The Rose Petal Beach (45 page)

‘Sometimes, it really is.’

‘She loved you.’

‘So? She loved me but she still left me. She had no part in my life until I was grown up. I’m starting to, you know, be cool with that. We all do what we gotta do. But I still hate that picture and that story. Yeah, she probably changed her mind and tried to come back, but some mistakes are too big.’

Yeah, they are,
I think. ‘Look, I’ll keep it for you. I wouldn’t feel right, accepting it, so I’ll keep it for you. Wherever I am, the picture will be too until you want it back.’

‘You sound like you’re going somewhere,’ she says.

‘Get off me! Don’t touch me!’ Chocolate-brown silk. Raised voices. Flailing,
fighting arms, kicking legs. Mirabelle’s face. My body burning with an incandescent rage.

‘You just never know what’s around the corner.’

‘True.’ Another look at Noah. I’m glad she has him. I’m glad she has someone. ‘But if I could give you one bit of advice from, like, someone who knows – don’t leave your kids. I know you wouldn’t but, you know, just don’t.’

I smile at her.

‘Get off me! Don’t touch me!’

I’m not sure how it was for Mirabelle in the actual moment when she left her child all those years ago, but I know that for me, I may not have any choice in the matter.

‘Hello, TB.’ He is so calm, so quiet, relaxed.

I shouldn’t have answered the phone, it’s not my house after all, but it was automatic: a phone rings, you pick it up, don’t you? Well, I do.

And it was him.
Him
.

He sounds … Normal. His voice, his tone, causes me to catch my breath, then to drop the phone.

‘Tami?’ his tiny, tinny voice squawks from the receiver on the carpet. ‘Tami? Are you there?’

Bending slowly, my trembling fingers reach for the silvery-grey handset and place it near my ear. Not actually to my ear because I don’t think I could stand to have his words reverberating directly through my body.

‘I know you don’t want to talk to me right now, but I need … sorry, what I need isn’t important. But I’d
like
to speak to you. I miss—’ I click the red telephone hang-up button. I can’t listen any longer. With a shaking hand, I return the handset to its cradle, staring at it, seeing his face. The lines that make up his manly, powerful features: his straight nose, his set lips, his brow above those chocolate-maple eyes, his hair styled carefully off his face.

He did not sound like a man in pain; so mired in his own private version of hell he has not been able to reply to my texts, answer my calls (not even when I have sneakily withheld my number). He will not speak to anyone at work who does not give their name and reason for calling.

Scott sounded like a man who missed his wife. A man in love with his wife.
‘Never mind his wife, he can’t love her, she can’t love him.’
Isn’t that what Tami said? Never mind that he was married, I lied to myself that it was OK what I was doing because
I
loved him. I defended myself, I defended him, I defended what we did by saying it was love, we couldn’t help ourselves, Tami was deluded because she couldn’t accept that.

I’m the one who’s deluded. My hand goes to my chest, to the site of my scar, to where the weight of the world seems to rest. I’m the one who’s been in denial about what I did, who I really am.

The door opens and she sticks her head around. Her gaze rests momentarily on my hand, on the way I am holding myself together.

‘Are you in pain?’ she asks. ‘Do you need me to call the doctor?’

I shake my head. It’s here now, dispersing through me like dye dropped into water, spreading out through me, staining every part of me as it moves. Guilt. Guilt at what I’ve seconds ago done and what I’ve done in the past.

‘Are you sure?’ she asks, stepping into the room. She avoids coming into this room as much as possible. It’s sort of become my living room because the children either play in the kitchen or in their bedrooms or in the garden. I wonder what happened in this room that has made her consign it to a never-visited zone. I used to avoid this room before I started to stay here because of the pictures of family life it held on its walls. Now I sit here and drink in those pictures, trying to believe I will be seeing them for years to come, that things will work out for me.

I am in that stage between appointments when I am recovering from surgery and waiting for chemotherapy. I am euphoric and exhausted often in the same spaces in time. I am here. I keep reminding myself of that. I am here. And now, my guilt is here, too.

Tami stands uncomfortably in her own living room and stares at me.

‘Did I hear the phone?’ she asks.

I say nothing, but my eyes dart to the phone in its cradle, the image of Scott’s face evaporated but the memory of hearing his
voice, discovering the way he really spoke to her, really felt about her, lingering like a heavy, cloying perfume that will take time to disappear. I press harder at the scar, at where the weight of the world lives, at where the guilt has started.

Her eyes go from me to the phone then back to me before moving on, like they always do eventually. She knows.

She knows I picked up the phone and it was Scott. She’s probably wondering what I told him, if I begged him to come back to me. If it’s only a matter of time before he is at the door claiming me. ‘Don’t answer my phone,’ she says calmly and not unpleasantly.

‘
Sorry
,’ I mumble.
‘Sorry for answering your phone. Sorry for sleeping with your husband. Sorry for trying to manipulate you into leaving him. Sorry for ruining your life. Sorry for everything. I am truly, truly sorry.’
Except I don’t say those things. I don’t say the single word. I don’t say those sentences. I’m not sorry enough to breathe in her presence right now. I’m not even sure I’m sorry enough to carry on living.

Something is different about her. I noticed it when I walked into the living room and she was standing there, clutching her chest, her body so rigid it seemed capable of shattering if I breathed too hard in her direction, looking as if she had just been diagnosed with cancer all over again.

She’d been talking to Scott, I realised when I asked about the phone. He’s the only one with that number, so she must have been. I don’t know what he said to her, I don’t know if he told her off, or said he’d never loved her, but it’s as if her spirit – whatever it is that has kept her going so far – has been peeled away by a sharp knife, leaving her with nothing. Leaving her with the shell of the person who doesn’t make it down to breakfast or any other meals any more, and barely raises her head when I take meals up to her.

I think she’s given up.

That selfishness, that denial about what their affair was about, that constant arguing we were doing was driving her. It’s evaporated. All I can see is a person who is sorry, a person disintegrating under the weight of her guilt.

She’s given up.

I need to speak to Scott, to find out what he said, but that would mean speaking to Scott. I still can’t manage that. We text and email about the girls, but we don’t speak. I can’t talk to him. His voice would sound the same, and he’d call me TB and arrange his words in sentences that I found so familiar and comforting, and normal, I’d only have the truck-smash sensation all over again when I put the phone down. Anyway, who rings her husband to find out what he said to his mistress to make her give up on life? Me, apparently.
Because this is the life I have been placed in. This is the life I’ve got since Mirabelle died and I have been battling with my own guilt demons.

I think she’s given up on life.

And I don’t know if I’m strong enough to find out how to make her live again.

The Rose Petal Beach picture is in front of me. The way Mirabelle said she knew the artist makes me think now that they were probably lovers. That’s why the picture is so intimate, the shape of her body so accurate, so precise. The person who had captured Mirabelle on this canvas knew her so well, had loved her so completely, they could put into the image something unique and precious. Every stroke is an act of love, a sonnet to the perfection they saw as Mirabelle.

The ache of missing her unfolds inside and I have to close my eyes as the suddenness, the enormity of it yawns throughout my body.

Mirabelle would have wanted to live. She would have given anything to live. The split fingernails, the state of the bathroom, the bruising on her body that DS Harvan told me about say that she fought as hard as she could to live. Her terror at what was coming must have been huge, insurmountable. Drowning, her lungs filling up with water each time she was submerged, the pain of fighting, the horror of knowing that she couldn’t stop what was happening to her.

Knowing, as she died, that she would never see her daughter again. She would be permanently leaving behind her baby girl.

Her face becomes clear in my mind, in the space where the chasm of missing her is, and I see her smile, I see her skin, the curls of her black hair, the look in her eyes that made her Mirabelle. Gone. It’s gone. She’s gone.

And now we have Beatrix.

She’s given up on life.

If I had believed Mirabelle, would her death still have happened?

‘
Get off me! Don’t touch me!’

There’s nothing I can do realistically to ‘save’ Beatrix. But I can help her. The question is, do I want to help her? She has helped me. Having her here, in my life, in my house, has held back the devastation, like Moses holding back the mighty, raging waters of the Red Sea. The pain and horror and sorrow, the deep wound is still there, but they are transmuted, frozen, waiting for the time they will be allowed to flow again. There is a time limit, of course, on how long I can defer the crash, but at the moment it is a divine luxury to be able to think, feel, breathe without being mentally and emotionally devastated.

Beatrix has given up on life. If I do nothing, it will be me who helped to kill her. It will be another death on my conscience; another splash of blood on my soul.

The shaking is back as I reach for the phone.

A second after I hit the dial button the line clicks to connect.

‘Hello, Scott,’ I say before he can speak. I need to delay hearing his voice for as long as possible because as soon as I do, I will become undone, like the threads of my life that have already been unwoven, I will come apart. ‘I think we need to talk.’

‘Hi, TB,’ he replies.

And I am undone.

‘Beatrix.’ How many times have I said her name since I found out? I’ve avoided saying it because her name was synonymous with the role she had in cleaving our lives apart.

I can tell I haven’t said her name too often because she stops staring at the window and refocuses on me. This room is a pit now. She has left it to go to the toilet, to go for a shower and to come back. She has been wallowing in bed, staring at the window, sometimes with the television on, sometimes with the radio on, mostly there is silence. I don’t know if she has been surfing the internet on her phone, but I know that mostly it is quiet in here. As quiet and still and darkened as you would imagine a mausoleum.

The blinds are always closed, firmly shut against the outside world. Light seeps in, of course, light is like life, it will not give up until it absolutely has no choice, but this room is dark, and it is quiet and it is still. The air has not moved in a long time, it has become stained, infected with the smell of sleeping bodies and food. It is stagnant. And I’m not going to put up with it for a moment longer.

Even though I have her attention, I stand and go to the window. I tug on the blinds cords to let in light, to let in the outside world, and then my fingers fumble for the catch, to open it, to let in some air, some new life.

‘Nggghhhh,’ she groans from the bed. ‘Don’t.’ She moves in bed, shies away from the light, pulling the covers over her head, disappearing from the freshness that has instantly started to wake up the room. There are security latches stopping the windows opening more than an inch or two, and if I didn’t have to go back to the
bedside table to get the key, I would throw them wide open letting the world around us cleanse this room of the staleness within.

‘Beatrix,’ I say again, the word mottling on my tongue, as I return to my seat beside the bed.

She slowly lowers her barrier of covers, to look at me again. Surprised that I have said that word, her name, again.

‘He loved you,’ I say. I don’t lie. I don’t lie unless … ‘I, erm, spoke to him. And he loved you. That doesn’t mean he didn’t love me as well, but you know …
Scott
. You know he’s complicated. He loved you. I know he did.’ Unless I have to. Unless I have this huge, terrible thing that I need to make up for in any way I can.

Moving as if she is in great pain, she eases herself upright in bed until her upper half – covered in a grubby, off-white top that I recognise as her yoga kit – is completely exposed. ‘Why are you saying this shit to me?’ she asks.

‘Because … because it’s the truth.’

‘No it’s not,’ she says, her face twisted in disgust. ‘Of course it’s not. What are you doing?’

‘I’m …’ I begin.

‘I fucked your husband, remember? For nearly two years. In this bed. I fucked your husband and I fucked you over, and I know it wasn’t because he loved me. It was because he could and I would. So why are you saying this shit to me?’

I’m shaking. I thought I could do this and I thought I could be strong. But the shaking is back. The
need
for a drink is back. The feeling of fear at what I think I have done is back. ‘Because it’s enough. There’s been enough loss and I want it to stop. You’ve given up because you think he didn’t love you. I need you to go back to fighting and looking after yourself and believing you can get through this. Mirabelle … She had no choice in what happened to her. But you do. You need to … just live, Beatrix, don’t give up. I can’t lose you, too.’

She stares at me, her forefinger and middle finger pressed against her trembling lips. ‘What is wrong with you?’ she snaps.
‘Why can’t you just hate me and be done with it? I did a horrible, horrible thing to you and to your family. If it was me, I would have put my foot down when I saw you in the road, not slowed down. I would have ripped out every hair on your head and scratched your face off. I remember how much I raged when I found out what my husband had been up to. I remember the unquenchable anger I had in me. But you … You won’t hate me. WHY DON’T YOU HATE ME?’