Then She Was Gone(36)

She’s shaking when she hangs up and she feels nauseous. She grabs her wine glass and takes a huge gulp. She should phone Floyd back, but she can’t. What would she say? Oh, my son’s partner just told me that she thinks you’ve got a dark aura and now I’m too upset to have jokey conversations about cardigans with you?

So she sits instead and for an hour she slowly and deliberately works her way through her wine until her hands have stopped shaking enough to send Floyd a text: Sorry about that. Jake had lots to say and now I’m tired and heading for bed. I will be wearing grey jersey pyjamas. They’re relatively old ?.

His reply arrives a few seconds later: That will give me plenty of food for thought to get me through the night. Sleep tight my perfect girl. Speak tomorrow x.

She turns off her phone, switches on the TV, finds something mindless to watch and pours herself another glass of wine. For an hour at least she coasts through oblivion, feeling sweet numbness spread over her like a heavy cloak. Then when she feels nothing at all, she finally goes to bed.

‘Oh,’ says Laurel, coming into the kitchen at Floyd’s house the following evening. ‘Hi, SJ. I wasn’t expecting to see you.’

SJ is standing at the sink, a pint glass of water in her hand. ‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ she says. ‘Me and Mum had a big fight last night.’ She shrugs, rests her left foot against her right foot and then the right against the left. She’s wearing a black lace top with black joggers and scuffed silver tennis shoes. A constellation of hoops and drops glitters at her earlobes. She reminds Laurel of one of the fairies in a book she used to read to the children when they were small. The fairy was called Silvermist and had silver hair and silver lips and was always dressed in black. It was a sad fairy. Androgynous. It had secrets.

Floyd comes in after Laurel and sighs. ‘To be fair,’ he says, as though Laurel had said something, ‘it has been a very long time since Kate and SJ fell out.’

‘We haven’t fallen out,’ SJ snaps.

‘Well, had a fight, whatever.’

‘What did you fight about?’ asks Laurel. ‘I mean you don’t have to tell me, obviously …’

Sara-Jade casts her long-lashed gaze to the floor and says, ‘She doesn’t like my new boyfriend.’

Floyd makes a strange noise behind Laurel and she turns to give him a questioning look.

‘He’s forty-nine,’ SJ says.

Floyd makes another noise and looks pointedly from Sara-Jade to Laurel and back again.

‘He’s married,’ says Sara-Jade. ‘Well, sort of married. In a long-term relationship.’

‘Oh,’ says Laurel, wishing she hadn’t asked.

‘He has four children. The youngest is eight.’

‘Oh,’ says Laurel again.

‘I’ve told her not to come here expecting validation or exemption from the usual rules of human decency.’

‘No,’ says Laurel. ‘No. I …’ She tries and fails to find somewhere to bring her gaze to rest.

And then SJ starts crying and runs from the room, her thin arms bunched together in front of her chest.

Laurel looks from the door to Floyd and back again.

‘You can go after her if you like,’ he says to her, slowly and calmly. ‘I’ve said all I’ve got to say on the subject.’

Laurel looks away from Floyd and towards the hallway. SJ is brittle, like Hanna, but Hanna never cries. Sometimes Hanna looks like she might cry but her eyes stay dry and the opportunity to touch her, to hold her, to nurture her eludes Laurel. So it is some long untapped maternal longing that sends her out of the kitchen and into the hall where SJ is snatching her coat off the coat rack and sobbing uncontrollably.

‘Sara,’ she starts. ‘SJ. Come into the living room with me. Come. We can talk.’

‘What is there to talk about?’ she wails. ‘I’m a bitch. I’m bad. There’s nothing else to say.’

‘Well, actually,’ says Laurel, ‘that’s not true. I …’ She inhales. ‘Come and sit with me. Please.’

SJ rehangs her coat and follows Laurel. In the living room she curls herself into the armchair and looks at Laurel through wet eyelashes.

Laurel sits opposite her. ‘I had an affair with a married man once. When I was very young.’

SJ blinks.

‘To be fair, he didn’t have any children. And he’d only been married for a year. We had an affair for two years. It was while I was at university.’

‘Was it a teacher?’

‘No. Not a teacher. Just a friend.’

‘And then what happened? Did he leave her for you?’

Laurel smiles. ‘No. He didn’t. I left university and moved to London and we thought we couldn’t live without each other and that we were going to have all these wildly romantic rendezvous in country hotels. Of course, within six weeks it had totally fizzled out. Apparently he and his wife split up that same year. Too young to get married, basically. We were all too young. Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five years old?’

SJ shrugs.

‘Who is it?’ Laurel asks.

‘It’s the course leader’, SJ says, ‘at the art college where I model.’