Meanwhile, Pat had slowly turned more and more afraid that she thought he was hearing things. He had taken it for granted that the animal was preying on her mind too. I said, “Unemployment had been getting to him?”
“Yeah. A lot. We were . . .” Jenny shifted restlessly in the bed, caught her breath sharply as some wound pulled. “We’d been having problems about that. We never used to fight, ever. But Pat loved providing for all of us—he was over the moon when I quit working, he was so proud that he could afford for me to do that. When he lost his job . . . At first he was all positive, all, ‘Don’t worry, babes, I’ll have something else before you know it, you go buy that new top you were wanting and don’t worry for one second.’ I thought he’d get something, too—I mean, he’s good at what he does, he works like mad, of course he would, right?”
She was still shifting, running a hand through her hair, tugging harder and harder at tangles. “That’s how it works. Everyone knows: if you don’t have a job, it’s because you’re crap at what you do, or because you don’t actually want one. End of story.”
I said, “There’s a recession on. During a recession, there are exceptions to most rules.”
“It just made sense that he’d find something, you know? But things don’t make sense any more. It didn’t matter what Pat deserved: there just weren’t any jobs out there. By the time that started hitting us, though, we were pretty much broke.”
The word sent a hot, raw red creeping up her neck. I said, “And that was putting a strain on you both.”
“Yeah. Having no money . . . it’s awful. I said that to Fiona once, but she didn’t get it. She was all, ‘So what? Sooner or later, one of you’ll get another job. Till then, you’re not starving, you’ve got plenty of clothes, the kids don’t even know the difference. You’ll be fine.’ I mean, maybe to her and her arty friends, money isn’t a big deal, but to most of us out here in the real world, it actually does make a difference. To actual real things.”
Jenny flashed me a defiant look, like she didn’t expect the old guy to get it. I said, “What kind of things?”
“Everything. Everything. Like, before, we used to have people over for dinner parties, or barbecues in the summer—but you can’t do that if all you can afford to give them is tea and Aldi biscuits. Maybe Fiona would, but I’d’ve died of embarrassment. Some of the people we know, they can be total bitches—they’d have been like, ‘Oh my God, did you see the label on the wine? Did you see, the SUV’s gone? Did you see she was wearing last year’s stuff? Next time we come over, they’ll be in shiny tracksuits, living on McDonald’s.’ Even the ones who wouldn’t have been like that, they’d have felt sorry for us, and I wasn’t going to take that. If we couldn’t do it right, I wasn’t going to do it at all. We just didn’t invite people around any more.”
That hot red had filled up her face, turning it swollen-looking and tender. “And it wasn’t like we could afford to go out, either. So we basically stopped ringing people—it was humiliating, having this nice normal chat with someone and then, when they’d say, ‘So when do you want to meet up?’ having to come up with some excuse about Jack having the flu. And after a few rounds of excuses, people stopped ringing us, too. Which I was actually glad about—it made things way easier—but all the same . . .”
I said, “It must have been lonely.”
The red deepened, as if that was something shameful too. She tucked her head down so that a haze of hair hid her face. “It was, yeah. Really lonely. If we’d been in town then I could’ve met other mums at the park, stuff like that, but out there . . . Sometimes I went a whole week without saying a word to another adult except Pat, only ‘Thanks’ at the shop. Back when we first got married we were going out three, four nights a week, our weekends were always packed, we were popular; and now here we were, staring at each other like a pair of no-friends losers.”
Her voice was speeding up. “We were starting to bitch at each other about little things, stupid things—how I folded the washing, or how loud he had the telly. And every single thing turned into a fight about money—I don’t even know how, but it always did. So I figured that had to be what was bothering Pat. All that stuff.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
“I didn’t want to push him about it. It was obviously a big deal already; I didn’t want to make it even bigger. So I just went, Right. OK. I’m going to make everything lovely for him. I’m going to show him we’re fine.” Jenny’s chin came up, remembering, and I caught that flash of steel. “I’d always had the house nice, but I started keeping it totally perfect, like not a crumb anywhere—even if I was wrecked, I cleaned the whole kitchen before I went to bed, so when Pat came down for breakfast it’d be spotless. I’d take the kids picking wildflowers so we’d have something to put in the vases. When the kids needed clothes I got them secondhand, off eBay—nice clothes, but God, a couple of years ago I’d’ve died sooner than put them in secondhand stuff—but it meant I had enough money left to get decent food that Pat liked, steak for dinner sometimes. It was like, Look, everything’s OK, see? We can totally handle this; it’s not like we’re going to turn into skangers overnight. We’re still us.”
Probably Richie would have seen a spoiled middle-class princess whose sense of herself was too shallow to survive without pesto salad and designer shoes. I saw a frail, doomed gallantry that broke my heart. I saw a girl who thought she had built a fortress against the wild sea, braced at the door with all her pathetic weapons, fighting her heart out while the water seeped past her.
I said, “But everything wasn’t OK.”
“No. It so wasn’t OK. By, like, the beginning of July . . . Pat kept getting jumpier, and more—not even like he was ignoring me and the kids, exactly; like he forgot we existed, because there was something huge on his mind. He talked about the noises in the attic a bunch more times, he even rigged up this old video baby monitor, but I still didn’t connect it up. I just thought . . . guys with gadgets, you know? I thought Pat was just finding ways to fill up all that spare time. By that stage I did know it wasn’t just being out of work that was getting to him, but . . . He was spending more and more time on the computer, or hanging around upstairs on his own when I had the kids downstairs. I was scared that he was addicted to some kind of weird porn, or having one of those online affairs, or like sexting someone on his phone?”
Jenny made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, harsh and sore enough that it made me jump. “God, if only. Probably I should’ve copped on to the monitor thing, but . . . I don’t know. I had my own stuff on my mind, too.”
“The break-ins.”
An uncomfortable shift of her shoulders. “Yeah. Well, or whatever they were. They started around then—or I started noticing them, anyway. It made it hard to think straight. I was all the time looking for anything going missing, or anything moved, but if I actually spotted something, I worried that I was just being paranoid—and then I got worried that I was being paranoid about Pat, too . . .”
And Fiona’s doubts hadn’t helped. I wondered whether Fiona had sensed, deep down, that she was nudging Jenny further off balance, or whether it had been innocent honesty; whether anything within families is ever innocent.
“So I just tried to ignore it all and keep going. I didn’t know what else to do. I cleaned the house even more; the second the kids got something messy, I’d tidy it away, or wash it—I was mopping the kitchen floor like three times a day. It wasn’t just to cheer Pat up any more. I needed to keep everything perfect, so that if anything was ever out of place, I’d know straightaway. I mean”—a flash of wariness—“it wasn’t a big deal, or anything. Like I told you before, I knew it was probably Pat moving stuff and forgetting. I was just making sure.”
And here I had thought she was shielding Conor. It had never even occurred to her that he was involved. She was positive that she had been hallucinating; all she could think about was the nightmare chance that the doctors would find out she was crazy and keep her here. What she was protecting was the most precious thing she had left: her plan.
“I understand,” I said. Under cover of shifting position, I checked my watch: we had been there around twenty minutes. Sooner or later, Fiona—especially if I was right about her—wouldn’t be able to make herself wait any longer. “And then . . . ? What changed?”
“Then,” Jenny said. The room was stifling and getting worse, but she had her arms wrapped around her body as if she was cold. “This one night, late, I went into the kitchen and Pat practically knocked the computer off the desk, trying to switch away from whatever he was doing. So I sat down next to him and I was like, ‘OK, you need to tell me what’s going on. I don’t care what it is, we can work through it, but I have to know.’ At first he was all, ‘Oh, everything’s fine, I’ve got it all under control, don’t worry about it.’ Of course that put me into a total panic—I was like, ‘Oh my God, what? What? Neither of us moves from this desk till you tell me what’s going on.’ And Pat, when he saw how scared I was, it just came pouring out of him: ‘I didn’t want to freak you out, I thought I could catch it and you’d never even have to know . . .’ And all this stuff about minks and polecats, and bones in the attic, and people online having ideas . . .”
That raw half-laugh again. “You know something? I was over the moon. I was like, ‘Wait, this is it? This is all that’s wrong?’ Here I’d been worrying about affairs and, I don’t know, terminal diseases, and Pat’s telling me we might have a rat or something. I practically burst into tears, I was so relieved. I went, ‘So we’ll ring an exterminator tomorrow. I don’t care if we have to get a bank loan, it’ll be worth it.’
“But Pat was all, ‘No, listen, you don’t understand.’ He said he’d already tried an exterminator, but the guy told him whatever we had was way out of his league. I was like, ‘Oh my God, Pat, and you just let us keep living here? Are you insane?’ He looked at me like a little kid who’s brought you his new drawing and you threw it in the bin. He went, ‘You think I’d let you and the kids stay if it wasn’t safe? I’m on it. We don’t need some exterminator guy messing around with poison and charging us a few grand. I’m going to get this thing.’”
Jenny shook her head. “I was like, ‘Um, hello? So far you haven’t even managed to get a look at it,’ and he went, ‘Well, yeah, but that’s because I couldn’t do anything that might tip you off. Now that you know, there’s all kinds of stuff I can do. God, Jen, this is such a massive relief!’
“He was laughing: flopped back in his chair, rubbing his head so his hair went all messy, and laughing. Personally I didn’t exactly see anything to laugh about, but still . . .” Something that might have been a smile, if it had been less crammed with sadness. “It was nice to see him like that, you know? Really nice. So I went, ‘What kind of stuff?’
“Pat leaned his elbows on the desk, all settled in like when we used to plan out a holiday or something, and he went, ‘Well, the monitor in the attic obviously isn’t working, right? The animal’s dodging it—maybe it doesn’t like the infrared, I don’t know. So what we have to do is think like the animal. See what I mean?’
“I went, ‘Totally not,’ and he laughed again. He went, ‘OK, what does it want? We’re not sure—could be food, warmth, even company. But whatever it is, the animal thinks it’s going to find it in this house, or it wouldn’t be here, right? It wants something that it thinks it’s going to get from us. So we have to give it the chance to get closer.’
“I was like, ‘Oh hell no,’ but Pat went, ‘No no no, don’t worry, not that close! I’m talking about a controlled chance. We control it, all the way. I rig up a monitor on the landing, pointing at the attic hatch, right? I leave the hatch open, but with wire mesh nailed over it, so the animal can’t get down into the house. We’ll keep the landing light on, so there’ll be enough light that I won’t need to use the infrared, in case that’s what’s scaring it away. And then we just have to wait. Sooner or later, it’s going to get tempted, it’s going to need to get closer to us, it’s going to head for the hatch—and boom-boom, caught on camera. See? It’s perfect!’”
Jenny’s palms turned up helplessly. “It didn’t exactly sound perfect to me. But, I mean . . . I’m supposed to support my husband, right? And like I said, this was the happiest he’d looked in months. So I went, ‘OK, fine. Off you go.’”