‘Well, no,’ Laura says. ‘Not right now.’
We lapse into silence, and then she says, ‘Marketing.’
‘What?’
‘It’s in marketing. At a bank.’
‘Marketing what?’
‘The bank.’
‘Sounds pointless.’
‘It’ll be good for me. To join the real world.’
‘The rat race,’ I say spitefully, even though I do not really mean it.
I am only jealous. Of her direction, but also the luxury of choice. To join a graduate scheme. To not have a planetary problem looming so large that the rest of life merely orbits around it, waiting for the trial, waiting for the outcome. To be able to choose to have a child this year, next year, the year after.
‘It’ll be good for us. Jonty is going to get one, too. We might sell the boat.’
‘Jonty can’t even put a pair of shoes on,’ I say, and it’s meant to be teasing, an emblem of their chaotic lifestyle with their barge that drifts along the Thames, as directionless as they are, and the motley crew of people who stay for a few weeks at a time and then move on. But it comes out as shrill, judgemental, like I am clinging on to a past Laura that she wants to leave behind.
‘Yeah, well. It’s not too late to learn,’ she says, looking at me kindly. Perhaps with pity.
‘Are you painting?’ I say, thinking of her beautiful, photograph-like paintings. They always make a feminist point, a political point. The most recent set are painted tabloid newspapers, with all of the photos of men in suits as women, and with page three as men.
‘No,’ she says.
She’s had her nails done. Straightened her hair. She looks totally different. And so while we’ve been making the same jokes, telling each other the same stories about our jobs, she’s been getting ready, behind the scenes, like a determined understudy. My life is ruined and hers is just beginning. Soon she’ll have all those things; all those proper things. Pensions, cars, a secretary. She would think that was selling out, but I never did. I just couldn’t find the Thing I wanted to do.
‘You stressed – about it all?’ she says, as though it all is merely a pressing deadline or an impending redundancy, not the reality that my life is being shaken up like the salt in the retro shaker in front of us.
‘Yes,’ I say shortly. ‘No. I don’t know.’
Sat opposite each other, talking over the counter, with the rainy dark world outside the round window, I feel like we’re in a café or at a bar. Reuben and Jonty go and sit on the sofa in our tiny living room. I can hear the tread of their shoes on the wooden floor behind us.
Laura dabs at the salt with the pad of her index finger.
‘It’s just – I don’t know. It’s time to grow up, isn’t it?’ she says. She looks excited. ‘It took me ages to realize. Years later than everyone else. But I want a proper career. I want to look forward to work – to use my brain. Which isn’t useless.’
‘No,’ I say, wondering whether she thinks mine is.
I can hear Reuben and Jonty talking. They’re saying something about July. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I hear Reuben say, his tone the exact one he uses when he’s agreeing to something that he’ll later cancel.
Laura’s hands are knotted together. She is always worrying; always analysing. No wonder she wants a career. She is nothing like me, drifting, daydreaming, from one location on the library bus to the next.
‘It’s the sixteenth,’ Jonty is saying behind me.
I tune into their conversation instead. It’s easier to listen to them than to think of my best friend changing her life because of something I have done. Our flat is so small that I can hear every word.
‘Is that a Saturday?’ Reuben says, sounding less reluctant. His tone is strange, and I cock my head, intent now.
‘Mm, yeah,’ Jonty says.
Laura looks lost in thought, dabbing her finger into the salt pile, over and over again, the grains making tiny pockmarks on her skin.
‘It’ll be just me, probably. If it’s July,’ Reuben says.
‘Oh, right,’ Jonty says, sounding taken aback.
I frown.
There’s a pause. Laura and I don’t speak, and neither do Reuben and Jonty.
And then I hear Jonty again. ‘Oh, yeah. Of course,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’
And it’s not the words, or the look I imagine Reuben gave him, which preceded his realization. No. It’s the tone. The tone people only speak in when they’re talking about my crime. My misdemeanour. As though I’ve been put on the sex offenders’ register or gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. Something shameful. And isn’t it?
‘Sorry, mate,’ Jonty adds softly again.
Laura doesn’t say anything then. I keep staring hard at her, knowing she heard my husband talk of my imminent incarceration as though it’s a certainty, but she doesn’t look up. I scrape all of the salt into the palm of my hand, and feel its weight, then throw it, with my right hand, over my left shoulder. For luck. To get rid of the devil, waiting patiently behind me.
‘Jonty was asking about their boat party thing this summer,’ Reuben says conversationally after they have left.
I remember their last summer party. Reuben had sent me a very Reuben-like text, across the boat from me, as a very boring woman talked to me about the alternative voting system. You alright there, or do you need rescuing? it said. Rescue me, I replied, and he came over, and said, ‘Sorry, my wife looks very bored.’
‘Yes,’ I say. I start scrubbing at the work surface, not looking at him.
Reuben is leaning against the kitchen counter and shifts away, looking curiously at what I’m doing. I hardly ever clean.
‘I haven’t RSVP’d for you.’ He says it simply.
He moves to the door frame and leans against it. I can feel his gaze on me. I turn and squeeze water out of the sponge.
‘Okay,’ I say brightly.
I should ask him why not – because I really can’t understand it. At the very least, I should turn around and look at him. Maybe then I would see it in his facial expression: the answer – what he thinks. Is it about prison? Or something else? Not wanting to speak for me when my life is a shambles?
‘Jo.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
He comes over to me, plucks the sponge out of my hand and tosses it in the sink.
‘What would happen?’ he says simply.
We both know what he means, but I pretend not to.
‘What would happen if what?’ I say.
His expression darkens. He looks thin. Has he lost weight? He’s always been slender, but I can see his collarbones behind his T-shirt, jutting out ever so slightly. I have gained weight, eating as though they will starve me in prison.
‘You know what,’ he says quietly.
‘No, I don’t,’ I say, taking the theoretical stance: I might not; therefore, I don’t. It almost seems irrelevant that I do. Why do I do these things?
‘What will happen if you get sent down?’ he says softly. ‘I want to discuss it so … if it happens. We don’t have to discuss it then, in the court. We have time now. Alone. Together.’
The words shock me. Sent down. They’re so colloquial. So inappropriate.
‘You heard Sarah. Mistake and self-defence.’
Reuben scrunches his nose up, makes a kind of moue with his mouth. As if to say, That won’t work. But he can’t mean that. Surely not.
He’s never done denial. Not like I have. Ripped-up, hidden car parking fines simply don’t exist for me, but he doesn’t think that way. He confronts issues head on, like this. Calmly, not hysterically, not the way I eventually tackle things I’ve been avoiding for years, taking deep, dramatic breaths and pulling a fine that’s become a court summons out from under the bed, and looking at it in horror.
But I can’t do it. It feels like facing an oncoming train.
‘I can’t talk to you about the rent as you’re being led away,’ he says. ‘We need to … to strategize.’