The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel Page 10

  Of course I knew the £12,000 would come from that stash you’d been given for making that dire rushed single in Holland (“they’re paying me in cash,” you’d explained, embarrassed, when you called from your Amsterdam hotel. “That’s the only reason I’m doing it.”)—the stash you’d been so nervous about having stolen that you’d ended up hiding it in a plastic bag in the fridge. I know all about that money from the time we managed a four-day break together and I booked a ridiculously expensive hotel on my credit card, which you insisted on repaying in cash, peeling off £1,000 from a wad stuffed into your back pocket and explaining how you’d grabbed it from the fridge earlier that day. “Tell me if you need more,” you’d said, pressing the creased notes awkwardly into my hand. “There’s plenty more where that came from.” (Not until afterward, when I stuffed the money down into an old UGG boot in the bottom of my closet, did I feel a little compromised by that transaction, that wad of grubby notes pressed into hands still smelling of sex.)

  But you know, as I started thinking it through, I began adding up what this whole thing might be worth now we were thinking in purely financial terms. Funny amount, isn’t it, £12,000? Anyone else would have rounded it down to £10,000 or up to £15,000, so I wondered if you’d used some kind of formula to work it out—added up my different grievances since York Way Friday, affording more weight to some than others. I started to do the same. For instance, those endless, sleepless nights, lying in bed while my heart threatened to explode clear through my chest and the movies of you and Susan played out endlessly through my restless mind—those must be worth a few hundred quid each, surely? And what about the prescription drug–induced anxieties, the dry mouth, the shaking hands pouring out the kids’ tea? The loss of income owing to days spent hunched over a computer obsessively checking and rechecking for emails that never came? The cracked teeth ground down to the exposed nerves during the nights, requiring potentially years of expensive dental work. The loss of self, the children asking why Mummy’s so different and once, pricelessly “has Mummy been turned into an alien?”

  I went through it all, quite fairly I have to say, totting it all up, making a tally. But you know, even before I finally gave up counting, I knew I wouldn’t be taking your money. You see I realized something interesting, Clive, as I was doing all that adding—that all the money in all the fridges in all the world can’t come close to making up for what I’ve lost.

  I really don’t want to get heavy with you.

  That’s an interesting turn of phrase, don’t you think? “Get heavy.” Because, of course, you are a heavy man. A weighty man. Sometimes when you were lying on top of me in one or another hotel bed with the quilted bedcover bunched up uncomfortably against the back of my legs and a dull ache spreading out from the arm pinioned to my side, a sensation of not being able to breathe would sweep suddenly over me and I’d shove you violently off, gasping for air.

  “Did I hurt you?” you’d fret. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

  The women among our group of friends inclined to the view that you were a “softie” really, a “pussycat.”

  “It’s hysterical that he has this reputation as a tough man,” they’d scoff. “Susan says he wells up at a Yellow Pages ad.”

  The men, though, were far more circumspect. I’d seen the way a group of locals standing at the bar would eye you warily when you walked in, raising themselves up almost imperceptibly, pulling abdominal muscles in, following your progress as you went to sit down, alert to you.

  “There’s something about him that I just don’t trust,” my old friend Jack had said on first meeting you.

  Ironically Daniel had jumped to your defense. “Oh, he might look like a criminal, but he’s got a heart of gold,” he’d said. But I’d seen the way men instinctively hardened themselves up when they saw you and I wasn’t so sure.

  “I can be very hard when I want to be,” you’d told me again when I’d teased you for crying after we’d had sex, or during World’s Strictest Parents. I’d smiled, imagining you were trying to protest your macho credentials.

  Now when I read that line in your Blood Money email—I really don’t want to get heavy with you—and I remember the fear on that Romanian squeegee man’s face—I wonder if you might actually have been issuing a warning.

  The young blonde doctor was dressed head to toe in blue today. Blue shift dress, blue cardigan, blue tights, and blue medium-heeled shoes that clicked loudly as she came out into the waiting room to call my name. Do you think I should have read something into that? All that blue?

  I’d gone for more antidepressants, of course. At the same time as I loathe them, I’m also obsessed with them, flying into a panic if I’m half an hour late for my daily dose. I was down to my last five and had been aware of a constant low-level tug of anxiety.

  I can imagine your disdain if you knew I was taking them. “Opiate for the masses,” you used to call the happy pills everyone and his dog seem to be on. But you know, in the absence of anything else to believe in, I might as well believe in those, don’t you think?

  “How have you been feeling?” Her head was already tilted to the side before she’d even sat down.

  After my pitiful show the last time I’d been in there, I was determined not to cry again. But there was something about that way she scrunched her lips and the way she made it sound as if she really was interested in how I’d been feeling that loosened something inside me.

  “Not so good,” I croaked, and a small tear dribbled, incontinent, out of the corner of my eye.

  The young doctor looked genuinely sorrowful.

  “Oh, poor you.” She looked at me, head still cocked, lips still scrunched, holding my gaze for an almost uncomfortably long time.

  “Is it still lack of work that’s making you so anxious?”

  I’d forgotten I’d told her that particular half truth. For a moment I was tempted to throw caution to the wind and tell her the whole story—about you, about me, about us, about this. I could always switch practices afterward, to save the children from being tarred with the slutty mummy brush. But something held me back, some last clinging vestiges of self-respect, perhaps.

  Instead, I nodded in agreement. Well, it’s not entirely untrue, after all. Work has been abysmal since York Way Friday, owing partly to me being unable to concentrate on anything for more than five seconds at a time and partly to the downward slide that began not too far into our relationship and gained momentum as our feelings intensified. You’d be very disapproving about that, I’m sure; you with your puritanical work ethic. I remember how you used to make me set word targets at the start of each day and how disappointed you’d be if I’d failed to achieve them. I was intrigued in the beginning about how your work drive fitted in with your fabled appetite for hedonism, or the libertinism of which you were so privately and justly proud. But later I realized it was all part of the same thing, the same need to exert control, even over your own supposedly unbridled passions.

  The doctor sat very still and gazed at me some more. She’d swiveled her chair away from the desk so that she was facing squarely toward me, the toes of her blue shoes hooked behind the base of the chair.

  “Owww,” she said sympathetically, doing an extra-emphatic scrunch of the lips. “Poor old you. Have you thought about finding a little job in a shop, just to tide you over?”

  A little job in a shop. I’m not joking. I almost wished you’d been there, Clive. You’d have found it priceless, you really would. I started thinking about what a funny story it would make to tell later, how I’d pop my head to the side and do that whole thing with the mouth as I imitated her, but all of a sudden I realized I was sobbing. Proper big, gulping, snotty old sobs. You’d have been absolutely horrified! So then I was glad you weren’t there to witness it.

  The doctor was clearly quite taken aback by the violence of my emotional display.

  “It can seem very hopeless, can’t it?” she empathized wildly. “But you know,
it isn’t really. How about we up your dose of Citalopram?”

  Well, I didn’t like to argue. Especially not now I’ve got such a love-hate thing going on with my drugs. I nodded my head docilely. Up with the dosage. Up and up. There seem to be few things in life that can’t be improved by more drugs, it seems to me. Yet, somehow I felt I ought to mention some of the problems I’d been having since I started taking the pills. It seemed only proper.

  So I told her about the erratic sleep, and the struggles to stay awake in the middle of the day, and the headaches and the sudden sweats, and she nodded a lot and crossed one blue leg over the other and began making circles in the air with the toe of her right blue shoe.

  “Yes,” she said, encouragingly. “Mmmmmm...”

  She agreed there was a possibility that all the things I’d mentioned could be side effects from the drug, but they could also, she informed me, be the effects of the depression.

  “We wouldn’t want you to have another episode,” she said, thoughtfully making me sound more like a jolly series of Friends than a psychological basket case. “So I think we’ll just pop on an extra twenty milligrams just to be on the safe side.”

  So there you have it. I’ve been supersized—in a pharmaceutical context anyway.

  Which is good because the rest of me feels diminished, reduced, downsized. I have less sleep, I eat less food, I inhabit less space in the world. Somehow I have less substance now that you are not in my life so I’ll take any kind of increase I can get. I’m sure you can understand that.

  The doctor made me fill in the same form as before, where you have to rate how strongly certain statements relate to you. I remembered how saddened she’d seemed the last time so I tried to temper them a little, interspersing a few more threes in with the fours. For instance, with the statement that says “I feel like a failure and like I’ve let my family down,” I circled 3 (a lot of the time) instead of 4 (all the time), because you know, in the odd hours of the night when I’m asleep, I don’t actually feel anything at all. Is that cheating? Well, maybe, but it was worth it for her smile of approbation at the end. “I think I’m starting to see the first faint signs of recovery.” She beamed.

  Maybe there ought to be an extra statement on that form. “I feel like I’ve let my health practitioner down.”

  I received our formal invitation to the vow-renewal ceremony in the mail this morning. I must say, it’s hysterical, it really is, so clever. The contrast between the photo on the front of you and Susan getting married in the 1980s (you look like children, the two of you, it’s so sweet!) and the photo inside where you’ve superimposed your two heads as they are now onto wrinkly old octogenarian bodies, is just genius. I see the hand of Susan in that. You never did really like being laughed at, despite all your protestations to the contrary.

  I’ve propped it up against my computer screen and keep sneaking glances at that original wedding photograph. Susan is much thinner there, of course, and her face is ludicrously young with that kind of half-drawn quality of the not-quite-adult. She’d only been in the UK a couple of years then since coming over from Oz as an eighteen-year-old model, and there’s something in the protective way she’s holding your arm which suggests that, even then, she liked to mother you.

  You’re also looking much thinner (there’s no getting away from it I’m afraid!). In fact if it wasn’t for the dent in your cheek I’d hardly recognize you! Your hair is much longer and curls over the lapel of your shiny early-eighties suit. I’ve never seen you in a tie before. It kind of suits you. You are staring out at the camera, and through the camera at me, through a distance of twenty-six years, but I still see you, and I still know you.

  Do you know, I hate the life you had before me. I hate the wedding guests in the background whom I’ve never met. I hate the fact that you chose that suit without me in mind, or that I wasn’t there to crack up when I saw you in those dreadful shoes. I hate that I never knew you when you were young and handsome and never got to run a finger down a face that was soft and smooth. I hate that I wasn’t there. I hate that you left me out. I hate all the time that was robbed, the history that doesn’t include me. I hate that somewhere not too far away from that photograph, a sixteen-year-old me is going about my life and you don’t even know it yet. I hate it that I don’t feature.

  That’s better.

  I’ve taken the invitation and folded it vertically in half down the center, so that Susan no longer appears and it’s just you in your dated suit with the white flower in the lapel smiling out at the world like someone who has it all in front of him, someone waiting for his life to start.

  Waiting for me.

  The oddest thing happened today.

  When I logged onto my email account, it was really slow. Slower even than normal (and you remember how much I used to complain when we were trying to rush through a flurry of emails and they’d suddenly slow to an agonizing snail’s pace, for no reason other than to spite me). Then I noticed that there was a message I hadn’t read which wasn’t marked up in bold. It wasn’t very interesting I have to confess, just the commissioning editor at one of the magazines sending a mass email canvassing for ideas, but it was strange the way it was marked as “read” even though I’d never seen it.

  I stared at it awhile. Well, let’s face it, work being the way it is I had very little else to do. Then, as is my wont these days, I googled “unread email messages marked as read” (increasingly I find myself unable to make the smallest of decisions or form the slightest opinion without googling it first. How long before I google “do I need to go to the loo?” I wonder). There were quite a few jargony explanations of technical things that could have contributed toward the unbolded unread message phenomenon, but one question really caught my eye. “Could anyone else have accessed your account and read your emails?”

  At first I dismissed the idea, but then I thought about it. And thought about it some more. Then, when I started to get a trickle of emails from people in my contacts list, telling me they’d received a personal email from me, clearly meant for someone else, I started to wonder. . . . Could that be you, Clive, making a little mischief?

  I looked in my “sent” folder. Sure enough I seemed to have sent a message to every name on my list. I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive about the content, but when I clicked on it, it was fairly innocuous. It was a message I must have originally sent to you, saying how bored I was with the piece I was writing, and how I was thinking of retraining as a teacher, or a vet, or an astronaut, basically any other job but this. It was a bit embarrassing, to be sure (silleeeee Salleeeee), but not as damaging as it could have been. Even sitting on my own in the windowless cubbyhole I think I must have blushed thinking of all the other emails that could have been sent... the sex ones (do you remember the era of Master and Kitten and their various adventures in steam rooms and Jacuzzis and the overspill carparks at B&Q?) or the vitriolic ones where we’d systematically trash someone we knew either through work or personally. Compared to those, the email that got sent out from me was unfortunate, but not catastrophic.

  It was almost like a warning.

  Do you find that fanciful, Clive? You’re probably right, but please indulge me a little. These days I must get my entertainment where I can find it.

  My password is, as usual, pathetically easy to guess for anyone with a cursory knowledge of my life (and let’s face it, you had a lot more than that. You had the deluxe membership to my life, with all the perks. And even now you’ve decided to cancel your subscription, I can’t take that insider knowledge back, can I? I can’t demand you hand back your memories along with your locker key and your entrance pass). We always had each other’s passwords to our dedicated email account (no secrets between us, we always told each other. Except it was largely an empty gesture as we were the only ones who ever used that account anyway). It wouldn’t take a terribly advanced technological brain (and let’s be honest, that isn’t you, is it?) to work out that if one email account has a
s its password the first line of an old address, another email account might just feature the first line of a different old address. I am nothing if not predictable.

  Was it you, Clive? Did you come creeping into my account in the night like a thief, sifting through my underwear drawer, emptying out my cupboards?

  I know I really ought to be outraged by the idea, but something in my ridiculous head persists in being flattered. Don’t laugh. It just seems like you’ve gone to an awful lot of trouble over this. I like the idea that, no matter how fleetingly, I was once more in the forefront of your thoughts, center stage as it were.

  So, believe it or not, I hesitated about changing my password. I mean there are all the practical considerations, like worrying whether I’d remember what on earth I’d changed it to and also the real possibility that it hadn’t been you after all, just some technological gremlin playing a practical joke. So I dithered for most of the day, spending long stretches of time just staring at my inbox on my screen, hoping to uncover some other hints as to your lurking presence. Wondering if, in your jumped-up cupboard (sad fuck in a box) in St. John’s Wood, you might be staring at exactly the same page on your screen. It made me feel quite connected to you, in a comforting sort of way.

  But in the end I did change it, of course. While I seem to have lost touch with most of my regular employers after these last months in the prescription drug haze, I’d be pretty stupid to run the risk of alienating them all, wouldn’t I? Not while Daniel is still “in training” (at forty, surely the oldest apprentice in history?) and the family finances so precarious (I’ve stopped opening official letters. Did I tell you? Helen told me to give myself a break and not to engage with people or situations that would upset me. I don’t suppose she was exactly talking about ignoring all official correspondence, but I’ve decided to apply the very loosest of interpretations).