If You Knew Her Read online

  ‘Shall I do the olives in halves or not bother?’ she asks, taking a sip of red wine.

  I sit opposite her. ‘Don’t bother,’ I say, before handing her a cucumber.

  She’d been telling me a story about a new boy band I hadn’t heard of who have just been caught in the press with fifty-pound notes rolled up their nostrils, hoovering up cocaine.

  ‘Anyway, looks like we’re going to have to drop them. I feel a bit sorry for them really. It’s all over before it even began. Too much too young. I mean, imagine if we’d had a million quid when we were twenty?’

  I picture us when we met at Bristol University, me in my impersonation Doc Martens, dark eyeliner round my eyes, rarely smiling to hide the gap in my teeth, trying to pretend I wasn’t giddy with freedom, and Jess next to me in the tie-dye outfits she’d picked up in Thailand, a roll-up permanently at her lips. She hated her halls so she moved into my room. We slept top to tail in my single bed for months. Back then, we’d try and picture what we would be like when we were married women with careers, families and now, almost twenty years on, we try and remember what we were like then.

  Neither of us says anything for a moment. Jess carries on chopping and I take oil and vinegar out of the cupboard to make a salad dressing. Jess finishes chopping the cucumber and sits back with her wine cupped in her hands, her long legs crossed.

  ‘So how’re things at Kate’s? How’s Frank?’

  ‘He’s just the same. I get so nervous the doctor I was telling you about will get the PVS diagnosis he’s after and that’ll be it for Frank. Then it’ll never be about rehabilitation for him, just management. He’s only just turned fifty for god’s sake, so young to have had such a massive stroke, and although it’s unrealistic to expect a full recovery, I don’t think it’s crazy to think he could get some quality of life back. Otherwise he could have another thirty years just staring at the ceiling.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Jess picks up the bottle of red and waves it at me; I shake my head and pour myself another fizzy water.

  ‘We’ve got a minor celebrity on the ward at the moment actually.’ It feels good to have a story Jess will appreciate for once.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Jess doesn’t look up as she pours herself another glass of wine.

  I feel hot with guilt suddenly. Cassie isn’t a ‘good story’; she’s a patient. I’d be livid if I heard someone else talking about Cassie like that. I remind myself that Mary tells Pat everything, and besides, Jess is, most of the time, an expert keeper of secrets. She has to be in her job.

  ‘It’s that woman from the Juice-C advert.’

  Jess looks blank for just a second before she says, ‘Oh god, not “There’s the sun” girl?’

  I nod. ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ I tell her about the hit and run, about Cassie, Charlotte and Jack. I don’t mention the baby; that would be a breach too far.

  ‘What are her mates like?’ Jess asks, but her phone buzzes on the table. She expertly starts pecking away at the screen with her forefinger, immediately disinterested. But it’s good timing; for once I’m glad her phone’s distracted her and I don’t have to answer her question.

  I wish I knew some of Cassie’s friends. I imagine them as bohemian creative types: people who probably lived abroad, maybe Italy for a while; people who practise mindfulness and have visited every theatre in London. I’d like to meet some of them; they’d reassure me that Cassie is more like them, not like the Disney-style character from the advert.

  Jess keeps tapping away at her phone before she waggles the screen towards me. She’s already found out Cassie’s full name from the advert credits and found Cassie’s account on Facebook. The photo is the one from Christmas, the close-up of Cassie in black and white decorating the tree. I feel another shameful twist of jealousy. Without doing anything, and despite everything, Cassie seems to have a knack of making me envious. To neutralise the feeling I say, ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’

  Jess turns the camera back towards herself. She wrinkles her nose as she looks at the picture. ‘Yeah, but she doesn’t look particularly happy if you ask me. I practically work in the business of fake smiles and that –’ she jabs her finger at her phone, and I wish she wouldn’t; it seems unkind, disrespectful somehow ‘– that is a fake smile.’

  I don’t look at Jess. Instead I turn away and start shaking the salad bottle hard. I hear Jonny’s voice, close, as if he was here in my kitchen, whispering in my ear. ‘She was scared.’

  Jess, thank god, drops her phone back on the table. She’s finished for now.

  ‘So what else is going on?’ she asks.

  I stop shaking the dressing. I want to tell someone. I want to tell Jess and, after all, I’ve been good not telling Jess about Cassie’s baby, but I can tell her about my own; that’s my choice. I put the dressing down on the table and bend my knees so I’m level with Jess. She looks slightly startled as I take her hand.

  ‘I’ve got some news actually.’

  She knows immediately, but even Jess isn’t quick enough to hide the frown, the concern that flashes across her face. We stand as she pulls me into a hug that lasts a bit too long.

  ‘Oh, Ali!’ she says, over my shoulder. ‘That’s great!’

  But I feel like I’m being consoled, not congratulated. I regret telling her immediately; the news curdles in my throat like a bad joke. Jess knows everything, of course, about all of my miscarriages. I feel I need to prove to her that I’m calm about it, that I know I’m still a long way from being a mother.

  ‘I’m only about three weeks though. You’re the first to know.’

  ‘Are you going to tell David?’ she asks. Her phone buzzes again but she ignores it this time, keeps holding my hands, trying to gauge if I am genuinely OK.

  I feel my face flush and think of Cassie not telling Jack. I think how brave, how loving she was to protect him. I want to do the same for David; he doesn’t need to go through it all again. I shake my head at Jess. ‘No, not yet. In a few weeks probably.’ I shrug, and meet her gaze. ‘I’m OK though, and I promise I’ll let you know if anything changes.’

  We both turn towards the door; we can hear David and Tim laughing, about to come into the kitchen. Jess kisses me quickly on the cheek and I turn away from the kitchen door, busying myself finding the right tools to serve the lasagne, while I compose my face.

  David and Tim burst into the kitchen. They’re too full of their own conversation to notice my delicate news hanging in the air. David opens another bottle of wine and David and Tim talk over each other as they explain a breakthrough they’ve just had with the building design. I serve up the lasagne with David, and as we all sit down, I’m breathing steadier again because I know, despite all the fear, there’s still a chance we might have a child, and I feel in my chest that old, familiar bud of hope beginning to bloom.

  11

  Frank

  I remember the glass of water. In an emergency, there’s always some poor sap who fetches a glass of water, isn’t there? In my case, no one knew his name. He was just out for a quiet Tuesday pint, one of those lonely drinkers; most pubs have one. I was one of them for a while. He probably felt like he needed to do something, wanted to help. So he went behind the bar and poured a pint of water from the tap – no ice, no lemon – and plonked it down in front of my nose where I rested, surrounded by broken glass on the cool, slightly sticky stone floor. Some of the water slip-sloshed over the edge.

  Could’ve got me a pint, mate.

  I looked through the glass. The pub was softer this way. It had a magical, dream-like quality. Even Ange who was cradling my head in her lap and screaming louder than ever on the phone.

  ‘How the hell do I know if it’s a stroke?!’, her fingers pressed hard into my neck – had a celestial quality to her. I wanted to ask if I gave up booze, seriously this time, would she take me back? That I need her help. Things are worse, way worse, without her … without Luce. But my voice came out in strange little barks like an annoying yapping dog. I didn’t want
to piss her off any more so I gave up trying.

  It started about an hour before Ange and I met in the Green Man. At first, I thought the pain was heartache because we were meeting to sign the divorce papers. I hadn’t gone to detox like I promised I would and I’d failed Ange’s ultimatum ‘booze or us’ for a third and final time. Every time I told her I chose ‘us’ I’d feel the creature limber up, protract its claws to test their sharpness, and lick its incisors. Honestly, I didn’t stand a chance. Before I even got to the Green Man the pain was electric, gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing just behind my eyeballs, deep in my head, like I was clenching a block of ice between my teeth.

  My second thought was that this pain was just a new flavour of hangover. So I decided to go to the Green Man early. I had plenty of time to down a few pints before she told me I failed, our marriage coffin arrived and we lowered the last twenty-three years into the ground.

  A small group of teenagers, younger than Lucy, clutching sparklers, on their way to a Bonfire Party, smirked and giggled as they walked past me on the street. I knew how I must look to them – a scruffy, saggy-eyed man walking in rigid zombie steps towards the pub – but I was too close to care. Small mercies.

  I tried to move my right arm to open the pub door, but it had grown distant, as if amputated from the rest of me. So I just threw my body against the door and almost fell into the comfort of the dark, damp-smelling pub.

  This is one bastard of a hangover.

  As I raised the pint glass to my mouth, I realised my hands had frozen rigid, like dinosaur claws. I had to use both of them to pick up the glass. The liquid streamed over my cheeks as I tipped my head back too far. It made my jumper wet.

  Wherever I’d been, there must have been whisky, and lots of it. I’m only like this when there’s whisky in me.

  I finished the first pint, then had another. I felt every one of the billions of cells in my body, as it chimed against its neighbour like fine crystal glass, and I thought that was probably a good sign, the booze doing its job. So I ordered a third pint, skilfully avoiding eye contact with the barman, when Ange arrived. It had been four months since I last saw her. Four months since she’d got the phone call from the police. I’d been gone a week, and had ended up under Waterloo Bridge apparently, trying to find a building site I thought I was managing. I’d been redundant for a year. Without a word she drove me to a cheap hotel in Worthing, a few miles from home. She’d already dumped my clothes inside.

  In the Green Man, Ange’s blonde hair was longer than I remembered. I wanted to tell her she looked pretty but she curled her lip when she saw me, as if I smelt bad, and she didn’t look pretty any more. My claw-hands clung to the lip of the bar like a bat’s thumb as I stood to hug her, but I misjudged it. Ange outstretched her arms to try and catch me, but I was too heavy. My pint smashed first, the liquid rebounding off the floor in a gorgeous amber wave. I remember thinking how much it’s going to hurt when I land on that glass but then immediately I stopped worrying because I was on the floor already, and the glass must have slid quietly through my skin and into my body but I didn’t feel it. Instead, every cell in my body melted with the cells from the stone floor, the boundary between my body and the floor no longer existed and I just wanted to stay, enjoy the feeling of my body evaporating, the creature curled and purring on the floor by my side. Even as Ange shouted down at me, that all-too-familiar look of shame and anger on her face giving away to horror as she started screaming for an ambulance, and despite all the heartache I’ve caused, all the embarrassment, and anguish, I let it all go, easy as exhaling cigarette smoke.

  Pooff!

  And it was the most tremendous relief.

  That was the last time I remember seeing her. Alice tells me she came in quite regularly in the beginning, but patience never was one of Ange’s virtues. For a while I liked to think she found it too hard seeing me like this, but Ange was always a pragmatic, practical type. She’s right to move on with her life; she’s spent too much time waiting for me to sort mine out.

  Happily, Jack disturbs my wallowing. He’s playing music from his phone connected to a little speaker for Cassie this morning. ‘Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”,’ he tells her (us). It’s only just started when his phone starts ringing through the speaker; he rejects the call. It rings immediately again. He frowns, irritated, and presses some buttons on his phone, presumably to stop it ringing a third time before he starts the music again from the beginning, holding the small speaker onto Cassie’s stomach, like they tell you to do in the baby books. It muffles the sound quality but I can still hear. The strings soar. I imagine the tiny baby turning somersaults, wriggling inside Cassie. I’m glad Jack’s here, with her. It must be a comfort for Cassie that the night visitor won’t come if Jack’s around.

  I’ve decided it was him, Jonny. He was desperate enough to run onto the ward before, after all. As I watch the baby grow, I keep thinking of his eyes and how panicked they were when he tried to get on the ward that first day, the life behind them like a fighting dog, who will either bite or lick if you put your hand too close.

  There’s only one reason he’d come to the ward, only one I can think of, and it makes all the hairs on my body rise and my organs clutch just thinking about it: the horror of him raising a pillow, or inserting something into Cassie’s drip. He wants to finish the job and I’ll be here, forced to watch.

  Come on, Frank, get a grip!

  It must be the music getting to me. I watch as Jack gazes at his wife. Every now and then, he smiles. I think he’s reminiscing. I wish he’d do it aloud; from here, they look like happy memories, and I could use some of them today.

  All too soon, Jack sits up straighter, clears his throat, and looking around himself quickly, he picks the speaker off Cassie’s belly and kisses her forehead and strokes her cheek before he leaves us alone again.

  I’m trying to replay the music, capture those soaring strings in my head, when Alice draws the curtain back. She’s humming; she must have heard the music as well. She turns my face towards her, the gap in her teeth visible. Small smiles keep escaping; they ripple across her face, and for once I wish they wouldn’t. I need her to be serious, on guard in case she’s here when he comes back.

  She looks down at me and out of the corner of my eye I see her smile drop. She moistens my eyes, and the solution runs wet tears down the side of my head towards my temples. It feels wonderful, lately my eyes have been even itchier than usual. I hope I’m not getting an infection.

  ‘Jonny Parker, Cassie and Jack’s neighbour, has been charged, Frank.’

  I know, Alice.

  She tells me about a ring that Cassie was wearing, her mum’s ring. She tells me about Jack holding Cassie’s engagement and wedding ring in his hands. I’m not too sure what she’s getting at. Alice has to wear her engagement ring around a chain on her neck to work; there’ll be a similarly perfectly innocent explanation why Cassie wasn’t wearing hers; maybe the turquoise ring suited her New Year’s outfit better. Jack probably brought her wedding rings in because he knew Cassie would want them in hospital with her, a talisman of hope for the future. If Alice knew, if she had any idea that Jonny’s been in here at night, she’d change her tune. I think of my vocal cords lying useless as a tiny shipwreck in the back of my throat, how they and they alone could save Cassie, could save her baby.

  I’ve amended my getting-better fantasy recently. I still walk out of the ward, holding Luce’s hand. We still stop at Alice, who hugs me as I thank her with all my being. The difference is, before Luce and I walk home and leave 9B forever, I tell that policewoman about Jonny, about him creeping in here and take him away there and then. No bail, no getting out this time. Cassie, behind her big pregnant belly, smiles thanks at me. Cassie wakes up soon after me and gives birth to a beautiful baby girl and her, Alice, Jack and the little one come and visit me and Luce in our little house in the countryside.

  Alice wipes the saline tears away from my face with some co
tton and her cautious smile is back as she turns to look at me, her brown eyes sparkling with joy, and I know what she’s going to say before she opens her mouth.

  ‘I’ve got some more news, Frank. Guess what?’

  Tell me, Alice.

  ‘I’m pregnant!’

  That’s wonderful.

  ‘I’m just a few weeks but I feel good, Frank, I really do. It feels different this time. I really think it’s different.’ Her smile fades only slightly. ‘I’m keeping it quiet though, for now. Just you and my friend Jess know.’

  Promise I won’t go blabbing.

  She smiles at me again, before she presses her bottom lip against her teeth a couple of times.

  What about a doctor, Alice. Shouldn’t you tell a doctor?

  But she’s up out of my visitor’s chair. She notes the readings from my machines before I hear another nurse calling her name.

  She comes back to me just a few minutes later, the bounce back in her voice as she says, ‘You have a visitor, Frank.’

  I don’t let myself think it could be her until I hear the sweetest word, sweeter than any music ever composed: ‘Dad?’

  Luce?

  ‘If you sit in this chair here,’ Alice tells her, ‘and lean in, he’ll be able to see you better.’

  Luce!

  I hear some scuffle and shuffle as Lucy follows Alice’s direction and then I see her. I see her. Her hair is darker, conker, thick, and bobbed. She blows her fringe off her forehead, just like she did when she was little and feeling nervous. Her skin is still milk-white and flawless. She’s had her nose pierced, a silver ring on her left nostril. She fiddles with it; there’s a red mark where it plunges into her, which looks painful, and I wince, despite myself.