The Woman He Loved Before (28 page)

‘Bet he feels even more of a dickhead now that you didn’t race him,’ I say.

‘Oh no, Mrs, you’re not getting off that easily,’ Jack replies. ‘What did you say to Angela about me after our first meeting?’

‘We’re married, what difference does it make now?’ I ask.

‘None, but I still want to know. What did you say?’

‘I told you, I didn’t mention you at all,’ I say. ‘You didn’t really register on my radar until you turned up with coffee and croissants. And even then it was the croissants and coffee that piqued my interest.’

‘Oh, Oscar Wilde had it so right – it really is better to be talked about behind your back than to not be talked about at all.’

‘Don’t take it so hard,’ I reassure. ‘It really was nothing personal.’

‘I can’t believe you were so indifferent to me,’ he wails.

‘Not every woman finds you instantly irresistible, thankfully.’

‘Why thankfully?’

‘Well, I don’t want every woman fan—’

The bang from somewhere to my right comes first, a fraction before the car is swept aside as if swatted by an angry giant. The screech of wheels fill my ears, my stomach falls at the lifting of the car; then there are the rough yellow sandstone bricks of the wall, and the solid muted grey of the lamppost hurtling towards me—

I open my eyes and I am in my bedroom, being held by a sleeping Jack. I am sweaty and shaky; my heart is racing, running,
galloping away from the nightmare that was a reality. My breathing is erratic and scattered, my chest hurts trying to keep oxygen in.

I’m probably crying, I feel as if I am. I feel as if I am back there, trapped in the wreckage, wedged beside a lamppost, my face is stinging and wet.

I couldn’t make a sound when I spoke; I kept losing chunks or slivers of time. But I kept trying, I kept calling his name, to see if he was OK. I just needed him to be alive and OK.

I think I’m suffocating. Jack’s suffocating me. I’m trying to breathe but he is squeezing the breath out of me by holding me. Not caring if I wake him, and ignoring the pain that ignites my nerve endings, I push him off me and sit up in bed and instantly my breathing improves, my heart slowing with every passing second that puts distance between us.

‘Libby?’ he asks, resting up on one arm. ‘What’s wrong?’

I turn my face away, I don’t want him to look at me, nor I him. I want to be as far away from him as possible. Everything is wrong, I want to say. ‘Nothing,’ I say, ‘just a dream.’

‘Oh, love,’ he says, moving towards me. It’s my turn to shy away from him. All those times he’s done it to me, now I’m doing it to him. It causes him to sit up, a frown on his face. He does it again – reaches for me – and I can’t stand it, I can’t stand to have him act like this, to act like everything is OK and everything is normal when he has been lying to me. Since I asked him about the crash back at the hospital, he has lied to me. He knows what happened directly after the crash, when we both came round, he knows what he did. I pull away from his reach, and slip out of bed.

‘I need to get a glass of water,’ I say.

‘OK,’ has barely left his lips before I am out of the room and fleeing down the corridor to the kitchen.

I sit in the dark, staring at the surface of the table, watching the imperfections in the wood make themselves into images.

This is because I decided to stop reading the diaries, isn’t it?
I ask the
great beyond. I decided to give Jack another chance, to move on and to maybe talk to him, and instead I’m given the true answer to the question he answered with a lie when I was in hospital. I now know what happened. I can now name that emotion that has been driving my need to find out about Eve. That emotion that is thumping through my veins, crawling over my skin like a million biting ants, sitting at the back of my throat like a pool of acid.

I am feeling betrayal, wrapped like climbing ivy around a huge monolith of jealousy.

jack

I think Libby knows what happened after the crash and that I lied to her about it. The way she fled the bedroom last night and didn’t return until I had fallen asleep, the way she was so quiet and reserved this morning, the way she skipped her daily row with Butch about whether he really expected her to bring his food and water to him in the corridor, by simply doing it, she tells me she knows.

Even Butch sat up and looked suspiciously at her, then at the food, sniffing it to see if it was all right.

‘I’ll see you later,’ Libby had said after she’d put breakfast on the table, without once looking in my direction. ‘Have a good day.’ She didn’t even wait for a reply before leaving me alone in the room.

She knows, so it’s only a matter of time until it’s all over.

libby

Growing up, I don’t remember feeling jealous. Not the true emotion of jealousy, the type that sinks its poison-tipped claws into your heart and feasts on the reason centre of your mind, while staining who you are with its filthy, indelible green ink. Jealousy is like a drug more addictive and rewarding than anything known to human kind. Its effects are instant, bolting through you faster than light, and switching you into that heightened state in an instant.

Once you are there, ensnared, doped up by this thing called jealousy, you see chances for a ‘hit’ everywhere.

The way Jack moves the cup to his lips then dips his head to take a sip of hot coffee – did he do that with Eve or did she know when to serve it to him so it was the perfect temperature for him to drink in comfortable gulps? The way he forgets where he’s put his keys – did he always do that or did Eve have a system whereby he never had to look for them? The way he smiles – did he always smile like that or did he always smile at Eve knowing he could
never
love anyone else like he loves her.

Because that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? That’s what fuels my jealousy and what gives it a hit every moment of every day – can he truly love someone else like he loves her? Can he truly love
me
like he loves her?

The answer has been staring me in the face since the moment I had sex with him in his corridor: no. He might want to, but he can’t. Or won’t. It doesn’t matter which: the reality is, he doesn’t.

In the empty kitchen of this perfect house, I sink to the ground and clutch the plate I have just cleaned and dried to my chest as if it is a teddy bear that will offer me some comfort. My whole life with him has been a lie. I have fooled myself into thinking that he was capable of loving me. He can’t because he still loves Eve. He thought he could share his heart with two people, dividing it up so we both got our fair share. But it is not that simple: if you were giving two children slices of cake – you would give the older one the biggest piece. They are bigger, have been around longer so they deserve the bigger portion. The younger one can’t compete – no matter how much she tries – with the length of time the older one has been around.

I have the smaller piece of the cake that is his heart.

Every time I close my eyes, the vision I first awakened to moments after the crash comes into focus, and I am transported back there, to the smell of burning rubber and twisted metal, to the agony of moving, the constant wetness running down my face and down my body …

I’m not in so much pain for some reason, the agony is receding like the tide going out, but I feel cold. I’m always cold though, so it’s probably nothing to worry about. I can move my right arm, so I reach out towards Jack. I feel the solidity of him, then I feel him move and relief and gratitude sweep through me.

‘Jack,’ I say. ‘Are you OK?’ But I’m not making noise with my words, I am speaking without sound.

‘Eve, are you OK?’ Jack asks, his body moving a little more under my hand. ‘Sweetheart, please tell me you’re OK.’

‘I’m not Eve,’ I say soundlessly.

‘Eve,’ he continues, because he can’t hear me. ‘Squeeze my
arm if you can hear me.’ I don’t squeeze his arm because I am not the woman he wants me to be.

‘Oh God, Eve. I can feel your hand on my arm, please tell me you’re all right. Please. I love you, I can’t live without you.’

‘I’m not Eve,’ I try to scream at him, but that makes the pain rush back into my body.

Blackness.

‘Libby, Libby?’ Jack brings me round. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. We’ve been in a crash, we’re going to be OK. I think we should try to get out before the car explodes.’

‘That only happens in the movies,’ I say, but of course he does not hear because I am not making words that can be heard; the words I make stain the air like letters written quickly and pointlessly on water.

‘Help’s on the way. You’ll be OK. It’s all going to be OK.’

Blackness.

‘Libby, Libby, wake up.’

I open my eyes again and there is man I do not know sitting where Jack was a minute ago. He is dressed like a fireman. I decide that his name is Sam.

‘Can you hear me?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Good, good. I’m Bill, and I’m a fireman.’

‘I like firemen,’ I tell him.

‘Well, that’s good. Think of me as your own private fireman.’

‘OK,’ I say.

‘We’re trying to get you out of here, but it’s complicated because the car is at an angle and too close to a lamppost for us to use the cutters yet.’

‘Fine. Don’t mind me, I’m going to go to sleep for a bit.’

‘No, Libby, don’t go to sleep. You mustn’t go to sleep.’

‘Why, will Freddy Kruger get me?’

‘No, he isn’t real.’

‘Spoilsport. Please let me go to sleep.’

‘No. Tell me about yourself, tell me about your husband.’

‘Jack? When I think about Jack …’

Blackness.

My eyes snap open, in case I become trapped back there, in case I have a black-out like I did then, when there is no one here to wake me up.

It’s not that he called me Eve. He was in shock and confused and probably terrified. That I can understand and almost dismiss – if it wasn’t for his reaction when he found out I was Libby. He was concerned and scared, but there was none of the begging, none of the ‘I can’t live without you’s. For all he knew, I could have been dying and he didn’t even say, ‘I love you.’

libby

I’m trying to keep my head down as I walk to the doctor’s surgery. I have a floppy, peaked cap on that hides the scar on my scalp and if I keep looking down fewer people will see my face. I’m walking as quickly as possible but that’s pretty slow when you’re in as much pain as I am in. I couldn’t have got a taxi. I just about managed in the one that brought me home from the hospital and now the thought of being in a car again actually makes me feel physically sick.

I know it was an accident, and cars aren’t dangerous – the people behind the wheel are – and I should get into a car soon because the longer I leave it, the harder it will be. I know all of the logical arguments, I’ve told myself them over and over again, but still I can’t do it. And why should I when I have one perfectly good leg and another perfectly damaged leg to carry me wherever I need to go? In this instance, an emergency appointment with my GP. They had a cancellation and said they’d let me have the slot. The air feels odd against my skin: it’s warm but fresher than I remember the air being. I go out into the garden for a few minutes every day, so I haven’t completely forgotten what fresh air is like, but this is different. It’s fresher, purer, despite the pollution, despite the carbon dioxide expelled by the people around. I’ve given and had quite a few
oxygen treatments in my time and they never felt as cleansing as this air does.

I need to open all the windows in the house, let this air through the place, sweeping away in its path all the dust, cobwebs, stagnancy and, of course,
Eve
. We painted it, re-carpeted it, refurnished it, even brought some of my stuff over, but – as I often feel – she is still there, hanging on, clinging on to her house, her life, her husband.

The pain I felt before, a band of fire around my middle, squeezes tight again. I’d had it while sitting on the kitchen floor thinking about Jack, and I’d nearly blacked out. It’d struck again as I crawled across the floor, Butch sitting in the doorway watching me, to get to my phone on the kitchen table. I’d been fine once I’d got the doctor’s appointment, but now it is back.

I stop in the street, cradle my middle in my arms and take a few deep breaths. In, out, in, out, in, out.

‘You all right, love?’ someone asks.

My body quakes at the horror of someone speaking to me. I haven’t spoken to anyone other than Jack, Grace and Angela face to face for over a week now. I lower my head further. The man wears stonewashed jeans and big workmen boots. I don’t know what else he is wearing because I can’t raise my head even a little in case he sees my face.

‘Fine. Just going to the doctors,’ I say.

‘Is it far? Do you want a hand?’

I shy away from him. ‘No, I’m fine. I’m fine. Thanks.’

Then my feet move me onwards, towards someone who can help and who can make this all go away.

‘How can I help?’ Dr Last asks.

‘I need some more painkillers,’ I tell her.

‘OK,’ she says, spinning to her computer screen and typing in my details. ‘You’re on quite a strong dose of Co-codamol as it is,’ she then says after reading what the computer tells her.