Missing You (7 page)

‘It’s in the Waitrose car park.’

‘Be a dear and fetch it,’ says Vincent. ‘Give Fen a lift home.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ says Fen.

‘You look like death warmed up; you’ll frighten off the customers,’ says Lina.

Vincent, who would never be so discourteous as to comment on a woman’s appearance, unless it was to pay a compliment, does not contradict Lina. He pushes back the hair that has fallen from the top of his head over his eyes.

‘Have the afternoon off,’ he says. ‘Go and lie in a darkened room until Connor comes home. And if you’re no better in the morning, don’t come in.’

‘Thank you,’ says Fen. ‘You are a lovely boss.’

‘I know, dear girl,’ says Vincent. ‘I know.’

Lina drives like a man, fast and tight, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other flat on the gear stick. Fen braces herself as Lina braves the car round the bends and through the lights at the London Road junction, squeezing through impossibly small gaps as she races up Snow Hill.

They reach Fairfield Park in record time and Lina drives down Crofters Road, skimming past the narrow, terraced houses trickling down the hill, but there are no spaces. She loops back up again along Claremont Road, and stops the Mazda in the middle of the road outside Lilyvale. A Range Rover pulls up behind.

‘You’ll be OK?’ she asks Fen.

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Call me this evening,’ says Lina. ‘Let me know how you are.’

Fen leans over and kisses Lina’s cheek. In the wing mirror, she sees the Range Rover driver make a frustrated gesture, both palms upturned.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ she calls to Lina, ‘and thank you!’

The fifteen minutes out of the shop, away from the heater, have made Fen feel a little better. Still, she thinks, she’ll do exactly as Vincent suggested. She’ll fill the kettle and put it on to boil while she changes into something less constricting than the demure navy-blue dress which Vincent says makes her look vaguely Jane Austen-y, a look which he believes appeals to the punters. Then she’ll fill a hot-water bottle, make a mug of ginger tea and get into bed; she’ll close her eyes and lie there until Connor is dropped off by the school transport. She’ll have at least three hours to herself, and by then the flashing lights will have gone from her eyes and the worst of the pain will have passed.

The sky is hazy, silvery. There’s a strange light over the city and the buildings are highlighted; they stand out like two-dimensional cut-outs, as if they were a film set. Fen recognizes the light. It usually precedes thunder, and she thinks this is one of the reasons why she has a migraine. As soon as the storm comes, her head will clear.

She goes tentatively down the steep, front garden steps, because she is still a little dizzy and the mirage has begun to zigzag giddily in front of her. She holds up her key to unlock the outer door, but as soon as her hand touches it, it swings open.

Fen swallows. She remembers locking the door before she walked to work. It was only a few hours ago. She remembers rattling the handle to double-check. Or is it yesterday she’s remembering? Were the blood vessels in her brain already constricting this morning? Migraines do weird things to her mind. They make her forget. Maybe she forgot to lock the door. Or maybe Sean has come back early. Maybe he’s come to collect something.

Still her heart begins to race.

She pushes the outer door wide open, sweeps aside a flyer on the doormat with the toe of her shoe and opens the inner door with her Yale key.

‘Hello?’ she calls quietly. ‘Sean?’

There is no answer. The doors to all three downstairs rooms open off the hall. They are all ajar. Fen can see into the kitchen, ahead of her. It is empty but there’s a Starbucks carton on the counter that wasn’t there before. Fen steps into the hall, and checks the living room and dining room. Both are empty. Both are as they were when she last saw them.

Her heart is beating so strongly that Fen can clearly feel the muscle contracting and pulsing in her chest. Breathing is difficult; she has to remember to inhale but the air only seems to reach the top third of her lungs and she exhales shakily. She stands still, listening, and she hears movement upstairs, she hears water.

At first she thinks that this is the sign she’s been waiting for – the sign that Tomas is back. The water is the clue, the running water. But much as she wants this to be the truth, there’s a more plausible explanation; she knows there is.

The cold tap that feeds the bath is broken. Sometimes she twists the handle tight into its thread until she is certain the tap is turned off but minutes, or sometimes hours, later water splashes from the spout. Sean said there’s something wrong with the plumbing; air in the system, he said, and it needs bleeding. Sometimes, when one or the other of them flushes the lavatory, the whole house groans and rattles. When Fen suggested calling a plumber, Sean told her to save her money. He said he’d look at it. He is, she has noticed, inclined to volunteer for mending and maintenance jobs around the house, although he never seems to find time to actually carry them out.

Fen holds her breath to slow her heart rate.

Her head is throbbing.

‘Which is more likely?’ she asks herself firmly. ‘That the cold tap has turned itself on again, or that Tomas is upstairs running himself a bath?’

Still she is careful. She pulls off her boots, takes hold of the banister and puts her bare left foot on the first stair.

Fen creeps up the stairs, moving one foot after the other, cautiously unpeeling her sole from the carpet at every step to make herself as light and quiet as possible. She treads carefully, breathing in little shallow gasps, trying not to imagine how she will feel if she taps on the bathroom door and Tomas is there, in the bath. What will she say to him? What will she do?

‘Stop it!’ she says, out loud, but very quietly. ‘Stop.’

At the top of the stairs, she pauses, rests a moment.

The bathroom door is open.

It’s not the cold tap making the noise. It’s not the bath either.

It’s the shower.

Fen takes two more steps forward, and looks through the narrow gap between the door and the door frame. The earthy, damp warmth of the bathroom, mingled with the metallic smell of hot water and the hot-plastic smell of the shower curtain, seeps through the crack.

There is no ghost in the bathroom.

It is Sean, and he’s alive. He is very alive.

He is standing beneath the shower.

The shower curtain is drawn and water streams down it, steam billowing softly so his silhouette and his colours are blurred, like the countryside seen through a rain-soaked window.

He is leaning forward. One arm is braced against the wall, slightly below the chrysanthemum-shaped shower head. The fingers of this hand are extended, spanned for balance, the palm supporting his weight. His head is inclined downward, so his face is hidden by the arm, and the water from the shower is firing onto the crown of his head, pelting down his back, which is slightly arched.

Although his body is hazy through the curtain and the water, Fen can tell that he has a beautiful shape from the way his back slopes into his buttocks, the length of his thighs and the tapering of his lower legs to his ankles.

One leg is bent gracefully at the knee, like a statue of an Athenian athlete about to run a marathon. The braced arm and the bent knee give Sean’s body a heroic pose. But it’s the movement of his other forearm that holds Fen’s eyes: the V shape of the elbow, smudged behind the curtain, and the rhythm of the wrist working that private, universal, unmistakable sexual rhythm.

Fen is spellbound.

Everything drains from her mind.

She is aware of nothing but the man in the shower just a few feet away from her, the beauty of him, the movement beneath the raining water.

She holds her breath and she watches.

She watches as the steam plumes, as the water splashes into the bath and trickles down the curtain. She watches as the water streams out of the shower head and down Sean’s wet hair, down the incline of his neck to the shadow of his shoulder blade, down the dark hairs of his leg to the bend of the knee. She watches the tension of his back, the movement of his elbow, his arm, his far shoulder arching even further, so muscular, so intent and intense. She breathes in his beauty as she watches and after a moment, after forever, he groans loud enough for her to hear. Then his head relaxes, and the working arm falls to his side and she sees the tension leave him.

He stands still, quite motionless for a moment or two beneath the shower water, and then he pushes himself upright with the braced hand. He stands up straight and tall, and pushes the hair and water out of his face with his two hands.

Fen holds her breath.

Then he turns, he turns towards the door, and she knows he cannot see her – there is a streaming, steamy shower curtain between them and she is just a shadow in the gap between the door and its frame; and he does not know she is there, she should be at work – yet she feels he looks right into her.

She sees the shape of his chest and the slightness of his hips and the dark, dark hair that trickles from his navel to his groin and the paler shape between his thighs, and she wants to groan like he has groaned, but she suppresses it.

He leans down, picks up a bottle of shampoo,
her
shampoo Fen notices with pleasure, and it is only then that she remembers she should not be here. She turns away and puts her back to the door frame, then slides down it until she is resting on her heels. She leans her head back and exhales, and it is as if she has been holding her breath forever. In a way, she supposes, she has.

‘God,’ she whispers. ‘My God.’

ten

Amy falls asleep in her car seat on the way back to Bath after Sean stops at the off-licence and buys beer and whisky. Back at Lilyvale, he sees Fen has left the downstairs lights on for him and her bedroom light is on. Sean carries Amy upstairs and puts her to sleep in his bed. Then he takes his guitar and goes down into the living room. He shuts the door, turns on a small lamp and opens a can of beer. He fingers the strings of the guitar and makes up a song, which he knows he will have forgotten by the morning. The song is called ‘Membury Blues’.

When he goes back upstairs, some hours, some beer and some whisky later, he finds Amy awake in the bed, watching
Poltergeist
on the television. The duvet is pulled up to her eyes, which are wide and round, terrified. Sean can’t remember the exact plot of the film but he knows it has something to do with a child of about Amy’s age being sucked into the mouth of hell, or something equally disturbing.

‘There are ghosts in the television, Daddy,’ she whispers, too scared almost to breathe. He switches off the set and scoops his daughter up in his arms. She is shivering and doesn’t seem to realize, thankfully, that she has wet herself and the bed. She would be mortified if she knew. Soon, the lap of Sean’s jeans is also damp. He holds Amy very close, wraps her into his big body and kisses her head. He strokes her hair over and over, smoothing it against her warm little skull with the flat of his hand, feeling the delicate shell-shape of her ear, and he tells her that there are no ghosts, that it was just a scary story.

‘I
saw
the ghosts,’ she insists, whispering, trembling in his arms.

‘Those were just pretend ghosts.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I know the man who made the film and he told me.’

Amy shifts her position and looks up at her father, wanting to believe him, but still suspicious. Her eyelashes are sticky with tears that catch the light from the landing and reflect in her dark pupils.

‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘Shall I phone him up now and you can ask him yourself?’

‘Your words don’t smell very nice,’ says Amy, pulling her face away from his. ‘I think you should brush your teeth, Daddy.’

The next day, they sleep in late, and Sean wakes to find his little daughter clinging to him like ivy to a tree. He unwinds her and wakes her, and she is hot and strange, an alien Amy. She behaves nothing like the quiet, eager-to-please daughter he knows and loves. She won’t let him comb her hair and refuses to brush her teeth or eat any breakfast. She says she does not want to go to Royal Victoria Park, she hates the park, she hates Bath, she wants her mummy, she wants to be at home. She works herself up into a desperate crying fit, sobbing as if her heart is breaking. Sean cannot touch her. She can’t hear what he says so he sits on the bed and waits for her to work the excess emotion out of her system. He has never seen Amy like this. It’s as if she has been broken.

He thinks: Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Is this my life?

Over his daughter’s wails, he hears Fen tactfully clatter Connor’s pushchair up the steps in the front garden. He hears her collecting the boy, hurrying him along, pretending she has somewhere to be so that Sean and Amy have the house to themselves. He is grateful.

When Amy’s crying has subsided into huge, swallowing, gulping sobs, he takes her downstairs and gives her little sips of sugared tea from a spoon, like a baby. He turns on the television out of habit, and Amy screams that the ghosts will come. She kicks the guitar that he left propped beside the settee. Amy knows that kicking his guitar is about the worst crime she can commit in her father’s presence. She is never naughty. She is, by nature, the least controversial child. Once she has kicked the guitar, her hand flies to her mouth and she looks up at her father with wide, startled eyes, as if she cannot believe what she has just done. Sean doesn’t care. He is tired and hung-over. He rubs his stubbly chin, rubs his eyes. He hitches up his jeans; he needs to buy a belt.

‘Come on,’ he says to his daughter. ‘We’re going into Bath.’

‘I don’t want to go into Bath.’

‘There’s a fairy shop,’ says Sean, ‘and it’s full of nice things. Really, Ames, I think you’ll like it.’

He noticed the shop some weeks back and has been saving it for an emergency.

They catch the bus down into the city centre and make their way through the Saturday crowds to the fairy shop, which is down one of the narrow little side streets that remind Sean of film sets; they are too authentic, too quaint to be real, he thinks. Amy holds his hand very tightly. She has gone quiet now. Occasionally she sniffs. The shop is tiny, a shrine to pink and glitter, fairy dust, wands, sequins, tinsel and fairy lights, all sparkly corners and mirrors and pink plastic.