Chapter 5
Charlie must sense our stares because he pulls apart from the woman and turns to us.
His shocked expression mirrors my own. The woman appears oblivious and obviously has no idea who I am.
I assess her. She’s younger than me and is petite and attractive with big dark eyes and long conker-coloured hair.
Charlie certainly has a type. She’s trendy too, more so than I am, in her short black skirt and black lace top, like a pretty Goth doll.
A whoosh of heat rises.
Charlie moves away from the woman, his face flushed. ‘Uh … Lena … Jo … hi. This is … um, Rosie, and, Rosie, this is Lena, my … er … ex-wife.’
‘We’re still married,’ I say coldly. ‘Separated,’ I add to Rosie, who smiles awkwardly. I turn back to Charlie. ‘Where’s Rufus?’
‘He’s gone back to the flat with Freddie. I’m about to go home.’
I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. Seeing Charlie with someone else hurts more than I’d thought it would. Foolishly I believed he was far from ready to date anyone else. I should have known they’d be around here after their gig.
‘Anyway,’ says Jo, ‘we’d better go. Our Uber is here.’ She steers me away from Charlie to our cab. I can’t speak as I climb into the back seat, but as we drive away I notice Charlie and Rosie staring after us.
‘God.’ I lean back against the seat. ‘He’s moved on quickly.’
‘Hon, it’s been over seven months,’ Jo says gently. ‘But he should have told you.’
I close my eyes to hide the film of tears, and nod, unable to say anything else.
She grips my hand, and we don’t speak until we arrive at my house. Once inside she goes to the fridge and pours us both some wine. ‘Do you want to talk about him?’ she says, handing me my glass.
‘No.’ I take it and gulp a mouthful. ‘I wonder if Rufus knows.’
A mix of emotions passes over Jo’s face. ‘Well, he should have told you first.’ She’s always liked Charlie and has never spoken ill of him, but I can see she’s struggling to keep her opinion in check.
We stand in silence for a few moments and her eyes go to Rufus’s recording equipment by the patio doors. Her face lights up. ‘Ooh, let’s hear this convo, then.’ She puts her glass on the counter, goes to the sound monitor and lifts it onto the kitchen table.
‘I don’t know …’ I feel bad about it now. They seem such nice people, and I’ve violated their privacy.
‘Oh, come on. You didn’t mean to record them. Don’t you want to know what they were talking about?’
I laugh. She knows me too well. And I could do with the distraction to stop myself thinking about Charlie with another, much younger, woman.
‘Okay, go on, then.’
She turns back to the monitor and rewinds the tape.
‘Not too far,’ I warn her, ‘or all you’ll get is owl and fox sounds.’
She laughs and presses play. Immediately Henry’s voice fills my kitchen.
‘… should we really try again?’
‘Rewind a bit,’ I say. ‘Budge over, let me do it.’
Jo steps aside and I rewind the tape a bit more, then press play. At first we don’t hear anything, just the far-off sound of an aeroplane, and then their voices ring out. Something about hearing it again in my kitchen brings me out in goosebumps.
‘… I don’t know, Mari …’
‘You promised me you’d take her. I’ve got everything ready. The room …’
‘I know … but … after what happened before … should we really try again?’
‘… we have no choice …’
Silence follows and I turn to Jo. ‘That’s when I stopped recording.’
‘They sound quite intense. What did she mean by “You promised me you’d take her”? Take who, where? And the room being ready?’
‘I don’t know … the baby, maybe? They have a grandchild.’
‘So what did they say next? Can you remember?’
I think back to their conversation. ‘Something about seeing it through to the very end. And broken promises. Marielle seemed obsessed about that. She got quite upset and started talking about how she couldn’t live if he didn’t do what she wanted.’
‘Shit.’
‘I know. And that’s when Henry said about it being too risky and they could get caught. Marielle then said something about how they had got away with it before.’
Jo leans across me to play back their conversation. She presses the stop button and looks at me, an eyebrow raised. Last year, when she turned forty-five, she’d had it pierced. ‘My midlife crisis,’ she’d called it. ‘We need to try to record them again.’
‘Wait, what? No. We can’t, Jo.’
She stands up straighter, pushing her shoulders back. I tease her that this is her ‘barrister pose’. She always does it when she wants to make a point, although it loses its power as she’s swaying slightly. ‘It could be illegal …’
Trust Jo to think that, her being a barrister. But an uneasy feeling washes over me. She’s right. This could be something. And, if it is, I can’t ignore it.
Not like you did before.
I push away the thought. That’s not fair, I tell my subconscious. Yet that started in exactly the same way, with a suspicion I talked myself out of. If I’d acted on it, I could have saved lives.
‘Lena?’ Jo is staring at me. ‘Come on! It’s doubtful we’ll hear anything, but it’s worth a shot.
’ She suppresses a hiccup. She’s a bit drunk and I know she’s enjoying the drama, the laugh of it all.
I might as well go along with it, even though I’d sobered up the moment I saw Charlie kissing another woman.
I sigh. ‘Okay. Come on, then, how shall we do it?’
‘This is what I think you should do …’ She grabs the sound monitor and hands me the microphone before walking out of the kitchen.
She has a habit of leaving rooms mid-sentence so that I have no choice but to follow.
She heads upstairs and I trail behind her with the microphone, which keeps getting caught on the ceiling.
When she reaches the top of the stairs she turns to me.
‘Rufus’s room? It’s the one that looks out onto the back garden, right? ’
I nod. She takes the mic from me and enters my son’s bedroom.
It’s bathed in a silvery light and she moves stealthily across his floor with exaggerated movements and pulls up the sash window.
‘If we rest the mic here and set the tape to record we might pick something up,’ she says, wedging the microphone between the window and the sill so that it resembles a rodent caught in a trap. ‘Just leave it running.’
‘Fine. Just don’t tape over Rufus’s background sounds. Use the other side of the tape.’
Jo hides the end of the microphone behind the curtain, plonks the monitor on the floor and turns to face me, looking pleased with herself.
‘Careful with that. Rufus’s college mate is picking it up on Saturday. I don’t want a bill for broken equipment, even if it is nearly thirty years old.’
She places a finger on her lips and giggles, then presses record on the monitor. She grabs my arm and wordlessly leads me from the room. It’s not until we’re back downstairs that she speaks again. ‘How long is the running time on the tape?’
‘I have no idea. Two hours? It’s eleven seventeen now.’
‘Listen to it in the morning. You just never know.’
I resist rolling my eyes at her.
We head downstairs and I put on some Taylor Swift (Charlie hates her music: too jolly for him!), light some candles and pour ourselves some Coke to sober us up as we have to get up for work the next morning.
We spend the next forty-five minutes theorizing over what the Morgans might have been talking about, each idea becoming more and more outlandish and absurd.
We’ve got them involved in everything from spying on the government to being the biggest swingers in town, to Bristol’s answer to Fred and Rose West. Then, just before midnight, Jo calls Paul to come and pick her up.
She must notice my worried expression at spending the night alone as she adds, ‘You’ll be okay, won’t you? Do you want me to stay the night?’
I bite my lip to stop myself saying yes and shake my head. ‘I’m fine. I’ve got Phoenix. But thanks for scaring me half to death with your theories on what the Morgans could be up to,’ I say.
Just five minutes later a pair of headlights beam through the glass of the front door.
Jo gathers up her bag and reaches over to hug me.
‘Let me know if anything else happens,’ she says, brushing her lips against my cheek.
When she pulls away she says, softly, ‘I know seeing Charlie tonight must have been really tough, but remember, you were the one who wanted the split. And it’s for the best. You weren’t happy, hon. ’
And then she’s gone.
The house feels even more silent now that she’s left, and I go around blowing out candles, turning off the music, making sure every downstairs window is shut and the patio doors are locked.
I think about the microphone upstairs, recording into the dark, humid night, and can’t help but smile to myself.
If nothing else, Rufus should get more background noise, although I’ll have to get up extra early tomorrow to record day sounds before work.
From outside I hear the cries of foxes and trudge up to bed with Phoenix at my heels.
Since Charlie moved out I’ve allowed the dog to sleep on the bed with me, and as I slip beneath the sheet I feel reassured by the heavy weight of him against my legs.
I turn off the light and try to sleep, but every time I close my eyes I see Charlie kissing the other woman.
In a burst of indignation, I sit up in bed, switching the lamp back on.
I stare down at my hands and the platinum wedding band embedded with tiny diamonds.
Inscribed inside is a short lyric from a song Charlie wrote about me when we first fell in love.
I twist it around my finger and then, in anger, I wrench it off and throw it into the drawer of my bedside table among my socks.
Fuck him, I fume. Fuck him and his stupid young girlfriend!