I Know Who You Are(30)

When the bottle is empty, I order another, topping up my glass as soon as it arrives. I look at the way Jack is staring at Alicia and wish she would just go away, I want him to look at me like that. Only me. The thought generates a moment of guilt; I am still married, but then I remember what Ben is doing to me now, and what he has done to me in the past. The lipstick under our bed didn’t get there by itself, and he couldn’t have come up with a plan this elaborate on his own either.

Who is she? Who is helping my husband try to destroy me? When I find out, I’ll destroy them both.

I am most definitely drunk.

Alicia stands to leave and I can smell her perfume as she kisses the air on either side of my cheeks. Her scent is too strong, overpowering and sickly, just like the woman wearing it. I slur my words when I try to say goodbye. It’s just Jack and me now, he’s finally looking back in my direction, and ready or not I know what I want.





Twenty-four


Essex, 1988

“I still don’t know if she’s ready for this,” says Maggie.

“She’s ready,” John replies. “All she’s got to do is walk and hold my hand, it ain’t difficult.”

I think maybe they are going to have a fight. They fight a lot, and it makes me wonder if my real mummy and daddy fought a lot, too, before she died. Maybe that’s just what grown-ups do: shout loud words at each other that have nothing to do with what they are really cross about.

“Would you rather something happened to me?” asks John. “I’m starting to wonder who you care more about? Me, or a child who isn’t even really ours?”

I hear the sound Maggie’s hand makes when it hits a cheek. I know the sound because sometimes it’s my cheek that it’s hitting. Then I hear the sound of John’s big leather boots coming towards my bedroom and the door bursts open. He grabs my wrist and pulls me into the hall. I only see Maggie for a second as we fly past their bedroom; I’ve never seen her cry before.

I trip on the stairs a couple of times on the way down, but John holds me up by one arm until my feet make contact with the wood again. When we get to the bottom, I think we are going to turn right through the metal door that leads into the betting shop, but we don’t do that. John bends down until his face is right in front of mine. His breath smells strange, and when he speaks, little bits of his spit land on my nose and cheeks.

“You stay with me the whole time. You hold my hand. You don’t do anything or say anything to anyone, or I’ll whip your arse so good you won’t be able to sit down for a week. Anyone says anything to you, you just smile. I’m your dad, and you and me are just going for a walk. You understand?”

I don’t understand most of what he just said, but I forget to answer because I’m watching him chew. He’s been chewing gum instead of smoking cigarettes, and I think maybe he should just smoke because chewing gum makes him cranky.

“Hello, is anybody home?” He knocks on my head as though it were a door. It hurts when he does this, and I wish that he wouldn’t. “Put your shoes on.”

I haven’t worn them since I first arrived, and it takes me a little while to remember what to do. I think my feet must have grown too, because my shoes are awfully tight now. John shakes his head as though I’ve done something else wrong, but then he opens the big front door that I came through the night I arrived, and I realize that we are going outside.

There are houses and trees and grass and sunshine, there is so much to see, but we are walking so fast along the road that everything rushes by in a blur, like a painting. John walks so quickly I have to run to keep up. He’s holding me tight with one hand, and holding a black-and-red bag with the word HEAD written on it in the other.

He only lets go of my hand when we are inside the bank. I know it’s a bank because it looks like one, and because it said so on the sign out front. I spend so much time reading now that I think I’m pretty good at it. The counter is almost exactly like the one in the betting shop, with glass between us and the woman behind it. I’m not tall enough to see her, but I can hear her voice through the holes in the screen. I decide that she sounds pretty and wonder if she is.

John unzips the bag and starts taking out bundles of money, then he puts it on the counter. The woman I can’t see slides a drawer so that she can empty it, then she slides it back and they do it all over again. There is a lot of money, so it takes a long time. First there are bundles of notes tied with thick rubber bands, then he takes out lots of different-colored mini plastic bags with coins. The green ones have ten-pence and twenty-pence coins inside, yellow is for fifty-pence, and pink is for pounds. There are a lot of pink bags. When the big bag that says HEAD is empty, John thanks the woman behind the counter and asks if he can take her for a drink sometime. I guess she must look thirsty.

He holds my hand less tight on the way back to the betting shop. I walk as slowly as I can because I like being outside. I like seeing the sky and the trees again, and feeling the sun on my cheeks. I like the sound of the man standing outside the fruit-and-vegetable shop saying, “Ten plums for a pound,” and the way the little green man made of light, inside a black box, tells you when it is safe to cross the road. John says we don’t have time to wait for him on the way back, so we cross even though it is the red man’s turn to shine.

“You’ve been a good girl and I think you deserve a treat,” says John when we are almost back where we started. I don’t reply because he says the word treat just like Maggie says the word surprise, so I think it might not be a good thing after all.