The Things We Do to Our Friends(61)

* * *



—

The house hadn’t settled for the night. I could hear the faint buzz of people moving around, the intermittent crack of a frame broken in a game of snooker several floors down, which felt like another world. It was like the parties my parents had held when I was very young. With so many guests, they went on late into the night, and the house never truly slept.

The logistics of what happened next are a blur. I know I got dressed and managed to book a taxi somehow. Then there are fragments that I can recall: harsh bluish light in the early morning; sitting at the end of the drive of that vast house, where I waited and waited for the taxi, and then the driver’s blank face when he saw the mess I was in. He just clarified where we were going, and I wondered if he’d done this journey before with someone like me. I wondered how many incidents like this had taken place in this very location. It was, of course, best for him not to ask any questions.

We stopped at a cashpoint when we reached central Edinburgh, and I walked back to the cab stiffly with a wad of notes to pay for the journey, my neck so painful that if I moved even an inch it would snap and my untethered head might float away like some monstrous helium balloon.

I got back to the flat and sat on my bed—all I could hear was a dull ringing sound, and it was like someone had poured a stream of boiling water down either side of my spine then thrown ice at me, a crushing state of hot and cold sweat. I couldn’t stop shaking, and I remember focusing more than usual on the flat. The curtains were drawn, and the room was cold and grubbier than usual. The bedding was unwashed and balled up at the bottom of the bed, where I’d flung it off at some point. My carefully arranged wardrobe that Imogen had helped me with had been abandoned, and there were clothes piled all over the floor, dirty and clean mixed together. I’d been so busy—so delighted with my control over everything—that I hadn’t even noticed.

That was the end of it. The end of that perfect slice of life, of jumping higher and higher, achieving more and more. Of everything always working out because we were blessed.

Nothing would be the same after that night, however hard we tried to piece it all back together.





50


A tall drink of water. Those are not my words. It’s a phrase someone old, a relative of my husband’s, once used about me behind my back. It was apparently a compliment. Now, people certainly remark how composed I seem, and this does not usually feel like praise.

I am capable, but also different, and I cannot be fixed by anyone or anything however hard they might try.

Behind closed doors, you see the cracks if you care to look. When I think about that night up in the Highlands, I remember the sense of everything that we’d worked so hard for gone in a flash, and it wasn’t just the group that fractured after the attack—I broke too, not for the first time, and I’ve broken again and again since, in so many ways. Tiny fissures. A prized vase glued together then shattered once more. You can’t believe how many times it can stand to be patched up. My sour contents all milky and spilling out, leaking and bubbling every time, then mended until I become presentable.

I can be violent with him sometimes, with my husband, in a way that is painful and secretive. Our bodies are hard and strangely solid against each other in a brutal clash like a fight which he enjoys. He would never say so, and he doesn’t see the full extent of it, not really. If I am wild, then he is submissive to it all, to my bites, my scratches, to the way I pin him down.

I do not see myself as a drink of water. I am surrounded by fire, and the flames lick close to me over the years, hotter sometimes, dying down to embers at other times. Is it a good or a bad thing? It is welcome sometimes, but it can also be uncontrollable.

He is a man who looks crisp, always. He does not like to be dirty or unshaven. He does not like me to be dirty or unshaven either and, on the surface, I oblige. I am freshly folded—take me out and put me away.

Clean sheets on the bed, starched and white, the highest thread count, and then my limbs are hot and I burn and burn.





51


Back to where it all began. Back to Périgueux.

My parents worked a lot when I was very young. That was how they met. Maybe it was love at first sight or maybe it wasn’t like that at all, but I like to think it was. I felt sure that their eyes met in an overcrowded office. Seeing each other for the first time: her—impossibly beautiful in a sallow and interesting way, like a dying princess; him—working class, British, a bit of a lad perhaps, before he calmed down and mellowed out to suit her. He’d worked hard to get where he was, which was why the fall later was so difficult.

They met, and they chose Périgueux, with its winding streets and leafy squares. They bought a huge house, lived in the countryside, and traveled far and wide for work. I know that.

Then I was born and it all started to go wrong. My mother stopped working because of her migraines. I could have been what was causing them; each time I came near, her hand would dart to her forehead as my father shook his head at me, batting me away.

When I played, I was rough “like a boy,” my mother would bemoan, but I was strategic in my attacks. When little girls fight there’s a particular brand of planned cruelty. I waited and retreated, then I’d spring into action, go for a jab in the eyes. Boisterous and unsuited to the cool, quiet house my parents flitted in and out of. They would catch my eye as you would with a casual acquaintance in the street, as if they were scared of what I’d do if they turned from me, as if I’d hurt them. I can’t remember ever actually doing anything too bad in those early years. But if you listened to their muddled accounts, I was terrible.