‘This isn’t a business!’ I say, so outraged I stumble over the words.
‘It most certainly is a business, and a very successful one. I had fifty clients within a fortnight of setting up the website, with more joining every day.’ She sounds like an advert for a franchise opportunity; like she’s bragging about adding to her chain of coffee shops.
She sits opposite us. ‘They’re so stupid. Commuters. You see them, every day, oblivious to the world around them. Plugged into their iPods, staring at their phones, reading their papers. Taking the same route every day, sitting in the same seat, standing on the same spot on the platform.’
‘They’re just going to work,’ I say.
‘You see the same ones every day. I was watching this woman once, doing her make-up on the Central line. I’d seen her a few times, and she always had the same routine. She’d wait till Holland Park, then she’d get out her make-up bag and start plastering her face. Powder first, then eye-shadow, mascara, lipstick. As the train slowed down at Marble Arch she’d be putting her make-up bag away. I watched her this one time, and as I looked away I caught a man watching her too, with a look in his eyes that suggested he was thinking about more than her face. That’s when I first had the idea.’
‘Why me?’ And as I say it I can’t believe it has only now occurred to me to ask. ‘Why put me on the website?’
‘I needed a few older women.’ She shrugs. ‘There’s no accounting for people’s tastes.’
‘But I’m your friend!’ Even as I say it I hate myself for how pathetic it sounds, like a schoolyard catfight over who plays with whom.
Melissa’s lips tighten. She stands up abruptly, striding towards the bi-fold doors and gazing into the garden. It’s several seconds before she speaks.
‘I’ve never known anyone moan about their life as much as you do.’ I’d been expecting something different; some indiscretion, committed years ago. Not this. ‘I had my kids too young,’ she mimics.
‘I’ve never said that.’ I look at Katie. ‘I’ve never regretted having you. Either of you.’
‘You walk out on a textbook husband – solvent, funny, hands-on with the kids – and replace him with someone equally textbook.’
‘You have no idea what my marriage to Matt was like. Or what my relationship with Simon is like, come to that.’ At the thought of Simon, guilt overwhelms me. How could I have thought he was responsible for the website? I think of the names, and the scribbled threats I found in Simon’s desk drawer, and for a second I doubt myself, then I realise what they are: research notes. He’s used the Moleskine for exactly the purpose it was intended; to plan his novel. Relief makes me smile, and Melissa looks at me with venom in her eyes.
‘It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it, Zoe? Yet you never stop complaining.’
‘Easy?’ I’d laugh, were it not for the knife in her hand, which catches the light from the skylight and throws rainbows around the room.
‘—and from the second you move in next door it’s the poor me routine. Single mum, struggling to pay the bills, bursting into tears every five minutes.’
‘It was a difficult time,’ I say, in my defence, speaking more to Katie than to Melissa. Katie reaches for my hand; gives me the silent support I need.
‘Whatever you asked for, I gave you. Money, a job, help looking after the kids.’ She spins round; I hear her heels scrape on the tiles then she bends over me, her hair falling over mine, and hisses in my ear. ‘What have you ever given me?’
‘I—’ My mind is blank. Surely I must have done something? But there’s nothing. Melissa and Neil have no children, no pets to look after, no houseplants to water when they’re away on holiday. There’s more to friendship than that though, isn’t there? Do the scales of friendship have to balance so absolutely? ‘You’re jealous,’ I say, and it seems such an insignificant word to justify something of this magnitude; of this horror.
Melissa looks at me as though she’s stepped in something unpleasant. ‘Jealous? Of you?’
But the idea takes root. Grows into something that feels right.
‘You think you’d have been a better mother than me.’
‘I’d have been a more grateful one, that’s for sure,’ she bites back.
‘I love my children.’ I can’t believe she’s even questioning it.
‘You hardly saw them! They were an inconvenience, parcelled off to mine whenever you were sick of them. Who was it who taught Katie how to cook? Who got Justin away from the thieving kids at school? He’d have ended up in prison if it hadn’t have been for me!’
‘You said you were happy to have them.’
‘Because they needed me! What else did they have? A mother who was constantly working, constantly moaning, constantly crying.’
‘That’s not fair, Melissa.’