A Traitor to Memory (111 page)

22

Y
ASMIN
E
DWARDS SENT
Daniel across the street to the Army Centre, a chocolate cake in his hands. He was surprised, considering how she'd reacted in the past to his lingering round the uniformed men, but he said, “Wicked, Mum!” and grinned at her and was gone in an instant to make what she'd called a thank-you visit to them. “Good of those blokes to offer you tea time to time,” she told her son, and if Daniel recognised the contradiction in this statement from her earlier fury at the idea of someone pitying her son, he didn't mention it.

Alone, Yasmin sat in front of the television set. She had the lamb stew simmering because—bloody fool that she was—she was
still
incapable of not doing what she'd said earlier she was going to do. She was also as unable to change her mind or to draw the line as she had been as Roger Edwards' girlfriend, his lover, his wife, and then as an inmate in Holloway Prison.

She wondered why now, but the answer lay before her in the hol-lowness she felt and the budding of a fear that she'd long ago buried. It seemed to her that her entire life had been described and dominated by that fear, a gripping terror of one thing that she'd been entirely unwilling to name, let alone to face. But all the running she'd done from the Bogey Man had only brought her to his embrace yet again.

She tried not to think. She wanted not to ponder the fact that
she'd been reduced once more to discovering that there was no sanctuary no matter how determinedly she believed there would be.

She hated herself. She hated herself as much as she'd ever hated Roger Edwards and more—far more—than she hated Katja, who'd brought her to this mirror of a moment and asked her to gaze long and gaze hard. It made no difference that every kiss, embrace, act of love, and conversation had been built on a lie she could not have discerned. What mattered was that she, Yasmin Edwards, had even allowed herself to be a party to it. So she was filled with self-loathing. She was consumed by a thousand “I should've known's.”

When Katja came in, Yasmin glanced at the clock. She was right on time, but she would be, wouldn't she, because the one thing Katja Wolff wasn't blind to was what was going on within others. It was a survival technique she'd learned inside. So she'd have read a whole book from Yasmin's visit to the laundry that morning. Thus, she'd be home on the stroke of dinner time, and she'd be prepared.

What she'd be prepared for, Katja wouldn't know. That was the only advantage Yasmin had. The rest of the advantages were all her lover's, and the single most important one was exactly like a beacon that had long been shining although Yasmin had always refused to acknowledge it.

Single-mindedness. That Katja Wolff had always had a goal was what had kept her sane in prison. She was a woman with plans, and she'd always been that. “You must know what you want and who you will become when you are out of here,” she'd told Yasmin time and again. “Do not let what they have done to you become their triumph. That will happen if you fail.” Yasmin had learned to admire Katja Wolff for that stubborn determination to become who she'd always intended to become despite her situation. And then she'd learned to love Katja Wolff for the solid foundation of the future she represented for them both, even while held within prison walls.

She'd said to her, “You got twenty
years
in here. You think you're going to step outside and start designing clothes when you're forty-five years old?”

“I will have a life,” Katja had asserted. “I will prevail, Yas. I will have a life.”

That life needed to start somewhere once Katja did her time, made her way through open conditions, proved herself there, and was released into society. She needed a place where she would be safe from notice so that she could begin to build her world again. She
wouldn't have wanted any spotlight on her. She wouldn't be able to achieve her dream if she failed to fit easily back into the world. Even then it would prove to be tough: establishing herself in the competitive arena of fashion, when all she was, at best, was a notorious graduate of the criminal justice system.

When she'd first fixed herself up in Kennington with Yasmin, Yasmin had understood that Katja would have to undergo a period of adjustment before she began to fulfil the dreams she'd spoken of. So she'd given her time to reacquaint herself with freedom, and she had not questioned the fact that Katja's talk of goals within prison did not immediately translate to action once she was outside. People were different, she told herself. It meant nothing that she—Yasmin—had begun to work at her new life furiously and single-mindedly the moment she was finally released. She, after all, had a son to provide for and a lover whose arrival she spent years anticipating. She had more incentive to put her world in order so that Daniel first and then Katja afterwards would have the home they both deserved.

But now she saw that Katja's talk had been that: merely talk. Katja had no inclination to make her way in the world because she did not need to. Her spot in the world had long been reserved.

Yasmin didn't move from the sofa as Katja shrugged out of her coat, saying, “
Mein Gott
. I'm exhausted,” and then, seeing her, “What're you doing in the dark there, Yas?” She crossed the room and switched on the table lamp, homing in as she usually did on the cigarettes that Mrs. Crushley wouldn't allow her to smoke anywhere near the laundry. She lit up from a book of matches that she took from her pocket and tossed down on the coffee table next to the packet of Dunhills from which she'd scored the cigarette. Yasmin leaned forward and picked up the matches.
Frère Jacques Bar and Brasserie
were the words printed on it.

“Where's Daniel?” Katja said, looking round the flat. She stepped into the kitchen and took note of the fact that the table was set only for two, because the next thing she said was, “Has he gone to a mate's for dinner, Yas?”

“No,” Yasmin said. “He'll be home soon.” She'd set it up that way to make sure she didn't cave in to her cowardice at the final moment.

“Then why's the table—” Katja stopped. She was a woman who had the discipline not to betray herself, and Yasmin saw her use that discipline now, silencing her own question.

Yasmin smiled bitterly. Right, she told her lover in silence. Didn't think little Pinky would open her eyes, did you, Kat? And if she
opened them or had them opened, didn't expect
her
to make a move, make the
first
move, put herself
out
there alone and afraid, did you, Kat? 'Cause you had five years to suss out how to get inside her skin and make her feel like she had a future with you. 'Cause even then you knew that if anyone ever made this little bitch start seeing possibilities where there wasn't a hope in hell of planting one, she'd give herself over to that worthless cow and do anything it took to make her happy. And that's what you needed, isn't it, Kat? That's what you were counting on.

She said, “I been to Number Fifty-five.”

Katja said guardedly, “You've been where?” And those V's were present in her voice again, those once-charming hallmarks of her dissimilarity.

“Number Fifty-five Galveston Road. Wandsworth. South London,” Yasmin said.

Katja didn't reply, but Yasmin could see her thinking despite the fact that her face was the perfect blank she'd learned to produce for anyone looking her way in prison. Her expression said, Nothing going on inside here. Her eyes, however, locked too tightly on Yasmin's.

Yasmin noticed for the first time that Katja was grimy: Her face was oily and her blonde hair clung in spears to her skull. “Didn't go there tonight,” she noted evenly. “Decided to shower at home, I s'pose.”

Katja came nearer. She drew in deeply on her cigarette, and Yasmin could see that still she was thinking. She was thinking it could all be a trick to force her into admitting something that Yasmin was only guessing at in the first place. She said, “Yas,” and put out her hand and grazed it along the line of plaits that Yasmin had drawn back from her face and tied at the nape of her neck with a scarf. Yasmin jerked away.

“Didn't need to shower there, I s'pose,” Yasmin said. “No cunt juice on your face tonight. Right?”

“Yasmin, what are you talking about?”

“I'm
talking
about Number Fifty-five, Katja. Galveston Road. I'm talking about what you
do
when you go there.”

“I go there to meet my solicitor,” Katja said. “Yas, you heard me tell that detective so this morning. Do you think I'm lying? Why would I lie? If you wish to phone Harriet and ask her if she and I went there together—”

“
I
went there,” Yasmin announced flatly. “I
went
there, Katja. Are you listenin' to me?”

“And?” Katja asked. Still so calm, Yasmin thought, still so sure of
herself or at least still so capable of looking that way. And why? Because she knew that no one was at home during the day. She believed that anyone ringing the bell would have no luck learning who lived within. Or perhaps she was just buying time to think how to explain it all away.

Yasmin said, “No one was home.”

“I see.”

“So I went to a neighbour and asked who lives there.” She felt the betrayal swelling inside her, like a balloon too inflated that climbed to her throat. She forced herself to say, “Noreen McKay,” and she waited to hear her lover's response. What's it going to be? she thought. An excuse? A declaration of misunderstanding? An attempt at a reasonable explanation?

Katja said, “Yas …” Then she murmured, “Bloody hell,” and the Englishism sounded so strange coming from her that Yasmin felt, if only for an instant, as if she were talking to a different person entirely to the Katja Wolff she'd loved for the last three of her years in prison and all of the five years that had followed them. “I do not know what to say,” she sighed. She came round the coffee table and joined Yasmin on the sofa. Yasmin flinched at her nearness. Katja moved away.

“I packed your things,” Yasmin said. “They're in the bedroom. I didn't want Dan to see … I'll tell him tomorrow. He's used to you not being here some nights anyway.”

“Yas, it wasn't always—”

Yasmin could hear her voice go higher as she said, “There's dirty clothes to be washed. I put them separate in a Sainsbury's bag. You can do them tomorrow or borrow a washing machine tonight or stop at a launderette or—”

“Yasmin, you must hear me. We were not always … Noreen and I … We were not always together as you're thinking we were. This is something …” Katja moved closer again. She put her hand on Yasmin's thigh, and Yasmin felt her body go rigid at the touch and that tensing of muscles, that hardening of joints, brought too much back, brought everything back, shot her into her past, where the faces overhung her….

She leapt to her feet. She covered her ears. “Stop it! You burn in hell!” she cried.

Katja held out her hand but didn't rise from the sofa. She said, “Yasmin, listen to me. This is something I cannot explain. It's here inside and it's been here forever. I cannot get it out of my system. I try.
It fades. Then it comes back again. With you, Yasmin, you must listen to me. With you, I thought … I hoped …”

“You used,” Yasmin said. “No thinking, no hoping.
Using
, Katja. Because what you thought was if things looked like you moved on from her, she'd finally have to step forward and say who she really was. But she didn't do that when you were inside. And she didn't do that when you came out. But you keep thinking she's going to do that, so you set up with me to force her hand. Only that's not how it works 'less she knows what you're up to and with who, right? And it sure's
hell
don't work 'less you give her a taste now and then of what she's missing.”

“That is not how it is.”

“You telling me you haven't done it, the two of you? You haven't been with her since you got out? You haven't been slithering over there after work, after dinner, even after you been with me and say you can't sleep and need a walk and know I won't wake up till morning and I can see it
all
now, Katja. And I want you gone.”