In front of the full-length changing room mirror I turn on the spot, checking my reflection from the front and both sides. I’m quite pleased with what I see. Black jeans fit snugly over slim hips that have long lost the signs of pregnancy, and my buttons don’t strain over a wobbly mummy-tummy. My once long blonde hair is shorter now and falls in a smooth dark sheet to my shoulders, feathered around a much slimmer face. It’s only through my eyes, the so-called windows to my soul, that you might see how my life has changed for the worse – but only if you look very carefully. If you look very carefully you might notice that when I smile, the sparkle doesn’t quite reach them the way it used to. You might notice how my nose doesn’t crinkle either side of my nostrils when I laugh – if I ever laugh anymore – that sometimes those eyes glass over, as though I’m in another place, another time, which often I am. Usually I’m with Dylan, singing him songs from
The Jungle Book
as I change his nappy or splashing around with him in the bath, but sometimes, every now and then, I’m with Mark. We’re honeymooning in Sorrento again, me lounging around by the pool while he plays water volleyball, or sitting at the bar sipping iced margaritas. Sometimes we’re trekking around an old castle, me running ahead excitedly, climbing up hidden stairways and jumping out at him from dark alcoves. More often than not, though, in these daydreams of mine, we’re just lounging on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, me eight months pregnant, and struggling to stay on next to him while we watch some awful programme on TV. Then I picture that same sofa with a Moses basket next to it; waking up in a hospital bed scared and confused as two police officers look down at me, waiting to write down every word I say.
Yes. Mark knows –
knew
– me inside and out. He’ll see the changes in me immediately. Every last one of them. And I suspect his eyes will look the same.
I’ve chosen a white vest top under a baggy grey off-the-shoulder jumper in the hope that I won’t look as though I’m trying too hard. I don’t want Mark thinking I’m attempting to get him back, or worse still that I’m crazy.
Still crazy.
‘Can I leave these on?’ I ask the changing room attendant. She looks like she’d rather say no for the sake of being awkward, but clearly the thought of losing a sale changes her mind.
‘Sure, just take the tags to the till. Don’t forget to ask them to take the security tags off. Don’t want to get yourself arrested.’ She laughs at her own joke, oblivious of where her latest customer has spent the last few years. Damn straight I don’t want to go back there.
Twenty minutes later I throw my handbag into the car and slide in after it, already planning what to say when Mark opens the door and finds his past on the doorstep.
Nick looked furious when he saw me first thing this morning. ‘So you’re actually going through with this?’ he demanded. ‘Aren’t you the least bit scared of what he’ll do?’
‘He won’t do anything stupid,’ I replied. ‘I know my ex-husband.’ I was only half convinced of this at the time. And now I’m fifty miles from his house, and not feeling so clever.
The house looks the same as it ever did, and as I approach I remember the feeling I used to get every single time I arrived home, a feeling of pride that this was where I lived, this was the life we had built for ourselves. Set slightly apart from the other houses surrounding it, it’s beautifully modern and I fell in love with it the minute I saw it. It was the first home that was mine, so dramatically different from the small house we crowded into as children, and the grubby three-bedroom flat I shared with my university friends. I can still picture myself sitting on the front porch, Mark pruning the mini fir trees that line the small driveway that curls round to the right, trying to look like he knew what he was doing. I was never interested in tending the garden; I was always the one to put up photographs or do the painting – a job Mark never had the patience for. I notice, as I pull up, that his silver Merc is parked outside the garage. That’s something he never did before, preferring to have his pride and joy tucked safely out of sight. It hasn’t been cleaned for a few weeks, either. The first day he brought the car home he stayed out until gone ten shining the paintwork and applying Back To Black in the dark while I supplied him with cups of tea, amused at how much pride he took in his car when he could never be bothered to so much as wash up inside.
Without me noticing, my mouth has dried up and my tongue now resembles a piece of sandpaper. Swallowing hard doesn’t help. It seems I’ve lost the ability to produce saliva altogether. My chest is tight, and I have the sudden awareness of my heart beating and heat in my face that I only get in situations like this.
A quick check of the mirror, and despite the heat in my face I’m as white as a sheet. How bloody charming, I look like I’ve caught the plague. Mark’s probably going to slam the door in my face and call the police.
The ten-metre walk to the front door feels like a mile, the ring of the doorbell as loud as the church bells tolling for a Sunday service. Or a funeral. The three minutes it takes Mark to open the door feels like an hour. And then there he is. The man I once loved more than I’d ever thought possible is standing in the doorway, and in the seconds it takes for him to recognise me, I realise with sickening clarity that I never really stopped loving him. How do you just fall out of love with someone who was once your everything? Even though he deserted me when I needed him most, I still have the image of the arms that are now folded across his chest holding me tight while I cried tears of loss for my mother, arms that were so absent for the loss of our son. The eyes that are now creased with anger used to smile at me in amusement when I uttered one of my ‘blondeisms’, as he called them. When he speaks, it’s with the same voice that used to say ‘I love you’ daily. Now, though, the words and the tone have changed and I wonder if I’ve made a mistake coming here. I’ve tried so hard to hate this man, when all the time I was avoiding ever properly grieving for the loss of him.
‘What are you doing here, Susan?’
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting. In the hours since I decided to come and see Mark I’ve pictured our opening scene a dozen times, the apologies he’d make, how he’d tell me everything would be OK and he’d help me find out what happened to our little boy. Clearly this isn’t going to be as easy as I allowed myself to imagine it.
‘I, um, well I needed to see you . . . to speak to you.’ My planned speech has been wiped clean from my mind at the mere sight of him.
The effect was much the same the first time I ever saw him. Roped Bridget Jones style into a dinner party by well-meaning smug couples, I was just about to invoke the ‘emergency call’ ploy when Mark walked in. Five hours later, glued to my chair, I was still listening enraptured to this beautiful, funny and warm man, the man I knew I was going to marry, or at least hoped to shag. That night, slightly tipsy and head over heels in love – well I was at least – we fell into bed together, and stayed there the entire weekend. Looking back, it still feels like the whole memory is a lie, a story I’ve told so many times I sometimes wonder if I could really have been that lucky or if I’ve romanticised our whole relationship, only choosing to remember the bits where I’m the centre of Mark’s universe.
‘I really don’t think that’s a good idea.’ Mark moves to close the door and I know that my only chance is slipping away.
‘Wait . . . It’s about . . . um . . . Dylan.’ I see him cringe when I say our son’s name, but he doesn’t close the door further. ‘I was sent this.’ I shove the photograph clumsily into his hands and watch his face as he looks down at it. Confusion clouds his beautiful brown eyes as he studies the photograph, then shock when he turns it over.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asks, his face noticeably paler than it was two minutes ago. ‘Never mind, come inside; I don’t want anyone seeing you here.’
He pulls the door open widely enough for me to enter and, feeling like a dirty secret, a mistress he doesn’t want the neighbours to glimpse, I step into the hallway, trying not to physically recoil at the rush of emotion that overcomes me. The hallway, still a pristine cream with our expensive oak flooring and winding oak staircase, looks bare and cold without the huge black-framed photos that used to depict our whole relationship. I spent two days measuring the distance between frames, displaying our proudest moments – our wedding day, our honeymoon in Sorrento, Dylan’s first hospital photo – for the whole world to see. Now they’re gone as if they never existed.
‘You kept the mirror,’ I comment, my voice dull and my words numb. It was the very first purchase I made on my own when we bought the house, and Mark took pains to remind me at every opportunity just how oversized and overpriced he thought it was.
‘Cost almost as much as the bloody house,’ he reminds me now. ‘I wasn’t about to just get rid of it, was I?’
Like you got rid of us.
He walks through to the living room before I have a chance to say something stupid about the missing frames, and feeling decidedly awkward by now, I have no choice but to follow him. Before I can take in the room around me, he turns suddenly and thrusts the photo towards me.
‘What the hell is this, Susan?’ he demands. ‘Some kind of joke?’
I step back into the hall, shocked by the anger in his face. ‘Of course it’s not a fucking joke,’ I snap, beginning to feel pretty angry myself now. He cringes at my use of the F word. ‘How sick do you think I am?’
The minute the words are out of my mouth I regret them, but it’s too late. I’ve seen the look on his face and he knows it. As far as he – and the rest of the world – is concerned, I murdered his only son. Turning up on his doorstep with a photo of the boy I killed is probably close to the bottom of the ‘how sick do you think I am’ scale.
‘Sit down,’ he instructs, then walks through to the back of the room and out of the door to the kitchen. Too weary to argue, I step back in and oblige without thinking. As soon as I throw myself down on the cream armchair, my throat constricts. This is the exact same suite we had when I lived here. The three-seater sofa opposite me is the sofa I lay down on the last time I remember seeing my son alive.
My ex-husband is living with the very cushions I was accused of using to kill our son.
I jump up, panic welling inside me. My thoughts spin around my head like a twister, dark and destructive. Why would he do that?
How
could he do that? At that moment Mark walks back into the room and sees me backed against the wall staring at the sofa. Realisation dawns on his face.
‘God, Susan, I’m so sorry, that was bloody insensitive of me.’ He places two mugs down on the end table next to the offending piece of furniture and crosses the room, putting his hands on my arms and pulling me close. I collapse into his embrace, my legs refusing to hold my weight. Mark lowers me to the floor and sits down in front of me, looking into my eyes and instructing me to breathe slowly. ‘It’s not the same sofa, Susie, it just looks the same. I replaced it when you left; I just didn’t know what to replace it with. You were always the interior designer. I spent four hours wandering round DFS and ended up coming home with an almost exact replica of the bloody thing.’
His words sink in one by one. It isn’t our sofa. Of course it isn’t; ours was rounder, a little longer, it fitted better. Just like everything did when I was here.
When he’s sure I’m not going to pass out or have some kind of nervous breakdown, Mark stands up, retrieves his cup of tea and passes me the other. I’m still not ready to sit on the sofa, replica or not, so I stay on the floor.
‘So tell me,’ he says, some of the coldness now gone from his voice, ‘what is this supposed to mean?’
He picks up the photo from the table once more and I realise I don’t want him to have it, I don’t even want him touching it. I reach out protectively and he passes it back to me without comment.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply truthfully. ‘It was posted through my door just days ago, no letter, no explanation, nothing. I thought it might have been from you.’ I can’t meet his eyes when I say the last part, especially as I’ve omitted the bit about finding the other photos in my own album.
‘Me?’ He sounds disbelieving and I look up at him defiantly.
He kept the sofa,
that devilish voice inside my head tells me. No, not
the
sofa, just
a
sofa that happens to look quite similar. So there. ‘That’s crazy.’ There’s that word again, and Mark’s realised it too. He rushes on. ‘I mean, I know Susie, I know how much you punished yourself for what happened. I would never . . .’ He trails off. Does he mean . . . has he forgiven me?
‘So who?’ I ask quietly. ‘Who would do this to me?’
Mark looks tired all of a sudden, and for the first time since I arrived I see the change in him, I see what the years have done to my strong, strong husband. Creases surround his eyes; not the laughter lines I used to love, but signs of stress, old age creeping up before its time. His skin is paler than I remember; the perpetual tan that was the envy of every man and woman we knew has been replaced by a pallor that I initially attributed to the shock of seeing me, yet the healthy glow has yet to return. The cocksure look in his eyes, the one that dragged me under from the first glint in my direction, is gone. I see what I’ve done to the man who must once have felt like he had the world at his feet: a great job, a beautiful house, a glowing pregnant wife and then an adorable baby boy.
‘I don’t know. I do know there are some spiteful people out there. If someone is trying to hurt you, I don’t know who and I don’t know why, but I promise you it isn’t me.’
I believe him. So I tell him everything. I tell him about Dr Riley, my meeting with Nick, Dylan’s blanket, though I leave out the fact that I’m living with a virtual stranger. His expression is getting darker with every word. When I tell him about the break-in at my house, he looks like he’s ready to explode.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ he asks, pacing now, something I never saw him do when he was agitated before. ‘Do you have any idea how much danger you could be putting yourself in?’