And so, without waiting any longer, I tell him.
He listens, not saying a word. He’s always been a great listener. He barely breaks eye contact, even when he sips his black coffee – he never drinks tea.
At the end of it, he sits back. ‘Jo,’ he says.
I wait for the tough love. This is how he does things. He listens silently, then sums it up in one sentence; usually a sentence nobody else would be able to get away with saying to me. You need to stop seeing your fucking rude parents, for example. Or, Stand up for yourself, then.
‘It will …’ he says, ‘it will be okay.’ He taps my leg, ever so gently, and that’s that.
‘And then after that,’ I say.
‘After it all … babies,’ he says with a nod, confirming that we are on the same page, even in a crisis.
‘Ginger babies,’ I say.
‘Steady on,’ he murmurs.
The relief is overwhelming. Both at his acceptance of our situation, and the reassurance he would never usually give. It’s so overwhelming it becomes intoxicating. I creep closer to him on the sofa. Maybe it will all be okay, I am thinking. Maybe this will be behind us in a few months’ time. Not laughed off, not minimized in the way that I’d hoped, but behind us nevertheless. Reuben is always right, and so I believe him.
And that’s what makes me want to tell him.
‘I was talking to Sarah about how long the guy was face down in the water …’
‘In the water?’ Reuben says.
‘Yes.’
He doesn’t say anything, but something in his body language changes. It stills. I am about to tell him, but then he is looking at me peculiarly. It is as though he is reassessing me.
‘And how long was it?’ he says.
‘No time, really,’ I lie. ‘I got him out straight away. But she asked,’ I add uselessly.
Reuben nods, once; a firm, downward movement. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘She probably just … she’s probably just checking.’
‘Yes. It was immediate.’
He doesn’t say anything else. I give it a few seconds, but he sips his coffee, swallows audibly, and then sips again. Not speaking. Not quite looking at me.
But I can read his features so well, even though what I see on them now surprises me. He is usually sympathetic to the wrongdoer; the underdog. But now I see his brow wrinkle, his top lip curl up slightly, and I know that he is thinking, How could you do this, Jo? But he doesn’t say it. Why would he?
11
Conceal
It’s all over the newspapers.
I can’t google it. Can’t ask anyone. Can’t browse BBC News on an iPad, for fear of leaving an evidence trail, but I can read it in the papers that come every morning – the papers Reuben devours with his coffee.
I grab the local newspaper before he can and spread it out in the sunlit kitchen. It’s stopped sleeting, finally, and outside the frost sparkles in the light.
The police are treating his death as suspicious, an article on page nine says. I read that sentence over and over. They are appealing for anybody who was in the area that night to come forward. The funeral will be next Monday, it adds.
I go to bundle the paper up, to throw it away before Reuben sees and asks me if I have volunteered what I know, but then I see the quote, in bold. Imran will be missed, it says. It is signed off Mohammed Abdullah, Imam, Paddington Mosque. He will be missed. Because of me.
I screw the paper up and take it outside, putting it in Edith’s recycling bin. My left hand aches as I do so. I call the GP. I’ll make something up, I reason. I make an appointment. I’ll get that hand sorted, if nothing else.
The next day, I swing my legs out of bed. The ever-present sweat evaporates off them, feeling like needles on my skin.
I haven’t hidden any evidence yet. I have been watching endless Netflix episodes in the night when I can’t sleep and not doing anything about my problems. It is Classic Joanna, Reuben would say, if he knew. Vintage Joanna. Not in a disparaging way. Just in a factual way: it is what I do.
Only, I’m not able to ignore it completely. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Usually, I have no trouble ignoring things. The huge gas bill we got that quarter when I had the heating on constantly. I just hid the bill under the bed. The lump in my armpit I had for over eighteen months but never saw the doctor about. It went, in the end, but what if it hadn’t? And yet this – this, I can’t ignore. It keeps popping into my mind, making me sweat and shake intermittently.
I’ve got to get rid of the evidence. That’s the most important thing. I’m not trying to get away with it. Not yet. I can’t decide that. The guilt is too bad. But I need to protect myself. For the time being. And that starts now.
I call work, speak to Daisy in the office, say I’m at the doctor’s. I’ll go in later. Nobody is surprised. I’ve got form for this unreliability, sadly, a fact Wilf – who has never called in sick once – finds astonishing.
We were the Murphy siblings. Off to Oxbridge. Ruling the school, in the musicals and the orchestras and the swimming teams. We were almost famous. We used to be so similar. We were high achievers, but we were also pissabouts, behind the scenes. Used to do our homework reluctantly so we could be free to find our Narnias in the back garden (Wilf once did a wee in the bushes and Dad told him off for being vulgar) and bounce on our beds. We were allies against our oppressive parents and the silent, huge house. And then he changed. Or rather, I floundered. I went to Oxford and couldn’t do it without somebody cracking the whip, and Wilf … well, he rose to it. Becoming the kind of person who enters six marathons a year and talks endlessly about training runs. The kind of person who has extreme opinions about the stock markets and discusses them in Zizzi on your thirtieth birthday – for example.
And so, despite what he’d say, I feel no guilt in calling in sick. I’m not even a librarian. I am unqualified. It hardly matters. Besides, it’s Ed’s day off today, thank God. Hopefully he’ll never realize I have been off, too.
I can’t make a list, and so I sit on the end of our bed and consider the evidence. I itemize it in my mind.
My coat.
My shoes.
CCTV.
My gloves.
My scarf.
My appearance.
Witnesses.
DNA?
I catch sight of myself in the mirrored wardrobe doors and wince. It’s all so amateur. If this had happened to Reuben – not that any of it ever would have, I think with a frown; not only because of his morals but also because of his gender – he would have had some idea of what to do. Do police look at the tread of a shoe at a crime scene? Do they check every CCTV camera, question everyone in the area, search for minuscule bits of DNA that might have drifted down on to the steps? Or would they think: this is unexplained; perhaps this man tripped? I have no idea. None.
The first thing I must do is get rid of everything I was wearing.
I can’t burn them. It would draw too much attention. I don’t want to bin them. I would worry about where they’d end up, that they could be traced to me.
Sainsbury’s, I think. There’s a clothing bank. I could put them in there. They will become anonymous, tangled with all the other clothes. I get in the car, having stuffed the clothes and shoes – those beautiful shoes, with their cream ribbons, worn once – in a bag for life, and drive there. My hands are slick with sweat on the steering wheel and leave an imprint on the plastic door handle as I get out.
I stand next to my car, the milky winter sunlight in my eyes. A man is ahead of me at the clothing bank, meticulously opening and closing the tray as he loads blouses and skirts on to it. I cannot help but stop and stare at him. It’s not what he’s doing. It’s the look on his face. I think he’s trying not to cry. His chin quivers violently. His hands shake.