I don’t know where the summer weather has gone. The sky outside my window is dishwater grey so I snap on the overhead lights as I make my way downstairs, humming ‘Summertime’ as I go. I’ve always loved that tune.
Flicking on the kettle in the kitchen, I wonder what she’s up to today. Maybe I should knock up a Quiche Lorraine for her to have tonight; something nice and easy. They could have it with a salad. Although last time I was round, I did notice the pasties I’d made were sitting, untouched, in the fridge. You would think Tilly and Mark would be eating them, even if Melissa isn’t that hungry.
I can’t help a small smile when I think of how surprised Mark was to see me there, drinking tea and chatting, in the first few days after … Dorset. He couldn’t have looked more taken aback if the Duchess of Cornwall had appeared at the big stripped pine table, helping herself to a homemade macadamia cookie. Ha! It was a challenge to keep the gleam of satisfaction from my eyes.
I asked him some questions about the progress of his television programme and he was polite but obviously dying to get away. He kept shooting puzzled looks at Melissa, but she had her head down and was once again attacking her kitchen surfaces with cleaning products. She does this far too much, this excessive cleaning. They should all, and especially Tilly, be exposed to at least some germs, in order to build up immunity. Maybe I’ll find something on the internet, now I’m a ‘silver surfer’, and print it out for her.
I pretended I was interested in his silly programme, but I have my own reasons for avoiding that sort of subject matter.
***
Terry found the trips to the fertility specialist quite excruciating. The doctor we saw certainly wasn’t like Mark, with his shiny good looks and smiles. No, he was an old school consultant with horn-rimmed glasses and an imperious manner. Terry tried to joke about the squalid little side room with its mucky magazines and plastic beaker but I didn’t want to hear about any of that. I just wanted some answers. And I got them.
Terry’s sperm count was very low. He’d blushed and looked very uncomfortable when this was revealed, as though his stupid pride was the most important thing! Age was part of it, but the specialist explained he was just ‘made that way’. There was nothing technically wrong with me, but I was the wrong side of thirty-five and that didn’t help.
This seemed so very cruel, when our local high street was – and still is – jammed with hi-tech buggies pushed by women who are no spring chickens. There was a time when every single one of them felt like a painful rebuke.
When things reached their lowest ebb for me, I considered going out to some bar and having intercourse with any old man who looked fertile (although quite how I would have assessed that, I’m not sure). I got as far as looking at the sluttish dresses and high-heeled shoes they sell in that cheap Turkish shop by the bank.
Women in films are always doing things like that, aren’t they? They sit in bars and wait to be approached. But I think this may be more of an American phenomenon. The Feathers pub doesn’t look like the kind of place a woman like me would stand out. There was also the possibility that I might run into one of Terry’s friends, or even Terry himself.
So I gave up on that idea and my longing and love turned into a cold, hard stone in my chest. It was his fault. Not mine. My life could have been different. I wouldn’t have had time to get mixed up in Melissa’s problems if things had happened as they should.
Sighing, I swirl the teabag around in the cup. As the water stains russet brown, I find my mind drifting back to Melissa’s appearance when I saw her yesterday. She has definitely lost weight, which is a concern. And don’t get me started on the hair. I can’t even think about that without getting upset.
I have had moments, it’s undeniable, when I have thought about easing her burden. What good would it do now though? What’s done is done. I’ve never thought there was much point in looking backwards.
But I can’t seem to stop bad thoughts from spiralling. I sometimes picture myself walking into a police station and announcing to the desk sergeant in a clear voice that I wish to report a murder. I can picture it all so clearly.
The neatness of it pleases me. I have nothing much going on in my life, after all. Only Bertie would really miss me. I can’t imagine prison is that bad. It’s all televisions and activities these days anyway; more like a holiday camp.
But I hope it won’t come to that. As long as Melissa can stay strong.
MELISSA
Her hand strays to the back of her neck, where newly exposed skin meets the tufty roughness of her hair. She can’t seem to stop worrying at this spot. There’s a strange sort of comfort in pulling it, tweaking, until it hurts.
Mark’s mouth was a perfect ‘O’ of shock when he saw what she had done to herself. Melissa mumbled something about it being ‘better for the summer’ but she was aware her husband thought she was going mad.
It hadn’t felt like madness, the evening she had started to cut it with the kitchen scissors. It seemed necessary and right. She wanted the Russian girl’s hair out and away from her. It didn’t belong to her. She had no right to it. It needed to be gone.
Hacking away, she had watched the hair pile up on the table in front of her; the translucent plugs queasy reminders that these soft tresses had grown on another, poorer, woman’s head. When she had finished, she stared at it for some time before bundling it up and almost running to the bin to throw it inside. Then she’d poured another glass of wine, filling it so high it slopped over the rim, and gone to watch television. She didn’t care what she watched these days. Cookery programme, drama, documentary … it didn’t matter. It just helped her to stop seeing Jamie bobbing about in that icy water. For a short time, at least.
But Tilly’s reaction the next morning prompted Melissa to go to a salon in Kentish Town to have it tidied up. She’d looked almost tearful and Melissa experienced a twinge of regret.
She couldn’t face her usual place. This salon, Hair by Jayne, was small and tatty and doing a bustling trade with chatty, elderly women having perms. She asked the stylist just to ‘make it look better, I don’t care’ and studiously avoided eye contact and conversation until it was done.
Now as she leaves her bedroom, she pulls the belt of her dressing gown around her narrowing middle. She hasn’t been able to face food, telling Mark and Tilly that she has been hit by a virus. Which doesn’t explain the hair.
Or why Hester is suddenly in her kitchen, seemingly all the time.
In the first few days after that horror trip to the river, she tried to convince Hester that she was too sick for visitors. But Hester had chirped, ‘Nonsense, you just need a rest! I’ll be back later with something home-cooked!’ and bustled off home. She came back later with a shepherd’s pie that Tilly said tasted ‘kind of weird’. It lay congealing on the side until Melissa had guiltily gouged the fatty, solid mass of it into the bin.
Hester made old-fashioned so-called ‘comfort food’, but it didn’t offer much in the way of solace. Devoid of even garlic, chilli, or coriander, it wasn’t the kind of thing her family was accustomed to eating. She was secretly glad Tilly was as fussy about this as she was about Melissa’s more adventurous cookery.
Hester came back with something else, Melissa forgets what, a day or so later. She had breezed in and sat down at the kitchen table as though nothing had happened there. As though they were normal neighbours who hadn’t hefted the lumpen weight of a dead man onto plastic together. As though Melissa wasn’t a murderer and Hester an accessory.