The Child(9)

He nodded and picked up the glass.

“Anyway,” she added as she followed him back to the bar, nose to the trail, determined to keep his attention, “who was running the pub back then? In the seventies and eighties? They’d have known the people living in the street, wouldn’t they?”

“Actually, it was my better half’s mum and dad,” he said. “We took over from them. Toni might be able to help, but she’s at work.”

“Don’t worry, I can come back,” Kate said.





SEVEN


    Emma


THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 2012

It’s lunchtime and I’m still in bed, where Paul left me this morning. The happy pills are working their magic and I am beginning to feel comfortably numb so I force myself up. I can smell the stink of stale sheets on me so I stand in the shower until my fingertips start to prune, then pull on a loose jumper dress to hide my body.

I’ve put the tranquilizers back in the bathroom cabinet and closed the door on them. I hate the pills—they mean I’m failing. I’d like to put them in the bin, but what if I can’t cope without them?

Maybe I’ll try to get a different sort of help this time—look beyond the chemical route. I almost laugh as I think it. It would mean talking, wouldn’t it? Telling someone my thoughts. Why I’m such a mess. What lies at the bottom of it all. It would mean brushing the loose dirt away and then excavating the thick clay packed deep around my memories.

My mum, Jude, once suggested talking therapy—back when the Bad Days had only just begun—but I refused to get in the car when she tried to take me to see a therapist. There was a terrible scene in the street, with her screaming at me to get in and me bracing myself against the car door. God, was that me? The thing was, I knew then that silence was—is—the only option.

I know I won’t do anything different now. It’s too late for that. I’ll just put it all away, take the pills until I get everything back under control, and get on with my work. Fill my life with other things to blot out the dread, like I normally do.

My normal.

Anyway, I’m going to go to the butcher’s to get some meat for Paul’s dinner—to make up for the burned offerings and frozen food. The word “meat” sticks in my head. Flesh and blood. And I want to throw up.

Stop it, I tell myself, twisting the skin of my stomach through the dress.

At the butcher’s, I can smell blood as soon as I enter the shop. Metallic and coating my throat. I can feel panic rising so I stand quietly in the queue practicing the breathing technique from yoga. In through the right nostril, out through the mouth. Or is it out through the left nostril?

“Mrs. Simmonds,” the butcher says quite loudly. “What can I do for you today?”

Startled out of my meditation, I blurt, “Er, steak, please. A sirloin steak.” I’ll have a salad, I think.

He looks unimpressed.

“Just the one? Eating alone tonight?” He laughs, all red faced under his stupid straw boater.

I give him a look. Then try to laugh it off to show the other women in the shop that I’m in on the joke. But it sounds fake.

“Yes, George Clooney’s let me down again,” I say.

I shove the parcel in my carrier bag, pay the king’s ransom demanded, and go home to try to get some work done.

? ? ?

It’s five o’clock and Paul will be home soon. The thought makes me type faster. I’ll carry on for another hour, then resume domestic duties. Can’t stop yet. Must keep going. If I stop I’ll be back with the baby. Distract, distract, distract.

I thank God for work most days. I got into editing about ten years ago. A good friend was working at a publishing house, and one weekend, when she was landed with an emergency rewrite, she asked me to help. I’d always written for myself—and at college—but this was sleeves-rolled-up writing, translating some fairly adolescent scribblings by a footballer into heart-wrenching prose. It appeared I had a talent and she got me more work.

Today, I’m in the midst of a marriage breakup, navigating the sorrow, guilt, and relief of a young actress over her parting from her “childhood” husband and her optimism (misplaced, as it turned out) for her first “industry” marriage. I never meet the subjects. That’s the ghost writer’s job. If it’s a big star, they spend hours—sometimes weeks—with them, teasing out their stories and feelings. I’m not in that league. I’m more X Factor winners, that sort of thing. From what I gather, most of it is based on cuttings about them from magazines and newspapers, and I tinker and polish until it reads like a fairy story. It’s never very satisfactory but when it’s a rush job for an unexpected news hook—death, scandal, success—it has to be done that way.

It’s hard work and sometimes, when I’m sweating every word, I curse the millions of people who buy celebrity memoirs just to look at the photos.

But it pays well enough and it’s my own money. Paul thinks the work is beneath my talents, but I can do it from home and I am anonymous.

No one knows who Emma Simmonds is, even though my words are sold all over the world, in dozens of languages. My name never appears on the cover of the book. And that’s how I want it to stay. Paul says I ought to be acknowledged, but I just laugh.

It always works. He’s got enough on his plate what with Dr. Beecham and his scheming. Paul is more worried than he lets on, and I try to boost his confidence. I tell him what a great teacher he is and how much his students love his classes.