Love and Fallout (31 page)

At five-thirty Frieda reaches for her shoulder bag.

‘Don't worry, you'll come up with something,' she says, gliding a comb through the fine wings of her blonde hair. ‘You always do.'

‘Do I?'

‘Absolutely. You're the most resourceful person I know,' she says, applying tinted lip gloss. Resourcefulness was a habit we developed at the common – rain-capes made from dustbin liners, earth ovens dug under the firepit, the mug tree made from a real tree. But I don't have any good ideas for magicking up cash.

Frieda smacks her lips together. ‘That should do it.'

She's seeing a film, and as she tells me about it the thought arrives that I would happily swap lives with her, pop the lip gloss into my bag and whiz off into the evening sunshine. She snaps the compact shut. ‘How about you, any plans?'

‘Just a quiet night.'

My mind travels the route home, enters our house and there we are, the Perry family, Dom upstairs strumming his bass guitar while me and Pete occupy separate ends of the living room, trying to make it to bed time without inflicting or experiencing fresh pain. Our communication has gone down to the bare minimum, and though we're still sleeping in the same bed to keep up appearances – Dom's brown eyes monitor us over the dinner table – we're only clinging on. Our marriage is crumbling. All day I carry traces of it underneath my fingernails like soil from the garden.

Five minutes later Frieda's gone, leaving a cloud of scent behind her. I sit for a while, watching the multicoloured pipes of the screensaver making and remaking themselves, thoughts whirring with the fan. Something she said gives me an idea.

The collection tins are in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, and with my heart beating, I dig one out, drop it into my backpack and lock the office door behind me.

*

The wheels of my bike slice through shapes of bright light and shadow, following the commuter traffic out of Cambridge, past the cream stone of college buildings as they gradually give way to featureless road, a petrol station, a row of shops and then the junction I'm seeking. Two more turns and I've found the cul-de-sac, a slope of compact houses; first homes for new families or last homes for the retired. A little boy in a Thomas the Tank Engine t-shirt runs through a sprinkler and his mother smiles as I pass with my collecting tin.

Number 78 is a well-kept semi-detached with a neat front garden and two terracotta pots of marigolds balanced on the white exterior windowsills. I fumble the gate latch. Lavender bunches haphazardly along the path and three foxgloves bend towards the front door, which is half panelled with smoky glass. On the letterbox a discreet handwritten sign reads No Junk Mail Please. The sun has dipped behind the house and my arms feel weak, as if they're carrying something much heavier than a plastic box with Easy Green stickered across the front.

The doorbell's three harmonic notes are loud, they send a chime of alarm through my arm and into my chest and all at once I have an urge to flee. In a bid for distraction I begin to count the petals of a marigold. Fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-two, and no one comes. Better not to know, to turn back and get on the bike in the low evening sunshine and cycle away. But then a blurred shape appears behind the glass like the shadow of a fish underwater and the shadow swells until the door swings open.

She wipes her hands on the tea towel slung over her shoulder and wary regard softens as she sees the tin, the tin which explains my presence on her doorstep. I press it forward. ‘I'm collecting for a charity. We're called Easy Green.' If it is her, has Pete told her any of this? Along with a denim skirt, she's wearing a washed-out pink vest, and without a bra her breasts make the shape of two shallow bells. She's what, five years younger than me? This knowledge pulses through my head followed by
Perhaps it isn't her at all, perhaps it's her mother
.

If she knows who I am there's no indication because she's looking at me with something that borders on sympathy, encouraging me to speak, the way people encourage the shy or the afflicted, trying to draw them out. She nods. ‘Oh yes?' An Irish accent. She's Irish. Why is this surprising? I begin to recite some information about the charity, an automatic spiel. Her skin is Celtic, naturally fair, but she's trained it to withstand the sun and a spray of freckles decorate her shoulders. There are whispers of grey coming through her dark brown hair. Her face, although pleasant, is unremarkable, nothing like the face I've imagined with its soft pout and coltish eyelashes.

‘So you visit local schools? I've taught at quite a few in this area.' She says this brightly because it links us; it gives us something in common. That immediate intimacy so often found in female conversation with its undertone of
Like me, I'm no threat
.

Then it is her. It is almost funny, so far removed is she from the woman who's been sashaying through my head. Her eyes are a greenish grey. Her mouth… what is this mouth like, the mouth that's been pressed to my husband's, the mouth that's tasted his skin? It is a mouth. It is an ordinary mouth, the lips a little thin.

My thoughts are escaping in all directions, I'd gathered them tightly but now they're a clutch of balloons rising and separating, and she gives me that sympathetic smile again.

‘Hang on a tick. I'll get my purse.' She dips back into the house. Her feet are bare and the toenails painted with a polish the colour of aubergines. She returns and drops a pound coin into the box. The money makes a hollow rattle. ‘Are the neighbours not feeling generous today?'

‘I've only just started.'

‘Oh right.' She nods, puzzled by my method of beginning a collection in the middle of the street.

‘It's a nice road. Have you lived here long?' I ask wondering if she has cooked for Pete, that tea towel slung over the shoulder.

‘Um… about four years now.'

‘And you like it?'

‘Sure.' She is holding the purse. ‘It's very friendly. You'll find that as you go around.' She checks behind her, as if her name has been called. Where is the kitchen? I would like to go inside and lift the lids of her pans, investigate her fridge to discover her tastes, make my way through the rest of the house to pick up the photographs in their frames, read the spines of her books, sort through her wardrobe, her bedside table, examine the contents of her bathroom cabinet. And I want to tell her I have a right. I need to know. And she needs to know too, about the insomnia, the effort it takes to drag through each day, to get out of bed and into the shower and into the office and the panicky feeling which never quite disappears, which follows you everywhere, as if you're about to speak to a thousand people.

She's taken half a step back.

‘Where do you teach?'

‘I'm private tutoring just now,' she says. ‘Exam season. All those anxious parents.'

Does she have children of her own? She shifts her weight from one hip to the other and now her face is guarded – she wants to go, to step back into that calm life she has for herself behind the front door, where other men's wives do not turn up unexpectedly, she wants to slip back there free as a fish. She has a hand on the door, swinging it ever so gently when a black cat appears and winds around her legs. ‘Oh,' she half laughs, the sudden flash of velvet against bare skin.

‘He probably wants feeding,' she says, stooping to run a hand along the animal's body. ‘Eat eat eat, that's all you do,' she says fondly. This is my cue to go.

My heart speeds. I part my lips. All I have to do is open my mouth and out it will come, the inconvenient truth, those words which will alter the course of her evening and the course of mine, and whatever is cooking inside that mysterious kitchen will burn.
I'm Pete's wife.
The roses on the wallpaper at daybreak. Our shoes still muddled in a heap by the wardrobe, just as they were a month ago when I didn't know she existed, when her naked body wasn't settled between us. She straightens up and we make eye contact. Her face is expectant. And I want to ask her
Do you know what this is like? Do you know what you've done?

I begin, ‘Do you…?'

She leans forwards, the better to express her empathy.

‘Do you want us to put you on our mailing list?'

She holds her hand up in refusal. ‘No. If you don't mind. I can hardly keep up with the mail I receive.' She smiles for the last time, wishes me a good evening and closes the door.

27

Silent Night

At half-past four in the morning, I stood arm-in-arm with Rori. We were waiting our turn to climb a collapsible aluminium ladder and go into the base. Three days had passed since she'd kissed me and in that time neither of us had spoken about it, nor had we kissed each other again, but I'd replayed the kiss a hundred times in my head, trying to remember what had been in her eyes when it happened. I wanted to talk to her, to know what it meant, although I thought I knew already. And anyway, talking about it in those terms might cheapen it, whatever it was. What was it? Had I fallen in love with her? Even whispering the idea made me uncomfortable, and yet what else could this be?

I thought about her all the time, I thought about her and I thought about the destruction of the world, and in my mind the two had become connected, because if there was no world there would be no Rori. In a dream, I'd knelt beside her dead body –which was perfectly intact after a nuclear blast, white and limpid like the Lady of Shalott's – and woken with a start to find her lying safe beside me. Stretching out a hand I'd touched her cheek in the half light while she slept. If I felt this way, then surely she felt the same? She had been the one to lean forward, to cradle my face and press her mouth against mine. And if she hadn't kissed me again perhaps it was because she was waiting for me to kiss her? I would. I wanted to. First we just needed to scale the nine-foot-high fence.

There were at least forty of us taking part in the action, though we couldn't see the other women clearly and only caught snatches of excited whispers and nervous movements in the birch scrub. I could hear Rori's breathing. All day I'd been questioning my courage, but she'd calmed me, and now we were here, poised in the darkness, a gauzy darkness relieved by torches beamed towards the ladders.

‘Your wings are crooked,' I said, adjusting them.

She checked behind her.‘Thanks, Skittle.'

I rearranged the tinsel fixed around my beanie. It was Christmas Eve and we'd decided to make the action celebratory. Someone had sourced various bits of festive costume along with a bag of angel wings. In addition, we were all wearing tabards decorated with luminous peace signs to identify us as demonstrators – rather than terrorists – in case things got hairy. Things
getting hairy
was Jean's euphemism for
In case we get shot at
. Getting shot was the main thing I was trying not to think about.

The woman setting up the ladder was called Jenny and she worked in the outside world as a paramedic. She was a safe pair of hands, at least. At the top she unfurled a roll of carpet rescued from Newbury dump which she laid protectively over the double coil of barbed wire, and there she balanced like a circus artist perched on a high wire, her sparkly deely boppers catching the moonlight as another ladder was offered up. This second ladder she lowered to the other side of the fence so we could manage the descent. A few seconds later came a thud and crackle as she landed.

‘The ground's not too bad,' she said, her face to the wire. ‘You've got to be quick.'

We'd decided to keep a chain going – each woman who went over stayed to help the woman following after. Two other ladders went up along the fence. I stood behind Rori in the bracken waiting my turn, a fine spray of rain coming down on our faces out of the black night, like mist from a sprinkler.

Sam appeared beside us and performed a clunky pirouette, she'd dressed as a Christmas fairy for the occasion, a pink ballet tutu pulled over her army trousers.

‘How are you going to get over in that?' I said.

‘I'm not taking it off. I got it specially,' she said, giving a curtsy. We began giggling. After a whispered discussion we agreed Sam should remove the skirt, throw it over the fence and put it on when she reached the other side. A woman with a misshapen silhouette ascended the ladder.

‘What's she got on her arms?' I said.

‘Cut-up tyres,' replied Rori.

‘Why?'

‘In case of police dogs,' said Sam through the shadows. ‘We'll be all right. I've got a few aniseed balls in my pocket, Alsatians hate them.'

‘We won't have time to feed them sweets,' I said. ‘Hey, we should have got tyre shoes. Boing. We could have bounced straight over.'

It wasn't funny, but the tension had made us dizzy with anxiety, and I was still snorting alongside Rori when I heard another whispered voice.

‘What's wrong with her?' I straightened up to see Angela, unadorned except for her tabard, staring at me.

‘Nothing,' I replied, straight-faced.

She gave me a sharp look and pushed her specs up her nose. ‘Once we're over we need to stay low and wait until we're together, then we can run forwards,' she said. ‘Does everyone have the number of the solicitor?'