‘I think she understands – a little bit.’
‘She’s a woman,’ Reuben says, nodding. He gets a second onion out of the bag.
I am sure he ordinarily wouldn’t, if he weren’t angry. It’ll be too strong, whatever he’s cooking. An onion husk skitters to the floor and he picks it up and puts it in the bin, then bends down and picks up a tiny, almost invisible piece and bins that too.
‘Don’t be such a misanthrope,’ I say. It comes from nowhere.
‘I am a misanthrope.’ He shrugs as he says it, the knife jarring in his grip.
Outside it’s sleeting. We have a round window in our kitchen. When Reuben’s not around I pretend our flat is a ship, narrate the shipping forecast as the kettle boils. I love to watch the weather through it, that portal. In the summer, the outside world looks like a terrarium, and I pretend I am a lizard.
He looks at me now, and adds, ‘Don’t go if you don’t want to. Do what you want.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ I say, though I don’t explain. Things are simple in his world. Things that are right are right and things that are wrong are wrong. Nothing is ever tangled. I look up at him as he tops and tails the onion.
He looks tired as he rubs his beard. On another day – in another life – I would have poked fun at that orange beard, said he looked like he’d been eating too many carrots. He would have smiled his small smile, shot me a mock-warning look.
‘Who have you told now?’ he says, sidestepping my irrationality like it is a smear on the pavement he wishes to avoid.
I am grateful for it, though it seems distasteful, somehow, too. His words remind me of a very specific period of my life, when I was seventeen.
Who shall we tell? Dad said when I got the letter. It was our favourite thing to do. He came up to my bedroom with the cordless home phone and his address book and we went through every contact he had. Joanna’s got into Oxford, he said, over and over again. It was nice, that night, that one tiny night in my teenage years that’s come to define them.
I look at Reuben now, his gaze wary, his body language braced. ‘Laura,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’
He nods, his mouth turned slightly down, his eyes on me.
He understands, I think. My shame.
‘What else did you do, today?’ he says, making small talk, so unlike him.
He’s moving the conversation along like it is a reluctant child who doesn’t want to go to school, who’s being hurried along against their will.
‘Went to the police station. That’s about it. It takes ages.’
His expression changes. It’s just a flash, but I see it. Judgement.
You know how he can be.
I turn away from him, unable to look at that expression any more. For the next six months I will have to check in. After we go out for brunch on a Sunday. Instead of work. It is where I will go every single day. Through winter colds and flu and vomiting bugs. And he will know about it.
I won’t be able to get up at eleven in the morning and have a shared bath. It has become the lynchpin of my day.
I go and sit in Reuben’s office, opening my laptop uselessly. It springs to life, and there’s an application for an arts grant open on it that I evidently couldn’t even finish. I was going to try to write a literary fiction novel. I had even opened Word, written a ‘1’ at the top of a blank page, and nothing more. It’s embarrassing, and I shut the laptop again, turning in the chair and looking at the spare bed. I can hear Reuben in the kitchen, and then I can hear him coming along the hallway to me.
‘Fancy a walk?’ he says. ‘While things cook?’
I catch his eye through the slice in the hinge of the door. One of his green eyes is visible, half an eyebrow, but nothing more.
‘Okay.’
‘It’s freezing,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
He opens the door. ‘Got your thirty coat?’ He looks past me at the laptop.
He has probably seen the arts grant. We use the same laptop. But he would never say, would never want to embarrass me, says he’s happy if I simply do sudoku for the rest of my life if I want to.
‘Forensics have it,’ I say. The coat he bought me for my birthday. That beautiful coat.
He winces, like he’s made an awkward faux pas at some work event, not offended his wife of two years, his partner of seven. ‘Sorry,’ he says, shifting imperceptibly away from me.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ I say, trying to reach out to him.
I step towards him, but he steps back further. His eyes are wary as they meet mine, his head tilted back slightly. I wonder if he fears me, too. If everybody does. If they are all secretly wondering what else I am capable of.
Suddenly, there in the spare room, I want to feel his skin on mine. His hands around the back of my waist in their protective way. His warm cheek against mine. His soft, full lips – I love those lips, the way he speaks right before he kisses me, sometimes, and it’s as if the gravelly, quiet words are just for me, breathing his air out into my mouth. I step towards him, placing a hand on his arm, wanting him to step forward, open his arms, his body, and hold me tight despite everything. For him to love me in spite of myself.
And he does hold me. But before that, there’s just a beat. It’s hardly noticeable, but I spot it. He hesitates. He doesn’t want to. But he weighs up his options and he knows that he should.
His body feels stiff against mine. Unimpressed. Unyielding. Conditional.
When he’s holding me, I feel his head moving. I can see it, too, in the mirror that hangs above the bed – the mirror I bought when I read it would make the room look much bigger, when I wanted to do up the spare room in a minimalist Scandi style after reading a spread in Elle about it.
‘What’s up?’ I say.
‘Nothing,’ he says, predictably. ‘Nothing.’
15
Conceal
I am eight stone ten.
I have started weighing myself regularly, watching with a strange fascination as the secrets build up inside me and the weight falls off. I stop looking at the numbers and go to work, eventually.
It should be my dream job, being a librarian. I have loved reading forever – there is always a curled-up paperback on my bedside table – but I have always wanted something … more. Something more than books and checking people’s fines and remembering to fill the bus up with petrol at the end of the day. Loving books isn’t enough.
I have driven to work. The clothes are back in my car, transferred to the boot. I have decided I want to hide them in the library’s offices.
The coat. Scarf. Gloves. I have decided I am going to put them into the lost property, like laundering money through an otherwise clean system. Nobody checks the lost property; Daisy just bins it annually, every summer, without looking. As long as I bury them deep, nobody will know. My coat is warm, with its filling, but isn’t distinctive looking, and if they ask me if it’s mine, I will deny it. None of them has ever seen the shoes, so it doesn’t matter that they are distinctive. They were brand new. Are unconnected to me. So they’ll be thrown away eventually and, until then – well. I know exactly where they are, but they are not in my house, and not discoverable by someone with the ability to connect them to me. But I can keep an eye on them. I do not have to worry about them being discovered by a stranger, uncovered, found by the police: they are hidden in plain sight.
The winter is rushing by, but the animal on my chest isn’t diminishing. If anything, it is growing in size. Maturing. Becoming the biggest animal in the world. A blue whale on my chest.
It is the shortest day of the year, which I would be pleased about if it wasn’t also the longest night. The shortest day would be welcome, gone in a few seconds, and the next, and the next, too.