He Said/She Said(4)
‘What’ve you got planned for today?’ I ask her, to gauge her mood as much as anything.
‘Calling a client first thing,’ she says. ‘And then this afternoon I thought I’d tackle my VAT. You got anything planned?’
I take heart from her joke. When she’s about to crash, her sense of humour is the first thing to go.
My rucksack has been packed for three days now. Half the considerable weight is camera equipment, lenses, chargers and my tripod, batteries and waterproofs, and then spares of everything. The camera is in its own bag, too precious to leave unattended in a luggage rack. My phone goes into the breast pocket of my orange windcheater.
‘Very chic,’ says Laura drily. ‘Have you got everything you need?’ I put the sandwich in my other pocket, check my Oyster card is easily accessible and then hoist on the rucksack. I nearly fall backwards under its weight.
Without warning, Laura’s smile drops and she brushes her forearms, twice in succession. This time we make eye contact and denial is as pointless as explanation. Reassurance is all I can give.
‘I’ve checked the passenger records,’ I say. ‘There’s no Beth Taylor on the list. No Taylors. No Elizabeth anything. No B or E anything, female.’
‘You know that’s completely meaningless.’
Indeed I do. Laura thinks that Beth has changed her name. I disagree; it’s a reflection of Laura’s paranoia. With a name like that, you can hide in plain sight. That was, after all, the inspiration behind our own rebranding. Why hide a needle in a haystack when you can hide a strand of hay? ‘And even if it’s true,’ presses Laura, ‘all that means is she’s not on your ship. What if she’s on the ground?’
I speak deliberately slowly. ‘If she is there, she’ll be looking for a festival. Somewhere there’s a sound system and a load of bongos, that’s where she’ll expect to find us. I’m going to be travelling with a load of retired Americans. And even if she doesn’t, Tórshavn’s a big place that’ll be crawling with tourists, eleven thousand people.’ I smooth down my beard. ‘There’s my cunning disguise. I’ll be on the lookout. I’ll be walking around with a periscope, checking all the corners before I go anywhere.’ I mime peeping through my fingers; she doesn’t laugh. ‘Mac’s round the corner, Ling’s two streets away, my mum’s an hour away, your dad’s on the phone whenever you need him.’
‘I can’t help it, Kit.’ I can see she hates herself for crying by the way she bites down hard on her lip. I draw her against me and with my other arm, I shake her hair from its messy topknot and comb it with my fingers, the way she likes me to. A tear rolls off the waterproof surface of my jacket. I take a deep breath and say the only thing she needs to hear.
‘If you want me to stay, I’ll stay.’
She pulls out of the hug and, for a horrible moment, I think this is to let me take my rucksack off. But instead she gets my camera bag and hangs the strap around my neck, solemnly, like she’s awarding an Olympic medal. This is how she gives me her blessing and I can see what it takes.
‘Look after yourself,’ she says.
‘You look after yourself. Yourselves,’ I correct, and without thinking of the consequences, I kneel down to kiss her belly. My thighs scream with the effort of standing upright again.
‘It could be worse,’ I say. ‘I could be going to Svalbard. Someone got mauled by a polar bear in Svalbard just last week.’
‘Heh,’ she says, but her heart’s not in it. To her, Beth Taylor is scarier than any flesh-eating bear. I know what she’s thinking; the first time Beth lashed out in retribution, she told us herself that she only stopped because they caught her. She actually admitted it would have been far worse if she’d attacked the person, rather than the property.
Outside, dawn has yet to break and the street glows orange in patches. There are two stone steps from our front door to street level. From the pavement, I turn to look up at Laura, who’s rolled her sleeves down over her wrists, her hands cupping her bump. I have what Mac would call a moment of clarity. I’m about to leave my pregnant, over-medicated, anxious wife to travel across the seas to another country where there is every chance the woman who nearly destroyed us will be waiting for me.
‘I’m not going,’ I say, and I’m not calling her bluff. Laura frowns back.
‘You bloody well are,’ she says. ‘Over a grand this trip’s cost. Go on.’ She shoos me off down the street. ‘Have the time of your life. Take some pictures. Come back with beautiful stories for our babies.’
I take a last look down at my feet; the pavements here are treacherous enough without throwing an undone bootlace into the mix. ‘The chances of her finding me are tiny,’ I say, but Laura has already closed the door, and I realise that I was talking to myself anyway.
It’s a five-minute walk from our house on Wilbraham Road to Turnpike Lane Station, less if you cut through Harringay Passage, a useful if rather Dickensian passageway that halves our grid of streets. I cross Duckett’s Common, looping around the swings and slides where our friends’ children play. Broken glass crunches under my feet.
Sweat is pouring off me already, cooling in my beard. For all the salt on my lips, it’s the lie that sits bitter on my tongue. There’s no way I could possibly have checked the passenger lists. That sort of thing is basic data protection. I can’t believe Laura didn’t pick up on it. When her anxiety’s active, she gets super-powers of perception. Paranoia alerts her to even the tiniest shift in my body language and she picks up the slightest dilution of the truth.