I told them how Edgar had been retreating, pulling back from me. My voice had that desperate shrill tone, especially when I mentioned things being moved around the house, and how I was writing things down, small incidentals at first, like that time I thought I saw a woman’s shadow in the garden, or the objects being moved from one place to another. Alice raised her eyebrows, and there was no denying her cynicism. The others gave me reassuring smiles, as if they wanted to believe me but weren’t quite buying it. I shifted the emphasis to Edgar. It was safer ground. I explained how I had noted all the extra hours he had spent at work, the events he’d told me he needed to attend, with invitations for one.
Karen and Lori were like sponges, soaking it all up, but Alice wasn’t letting go: Edgar was an international jewellery designer, with any number of rich and elite clients who wanted to meet him now his commercial range had taken off. I stopped listening after a while. I knew what they were thinking. That I had been unwell of late. Edgar had called it a bout of depression and said I was getting things mixed up because of the medication. All I needed was time out to recharge. No one called it a breakdown – but that’s what they were all thinking. Lori said she understood about Edgar. Karen said all men were bastards. Alice looked wary.
When I told them about him visiting strange sites on the internet, Karen thought he was using it to see porn. It wasn’t that, or not exactly. All three took notice when I explained about the internet dating site, and how the laptop in the study had been acting up, the one Edgar used when he was working from home. How I was working on it one afternoon when the whole thing crashed. I thought we’d lost everything so I phoned the girl we’d met at our school reunion, Marjorie, the computer geek. She talked me through rebooting it in safe mode, and afterwards suggested doing a few more background checks and defragmenting the hard drive. Alice got tetchy then, telling me to get to the bloody point, but I kept going.
I explained that it wasn’t long before Marjorie suggested clearing the cookies. I didn’t want to clear them all in one go. I thought there might be something important there, something Edgar might need. Instead I trawled through the links line by line, working out which ones were okay to delete. That was when I saw the first site link, and then, like a message you don’t want to read, it repeated itself over and over, as the words Cassie4Casanova kept reappearing on the screen.
I
ALONG WITH THE eye of the camera, I’m keen on another eye: the inner eye of self. I like Rudyard Kipling’s poem about the road through the woods, the one that is no longer there. The road is hidden by time past, weather and rain, with trees planted over it. But it still exists, underneath, where only the keeper sees it, and if you listen hard, you can hear the horse’s hoofs, and the swish of a female rider’s skirt on the old lost road. That hidden road is part of me.
I want you to imagine something. I want you to imagine that you see children playing in the park, pre-school children. There are swings and slides and climbing frames. The playground is colourful, and the sky is clear and blue. You can feel the heat of the sun on your face. There are parents too, huddled in groups. Can you see them all now? Perhaps you hear laughter or the sound of the swings swishing back and forth. I see something else. I hear other things. I see the children as if they are asleep. Their eyes are closed. They might be dreaming. The sky is turning dark, and I’m in the shadows. As I stare at the swings, their ropes fray, the seats break. When I turn to look at the slides, children’s bodies lie in a heap at the bottom, on top of one another, like bags of grain. The climbing frame surrounding the playground locks everyone in. The image of the inner eye is disturbing, don’t you think? It distorts things. It makes good things bad and bad things good. I’ve learned to do both. I’ve had to. My life is often in the shadows, but it constantly seeks escape to the light.
I remember an afternoon a long time ago. It had been raining. One moment the sky was clear, and then, without warning, it was thunderous, loud, dark and threatening, as if the heavens were angry. Things began to change, like the children in the playground. I found myself standing in a place I had no memory of. I looked for the familiar, something to make sense of the new. I realised slowly that, no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to where I was before.
I wasn’t alone and, like the road in the woods, the one that can’t be seen, the person lurking in the shadows was hidden to me. But they were watching, following me, counting each breath I took. The woman in the shadows comes to me at moments of anxiety. Her presence is like an all-consuming claw, pulling me to her.