Authors: Catherine Hunt
Harry Pelham had spent Monday evening spying on his wife and daughter. He had taken a risk and gone home to collect his car. He reckoned he had a good chance of getting away with it so long as he was careful and he needed the car if he was going to watch her. A taxi dropped him at the end of his road and he walked, very cautiously, towards his house. It was possible the police would be waiting for him, but he doubted they had the manpower to stake out his home all the time. Most likely, they checked now and again to see if he’d come back.
The house was detached and well screened from its neighbours, and, so far as Harry could tell, the coast was clear. He avoided the house itself, made straight for the garage to the side of it, and within a couple of minutes, had taken his car and was gone. He checked the rear-view mirror; there was no one in pursuit.
He drove to the country lane where his wife and daughter lived, leaving his car a few hundred yards short of their cottage where the lane widened and he could park anonymously among residents’ cars. He walked towards the cottage, passing a couple of houses and arriving at the gate without seeing anyone. He crept inside, stood in the cover of the boundary hedge, and waited.
It had turned out to be a cold and fruitless exercise. All he had got from it was a glimpse of Martha through the kitchen window.
Later that night, he had walked down to the sea front and sat on a bench in the chill, bright night. But it was not the cold that made his hands tremble. He had stayed a long time, staring out at the sea glittering under the moon, considering his next move. Then he went back to his hotel. Hard to sleep. Uneasy dreams.
He’s collecting Martha. She’s in a building, on the twelfth floor. He’s waiting by the lift, waiting for a long, long time. He’s getting impatient. At last it arrives. The doors open but there’s no lift; just thick ropes hanging down covered in bright red jelly. A security guard walks over to him, hands him one of the ropes, tells him he must climb to the twelfth floor if he wants to see his daughter.
He starts climbing, but he’s afraid. His hands keep slipping on the jelly. He looks up and sees two men dressed as clowns laughing at him from the twelfth floor. He carries on, gets halfway up the lift shaft, then realizes it’s not jelly at all. It’s blood. Bright red blood. He lets go of the rope in shock and he falls …
Harry woke up urgently needing to see his daughter. He could not wait a moment longer. Ben Morgan’s words were in his head, eating away at him, ‘She’s heartbroken, she misses you so much … she cries herself to sleep and talks to you through her favourite teddy bear.’
He told himself the man was deranged, perhaps so traumatized by his own experience that he was muddling up his daughter, Millie, with Martha – putting her words into Martha’s mouth. More likely still, it was all a product of Morgan’s unhinged imagination. In any case he was a fool to let it bother him. Harry told himself these things but his heart rebelled.
It was half-term week and Martha was going away on Wednesday to stay with a school friend. She would be back at the end of the week and he was due to take her out for the day on Saturday. That was all organized before the bail conditions, of course, he thought bitterly. Now he was not due to take Martha out at all, not ever.
On Tuesday morning Harry texted his daughter, asked if she was free any time that day to meet him, just for half an hour or so. It was a stupid thing to do, he knew that, a deliberate breach of his bail, and if his wife and her lawyer got to know about it, he was in trouble. But he was desperate so he did it anyway.
Martha replied that she was spending the day with her friend, Jessie. Her mum was about to drop her there and then Jessie’s mum was taking them shopping in town and then bowling. She supposed she could meet him but it couldn’t be for long, before lunch maybe. Did he want her to keep it a secret?
Her message sounded so grown-up that it made him wince. Mixed emotions. Pleasure that he could see her, guilt that he was involving her in something she thought of as a deception. It astonished him how she picked up the vibes, how instinctively she knew she should keep quiet about meeting him. She was only eight but already she was wise in the ways of adults. It scared him like a lot of things had recently.
He waited for her outside a doll and teddy bear shop in The Lanes. Not so long ago it had been a favourite place but, lately, she’d made it clear she was far too old for it. Unlikely then, he thought unhappily, that she would talk to him at night through her favourite bear. He realized then that it was not something he would feel able to ask her.
He saw the three of them approaching and his heart squeezed. Martha was tall for her age and thin. Almost too thin, Harry thought, though she liked her food well enough. But Anna was strict. No daughter of hers was going to be overweight, she said. Anna had told him she had once been fat herself and had suffered badly for it.
He was relieved to find that he didn’t recognize the woman or Jessie, the other child. Martha ran the last few yards, threw her arms around him and hugged him in her usual enthusiastic way. She smiled up at him with his own dark brown eyes. In looks, at least, she resembled him a lot.
The woman was friendly enough; she seemed to have no problem with the meeting and asked no awkward questions. They agreed that he would bring Martha back in an hour’s time to the Italian place round the corner where they were having lunch.
‘I told her you had to go away for work and I wanted to see you now,’ his daughter announced proudly when the other two had gone.
Harry put his hand on her head, stroked her long, dark hair. She was lying for him now and it made him feel awful. He said gently that it wasn’t really a good idea to make things up.
‘But Daddy I had to tell her something or she might have rung Mummy to check. I thought she might anyway so I said Mummy knew about it and it was like a last minute thing.’
He sighed and she asked him if anything was wrong. He understood then that she was anxious, that his text had been out of the ordinary and it had upset her. He wished he hadn’t troubled her. What purpose had there been in it anyway, except his own selfish desire to see her and to reassure himself that the things Ben Morgan had said were not true? A gloomy helplessness descended on him, these days he seemed to call everything wrong.
‘Sweetheart, everything’s great. I just wanted to see you, that’s all. You know how much I love you, don’t you? And I miss you.’
She gave him the ‘look’, the one that, even though she was eight-years-old, was always dead on and never missed. He remembered that he never could fool her.
‘I love you too, Daddy,’ she said in a serious voice and his heart twisted.
He sat with her in a café for the next hour in a state of forced cheerfulness, her dark eyes watching him over the top of her strawberry milkshake. He talked of anything but what he wanted to say. At the end of it he hoped he’d set her mind at rest but his own was still in a mess. He could not be sure that tonight she would not cry herself to sleep, could not be certain that the teddy bear was a fiction.
‘Is Joe a friend of yours too?’ she asked him. It came out of the blue just as they were about to leave.
‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure I know him,’ he said carefully, then with a sudden flash of intuition added, ‘but maybe I do. Is he a teddy bear?’
She looked at him as if he was a total idiot. The scorn in her young face withered him.
‘Of course he isn’t,’ she said sternly, ‘he’s a friend of Mummy’s. He came to see her yesterday.’
For almost three hours they’d kissed and touched and tasted and pressed their bodies together and still Anna Pelham had not had nearly enough of him. His beauty overwhelmed her and she experienced, for just a few moments, a total joy. But then the maggot of doubt was crawling back into her Eden, bigger than ever, feeding off her insecurity and terror – the terror of losing him, the unshakeable fear that she was on borrowed time.
Just the thought of his arrival had given her a tremendous high, a buzz all through her body. Even now, after months of knowing him, her heart beat a little faster, butterflies fluttered in her stomach, and the palms of her hands were damp. She checked herself in the bedroom mirror. Did she look good enough? Good enough for him.
She had washed her blonde hair twice and it shone. Long legs, flat belly, lots of curves, waxed all over. Joe Greene found all these things hot and she made sure she didn’t disappoint. She kept herself fit and slender, relentlessly expelling any hint of fat. She exercised with a personal trainer twice a week and whenever she could, which was nearly every day in term time, she swam fifty lengths at the pool.
She loved the cottage because everything in it reminded her of him. His smell was on the sheets, on the duvet as she hugged it to her face. Before leaving Harry, she had searched long and hard for a place to rent; a place not just for herself and Martha, but for herself and Joe, where his visits could pass unnoticed, where nosy neighbours could be kept at arm’s length, where one day they could be together, forever, as they were meant to be. As they had always been meant to be.
He visited mainly during the day when Martha was at school but sometimes, if Martha had a sleepover at a friend’s house, Joe would come in the evening. There had been two heavenly occasions when he’d stayed all night. On one of them, while he was sleeping, she had taken a photo on her mobile of the two of them in bed together. She knew it was reckless because they mustn’t be found out, but she couldn’t resist it. She needed it, needed something definite to cling on to when he was not with her, something to look at, and love.
In Anna’s subconscious, though, he was with her all the time. She felt his presence in every room. In the early evening watching TV with her daughter, he was sitting there with them like a proper family; when she took a bath he would slide down with her into the warm water; at night he slept with her in the double bed. She would desire him, reach for him, imagine that he held her close and it would light the fire inside her. Later, when her hand lay flat on the empty sheet, she would feel a pang of disappointment at the realization that he was not actually there.
Anna had reread her schooldays’ notebook many times in recent months and now she looked through it again. Joe Greene. The saviour. She had been so right about him twenty years ago – about how much she wanted him. It had been no simple infatuation. It had stood the test of time.
It had been there, bubbling away inside her, all those years. A dormant volcano waiting to erupt. He had been there, constantly there, at the back of her mind. But the chances of ever having him had seemed so utterly remote that she had resigned herself, or imagined she had, to forgetting him. What nonsense that had been, a total delusion. She had never resigned herself. Of course not. She could have no life without him. That was so clear to her now. Why else did she have Joe’s collection, with everything she had taken from the dustbins all those years ago, buried in a locked briefcase in the garden? Why else had she kept it safe and cherished it?
Two years ago, when she and Harry moved house, she had taken it out again. She had not looked at it since her marriage, had locked it away out of sight, out of her life, because she knew how badly it destabilized her. It had lost none of its potency. She searched for him then on the Internet, couldn’t help herself, and the thrill of discovering that he was an actor had been extreme. His picture stared out from the computer screen. It was like a time bomb going off, reawakening all the old feelings of love as if they had never slept. Intense. Overwhelming. Uncontrollable.
It rattled, close on blew away, the flimsy structure of her relationship with Harry. Anna had found marriage difficult and having a family even harder. She had put off getting pregnant as long as she could, not wanting the commitment, but Harry had become insistent, and in the end, she had gone along with him. Why not, she thought? – after all, no other life, no other man would be much better because the only life she had ever wanted, the only man she had ever wanted, was Joe, and he was gone.
Now she had found him again and her world shook. She searched for news of him, constantly, on every website she could think of, but it was a disappointing quest for there was not much to find. One day, one very special day, she found him on Facebook. She could access only a few basic details but his photo was there and she stared at it, spellbound. She ached to ask him to accept her as a ‘friend’ but she didn’t dare to. She could not face possible rejection.
Then came a heart-stopping moment when she read that he was appearing in a play by Tom Stoppard called
The Real Thing
. It was on at a fringe theatre in East London. The thought of seeing Joe, glorious on stage, took her breath away and she knew at once that she must go.
The play was about love, and Joe had the lead part. The script was complicated, and as she sat there gazing at him, she wasn’t sure she fully understood it. It seemed to be trying to pin down the nature of love – what is real love and how do you know when you have it? But she didn’t need to follow the words because she already knew the answers to the questions. She simply stared at the man who was saying them. She felt the yearning for him, deep and strong.
Anna cursed herself for marrying Harry; what had she been thinking of? Now she had Joe again, life with Harry was unbearable, sex with Harry intolerable but she had to bear it because Harry would not be denied, would not leave her alone. She gritted her teeth, tried unsuccessfully to blot out his face and replace it with Joe’s.
It was a couple of months after the theatre visit that it happened. She was searching the websites again with keen anticipation, hoping for something thrilling, perhaps a new play she could see him in. As she entered Joe’s name on the screen, a rush of excitement ran through her.
She believed she had a sixth sense about him, that she could tell if he was happy or sad, that she would know instinctively if he were to undergo any life-changing event. It made the shock ten times worse. She had no premonition, no sense that something bad was going to happen. It was a bolt from the blue.