The Rose Petal Beach (47 page)

‘Thank you, as I said, for agreeing to see me,’ Scott says. ‘I’ve been seeing Dr Bruwood since I left the house and he suggested it might be time for me to try to talk to you. I’ve wanted to speak to you, but have had to stop myself because that would all be for my benefit instead of yours.

‘First of all, I’m not going to try to persuade you to take me back. You did absolutely the right thing in asking me to leave, I would never have started the process of helping myself if you hadn’t done that. It’s probably saved me. I had crossed so many boundaries … I’m sorry, that’s the most important thing I wanted to say. I’m sorry for what I put you through. I’m sorry for lying to you and cheating on you and manipulating you. And for the rest of it.

‘Since I left I’ve signed up for a perpetrator’s programme. It’s hard.’ From the corner of my eye I see him nodding, confirming to himself that it is difficult. Of course it is, accepting what you are. ‘It’s really hard. I’ve only done one session, but I’ve had to accept that I’m no better than men like my father and my brother.
I always thought because I didn’t threaten people for money, that I didn’t go on the rob or didn’t beat the children, that I was better than them. I’m not. And I’m doing everything I can to change that.

‘I’ve also been talking a lot to Dr Bruwood about my porn addiction and how it affected me. I’m starting to realise it completely altered how I saw women, how I thought about women. I basically saw all women in terms of what they could do for me, sexually. I stopped seeing women as human beings, just as orifices. I also believed sex was all about how I wanted it, how I thought sex should be, what I was entitled to do …’

He wants me to look at him. He wants me to connect with him
, I think.

Scott continues, ‘I thought I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I decided that what I wanted was going to happen no matter what.

‘I’m sorry for how I made our sex life, for the resentment I showed towards you for not wanting to do the porn stuff. I’m sorry for not even contemplating that you have a sexuality that is as important as mine. And I’m …
so
sorry … for what I did to you that night.’

The memory of the night of yes that felt like a no wells up, and immediately my body becomes rigid with the reverberations of those feelings. The confusion, the horror, the pain. I shut my eyes, trying to hide from what is coursing through my veins, then my eyes jolt open – it’s much more real in the dark. Confusion, horror, pain send shockwaves through me again.

‘Mrs Challey, Tami, are you OK?’ The therapist’s voice is calm and gentle. ‘Would you like to stop?’ The man who I had been lightly mocking in my head sounds so concerned, so sweet. It brings me back to the present, banishes the memory and its feelings back to where it came from. In the past. Firmly, securely in the past. ‘Would you like to stop?’ he repeats even more gently.

‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ I say through my rigid mouth. The memory is gone but my body can’t relax, it can’t immediately let go of the residual emotions.

It’s because he’s said it, admitted it wasn’t right or fair. All this time, the only other person who was there carried on as normal so I had normalised it in my head, convinced myself that I was the one who had misunderstood and overreacted, not him. He is telling me that it wasn’t me, I was right to feel as I did. It was him. He had … It was too complicated to unravel in its entirety but he used my yes, my consent, to brutalise me. He used my love for him and our family to pretend it was nothing out of the ordinary. If I hadn’t stopped sleeping with him after that, he would have carried on and got worse, he would have carried on until … I shudder. I saw the videos, I know where things could have ended up. I remove the thought of that from my mind. I cannot think about it any longer and go back to normal life. Another time I will deal with that, another time I will process it.

‘Would you like a drink of water?’ Dr Bruwood asks. He really is a nice man, I shouldn’t have teased him, even in the privacy of my own head.

‘No. I just want this over with.’ I sound hard now.

‘I’m so sorry, TB. I didn’t think how bringing that up might affect you. I’m such a fool … Look, one of the other things I wanted to tell you was that I went to the police. I told them the truth about Mirabelle. What I did, how I lied.’

I whip around to him. ‘What?’

The shock of what he’s just said is transmuted by the shock of seeing him properly. He looks … like Scott again. He’s lost the polish and sheen that encapsulated the man he has been these past few years. His hair has a gentle, slightly unkempt quality that looks like it was held under the shower for a few minutes then allowed to dry. Gone is the harsh cut, the preened creations he’d progressed to. His face is lined and lived in, he has a few open pores on his cheeks, his skin tone is uneven and healthy-looking instead of fake, smooth and unnaturally glossy from his almost fanatical use of products. His fingernails are scraggly and chewed instead of manicured and perfect. He’s wearing an old T-shirt of
his that I’d ‘borrowed’ originally because it smelt of him, and kept after a few washes because it felt of him against my skin. It was a reminder of him, the real him, when I was living with the other him. He’s also wearing jeans he bought for fifteen pounds at Liverpool’s Saturday market when we went up there to see his sister one time when the kids were young. (She’d been surprisingly welcoming but had made it clear we weren’t to tell their parents she’d so much as seen us.)

He’s looking me over, too. Seeing if I have changed, what’s different about me. Trying, I guess, to see if what has been happening has altered me physically. It has, of course it has. The past few weeks have been life-changing, and life changes are always worn on your body – inside or out. ‘You did what?’ I repeat.

‘I went and told the police the truth. What’s the point in doing all this work on myself, trying to change, if I can’t tell the truth about what I’d become?’

‘What did they say?’ I daren’t ask what the truth is in case it is as bad as I fear.

He looks down at his hands, his body now a different shape as he holds it in a different way. Shame. Before he held himself in honesty and openness, now he holds himself in shame. He links his hands and then unlinks them. ‘That policewoman, Harvan, told me that because the statement had been retracted and she’s …
gone
it was too late now for an attack of the guilts, as she called it. She said she wanted to prosecute me for wasting police time and lying to the police. And they’re very close to uncovering the evidence that will prove you were the murderer, not just there that night, and when she does so, she’s going to do me as accessory before and after the fact.’

My body recoils; they still think they can prove that I did it. That I am capable of that. I still can’t prove that I didn’t.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that they thought you did it?’ he asks quietly. ‘She said you’re their only suspect but wouldn’t say why. Why didn’t you tell me any of this?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were sleeping with my friend?’ I reply, still shaky from the knowledge the police haven’t given up on pinning a murder on me.

He inhales deeply and lets the matter drop by lowering his gaze. When he raises his gaze to me again, I can tell by the colour of his eyes that I am seconds away from hearing terrible news, I can tell by the way he has paused that he’s about to reveal something so atrocious I will want to throw up. ‘I’ve been unfaithful before,’ he says.

I turn away again, my eyes focusing on the window as this latest truck strikes me without slowing; it is a full-force hit, square on the body.

‘More than once but by different degrees,’ he continues. Can’t he see I’m already down here, can’t he see that I was going to struggle to get up, why has he put his foot on the brake to stop and is now reversing to hit me again?

‘I didn’t … just start with a full-blown affair, there were different incidents over the years that allowed me to believe I could do it and get away with it. First it was a couple of flirtations, they weren’t doing any harm so I didn’t think anything of them.’
Wham! He’s hit me again and has now applied the brakes and is coming for me again.
‘Then came a few more flirtations that I took a bit further with texts and emails and naked pictures.’
Wham! Brake. Reverse.
‘Then it was a couple of kisses with one of those people.’
Wham! Brake. Forwards.
‘I always stopped for a while, afterwards, told myself I was being stupid risking everything like that when I loved you and the girls. Often you’d mention something, about one of those women, and I’d convince you that you were being jealous and paranoid.’
Wham! Brake. Reverse.
‘But when you let it go, I guess I thought it can’t have been that bad, I wasn’t going to get found out, so when the opportunity arose I did it again. But then, it was the next step – a couple of one-night stands on business trips.’
Wham! Brake. Forwards
. ‘After each of those I swore never again. I didn’t want to hurt you like that. I’d made a legitimate mistake and I needed to
pull myself back and recommit to you. Make it up to you even though you never knew.’
Wham! Brake. Reverse.
‘And then, things took another step when I had a three-month thing with …’

‘With the American woman who came over to find out about how the company worked,’ I find myself saying. I
knew
he fancied her, I
knew
from the hour I spent with her when she dropped by before they met other work colleagues for dinner, she fancied him. But when I mentioned it he said I was paranoid, a jealous, nagging wife who was putting one and one together and coming up with sixty-nine. He’d been really proud of
that
joke, had chuckled to himself for weeks about it.

‘Yeah,’ he breathes.
Wham! Brake. Reverse.

I can picture her, all long auburn hair, perfect white teeth, flawless skin, laughing at me as she sat astride him, fucking him. The little housewife she’d looked down her nose at when she sat in my home.
‘Gee, your house is beautiful. You must be so dedicated to keep it that way,’
she’d said, moving a cushion on the sofa to the position she obviously thought it should be. I can see him, too, guffawing at how pathetic I’d been sitting there after serving them wine and not having a clue what their practically coded conversation was about.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘For all of it. It’s all bad, it’s all terrible. I have behaved appallingly. I have treated you appallingly.’

‘Why did you tell me that?’ I say, unable to look at him. ‘You could have gone the rest of your life without telling me that. I wish you had gone the rest of your life without telling me that.’ I cover my eyes with my hands, pulling air in and pushing air out of my lungs as fast as possible to stop myself breaking down.

‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ he says, his voice weighted with regret. ‘But I had to because I had to let you know all the facts of your life before you make any decisions. I lied to you for so long, I need to be honest even though I
know
this will be the end. I have hurt you so badly, and you didn’t even know the half of it. I’m sorry. I can’t think of anything else to say except sorry.’

That
word
. I
hate
that word. It means nothing – just like anything, if you say it enough times, it loses all sense, all meaning – but people say it all the time. People say it to me all the time. It is a combination of letters that has no meaning attached to it if you are having to repeat it several times over several occasions.

I hate that word with a passion.

‘I love you,’ Scott adds in a whisper. ‘I wanted to say I love you. I never stopped loving you, I just thought what I wanted was more important than anything.’

‘That makes it worse,’
I say in my head.
‘You loving me and still being capable of all those things, all those deceits and lies, it makes it worse. It shows that love is meaningless to you. How can you do that to someone you love? How?’

My tears are too much for me to speak through. And what is there to say? But why am I crying anyway? It’s not as if he could ever come back, as if I could ever live with him again anyway. This is simply confirmation of information – that we’re over – that I already knew. Why am I crying? Did part of me hope that it would work out? That he could somehow undo his addiction, his behaviour, his arrogance, his
crime
?

Or is it that there is more of my marriage to be rewritten, more of the thread of my life to be unpicked and rewoven? Is it because I thought I knew it all, and in the end, it was only the tip of the iceberg of his betrayal?

I pick up my bag, my fingers closing around the cotton handle and finding an odd comfort in its familiarity. I stand and look directly at my husband. He meets my gaze with tears in his eyes.

I cannot speak right now. I cannot speak at all.

Without a word to anyone, I turn and leave the room. There are no second chances to be given here. Maybe a part of me came for that, maybe a part of me hoped that if he had done all the right things – even though I had no real idea what those right things were – I could learn to forgive, learn to forget.

That’s not going to happen.