Chapter 21
Istart the following day at the local library, scouring the community noticeboard for casual employment opportunities like house-cleaning and dog-walking.
I find plenty, but several phone calls later, I’m no closer to securing one.
What’s worse is that, after a trip to the supermarket to replace what was destroyed last night, running out of money entirely seems sickeningly imminent.
As I cross Main Street and round the corner to start up Delaney Row, anxiety about this is swirling in my stomach. I tell myself I just need to get inside, sit down with a cup of coffee and figure this out. That everything will be fine. After all, I’ve made it this far.
Distracted, I collide with another moving body.
A woman. Leaving Delaney Row. Also carrying shopping bags, which tangle with mine. We both say some version of, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’
I fear it’s Sophie.
But then I recognize the voice and wish that it was.
She got the address from my mother. That isn’t something I thought I had to explicitly tell my mother not to share and I panic at the possibility that she’s been sharing it widely and that someone else she’s shared it with is whoever has been coming to my house to spill my food, smash my bathroom mirror and wrench off my microwave’s door.
I want Nicole to leave so I can call my mother and interrogate her.
I want Nicole to leave, period.
I only invited her in because I didn’t want to tell her to fuck off within earshot of the neighbours and, if she got my address from my mother, chances are she’ll be reporting everything back to her too.
I can’t even imagine why she’s come. All those years in prison and not one visit, but three days in this house and she’s already here.
Why?
She’s brought a bag from Donnybrook Fair, a grocery store with notions and a branch just up the road.
As she hands it to me, she says, ‘This needs to go in the fridge.’ I look inside.
A bottle of Sancerre, a pre-assembled cheeseboard on a piece of slate, and a box of rosemary-and-sea-salt sourdough crackers.
I think, What this really needs is to go in a different house.
Nicole herself doesn’t belong here either.
She’s impeccably dressed, expensively groomed and trails a cloud of citrus perfume as she walks around the kitchen, looking like an actress who’s wandered on to the wrong film set.
But it’s more than that. Her presence is an active intrusion, an unyielding piece of dark matter around which all light must bend.
She’s the past, all that was lost, made real and measurable.
And she’s part of the reason I lost it.
‘Can I open this?’ she asks, indicating the patio door. ‘It’s a little warm in here.’
We both know that’s a barefaced lie; there was frost on the ground this morning and this house has no working heating. Her problem is the faintly sour smell I still haven’t managed to get rid of, the ever-present mustiness.
I go to the door and bend to remove the dowel, ignoring her quizzical look.
When I pull it open, a blast of icy air rushes in.
‘I love this time of year,’ she says, smiling.
‘Why are you here, Nicole?’
She bites her lip. ‘Can we sit down?’
She takes the seat at the dining table closest to the open door, which is at the head of the table. I take the seat at her right elbow.
‘How are you?’ she asks.
‘Not in prison any more. So.’
Nicole shifts uneasily in her seat. ‘I’m sorry, Han.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.’
‘I should’ve been there for you.’
‘Again, I’m going to need more detail, just to nail down which time you mean. There were several, if you recall. And that’s not including the span of years before I even knew Jason existed, when you all effectively abandoned me.’
‘Abandoned you?’ she scoffs. ‘I didn’t realize that having a friend meant I couldn’t have any life of my own. You should’ve said.’
We fall into a tense silence.
‘Look,’ she says then. ‘We all made mistakes. Both sides. I—’
‘I didn’t realize there were sides.’
‘That’s not what I meant. But … we were married, Han. Just married, most of us. All of us, except you.’
‘Thanks for reminding me.’
‘Would you just listen for a second? I’m trying to explain why we reacted the way we did. Could we have handled ourselves better? Sure. But we were thinking about what it would feel like if someone was doing to us what you were doing to her.’
I stare at her, disbelieving. ‘You’re still at this, Nic? Blaming me? Ten years later? I didn’t do anything to her.’
Her eyebrows shoot up into her hairline.
‘I mean when I first met him,’ I add quickly. ‘I didn’t even know she existed.’
‘I’m just trying to explain my actions. But, look, if you want me to go …’
‘Why did you come?’
‘To see how you were. To check that you were OK.’
‘Fine, no thanks to you.’
‘I said I was sorry.’
‘Are you, though?’
‘Of course I am. Jesus, Han. I was sick over it.’
‘So you regret it?’
But her hesitation tells me everything I need to know.
‘Listen,’ she says, seeing my face. ‘Here’s the truth, OK?
You’re not going to want to hear this, and I didn’t come here intending to say it, but since you can’t seem to understand what actually happened back then, here it comes.
You asked me to go to court – to court – and stand up and swear an oath or whatever and say what a great person you were.
After not having spoken to you for, what, years at that point?
I felt like I didn’t even know you any more.
I know I didn’t. Because the Hannah I knew would never, ever have done what you did. ’
This stings like a slap.
I would’ve said the same, before.
But we just don’t know what we’re capable of, do we? What we can be driven to do.
‘You can justify it however you want,’ I say. ‘We both know it was because you didn’t want your name in the papers.’
The silence this time is longer.
‘I’m fine, too,’ Nicole says then. ‘Thanks for asking.’
I don’t know anything about her life that isn’t almost a decade out of date. Do I want to? I am, admittedly, curious. I exhale hard, trying to release some of my anger. I force myself to drop my shoulders, uncross my arms.
What’s the point in us sniping at each other like this? What does that achieve, now?
‘How’s Richard?’ I ask.
She hesitates. ‘He’s good. We’re good.’
‘Are you still with the bank?’
‘I’m at home now,’ she says. ‘We have three children.’
‘Three?’
‘Yeah, I know.’ A small smile. ‘Two boys and a girl.’
‘Well … good.’
Nicole barks a laugh.
The sound breaks open a time capsule of memories, which come spilling out.
She and I painting our nails down the back of the class, sniggering when the teacher wondered aloud what that smell was.
Drunk in a taxi on the way home after a night out, sharing our garlic cheese fries with the driver because that was the only way he’d let us eat in the car.
A hazy summer on Hilton Head Island, bringing shame upon the J-1 student visa programme and having so much fun, we’d fly home already having forgotten half of it because so much more had happened since.
I push myself back into the present moment with a hard shove.
‘Oh, Han.’ Nicole is wiping her eyes; she’s laughing so much she’s started crying. ‘Some things never change, do they? I love how you can’t even feign interest in them. I mean, I have to respect that kind of consistency.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, no, it’s fine.’ She waves a hand. ‘I totally get it. Even I find other people’s kids boring.
God, I don’t know how many times I’ve had to sit through one of the school mums telling me about some hilarious thing their child did that either isn’t even mildly amusing or is obviously completely made up.
There’s this woman whose son is in Rugbytots with Casper who thinks she’s, like, a mumfluencer or whatever, and she’s always posting these profound nuggets her son supposedly said – but weirdly, there’s never any video of it, even though she has the phone pointed at the child nearly all of the time. ’
Rugbytots. Casper. Mumfluencer.
She may as well be speaking a foreign language. But then, compared to me, she does live in a foreign country.
‘And what about you?’ she says. ‘You bought a house. By yourself. That’s amazing. That was the dream, right?’
‘Um … yeah.’ I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mother the truth of how I ended up with the house, so I told her that I’d bought it with some long-forgotten post-office savings and a mythical mortgage scheme aimed at low-income earners.
This was a woman who’d bought her home for four figures and who’d owned it outright for four popes, so she’d readily accepted this explanation.
But there was no way Nicole would fall for the same story, so now I hurry to move the conversation on from the actual purchasing part.
‘Obviously it’s in need of a lot of work, but … ’
‘Fabulous location, though.’
I catch the slightest frown.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘That face you made. Just then.’
‘I wasn’t making any face.’
I know I saw it, but I let it go.
‘Anyway,’ Nicole says. ‘Are you working or …?’
I want to snap at her about the realities of job-searching as a convicted criminal, but I force myself to take a breath and say, ‘I’m just focusing on getting settled at the moment.’
‘And I presume you haven’t …?’ Nicole gives me a meaningful look.
‘What?’
‘Have you had any, you know, contact? With him?’
I fix her with a hard stare. ‘Of course not.’
‘I looked him up. On Instagram. Just out of curiosity.’ Nicole hesitates. ‘To see if she was on there. The wife.’
I already know that she’s not, but I’m not going to admit that I looked him up too.
‘You know she’s MIA?’ Nicole says. ‘Cut off all contact with her friends and family a couple of years after they went to Australia.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Niamh’s husband. He has a friend who worked at Shreddr, remember?’
Of course I remember. That was how everyone found out.