Chapter Fifty-Six
I’ve been stuck in this room for four days and I can’t take the quiet anymore. I want to go for a walk, hang out with Daisy in the kitchen, cook nice food, go for a pint in the village with Hugo. I want to watch TV.
Jessamine likes having me up here, trapped behind a locked door, but I’m working on her.
“You know,” I say, “we should go out for dinner. You and me. We’ve never done that.”
She throws me a sideways look. “I don’t think you should be going out. Not yet. You’re still in a bad way.”
I am in a bad way. My ear throbs and burns.
Annie has redressed it a couple of times, but I think I need antibiotics.
I want to see my GP. I already know what I’ll say, how I’ll word it, how I’ll swerve the inevitable “why didn’t you go straight to hospital?
” I just need to get it sorted. I need to talk to Blaise.
I need to make sure she got back to Oz OK.
It’s my brother’s birthday next week. I need to send him a card, give him a ring on the day, like I always do.
I need to start getting the garden ready for spring.
I need to check Daisy’s got enough clean uniforms, that there’s enough decent food in the fridge.
I want to wash my hair, shave. But Jessamine, she’s on edge, her sobriety is killing her.
She shakes. She’s down. Gloomy. No wild mood swings, just one flat line.
I have to get out of this fucking room.
“I’m feeling so much better,” I say. “Honestly. I just want to get back to normal. And I want to spend some quality time with you.” I give her a hopeful smile.
It’s fake as fuck. There is no “quality time” with Jessamine.
Any time spent with her is fraught, brittle, frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, depressing.
“I don’t want to go out for dinner if I can’t have a drink. And I can’t have a drink. So there goes that.” She makes a puffing noise and shrugs.
“Well,” I say, “a walk, then. Around the village. Or I could try and get your mum’s car running; we could go for a drive.
Maybe into the countryside. It’s just, you and I, we got into a bad place, I think.
A rut. We forgot that we’re great together.
Remember,” I say, taking one of her dry hands into mine, “when we first met? When we laughed? When we had sex, all the time? When we really enjoyed each other. Remember that?”
It’s a horrible exaggeration of the truth.
We were drunk all the time; we had a lot of sex, but it was weird and meaningless, Jessamine taking me through the paces of some kind of quasi-BDSM litany of weird positions and stage directions that it never felt like she was really enjoying, rather that she was enjoying pretending to enjoy.
I see her face soften; a giddy giggle erupts from her. “Feels like a long time ago.”
“Yes,” I say. “It was a long time ago.”
“But how will I know that you won’t do what you did again?”
“What I did?”
“Yes. How will I know that you won’t leave me like that?”
“Like…? You mean, having dinner with my daughter?”
The softness leaves her face, and it contorts again.
“You didn’t just have dinner with your daughter.
You disappeared! All day! You didn’t answer my messages!
My calls! You literally abandoned me, Stuart.
It was one of the worst days of my life.
I mean, I know I shouldn’t have done what I did”—she gestures toward my ear—“but it could have been worse. I could have died. I thought about it, you know. I really did. Ask Mum. She had to pry the knife out of my hand.”
She sets her jaw as she says this. I resist the urge to ask her if her mother put the knife back into her hand when I returned home.
Instead, I sigh and say, “I’m sorry. I really am.
But it felt like I had no choice. I felt trapped, and, you know, Jessamine, I can’t be trapped.
I’m a free spirit. You can’t keep me here at your will.
I need to be free to come and go.” I give her a hopeful smile.
“You are free to come and go.”
“Good,” I say. “So let me out of this room, please, sweetheart.”
She tuts and says, “I only locked the door to keep you safe. You were such a mess. I didn’t know what you might do.”
My mouth is dry with the anticipation of Jessamine’s next moves. My eyes don’t blink. I swallow drily and the sound of the gulp seems to echo around the room.
She cocks her head slightly and puts her hand against my forearm. “Well, we have missed you. The house is a bit of a mess. I’ve been trying my best. But you know how hopeless I am. How hopeless we all are.” There’s that unnerving girlish giggle again.
I laugh in response. “I know,” I say. “God bless my girls.”
If you were watching, you’d never guess.
You’d never guess at the hard rock of fear in the pit of my stomach, the throb of dysfunction and darkness running through every word of our exchange.
You’d never guess that the sweet, strange woman giggling on my bed tried to kill me four nights ago.
You’d never guess that she’d kept me locked in here in this secret room, like a prisoner. You’d never guess.
It’s a sick tableau, but it’s all I’ve got to hold on to.
Stay sweet.
Stay kind.
And somehow, I promise myself, to get away from here without anybody dying in the process.
For the first few days after Jessamine lets me out of the room at the top of the house, I play it safe.
I use the time to clean myself, recalibrate, re-center myself.
Daisy catches my eye once or twice, but I ward her off with a small shake of my head.
No, I say silently, not now. For now, let’s go through the motions, minute by minute, day by day.
She returns my look with a knowing nod, and we both carry on with our business.
But there are things running through my head, constantly.
That room, up there, with the lock on the outside.
The knife slicing through my ear. The mystery surrounding Annie’s former husband.
The au pair. The clown mask. The dead cat. All of it. Jesus.
Jessamine returns my phone that first night and I see that she has deleted every single message and text from before the day I met Blaise for dinner.
I go to send Blaise a message but can’t find her name in my contacts.
I look at Jessamine, who is sitting opposite me at the kitchen table, and I say, “Jess. What did you do with Blaise’s number? ”
She shrugs.
“No, seriously. Did you delete it?”
I go through my phone then, looking for other contacts: my son, my brother, my nephews, Blaise’s mum, my son’s mum.
All gone. All of them. I feel a roar of fury begin to build up in the pit of my gut, but I tamp it down.
Instead, I take a deep breath and then let it out very slowly through my nose before I say, “Jessamine? Seriously? My family? My kids? Why would you do that? Why?”
She picks at the hem of the tablecloth and sniffs. “I was drunk,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“Yes. It was that first night. When I was so, so mad, Stuart. So mad. I mean, I’m sorry I did that, but you shouldn’t have done what you did.
You should have told me where you were going, you should have answered my phone calls, replied to my messages.
I mean, it was kind of your fault, Stuart, and I know I played my part. But really, you played your part too.”
I sigh heavily. I can get the phone numbers back, but it will take work and time and right now all I want to do is get in touch with Blaise. She must be worried about me. So, I don’t pick a fight. I acquiesce. “I’ll go into the village,” I say. “Get something in for dinner. What do you fancy?”
She twitches. “I’ll come with you.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “I can go on my own.”
“But—” Her voice is shrill and dry. “How do I know you’ll come back?”
“I came back last time, didn’t I?”
“Eventually.”
“Eventually. But I came back. You have to trust me.”
“Call me,” she says, “when you get to the shops. Send me a photo, of you at the shop. And if you’re not back in half an hour, Stuart, I can’t promise I won’t do something stupid.”
“I’ll be back in half an hour, OK? And I’ll send you a photo of me in the supermarket. OK?”
She nods and purses her mouth. “But, Stuart,” she says. “I’m trusting you. Please don’t let me down…”
The warmth of the early spring sun on my skin as I swing my empty bag-for-life back and forth makes me feel euphoric.
The sight of normal people going about their normal lives, the sound of children screeching in the playground of the local school, dog walkers, delivery vans, fresh flowers on the pavement outside the florist, a small queue outside the French bakery, all of it fills my heart with joy.
I make sure to send Jessamine a photo of myself in the supermarket.
I even smile. Appease, appease. I’m in so deep that I can’t extricate myself in one fell swoop.
Bit by bit. Moment by moment. But extricate myself I will.
Daisy beams when she sees me at the kitchen sink when she gets home from school that afternoon. “You’re back,” she says, and gives me a celebratory fist bump.
“I am,” I say, “and I’m making lasagna.”
“Oh my God,” she says dramatically. “Thank God.”
“How’s school?”
“Good,” she says, plucking grapes from the fresh bunch I’ve put in a bowl for her. “You know. OK.”
“What happened about that girl who was giving you a hard time. Tamara?”
“Tamika. Yeah. She’s still being a bitch, but it’s fine. I’ve got it under control. And there’s a boy…”
I see an uncharacteristic bloom of heat pass through her pale complexion and a small smile pulls at her mouth.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Jackson.”
“And Jackson is how old?”
“Same age as me.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “Don’t tell your mum.”
“As if! And anyway, it’s not like anything’s happening. We’re just chatting. He’s nice, that’s all.” She stands and watches me drying a measuring jug with a tea towel. “How was Blaise?” she says, biting her lip slightly.
I turn and smile at her. “She was amazing. It was amazing. We had the best, best night. But your mum, she deleted her number from my phone, so I haven’t been able to message her.”
Daisy pulls her phone out of her pocket and looks at me over the top of it. “Blaise Tucker?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “Drummond. She has her mother’s surname.”
“Blaise with an S?”
I nod.
She taps her phone.
A moment later she turns it toward me. “Is that her?”
It is. It’s my girl, smiling and laughing all over the world, those big white teeth of hers, that sweet open face. I nod again. “That’s her.”
Daisy passes me her phone and says, “Send her a message.”
I take the phone from her and type in a message:
Sweetheart, it’s Dad. I’ve lost all the contacts on my phone. Can you send me your number on here? This is Daisy’s account, who I live with. Thanks, love. Would be great to have your brother’s phone number too. And your mum. Love you, Dad.
I press send and then go back to Blaise’s account.
Her last post is a series of ten photos, each taken in a different part of London, and there’s me and her in the final shot, our arms around each other, smiling up into the phone camera in our booth at the Standard.
I look so happy, so relaxed. I turn it to show Daisy.
“Look,” I say, “that’s us the night we got together. ”
Daisy stares at the image thoughtfully. “She’s really pretty. You look really happy.”
“Yup. Right on both counts.”
“I’m really sorry,” she says, taking her phone back from me. “About what happened. I feel like it was my fault, for telling you to go.”
“No,” I say. “No, it was not your fault. It was the right thing to do. I’m glad I went. And the only person to blame for what happened to me is your mum. OK?”
Daisy nods, fiddling with her fingernails in her lap.
Then suddenly she looks up at me and says, “Promise me you won’t leave us, Stuart.
Please. I know it’s a nightmare here. I know Mum is fucking mad and Grandma is a total bitch.
I know how shit it all is, but please, please don’t leave. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I look Daisy directly in the eye and I smile. “I will stay here until you’re eighteen, OK? I’ll stay here until you’re ready to fly.”
Five and a half years, I think to myself.
In five and a half years, I’ll only be forty-six.
I’ll still have gas in the tank. I’ll still have money in the bank, a twinkle in my eye.
I could start again. Maybe even somewhere new.
Amsterdam? Edinburgh? Maybe even settle in Australia to be closer to Blaise?
If there’s one thing my years in this tainted house have taught me, it’s the beauty of everything, of every single thing.
Having your wings clipped makes you see the world differently, shows you the extraordinariness of normal lives.
Daisy nods. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.”