thin shoulders I felt a rush of desire so intense it took away my breath. Then I realized that this was purely maternal. What I really wanted was a baby.

So I found myself a proper grown-up man with broad shoulders, got married and by the time I was twenty-five I had two children and we had bought the house in whose basement I had spent my carefree single life. When the marriage unravelled in a miasma of drink, recriminations and faithlessness I embarked on a series of disastrous relationships, blah blah, you don't want to hear about them. It's an old story.

Let's just say that I was like a drone missile in my ability to seek out Mr Wrong. And them with me. But with my advancing years even these have petered out. Men want young women. That's the brutal truth. They want to cheat death, don't we all? They want a reflection of their younger selves, not a wrinkled face that mirrors back their own mortality. That rush of renewal must be intoxicating, the bastards.

Actually it's a beautiful day today, summertime's started. Outside, the trees are heavy with blossom. I live in a charming street of terraced houses now inhabited by bankers and adulterous politicians fiddling their expenses. This area has changed; the families whose children played with mine have long since departed. Opposite, the council flats have been sold to the young professionals whose faces I see illuminated by their laptops. The only person who remains is the obligatory mad-woman-with-cats who lives up the road and who, like all mad people, never seems to grow older. Ha! Maybe she's thinking the same thing about me.

I can't rattle around this house for ever. I know I should sell up and move somewhere smaller but the idea fills me with panic. Where would I go? It could be anywhere, that's the problem. I keep thinking that something will happen to jolt me out of my inertia. It'll happen when I least expect it, and it will change my life for ever.

I'm sitting at my laptop, scrolling through images of Prague. I'm researching illustrations for a biography of an actress called Fanny Janauschek (me neither). Ladybirds have arrived from nowhere and are crawling over the window-panes.

Maybe I should get that dog and move to the country. Something's got to happen. I'm pondering this when suddenly, startlingly, the silence is broken. It's the phone ringing.

‘WHAT'S UP, HONEY?'

Lorrie jumped. Todd was standing behind her on the patio.

‘Nothing,' she said quickly. ‘I was watching that bird.'

‘What bird?'

‘It's flown into the bushes.'

There was a silence as they gazed at the battered grass of their backyard. It was littered with kids' toys – a football, a doll's stroller. Cans lay scattered from Dean's target practice.

Todd squatted down behind her, his hands on her shoulders. Lorrie's heart thumped. Her husband had been home for three days now. Whenever he appeared she froze, waiting for him to have discovered that their life savings had disappeared.
I just been online, sweetheart. There seems to be some mistake.

Each morning she woke up and, just for a moment, thought it had all been a dream. Then the reality hit her. She had been living her days in a state of paralysis. It was terrible not to tell her husband but she hadn't yet plucked up the courage. She simply couldn't. One sentence and his life would be shattered.

So she said nothing. A canyon had opened up between them and only she was aware of it. In his innocence Todd had become unreachable and she felt sick with loneliness. Her own husband, her best friend and confidant. How could she possibly tell him what she had done?

The website had disappeared overnight. She had looked up
internet fraud
and found it was a common scam, called phishing. How could she have been so stupid? Ever since then she had moved around like an elderly person, frail and sick. The kids noticed nothing, but they never did. And nor, it seems, did Todd.

‘Hey, baby.' Todd was squatting on his haunches behind her. ‘You thinking what I'm thinking?'

She froze. ‘What's that?'

‘I'm thinking the kids won't be back for an hour.' His hands kneaded her breasts. ‘How about we go upstairs and have ourselves a little horizontal workout?'

She paused. ‘I'm not sure …'

‘Hey, hon.' He pressed against her, speaking into her hair. ‘Like the old days, remember? When the kids were having their nap.' He chuckled. ‘Remember Dean walking in with his diaper round his ankles?'

His voice echoed from miles away, across the gulf. Lorrie felt desolate. Not for their early marriage, but for the lost era that stretched right up to Tuesday, when she had sat at her computer and with a click of the keyboard divided
then
from
now
.

‘Or still got your period?' he asked.

She had used this excuse on the first night, when he had tried to make love to her. Shaking her head, she said: ‘It's OK now.' She thought: I'll have to act natural or he'll suspect something's wrong.

Todd took her hand and led her upstairs. Lorrie had always been faithful to her husband but now, as she closed the door, she felt like an adulteress. Todd grinned at her and sat down on the bed. He hunched his shoulders, pulled off his T-shirt with one hand and threw it at the chair. It was such a familiar gesture and the normality of it pierced her heart.

Lorrie sat beside her husband and lifted her arms. He pulled off her sweatshirt and flung it across the room. He was a wiry, hairy man and she had once joked,
It's like you're a monkey crawling all over me.
They were naked now and lying side by side. Today, however, she kept her eyes closed. As she stroked his skin with her guilty fingers she thought,
This is how women fake it
, and was filled with misery.

He slid his hand between her legs. She stiffened. He murmured: ‘Oh huggy-bear, I do love you.'

He moved on top of her. Treacherously she let him enter her and now she felt like a whore, moaning and urging him on, willing him to finish. But this only excited him further. Afterwards he flung himself back on the pillow, panting. ‘Wow, baby. Where did
that
come from?'

She kissed him on the forehead and sat up. But he gently pulled her back.

‘Lorelei, I got something to ask you.'

Her mouth went dry. He never called her Lorelei unless it was serious. ‘Yes?' she whispered.

‘What do you say we have another baby?'

He looked at her, eyebrows raised. There was a silence.

‘We always talked about it, right? When we first got together. And now Angie's in first grade … And we both love kids …” He was propped up on one elbow, searching her face. ‘What do you say, honey-bun? We'll have a new home soon.'

Still she didn't reply.

He said: ‘It's what we always wanted, right?'

The two of them were buying a turtle for Angelina's birthday. Their daughter was too young for a pet but she had set her little heart on one. Todd was keen for her to have a creature to care for and turtles, he'd heard, were no trouble. Lorrie had her doubts but she was agreeing with everything her husband said these days. Her secret, still undiscovered, had made her desperate to avoid any friction or upset him in any way. How compliant she had become in her guilt! During these weeks she treated Todd with tenderness, as if he were an invalid.

They hadn't spoken again about the baby; she said she was thinking about it and Todd respected that. Sometimes she caught him looking at her, his thick eyebrows raised, but he said nothing. Had he noticed anything different in her behaviour? She watched him inspecting the tanks in Gary's Pet Center, her fit, wiry little husband with his brutal army haircut.

She was playing for time. In a few months Todd would be returning to the Middle East for a long tour of duty. He had no head for paperwork; though he was the boss he largely left the finances to her – after all, she was the one who kept the household ticking over in his absence. And their savings had been in a separate account. So far he had felt no need to check up on it and each day brought his departure nearer. She would hang on until he was gone and then her head would be clear.

Clear to do what?

‘This little fella's called a diamondback.' The guy lifted up a turtle. ‘Look at his shell and you can see why. He'll grow to six inches.'

He placed it in Todd's palm. Its head re-emerged, warily. She watched Todd's finger stroking its snout. He was always gentle with those frailer than himself, it was one of the things she loved about him. She remembered how tender he was with their babies, crooning to them as he changed their diapers with his clumsy, unaccustomed hands.

And yet he could erupt in a rage over something trivial, like a lost remote or Dean using his bath towel. He needed, with a fury, to have his own things safe and sound; he needed order in his life. Home sweet home. After his first tour in Iraq he had bought a gun to blow out the brains of anyone who threatened his family. Recently, in her nightmares, Lorrie had pictured him turning the gun on herself.

Lorrie stood there in the pitiless strip light. Beside her stood a wall of tanks. In one, a lizard pawed at the glass with his tiny fingers and fell back.

The guy, maybe Gary himself, was talking about reptiles. ‘Some of these species are, like, a million years old.' A dreamy look came into his eyes. ‘It's like, we're walking with dinosaurs. Crazy or what?'

As he spoke Lorrie felt weightless, as if her life had disconnected. Dinosaurs came and went and so did they, snuffed out like candles. Six years earlier she had found a lump in her breast. For a while she was facing death and felt this same sensation of spinning away from the rest of the human race, separate and utterly alone. Now she saw herself and Todd as mere specks, adrift in the universe. Just for a moment, nothing really mattered.

She wished she could tell Todd this but he didn't like such talk. He liked to talk about things – the game, the kids, plans for their new house. Their new house, which had been snuffed out too.

Of course he wouldn't shoot her. He would be devastated and very, very angry.
Why didn't you go to the police?
What, and look a fool? The website had vanished; there was nothing the cops could do. At night, when Todd was asleep, she went online and read about similar cases – bitter outpourings from people like herself. She had become increasingly addicted to them. Nobody had gotten their money back.

‘Honey, let's buy a pair,' she said. ‘He'll be lonesome on his ownsome.'

So they bought a pair, and a tank, and a pump and filtration system, and a UVB fluorescent lamp for the basking platform. Todd grumbled at the cost but she was still feeling spaced-out. What the hell. There was an English expression – in for a penny, in for a pound.

She thought: I just have to find $48,000 before my husband discovers the truth. Easy! I could become a prostitute! Some men like the larger woman. I could deal drugs! Tyler next door could help me with that. I could win the Powerball jackpot!

‘What's so funny?' asked Todd.

‘I'm just thinking of Angie's little face,' she said.

The sunshine hit them as they walked out the door. Cars shimmered in the heat of the little shopping mall. As her husband opened the trunk, Lorrie crossed over to the Hallmark store to get Angie a card. She felt dizzy with a mad sort of exhilaration. Later, she wondered if that was why she had the crazy idea.

For there, browsing through the cards, was her friend Kelda. She was another army wife who lived across the street from them, a vast, cheerful woman who habitually dressed in a pink sweatsuit. Todd called her The Marshmallow.

‘Look at these darling cards.' She was holding two. ‘Which should I choose? They're for my sister in St Louis, who's having a baby.'

One card showed a painting of a pregnant woman:
Expecting a Miracle
. The other was printed with big gold letters:
I'm Only the Oven
.

‘Oven?' said Lorrie.

‘Don't you remember, you goof? She's a surrogate mom.'