Chapter 12
It’s Tuesday morning and Anna’s still asleep as Eddy flicks the kettle on.
Yawning, he starts up her laptop on the kitchen table.
She’d spent most of the night down here, tapping away while he pretended to sleep upstairs.
Since Singapore he’s often caught her reading messages on his phone, emails on his laptop.
Of course he doesn’t like it, but he lets it go.
Their therapist had said that rebuilding trust required effort on both sides.
His effort is practising patience and if that means letting Anna snoop from time to time, then so be it.
He’s never felt the need to spy on her in return, but since she came back from talking to Seb she’s been muttering about ‘doing something’ and Eddy is pretty sure whatever it is she’s planning is laid out on her laptop.
Albie sloshes milk all over his Weetabix and flicks through an old Lego magazine while Eddy taps ‘Smithson’– Anna’s maiden name– into her computer and the screen lights up with a Word document.
He rubs the coarse hair of his beard, the words blurry without his glasses; he can only make out a few: ‘unethical behaviour’, ‘unsafe’ and ‘immediate removal’.
‘What the fuck,’ he mutters, and Albie looks up at him sharply. ‘Sorry, Albs,’ Eddy says to his littlest one as the kettle comes to an angry boil. ‘I’m just going to take Mum a cup of tea, I’ll be back in a minute.’
Albie doesn’t lift his eyes from his magazine; he just nods as Eddy tucks the laptop under his arm and carries two cups of tea upstairs.
Blake’s door is still closed– he’ll still be fast asleep– but Eddy doesn’t have long before Albie will need him again, he doesn’t have long to find out whatever it is Anna’s planning.
Anna’s sitting up in bed, blinking against the brightness of the day. She eyes the mug in Eddy’s hand. ‘Thanks, sweetie.’
He reaches to his side table for his glasses and sits on the edge of the bed. She smiles when she sees the laptop; she seems glad, flattered even, that he’s been poking around.
‘You read it?’ she asks.
‘Not yet.’ He puts on his glasses and starts reading. ‘“Petition to remove Sebastian Kent as head teacher from Waverly Community Secondary School.” Anna,’ he says, the vowels long and full of warning, ‘you want to get Seb fired ?’
‘I was hoping he’d resign before it came to that,’ Anna says defensively.
For as long as Eddy can remember, Seb had always wanted to be head teacher.
Eddy never understood it, even tried to turn Seb’s head by showing off his own larger paycheques, the company car, the flashy business trips.
Seb had been appropriately impressed but had stuck to his course.
When he’d told Eddy he’d got the head teacher job just a few months ago, they’d held on to each other’s arms and jumped about Eddy’s kitchen, whooping, until Blake came in and told them, smiling, that they were both acting like kids.
Now, Eddy is reading a document his wife has written to bring all that to an ignoble end. The petition reads like a fever dream; she hasn’t bothered with punctuation.
It’s a relief she doesn’t mention exactly what it is that Seb’s done, but still, it’s written to incriminate him, written to show him in the worst possible light.
‘Anna, you can’t really think he’s not safe to do his job…’
‘If he worked in a factory or was an IT guy, then sure, whatever. I wouldn’t care. But he doesn’t, does he? He’s a teacher, our son’s head teacher. He should be a role model, lead by example. He has a responsibility to our children, to our whole community, to act with integrity with…’
Eddy holds up his hand and interrupts, ‘Yes, fine. I agree, I do, but when he’s not at work then surely he can do what he likes as long as it’s legal. Think about that presenter guy who was caught messaging younger men at work, Max…’
‘Max Harting.’
‘That’s it. Didn’t you say that you didn’t like what he was doing, didn’t agree with it, but that it wasn’t illegal so never mind?’
He sounds desperate, but it isn’t fair, he wasn’t prepared, and Anna has been up thinking about this all night.
She enunciates her words carefully as she says, ‘What if Seb was a far-right lunatic in his spare time, had a swastika tattoo and posted awful stuff online– would you want to know about that?’
Eddy pulls a face. ‘Of course I would,’ he says gruffly.
‘Yeah, but all that’s legal, so…’ Anna makes her eyes wide, shrugs, like, ‘what’s the problem?’ She’s made her point. ‘Well, I’d want to know if he slept with prostitutes, and I think other women would agree with me.’
Eddy stares dumbly at the laptop screen, silent for a moment. He doesn’t want to get into an argument about gender. About why this prostitute thing is worse, more offensive– or so Anna seems to be suggesting– to women. He’ll certainly lose.
Eddy knew some of his colleagues, on work trips to faraway places, would sometimes pay.
But Eddy had never considered it; the best part had always been the chase, the ‘will we, won’t we?
’ Paying for it– he imagined– took all the magic, all the sexiness away.
But he won’t mention any of this to Anna.
He needs to keep his own name as far away from all this as possible.
‘What does this mean, then, for our family, for Blake?’
‘Well, I think if we can’t get rid of Seb then we’re going to have to find somewhere else for Blake, even if it’s further away. Brighton has some good places…’
‘Brighton’s half an hour away!’
‘We’ll make it work.’
‘Anna, all his friends are here, he’s happy at Waverly, we can’t just…’
‘Then for once in your life, Eddy, support me! The petition will get rid of him, everyone will sign it– trust me. We’ll get a new head and then we won’t have to move Blake.’
‘But Seb’s his godfather…’ Eddy replies meekly and Anna reaches for his hand, squeezes, like she’s full of regret about that choice they made fifteen years ago, too.
He can’t say out loud what he’s really thinking, the feeling that crowds out almost everything else.
The panic that he’ll lose Seb. His best friend and perhaps, he realizes now, the truth sinking within him, his only real friend.
Anna will tell him he’s being selfish, thinking only about himself again, like always.
So instead, Eddy asks, ‘And what about Abi and her girls, the repercussions for Rosie? It’s not just Seb who’ll be impacted by this. ’
Anna just nods, sadly. ‘I know. I’m going to try and talk to Rosie today, let her know that we’ll be there for her…’
‘She can’t possibly think this is a good idea.’
Anna breathes out gently, tries to keep herself calm, reminding Eddy that she’s an expert in this particular kind of heartbreak.
‘Look, Ed, Rosie’s in the denial stage now.
I remember it myself. She can’t think straight about anything, but when she’s processed some of her own feelings, I think she’ll understand where I’m coming from with the petition. ’
‘And Abi? What about Abi?’ Eddy asks, clutching for the thing that will make Anna stop or at least pause, but he hasn’t found it yet because Anna replies, ‘I don’t name her; I don’t even mention exactly what he did.’
Eddy tries to ignore the strange slippery feeling in his stomach. He noticed the way Blake blushed and looked away when he mentioned Lily’s name the other day. Blake has a crush on Lily, which Anna doesn’t know about and which only serves to complicate everything even more.
‘Yes, but it will come out, won’t it? She’ll be implicated…’
‘Well,’ Anna sniffs, ‘excuse the pun, but she made her bed, didn’t she? I’m afraid I can’t protect everyone.’
He can’t help it. He has to say something about the cost to his own life.
‘And what about my thirty-year friendship?’
Anna breathes out; Eddy’s exasperating her now. ‘I don’t know, Ed. That’ll be up to you guys to figure out.’
Eddy’s head feels like an untethered balloon, bobbing around; he knows he should say something, but he can’t find any thoughts, just air where thoughts should be, so he pleads, ‘Can you just let me talk to him first, please, before posting this?’
Anna props herself up on her elbows a little, considering, and says, ‘I tried that already, didn’t I, Eddy?
’ Her eyebrows slant together which means she’s about to say something difficult.
‘Look, Ed, I didn’t want to tell you this, but when I spoke to Seb he compared what he’s done with what you did, in Singapore. He said it was the same thing.’
Eddy wilts. ‘What?’
Anna nods. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not, of course. You didn’t plan to be unfaithful, you didn’t pay a poor, desperate woman for sex and you came home and told me straight away about what you’d done, so…’
Eddy can feel her eyes on him, anxious for his reaction. Anna’s quiet for a moment, staring at him, before she glances at the laptop balanced on his knees and her face lifts with excitement. ‘Oh my God, Ed!’
‘What?’ Eddy says, nervous again.
‘You remember when you and Blake saw Seb at school and he slammed his laptop shut and you started that whole stupid “Seb’s a spy” gag– can you remember whether it was his school computer?’
Where feelings should be, Eddy’s mind is completely blank. He looks at his wife, mystified, shakes his head, blows out to show that he has no idea, absolutely none.
‘It probably was? He uses it for everything, I’m pretty sure. What difference does it make?’
‘What difference? Ed, if he was looking for sex workers, literally shopping for women to abuse and using school property to do it, then he really is a danger to kids…’
‘What? How?’
Anna rolls her eyes at his slowness. ‘Imagine if a child came into his office, if they’d seen those images…’
‘Anna, come on, that’s pretty unlikely…’
But Anna doesn’t care what Eddy thinks because she keeps talking, ‘He’s being paid by the taxpayer, literally funded by us, the hard-working public, and he’s using that time on school property to look up women to abuse.’