The Forgetting(30)
Pushing the buggy towards the car park, she remembered that the ticket machine wasn’t taking cards, delved into her bag for her purse to see if she had any cash. Unzipping the inside pocket, she found a square of paper, neatly folded. Flattening it out, she saw Dominic’s meticulous handwriting. To my beautiful goldfish. Don’t forget to call the council about the bin collection. I love you. D xx.
Her memory jolted. For two weeks, the refuse collectors hadn’t taken their rubbish, and she’d been promising Dominic that she’d log it with the council. Cursing herself for having forgotten yet again, she picked up her phone and set a reminder for the following morning, folded the note and put it back in her bag.
There had been an abundance of Dominic’s notes left around the house last week: in the freezer next to the ice cream (Don’t be tempted! You’ll only be cross with yourself afterwards! xxx); in the cutlery drawer (Remember that we go TIP UP in the dishwasher xxx); in Leo’s toy box (Dear Leo, Please make sure that I am FULL when Daddy gets home. You know he doesn’t like clutter all over the sitting room floor xxx). Sometimes Dominic’s notes were a comfort: a sense of his presence even in his absence. But other times – notes reminding her to collect something, send something, pay for something – she wished he’d just send her a reminder on WhatsApp so there was no chance of her overlooking it.
Her phone pinged and she looked at the screen, anticipating a reply from Aisha. Instead, there was a text message from a number she didn’t recognise.
Hello Livvy. It’s Imogen, Dominic’s mother. I wanted to apologise again for our encounter last week. I didn’t mean to upset you. But I really do need to get hold of Dominic. He’s still not replying to any of my messages. I’d be very grateful if you could have a word with him about John’s funeral. It’s this Friday. I’ve sent him all the details. Thank you. Imogen
Livvy whipped her head around, looked left and right, behind her and in front, eyes scouring the people milling by for the face of her mother-in-law. She was aware of her heart rate accelerating, of her hand reaching over the top of the buggy, resting on Leo’s shoulder.
She looked back down at the message, her skin bristling with a sudden realisation: she hadn’t given Imogen her mobile number. She had no idea where Dominic’s mother had got it from.
Rereading the message, she saw the outright lie in it. It was three days since Dominic had emailed his mother, instructing her not to contact them again. And yet here she was, claiming that Dominic had failed to reply to any of her messages.
Taking one last glance around to reassure herself that Imogen wasn’t spying on them, Livvy turned back to her phone, saved Imogen’s number under an innocuous letter ‘I’ so that she could screen any further communications, and then pressed a finger down on the delete button, eradicating the message. The decision was there without her consciously having taken it: ignore the message, don’t tell Dominic, spare him yet more anger and upset. If both she and Dominic ghosted all Imogen’s communications from now on, surely she’d get the message and leave them alone.
Looking inside her purse, she discovered precisely eighty-seven pence, realised she wouldn’t be able to pay for parking without withdrawing some cash.
At the cashpoint, she entered her pin to check the balance on the joint account, and a number flashed up on screen that caused Livvy to pause, blink, stare.
It didn’t make any sense.
Only last week there had been almost five thousand pounds in their joint account. Now there was little more than two hundred. Confusion darted in Livvy’s head as she considered the possibility that somebody had hacked into their account and taken all their money. Dominic had been berating her for months about the inadequacy of her online security, imploring her to change her passwords to something less obvious. A year ago, when they’d got married and Dominic had suggested they move all their separate finances into a single joint account, she’d promised to improve her banking security and yet somehow it had never moved off her To Do list. And now, twelve months later, almost five thousand pounds had inexplicably disappeared.
‘Are you gonna be much longer?’
Livvy whipped her head around, saw a man standing behind her in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie pulled up over his head. Heart pounding, she mumbled an apology, withdrew ten pounds, retrieved her bank card and moved out of the way.
Pulling her mobile from her pocket, she dialled Dominic’s number, heard herself groan when it went to voicemail. ‘It’s me. Can you call me as soon as you get this? Something’s happened. Nothing terrible – we’re both fine – but . . . well, can you just call me?’
For a few moments she stood on a street corner, staring down at her phone as though, if she looked at it long enough, she could summon Dominic, like a genie from a bottle. But her phone remained stubbornly silent. Her mind raced, trying to devise a meaningful reason why Dominic might have withdrawn that much money, but she knew she was clutching at straws. Dominic was careful with money. There was no imaginable scenario in which he’d have spent almost five thousand pounds in a week.
She thought about phoning the bank, reporting the lost money, asking them to investigate. Glancing at the time, she saw it was almost half past five. Leo was late for his dinner and Dominic would be video-calling soon. And the damage had been done now anyway: the money was gone. All she could do now was go home, wait for Dominic to call, and hope that between them, they could figure out what on earth had happened.