Chapter 24
Tom sat in bed, following me with probing eyes as I moved about the room. For the last hour, I’d been avoiding him, waiting to enter the bathroom until he’d finished rather than brush my teeth next to him as usual, now turning from him as I changed into the tee shirt and underwear that I slept in.
As I climbed into bed, he ejected a short laugh. “Well, she’s quite something.”
“Louise? I thought you’d find her amusing.”
“Sure, she’s amusing, in a cunning sort of way.”
I could hear the edginess in my voice. “What do you mean, cunning?”
“Bowles, Kerouac, Burroughs, Mailer, Dylan…” He was counting them off on his fingers. “Is it even chronologically possible? I’d have to look at a timeline. And that weird, like, pan-European accent she puts on,” Tom said with a snort.
“I’m sure some of it’s true. She knew Bill.”
“But it’s the way she always has to go one better,” he went on. “Every famous person you mention, she doesn’t just know him, she attended the birth of his child or gave him a tattoo or something.”
I laughed.
“Just be careful, Sally.”
“Of what?”
He was looking at me closely. Taking my hand, he said, “Why did you lie to me about the bracelet?”
“What do you mean?”
“Sally, come on, you can tell me. Did you give it to her?”
“It’s a coincidence. They sell them at the market.”
There was a silence before he said, “Is this about your mother?”
“Please, I barely remember her.”
“You know what I mean. It’s only natural, given who your mother was, that you’d want that—”
I snorted out a laugh. “Whatever, Tom. I’m a grown woman, I don’t need a mother.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and I shook them off, enraged by his look of pity. It was so much worse than being despised. I had an urge to provoke him, tell him he was stupid, he knew nothing about me. I wanted him to yell at me, call me a lying bitch. I knew how to make him lose control.
Instead, I lay on my side, swallowing it all down, trembling within the expanding silence.
When, at length, he rubbed my back, I began to cry.
I couldn’t stop the tears spilling out, hot and loathed, furious with myself for being weak, ashamed that I continued to let him touch me when I could have taken a butcher’s knife and chopped his hand clean off.