The Girl on the Train / Девушка в поезде (by Paula Hawkins) - аудиокнига на английском

Paula Hawkins THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN FOR KATE • • • She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn. Not more than a little pile of stones, really. I didn’t want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn’t leave her without remembrance. She’ll sleep peacefully there, no one to disturb her, no sounds but birdsong and the rumble of passing trains. • • • One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl… Three for a girl. I’m stuck on three, I just can’t get any further. My head is thick with sounds, my mouth thick with blood. Three for a girl. I can hear the magpies—they’re laughing, mocking me, a raucous cackling. A tiding. Bad tidings. I can see them now, black against the sun. Not the birds, something else. Someone’s coming. Someone is speaking to me. Now look. Now look what you made me do. RACHEL • • • FRIDAY, JULY 5, 2013 There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks. Light-blue cloth—a shirt, perhaps—jumbled up with something dirty white. It’s probably rubbish, part of a load dumped into the scrubby little wood up the bank. It could have been left behind by the engineers who work this part of the track, they’re here often enough. Or it could be something else. My mother used to tell me that I had an overactive imagination; Tom said that, too. I can’t help it, I catch sight of these discarded scraps, a dirty T-shirt or a lonesome shoe, and all I can think of is the other shoe and the feet that fitted into them. The train jolts and scrapes and screeches back into motion, the little pile of clothes disappears from view and we trundle on towards London, moving at a brisk jogger’s pace. Someone in the seat behind me gives a sigh of helpless irritation; the 8:04 slow train from Ashbury to Euston can test the patience of the most seasoned commuter. The journey is supposed to take fifty-four minutes, but it rarely does: this section of the track is ancient, decrepit, beset with signalling problems and never-ending engineering works. The train crawls along; it judders past warehouses and water towers, bridges and sheds, past modest Victorian houses, their backs turned squarely to the track. My head leaning against the carriage window, I watch these houses roll past me like a tracking shot in a film. I see them as others do not; even their owners probably don’t see them from this perspective. Twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home. Someone’s phone is ringing, an incongruously joyful and upbeat song. They’re slow to answer, it jingles on and on around me. I can feel my fellow commuters shift in their seats, rustle their newspapers, tap at their computers. The train lurches and sways around the bend, slowing as it approaches a red signal. I try not to look up, I try to read the free newspaper I was handed on my way into the station, but the words blur in front of my eyes, nothing holds my interest. In my head I can still see that little pile of clothes lying at the edge of the track, abandoned. The premixed gin and tonic fizzes up over the lip of the can as I bring it to my mouth and sip. Tangy and cold, the taste of my first-ever holiday with Tom, a fishing village on the Basque coast in 2005. In the mornings we’d swim the half mile to the little island in the bay, make love on secret hidden beaches; in the afternoons we’d sit at a bar drinking strong, bitter gin and tonics, watching swarms of beach footballers playing chaotic twenty-five-a-side games on the low-tide sands. I take another sip, and another; the can’s already half empty, but it’s OK, I have three more in the plastic bag at my feet. It’s Friday, so I don’t have to feel guilty about drinking on the train. TGIF. The fun starts here. It’s going to be a lovely weekend, that’s what they’re telling us. Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies. In the old days we might have driven to Corly Wood with a picnic and the papers, spent all afternoon lying on a blanket in dappled sunlight, drinking wine. We might have barbecued out back with friends, or gone to the Rose and sat in the beer garden, faces flushing with sun and alcohol as the afternoon went on, weaving home, arm in arm, falling asleep on the sofa. Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies, no one to play with, nothing to do. Living like this, the way I’m living at the moment, is harder in the summer when there is so much daylight, so little cover of darkness, when everyone is out and about, being flagrantly, aggressively happy. It’s exhausting, and it makes you feel bad if you’re not joining in. The weekend stretches out ahead of me, forty-eight empty hours to fill. I lift the can to my mouth again, but there’s not a drop left. MONDAY, JULY 8, 2013 It’s a relief to be back on the 8:04. It’s not that I can’t wait to get into London to start my week—I don’t particularly want to be in London at all. I just want to lean back in the soft, sagging velour seat, feel the warmth of the sunshine streaming through the window, feel the carriage rock back and forth and back and forth, the comforting rhythm of wheels on tracks. I’d rather be here, looking out at the houses beside the track, than almost anywhere else. There’s a faulty signal on this line, about halfway through my journey. I assume it must be faulty, in any case, because it’s almost always red; we stop there most days, sometimes just for a few seconds, sometimes for minutes on end. If I sit in carriage D, which I usually do, and the train stops at this signal, which it almost always does, I have a perfect view into my favourite trackside house: number fifteen. Number fifteen is much like the other houses along this stretch of track: a Victorian semi, two storeys high, overlooking a narrow, well-tended garden that runs around twenty feet down towards some fencing, beyond which lie a few metres of no-man’s-land before you get to the railway track. I know this house by heart. I know every brick, I know the colour of the curtains in the upstairs bedroom (beige, with a dark-blue print), I know that the paint is peeling off the bathroom window frame and that there are four tiles missing from a section of the roof over on the right-hand side. I know that on warm summer evenings, the occupants of this house, Jason and Jess, sometimes climb out of the large sash window to sit on the makeshift terrace on top of the kitchen-extension roof. They are a perfect, golden couple. He is dark-haired and well built, strong, protective, kind. He has a great laugh. She is one of those tiny bird-women, a beauty, pale-skinned with blond hair cropped short. She has the bone structure to carry that kind of thing off, sharp cheekbones dappled with a sprinkling of freckles, a fine jaw. While we’re stuck at the red signal, I look for them. Jess is often out there in the mornings, especially in the summer, drinking her coffee. Sometimes, when I see her there, I feel as though she sees me, too, I feel as though she looks right back at me, and I want to wave. I’m too self-conscious. I don’t see Jason quite so much, he’s away a lot with work. But even if they’re not there, I think about what they might be up to. Maybe this morning they’ve both got the day off and she’s lying in bed while he makes breakfast, or maybe they’ve gone for a run together, because that’s the sort of thing they do. (Tom and I used to run together on Sundays, me going at slightly above my normal pace, him at about half his, just so we could run side by side.) Maybe Jess is upstairs in the spare room, painting, or maybe they’re in the shower together, her hands pressed against the tiles, his hands on her hips. Turning slightly towards the window, my back to the rest of the carriage, I open one of the little bottles of Chenin Blanc I purchased from the Whistlestop at Euston. It’s not cold, but it’ll do. I pour some into a plastic cup, screw the top back on and slip the bottle into my handbag. It’s less acceptable to drink on the train on a Monday, unless you’re drinking with company, which I am not. There are familiar faces on these trains, people I see every week, going to and fro. I recognize them and they probably recognize me. I don’t know whether they see me, though, for what I really am. It’s a glorious evening, warm but not too close, the sun starting its lazy descent, shadows lengthening and the light just beginning to burnish the trees with gold. The train is rattling along, we whip past Jason and Jess’s place, they pass in a blur of evening sunshine. Sometimes, not often, I can see them from this side of the track. If there’s no train going in the opposite direction, and if we’re travelling slowly enough, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of them out on their terrace. If not—like today—I can imagine them. Jess will be sitting with her feet up on the table out on the terrace, a glass of wine in her hand, Jason standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders. I can imagine the feel of his hands, the weight of them, reassuring and protective. Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches. TUESDAY, JULY 9, 2013 The pile of clothes from last week is still there, and it looks dustier and more forlorn than it did a few days ago. I read somewhere that a train can rip the clothes right off you when it hits. It’s not that unusual, death by train. Two to three hundred a year, they say, so at least one every couple of days. I’m not sure how many of those are accidental. I look carefully, as the train rolls slowly past, for blood on the clothes, but I can’t see any. The train stops at the signal as usual. I can see Jess standing on the patio in front of the French doors. She’s wearing a bright print dress, her feet are bare. She’s looking over her shoulder, back into the house; she’s probably talking to Jason, who’ll be making breakfast. I keep my eyes fixed on Jess, on her home, as the train starts to inch forward. I don’t want to see the other houses; I particularly don’t want to see the one four doors down, the one that used to be mine. I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I can’t look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me. Even though I remember so clearly how it felt that time I looked up and noticed that the cream linen blind in the upstairs bedroom was gone, replaced by something in soft baby pink; even though I still remember the pain I felt when I saw Anna watering the rosebushes near the fence, her T-shirt stretched tight over her bulging belly, and I bit my lip so hard, it bled. I close my eyes tightly and count to ten, fifteen, twenty. There, it’s gone now, nothing to see. We roll into Witney station and out again, the train starting to pick up pace as suburbia melts into grimy North London, terraced houses replaced by tagged bridges and empty buildings with broken windows. The closer we get to Euston, the more anxious I feel; pressure builds; how will today be? There’s a filthy, low-slung concrete building on the right-hand side of the track about five hundred metres before we get into Euston. On its side, someone has painted: LIFE IS NOT A PARAGRAPH. I think about the bundle of clothes on the side of the track and I feel as though my throat is closing up. Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis. The train I take in the evening, the 5:56, is slightly slower than the morning one—it takes one hour and one minute, a full seven minutes longer than the morning train despite not stopping at any extra stations. I don’t mind, because just as I’m in no great hurry to get into London in the morning, I’m in no hurry to get back to Ashbury in the evening, either. Not just because it’s Ashbury, although the place itself is bad enough, a 1960s new town, spreading like a tumour over the heart of Buckinghamshire. No better or worse than a dozen other towns like it, a centre filled with caf?s and mobile-phone shops and branches of JD Sports, surrounded by a band of suburbia and beyond that the realm of the multiplex cinema and out-of-town Tesco. I live in a smart(ish), new(ish) block situated at the point where the commercial heart of the place starts to bleed into the residential outskirts, but it is not my home. My home is the Victorian semi on the tracks, the one I part-owned. In Ashbury I am not a homeowner, not even a tenant—I’m a lodger, occupant of the small second bedroom in Cathy’s bland and inoffensive duplex, subject to her grace and favour. Cathy and I were friends at university. Half friends, really, we were never that close. She lived across the hall from me in my first year, and we were both doing the same course, so we were natural allies in those first few daunting weeks, before we met people with whom we had more in common. We didn’t see much of each other after the first year and barely at all after college, except for the occasional wedding. But in my hour of need she happened to have a spare room going and it made sense. I was so sure that it would only be for a couple of months, six at the most, and I didn’t know what else to do. I’d never lived by myself, I’d gone from parents to flatmates to Tom, I found the idea overwhelming, so I said yes. And that was nearly two years ago. It’s not awful. Cathy’s a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring. But it’s not so bad, I can think of worse traits in a flatmate. No, it’s not Cathy, it’s not even Ashbury that bothers me most about my new situation (I still think of it as new, although it’s been two years). It’s the loss of control. In Cathy’s flat I always feel like a guest at the very outer limit of her welcome. I feel it in the kitchen, where we jostle for space when cooking our evening meals. I feel it when I sit beside her on the sofa, the remote control firmly within her grasp. The only space that feels like mine is my tiny bedroom, into which a double bed and a desk have been crammed, with barely enough space to walk between them. It’s comfortable enough, but it isn’t a place you want to be, so instead I linger in the living room or at the kitchen table, ill at ease and powerless. I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head. WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, 2013 The heat is building. It’s barely half past eight and already the day is close, the air heavy with moisture. I could wish for a storm, but the sky is an insolent blank, pale, watery blue. I wipe away the sweat on my top lip. I wish I’d remembered to buy a bottle of water. I can’t see Jason and Jess this morning, and my sense of disappointment is acute. Silly, I know. I scrutinize the house, but there’s nothing to see. The curtains are open downstairs but the French doors are closed, sunlight reflecting off the glass. The sash window upstairs is closed, too. Jason may be away working. He’s a doctor, I think, probably for one of those overseas organizations. He’s constantly on call, a bag packed on top of the wardrobe; there’s an earthquake in Iran or a tsunami in Asia and he drops everything, he grabs his bag and he’s at Heathrow within a matter of hours, ready to fly out and save lives. Jess, with her bold prints and her Converse trainers and her beauty, her attitude, works in the fashion industry. Or perhaps in the music business, or in advertising—she might be a stylist or a photographer. She’s a good painter, too, plenty of artistic flair. I can see her now, in the spare room upstairs, music blaring, window open, a brush in her hand, an enormous canvas leaning against the wall. She’ll be there until midnight; Jason knows not to bother her when she’s working. I can’t really see her, of course. I don’t know if she paints, or whether Jason has a great laugh, or whether Jess has beautiful cheekbones. I can’t see her bone structure from here and I’ve never heard Jason’s voice. I’ve never seen them up close, they didn’t live at that house when I lived down the road. They moved in after I left two years ago, I don’t know when exactly. I suppose I started noticing them about a year ago, and gradually, as the months went past, they became important to me. I don’t know their names, either, so I had to name them myself. Jason, because he’s handsome in a British film star kind of way, not a Depp or a Pitt, but a Firth, or a Jason Isaacs. And Jess just goes with Jason, and it goes with her. It fits her, pretty and carefree as she is. They’re a match, they’re a set. They’re happy, I can tell. They’re what I used to be, they’re Tom and me five years ago. They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be. My shirt, uncomfortably tight, buttons straining across my chest, is pit-stained, damp patches clammy beneath my arms. My eyes and throat itch. This evening I don’t want the journey to stretch out; I long to get home, to undress and get into the shower, to be where no one can look at me. I look at the man in the seat opposite mine. He is about my age, early to midthirties, with dark hair, greying at the temples. Sallow skin. He’s wearing a suit, but he’s taken the jacket off and slung it on the seat next to him. He has a MacBook, paper-thin, open in front of him. He’s a slow typist. He’s wearing a silver watch with a large face on his right wrist—it looks expensive, a Breitling maybe. He’s chewing the inside of his cheek. Perhaps he’s nervous. Or just thinking deeply. Writing an important email to a colleague at the office in New York, or a carefully worded break-up message to his girlfriend. He looks up suddenly and meets my eye; his glance travels over me, over the little bottle of wine on the table in front of me. He looks away. There’s something about the set of his mouth that suggests distaste. He finds me distasteful. I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s not just that I’ve put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move. One night last week, when I left my room to get myself a glass of water, I overheard Cathy talking to Damien, her boyfriend, in the living room. I stood in the hallway and listened. “She’s lonely,” Cathy was saying. “I really worry about her. It doesn’t help, her being alone all the time.” Then she said, “Isn’t there someone from work, maybe, or the rugby club?” and Damien said, “For Rachel? Not being funny, Cath, but I’m not sure I know anyone that desperate.” THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2013 I’m picking at the plaster on my forefinger. It’s damp, it got wet when I was washing out my coffee mug this morning; it feels clammy, dirty, though it was clean on this morning. I don’t want to take it off because the cut is deep. Cathy was out when I got home, so I went to the off-licence and bought two bottles of wine. I drank the first one and then I thought I’d take advantage of the fact that she was out and cook myself a steak, make a red-onion relish, have it with a green salad. A good, healthy meal. I sliced through the top of my finger while chopping the onions. I must have gone to the bathroom to clean it up and gone to lie down for a while and just forgotten all about it, because I woke up around ten and I could hear Cathy and Damien talking and he was saying how disgusting it was that I would leave the kitchen like that. Cathy came upstairs to see me, she knocked softly on my door and opened it a fraction. She cocked her head to one side and asked if I was OK. I apologized without being sure what I was apologizing for. She said it was all right, but would I mind cleaning up a bit? There was blood on the chopping board, the room smelled of raw meat, the steak was still sitting out on the countertop, turning grey. Damien didn’t even say hello, he just shook his head when he saw me and went upstairs to Cathy’s bedroom. After they’d both gone to bed I remembered that I hadn’t drunk the second bottle, so I opened that. I sat on the sofa and watched television with the sound turned down really low so they wouldn’t hear it. I can’t remember what I was watching, but at some point I must have felt lonely, or happy, or something, because I wanted to talk to someone. The need for contact must have been overwhelming, and there was no one I could call except for Tom. There’s no one I want to talk to except for Tom. The call log on my phone says I rang four times: at 11:02, 11:12, 11:54, 12:09. Judging from the length of the calls, I left two messages. He may even have picked up, but I don’t remember talking to him. I remember leaving the first message; I think I just asked him to call me. That may be what I said in both of them, which isn’t too bad. The train shudders to a standstill at the red signal and I look up. Jess is sitting on her patio, drinking a cup of coffee. She has her feet up against the table and her head back, sunning herself. Behind her, I think I can see a shadow, someone moving: Jason. I long to see him, to catch a glimpse of his handsome face. I want him to come outside, to stand behind her the way he does, to kiss the top of her head. He doesn’t come out, and her head falls forward. There is something about the way she is moving today that seems different; she is heavier, weighed down. I will him to come out to her, but the train jolts and slogs forward and still there is no sign of him; she’s alone. And now, without thinking, I find myself looking directly into my house, and I can’t look away. The French doors are flung open, light streaming into the kitchen. I can’t tell, I really can’t, whether I’m seeing this or imagining it—is she there, at the sink, washing up? Is there a little girl sitting in one of those bouncy baby chairs up there on the kitchen table? I close my eyes and let the darkness grow and spread until it morphs from a feeling of sadness into something worse: a memory, a flashback. I didn’t just ask him to call me back. I remember now, I was crying. I told him that I still loved him, that I always would. Please, Tom, please, I need to talk to you. I miss you. No no no no no no no. I have to accept it, there’s no point trying to push it away. I’m going to feel terrible all day, it’s going to come in waves—stronger then weaker then stronger again—that twist in the pit of my stomach, the anguish of shame, the heat coming to my face, my eyes squeezed tight as though I could make it all disappear. And I’ll be telling myself all day, it’s not the worst thing, is it? It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever done, it’s not as if I fell over in public, or yelled at a stranger in the street. It’s not as if I humiliated my husband at a summer barbecue by shouting abuse at the wife of one of his friends. It’s not as if we got into a fight one night at home and I went for him with a golf club, taking a chunk out of the plaster in the hallway outside the bedroom. It’s not like going back to work after a three-hour lunch and staggering through the office, everyone looking, Martin Miles taking me to one side, I think you should probably go home, Rachel. I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she’d just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and I thought, I’m not that bad. This is where the bar is set. I have been thinking about Jess all day, unable to focus on anything but what I saw this morning. What was it that made me think that something was wrong? I couldn’t possibly see her expression at that distance, but I felt when I was looking at her that she was alone. More than alone—lonely. Perhaps she was—perhaps he’s away, gone to one of those hot countries he jets off to to save lives. And she misses him, and she worries, although she knows he has to go. Of course she misses him, just as I do. He is kind and strong, everything a husband should be. And they are a partnership. I can see it, I know how they are. His strength, that protectiveness he radiates, it doesn’t mean she’s weak. She’s strong in other ways; she makes intellectual leaps that leave him openmouthed in admiration. She can cut to the nub of a problem, dissect and analyse it in the time it takes other people to say good morning. At parties, he often holds her hand, even though they’ve been together years. They respect each other, they don’t put each other down. I feel exhausted this evening. I am sober, stone-cold. Some days I feel so bad that I have to drink; some days I feel so bad that I can’t. Today, the thought of alcohol turns my stomach. But sobriety on the evening train is a challenge, particularly now, in this heat. A film of sweat covers every inch of my skin, the inside of my mouth prickles, my eyes itch, mascara rubbed into their corners. My phone buzzes in my handbag, making me jump. Two girls sitting across the carriage look at me and then at each other, with a sly exchange of smiles. I don’t know what they think of me, but I know it isn’t good. My heart is pounding in my chest as I reach for the phone. I know this will be nothing good, either: it will be Cathy, perhaps, asking me ever so nicely to maybe give the booze a rest this evening? Or my mother, telling me that she’ll be in London next week, she’ll drop by the office, we can go for lunch. I look at the screen. It’s Tom. I hesitate for just a second and then I answer it. “Rachel?” For the first five years I knew him, I was never Rachel, always Rach. Sometimes Shelley, because he knew I hated it and it made him laugh to watch me twitch with irritation and then giggle because I couldn’t help but join in when he was laughing. “Rachel, it’s me.” His voice is leaden, he sounds worn out. “Listen, you have to stop this, OK?” I don’t say anything. The train is slowing, and we are almost opposite the house, my old house. I want to say to him, Come outside, go and stand on the lawn. Let me see you. “Please, Rachel, you can’t call me like this all the time. You’ve got to sort yourself out.” There is a lump in my throat as hard as a pebble, smooth and obstinate. I cannot swallow. I cannot speak. “Rachel? Are you there? I know things aren’t good with you, and I’m sorry for you, I really am, but… I can’t help you, and these constant calls are really upsetting Anna. OK? I can’t help you anymore. Go to AA or something. Please, Rachel. Go to an AA meeting after work today.” I pull the filthy plaster off the end of my finger and look at the pale, wrinkled flesh beneath, dried blood caked at the edge of my fingernail. I press the thumbnail of my right hand into the centre of the cut and feel it open up, the pain sharp and hot. I catch my breath. Blood starts to ooze from the wound. The girls on the other side of the carriage are watching me, their faces blank. MEGAN • • • One year earlier WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2012 I can hear the train coming; I know its rhythm by heart. It picks up speed as it accelerates out of Northcote station and then, after rattling round the bend, it starts to slow down, from a rattle to a rumble, and then sometimes a screech of brakes as it stops at the signal a couple hundred yards from the house. My coffee is cold on the table, but I’m too deliciously warm and lazy to bother getting up to make myself another cup. Sometimes I don’t even watch the trains go past, I just listen. Sitting here in the morning, eyes closed and the hot sun orange on my eyelids, I could be anywhere. I could be in the south of Spain, at the beach; I could be in Italy, the Cinque Terre, all those pretty coloured houses and the trains ferrying the tourists back and forth. I could be back in Holkham, with the screech of gulls in my ears and salt on my tongue and a ghost train passing on the rusted track half a mile away. The train isn’t stopping today, it trundles slowly past. I can hear the wheels clacking over the points, can almost feel it rocking. I can’t see the faces of the passengers and I know they’re just commuters heading to Euston to sit behind desks, but I can dream: of more exotic journeys, of adventures at the end of the line and beyond. In my head, I keep travelling back to Holkham; it’s odd that I still think of it, on mornings like this, with such affection, such longing, but I do. The wind in the grass, the big slate sky over the dunes, the house infested with mice and falling down, full of candles and dirt and music. It’s like a dream to me now. I feel my heart beating just a little too fast. I can hear his footfall on the stairs, he calls my name. “You want another coffee, Megs?” The spell is broken, I’m awake. I’m cool from the breeze and warm from the two fingers of vodka in my martini. I’m out on the terrace, waiting for Scott to come home. I’m going to persuade him to take me out to dinner at the Italian on Kingly Road. We haven’t been out for bloody ages. I haven’t got much done today. I was supposed to sort out my application for the fabrics course at St. Martins; I did start it, I was working downstairs in the kitchen when I heard a woman screaming, making a horrible noise, I thought someone was being murdered. I ran outside into the garden, but I couldn’t see anything. I could still hear her, though, it was nasty, it went right through me, her voice really shrill and desperate. “What are you doing? What are you doing with her? Give her to me, give her to me.” It seemed to go on and on, though it probably only lasted a few seconds. I ran upstairs and climbed out onto the terrace and I could see, through the trees, two women down by the fence a few gardens over. One of them was crying—maybe they both were—and there was a child bawling its head off, too. I thought about calling the police, but it all seemed to calm down then. The woman who’d been screaming ran into the house, carrying the baby. The other one stayed out there. She ran up towards the house, she stumbled and got to her feet and then just sort of wandered round the garden in circles. Really weird. God knows what was going on. But it’s the most excitement I’ve had in weeks. My days feel empty now I don’t have the gallery to go to any longer. I really miss it. I miss talking to the artists. I even miss dealing with all those tedious yummy mummies who used to drop by, Starbucks in hand, to gawk at the pictures, telling their friends that little Jessie did better pictures than that at nursery school. Sometimes I feel like seeing if I can track down anybody from the old days, but then I think, what would I talk to them about now? They wouldn’t even recognize Megan the happily married suburbanite. In any case, I can’t risk looking backwards, it’s always a bad idea. I’ll wait until the summer is over, then I’ll look for work. It seems like a shame to waste these long summer days. I’ll find something, here or elsewhere, I know I will. TUESDAY, AUGUST 14, 2012 I find myself standing in front of my wardrobe, staring for the hundredth time at a rack of pretty clothes, the perfect wardrobe for the manager of a small but cutting-edge art gallery. Nothing in it says “nanny.” God, even the word makes me want to gag. I put on jeans and a T-shirt, scrape my hair back. I don’t even bother putting on any makeup. There’s no point, is there, prettying myself up to spend all day with a baby? I flounce downstairs, half spoiling for a fight. Scott’s making coffee in the kitchen. He turns to me with a grin, and my mood lifts instantly. I rearrange my pout to a smile. He hands me a coffee and kisses me. There’s no sense blaming him for this, it was my idea. I volunteered to do it, to become a childminder for the people down the road. At the time, I thought it might be fun. Completely insane, really, I must have been mad. Bored, mad, curious. I wanted to see. I think I got the idea after I heard her yelling out in the garden and I wanted to know what was going on. Not that I’ve asked, of course. You can’t really, can you? Scott encouraged me—he was over the moon when I suggested it. He thinks spending time around babies will make me broody. In fact, it’s doing exactly the opposite; when I leave their house I run home, can’t wait to strip my clothes off and get into the shower and wash the baby smell off me. I long for my days at the gallery, prettied up, hair done, talking to adults about art or films or nothing at all. Nothing at all would be a step up from my conversations with Anna. God, she’s dull! You get the feeling that she probably had something to say for herself once upon a time, but now everything is about the child: Is she warm enough? Is she too warm? How much milk did she take? And she’s always there, so most of the time I feel like a spare part. My job is to watch the child while Anna rests, to give her a break. A break from what, exactly? She’s weirdly nervous, too. I’m constantly aware of her, hovering, twitching. She flinches every time a train passes, jumps when the phone rings. “They’re just so fragile, aren’t they?” she says, and I can’t disagree with that. I leave the house and walk, leaden-legged, the fifty yards along Blenheim Road to their house. No skip in my step. Today, she doesn’t open the door, it’s him, the husband. Tom, suited and booted, off to work. He looks handsome in his suit—not Scott handsome, he’s smaller and paler, and his eyes are a little too close together when you see him up close, but he’s not bad. He flashes me his wide, Tom Cruise smile, and then he’s gone, and it’s just me and her and the baby. THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 2012 I quit! I feel so much better, as if anything is possible. I’m free! I’m sitting on the terrace, waiting for the rain. The sky is black above me, swallows looping and diving, the air thick with moisture. Scott will be home in an hour or so, and I’ll have to tell him. He’ll only be pissed off for a minute or two, I’ll make it up to him. And I won’t just be sitting around the house all day: I’ve been making plans. I could do a photography course, or set up a market stall, sell jewellery. I could learn to cook. I had a teacher at school who told me once that I was a mistress of self-reinvention. I didn’t know what he was on about at the time, I thought he was putting me on, but I’ve since come to like the idea. Runaway, lover, wife, waitress, gallery manager, nanny, and a few more in between. So who do I want to be tomorrow? I didn’t really mean to quit, the words just came out. We were sitting there, around the kitchen table, Anna with the baby on her lap, and Tom had popped back to pick something up, so he was there, too, drinking a cup of coffee, and it just seemed ridiculous, there was absolutely no point in my being there. Worse than that, I felt uncomfortable, as if I was intruding. “I’ve found another job,” I said, without really thinking about it. “So I’m not going to be able to do this any longer.” Anna gave me a look—I don’t think she believed me. She just said, “Oh, that’s a shame,” and I could tell she didn’t mean it. She looked relieved. She didn’t even ask me what the job was, which was a relief, because I hadn’t thought up a convincing lie. Tom looked mildly surprised. He said, “We’ll miss you,” but that’s a lie, too. The only person who’ll really be disappointed is Scott, so I have to think of something to tell him. Maybe I’ll tell him Tom was hitting on me. That’ll put an end to it. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2012 It’s just after seven, it’s chilly out here now, but it’s so beautiful like this, all these strips of garden side by side, green and cold and waiting for fingers of sunshine to creep up from the tracks and make them all come alive. I’ve been up for hours; I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in days. I hate this, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head. I want to run. I want to take a road trip, in a convertible, with the top down. I want to drive to the coast—any coast. I want to walk on a beach. Me and my big brother were going to be road trippers. We had such plans, Ben and I. Well, they were Ben’s plans mostly—he was such a dreamer. We were going to ride motorbikes from Paris to the C?te d’Azur, or all the way down the Pacific coast of the USA, from Seattle to Los Angeles; we were going to follow in Che Guevara’s tracks from Buenos Aires to Caracas. Maybe if I’d done all that, I wouldn’t have ended up here, not knowing what to do next. Or maybe, if I’d done all that, I’d have ended up exactly where I am and I would be perfectly contented. But I didn’t do all that, of course, because Ben never got as far as Paris, he never even made it as far as Cambridge. He died on the A10, his skull crushed beneath the wheels of an articulated lorry. I miss him every day. More than anyone, I think. He’s the big hole in my life, in the middle of my soul. Or maybe he was just the beginning of it. I don’t know. I don’t even know whether all this is really about Ben, or whether it’s about everything that happened after that, and everything that’s happened since. All I know is, one minute I’m ticking along fine and life is sweet and I want for nothing, and the next I can’t wait to get away, I’m all over the place, slipping and sliding again. So, I’m going to see a therapist! Which could be weird, but it could be a laugh, too. I’ve always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean. This is not quite the same thing, of course. I’m a bit nervous, but I haven’t been able to get to sleep lately, and Scott’s been on my case to go. I told him I find it difficult enough talking to people I know about this stuff—I can barely even talk to him about it. He said that’s the point, you can say anything to strangers. But that isn’t completely true. You can’t just say anything. Poor Scott. He doesn’t know the half of it. He loves me so much, it makes me ache. I don’t know how he does it. I would drive me mad. But I have to do something, and at least this feels like action. All those plans I had—photography courses and cookery classes—when it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable. I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife. I don’t understand how anyone does it—there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you. I’ve been kept waiting. The appointment was for half an hour ago, and I’m still here, sitting in the reception room flicking through Vogue, thinking about getting up and walking out. I know doctors’ appointments run over, but therapists? Films have always led me to believe that they kick you out the moment your thirty minutes are up. I suppose Hollywood isn’t really talking about the kind of therapist you get referred to on the National Health Service. I’m just about to go up to the receptionist to tell her that I’ve waited long enough, I’m leaving, when the doctor’s office door swings open and this very tall, lanky man emerges, looking apologetic and holding out his hand to me. “Mrs. Hipwell, I am so sorry to have kept you waiting,” he says, and I just smile at him and tell him it’s all right, and I feel, in this moment, that it will be all right, because I’ve only been in his company for a moment or two and already I feel soothed. I think it’s the voice. Soft and low. Slightly accented, which I was expecting, because his name is Dr. Kamal Abdic. I guess he must be midthirties, although he looks very young with his incredible dark honey skin. He has hands I could imagine on me, long and delicate fingers, I can almost feel them on my skin. We don’t talk about anything substantial, it’s just the introductory session, the getting-to-know-you stuff; he asks me what the trouble is and I tell him about the panic attacks, the insomnia, the fact that I lie awake at night too frightened to fall asleep. He wants me to talk a bit more about that, but I’m not ready yet. He asks me whether I take drugs, drink alcohol. I tell him I have other vices these days, and I catch his eye and I think he knows what I mean. Then I feel as if I ought to be taking this a bit more seriously, so I tell him about the gallery closing and that I feel at a loose end all the time, my lack of direction, the fact that I spend too much time in my head. He doesn’t talk much, just the occasional prompt, but I want to hear him speak, so as I’m leaving I ask him where he’s from. “Maidstone,” he says, “in Kent. But I moved to Corly a few years back.” He knows that wasn’t what I was asking; he gives me a wolfish smile. Scott is waiting for me when I get home, he thrusts a drink into my hand, he wants to know all about it. I say it was OK. He asks me about the therapist: did I like him, did he seem nice? OK, I say again, because I don’t want to sound too enthusiastic. He asks me whether we talked about Ben. Scott thinks everything is about Ben. He may be right. He may know me better than I think he does. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2012 I woke early this morning, but I did sleep for a few hours, which is an improvement on last week. I felt almost refreshed when I got out of bed, so instead of sitting on the terrace I decided to go for a walk. I’ve been shutting myself away, almost without realizing it. The only places I seem to go these days are to the shops, my Pilates classes and the therapist. Occasionally to Tara’s. The rest of the time, I’m at home. It’s no wonder I get restless. I walk out of the house, turn right and then left onto Kingly Road. Past the pub, the Rose. We used to go there all the time; I can’t remember why we stopped. I never liked it all that much, too many couples just the right side of forty drinking too much and casting around for something better, wondering if they’d have the courage. Perhaps that’s why we stopped going, because I didn’t like it. Past the pub, past the shops. I don’t want to go far, just a little circuit to stretch my legs. It’s nice being out early, before the school run, before the commute gets going; the streets are empty and clean, the day full of possibility. I turn left again, walk down to the little playground, the only rather poor excuse for green space we have. It’s empty now, but in a few hours it will be swarming with toddlers, mothers and au pairs. Half the Pilates girls will be here, head to toe in Sweaty Betty, competitively stretching, manicured hands wrapped around their Starbucks. I carry on past the park and down towards Roseberry Avenue. If I turned right here I’d go up past my gallery—what was my gallery, now a vacant shop window—but I don’t want to, because that still hurts a little. I tried so hard to make a success of it. Wrong place, wrong time—no call for art in suburbia, not in this economy. Instead, I turn right, past the Tesco Express, past the other pub, the one where people from the estate go, and back towards home. I can feel butterflies now, I’m starting to get nervous. I’m afraid of bumping into the Watsons, because it’s always awkward when I see them; it’s patently obvious that I don’t have a new job, that I lied because I didn’t want to carry on working for them. Or rather, it’s awkward when I see her. Tom just ignores me. But Anna seems to take things personally. She obviously thinks that my short-lived career as a nanny came to an end because of her or because of her child. It actually wasn’t about her child at all, although the fact that the child never stops whinging did make her hard to love. It’s all so much more complicated, but of course I can’t explain that to her. Anyway. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been shutting myself away, I suppose, because I don’t want to see the Watsons. Part of me hopes they’ll just move. I know she doesn’t like being here: she hates that house, hates living among his ex-wife’s things, hates the trains. I stop at the corner and peer into the underpass. That smell of cold and damp always sends a little shiver down my spine, it’s like turning over a rock to see what’s underneath: moss and worms and earth. It reminds me of playing in the garden as a child, looking for frogs by the pond with Ben. I walk on. The street is clear—no sign of Tom or Anna—and the part of me that can’t resist a bit of drama is actually quite disappointed. Scott’s just called to say he has to work late, which is not the news I wanted to hear. I’m feeling edgy, have been all day. Can’t keep still. I need him to come home and calm me down, and now it’s going to be hours before he gets here and my brain is going to keep racing round and round and round and I know I’ve got a sleepless night coming. I can’t just sit here, watching the trains, I’m too jittery, my heartbeat feels like a flutter in my chest, like a bird trying to get out of a cage. I slip my flip-flops on and go downstairs, out of the front door and on to Blenheim Road. It’s around seven thirty—a few stragglers on their way home from work. There’s no one else around, though you can hear the cries of kids playing in their back gardens, taking advantage of the last of the summer sunshine before they get called in for dinner. I walk down the road, towards the station. I stop for a moment outside number twenty-three and think about ringing the doorbell. What would I say? Ran out of sugar? Just fancied a chat? Their blinds are half open, but I can’t see anyone inside. I carry on towards the corner and, without really thinking about it, I continue down into the underpass. I’m about halfway through when the train runs overhead, and it’s glorious: it’s like an earthquake, you can feel it right in the centre of your body, stirring up the blood. I look down and notice that there’s something on the floor, a hair band, purple, stretched, well used. Dropped by a runner, probably, but something about it gives me the creeps and I want to get out of there quickly, back into the sunshine. On the way back down the road, he passes me in his car, our eyes meet for just a second and he smiles at me. RACHEL • • • FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2013 I am exhausted, my head thick with sleep. When I drink, I hardly sleep at all. I pass out cold for an hour or two, then I wake, sick with fear, sick with myself. If I have a day when I don’t drink, that night I fall into the heaviest of slumbers, a deep unconsciousness, and in the morning I cannot wake properly, I cannot shake sleep, it stays with me for hours, sometimes all day long. There is just a handful of people in my carriage today, none in my immediate vicinity. There is no one watching me, so I lean my head against the window and close my eyes. The screech of the train’s brakes wakes me. We’re at the signal. At this time of morning, at this time of year, the sun shines directly onto the back of the trackside houses, flooding them with light. I can almost feel it, the warmth of that morning sunshine on my face and arms as I sit at the breakfast table, Tom opposite me, my bare feet resting on top of his because they’re always so much warmer than mine, my eyes cast down at the newspaper. I can feel him smiling at me, the blush spreading from my chest to my neck, the way it always did when he looked at me a certain way. I blink hard and Tom’s gone. We’re still at the signal. I can see Jess in her garden, and behind her a man walking out of the house. He’s carrying something—mugs of coffee, perhaps—and I look at him and realize that it isn’t Jason. This man is taller, slender, darker. He’s a family friend; he’s her brother or Jason’s brother. He bends down, placing the mugs on the metal table on their patio. He’s a cousin from Australia, staying for a couple of weeks; he’s Jason’s oldest friend, best man at their wedding. Jess walks towards him, she puts her hands around his waist and she kisses him, long and deep. The train moves. I can’t believe it. I snatch air into my lungs and realize that I’ve been holding my breath. Why would she do that? Jason loves her, I can see it, they’re happy. I can’t believe she would do that to him, he doesn’t deserve that. I feel a real sense of disappointment, I feel as though I have been cheated on. A familiar ache fills my chest. I have felt this way before. On a larger scale, to a more intense degree, of course, but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it. I found out the way everyone seems to find out these days: an electronic slip. Sometimes it’s a text or a voice mail message; in my case it was an email, the modern-day lipstick on the collar. It was an accident, really, I wasn’t snooping. I wasn’t supposed to go near Tom’s computer, because he was worried I would delete something important by mistake, or click on something I shouldn’t and let in a virus or a Trojan or something. “Technology’s not really your strong point, is it, Rach?” he said after the time I managed to delete all the contacts in his email address book by mistake. So I wasn’t supposed to touch it. But I was actually doing a good thing, I was trying to make amends for being a bit miserable and difficult, I was planning a special fourth-anniversary getaway, a trip to remind us how we used to be. I wanted it to be a surprise, so I had to check his work schedule secretly, I had to look. I wasn’t snooping, I wasn’t trying to catch him out or anything, I knew better than that. I didn’t want to be one of those awful suspicious wives who go through their husband’s pockets. Once, I answered his phone when he was in the shower and he got quite upset and accused me of not trusting him. I felt awful because he seemed so hurt. I needed to look at his work schedule, and he’d left his laptop on, because he’d run out late for a meeting. It was the perfect opportunity, so I had a look at his calendar, noted down some dates. When I closed down the browser window with his calendar in it, there was his email account, logged in, laid bare. There was a message at the top from [email protected]. I clicked. XXXXX. That was it, just a line of Xs. I thought it was spam at first, until I realized that they were kisses. It was a reply to a message he’d sent a few hours before, just after seven, when I was still slumbering in our bed. I fell asleep last night thinking of you, I was dreaming about kissing your mouth, your breasts, the inside of your thighs. I woke this morning with my head full of you, desperate to touch you. Don’t expect me to be sane, I can’t be, not with you. I read through his messages: there were dozens, hidden in a folder entitled “Admin.” I discovered that her name was Anna Boyd, and that my husband was in love with her. He told her so, often. He told her that he’d never felt like this before, that he couldn’t wait to be with her, that it wouldn’t be long until they could be together. I don’t have words to describe what I felt that day, but now, sitting on the train, I am furious, nails digging into my palms, tears stinging my eyes. I feel a flash of intense anger. I feel as though something has been taken away from me. How could she? How could Jess do this? What is wrong with her? Look at the life they have, look at how beautiful it is! I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all. Hatred floods me. If I saw that woman now, if I saw Jess, I would spit in her face. I would scratch her eyes out. There’s been a problem on the line. The 5:56 fast train to Stoke has been cancelled, so its passengers have invaded my train and it’s standing room only in the carriage. I, fortunately, have a seat, but by the aisle, not next to the window, and there are bodies pressed against my shoulder, my knee, invading my space. I have an urge to push back, to get up and shove. The heat has been building all day, closing in on me, I feel as though I’m breathing through a mask. Every single window has been opened and yet, even while we’re moving, the carriage feels airless, a locked metal box. I cannot get enough oxygen into my lungs. I feel sick. I can’t stop replaying the scene in the coffee shop this morning, I can’t stop feeling as though I’m still there, I can’t stop seeing the looks on their faces. I blame Jess. I was obsessing this morning about Jess and Jason, about what she’d done and how he would feel, about the confrontation they would have when he found out and when his world, like mine, was ripped apart. I was walking around in a daze, not concentrating on where I was going. Without thinking, I went into the coffee shop that everyone from Huntingdon Whitely uses. I was through the door before I saw them, and by the time I did it was too late to turn back; they were looking at me, eyes widening for a fraction of a second before they remembered to fix smiles on their faces. Martin Miles with Sasha and Harriet, a triumvirate of awkwardness, beckoning, waving me over. “Rachel!” Martin said, arms outstretched, pulling me into a hug. I wasn’t expecting it, my hands were caught between us, fumbling against his body. Sasha and Harriet smiled, gave me tentative air-kisses, trying not to get too close. “What are you doing here?” For a long, long moment, I went blank. I looked at the floor, I could feel myself colouring and, realizing it was making it worse, I gave a false laugh and said, “Interview. Interview.” “Oh.” Martin failed to hide his surprise, while Sasha and Harriet nodded and smiled. “Who’s that with?” I couldn’t remember the name of a single public relations firm. Not one. I couldn’t think of a property company, either, let alone one that might realistically be hiring. I just stood there, rubbing my lower lip with my forefinger, shaking my head, and eventually Martin said, “Top secret, is it? Some firms are weird like that, aren’t they? Don’t want you saying anything until the contracts are signed and it’s all official.” It was bullshit and he knew it, he did it to save me and nobody bought it, but everyone pretended they did and nodded along. Harriet and Sasha were looking over my shoulder at the door, they were embarrassed for me, they wanted a way out. “I’d better go and order my coffee,” I said. “Don’t want to be late.” Martin put his hand on my forearm and said, “It’s great to see you, Rachel.” His pity was almost palpable. I’d never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied. The plan had been to go to Holborn Library on Theobalds Road, but I couldn’t face it, so I went to Regent’s Park instead. I walked to the very far end, next to the zoo. I sat down in the shade beneath a sycamore tree, thinking of the unfilled hours ahead, replaying the conversation in the coffee shop, remembering the look on Martin’s face when he said good-bye to me. I must have been there for less than half an hour when my mobile rang. It was Tom again, calling from the home phone. I tried to picture him, working at his laptop in our sunny kitchen, but the image was spoilt by encroachments from his new life. She would be there somewhere, in the background, making tea or feeding the little girl, her shadow falling over him. I let the call go to voice mail. I put the phone back into my bag and tried to ignore it. I didn’t want to hear any more, not today; today was already awful enough and it was not yet ten thirty in the morning. I held out for about three minutes before I retrieved the phone and dialled into voice mail. I braced myself for the agony of hearing his voice—the voice that used to speak to me with laughter and light and now is used only to admonish or console or pity—but it wasn’t him. “Rachel, it’s Anna.” I hung up. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t stop my brain from racing or my skin from itching, so I got to my feet and walked to the corner shop on Titchfield Street and bought four gin and tonics in cans, then went back to my spot in the park. I opened the first one and drank it as fast as I could, and then opened the second. I turned my back to the path so that I couldn’t see the runners and the mothers with buggies and the tourists, and if I couldn’t see them, I could pretend like a child that they couldn’t see me. I called my voice mail again. “Rachel, it’s Anna.” Long pause. “I need to talk to you about the phone calls.” Another long pause—she’s talking to me and doing something else, multitasking, the way busy wives and mothers do, tidying up, loading the washing machine. “Look, I know you’re having a tough time,” she says, as though she has nothing to do with my pain, “but you can’t call us at night all the time.” Her tone is clipped, irritable. “It’s bad enough that you wake us when you call, but you wake Evie, too, and that’s just not acceptable. We’re struggling to get her to sleep through at the moment.” We’re struggling to get her to sleep through. We. Us. Our little family. With our problems and our routines. Fucking bitch. She’s a cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest. She has taken everything from me. She has taken everything and now she calls me to tell me that my distress is inconvenient for her? I finish the second can and make a start on the third. The blissful rush of alcohol hitting my bloodstream lasts only a few minutes, and then I feel sick. I’m going too fast, even for me, I need to slow down; if I don’t slow down something bad is going to happen. I’m going to do something I will regret. I’m going to call her back, I’m going to tell her I don’t care about her and I don’t care about her family and I don’t care if her child never gets a good night’s sleep for the rest of its life. I’m going to tell her that the line he used with her—don’t expect me to be sane—he used it with me, too, when we were first together; he wrote it in a letter to me, declaring his undying passion. It’s not even his line: he stole it from Henry Miller. Everything she has is secondhand. I want to know how that makes her feel. I want to call her back and ask her, What does it feel like, Anna, to live in my house, surrounded by the furniture I bought, to sleep in the bed that I shared with him for years, to feed your child at the kitchen table he fucked me on? I still find it extraordinary that they chose to stay there, in that house, in my house. I couldn’t believe it when he told me. I loved that house. I was the one who insisted we buy it, despite its location. I liked being down there on the tracks, I liked watching the trains go by, I enjoyed the sound of them, not the scream of an inner-city express but the old-fashioned trundling of ancient rolling stock. Tom told me, “It won’t always be like this, they’ll eventually upgrade the line and then it will be fast trains screaming past,” but I couldn’t believe it would ever actually happen. I would have stayed there, I would have bought him out if I’d had the money. I didn’t, though, and we couldn’t find a buyer at a decent price when we divorced, so instead he said he’d buy me out and stay on until he got the right price for it. But he never found the right buyer, instead he moved her in, and she loved the house like I did, and they decided to stay. She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them, for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before. She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes, moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the oven, just like Sylvia did. I must have fallen asleep, the gin and the hot sun lulling me. I woke with a start, scrabbling around desperately for my handbag. It was still there. My skin was prickling, I was alive with ants, they were in my hair and on my neck and chest and I leaped to my feet, clawing them away. Two teenage boys, kicking a football back and forth twenty yards away, stopped to watch, bent double with laughter. The train stops. We are almost opposite Jess and Jason’s house, but I can’t see across the carriage and the tracks, there are too many people in the way. I wonder whether they are there, whether he knows, whether he’s left, or whether he’s still living a life he’s yet to discover is a lie. SATURDAY, JULY 13, 2013 I know without looking at a clock that it is somewhere between seven forty-five and eight fifteen. I know from the quality of the light, from the sounds of the street outside my window, from the sound of Cathy vacuuming the hallway right outside my room. Cathy gets up early to clean the house every Saturday, no matter what. It could be her birthday, it could be the morning of the Rapture—Cathy will get up early on Saturday to clean. She says it’s cathartic, it sets her up for a good weekend, and because she cleans the house aerobically, it means she doesn’t have to go to the gym. It doesn’t really bother me, this early-morning vacuuming, because I wouldn’t be asleep anyway. I cannot sleep in the mornings; I cannot snooze peacefully until midday. I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that’s it. I’m awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be. I lie there, listening to the sound of Cathy’s urgent, cheerful busyness, and I think about the clothes on the side of the railway line and about Jess kissing her lover in the morning sunshine. The day stretches out in front of me, not a minute of it filled. I could go to the farmer’s market on the Broad; I could buy venison and pancetta and spend the day cooking. I could sit on the sofa with a cup of tea and Saturday Kitchen on TV. I could go to the gym. I could rewrite my CV. I could wait for Cathy to leave the house, go to the off-licence and buy two bottles of sauvignon blanc. In another life, I woke early, too, the sound of the 8:04 rumbling past; I opened my eyes and listened to the rain against the window. I felt him behind me, sleepy, warm, hard. Afterwards, he went to get the papers and I made scrambled eggs, we sat in the kitchen drinking tea, we went to the pub for a late lunch, we fell asleep, tangled up together in front of the TV. I imagine it’s different for him now, no lazy Saturday sex or scrambled eggs, instead a different sort of joy, a little girl tucked up between him and his wife, babbling away. She’ll be just learning to talk now, all “Dada” and “Mama” and a secret language incomprehensible to anyone but a parent. The pain is solid and heavy, it sits in the middle of my chest. I cannot wait for Cathy to leave the house. I am going to see Jason. I spent all day in my bedroom, waiting for Cathy to go out so that I could have a drink. She didn’t. She sat steadfast and unmovable in the living room, “just catching up on a bit of admin.” By late afternoon I couldn’t stand the confinement or the boredom any longer, so I told her I was going out for a walk. I went to the Wheatsheaf, the big, anonymous pub just off High Street, and I drank three large glasses of wine. I had two shots of Jack Daniel’s. Then I walked to the station, bought a couple of cans of gin and tonic and got onto the train. I am going to see Jason. I’m not going to visit him, I’m not going to turn up at his house and knock on the door. Nothing like that. Nothing crazy. I just want to go past the house, roll by on the train. I’ve nothing else to do, and I don’t feel like going home. I just want to see him. I want to see them. This isn’t a good idea. I know it’s not a good idea. But what harm can it do? I’ll go to Euston, I’ll turn around, I’ll come back. (I like trains, and what’s wrong with that? Trains are wonderful.) Before, when I was still myself, I used to dream of taking romantic train journeys with Tom. (The Bergen Line for our fifth anniversary, the Blue Train for his fortieth.) Hang on, we’re going to pass them now. The light is bright, but I can’t see all that well. (Vision doubling. Close one eye. Better.) There they are! Is that him? They’re standing on the terrace. Aren’t they? Is that Jason? Is that Jess? I want to be closer, I can’t see. I want to be closer to them. I’m not going to Euston. I’m going to get off at Witney. (I shouldn’t get off at Witney, it’s too dangerous, what if Tom or Anna sees me?) I’m going to get off at Witney. This is not a good idea. This is a very bad idea. There’s a man on the opposite side of the train, sandy blond hair veering towards ginger. He’s smiling at me. I want to say something to him, but the words keep evaporating, vanishing off my tongue before I have the chance to say them. I can taste them, but I can’t tell if they are sweet or sour. Is he smiling at me, or is he sneering? I can’t tell. SUNDAY, JULY 14, 2013 My heartbeat feels as though it is in the base of my throat, uncomfortable and loud. My mouth is dry, it hurts to swallow. I roll onto my side, my face turned to the window. The curtains are drawn, but what light there is hurts my eyes. I bring my hand up to my face; I press my fingers against my eyelids, trying to rub away the ache. My fingernails are filthy. Something is wrong. For a second, I feel as though I’m falling, as though the bed has disappeared from beneath my body. Last night. Something happened. The breath comes sharply into my lungs and I sit up, too quickly, heart racing, head throbbing. I wait for the memory to come. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it’s there in front of my eyes in seconds. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all. Something happened, something bad. There was an argument. Voices were raised. Fists? I don’t know, I don’t remember. I went to the pub, I got onto the train, I was at the station, I was on the street. Blenheim Road. I went to Blenheim Road. It comes over me like a wave: black dread. Something happened, I know it did. I can’t picture it, but I can feel it. The inside of my mouth hurts, as though I’ve bitten my cheek, there’s a metallic tang of blood on my tongue. I feel nauseated, dizzy. I run my hands through my hair, over my scalp. I flinch. There’s a lump, painful and tender, on the right side of my head. My hair is matted with blood. I stumbled, that’s it. On the stairs at Witney station. Did I hit my head? I remember being on the train, but after that there is a gulf of blackness, a void. I’m breathing deeply, trying to slow my heart rate, to quell the panic rising in my chest. Think. What did I do? I went to the pub, I got on the train. There was a man there—I remember now, reddish hair. He smiled at me. I think he talked to me, but I can’t remember what he said. There’s something more to him, more to the memory of him, but I can’t reach it, can’t find it in the black. I’m frightened, but I’m not sure what I’m afraid of, which just exacerbates the fear. I don’t even know whether there’s anything to be frightened of. I look around the room. My phone is not on the bedside table. My handbag is not on the floor, it’s not hanging over the back of the chair where I usually leave it. I must have had it, though, because I’m in the house, which means I have my keys. I get out of bed. I’m naked. I catch sight of myself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe. My hands are trembling. Mascara is smeared over my cheekbones, and I have a cut on my lower lip. There are bruises on my legs. I feel sick. I sit back down on the bed and put my head between my knees, waiting for the wave of nausea to pass. I get to my feet, grab my dressing gown and open the bedroom door just a crack. The flat is quiet. For some reason I am certain Cathy isn’t here. Did she tell me that she was staying at Damien’s? I feel as though she did, though I can’t remember when. Before I went out? Or did I speak to her later? I walk as quietly as I can out into the hallway. I can see that Cathy’s bedroom door is open. I peer into her room. Her bed is made. It’s possible she has already got up and made it, but I don’t think she stayed here last night, which is a source of some relief. If she isn’t here, she didn’t see or hear me come in last night, which means that she doesn’t know how bad I was. This shouldn’t matter, but it does: the sense of shame I feel about an incident is proportionate not just to the gravity of the situation, but also to the number of people who witnessed it. At the top of the stairs I feel dizzy again and grip the banister tightly. It is one of my great fears (along with bleeding into my belly when my liver finally packs up) that I will fall down the stairs and break my neck. Thinking about this makes me feel ill again. I want to lie down, but I need to find my bag, check my phone. I at least need to know that I haven’t lost my credit cards, I need to know who I called and when. My handbag has been dumped in the hallway, just inside the front door. My jeans and underwear sit next to it in a crumpled pile; I can smell the urine from the bottom of the stairs. I grab my bag to look for my phone—it’s in there, thank God, along with a bunch of scrunched-up twenties and a bloodstained Kleenex. The nausea comes over me again, stronger this time; I can taste the bile in the back of my throat and I run, but I don’t make it to the bathroom, I vomit on the carpet halfway up the stairs. I have to lie down. If I don’t lie down, I’m going to pass out, I’m going to fall. I’ll clean up later. Upstairs, I plug in my phone and lie down on the bed. I raise my limbs, gently, gingerly, to inspect them. There are bruises on my legs, above the knees, standard drink-related stuff, the sort of bruises you get from walking into things. My upper arms bear more worrying marks, dark, oval impressions that look like fingerprints. This is not necessarily sinister, I have had them before, usually from when I’ve fallen and someone has helped me up. The crack on my head feels bad, but it could be from something as innocuous as getting into a car. I might have taken a taxi home. I pick up my phone. There are two messages. The first is from Cathy, received just after five, asking where I’ve got to. She’s going to Damien’s for the night, she’ll see me tomorrow. She hopes I’m not drinking on my own. The second is from Tom, received at ten fifteen. I almost drop the phone in fright as I hear his voice; he’s shouting. “Jesus Christ, Rachel, what the hell is wrong with you? I have had enough of this, all right? I’ve just spent the best part of an hour driving around looking for you. You’ve really frightened Anna, you know that? She thought you were going to… she thought… It’s all I could do to get her not to ring the police. Leave us alone. Stop calling me, stop hanging around, just leave us alone. I don’t want to speak to you. Do you understand me? I don’t want to speak to you, I don’t want to see you, I don’t want you anywhere near my family. You can ruin your own life if you want to, but you’re not ruining mine. Not anymore. I’m not going to protect you any longer, understand? Just stay away from us.” I don’t know what I’ve done. What did I do? Between five o’clock and ten fifteen, what was I doing? Why was Tom looking for me? What did I do to Anna? I pull the duvet over my head, close my eyes tightly. I imagine myself going to the house, walking along the little pathway between their garden and the neighbour’s garden, climbing over the fence. I think about sliding open the glass doors, stealthily creeping into the kitchen. Anna’s sitting at the table. I grab her from behind, I wind my hand into her long blond hair, I jerk her head backwards, I pull her to the floor and I smash her head against the cool blue tiles. Someone is shouting. From the angle of the light streaming in through my bedroom window I can tell I have been sleeping a long time; it must be late afternoon, early evening. My head hurts. There’s blood on my pillow. I can hear someone yelling downstairs. “I do not believe this! For God’s sake! Rachel! RACHEL!” I fell asleep. Oh Jesus, and I didn’t clear up the vomit on the stairs. And my clothes in the hallway. Oh God, oh God. I pull on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. Cathy is standing right outside my bedroom door when I open it. She looks horrified when she sees me. “What on earth happened to you?” she says, then raises her hand. “Actually, Rachel, I’m sorry, but I just don’t want to know. I cannot have this in my house. I cannot have…” She tails off, but she’s looking back down the hall, towards the stairs. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry, I was just really ill and I meant to clear it up—” “You weren’t ill, were you? You were drunk. You were hungover. I’m sorry, Rachel. I just can’t have this. I cannot live like this. You have to go, OK? I’ll give you four weeks to find somewhere else, but then you have to go.” She turns around and walks towards her bedroom. “And for the love of God, will you clean up that mess?” She slams her bedroom door behind her. After I’ve finished cleaning up, I go back to my room. Cathy’s bedroom door is still closed, but I can feel her quiet rage radiating through it. I can’t blame her. I’d be furious if I came home to piss-soaked knickers and a puddle of vomit on the stairs. I sit down on the bed and flip open my laptop, log in to my email account and start to compose a note to my mother. I think, finally, the time has come. I have to ask her for help. If I moved home, I wouldn’t be able to go on like this, I would have to change, I would have to get better. I can’t think of the words, though, I can’t think of a way to explain this to her. I can picture her face as she reads my plea for help, the sour disappointment, the exasperation. I can almost hear her sigh. My phone beeps. There’s a message on it, received hours ago. It’s Tom again. I don’t want to hear what he has to say, but I have to, I can’t ignore him. My heartbeat quickens as I dial into my voice mail, bracing myself for the worst. “Rachel, will you phone me back?” He doesn’t sound so angry any longer, and my heartbeat slows a little. “I want to make sure you got home all right. You were in some state last night.” A long, heartfelt sigh. “Look. I’m sorry that I yelled last night, that things got a bit… overheated. I do feel sorry for you, Rachel, I really do, but this has just got to stop.” I play the message a second time, listening to the kindness in his voice, and the tears come. It’s a long time before I stop crying, before I’m able to compose a text message to him saying I’m very sorry, I’m at home now. I can’t say anything else because I don’t know what exactly it is I’m sorry for. I don’t know what I did to Anna, how I frightened her. I don’t honestly care that much, but I do care about making Tom unhappy. After everything he’s been through, he deserves to be happy. I will never begrudge him happiness—I only wish it could be with me. I lie down on the bed and crawl under the duvet. I want to know what happened; I wish I knew what I had to be sorry for. I try desperately to make sense of an elusive fragment of memory. I feel certain that I was in an argument, or that I witnessed an argument. Was that with Anna? My fingers go to the wound on my head, to the cut on my lip. I can almost see it, I can almost hear the words, but it shifts away from me again. I just can’t get a handle on it. Every time I think I’m about to seize the moment, it drifts back into the shadow, just beyond my reach. MEGAN • • • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2012 It’s going to rain soon, I can feel it coming. My teeth are chattering in my head, the tips of my fingers are white with a tinge of blue. I’m not going inside. I like it out here, it’s cathartic, cleansing, like an ice bath. Scott will come and haul me inside soon anyway, he’ll wrap me in blankets, like a child. I had a panic attack on the way home last night. There was a motorbike, revving its engine over and over and over, and a red car driving slowly past, like a kerb crawler, and two women with buggies blocking my path. I couldn’t get past them on the pavement, so I went into the street and was almost hit by a car coming in the opposite direction, which I hadn’t even seen. The driver leaned on the horn and yelled something at me. I couldn’t catch my breath, my heart was racing, I felt that lurch in my stomach, like when you’ve taken a pill and you’re just about to come up, that punch of adrenaline that makes you feel sick and excited and scared all at once. I ran home and through the house and down to the tracks, then I sat down there, waiting for the train to come, to rattle through me and take away the other noises. I waited for Scott to come and calm me down, but he wasn’t at home. I tried to climb over the fence, I wanted to sit on the other side for a while, where no one else goes. I cut my hand, so I went inside, and then Scott came back and asked me what had happened. I said I was doing the washing up and dropped a glass. He didn’t believe me, he got very upset. I got up in the night, left Scott sleeping and sneaked down to the terrace. I dialled his number and listened to his voice when he picked up, at first soft with sleep, and then louder, wary, worried, exasperated. I hung up and waited to see if he’d call back. I hadn’t disguised my number, so I thought he might. He didn’t, so I called again, and again, and again. I got voice mail then, bland and businesslike, promising to call me back at his earliest convenience. I thought about calling the practice, bringing forward my next appointment, but I don’t think even their automated system works in the middle of the night, so I went back to bed. I didn’t sleep at all. I might go to Corly Wood this morning to take some photographs; it’ll be misty and dark and atmospheric in there, I should be able to get some good stuff. I was thinking about maybe making little cards, seeing if I could sell them in the gift shop on Kingly Road. Scott keeps saying that I don’t need to worry about working, that I should just rest. Like an invalid! The last thing I need is rest. I need to find something to fill my days. I know what’s going to happen if I don’t. Dr. Abdic—Kamal, as I have been invited to call him—suggested in this afternoon’s session that I start keeping a diary. I almost said, I can’t do that, I can’t trust my husband not to read it. I didn’t, because that would feel horribly disloyal to Scott. But it’s true. I could never write down the things I actually feel or think or do. Case in point: when I came home this evening, my laptop was warm. He knows how to delete browser histories and whatever, he can cover his tracks perfectly well, but I know that I turned the computer off before I left. He’s been reading my emails again. I don’t really mind, there’s nothing to read in there. (A lot of spam emails from recruitment companies and Jenny from Pilates asking me if I want to join her Thursday-night supper club, where she and her friends take turns cooking one another dinner. I’d rather die.) I don’t mind, because it reassures him that there’s nothing going on, that I’m not up to anything. And that’s good for me—it’s good for us—even if it isn’t true. And I can’t really be angry with him, because he has good reason to be suspicious. I’ve given him cause in the past and probably will again. I am not a model wife. I can’t be. No matter how much I love him, it won’t be enough. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2012 I slept for five hours last night, which is longer than I have done in ages, and the weird thing is, I was so wired when I got home yesterday evening, I thought I’d be bouncing off the walls for hours. I told myself that I wouldn’t do it again, not after last time, but then I saw him and I wanted him and I thought, why not? I don’t see why I should have to restrict myself, lots of people don’t. Men don’t. I don’t want to hurt anybody, but you have to be true to yourself, don’t you? That’s all I’m doing, being true to my real self, the self nobody knows—not Scott, not Kamal, no one. After my Pilates class last night I asked Tara if she wanted to go to the cinema with me one night next week, then if she’d cover for me. “If he calls, can you just say I’m with you, that I’m in the loo and I’ll ring him straight back? Then you call me, and I call him, and it’s all cool.” She smiled and shrugged and said, “All right.” She didn’t even ask where I was going or who with. She really wants to be my friend. I met him at the Swan in Corly, he’d got us a room. We have to be careful, we can’t get caught. It would be bad for him, life-wrecking. It would be a disaster for me, too. I don’t even want to think about what Scott would do. He wanted me to talk afterwards, about what happened when I was young, living in Norwich. I’d hinted at it before, but last night he wanted the details. I told him things, but not the truth. I lied, made stuff up, told him all the sordid things he wanted to hear. It was fun. I don’t feel bad about lying, I doubt he believed most of it anyway. I’m pretty sure he lies, too. He lay on the bed, watching me as I got dressed. He said, “This can’t happen again, Megan. You know it can’t. We can’t keep doing this.” And he was right, I know we can’t. We shouldn’t, we ought not to, but we will. It won’t be the last time. He won’t say no to me. I was thinking about it on the way home, and that’s the thing I like most about it, having power over someone. That’s the intoxicating thing. I’m in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine, when Scott comes up behind me and puts his hands on my shoulders and squeezes and says, “How did it go with the therapist?” I tell him it was fine, that we’re making progress. He’s used now to not getting any details out of me. Then: “Did you have fun with Tara last night?” I can’t tell, because my back’s to him, whether he’s really asking or whether he suspects something. I can’t detect anything in his voice. “She’s really nice,” I say. “You and she’d get on. We’re going to the cinema next week, actually. Maybe I should bring her round for something to eat after?” “Am I not invited to the cinema?” he asks. “You’re very welcome,” I say, and I turn to him and kiss him on the mouth, “but she wants to see that thing with Sandra Bullock, so…” “Say no more! Bring her round for dinner afterwards, then,” he says, his hands pressing gently on my lower back. I pour the wine and we go outside. We sit side by side on the edge of the patio, our toes in the grass. “Is she married?” he asks me. “Tara? No. Single.” “No boyfriend?” “Don’t think so.” “Girlfriend?” he asks, eyebrow raised, and I laugh. “How old is she, then?” “I don’t know,” I say. “Around forty.” “Oh. And she’s all alone. That’s a bit sad.” “Mmm. I think she might be lonely.” “They always go for you, the lonely ones, don’t they? They make a beeline straight for you.” “Do they?” “She doesn’t have kids, then?” he asks, and I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but the second the subject of children comes up, I can hear an edge in his voice and I can feel the argument coming and I just don’t want it, can’t deal with it, so I get to my feet and I tell him to bring the wineglasses, because we’re going to the bedroom. He follows me and I take off my clothes as I’m going up the stairs, and when we get there, when he pushes me down on the bed, I’m not even thinking about him, but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t know that. I’m good enough to make him believe that it’s all about him. RACHEL • • • MONDAY, JULY 15, 2013 Cathy called me back just as I was leaving the flat this morning and gave me a stiff little hug. I thought she was going to tell me that she wasn’t kicking me out after all, but instead she slipped a typewritten note into my hand, giving me formal notice of my eviction, including a departure date. She couldn’t meet my eye. I felt sorry for her, I honestly did, though not quite as sorry as for myself. She gave me a sad smile and said, “I hate to do this to you, Rachel, I honestly do.” The whole thing felt very awkward. We were standing in the hallway, which, despite my best efforts with the bleach, still smelled a bit of sick. I felt like crying, but I didn’t want to make her feel worse than she already did, so I just smiled cheerily and said, “Not at all, it’s honestly no problem,” as though she’d just asked me to do her a small favour. On the train, the tears come, and I don’t care if people are watching me; for all they know, my dog might have been run over. I might have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic. It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn? Not when I met Tom, who saved me from grief after Dad died. Not when we married, carefree, drenched in bliss, on an oddly wintry May day seven years ago. I was happy, solvent, successful. Not when we moved into number twenty-three, a roomier, lovelier house than I’d imagined I’d live in at the tender age of twenty-six. I remember those first days so clearly, walking around, shoeless, feeling the warmth of wooden floorboards underfoot, relishing the space, the emptiness of all those rooms waiting to be filled. Tom and I, making plans: what we’d plant in the garden, what we’d hang on the walls, what colour to paint the spare room—already, even then, in my head, the baby’s room. Maybe it was then. Maybe that was the moment when things started to go wrong, the moment when I imagined us no longer a couple, but a family; and after that, once I had that picture in my head, just the two of us could never be enough. Was it then that Tom started to look at me differently, his disappointment mirroring my own? After all he gave up for me, for the two of us to be together, I let him think that he wasn’t enough. I let the tears flow as far as Northcote, then I pull myself together, wipe my eyes and start writing a list of things to do today on the back of Cathy’s eviction letter: Holborn Library Email Mum Email Martin, reference??? Find out about AA meetings—central London/Ashbury Tell Cathy about job? When the train stops at the signal, I look up and see Jason standing on the terrace, looking down at the track. I feel as though he’s looking right at me, and I get the oddest sensation—I feel as though he’s looked at me like that before; I feel as though he’s really seen me. I imagine him smiling at me, and for some reason I feel afraid. He turns away and the train moves on. I’m sitting in the emergency room at University College Hospital. I was knocked down by a taxi while crossing Gray’s Inn Road. I was sober as a judge, I’d just like to point out, although I was in a bit of a state, distracted, panicky almost. I’m having an inch-long cut above my right eye stitched up by an extremely handsome junior doctor who is disappointingly brusque and businesslike. When he’s finished stitching, he notices the bump on my head. “It’s not new,” I tell him. “It looks pretty new,” he says. “Well, not new today.” “Been in the wars, have we?” “I bumped it getting into a car.” He examines my head for a good few seconds and then says, “Is that so?” He stands back and looks me in the eye. “It doesn’t look like it. It looks more like someone’s hit you with something,” he says, and I go cold. I have a memory of ducking down to avoid a blow, raising my hands. Is that a real memory? The doctor approaches again and peers more closely at the wound. “Something sharp, serrated maybe…” “No,” I say. “It was a car. I bumped it getting into a car.” I’m trying to convince myself as much as him. “OK.” He smiles at me then and steps back again, crouching down a little so that our eyes are level. “Are you all right…” He consults his notes. “Rachel?” “Yes.” He looks at me for a long time; he doesn’t believe me. He’s concerned. Perhaps he thinks I’m a battered wife. “Right. I’m going to clean this up for you, because it looks a bit nasty. Is there someone I can call for you? Your husband?” “I’m divorced,” I tell him. “Someone else, then?” He doesn’t care that I’m divorced. “My friend, please, she’ll be worried about me.” I give him Cathy’s name and number. Cathy won’t be worried at all—I’m not even late home yet—but I’m hoping that the news that I’ve been hit by a taxi might make her take pity on me and forgive me for what happened yesterday. She’ll probably think the reason I got knocked down is because I was drunk. I wonder if I can ask the doctor to do a blood test or something so that I can provide her with proof of my sobriety. I smile up at him, but he isn’t looking at me, he’s making notes. It’s a ridiculous idea anyway. It was my fault, the taxi driver wasn’t to blame. I stepped right out—ran right out, actually—in front of the cab. I don’t know where I thought I was running to. I wasn’t thinking at all, I suppose, at least not about myself. I was thinking about Jess. Who isn’t Jess, she’s Megan Hipwell, and she’s missing. I’d been in the library on Theobalds Road. I’d just emailed my mother (I didn’t tell her anything of significance, it was a sort of test-the-waters email, to gauge how maternal she’s feeling towards me at the moment) via my Yahoo account. On Yahoo’s front page there are news stories, tailored to your postcode or whatever—God only knows how they know my postcode, but they do. And there was a picture of her, Jess, my Jess, the perfect blonde, next to a headline that read CONCERN FOR MISSING WITNEY WOMAN. At first I wasn’t sure. It looked like her, she looked exactly the way she looks in my head, but I doubted myself. Then I read the story and I saw the street name and I knew. Buckinghamshire Police are becoming increasingly concerned for the welfare of a missing twenty-nine-year-old woman, Megan Hipwell, of Blenheim Road, Witney. Mrs. Hipwell was last seen by her husband, Scott Hipwell, on Saturday night when she left the couple’s home to visit a friend at around seven o’clock. Her disappearance is “completely out of character,” Mr. Hipwell said. Mrs. Hipwell was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. She is five foot four, slim, with blond hair and blue eyes. Anyone with information regarding Mrs. Hipwell is requested to contact Buckinghamshire Police. She’s missing. Jess is missing. Megan is missing. Since Saturday. I Googled her—the story appeared in the Witney Argus, but with no further details. I thought about seeing Jason—Scott—this morning, standing on the terrace, looking at me, smiling at me. I grabbed my bag and got to my feet and ran out of the library, into the road, right into the path of a black cab. “Rachel? Rachel?” The good-looking doctor is trying to get my attention. “Your friend is here to pick you up.” MEGAN • • • THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2013 Sometimes, I don’t want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again. I don’t even miss working. I just want to remain safe and warm in my haven with Scott, undisturbed. It helps that it’s dark and cold and the weather is filthy. It helps that it hasn’t stopped raining for weeks—freezing, driving, bitter rain accompanied by gales howling through the trees, so loud they drown out the sound of the train. I can’t hear it on the tracks, enticing me, tempting me to journey elsewhere. Today, I don’t want to go anywhere, I don’t want to run away, I don’t even want to go down the road. I want to stay here, holed up with my husband, watching TV and eating ice cream, after calling him to come home from work early so we can have sex in the middle of the afternoon. I will have to go out later, of course, because it’s my day for Kamal. I’ve been talking to him lately about Scott, about all the things I’ve done wrong, my failure as a wife. Kamal says I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. It’s true, I do, I know I do, and then I’m in the moment and I just think, fuck it, life’s too short. I think about that time when we went on a family holiday to Santa Margherita in the Easter school holidays. I’d just turned fifteen and I met this guy on the beach, much older than I was—thirties, probably, possibly even early forties—and he invited me to go sailing the next day. Ben was with me and he was invited, too, but—ever the protective big brother—he said we shouldn’t go because he didn’t trust the guy, he thought he was a sleazy creep. Which, of course, he was. But I was furious, because when were we ever going to get the chance to sail around the Ligurian Sea on some bloke’s private yacht? Ben told me we’d have lots of opportunities like that, that our lives would be full of adventure. In the end we didn’t go, and that summer Ben lost control of his motorbike on the A10, and he and I never got to go sailing. I miss the way we were when we were together, Ben and I. We were fearless. I’ve told Kamal all about Ben, but we’re getting closer to the other stuff now, the truth, the whole truth—what happened with Mac, the before, the after. It’s safe with Kamal, he can’t ever tell anyone because of patient confidentiality. But even if he could tell someone, I don’t think he would. I trust him, I really do. It’s funny, but the thing that’s been holding me back from telling him everything is not the fear of what he’d do with it, it’s not the fear of judgement, it’s Scott. It feels like I’m betraying Scott if I tell Kamal something I can’t tell him. When you think about all the other stuff I’ve done, the other betrayals, this should be peanuts, but it isn’t. Somehow this feels worse, because this is real life, this is the heart of me, and I don’t share it with him. I’m still holding back, because obviously I can’t say everything I’m feeling. I know that’s the point of therapy, but I just can’t. I have to keep things vague, jumble up all the men, the lovers and the exes, but I tell myself that’s OK, because it doesn’t matter who they are. It matters how they make me feel. Stifled, restless, hungry. Why can’t I just get what I want? Why can’t they give it to me? Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes all I need is Scott. If I can just learn how to hold on to this feeling, this one I’m having now—if I could just discover how to focus on this happiness, enjoy the moment, not wonder about where the next high is coming from—then everything will be all right. I have to focus when I’m with Kamal. It’s difficult not to let my mind wander when he looks at me with those leonine eyes, when he folds his hands together on his lap, long legs crossed at the knee. It’s hard not to think of the things we could do together. I have to focus. We’ve been talking about what happened after Ben’s funeral, after I ran off. I was in Ipswich for a while; not long. I met Mac there, the first time. He was working in a pub or something. He picked me up on his way home. He felt sorry for me. “He didn’t even want… you know.” I start laughing. “We got back to his flat and I asked for the money, and he looked at me like I was mad. I told him I was old enough, but he didn’t believe me. And he waited, he did, until my sixteenth birthday. He’d moved, by then, to this old house near Holkham. An old stone cottage at the end of a lane leading nowhere, with a bit of land around it, about half a mile from the beach. There was an old railway track running along one side of the property. At night I’d lie awake—I was always buzzing then, we were smoking a lot—and I used to imagine I could hear the trains, I used to be so sure, I’d get up and go outside and look for the lights.” Kamal shifts in his chair, he nods, slowly. He doesn’t say anything. This means I’m to go on, I’m to keep talking. “I was actually really happy there, with Mac. I lived with him for… God, it was about three years, I think, in the end. I was… nineteen when I left. Yeah. Nineteen.” “Why did you leave, if you were happy there?” he asks me. We’re there now, we got there quicker than I thought we would. I haven’t had time to go through it all, to build up to it. I can’t do it. It’s too soon. “Mac left me. He broke my heart,” I say, which is the truth, but also a lie. I’m not ready to tell the whole truth yet. Scott isn’t home when I get back, so I get my laptop out and Google him, for the first time ever. For the first time in a decade, I look for Mac. I can’t find him, though. There are hundreds of Craig McKenzies in the world, and none of them seems to be mine. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2013 I’m walking in the woods. I’ve been out since before it got light, it’s barely dawn now, deathly quiet except for the occasional outburst of chatter from the magpies in the trees above my head. I can feel them watching me, beady-eyed, calculating. A tiding of magpies. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. I’ve got a few of those. Scott is away, on a course somewhere in Sussex. He left yesterday morning and he’s not back until tonight. I can do whatever I want. Before he left, I told Scott I was going to the cinema with Tara after my session. I told him my phone would be off, and I spoke to her, too. I warned her that he might ring, that he might check up on me. She asked me, this time, what I was up to. I just winked and smiled, and she laughed. I think she might be lonely, that her life could do with a bit of intrigue. In my session with Kamal, we were talking about Scott, about the thing with the laptop. It happened about a week ago. I’d been looking for Mac—I’d done several searches, I just wanted to find out where he was, what he was up to. There are pictures of almost everyone on the Internet these days, and I wanted to see his face. I couldn’t find him. I went to bed early that night. Scott stayed up watching TV, and I’d forgotten to delete my browser history. Stupid mistake—it’s usually the last thing I do before I shut down my computer, no matter what I’ve been looking at. I know Scott has ways of finding what I’ve been up to anyway, being the techie he is, but it takes a lot longer, so most of the time he doesn’t bother. In any case, I forgot. And the next day, we got into a fight. One of the bruising ones. He wanted to know who Craig was, how long I’d been seeing him, where we met, what he did for me that Scott didn’t do. Stupidly, I told Scott that he was a friend from my past, which only made it worse. Kamal asked me if I was afraid of Scott, and I got really pissed off. “He’s my husband,” I snapped. “Of course I’m not afraid of him.” Kamal looked quite shocked. I actually shocked myself. I hadn’t anticipated the force of my anger, the depth of my protectiveness towards Scott. It was a surprise to me, too. “There are many women who are frightened of their husbands, I’m afraid, Megan.” I tried to say something, but he held up his hand to silence me. “The behaviour you’re describing—reading your emails, going through your Internet browser history—you describe all this as though it is commonplace, as though it is normal. It isn’t, Megan. It isn’t normal to invade someone’s privacy to that degree. It’s what is often seen as a form of emotional abuse.” I laughed then, because it sounded so melodramatic. “It isn’t abuse,” I told him. “Not if you don’t mind. And I don’t. I don’t mind.” He smiled at me then, a rather sad smile. “Don’t you think you should?” he asked. I shrugged. “Perhaps I should, but the fact is, I don’t. He’s jealous, he’s possessive. That’s the way he is. It doesn’t stop me loving him, and some battles aren’t worth fighting. I’m careful—usually. I cover my tracks, so it isn’t usually an issue.” He gave a little shake of the head, almost imperceptible. “I didn’t think you were here to judge me,” I said. When the session ended, I asked him if he wanted to have a drink with me. He said no, he couldn’t, it wouldn’t be appropriate. So I followed him home. He lives in a flat just down the road from the practice. I knocked on his door, and when he opened it, I asked, “Is this appropriate?” I slipped my hand around the back of his neck, stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the mouth. “Megan,” he said, voice like velvet. “Don’t. I can’t do this. Don’t.” It was exquisite, that push and pull, desire and restraint. I didn’t want to let the feeling go, I wanted so badly to be able to hold on to it. I got up in the early hours of the morning, head spinning, full of stories. I couldn’t just lie there, awake, alone, my mind ticking over all those opportunities that I could take or leave, so I got up and got dressed and started walking. Found myself here. I’ve been walking around and playing things back in my head—he said, she said, temptation, release; if only I could settle on something, choose to stick, not twist. What if the thing I’m looking for can never be found? What if it just isn’t possible? The air is cold in my lungs, the tips of my fingers are turning blue. Part of me just wants to lie down here, among the leaves, let the cold take me. I can’t. It’s time to go. It’s almost nine by the time I get back to Blenheim Road, and as I turn the corner I see her, coming towards me, pushing the buggy in front of her. The child, for once, is silent. She looks at me and nods and gives me one of those weak smiles, which I don’t return. Usually, I would pretend to be nice, but this morning I feel real, like myself. I feel high, almost like I’m tripping, and I couldn’t fake nice if I tried. I fell asleep in the afternoon. I woke feverish, panicky. Guilty. I do feel guilty. Just not guilty enough. I thought about him leaving in the middle of the night, telling me, once again, that this was the last time, the very last time, we can’t do this again. He was getting dressed, pulling on his jeans. I was lying on the bed and I laughed, because that’s what he said last time, and the time before, and the time before that. He shot me a look. I don’t know how to describe it, it wasn’t anger, exactly, not contempt—it was a warning. I feel uneasy. I walk around the house; I can’t settle, I feel as though someone else has been here while I was sleeping. There’s nothing out of place, but the house feels different, as though things have been touched, subtly shifted out of place, and as I walk around I feel as though there’s someone else here, always just out of my line of sight. I check the French doors to the garden three times, but they’re locked. I can’t wait for Scott to get home. I need him. RACHEL • • • TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2013 I’m on the 8:04, but I’m not going into London. I’m going to Witney instead. I’m hoping that being there will jog my memory, that I’ll get to the station and I’ll see everything clearly, I’ll know. I don’t hold out much hope, but there is nothing else I can do. I can’t call Tom. I’m too ashamed, and in any case, he’s made it clear: he wants nothing more to do with me. Megan is still missing; she’s been gone more than sixty hours now, and the story is becoming national news. It was on the BBC website and Daily Mail this morning; there were a few snippets mentioning it on other sites, too. I printed out both the BBC and Daily Mail stories; I have them with me. From them I have gleaned the following: Megan and Scott argued on Saturday evening. A neighbour reported hearing raised voices. Scott admitted that they’d argued and said that he believed his wife had gone to spend the night with a friend, Tara Epstein, who lives in Corly. Megan never got to Tara’s house. Tara says the last time she saw Megan was on Friday afternoon at their Pilates class. (I knew Megan would do Pilates.) According to Ms. Epstein, “She seemed fine, normal. She was in a good mood, she was talking about doing something special for her thirtieth birthday next month.” Megan was seen by one witness walking towards Witney train station at around seven fifteen on Saturday evening. Megan has no family in the area. Both her parents are deceased. Megan is unemployed. She used to run a small art gallery in Witney, but it closed down in April last year. (I knew Megan would be arty.) Scott is a self-employed IT consultant. (I can’t bloody believe Scott is an IT consultant.) Megan and Scott have been married for three years; they have been living in the house on Blenheim Road since January 2012. According to the Daily Mail, their house is worth four hundred thousand pounds. Reading this, I know that things look bad for Scott. Not just because of the argument, either; it’s just the way things are: when something bad happens to a woman, the police look at the husband or the boyfriend first. However, in this case, the police don’t have all the facts. They’re only looking at the husband, presumably because they don’t know about the boyfriend. It could be that I am the only person who knows that the boyfriend exists. I scrabble around in my bag for a scrap of paper. On the back of a card slip for two bottles of wine, I write down a list of most likely possible explanations for the disappearance of Megan Hipwell: 1. She has run off with her boyfriend, who from here on in, I will refer to as B. 2. B has harmed her. 3. Scott has harmed her. 4. She has simply left her husband and gone to live elsewhere. 5. Someone other than B or Scott has harmed her. I think the first possibility is most likely, and four is a strong contender, too, because Megan is an independent, wilful woman, I’m sure of it. And if she were having an affair, she might need to get away to clear her head, mightn’t she? Five does not seem especially likely, since murder by a stranger isn’t all that common. The bump on my head is throbbing, and I can’t stop thinking about the argument I saw, or imagined, or dreamed about, on Saturday night. As we pass Megan and Scott’s house, I look up. I can hear the blood pulsing in my head. I feel excited. I feel afraid. The windows of number fifteen, reflecting morning sunshine, look like sightless eyes. I’m just settling into my seat when my phone rings. It’s Cathy. I let it go to voice mail. She leaves a message: “Hi, Rachel, just phoning to make sure you’re OK.” She’s worried about me, because of the thing with the taxi. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry, you know, about the other day, what I said about moving out. I shouldn’t have. I overreacted. You can stay as long as you want to.” There’s a long pause, and then she says, “Give me a ring, OK? And come straight home, Rach, don’t go to the pub.” I don’t intend to. I wanted a drink at lunchtime; I was desperate for one after what happened in Witney this morning. I didn’t have one, though, because I had to keep a clear head. It’s been a long time since I’ve had anything worth keeping a clear head for. It was so strange, this morning, my trip to Witney. I felt as though I hadn’t been there in ages, although of course it’s only been a few days. It may as well have been a completely different place, though, a different station in a different town. I was a different person than the one who went there on Saturday night. Today I was stiff and sober, hyperaware of the noise and the light and fear of discovery. I was trespassing. That’s what it felt like this morning, because it’s their territory now, it’s Tom and Anna’s and Scott and Megan’s. I’m the outsider, I don’t belong there, and yet everything is so familiar to me. Down the concrete steps at the station, right past the newspaper kiosk into Roseberry Avenue, half a block to the end of the T-junction, to the right the archway leading to a dank pedestrian underpass beneath the track, and to the left Blenheim Road, narrow and tree-lined, flanked with its handsome Victorian terraces. It feels like coming home—not just to any home, but a childhood home, a place left behind a lifetime ago; it’s the familiarity of walking up stairs and knowing exactly which one is going to creak. The familiarity isn’t just in my head, it’s in my bones; it’s muscle memory. This morning, as I walked past the blackened tunnel mouth, the entrance to the underpass, my pace quickened. I didn’t have to think about it because I always walked a little faster on that section. Every night, coming home, especially in winter, I used to pick up the pace, glancing quickly to the right, just to make sure. There was never anyone there—not on any of those nights and not today—and yet I stopped dead as I looked into the darkness this morning, because I could suddenly see myself. I could see myself a few metres in, slumped against the wall, my head in my hands, and both head and hands smeared with blood. My heart thudding in my chest, I stood there, morning commuters stepping around me as they continued on their way to the station, one or two turning to look at me as they passed, as I stood stock-still. I didn’t know—don’t know—if it was real. Why would I have gone into the underpass? What reason would I have had to go down there, where it’s dark and damp and stinks of piss? I turned around and headed back to the station. I didn’t want to be there any longer; I didn’t want to go to Scott and Megan’s front door. I wanted to get away from there. Something bad happened there, I know it did. I paid for my ticket and walked quickly up the station steps to the other side of the platform, and as I did it came to me again in a flash: not the underpass this time, but the steps; stumbling on the steps and a man taking my arm, helping me up. The man from the train, with the reddish hair. I could see him, a vague picture but no dialogue. I could remember laughing—at myself, or at something he said. He was nice to me, I’m sure of it. Almost sure. Something bad happened, but I don’t think it had anything to do with him. I got on the train and went into London. I went to the library and sat at a computer terminal, looking for stories about Megan. There was a short piece on the Telegraph website that said that “a man in his thirties is helping police with their inquiries.” Scott, presumably. I can’t believe he would have hurt her. I know that he wouldn’t. I’ve seen them together; I know what they’re like together. They gave a Crimestoppers number, too, which you can ring if you have information. I’m going to call it on the way home, from a pay phone. I’m going to tell them about B, about what I saw. My phone rings just as we’re getting into Ashbury. It’s Cathy again. Poor girl, she really is worried about me. “Rach? Are you on the train? Are you on your way home?” She sounds anxious. “Yes, I’m on my way,” I tell her. “I’ll be fifteen minutes.” “The police are here, Rachel,” she says, and my entire body goes cold. “They want to talk to you.” WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 2013 Megan is still missing, and I have lied—repeatedly—to the police. I was in a panic by the time I got back to the flat last night. I tried to convince myself that they’d come to see me about my accident with the taxi, but that didn’t make sense. I’d spoken to police at the scene—it was clearly my fault. It had to be something to do with Saturday night. I must have done something. I must have committed some terrible act and blacked it out. I know it sounds unlikely. What could I have done? Gone to Blenheim Road, attacked Megan Hipwell, disposed of her body somewhere and then forgotten all about it? It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But I know something happened on Saturday. I knew it when I looked into that dark tunnel under the railway line, my blood turning to ice water in my veins. Blackouts happen, and it isn’t just a matter of being a bit hazy about getting home from the club or forgetting what it was that was so funny when you were chatting in the pub. It’s different. Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved. Tom bought me a book about it. Not very romantic, but he was tired of listening to me tell him how sorry I was in the morning when I didn’t even know what I was sorry for. I think he wanted me to see the damage I was doing, the kind of things I might be capable of. It was written by a doctor, but I’ve no idea whether it was accurate: the author claimed that blacking out wasn’t simply a matter of forgetting what had happened, but having no memories to forget in the first place. His theory was that you get into a state where your brain no longer makes short-term memories. And while you’re there, in deepest black, you don’t behave as you usually would, because you’re simply reacting to the very last thing that you think happened, because—since you aren’t making memories—you might not actually know what the last thing that happened really was. He had anecdotes, too, cautionary tales for the blacked-out drinker: There was a guy in New Jersey who got drunk at a fourth of July party. Afterwards, he got into his car, drove several miles in the wrong direction on the motorway and ploughed into a van carrying seven people. The van burst into flames and six people died. The drunk guy was fine. They always are. He had no memory of getting into his car. There was another man, in New York this time, who left a bar, drove to the house he’d grown up in, stabbed its occupants to death, took off all his clothes, got back into his car, drove home and went to bed. He got up the next morning feeling terrible, wondering where his clothes were and how he’d got home, but it wasn’t until the police came to get him that he discovered he had brutally slain two people for no apparent reason whatsoever. So it sound ridiculous, but it’s not impossible, and by the time I got home last night I had convinced myself that I was in some way involved in Megan’s disappearance. The police officers were sitting on the sofa in the living room, a fortysomething man in plain clothes and a younger one in uniform with acne on his neck. Cathy was standing next to the window, wringing her hands. She looked terrified. The policemen got up. The plainclothes one, very tall and slightly stooped, shook my hand and introduced himself as Detective Inspector Gaskill. He told me the other officer’s name as well, but I don’t remember it. I wasn’t concentrating. I was barely breathing. “What’s this about?” I barked at them. “Has something happened? Is it my mother? Is it Tom?” “Everyone’s all right, Ms. Watson, we just need to talk to you about what you did on Saturday evening,” Gaskill said. It’s the sort of thing they say on television; it didn’t seem real. They want to know what I did on Saturday evening. What the fuck did I do on Saturday evening? “I need to sit down,” I said, and the detective motioned for me to take his place on the sofa, next to Neck Acne. Cathy was shifting from one foot to another, chewing on her lower lip. She looked frantic. “Are you all right, Ms. Watson?” Gaskill asked me. He motioned to the cut above my eye. “I was knocked down by a taxi,” I said. “Yesterday afternoon, in London. I went to the hospital. You can check.” “OK,” he said, with a slight shake of his head. “So. Saturday evening?” “I went to Witney,” I said, trying to keep the waver out of my voice. “To do what?” Neck Acne had a notebook out, pencil raised. “I wanted to see my husband,” I said. “Oh, Rachel,” Cathy said. The detective ignored her. “Your husband?” he said. “You mean your ex-husband? Tom Watson?” Yes, I still bear his name. It was just more convenient. I didn’t have to change my credit cards, email address, get a new passport, things like that. “That’s right. I wanted to see him, but then I decided that it wasn’t a good idea, so I came home.” “What time was this?” Gaskill’s voice was even, his face completely blank. His lips barely moved when he spoke. I could hear the scratch of Neck Acne’s pencil on paper, I could hear the blood pounding in my ears. “It was… um… I think it was around six thirty. I mean, I think I got the train at around six o’clock.” “And you came home… ?” “Maybe seven thirty?” I glanced up and caught Cathy’s eye and I could see from the look on her face that she knew I was lying. “Maybe a bit later than that. Maybe it was closer to eight. Yes, actually, I remember now—I think I got home just after eight.” I could feel the colour rising to my cheeks; if this man didn’t know I was lying then, he didn’t deserve to be on the police force. The detective turned around, grabbed one of the chairs pushed under the table in the corner and pulled it towards him in a swift, almost violent movement. He placed it directly opposite me, a couple of feet away. He sat down, his hands on his knees, head cocked to one side. “OK,” he said. “So you left at around six, meaning you’d be in Witney by six thirty. And you were back here around eight, which means you must have left Witney at around seven thirty. Does that sound about right?” “Yes, that seems right,” I said, that wobble back in my voice, betraying me. In a second or two he was going to ask me what I’d been doing for an hour, and I had no answer to give him. “And you didn’t actually go to see your ex-husband. So what did you do during that hour in Witney?” “I walked around for a bit.” He waited, to see if I was going to elaborate. I thought about telling him I went to a pub, but that would be stupid—that’s verifiable. He’d ask me which pub, he’d ask me whether I’d spoken to anyone. As I was thinking about what I should tell him, I realized that I hadn’t actually thought to ask him to explain why he wanted to know where I was on Saturday evening, and that that in itself must have seemed odd. That must have made me look guilty of something. “Did you speak to anyone?” he asked me, reading my mind. “Go into any shops, bars… ?” “I spoke to a man in the station!” I blurted this out loudly, triumphantly almost, as though it meant something. “Why do you need to know this? What is going on?” Detective Inspector Gaskill leaned back in the chair. “You may have heard that a woman from Witney—a woman who lives on Blenheim Road, just a few doors along from your ex-husband—is missing. We have been going door-to-door, asking people if they remember seeing her that night, or if they remember seeing or hearing anything unusual. And during the course of our enquiries, your name came up.” He fell silent for a bit, letting this sink in. “You were seen on Blenheim Road that evening, around the time that Mrs. Hipwell, the missing woman, left her home. Mrs. Anna Watson told us that she saw you in the street, near Mrs. Hipwell’s home, not very far from her own property. She said that you were acting strangely, and that she was worried. So worried, in fact, that she considered calling the police.” My heart was fluttering like a trapped bird. I couldn’t speak, because all I could see at that moment was myself, slouched in the underpass, blood on my hands. Blood on my hands. Mine, surely? It had to be mine. I looked up at Gaskill, saw his eyes on mine and knew that I had to say something quickly to stop him reading my mind. “I didn’t do anything.” I said. “I didn’t. I just… I just wanted to see my husband…” “Your ex-husband,” Gaskill corrected me again. He pulled a photograph out of his jacket pocket and showed it to me. It was a picture of Megan. “Did you see this woman on Saturday night?” he asked. I stared at it for a long time. It felt so surreal having her presented to me like that, the perfect blonde I’d watched, whose life I’d constructed and deconstructed in my head. It was a close-up head shot, a professional job. Her features were a little heavier than I’d imagined, not quite so fine as those of the Jess in my head. “Ms. Watson? Did you see her?” I didn’t know if I’d seen her. I honestly didn’t know. I still don’t. “I don’t think so,” I said. “You don’t think so? So you might have seen her?” “I… I’m not sure.” “Had you been drinking on Saturday evening?” he asked. “Before you went to Witney, had you been drinking?” The heat came rushing back to my face. “Yes,” I said. “Mrs. Watson—Anna Watson—said that she thought you were drunk when she saw you outside her home. Were you drunk?” “No,” I said, keeping my eyes firmly on the detective so that I didn’t catch Cathy’s eye. “I’d had a couple of drinks in the afternoon, but I wasn’t drunk.” Gaskill sighed. He seemed disappointed in me. He glanced over at Neck Acne, then back at me. Slowly, deliberately, he got to his feet and pushed the chair back to its position under the table. “If you remember anything about Saturday night, anything that might be helpful to us, would you please call me?” he said, handing me a business card. As Gaskill nodded sombrely at Cathy, preparing to leave, I slumped back into the sofa. I could feel my heart rate starting to slow, and then it raced again as I heard him ask me, “You work in public relations, is that correct? Huntingdon Whitely?” “That’s right,” I said. “Huntingdon Whitely.” He is going to check, and he is going to know I lied. I can’t let him find out for himself, I have to tell him. So that’s what I’m going to do this morning. I’m going to go round to the police station to come clean. I’m going to tell him everything: that I lost my job months ago, that I was very drunk on Saturday night and I have no idea what time I came home. I’m going to say what I should have said last night: that he’s looking in the wrong direction. I’m going to tell him that I believe Megan Hipwell was having an affair. The police think I’m a rubbernecker. They think I’m a stalker, a nutcase, mentally unstable. I should never have gone to the police station. I’ve made my own situation worse and I don’t think I’ve helped Scott, which was the reason I went there in the first place. He needs my help, because it’s obvious the police will suspect that he’s done something to her, and I know it isn’t true, because I know him. I really feel that, crazy as it sounds. I’ve seen the way he is with her. He couldn’t hurt her. OK, so helping Scott was not my sole reason for going to the police. There was the matter of the lie, which needed sorting out. The lie about my working for Huntingdon Whitely. It took me ages to get up the courage to go into the station. I was on the verge of turning back and going home a dozen times, but eventually I went in. I asked the desk sergeant if I could speak to Detective Inspector Gaskill, and he showed me to a stuffy waiting room, where I sat for over an hour until someone came to get me. By that time I was sweating and trembling like a woman on her way to the scaffold. I was shown into another room, smaller and stuffier still, windowless and airless. I was left there alone for a further ten minutes before Gaskill and a woman, also in plain clothes, turned up. Gaskill greeted me politely; he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He introduced his companion as Detective Sergeant Riley. She is younger than I am, tall, slim, dark-haired, pretty in a sharp-featured, vulpine sort of way. She did not return my smile. We all sat down and nobody said anything; they just looked at me expectantly. “I remembered the man,” I said. “I told you there was a man at the station. I can describe him.” Riley raised her eyebrows ever so slightly and shifted in her seat. “He was about medium height, medium build, reddish hair. I slipped on the steps and he caught my arm.” Gaskill leaned forward, his elbows on the table, hands clasped together in front of his mouth. “He was wearing… I think he was wearing a blue shirt.” This is not actually true. I do remember a man, and I’m pretty sure he had reddish hair, and I think that he smiled at me, or smirked at me, when I was on the train. I think that he got off at Witney, and I think he might have spoken to me. It’s possible I might have slipped on the steps. I have a memory of it, but I can’t tell whether the memory belongs to Saturday night or to another time. There have been many slips, on many staircases. I have no idea what he was wearing. The detectives were not impressed with my tale. Riley gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Gaskill unclasped his hands and spread them out, palms upwards, in front of him. “OK. Is that really what you came here to tell me, Ms. Watson?” he asked. There was no anger in his tone, he sounded almost encouraging. I wished that Riley would go away. I could talk to him; I could trust him. “I don’t work for Huntingdon Whitely any longer,” I said. “Oh.” He leaned back in his seat, looking more interested. “I left three months ago. My flatmate—well, she’s my landlady, really—I haven’t told her. I’m trying to find another job. I didn’t want her to know because I thought she would worry about the rent. I have some money. I can pay my rent, but… Anyway, I lied to you yesterday about my job and I apologize for that.” Riley leaned forward and gave me an insincere smile. “I see. You no longer work for Huntingdon Whitely. You don’t work for anyone, is that right? You’re unemployed?” I nodded. “OK. So… you’re not registered to collect unemployment benefits, nothing like that?” “No.” “And… your flatmate, she hasn’t noticed that you don’t go to work every day?” “I do. I mean, I don’t go to the office, but I go into London, the way I used to, at the same time and everything, so that she… so that she won’t know.” Riley glanced at Gaskill; he kept his eyes on my face, the hint of a frown between his eyes. “It sounds odd, I know…” I said, and I tailed off then, because it doesn’t just sound odd, it sounds insane when you say it out loud. “Right. So, you pretend to go to work every day?” Riley asked me, her brow knitted, too, as though she were concerned about me. As though she thought I was completely deranged. I didn’t speak or nod or do anything, I kept silent. “Can I ask why you left your job, Ms. Watson?” There was no point in lying. If they hadn’t intended to check out my employment record before this conversation, they bloody well would now. “I was fired,” I said. “You were dismissed,” Riley said, a note of satisfaction in her voice. It was obviously the answer she’d anticipated. “Why was that?” I gave a little sigh and appealed to Gaskill. “Is this really important? Does it matter why I left my job?” Gaskill didn’t say anything, he was consulting some notes that Riley had pushed in front of him, but he did give the slightest shake of his head. Riley changed tack. “Ms. Watson, I wanted to ask you about Saturday night.” I glanced at Gaskill—we’ve already had this conversation—but he wasn’t looking at me. “All right,” I said. I kept raising my hand to my scalp, worrying at my injury. I couldn’t stop myself. “Tell me why you went to Blenheim Road on Saturday night. Why did you want to speak to your ex-husband?” “I don’t really think that’s any of your business,” I said, and then, quickly, before she had time to say anything else, “Would it be possible to have a glass of water?” Gaskill got to his feet and left the room, which wasn’t really the outcome I was hoping for. Riley didn’t say a word; she just kept looking at me, the trace of a smile still on her lips. I couldn’t hold her gaze, I looked at the table, I let my eyes wander around the room. I knew this was a tactic: she was remaining silent so that I would become so uncomfortable that I had to say something, even if I didn’t really want to. “I had some things I needed to discuss with him,” I said. “Private matters.” I sounded pompous and ridiculous. Riley sighed. I bit my lip, determined not to speak until Gaskill came back into the room. The moment he returned, placing a glass of cloudy water in front of me, Riley spoke. “Private matters?” she prompted. “That’s right.” Riley and Gaskill exchanged a look, I wasn’t sure if it was irritation or amusement. I could taste the sweat on my upper lip. I took a sip of water; it tasted stale. Gaskill shuffled the papers in front of him and then pushed them aside, as though he was done with them, or as though whatever was in them didn’t interest him all that much. “Ms. Watson, your… er… your ex-husband’s current wife, Mrs. Anna Watson, has raised concerns about you. She told us that you have been bothering her, bothering her husband, that you have gone to the house uninvited, that on one occasion…” Gaskill glanced back at his notes, but Riley interrupted. “On one occasion you broke into Mr. and Mrs. Watson’s home and took their child, their newborn baby.” A black hole opened up in the centre of the room and swallowed me. “That is not true!” I said. “I didn’t take… It didn’t happen like that, that’s wrong. I didn’t… I didn’t take her.” I got very upset then, I started to shake and cry, I said I wanted to leave. Riley pushed her chair back and got to her feet, shrugged at Gaskill and left the room. Gaskill handed me a Kleenex. “You can leave any time you like, Ms. Watson. You came here to talk to us.” He smiled at me then, an apologetic sort of smile. I liked him in that moment, I wanted to take his hand and squeeze it, but I didn’t, because that would have been weird. “I think you have more to tell me,” he said, and I liked him even more for saying “tell me” rather than “tell us.” “Perhaps,” he said, getting to his feet and ushering me towards the door, “you would like to take a break, stretch your legs, get yourself something to eat. Then when you’re ready, come back, and you can tell me everything.” I was planning to just forget the whole thing and go home. I was walking back towards the train station, ready to turn my back on the whole thing. Then I thought about the train journey, about going backwards and forwards on that line, past the house—Megan and Scott’s house—every day. What if they never found her? I was going to wonder forever—and I understand that this is not very likely, but even so—whether my saying something might have helped her. What if Scott was accused of harming her just because they never knew about B? What if she was at B’s house right now, tied up in the basement, hurt and bleeding, or buried in the garden? I did as Gaskill said, I bought a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle of water from a corner shop and took it to Witney’s only park, a rather sorry little patch of land surrounded by 1930s houses and given over almost entirely to an asphalted playground. I sat on a bench at the edge of this space, watching mothers and childminders scolding their charges for eating sand out of the pit. I used to dream of this, a few years back. I dreamed of coming here—not to eat ham and cheese sandwiches in between police interviews, obviously. I dreamed of coming here with my own baby. I thought about the buggy I would buy, all the time I would spend in Trotters and at the Early Learning Centre sizing up adorable outfits and educational toys. I thought about how I would sit here, bouncing my own bundle of joy on my lap. It didn’t happen. No doctor has been able to explain to me why I can’t get pregnant. I’m young enough, fit enough, I wasn’t drinking heavily when we were trying. My husband’s sperm was active and plentiful. It just didn’t happen. I didn’t suffer the agony of miscarriage, I just didn’t get pregnant. We did one round of IVF, which was all we could afford. It was, as everyone had warned us it would be, unpleasant and unsuccessful. Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us. The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it all the time. My mother, our friends, colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? At some point our childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should be doing, do you really think you should be having a second glass of wine? I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under, and I gave up hope. At the time, I resented the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that I was the one letting the side down. But as the speed with which he managed to impregnate Anna demonstrates, there was never any problem with Tom’s virility. I was wrong to suggest that we should share the blame; it was all down to me. Lara, my best friend since university, had two children in two years: a boy first and then a girl. I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to hear anything about them. I didn’t want to be near them. Lara stopped speaking to me after a while. There was a girl at work who told me—casually, as though she were talking about an appendectomy or a wisdom-tooth extraction—that she’d recently had an abortion, a medical one, and it was so much less traumatic than the surgical one she’d had when she was at university. I couldn’t speak to her after that, I could barely look at her. Things became awkward in the office; people noticed. Tom didn’t feel the way I did. It wasn’t his failure, for starters, and in any case, he didn’t need a child like I did. He wanted to be a dad, he really did—I’m sure he daydreamed about kicking a football around in the garden with his son, or carrying his daughter on his shoulders in the park. But he thought our lives could be great without children, too. “We’re happy,” he used to say to me. “Why can’t we just go on being happy?” He became frustrated with me. He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it. I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then a bit more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around a drunk. I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost. I liked my job, but I didn’t have a glittering career, and even if I had, let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers. I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless. I can’t blame all this for my drinking—I can’t blame my parents or my childhood, an abusive uncle or some terrible tragedy. It’s my fault. I was a drinker anyway—I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that. I’m better now, about the children thing; I’ve got better since I’ve been on my own. I’ve had to. I’ve read books and articles, I’ve realized that I must come to terms with it. There are strategies, there is hope. If I straightened myself out and sobered up, there’s a possibility that I could adopt. And I’m not thirty-four yet—it isn’t over. I am better than I was a few years ago, when I used to abandon my trolley and leave the supermarket if the place was packed with mums and kids; I wouldn’t have been able to come to a park like this, to sit near the playground and watch chubby toddlers rolling down the slide. There were times, at my lowest, when the hunger was at its worst, when I thought I was going to lose my mind. Maybe I did, for a while. The day they asked me about at the police station, I might have been mad then. Something Tom once said tipped me over, sent me sliding. Something he wrote, rather: I read it on Facebook that morning. It wasn’t a shock—I knew she was having a baby, he’d told me, and I’d seen her, seen that pink blind in the nursery window. So I knew what was coming. But I thought of the baby as her baby. Until the day I saw the picture of him, holding his newborn girl, looking down at her and smiling, and beneath he’d written: So this is what all the fuss is about! Never knew love like this! Happiest day of my life! I thought about him writing that—knowing that I would see it, that I would read those words and they would kill me, and writing it anyway. He didn’t care. Parents don’t care about anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else’s suffering or joy matters, none of it is real. I was angry. I was distraught. Maybe I was vengeful. Maybe I thought I’d show them that my distress was real. I don’t know. I did a stupid thing. I went back to the police station after a couple of hours. I asked if I could speak to Gaskill alone, but he said that he wanted Riley to be present. I liked him a little less after that. “I didn’t break into their home,” I said. “I did go there, I wanted to speak to Tom. No one answered the doorbell…” “So how did you get in?” Riley asked me. “The door was open.” “The front door was open?” I sighed. “No, of course not. The sliding door at the back, the one leading into the garden.” “And how did you get into the back garden?” “I went over the fence, I knew the way in—” “So you climbed over the fence to gain access to your ex-husband’s house?” “Yes. We used to… There was always a spare key at the back. We had a place we hid it, in case one of us lost our keys or forgot them or something. But I wasn’t breaking in—I didn’t. I just wanted to talk to Tom. I thought maybe… the bell wasn’t working or something.” “This was the middle of the day, during the week, wasn’t it? Why did you think your husband would be at home? Had you called to find out?” Riley asked. “Jesus! Will you just let me speak?” I shouted, and she shook her head and gave me that smile again, as if she knew me, as if she could read me. “I went over the fence,” I said, trying to control the volume of my voice, “and knocked on the glass doors, which were partly open. There was no answer. I stuck my head inside and called Tom’s name. Again, no answer, but I could hear a baby crying. I went inside and saw that Anna—” “Mrs. Watson?” “Yes. Mrs. Watson was on the sofa, sleeping. The baby was in the carry-cot and was crying—screaming, actually, red in the face, she’d obviously been crying for a while.” As I said those words it struck me that I should have told them that I could hear the baby crying from the street and that’s why I went round to the back of the house. That would have made me sound less like a maniac. “So the baby’s screaming and her mother’s right there, and she doesn’t wake?” Riley asks me. “Yes.” Her elbows are on the table, her hands in front of her mouth so I can’t read her expression fully, but I know she thinks I’m lying. “I picked her up to comfort her. That’s all. I picked her up to quieten her.” “That’s not all, though, is it, because when Anna woke up you weren’t there, were you? You were down by the fence, by the train tracks.” “She didn’t stop crying right away,” I said. “I was bouncing her up and down and she was still grizzling, so I walked outside with her.” “Down to the train tracks?” “Into the garden.” “Did you intend to harm the Watsons’ child?” I leaped to my feet then. Melodramatic, I know, but I wanted to make them see—make Gaskill see—what an outrageous suggestion that was. “I don’t have to listen to this! I came here to tell you about the man! I came here to help you! And now… what exactly are you accusing me of? What are you accusing me of?” Gaskill remained impassive, unimpressed. He motioned at me to sit down again. “Ms. Watson, the other… er, Mrs. Watson—Anna—mentioned you to us during the course of our enquiries about Megan Hipwell. She said that you had behaved erratically, in an unstable manner, in the past. She mentioned this incident with the child. She said that you have harassed both her and her husband, that you continue to call the house repeatedly.” He looked down at his notes for a moment. “Almost nightly, in fact. That you refuse to accept that your marriage is over—” “That is simply not true!” I insisted, and it wasn’t—yes, I called Tom from time to time, but not every night, it was a total exaggeration. But I was getting the feeling that Gaskill wasn’t on my side after all, and I was starting to feel tearful again. “Why haven’t you changed your name?” Riley asked me. “Excuse me?” “You still use your husband’s name. Why is that? If a man left me for another woman, I think I’d want to get rid of that name. I certainly wouldn’t want to share my name with my replacement…” “Well, maybe I’m not that petty.” I am that petty. I hate that she’s Anna Watson. “Right. And the ring—the one on a chain around your neck. Is that your wedding band?” “No,” I lied. “It’s a… it was my grandmother’s.” “Is that right? OK. Well, I have to say that to me, your behaviour suggests that—as Mrs. Watson has implied—you are unwilling to move on, that you refuse to accept that your ex has a new family.” “I don’t see—” “What this has to do with Megan Hipwell?” Riley finished my sentence. “Well. The night Megan went missing, we have reports that you—an unstable woman who had been drinking heavily—were seen on the street where she lives. Bearing in mind that there are some physical similarities between Megan and Mrs. Watson—” “They don’t look anything like each other!” I was outraged at the suggestion. Jess is nothing like Anna. Megan is nothing like Anna. “They’re both blond, slim, petite, pale-skinned…” “So I attacked Megan Hipwell thinking she was Anna? That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. But that lump on my head was throbbing again, and everything from Saturday night was still deepest black. “Did you know that Anna Watson knows Megan Hipwell?” Gaskill asked me, and I felt my jaw drop. “I… what? No. No, they don’t know each other.” Riley smiled for a moment, then straightened her face. “Yes they do. Megan did some childminding for the Watsons…” She glanced down at her notes. “Back in August and September last year.” I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine it: Megan in my home, with her, with her baby. “The cut on your lip, is that from when you got knocked down the other day?” Gaskill asked me. “Yes. I bit it when I fell, I think.” “Where was it, this accident?” “It was in London, Theobalds Road. Near Holborn.” “And what were you doing there?” “I’m sorry?” “Why were you in central London?” I shrugged. “I already told you,” I said coldly. “My flatmate doesn’t know that I’ve lost my job. So I go into London, as usual, and I go to libraries, to job hunt, to work on my CV.” Riley shook her head, in disbelief perhaps, or wonder. How does anyone get to that point? I pushed my chair back, readying myself to leave. I’d had enough of being talked down to, being made to look like a fool, like a madwoman. Time to play the trump card. “I don’t really know why we’re talking about this,” I said. “I would have thought that you would have better things to do, like investigating Megan Hipwell’s disappearance, for example. I take it you’ve spoken to her lover?” Neither of them said anything, they just stared at me. They weren’t expecting that. They didn’t know about him. “Perhaps you didn’t know. Megan Hipwell was having an affair,” I said, and I started to walk to the door. Gaskill stopped me; he moved quietly and surprisingly quickly, and before I could put my hand on the door handle he was standing in front of me. “I thought you didn’t know Megan Hipwell,” he said. “I don’t,” I said, trying to get past him. “Sit down,” he said, blocking my path. I told them then about what I’d seen from the train, about how I often saw Megan sitting out on her terrace, sunbathing in the evenings or having coffee in the mornings. I told them about how last week I saw her with someone who clearly wasn’t her husband, how I’d seen them kissing on the lawn. “When was this?” Gaskill snapped. He seemed annoyed with me, perhaps because I should have told them this straightaway, instead of wasting all day talking about myself. “Friday. It was Friday morning.” “So the day before she went missing, you saw her with another man?” Riley asked me with a sigh of exasperation. She closed the file in front of her. Gaskill leaned back in his seat, studying my face. She clearly thought I was making it up; he wasn’t so sure. “Can you describe him?” Gaskill asked. “Tall, dark—” “Handsome?” Riley interrupted. I puffed my cheeks out. “Taller than Scott Hipwell. I know, because I’ve seen them together—Jess and—sorry, Megan and Scott Hipwell—and this man was different. Slighter, thinner, darker-skinned. Possibly an Asian man,” I said. “You could determine his ethnic group from the train?” Riley said. “Impressive. Who is Jess, by the way?” “I’m sorry?” “You mentioned Jess a moment ago.” I could feel my face flushing again. I shook my head, “No, I didn’t,” I said. Gaskill got to his feet and held out his hand for me to shake. “I think that’s enough.” I shook his hand, ignored Riley and turned to go. “Don’t go anywhere near Blenheim Road, Ms. Watson,” Gaskill said. “Don’t contact your ex-husband unless it’s important, and don’t go anywhere near Anna Watson or her child.” On the train on the way home, as I dissect all the ways that today went wrong, I’m surprised by the fact that I don’t feel as awful as I might do. Thinking about it, I know why that is: I didn’t have a drink last night, and I have no desire to have one now. I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction. THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2013 I bought three newspapers before getting onto the train this morning: Megan has been missing for four days and five nights, and the story is getting plenty of coverage. The Daily Mail, predictably, has managed to find pictures of Megan in her bikini, but they’ve also done the most detailed profile I’ve seen of her so far. Born Megan Mills in Rochester in 1983, she moved with her parents to King’s Lynn in Norfolk when she was ten. She was a bright child, very outgoing, a talented artist and singer. A quote from a school friend says she was “a good laugh, very pretty and quite wild.” Her wildness seems to have been exacerbated by the death of her brother, Ben, to whom she was very close. He was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was nineteen and she fifteen. She ran away from home three days after his funeral. She was arrested twice—once for theft and once for soliciting. Her relationship with her parents, the Mail informs me, broke down completely. Both her parents died a few years ago, without ever being reconciled with their daughter. (Reading this, I feel desperately sad for Megan. I realize that perhaps, after all, she isn’t so different from me. She’s isolated and lonely, too.) When she was sixteen, she moved in with a boyfriend who had a house near the village of Holkham in north Norfolk. The school friend says, “He was an older guy, a musician or something. He was into drugs. We didn’t see Megan much after they got together.” The boyfriend’s name is not given, so presumably they haven’t found him. He might not even exist. The school friend might be making this stuff up just to get her name into the papers. They skip forward several years after that: suddenly Megan is twenty-four, living in London, working as a waitress in a North London restaurant. There she meets Scott Hipwell, an independent IT contractor who is friendly with the restaurant manager, and the two of them hit it off. After an “intense courtship,” Megan and Scott marry, when she is twenty-six and he is thirty. There are a few other quotes, including one from Tara Epstein, the friend with whom Megan was supposed to stay on the night she disappeared. She says that Megan is “a lovely, carefree girl” and that she seemed “very happy.” “Scott would not have hurt her,” Tara says. “He loves her very much.” There isn’t a thing Tara says that isn’t a clich?. The quote that interests me is from one of the artists who exhibited his work in the gallery Megan used to manage, one Rajesh Gujral, who says that Megan is “a wonderful woman, sharp, funny and beautiful, an intensely private person with a warm heart.” Sounds to me like Rajesh has got a crush. The only other quote comes from a man called David Clark, “a former colleague” of Scott’s, who says, “Megs and Scott are a great couple. They’re very happy together, very much in love.” There are some news pieces about the investigation, too, but the statements from the police amount to less than nothing: they have spoken to “a number of witnesses,” they are “pursuing several lines of enquiry.” The only interesting comment comes from Detective Inspector Gaskill, who confirms that two men are helping the police with their enquiries. I’m pretty sure that means they’re both suspects. One will be Scott. Could the other be B? Could B be Rajesh? I’ve been so engrossed in the newspapers that I haven’t been paying my usual attention to the journey; it seems as though I’ve only just sat down when the train grinds to its customary halt opposite the red signal. There are people in Scott’s garden—there are two uniformed police just outside the back door. My head swims. Have they found something? Have they found her? Is there a body buried in the garden or shoved under the floorboards? I can’t stop thinking of the clothes on the side of the railway line, which is stupid, because I saw those there before Megan went missing. And in any case, if harm has been done to her, it wasn’t by Scott, it can’t have been. He’s madly in love with her, everyone says so. The light is bad today, the weather’s turned, the sky leaden, threatening. I can’t see into the house, I can’t see what’s going on. I feel quite desperate. I cannot stand being on the outside—for better or worse, I am a part of this now. I need to know what’s going on. At least I have a plan. First, I need to find out if there’s any way that I can be made to remember what happened on Saturday night. When I get to the library, I plan to do some research and find out whether hypnotherapy could make me remember, whether it is in fact possible to recover that lost time. Second—and I believe this is important, because I don’t think the police believed me when I told them about Megan’s lover—I need to get in touch with Scott Hipwell. I need to tell him. He deserves to know. The train is full of rain-soaked people, steam rising off their clothes and condensing on the windows. The fug of body odour, perfume and laundry soap hangs oppressively above bowed, damp heads. The clouds that menaced this morning did so all day, growing heavier and blacker until they burst, monsoon-like, this evening, just as office workers stepped outside and the rush hour began in earnest, leaving the roads gridlocked and tube station entrances choked with people opening and closing umbrellas. I don’t have an umbrella and am soaked through; I feel as though someone has thrown a bucket of water over me. My cotton trousers cling to my thighs and my faded blue shirt has become embarrassingly transparent. I ran all the way from the library to the tube station with my handbag clutched against my chest to hide what I could. For some reason I found this funny—there is something ridiculous about being caught in the rain—and I was laughing so hard by the time I got to the top of Gray’s Inn Road, I could barely breathe. I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that. I’m not laughing now. As soon as I got myself a seat, I checked the latest on Megan’s case on my phone, and it’s the news I’ve been dreading. “A thirty-four-year-old man is being questioned under caution at Witney police station regarding the disappearance of Megan Hipwell, missing from her home since Saturday evening.” That’s Scott, I’m sure of it. I can only hope that he read my email before they picked him up, because questioning under caution is serious—it means they think he did it. Although, of course, it is yet to be defined. It may not have happened at all. Megan might be fine. Every now and again it does strike me that she’s alive and well and sitting on a hotel balcony with a view of the sea, her feet up on the railings, a cold drink at her elbow. The thought of her there both thrills and disappoints me, and then I feel sick for feeling disappointed. I don’t wish her ill, no matter how angry I was with her for cheating on Scott, for shattering my illusions about my perfect couple. No, it’s because I feel like I’m part of this mystery, I’m connected. I am no longer just a girl on the train, going back and forth without point or purpose. I want Megan to turn up safe and sound. I do. Just not quite yet. I sent Scott an email this morning. His address was easy to find—I Googled him and found www.shipwellconsulting.co.uk, the site where he advertises “a range of consultancy, cloud- and web-based services for business and nonprofit organizations.” I knew it was him, because his business address is also his home address. I sent a short message to the contact address given on the site: Dear Scott, My name is Rachel Watson. You don’t know me. I would like to talk to you about your wife. I do not have any information on her whereabouts, I don’t know what has happened to her. But I believe I have information that could help you. You may not want to talk to me, I would understand that, but if you do, email me on this address. Yours sincerely, Rachel I don’t know if he would have contacted me anyway—I doubt that I would, if I were in his shoes. Like the police, he’d probably just think I’m a nutter, some weirdo who’s read about the case in the newspaper. Now I’ll never know—if he’s been arrested, he may never get a chance to see the message. If he’s been arrested, the only people who see it may be the police, which won’t be good news for me. But I had to try. And now I feel desperate, thwarted. I can’t see through the mob of people in the carriage across to their side of the tracks—my side—and even if I could, with the rain still pouring down I wouldn’t be able to see beyond the railway fence. I wonder whether evidence is being washed away, whether right at this moment vital clues are disappearing forever: smears of blood, footprints, DNA-loaded cigarette butts. I want a drink so badly, I can almost taste the wine on my tongue. I can imagine exactly what it will feel like for the alcohol to hit my bloodstream and make my head rush. I want a drink and I don’t want one, because if I don’t have a drink today then it’ll be three days, and I can’t remember the last time I stayed off for three days in a row. There’s a taste of something else in my mouth, too, an old stubbornness. There was a time when I had willpower, when I could run 10k before breakfast and subsist for weeks on thirteen hundred calories a day. It was one of the things Tom loved about me, he said: my stubbornness, my strength. I remember an argument, right at the end, when things were about as bad as they could be; he lost his temper with me. “What happened to you, Rachel?” he asked me. “When did you become so weak?” I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it. The train comes to an abrupt halt, brakes screeching alarmingly, at the signal on the London side of Witney. The carriage is filled with murmured apologies as standing passengers stumble, bumping into one another, stepping on one another’s feet. I look up and find myself looking right into the eyes of the man from Saturday night—the ginger one, the one who helped me up. He’s staring right at me, his startlingly blue eyes locked on mine, and I get such a fright, I drop my phone. I retrieve it from the floor and look up again, tentatively this time, not directly at him. I scan the carriage, I wipe the steamy window with my elbow and stare out, and then eventually I look back over at him and he smiles at me, his head cocked a little to one side. I can feel my face burning. I don’t know how to react to his smile, because I don’t know what it means. Is it Oh, hello, I remember you from the other night, or is it Ah, it’s that pissed girl who fell down the stairs and talked shit at me the other night, or is it something else? I don’t know, but thinking about it now, I believe I have a snatch of sound track to go with the picture of me slipping on the steps: him saying, “You all right, love?” I turn away and look out of the window again. I can feel his eyes on me; I just want to hide, to disappear. The train judders off, and in seconds we’re pulling into Witney station and people start jostling one another for position, folding newspapers and packing away tablets and e-readers as they prepare to disembark. I look up again and am flooded with relief—he’s turned away from me, he’s getting off the train. It strikes me then that I’m being an idiot. I should get up and follow him, talk to him. He can tell me what happened, or what didn’t happen; he might be able to fill in some of the blanks at least. I get to my feet. I hesitate—I know it’s already too late, the doors are about to close, I’m in the middle of the carriage, I won’t be able to push my way through the crowd in time. The doors beep and close. Still standing, I turn and look out of the window as the train pulls away. He’s standing on the edge of the platform in the rain, the man from Saturday night, watching me as I go past. The closer I get to home, the more irritated with myself I feel. I’m almost tempted to change trains at Northcote, go back to Witney and look for him. A ridiculous idea, obviously, and stupidly risky given that Gaskill warned me to stay away from the area only yesterday. But I’m feeling dispirited about ever recalling what happened on Saturday. A few hours of (admittedly hardly exhaustive) Internet research this afternoon confirmed what I suspected: hypnosis is not generally useful in retrieving hours lost to blackout because, as my previous reading suggested, we do not make memories during blackout. There is nothing to remember. It is, will always be, a black hole in my timeline. MEGAN • • • THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2013 The room is dark, the air close, sweet with the smell of us. We’re at the Swan again, in the room under the eaves. It’s different, though, because he’s still here, watching me. “Where do you want to go?” he asks me. “A house on the beach on the Costa de la Luz,” I tell him. He smiles. “What will we do?” I laugh. “You mean apart from this?” His fingers are tracing slowly over my belly. “Apart from this.” “We’ll open a caf?, show art, learn to surf.” He kisses me on the tip of my hip bone. “What about Thailand?” he says. I wrinkle my nose. “Too many gap-year kids. Sicily,” I say. “The Egadi islands. We’ll open a beach bar, go fishing…” He laughs again and then moves his body up over mine and kisses me. “Irresistible,” he mumbles. “You’re irresistible.” I want to laugh, I want to say it out loud: See? I win! I told you it wasn’t the last time, it’s never the last time. I bite my lip and close my eyes. I was right, I knew I was, but it won’t do me any good to say it. I enjoy my victory silently; I take pleasure in it almost as much as in his touch. Afterwards, he talks to me in a way he hasn’t done before. Usually I’m the one doing all the talking, but this time he opens up. He talks about feeling empty, about the family he left behind, about the woman before me and the one before that, the one who wrecked his head and left him hollow. I don’t believe in soul mates, but there’s an understanding between us that I just haven’t felt before, or at least, not for a long time. It comes from shared experience, from knowing how it feels to be broken. Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps. All these things I know, but I don’t say them out loud, not now. “When will we go?” I ask him, but he doesn’t answer me, and I fall asleep, and he’s gone when I wake up. FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2013 Scott brings me coffee on the terrace. “You slept last night,” he says, bending down to kiss my head. He’s standing behind me, hands on my shoulders, warm and solid. I lean my head back against his body, close my eyes and listen to the train rumbling along the track until it stops just in front of the house. When we first moved here, Scott used to wave at the passengers, which always made me laugh. His grip tightens a little on my shoulders; he leans forward and kisses my neck. “You slept,” he says again. “You must be feeling better.” “I am,” I say. “Do you think it’s worked, then?” he asks. “The therapy?” “Do I think I’m fixed, do you mean?” “Not fixed,” he says, and I can hear the hurt in his voice. “I didn’t mean…” “I know.” I lift my hand to his and squeeze. “I was only joking. I think it’s a process. It’s not simple, you know? I don’t know if there will be a time when I can say that it’s worked. That I’m better.” There’s a silence, and he grips just a little harder. “So you want to keep going?” he asks, and I tell him I do. There was a time when I thought he could be everything, he could be enough. I thought that for years. I loved him completely. I still do. But I don’t want this any longer. The only time I feel like me is on those secret, febrile afternoons like yesterday, when I come alive in all that heat and half-light. Who’s to say that once I run, I’ll find that isn’t enough? Who’s to say I won’t end up feeling exactly the way I do right now—not safe, but stifled? Maybe I’ll want to run again, and again, and eventually I’ll end up back by those old tracks, because there’s nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don’t you? I go downstairs to say good-bye as he’s heading off to work. He slips his arms around my waist and kisses the top of my head. “Love you, Megs,” he murmurs, and I feel horrible then, like the worst person in the world. I can’t wait for him to shut the door because I know I’m going to cry. RACHEL • • • FRIDAY, JULY 19, 2013 The 8:04 is almost deserted. The windows are open and the air is cool after yesterday’s storm. Megan has been missing for around 133 hours, and I feel better than I have in months. When I looked at myself in the mirror this morning, I could see the difference in my face: my skin is clearer, my eyes brighter. I feel lighter. I’m sure I haven’t actually lost an ounce, but I don’t feel encumbered. I feel like myself—the myself I used to be. There’s been no word from Scott. I scoured the Internet and there was no news of an arrest, either, so I imagine he just ignored my email. I’m disappointed, but I suppose it was to be expected. Gaskill rang this morning, just as I was leaving the house. He asked me whether I would be able to come by the station today. I was terrified for a moment, but then I heard him say in his quiet, mild tone that he just wanted me to look at a couple of pictures. I asked him whether Scott Hipwell had been arrested. “No one has been arrested, Ms. Watson,” he said. “But the man, the one who’s under caution… ?” “I’m not at liberty to say.” His manner of speaking is so calming, so reassuring, it makes me like him again. I spent yesterday evening sitting on the sofa in jogging bottoms and a T-shirt, making lists of things to do, possible strategies. For example, I could hang around Witney station at rush hour, wait until I see the red-haired man from Saturday night again. I could invite him for a drink and see where it leads, whether he saw anything, what he knows about that night. The danger is that I might see Anna or Tom, they would report me and I would get into trouble (more trouble) with the police. The other danger is that I might make myself vulnerable. I still have the trace of an argument in my head—I may have physical evidence of it on my scalp and lip. What if this is the man who hurt me? The fact that he smiled and waved doesn’t mean anything, he could be a psychopath for all I know. But I can’t see him as a psychopath. I can’t explain it, but I warm to him. I could contact Scott again. But I need to give him a reason to talk to me, and I’m worried that whatever I saw will make me look like a madwoman. He might even think I have something to do with Megan’s disappearance, he could report me to the police. I could end up in real trouble. I could try hypnosis. I’m pretty sure it won’t help me remember anything, but I’m curious about it anyway. It can’t hurt, can it? I was still sitting there making notes and going over the news stories I’d printed out when Cathy came home. She’d been to the cinema with Damien. She was obviously pleasantly surprised to find me sober, but she was wary, too, because we haven’t really spoken since the police came round on Tuesday. I told her that I hadn’t had a drink for three days, and she gave me a hug. “I’m so glad you’re getting yourself back to normal!” she chirruped, as though she knows what my baseline is. “That thing with the police,” I said, “it was a misunderstanding. There’s no problem with me and Tom, and I don’t know anything about that missing girl. You don’t have to worry about it.” She gave me another hug and made us both a cup of tea. I thought about taking advantage of the good will I’d engendered and telling her about the job situation, but I didn’t want to spoil her evening. She was still in a good mood with me this morning. She hugged me again as I was getting ready to leave the house. “I’m so pleased for you, Rach,” she said. “Getting yourself sorted. You’ve had me worried.” Then she told me that she was going to spend the weekend at Damien’s, and the first thing I thought was that I’m going to get home tonight and have a drink without anyone judging me. The bitter tang of quinine, that’s what I love about a cold gin and tonic. Tonic water should be by Schweppes and it should come out of a glass bottle, not a plastic one. These premixed things aren’t right at all, but needs must. I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but I’ve been building up to it all day. It’s not just the anticipation of solitude, though, it’s the excitement, the adrenaline. I’m buzzing, my skin is tingling. I’ve had a good day. I spent an hour alone with Detective Inspector Gaskill this morning. I was taken in to see him straightaway when I arrived at the station. We sat in his office, not in the interview room this time. He offered me coffee, and when I accepted I was surprised to find that he got up and made it for me himself. He had a kettle and some Nescaf? on top of a fridge in the corner of the office. He apologized for not having sugar. I liked being in his company. I liked watching his hands move—he isn’t expressive, but he moves things around a lot. I hadn’t noticed this before because in the interview room there wasn’t much for him to move around. In his office he constantly altered the position of his coffee mug, his stapler, a jar of pens, he shuffled papers into neater piles. He has large hands and long fingers with neatly manicured nails. No rings. It felt different this morning. I didn’t feel like a suspect, someone he was trying to catch out. I felt useful. I felt most useful when he took one of his folders and laid it in front of me, showing me a series of photographs. Scott Hipwell, three men I’d never seen before, and then B. I wasn’t sure at first. I stared at the picture, trying to conjure up the image of the man I saw with her that day, his head bent as he stooped to embrace her. “That’s him,” I said. “I think that’s him.” “You’re not sure?” “I think that’s him.” He withdrew the picture and scrutinized it himself for a moment. “You saw them kissing, that’s what you said? Last Friday, was it? A week ago?” “Yes, that’s right. Friday morning. They were outside, in the garden.” “And there’s no way you could have misinterpreted what you saw? It wasn’t a hug, say, or a… a platonic kind of kiss?” “No, it wasn’t. It was a proper kiss. It was… romantic.” I thought I saw his lips flicker then, as though he were about to smile. “Who is he?” I asked Gaskill. “Is he… Do you think she’s with him?” He didn’t reply, just shook his head a little. “Is this… Have I helped? Have I been helpful at all?” “Yes, Ms. Watson. You’ve been helpful. Thank you for coming in.” We shook hands, and for a second he placed his left hand on my right shoulder lightly, and I wanted to turn and kiss it. It’s been a while since anyone touched me with anything approaching tenderness. Well, apart from Cathy. Gaskill ushered me out of the door and into the main, open-plan part of the office. There were perhaps a dozen police officers in there. One or two shot me sideways glances, there might have been a flicker of interest or disdain, I couldn’t be sure. We walked through the office and into the corridor and then I saw him walking towards me, with Riley at his side: Scott Hipwell. He was coming through the main entrance. His head was down, but I knew right away that it was him. He looked up and nodded an acknowledgment to Gaskill, then he glanced at me. For just a second our eyes met and I could swear that he recognized me. I thought of that morning when I saw him on the terrace, when he was looking down at the track, when I could feel him looking at me. We passed each other in the corridor. He was so close to me I could have touched him—he was beautiful in the flesh, hollowed out and coiled like a spring, nervous energy radiating off him. As I got to the main hallway I turned to look at him, sure I could feel his eyes on me, but when I looked back it was Riley who was watching me. I took the train into London and went to the library. I read every article I could find about the case, but learned nothing more. I looked for hypnotherapists in Ashbury, but didn’t take it any further—it’s expensive and it’s unclear whether it actually helps with memory recovery. But reading the stories of those who claimed that they had recovered memories through hypnotherapy, I realized that I was more afraid of success than failure. I’m afraid not just of what I might learn about that Saturday night, but so much more. I’m not sure I could bear to relive the stupid, awful things I’ve done, to hear the words I said in spite, to remember the look on Tom’s face as I said them. I’m too afraid to venture into that darkness. I thought about sending Scott another email, but there’s really no need. The morning’s meeting with Detective Gaskill proved to me that the police are taking me seriously. I have no further role to play, I have to accept that now. And I can feel at least that I may have helped, because I cannot believe it could be a coincidence that Megan disappeared the day after I saw her with that man. With a joyful click, fizz, I open the second can of G