Girl A(68)

‘I don’t know.’

‘You humiliated me. Do you understand that? Here – you’re supposed to be on my side.’

‘I’m always on your side.’

‘But you weren’t then, were you? There always has to be – your objectivity. And – speaking as somebody who has to be objective a great deal of the time – it isn’t always appreciated. I need you on my team.’

‘You sound like a child,’ I said. ‘Teams?’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said, ‘what it was like. Growing up in this house. It was miserable, Lex.’

‘Was it?’ I said. ‘Was it really so fucking bad?’

He flinched. They’re just words, JP, I thought, and then, knowing that I could think something like that: Well. I suppose this is it.

‘What did you mean,’ he said, ‘about children? About that being decided?’

‘You want the truth?’ I said. ‘There’s something you should know. About our future family.’

That wasn’t the end of it, of course. There was the journey back to London on Boxing Day, suspended in traffic with a Christmas playlist, which JP cut midway through. There were the messages exchanged at work, spiteful and sad, while we sat at our desks with still faces. There was the fact that we were still fucking, hating each other a little more every time. There was the last time, when the hating outweighed the pleasure. There was the conversation when JP said – and I quote – ‘You should have told me that you were—’

‘Go on. Say it.’

‘That you were— Fine. Broken.’

For the first time in many years, I considered seeing Dr K. She had celebrated the beginning of it: let her commiserate the end. I had recognized the relief in her expression, that evening in her office garden. That I might have found somebody who would offer normality, ambition, forgetting. She had expected that JP might drag me with him, and I had hoped for the same. But my past wasn’t something which could be left behind us on a footpath, or in a cluttered house in a distant city. The facts of it lived inside me, and if he was going to take me with him, he would need to bear them, too.

Instead, Evie came to stay. She took a train from Gatwick and arrived before sunrise. I found her huddled by my door in a thin jacket, her hands tucked underneath it for the warmth of her body. ‘Surprise,’ she said, although she had called from the airport, to check that I was awake. ‘You didn’t need to,’ I said, and it was true: I was dry-eyed and showered, and dressed for work. ‘I know,’ she said.

She cooked dinners; she sourced terrible television; she wore my sweaters, until everything smelt of her. After the first time, we didn’t talk about JP. ‘Listen,’ she said, once I had explained it. ‘Fuck him.’ At the weekend, we dressed beautifully and visited a bar, and danced recklessly on an empty dance floor, ignoring the people watching. We walked home together, across the river in a thin, fine drizzle, both of us stopping to vomit into the Thames. We slept until Saturday afternoon, our limbs entwined. Beneath the pain, I felt better. Devlin’s reputation had drifted across the Atlantic, and I had already scheduled a call. I cancelled JP’s flight to New York, and upgraded my own. Another escape.

In Soho, I awoke suddenly in the night, as if the recollection of our parting had startled me. It wasn’t so bad. I had been telling the truth. For the most part, anyway. And there were far more embarrassing things that I could have said. About loneliness, for example. In the face of his gibbering – all of the fucking melancholy – I had been so composed. It had never been likely to last.

I reached for the light switch and wandered through to the bathroom. I had been too tired to shower when I got in, and now I felt dirty and nauseous. I had thought in the evening that there had been longing in JP’s face, but, sober and alone in the night, I concluded that it had probably been pity. I turned the shower as hot as I could stand it and stepped inside. My hair collapsed across my face, and my skin became a hot, porcine pink where the water hit it. I cleaned my body, the folds of it, the old scars, as carefully as if it was somebody else’s, and afterwards I held the skin above my womb, trying to imagine it taut with a child. Sometimes I dreamt about it, in vivid, mundane dreams, but when I was awake it was no good. Even the imagining was impossible.

There were two events which marked the end of my time at Five Fields. The first was Father’s disappearance. The second was the opening of the computer shop in Hollowfield, although I didn’t realize its significance at the time. That came many years later, and only with Dr K’s assistance.

Father went missing on my final day at Five Fields. I had just left English, which was one of the few classes I shared with Cara. Homework had been handed back – it was our first essay on The Bridge to Terabithia – and she was bad-tempered and cold. I had received an A, and she had been awarded a B+. ‘How is it,’ she said, ‘that I’m the one who has to bring you books to read, and you still find a way to beat me?’ I had nothing to say to that. We walked in silence, heading for the final class of the day. Everybody in our year ended Thursday afternoon with mathematics, and there was a crush of students waiting in the maths corridor. Cara was in the set below me, and I was relieved; tonight, Evie would congratulate me on the A, and by break time on Friday, Cara would be appeased by the proximity of the weekend.