Unbind (30 page)

During that period of separation our texts were brief but every one of his lit up my face. Just to know he was thinking about me was truly a gift. He called some nights and I would tell him about my day, about my colleagues and the funny things they did. I didn’t tell him that I woke some mornings with an overwhelming sorrow in my heart after realising he wasn’t there beside me. I didn’t tell him that my colleagues, and Kay, were some of the only things keeping me going. I absorbed their kindnesses like a cracked, dry riverbed absorbed the first rain in six months. I leaned on them, and even though they didn’t realise it, they were helping me. Just by being their usual selves, while beneath, I suffered for lots of different reasons.

Some of our Skype sessions became too emotional (well, I did) and we stopped those. I couldn’t even do phone sex. All I knew, all I felt, was that I was in love with a man who lived abroad and it might not be possible for us to be together. That’s the block I had on myself being happy. I wrote long, long emails, staying late to write them at my workstation. I wrote about all the things I’d gone through back in Barnsley. I wrote about feelings I’d never admitted before, never talked about. I wanted to tell him so much that I’d never told anyone else. I wrote wildly and excessively, detailing all my pain and suffering. I never sent a single one because I didn’t think he could take it. Hell, some days, even I couldn’t take it. It was cathartic nonetheless, getting all those things down.

It was Friday afternoon of my second week back from New York when Trevor asked me to join him in a meeting room one day, explaining that the New York office expansion wasn’t a feasible venture after all. Something about too much risk, our ethos not fitting well with theirs, the office rents being too high and some already-established subsidiary division of our company recently losing contracts and pinching budgets. There were no more jobs on offer out there. What people were already working in New York would be eventually redistributed to other sister companies because it wasn’t a workable scheme. There was too much competition already, in New York, to expand there. What we had going on in London was too much of a good thing for the company and to risk that by branching out would be a mistake, the board decided. I told Trevor I was unbelievably relieved. I told him my gut had told me that the whole thing was more than we could chew. Nothing about their operation there had appealed to me because it wasn’t the way I was used to running things. It was Media Solutions
trying to take on too much.

“You know, Chloe. Your intuitions are pretty good. Why is it that you don’t believe in yourself more?”

“You know, a few months’ working with me doesn’t mean you know me, Trev,” I smarted, trying to ignore how right he was.

“Seriously, both of us knew that whole thing would crumble. So why am I even your boss? You’re the perfect candidate to go higher… you are a leader, not just a journalist.”

I brushed him off with a smile but his expression didn’t change. He was deadly serious and expectant. So I threw him a bone. “Between me and you, it’s not that I don’t believe in myself. It’s just that few understand what it’s like to make a decision that changes other people’s lives… and to have to live with the consequences of that decision… knowing it took things from you you’ll never get back. Knowing that one decision maybe changed the course of fate forever, and maybe just maybe, the sacrifices weren’t at all worth it. I just decided to avoid making decisions and I’d been getting away with it a long time before I came here.”

He stared at me without flinching though he could probably see the emotion in my eyes. “We all fuck up Chloe, but anyone here can see, you deserve more. You’re not the sit-down-and-hide type, you’re the go-get-it-out-there type,” he pointed outdoors. “You just lost your way a while.”

“Time doesn’t heal all, it never will. I don’t need success or riches. This’ll do for now.”

“For now? This’ll do? Listen yourself.” His raised eyebrow wriggled, and I gave him daggers.

I went back to my desk and glared absentmindedly for some time. Trevor wound me up and I stewed on his words, on all the things I already knew but didn’t want to face. I knew that for so many years, I had driven myself round the bend thinking about every tiny decision in my life, wondering if I was making the right choices. I’d given up my sister in a heartbeat while I laid in that hospital bed. Nowadays, I couldn’t even choose a shade of lipstick without researching it online first before actually going into the shop and then double-checking with the assistant that the shade picked out suited me. I couldn’t have objects lying around the house without lines, couldn’t walk pavements outside the grooves of the slabs, couldn’t allow myself to fuck up with a spending spree just once in a while.

I took out my phone and texted Cai:
No New York office expansion. It’s a no-go
.
The board turned it down
.

I got on with some work while I awaited his response. Eventually, it came:
I heard something along those lines from a friend
…
no shock, there.

How was I to interpret that? Was he pleased? Disappointed? He always seemed so cool, sometimes it aggravated me.

ME:
What are we going to do?

CAI:
We’ll figure it out. Listen, I’m trying to get a flight
…

ME:
For when?

CAI:
Tonight. I miss you too much. Meet me at the Savoy in the morning?

ME:
Breakfast?

CAI:
Oh yeah. With bells on.

He coined my phrase. I loved him a little bit more for it. He was always listening.

I went into the toilets at work and sobbed. Unfortunately Jasinder caught me and asked what was wrong. I said only:

“I’m in love.”

Her face expanded into the hugest grin.

“It does that,” she said.

Past

AS CAIUS GREW older, he got ever more inquisitive and angry. He was furious with his evil father for keeping his mother enslaved and for keeping him, his son, entrapped in that same arrangement. Cai’s mind was growing suddenly, exponentially, and he wanted to know it
all
. His tête-à-têtes with Jackie got even more competitive but she was determined to match him, to keep up. She didn’t know he didn’t care for her, not like that, nor that every night she stared out of her window longingly, thinking of him, he was mostly concerned with spying on what his mother and father were up to.

In the past six months, Cai had overheard lots of talk about bankruptcy and overdue bills. It didn’t surprise him when he thought about it—neither of his parents worked and nobody had an unlimited amount of money, did they? It was Claire and Dirk he first heard talking about the estate’s money troubles, but then all of a sudden, it all went away. Even an 11 year old—who’d been hidden away all his life—knew money didn’t just appear from thin air. He wanted to know what in the heck was going on.

Caius had enough time on his hands in the holidays to find hiding places, some he didn’t think even his mom and dad knew about. Maybe Claire and Dirk, the help, didn’t know about them either—even though they’d worked in that house for decades—for Chester before his mother, Claudia.

The drawing room was one of those areas people passed in and out of all day long. So it was somewhere he liked to hide—opening the lid on the window seat to lay inside and eavesdrop.

He found some adult conversations fascinating and often considered whether he would also grow up to become a complaining jerk, just like them. His method of spying only convinced him his parents were shitty people, and even shittier liars.

“I am not getting drunk,” his mother would protest feebly, while she and his father sat around the liquor cabinet. Everyday at the strike of noon the door to the drawing room opened and the liquor cabinet became a free-for-all. Who replenished the ever-diminishing stocks of spirits? Cai didn’t know. All he saw was his mother stewing in her painting clothes all day, not painting, but bingeing as she tried to keep up with Philippe by consuming her own weight in alcohol.

“You cannot hold your liquor,
Señorita
?” his father would reply in his soft, Spanish accent.

“I can too,” the game would continue, “I’ll prove it.”

Caius knew his parents played games. The same, every day. He just didn’t know why.

He never told Jackie the extent of his parent’s evil. He didn’t even mention it to the adopted parents, Claire and Dirk, he just kept his own thoughts to himself. He had already decided that they could screw up their lives, but it didn’t mean he had to screw up his. He was anxious to start becoming a man, to be as big as his father, to reach 18 and finally have the lawful right to divorce himself of those people.

GOING against Claire’s wishes and kicking a ball around the dining room one day, Cai accidentally hit a panel and the sharp snap of rubber against wood made him panic. Surely he would be punished for it. Either by the help, or by his father. He didn’t know which was worse—to displease a person he actually cared about or to incur his father’s wrath.

He ran to catch the ball before anyone saw but when he got closer to pick it up, he saw the wall had come open. On inspection, he realised it was a secret doorway to a hole in the wall. Cai loved reading history books in the library and had discovered that lots of houses like this had hidden doors used in the past for smuggling all kinds of possessions, even people in some cases—perhaps those escaping slavery, or others running from prison or extradition. Cai had even found some material on the house they were living in, discovering it was built in the mid-1700s. He often sat trying to picture a scene—a maid tending the lady of the house, the valet dressing the master for dinner. What would they have thought if they had known that in years to come a lazy, belligerent bitch would be put in charge of the house?

Caius stepped inside the hiding place he’d found and discovered it was a hollowed-out part of the design, cut into the granite during construction of the foundations. There was nothing in there apart from cold walls and the slight smell of damp. It had definitely been a slave passage, if the bricked-up exit was anything to go by—pity it was solid and not easily broken open. He doubted Claire or even Dirk knew of this place—and they’d been here way before his mother took over from her Uncle Chester.

Caius hated it that his parents had no respect for the history of that house, nor the fact that the building had started to go to wrack and ruin since she stopped repairing all the little faults that do and usually go wrong on a place like that. Dirk and Claire complained but they couldn’t force his mother to dip into her alcohol/canvas fund and expect her to stump up for repairs that might actually be more investment than outlay, if she had any sense at all. (He heard these murmurs from Claire and Dirk as he hung around the kitchen some mornings.) It was a sinking ship they were running—they often complained when they thought nobody was listening.

Claire often told Cai off for his smart mouth during lessons, if she was slow to explain things and he wanted to move faster through the work. He wanted to tell her that a dirty tongue could be no worse than what his parents did, day after day: get drunk, fight, invite strangers to fuck, rinse, and repeat. That house just wasn’t big enough to shelter Caius from what they were, and what they did—to each other.

It disgusted and repulsed him.

He was forced into constant seclusion but even he knew that his parents had no function in society, none at all. He wouldn’t have even known about society unless he snuck out to see Jackie every day (he was still only getting away with this because of Dirk and Claire’s mercy).

So, Caius started storing stuff in his new hiding place. He felt sure none of the adults were aware of this hole so he hid books and journals, photographs and equipment—things he might like to protect should the house go up in smoke or his parents decided to empty his cupboards and drawers of belongings, just for kicks. He knew he was a laughing stock to them—had heard them picking their only child apart during their drunken chats—saying he was a pussy, too sensitive to ever become anything of note. Caius honestly didn’t know where their wickedness came from or why they were subjecting him to their chosen lifestyle, but he didn’t really care about that. What he wanted to know was where this sudden income was coming from because it sure as hell wasn’t from sales of his mother’s artwork.