Chapter 13
Seb works from home on a Tuesday; with his new open-door policy at school, it made sense having one clear morning to tackle budget admin and staffing issues, and make confidential phone calls somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed.
When Rosie gets back from drop-off, she finds him hunched over his laptop, long legs splayed at the kitchen table, his head snapping up from the screen as she enters.
‘Ro, sorry, I thought you’d be at work.’
Rosie flicks the kettle on and looks at Seb. God, his earnest expression is so transparent; nervously touching the scar on his lip.
‘I’ve taken the rest of the week off work,’ she says, her tone bland, emotionless. ‘Good old Norovirus.’
‘You didn’t tell me,’ Seb says, a whine in his voice, eyes blinking from behind his glasses.
Rosie snorts a fake laugh and Seb at least has the decency to look away, abashed. That was an idiotic thing to say.
His work phone starts ringing; he looks down. ‘Sorry, it’s Harriet, I’m going to have to take this.’
Rosie shrugs and turns her back to him to get a mug and teabag as Seb stands and walks out of the kitchen to take the call upstairs, saying, ‘Morning, Harriet,’ to the chair of governors as he leaves.
Once he’s gone, Rosie turns back round to face the kitchen table, ignoring the kettle as it spits and bubbles behind her.
As she hears Seb move around safely away upstairs, she stares at one thing.
His school laptop. Seb thinks she doesn’t know his password, but she’s watched him open it enough times that she knows it’s their kids’ initials followed by the year.
He is vigi lant about protecting his students’ and teachers’ confidential information, but not vigilant enough.
Fucking Seb. Fucking upright, law-abiding Seb.
She moves across the kitchen, sits down on the still-warm chair.
Seb. So good when it came to everyone else and such a traitorous slimy shit when it came to her– his wife.
Rosie taps in his password, and the screen comes alive.
Above her, the floorboards groan. He’s pacing around.
She feels her hands moisten, nervous suddenly at what she’s going to ask them to do; they’ve never done this, never snooped before.
But she didn’t listen to her instinct before, when she suspected something more had gone on between Seb and Abi, and look where it has left her.
Betrayed in the most degrading way. She remembers Blake and Eddy’s story– how Seb had slammed his computer shut when they’d disturbed him at school.
She won’t ignore her instinct again. She clicks through to the computer’s history easily, and the screen fills with an incredibly young-looking Asian girl, peering over her shoulder, looking back at Rosie, around her pert, naked bottom the words ‘GeeGee is ready to play!’ Rosie whimpers and clicks on the next page.
This time it’s a white woman with long brown hair in a squat over a chair, bronzed, doughy breasts pushed up, masturbating, her eyes closed, her lip slightly curled, furiously focused on her own pleasure.
‘Discounted rates! Only ￡130 for the first hour!!!!!’
Rosie clicks on more and more pages. Where was she, she wonders, when Seb was staring at them? Was she putting their kids to bed? Cleaning the bathroom? Folding fucking laundry?
Rosie sits back and lifts her face to the ceiling, feeling herself drop fully into what she suspected to be true.
Seb is a liar, a perpetual liar. He’d been shopping online for people just like how she’d buy toilet roll and tomatoes.
He hadn’t just stumbled on Abi’s website like he said.
He’d hunted for her, hunted specifically for Abi with her brown eyes, toned legs and perky breasts.
Upstairs, on the phone, Seb laughs, and Rosie feels like she’s suddenly no longer made of bone and muscle. No. Now she’s all rage.
She stands, knocking the chair over but not caring; she can’t sit with him smiling and laughing, thinking he’s got away with this sick browsing .
She leans over the laptop, palm pressed against the table, hunched as she keeps clicking.
He’d considered hundreds, not caring how cheap or young or desperate their eyes looked in the photos.
He couldn’t have called them all, but can she, Rosie, ever be sure he didn’t?
How can she ever know for certain that he didn’t go and visit the thin Black girl with fake breasts, stilettos and huge, sad eyes?
Her hand reaches for her shoulder, her forearm slung across her own slack breasts like she’s protecting them from the perfect twenty-year-old breasts on the screen.
She feels her own vagina pressing chubbily, falling out of itself against her old cotton pants, the creeping hair, a different species to the impossibly neat slit of these women.
She bets they all smell lovely, those tidy, hairless vaginas, like perfect, silken closed mouths despite the grind of their endless, tiring work.
‘Rosie?’
Rosie’s head snaps up from the screen as she slams the laptop closed. Eva is standing in the back doorway, holding something wrapped in a tea towel and looking quietly at her daughter-in-law.
‘You scared me!’
‘Sorry,’ Eva says, addressing the toppled chair on the floor before looking back up to Rosie. ‘I did knock but you were miles away.’
Eva’s eyes move from Rosie’s face to her hand, her fingertips resting on Seb’s laptop, the Waverly Community Secondary School label stuck on top.
‘Yes, I was just… Seb’s upstairs on a call. I’m actually about to go out. I want to go for a swim and then I promised I’d see Anna.’ Rosie had, in a weak moment, finally given in to Anna’s incessant requests to meet and talk.
‘That sounds like a good idea.’ Eva nods approvingly and Rosie knows she’s referring to the swim rather than to Anna, whom Eva has never really connected with.
Eva is one of those people who believes cold water cures everything from dry skin to a broken heart.
‘I just wanted to see if you needed anything– a chat, maybe, or food or help with the children…’
‘No, I’m fine. Thanks, Eva.’
Still on edge from almost being caught out, Rosie can’t return Eva’s smile as she passes Rosie the warm bundle she’s been holding.
‘Here– I baked it this morning. It’s the one with cheese and chives.’
Heath’s favourite.
Eva glances again at the laptop on the table, like she’s thinking about saying something. It makes Rosie bristle.
‘I’m so sorry this has happened,’ she says, quiet but steady.
Rosie doesn’t want Eva’s calm now, not when all those websites are spinning so wildly in her brain. She puts the bread on to the work surface and grabs a tote bag from the hook by the back door before shoving in a still-damp towel from the drying rack.
Eva says nothing, knows Rosie well enough to know when to back off.
‘Seb probably won’t be long,’ Rosie says, bending down to pick up the fallen chair.
‘No, I won’t wait for him. It was you I wanted to check in on.’
Rosie doesn’t know what to say so she just nods furiously and says, ‘Yes, well, I’m fine. Fine!’
She heads out of the back door, leaving Eva to deal with the human maggot she raised whom she can still hear, laughing, above their heads.
Rosie walks quickly into the water and the cold screams through her as she wades up to her hips.
A huge wave, made up of a million angry foaming mouths, rises to bite, but she dives underneath it.
The freeze makes her retract into herself so she can hardly move at all.
Then a great pull drags her up and out and she surfaces, screaming, swearing, and she’s so fucking small but she’ll keep fighting because there’s nothing else.
Another enormous wave roars towards her, a great salty mouth howling for her.
This time, she lets it take her, pulling her into its mess, its rage, and while it plays with her, rolling her around with its watery tongue, there’s a moment of immense silence, of such elemental gentleness that Rosie doesn’t feel scared, she doesn’t feel anything and, for a second, she disappears.
Then, without warning, the sea starts chewing her again, her lungs panic, heave, and suddenly the sea is done with her.
It spits her out, a diner spitting a bone out of a stew.
She’s left in the shallows, spluttering and breathing hard.
The water has worked smooth Rosie’s jagged edges like sea glass.
She isn’t thinking about Abi and all those other plastic women online and for a moment she’s left with just the clean, simple realization: Seb was never good.
He’d been yearning and suppressing and hiding himself all along.
He’d had secrets. And she loves him, and she hates him and she loves him and she hates him, and she has no idea how they’re going to survive.
She doesn’t dry herself well so she’s shaking with cold by the time she gets back to the car, but this is the best bit, her skin tasting of salt, the sparkle and fizz of blood in her veins. Her phone buzzes with more missed calls from Seb and one from Eddy and then a text comes through from Anna.
Just got to the cafe, babe. Will order us some tea. Love you. X