The Turning Tide (7 page)
Erykah’s mobile wouldn’t stop ringing. She had set it to vibrate, but even that was distracting.
She twirled the diamond engagement and wedding rings on her finger. They felt unfamiliar there. But they were necessary for keeping up the pretence. The Big Billions Lottery publicity shoot was supposed to be a small thing, they said. A couple of hours at most. It was now taking over the entire house. ‘We want to show you as approachable and normal as possible,’ explained the set dresser they had sent. ‘Your own home, your own clothes. An everyday couple – like any of our other players.’
‘It could be anyone,’ Erykah said.
He nodded. ‘Exactly. Gorgeous house. We couldn’t have had a better couple for our first winners, you two really look the part,’ he said. ‘This place is immaculate. I wouldn’t change a thing.’
He started scattering primary coloured cushions and vases of flowers around the rooms. The photographer’s assistant rolled out a huge Union Flag rug in shades of grey on the dining room floor and fluffed some newly purchased Keep Calm pillows. Erykah cringed.
‘I feel terrible,’ Erykah said. She looked over a printed sheet of talking points she had been handed when they arrived. ‘I know almost nothing about the lottery, my husband bought the ticket. I have to admit, I had never heard of it before we won.’
The set dresser looked over his shoulder and chuckled. ‘To tell you the truth, I hadn’t either until they hired me to do this job,’ he said. ‘You’re not the only one.’
‘No, I guess not,’ Erykah said. ‘But you took the job anyway? For a company you had never heard of?’
‘Sure, why not?’ He grinned. ‘So it’s registered in the Channel Islands, or whatever. We’re living in a global economy now, right? It all goes in my bank account just the same.’
‘Sure,’ Erykah said. It occurred to her that so far, she hadn’t met anyone else from the Big Billions lottery. Rab assured her everything was in hand; he showed her some emails he received, and a business card from someone he said came by when she was out buying groceries. But shouldn’t someone from the lottery be here right now, hovering over their first jackpot winners? Something about the arrangement felt strange to her.
‘Anyway, honey,’ the set dresser said. ‘I think the entire point of this photo shoot is to spread the word. Get it up in the public consciousness, you know what I mean?’
‘Oh, right,’ Erykah said. ‘Of course. Of course.’
The glass doors facing out into the garden were flung open and let in a chilly breeze. The set dresser examined Erykah’s outfit, a sleek navy blue bandage dress that showed off her athletic frame, her bright coral lipstick. ‘I don’t suppose you have something a little less . . . severe? And maybe, I don’t know, softer make-up? The press will be here any minute.’
Erykah gritted her teeth but obliged. It had been a long time since anyone had told her how to dress, when to smile, and how to do her make-up, but she wanted this over with and quickly.
By the time she came back downstairs in a prim tea dress that she hated the reporters were already waiting. The photographer shoved her outside. Pots of hothouse flowers had been dotted around the garden, and lights were set up to make it all look warmer and more spring-like than it really was.
‘That’s it; now pop the champagne, Rab. Erykah, if we can get you with a glass in there . . . perfect.’ They were ordered this way and that. Sitting on the stone garden seat, standing by the glossy black door to their house. With the cheque, without the cheque. Standing together, standing alone. Erykah under the horse chestnut tree in the back garden, close cropped so the bare branches didn’t show, trying to hide her chattering teeth. Rab put his thumb over the top of the bottle of fizz and shook it up, spraying it all over his wife. The cameras snapped away.
‘She’s a great looking lady,’ one cameraman murmured to his assistant. ‘And look at this place. This guy’s got to be the luckiest slob in the world.’
Erykah had misgivings about playing house for the cameras but did her best to go along. She bared her teeth in the perfect imitation of a spontaneous laugh over and over. Meanwhile she was totting up the sums in her head. Maybe her initial reaction to the news had been over the top. Even subtracting Rab’s outstanding loans, they were still going to end up with more cash than she could ever have expected to see in her life.
Her married life up until now had been only merely wealthy. This? This was
Rich
with a capital R. The kind of money that made even people in Molesey stop and stare: vulgar, shameless. The kind of rich that hip-hop songs were written about, that kids back in Streatham dreamed about. She didn’t stop herself from doing the mental maths, calculating how many childhoods of growing up in poverty this would have bought. It would have paid for her first sixteen years a hundred times over. With cash to spare.
In between shots she grabbed a bile-coloured chenille throw that had been draped over the sofa and wrapped her hands around a mug of tea. ‘Warming up,’ she smiled at the photographer’s assistant who noticed her trembling hands. ‘Do you have to do an outdoor shoot in February?’ He shrugged and mumbled something about the light. She fumbled with her mobile, clocking the missed calls and voicemails. She decided to ignore those for now.
Because she was scared. Really scared. How much longer? she wondered. How much longer until someone in the press figured out who she was? Before her name pinged some newspaper editor’s memory bank and they dug out those photographs?
Maybe not, though. Maybe they would miss it. It was all back in the time before the Internet, and who knew for sure, maybe by now it was gone for good. Maybe no one would care. Maybe her married name would be enough to trip up anyone who went looking. The trial had been big news at the time, sure, but who would remember the girlfriend of an accused murderer from over twenty years ago?
Erykah put the mug back on the counter. What would her life be like now if things had gone differently? She might have stayed at university, never met Rab, and had a career. Or she might have stayed with Grayson and life would have been, if not much like her dreams, at least interesting. In the three years they had been together, he had never bored her.
She smoothed the ditsy flowered fabric of the dress down over her thighs and scrunched her fingers through her hair. Grayson would have liked the first outfit better, the sex kitten look, not this fake ’50s housewife image.
God, it had been ages since she last thought of Grayson. Maybe other women wondered where their exes were more often. She supposed maybe it was because she didn’t have to wonder. She knew exactly where he was. He was in prison, probably for the rest of his life. And unless something had changed in the last two decades, an unrepentant killer.
‘Erykah, tilt your head this way. Erykah, over here.’
Photographers hadn’t changed at all since the last time she was faced with a bank of flashbulbs. Ordering you to look this way and that way, parroting your name over and over, pushing for a reaction.
Grayson had been her first boyfriend. He was ten years older, already with something of a fearsome reputation, but loyal to friends and family. He was the first to look past the gangly nerd in glasses and see – well, a gangly nerd who cleaned up nicely. And was good with sums. Which, given his ambitions, was exactly what he was looking for. ‘My diamond in the rough,’ he used to say. And she made the effort to look more like the kind of woman he wanted her to be. Not that it was all one sided. He took a subscription to the
Financial Times
, he said, to impress her.
He always had money. She knew where it came from; his source of income was common knowledge in their neighbourhood. But Grayson assured her he was more than some go-nowhere street dealer. Some said he had big connections down the hill in Brixton, others claimed it was further afield, Manchester, even. He promised he was going to do her proud, cash out and go straight. Get into the real world of business. Invest in property. He talked about their future life together as he drove her from Harrods to Harvey Nicks to Selfridges in his 5 Series Beemer. ‘Nothing’s too good for my Rikki,’ he would say, and squeeze the top of her thigh. ‘You ask, and it’s yours.’
‘Don’t you see, Rikki,’ Rainbow would hiss as she watched Erykah get ready for a date, ‘he’s with you because he can control you. Why would a man like that be interested in a girl your age? Why would he be interested in a girl like you at all?’
Erykah hated her for that. Hated her mother for reducing her to an ugly duckling, to a little girl. She would show her mum, she would show them all they were wrong about him.
Rainbow put her hands on her shoulders and turned her daughter towards her. There were tears in her eyes, although that might have been the watery, unfocused look she had sometimes when she was deep in withdrawal. ‘Rikki, honey,’ she said, ‘I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I made,’ she said. ‘I look at you and I see a girl who doesn’t know yet that the world is not going to give someone like you a lot of second chances.’
Erykah shrugged her off. What was she talking about? She got good marks, worked hard. She had never even tried drugs, and she and Grayson always used protection. She and her mother were nothing alike. She knew that with the certainty only a teenage girl knows.
It was Grayson who took her under his wing. When she was with him she saw less of the things she hated about herself. When she looked in a mirror her skinny arms and legs didn’t bother her so much. Her frizzy hair, her eyes too close together, they no longer seemed so bad. He was the one who told her, no, she was long like a model and she should dress like one. She should style her hair so it fell in ringlets, emphasise her eyes with make-up. And he was right.
‘Come here, baby, come here.’ She would lean in and let him rub a moistened finger along her forehead, smooth her baby hairs into place. His big hands framed her jaw. He looked her over and nodded, satisfied with what he saw. When Erykah was accepted at university to study computer science, it was Grayson who bragged to all his friends and family. His girl was going to have a degree. Rainbow barely seemed to register what was happening by that point, wrapped in the layers of her worsening addiction.
‘Maybe someday you gonna figure out how to hack a bank and make me a millionaire,’ he had said.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
Her perfectly straight response made him laugh. ‘My baby’s smart and beautiful.’ She ducked her head and felt a flutter in her chest. No one had ever called her beautiful before.
A couple of years passed. She went to university. Still Grayson was no closer to leaving dealing like he promised. It was the money, he said. A little bit more, that was all he needed. She got impatient. How much before it was going to be enough?
‘But we earned this, Rikki,’ he would say, rolling down the tinted car windows so she could feel the thick, hot air of the city waft through, rustling the heaps of shopping bags in the back seat. He paid for her driving lessons, so that he could give her a new car someday. ‘And this is only the beginning.’
It wasn’t the beginning of anything good. But they had no way of knowing it then.
What Grayson never understood was that, for Erykah, it wasn’t about the money. She loved him with that heart-rending puppy love that only happens the first time. She believed he was a good person, not the heartless criminal everyone else painted him as. And when he was torn from her life she thought – really thought – she might die.
Numb with grief through the trial, she did all she could do: told the court what had happened on that rainy night outside the stranger’s house in Hampstead. Told them what she knew and when she knew it. When she was on the stand she could see him from the corner of her eye. He nodded gently as her words unfurled into the rapt courtroom. It bothered her not to be able to talk directly to him – to explain that she’d had no choice. Did he know? Did he hate her for it?
‘Let’s get you two on the sofa now,’ Champagne glasses were pressed into Erykah and Rab’s hands and they were shepherded back towards the photographers. The cameras clicked away as Erykah draped an arm around Rab. Now this was a part she had practiced to perfection.
On the outside, anyway. It was a long time before Erykah had stopped feeling like a fraud in her Molesey life. Virginia Woolf was wrong. A woman doesn’t need a room of her own. What she needs is a credit card of her own.
‘A second honeymoon? Well, I wouldn’t say it’s out of the question,’ Erykah answered questions from the pre-approved list the lottery company had supplied to reporters. A buzz as her phone vibrated again. She looked at the screen and switched it off. It was time to play the part of happy and loving wife for now. And she could act, boy could she act. The brush of the lips with a man she hadn’t kissed in years; her hand linked with his while they listened to the press ask the same three questions over and over again . . .
Rab wasn’t handling it as well. He flinched at any direct question that came his way, his eyes darting from person to person like a prisoner facing the Inquisition. It irritated Erykah. With all the money they had won surely he would be feeling a sense of relief? It was enough to pay off his debts nearly twenty times over. If she had been in his shoes, she would have been howling at the moon with sheer delight.
She smelled the tang of anxiety in his sweat as they settled on the sofa and another journo vied for their attention, asking about holidays, homes and yachts. ‘I think we should give it all to charity,’ Rab mumbled.
Erykah elbowed him in the ribs and her smile didn’t budge an inch. ‘My husband has a wicked sense of humour,’ she said. ‘Obviously we’ll give some of it to charity. But this opens up all kinds of opportunities for us, doesn’t it, darling?’
The reporter nodded, jotting notes on a pad of paper. ‘With your husband being one of the many who lost their jobs in the recession—’
‘Exactly,’ Erykah said, and rubbed Rab’s knee. Her smile felt as if it was going to split her face in half, a parody of interest and affection. ‘We know how lucky we’ve been.’
