21:58: Dropped wineglass on floor during service. Jenkins snarled and said he will dock cost from next paycheck, adding the two plates I broke yesterday (NTS: Should be careful over next few weeks, otherwise there will be nothing left of salary).
22:53: Stepped out of VB to discover Mark waiting outside with yet another bouquet of roses. After week of ignoring his miserable presence (he did, after all, wait outside for seven consecutive nights with ever-expanding bouquets), I felt sudden twinge of sympathy for him. Perhaps he’s really sorry.…
The entry suggests that I spiraled into terrible depression after discovering that Mark had been two-timing me with another girl. This prompted me to seek medical help. My depression might have also caused me to do something stupid, like cut out twelve pages from my own diary.
Yet all is not lost as far as these missing pages are concerned. Fact: I’m good at learning my diaries. I spend more time learning their contents than my husband does (I pore over my iDiary each morning, while Mark only gives his device a perfunctory glance; his Duo arrogance blinds him to the fact that he puts in less effort than I do). I should have faith in the facts that persist in my head.
To test myself, I scrunch my eyes shut in an attempt to dredge up some facts I’ve learned about that twelve-day period. This is what happened on the night of the Trinity ball, soon after I found Mark on his own along Magdalene Street:
“Mark!” I called out behind him.
He froze in his tracks before turning around. As soon as he realized it was me, his shoulders went rigid.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I saw you earlier,” I said, advancing towards him. “Holding her hand.”
Mark’s mouth fell open at that point. I noticed that his white bow tie was loose after his scuffle with the girl.
“I saw everything on Jesus Green.” My words tumbled out in a torrent. “Everything. You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you? I thought we were seeing each other.”
“I can…explain…”
“You’ve been stringing me along. With your roses. Your sugary words. Your lies. Well, you can go to hell, Mark. I don’t want to see you ever again.”
With that, I turned around and stomped back in the direction of Varsity Blues.
He made no attempt to follow me. Or apologize. Or plead with me to reconsider, for that matter.
And this is what happened on 24 June, the evening before I called Bridge Street Medical Center:
Emily came up to me before I left VB, a deep frown of concern shading her forehead.
“You haven’t been yourself recently,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“No, Claire. You’re not. I can see it in your face and in the way you’ve been acting.”
“You’re imagining it.”
“You broke two plates earlier. You told Jenkins you were careless. But I saw you sobbing just before you dropped those plates.”
“We all have bad days from time to time. Isn’t this a fact?”
“I’m still seventeen. I remember small details you may have left out of your diary. Like the way you come in here each day with your eyes fixed on the ground, as if you’re hoping it might swallow you up. Trust me, sweetie. You haven’t been well over the past two weeks.”
I couldn’t think of a suitable response.
“You ought to see your GP. He might give you some pills that will make you feel better.”
“I don’t need a doctor.”
“Just think about it, will you?” She patted my shoulder before pointing to the door of the restaurant. “The Duo’s waiting outside with more roses, by the way. I can’t believe he’s been standing there at closing time for a whole week now, with bouquets that get larger and larger each time. Maybe you should listen to what he has to say.”
Emily was right. I stepped out of VB to discover that Mark was standing outside with a giant bouquet of crimson roses in his hands.
“I’m sorry, Claire,” he said.
I wondered if I should listen to Emily. But I decided to elbow him away before jumping onto my bicycle and pedaling off.
I should be pleased that some facts I’ve learned about 24 June are still in my head; I must have worked hard to learn these fragments from my diary. I don’t really need those twelve missing pages, do I? But are there any other facts from that period that I should be reevaluating today in light of what has happened? Facts that will confirm my growing suspicion that love was never in the equation for Mark and that lust drove our relationship at the start?
I freeze.
There are no other facts from that twelve-day period inside my head.
I force my eyes shut, struggling to draw up something. Anything at all. But there’s only a dark void within me. I get up and pace the room with a growing sense of desperation, trying to haul up some relevant facts. But much of the period remains a gnawing blank. I can’t summon any details about what happened the day following the Trinity ball, after I stalked away from Mark in a fury. Nor am I able to dredge up any more facts from the days that followed. It’s as if they never occurred. They’ve become a gaping vacuum, a black hole within my past.
I must have made little effort—or no effort whatsoever—to learn the contents of those pages before chopping them out. I must have become seriously depressed after the night of the Trinity ball if I decided not to learn twelve days’ worth of facts. To make things worse, I’ve vandalized my own diary. Now I know what happens when I don’t learn my entries: it feels as if I’ve erased a part of myself.
Part of my mind, perhaps even part of my soul.
I wonder what I did with those missing pages. I could have flung them into the fireplace and watched them burn. But there may well be other written records spanning the period of 13 to 24 June in this house.
A door slams in the distance. I hear feet shuffling in the hallway outside. I shove my diary back into the safe before keying in the numbers 8412 again. The green indicator light flashes in response.
It’s time to confront my husband. That lying spouse of mine.
The path to political stardom is littered with the bodies of those who failed to get their spin right. Ignore this fact at your peril.
—Rowan Redford, Spin Your Way to Success
Chapter Eight
Mark
I let myself in through the front door with a sigh. Fact: I’ve written about police interrogations in my novels. But the real thing was more unpleasant than anything I could have ever imagined. After twenty-seven minutes of verbal skewering by a bellicose bulldog, I’m in desperate need of a mug of hot tea.
Especially because my nerves are still jangling from the way the interview ended. I’d terminated the conversation soon after Richardson’s outburst about Virginia Woolf, stating that I had to go. Richardson had checked Sergeant Angus’s typed statement before shoving it into my hands. The opening and closing paragraphs made me wince:
Witness Statement
CJ Act 1967, § 9; MC Act 1980, §§ 5A(3)(a), 5B; Criminal Procedure Rules 2005, 27.1
Statement of: Mark Henry Evans
Date: 6 June 2015
Occupation: Novelist
Class: Duo