But I can’t just forget what’s happened because this has been the most memorable weekend I’ve had since I was seven, when our caravan got wedged under a car park barrier on the Isle of Sheppey. And I can’t go back because my old life has gone forever. The last couple of days have been a, well I wouldn’t use the word
nightmare
, because you recover from bad dreams, don’t you?
Sorry, I know I’m rambling. I think it’s shock.
They need some decent curtains on the windows in this room. Heals are having a sale, they could get it out of petty cash and keep the receipt because you never know, the colours might clash. Do thugs get expenses?
I don’t feel well. I think I’m going to be sick.
I don’t deserve to be in a situation like this. I can no longer make sense of the world. Nothing is in its right place anymore. There are shadows everywhere. Life can cloud over as fast as a spring morning, and suddenly everything becomes hopeless. It seems unfair, like being told you’re seriously ill by a cheerful, harrassed doctor.
Let me start at the – you know.
CHAPTER TWO
Mrs. Bloke
M
Y FULL NAME
is Penelope June Cryer, only I changed my Christian and middle names around because no-one wants to be called Penny Cryer, it sounds like a Victorian newspaper.
First of all, let me get this straight, I never meant to get involved in anything violent. It’s not like me. I’m too unfashionable. I’m nice. I always buy tea-towels from those boys who call at the front door trying to better themselves. I’ll always put a woolly glove on the railings. I stop and listen to charity muggers until they look for a chance to get away. But nice people finish last, don’t they?
I know that being a housewife is as boring as a Post Office queue. I wanted something more, but not this. They say loss of innocence is irreversible. Well, my consciousness has been raised. I’ve finally found out what I’ve been missing, and it’s way too much information, I can tell you.
Look, I’m trying to keep everything together so I can explain, but it’s not easy.
Today is Sunday, but my descent into chaos goes further back to… well, my old life, my life up to the end of last week, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where… although I’d say handwriting.
I did calligraphy at school and have a wonderful signature, with a sweeping Arabic flourish on the end of the ‘Y’ like I’m signing my name to a painting after years of work. I could show you a hundred signatures and they’d all be identical. I could make a biro work upside down, like spacemen. I got married and when the marriage disappointed, I started shopping. I was ready to use my signature in the nation’s stores, and what happened? They introduced pin numbers, which aren’t the same. Signatures were personal. Nobody sees my signature now. It was all I had, damnit. Now I’m just an arrangement of digits in someone’s databank.
Credit was easy, not really money at all, just tapping out four numbers. I carried no cash. My mother said cash was the filthiest thing you could ever hold in your hand because of all the other people it’s been through. Obviously she’d had little experience of penises.
I’ve never been good with money. I got a parking fine every single time I moved the car. We’re all supposed to ride bicycles now for the environment, but my mother was a district nurse and says all bicycles ever gave her was saddle-rash and an aversion to wicker.
I suppose the whole thing
really
started last Christmas. That was the first time I realised I had a problem.
I have shopping glands. The only thing I love more than shopping is reassessing my purchases. You know, when you get them home and lay them all out and see exactly what you’ve bought? Remember that great feeling?
Between December 18th and 24th I spent over £9,450 on presents. The national average is £700. And I don’t even have anyone to buy for except my husband, my mother and a friend who lives down the street. When the bills came in I thought they’d got it wrong, then realised that I didn’t remember the shopping trip at all. I’d parked the car in Selfridges, I’d driven home with the boot and the back seat full of bags, but the bit in between was a complete blank.
I’d bought electrical goods I would never use, sweaters in triplicate, a yogurt-maker, night-goggles for God’s sake. I’d ordered a cat. Some rare breed with evil, wonky eyes and overactive sweat glands that you have to keep wiping down with a damp cloth; I don’t know, it must have been on TV. Last year I bought a home defibrillator. It’s still in its box in the spare room.
The realisation of what I had done spoiled Christmas for me. I hid the bills from Gordon until I could figure out what to do. He spent the afternoon slumped in front of the telly performing eating rituals peculiar to the season, peering inside brazil nuts and chewing dried figs on a plastic fork. I bunged a Butterball into the oven but barely touched any of it myself. I had a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, three valiums and a packet of dry-roasted nuts, and sat in the kitchen fretting.
He went mad at me when he found the bills, but grudgingly paid up. He could afford it. Gordon places such importance on looking normal that it really becomes quite strange. He’s the sort of man who wears a tie to a funfair. When I was a kid, I used to stick Welsh flags in seaside sandcastles; thinking about it, it’s really odd, you know? I did it because the Welsh flag always came in a packet with the other flags when you bought a bucket and spade, that’s all. So it was the normal thing to do. Gordon thinks eating dried figs one day a year is normal, but it’s just what you’re used to.
We all do what we’re used to, and I’m used to Gordon. He was always kind to me, in a vague, thoughtless English way. He often came home with garage carnations (why is one always bright blue?) and a box of Black Magic. Men called Gordon do things like that, they have to live up to the name. He allowed me to assume that he would always be there for me. He made sure our life together was cloaked in common sense.
That’s how things were with us. We didn’t lead the empowered lives you read about in magazines. People in magazines are only in magazines because they’re not remotely normal. Me, I’m used to being invisible. The kids in our street called me Mrs. Bloke because that’s what I was, the wife of some man they saw going to work every morning, leaving the house with a briefcase. If I was on a soap opera I’d be billed as Woman Carrying Sainsbury’s Bags, Woman Examining Refrigerated Desserts, Woman Peering Crossly Out Of Garden Window.
I feel special now, singled out for attention after years of transparency, but when you see what I’ve had to go through in the last couple of days, you’ll understand why.
CHAPTER THREE
The Betrayal
I
REALISED
I had a problem with spending money. Getting it was easy enough, because I had an allowance from Gordon. He’s always had the same job – he works for Selway, the biggest shoe company in Croydon, no designer labels, just generic menswear, black Oxford toecaps, trainers, workboots, the kind of shoes you see on salesmen who smell like hot cows after two months in the same footgear. Middle-aged men wear belts that are slightly too tight, just as women do with brassieres. Any sales assistant will tell you there’s hardly a woman over thirty who chooses the right bra size. Gordon is nine years older than me, and Head of Regional Sales. He makes good money and was always generous, but when the men in his family hit thirty-five they all start to look like something out of Sofa World, and only notice you when you stand in front of the football and lift their legs to vacuum.
Gordon and June. Our names went together like Marks & Spencer or Burke & Hare. One never appeared without the other. Before we got married, Gordon didn’t behave like a Gordon. He was more of a Dan or Jack. He was full of grand ideas. He gave me the impression that he wanted to get tattooed and spend a year in Goa before owning a chain of stores that sold personalised sound systems, but after one sniff of an air-conditioned office he was ready for a nameplate on his desk. I didn’t have any grand plans, but I wanted a baby boy. The pregnancy was a surprise and he married me because his mother insisted, and he forgot he ever had dreams, but he remembered to blame me.
Everything continued to stay normal until just over a month ago, when our son would have been ten. That was when we had the really big fight. I thought I knew all there was to know about a man. They didn’t appear to be much more complicated than video recorders, it was just a matter of programming them correctly. It turns out they’re more like Swedish ovens; certain buttons used in combination produce entirely inexplicable effects.
It was a special occasion, and I wanted to buy Gordon something special to mark the day, so I decided to borrow the car because the trains were playing up. He kept a spare key inside the mallard. We have this china duck on the mantelpiece. Gordon won’t let me drive his car, not because he thinks I’m a bad driver, he just thinks I’ll crash it and kill someone, so I’ve always taken the train, but they were running late so I risked his new Vauxhall.
I didn’t tell him I was going to borrow it. I thought he wouldn’t find out if I put the seat and mirror back. I like shopping in London even though the parking is enough to make you stab a traffic warden through the eye, but I decided to head to Croydon because I get bored driving. Except when there’s a radio play on, and even then the sound effects annoy me, especially opening doors and tinkling tea-things.
The Vauxie’s air conditioning made a terrible rattling noise when I turned it on. I lay down on the seat and shone a torch through the vent on the passenger side but couldn’t see anything, so I unscrewed the panel under it and disconnected the hose. I know how to do basic car maintenance because my father ran a garage and I used to watch him. I still couldn’t see what was making the noise, so I connected the nozzle of my vacuum cleaner to the hose and put it on blow. I was looking down the vent, which was probably a bad idea because something shot out and hit me in the face.
More accurately, it stuck in my forehead. I felt blood trickling into my eyes. I went back into the house and ran to a mirror. It was a diamond earring, elegant setting, a good-sized blue-white oval stone, and it wasn’t mine. And it was stuck between my eyes. I looked like an Indian woman.
How does a strange diamond earring get into the air vent of a car only driven by your husband?
Let me tell you about Gordon. He’s insensible to the grace of living. Desk and office, house and garden, no mysteries that can’t be solved with the contents of a toolbox. I suppose I’d always known about his affairs. It wasn’t the first time he had been unfaithful. He’s not particularly attractive, he’s a little overweight and drifting within range of Pringle jumpers, so I think when the offer of sex came up he just took it.
He believes everything he reads in the tabloids, especially about immigrants ruining the country. I’ve always wondered what would happen if he met a sexy immigrant, he’d probably blow a fuse puzzling over the paradox. He travelled a fair amount, so there were hotels, and of course his car, which functioned like a combination office and bedroom. I’m pretty sure they were doing it in the Vauxhall because once I searched the glove box and found an empty foil disc of birth control pills and a luggage receipt for Antwerp. But I still couldn’t imagine him being unfaithful – even with all the weird phone calls.
They were weird because he took the cordless into the shed even when the temperature was below zero, and he had the kind of peculiar strangled conversations men have when they’re trying to hide something. I’d stayed in denial because I wanted our marriage to work, which is an unfashionable view when you see all those trendy women in car commercials kicking men out of their loft apartments. But life wasn’t like that for me, it was about bleach and Hoover bags and quietly crying after midnight so as not to let the neighbours hear. Gordon said we had to talk problems over, but he always managed to talk me out of anything I wanted to change.
I cleaned the cut on my head and was standing by the garden gate with the earring in my hand feeling a bit dazed when Hilary, my next door neighbour, walked past and spoke without stopping to engage her brain. Hilary is tall and wears a shade of coral gloss lipstick I’m sure they’ve discontinued everywhere except Africa.
‘Oh you’ve found it,’ she said, ‘thank God, I’ve been looking everywhere.’
She thought I’d just picked the earring up in the street. Then she realised the truth and changed colour. Hilary makes herself taller with pinned-up hair that needs a better conditioner than the complimentary kind she hoards from air-crew hotels. Hilary is a BA flight attendant who knows how to blow a whistle for attracting attention, which is something she looks like she’s had a lot of practice at.
I didn’t know what to say. I numbly handed her the earring, and as I did I had a clear mental picture of Hilary with her tights off and her Zara skirt hiked up astride Gordon in the passenger seat, banging her head against the windscreen. What was so galling is that she’s older than me, one of those old-school British Airways bulldog-women in Belisha-beacon makeup who’s born to wear a Hermes neck scarf with horseshoes on it.
I had a deal going with Gordon; he always paid for his infidelities. But this was so blatant that as I grabbed the car keys I thought to hell with Croydon, it’s time for Selfridges and Harvey Nicks, the point being that in one afternoon I planned to revenge-shop myself into a coma. If I hadn’t decided to do that I wouldn’t have seen the shoes and I’d never have ended up here, covered in blood.
I was only going to go shopping, and now I have to die for it, how does that one work out?
CHAPTER FOUR
Birth Of An Addiction
B
EFORE
I
MOVED
to Hamingwell, I lived with my parents in one of those yellow-brick Edwardian terraced houses that provided a dream-memory of order and safety for its inheritors.