She takes a step towards him, and he sees it turn into a stagger. She can’t be bleeding out yet, he thinks. It must be panic. She’s scared. Yes. The fucking bitch is scared. I did that. Me. She’s scared because of something I did.
‘You’ve got to call an ambulance,’ she says. ‘I’m really hurt.’
He’s cold all over, but his cock is magnificently, triumphantly hard. He shrugs indifferently. ‘Got no phone,’ he says, and walks away.
Chapter Sixteen
She’s never unlearned the habit of hope. Ever since she can remember, Amber has woken with the same thought: today will be a good day. She learned the practice in her stepfather’s house, clung fast to it at Blackdown. Has marked her life out in small milestones of happiness – the dogs, Vic, her home and its improvements, birthday parties, small gestures of friendship – and refuses to dwell on negatives.
She lies on her back, arms spread across the empty bed, and stares at the daylight leaking past the curtains on to the bedroom ceiling. Day workers are beginning to come home; she can hear engines and car doors and bellowed greetings out on Tennyson Way. The bed is hot, the room frowsty. She throws off the covers and lies there, cooling off. The sun has obviously come out while she’s been asleep. She’s missed another summer day. But thank you, thank you, for giving me summer. It’s going to be OK, I can feel it in my bones. I worry too much, that’s the problem. Nothing bad can happen, I’ve come too far.
Amber gets up, takes a shower and washes last night’s work out of her hair. The water, lukewarm, wakes her up a little. She can hear faint sounds of movement downstairs. Vic is still home – it must be his day off – but she doesn’t hear the sound of voices and guesses Jackie has gone out.
Rubbing her hair with a towel, she checks the clock by the bed. Five p.m. Several hours to work-time. For once, it’s worth putting on home clothes. She digs through the wardrobe and chooses a sundress, gaily printed with a pattern of birds and tropical foliage. Slips it over her head, feels the pleasure of dressing pretty for once, and goes down to find her common-law husband.
He’s sitting at the kitchen table, all the windows and the back door thrown wide. Her bag sits before him, open. He holds something loosely in his hand. She greets him brightly. He merely looks at her, silently, in return. Amber feels the smile slip from her face. The day goes dark.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asks.
He opens his hand and shows her. ‘So what else have you been lying to me about?’ he asks. His voice is cold, reptilian. She blanches. The Other Vic is back.
He’s holding the cigarette packet Jade pushed into her hand yesterday. She’d shoved it into her handbag and forgotten about it. She stares at it like a rabbit caught in headlights. ‘No, Vic, I… They’re not mine,’ she stumbles.
He raises his eyebrows, then drops them so his eyes are hooded. ‘Liar!’ he says accusingly. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Don’t lie to me. I told you, Amber. I will always find you out.’
‘Vic…’ Lying is his big bugbear, his pet hate. He’s always said it: lying is the biggest betrayal of all. ‘Vic, I’m not lying to you.’
‘Or what?’ he asks. ‘You think I’m stupid then? Don’t take me for a mug, Amber.’
‘I’m not. I-’
‘The whole place stinks of fag smoke. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?’
‘That’s Jackie. C’mon. You know she smokes like a chimney. I’m sorry. It was raining and I let her smoke in the kitchen.’
‘Yeah,’ says Vic. ‘Good try.’
‘No,’ she says, knowing she’s fighting a losing battle. Once he’s got the bit between his teeth, there’s no stopping him. He’ll twist and twist her words until whatever she says sounds like lying. He’ll do it once a month or so, and leave her wrong-footed, shaking. And yet, every time he does it, she tries to protest, tries to assure him he’s wrong, keeps hoping that one day the outcome will be different, the way she did as a child. It’s like some ritual dance they have to perform with the dark of the moon. He’ll apologise afterwards, beg forgiveness, but the intervening days will be a cold, baleful hell of accusing looks and silent judgement. ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong. I swear, Vic.’
‘If you’d just tell me the truth, it’d be a different matter,’ he says, ignoring her. ‘That’s the thing I don’t understand. Why you have to lie about things when you know what it does to me.’
She’s aware that a big fat lie is coming from his own mouth. Come on, she thinks. You don’t really think that. If I came to you and said, ‘Hey, Vic, I’ve decided to go against your wishes and take up smoking again,’ you’d never just say, ‘Oh, OK, babe, that’s fine as long as you’ve told me.’ You know I only gave up because you made me; because the sulks and the barbed remarks about my body smell and the refusal to kiss me wore me down. And the stupid thing is that I know, deep down, that you don’t really care either way. That the reason smoking was an issue was nothing to do with any of those things, or with fear about my health or yours, it was all of it about control. All about imposing your will on mine and watching yourself win.
‘I’m not lying,’ she repeats. She snatches the pack from his hand, turns it over to find Jade’s phone number. ‘Look. That’s why I’ve got it. See?’
She realises her error the instant the words leave her mouth. Wonders if she will ever learn. He’s got her now, can segue straight into new accusations.
He takes the pack from her. ‘What’s this?’
‘A phone number,’ she says hesitantly, wishing she could backtrack. ‘You know how people write phone numbers on fag packets.’
‘People?’ A small smirk plays at the edge of his mouth. ‘And what people would that be, then, Amber? You didn’t tell me about any people.’
Christ, she thinks. Now I do have to lie.
She knows she sounds as guilty as he’s making her feel as she fishes around for the right words. Vic is turning the pack over and over in his hands as she speaks.
‘Just… this chick I used to know,’ she says, and sees his eyes flick up to read her guarded expression. ‘Like… You know… Ages ago.’
‘Chick,’ he says.
Don’t. Don’t rise to it. You know how, when he’s in this mood, he will interpret any sort of excuse, any sort of explanation, as protesting-too-much. ‘Yes, chick,’ she says, trying to make it sound firm and hearing the defensiveness in her tone. ‘Chick from Liverpool. She used to live two doors down from me.’
He says nothing.
‘She was at Funnland,’ she says. ‘I bumped into her. Vic…’
He shakes his head, slowly, emphasising his disbelief. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘What?’
‘OK. So you bump into some chick and you don’t tell me about it?’
‘Jeez. You don’t tell me every detail of your day, do you?’
‘I would if it was something like this.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she lies. ‘I forgot about it. It’s not as big a deal as you’re making it out to be.’
Of course she’d not forgotten. Not the shock of meeting Jade, not the unpleasantness of trying to shake her off. But a scrap of cardboard in the bottom of a loaded handbag? Yes. Maybe the forgetting has some Freudian element to it, is an unconscious way of avoiding dealing with the evidence of the encounter, but she certainly had forgotten, until she saw the pack in Vic’s hand.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘What’s her name then? This chick?’
Amber panics. She can’t use the real name; has probably used it, out loud at least, less in the past twenty-five years than any member of her generation except Jade herself. She flails internally, tries to think of an alternative, finds that every female name she has ever known has fled her head. ‘Jade,’ she says.