‘You’re angry.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Reuben says softly. ‘I’m so, so fucking angry with you, Jo.’
My head snaps back, reeling, as though I’ve been slapped. And haven’t I? No, worse than slapped. Diced up. Skinned. The top of my head sliced open and my insides taken out.
‘You were so stupid,’ he says. As I begin to protest, he holds a hand up. ‘I think of that night sometimes. If you hadn’t made that mistake. How different things would be. We’d probably have babies. Different house. We were so happy, Jo. Even that night – just an ordinary Friday – I was looking forward to you coming home. I always did. With your daft schemes to buy a smallholding or open a juice bar. And now it’s … it’s all wrong. It feels wrong. You being home. It’s too …’
‘But you’ll get used to me again,’ I say. ‘I’ll get used to it all again. I’ll still come up with stupid schemes, if you want.’
‘But you’re different now.’
‘No.’
‘And you … you seriously injured someone. You went to trial.’
‘Yes. You can’t forgive that? A mistake? Is being right and good so much more important than me? And loving me?’ The anger comes as his betrayal really hits me. How could he? How could he? I would have told the police absolutely anything for Reuben. Anything at all. I would have lied for him. I would have buried a body with him. I would have given him an alibi.
I realize as I stand and stare at my husband that I hardly know him at all. His honesty – his goodness – trumps everything. Even me.
Reuben shrugs then. And for all his words and all his judgement and all those nights he spent alone, peeling – emotionally – away from me as I counted down the days in prison, it seems shocking it ends like this. With a shrug. A lazy, contemptuous shrug. As though he doesn’t know, doesn’t care to find out.
He moves out two days later.
Two days after that, his father dies.
39
Conceal
There is only one eventual destination on my list as my train pulls into London Marylebone but I put it off. I guess some of my habits might subsist for longer than they should. Procrastinating. Faffing around. Stopping to take a photograph of the light that streams in through the entrance of Marylebone, even though nobody will ever see it. I have always loved that view. The trees. The openness. Almost like it’s the edge of London, and London truly begins just beyond it. Come in, that square of light beckons.
I take a walk along the river on my way to the exhibition, even though it leaves me breathless and tired. It’s like coming home. I had forgotten how much I love London. I had forgotten its exact character, like being reunited with an old friend and seeing anew their mannerisms.
It’s boiling and my skin prickles with the heat. We’re four weeks into a heatwave and everybody is already bored of it, complaining about not being able to sleep and that hardly anywhere has air con. People have stopped Instagramming the sky and the trees, and have started taking photographs of the bad things instead. The parched grass by the sides of the roads. The dried-up canals, boats’ bodies exposed like corpses. I don’t like looking at them. It’s like seeing somebody with their clothes off, seeing the bottom of the river bed.
I can’t be in London and not think of Reuben. They are interrelated. I try to stop myself thinking of him so often, at the moment. Somebody cycles past. A father and daughter are finger-painting down at the river’s edge together – there’s a spare paintbrush in a jar of cloudy water on the ground by the steps up to Tower Bridge, its end hardened with blue paint. I can smell that chalky smell. I have always loved it.
First right. Second left, down a cool, dark alley. I don’t think I will ever forget that night, two Decembers ago, when walking down an alleyway, but it doesn’t chill me like it previously has. I stand still in the shade for a second and look. Nobody’s coming. I know that now. But, somehow, it’s no longer about that. The guilty don’t only worry about getting found out. Here I am, two years on. I have almost certainly got away with it, and yet there is no relief. Because it was not really the paranoia that I was struggling with: it was the guilt. They were two sides of the same object, but they were different. And one was not chased away by evidence, by facts, by reassurance. It was there – my chest animal – because I have killed a man. And it will always be there, forever. I accept its weight, now, and don’t fight it. It’s here to stay.
Three people pass me on my way down the side street. The world is full of people. Everyone knows that. But this world I’m in has one fewer. Because of me.
I reach a door that has the laminated card on it, its green string yellowed at the edges, push it open, and go inside. Outside is so bright that my eyes take a few seconds to adjust to the blueish darkness.
The floor is unpolished wood and there are paintings hung around the walls. For a moment I think that I’m accidentally in somebody’s house and I start, my whole body shaking – this bothers me more than most. I have invaded too much. I have taken something that wasn’t mine, in Imran, already. But as my eyes adjust, I see the paintings and the little placards and know I’m in the right place.
I saw it on Facebook. It popped up, a mutual friend having liked the event in my newsfeed. Laura. Her paintings. Her first exhibition.
One of the paintings portrays a set of people going through the tube barriers. It’s almost photographically real. The tube maps on the back wall, the man selling flowers just inside the station. The people’s coats and umbrellas. There are autumn leaves and puddles at their feet, dashed white as they catch the overhead lights. It’s clear they’re supposed to be commuting. But all the people are in the same position, like zombies going through the barriers. Drones on a commute.
I can’t resist reading the plaque. By Laura Cohen. My Laura. My eyes fill with tears. All those years of striving. All those tries and fails. Of all the people in the world who try to do something artistic, and all those people who never, ever get there; who never finish paintings, and who never get taken on. She made it.
I take in each one in turn now. They’re a slant on corporate life, I see. They’re almost funny. A woman at her desk with all of the Mondays to Fridays crossed out on a calendar. The clock a huge hourglass, suspended above her. A man, sitting in a kitchen with ‘home’ written above the door, saving up in a jar labelled Deposit. It’s a satire on modern life. Her breakthrough work. It’s not what I thought it would be, but isn’t that always the way? I thought she’d sell her feminist paintings, the one where a woman walked down the street with forty pairs of eyes on her, the men looking away from what they were doing. All with the same photographic, portrait-like quality. I always thought she’d sell those. But this was it: the work that broke her through.
I linger there for an hour, looking and looking. Searching for hidden things in the paintings. A barge boat, or someone who has my lip-shape or body language or unruly hair. But there are none. There’s no evidence of me, in the exhibition of the person who used to be my closest friend.
Of course not. I left her; I left all of them.
Just as I leave now, in an alcove on its own, there’s a painting I didn’t see before. I peer closely at it. The insert says it’s the painting that captured the art dealer’s attention.
And there they are. A woman, lying on her front in her bed, the green WhatsApp display clearly visible. Laura’s caught the sheen of an iPhone just perfectly. I would have believed it was a phone, superimposed right there on to the portrait. The canvas is split, a bed in a different room set out in the other half of the frame. There is another iPhone, and another woman, but she is transparent. I look at it curiously, wanting to trace a finger over it but not daring to. I can see the pink bedsheets through her transparent body.