The Dare, page 17
She walks to the fridge and removes the carton of orange juice, pours herself a large glass. I feel a twist of irritation in my stomach. I’ve told her to help herself to whatever she needs, and I meant it, but there’s something not quite right about her today. An air of entitlement that grates on me. What’s that old saying? Guests, like fish, start to smell after three days, and it’s been almost a fortnight now.
‘You’ll have to ask Lizzie,’ Ross snaps. ‘It’s a surprise.’
It was a mistake from the start: the whole fucking charade. Catherine made it seem so easy, though.
‘Get close to her,’ she’d said. ‘I mean, really close. Make her open up and tell you the truth. She pushed Alice in front of that train, Ross. I know she did. She told Alice she wished she was dead. Alice was in tears when she came back from that disco. Then the sly bitch pretended to have a seizure so the two of them could bunk off a school trip. If she could pretend once, she could pretend twice. And if she won’t talk, go ahead and break her heart anyway. Why should she get to be happy?’
God, how she hated her.
She gave me instructions right from the start. How to approach her in the café that first time. What to say. What to do. Somehow, she’d known exactly what Lizzie would need to see or hear in order to fall in love with me. Although, I like to think I might have managed at least some of that on my own.
I found it interesting, the things Catherine tolerated and the things she didn’t. She was surprisingly cool about the sex. Made me tell her all about it. It turned her on. And when Catherine got turned on, I did too.
When she first suggested that I ask Lizzie to move in with me, I said ‘no way’. It seemed like a step too far, but Catherine had a way of bending me to her will. She’d moulded me into a creature of her own making, and I’d let her. I was stupid to get involved. Stupid and weak. Because the truth was, I no longer cared whether Lizzie did push Alice. Kids do all sorts of bad stuff. I know that more than anyone.
The original plan was to encourage her to apply for a job at the surgery so that Catherine could ‘meet’ her there. When that didn’t work, the plan evolved. It was always evolving. We’d have a housewarming party instead. Catherine would do what she needed to do and I’d split up with Lizzie when she was done. Lizzie could have gone back home to Mummy and Daddy, her heart well and truly broken. A nice big notch in Catherine’s belt.
But then I messed up again. I messed up big time. Getting Lizzie pregnant was never part of the plan. Nor was her finding that fucking congratulations card. Why on earth did Sue keep it all these years? As some kind of memento? At least Catherine can’t blame me for that. Not wearing a condom, though, that was entirely my bad.
Or was it? Was it really? Maybe it was just a fantasy. Mr and Mrs Normal and their baby. No games. No danger. No risk.
No, it was unthinkable. And yet …
And yet.
42
I watch from the window as first Catherine, then Ross, climb into their respective cars. Catherine drives off almost immediately, but Ross is still trying to manoeuvre out of an impossibly tight parking space. The man from number 14 with the pimped-up Mazda has hemmed him in again. I can see Ross cursing to himself. Eventually, he pulls away and I exhale, slowly. It’s nice to have the house to myself at last, especially after the tension between Ross and Catherine just now. What the hell was all that about? Has something happened between them at work, some misunderstanding?
Upstairs, I notice that, for once, Catherine has left her door ajar. Up till now, I’ve resisted being nosy but, for some reason, today I push the door open a little wider and step inside. After all, it’s not actually her room, is it? I have a perfect right to enter it when she’s not here. What if I were to need a spare coat hanger from the wardrobe, for instance?
Except of course, I don’t. I have no reason to be standing here in the doorway looking at how Catherine has settled in other than pure curiosity and maybe a smattering of annoyance that her stay here might end up being longer than two weeks.
The room smells of her. Or rather, the coconut oil she likes to use. I can see that she’s made some attempt to organize things, but lots of her stuff is still in boxes and bags on the floor. To be fair, there’s nowhere else for it to go.
The duvet has been hastily pulled into place, a corner of the rumpled bottom sheet still visible at the end of the bed, and a flimsy pair of bedshorts and camisole top have been flung on to her pillow. I’m glad she always wears that blue towelling robe of hers, the one that’s hanging from the hook on the back of the door. I’d hate for Ross to see her in this get-up.
A memory flashes into my mind. Alice and I following her to Nando’s one sunny Saturday. The denim shorts she’d made herself cut so high that half her bum was hanging out.
I give the rest of the room a quick scan. Catherine has arranged her books on the floor against the wall. Most of them are nursing textbooks, but there are also a few psychological thrillers, a couple of old foreign-language phrasebooks and an illustrated children’s bible. I’m surprised she has something like this. She doesn’t strike me as particularly religious.
I pick it up. I used to have one a bit like this. There’s a picture of the three wise men arriving at Jerusalem on its dog-eared jacket and the pages have that thin, silky feeling. The illustrations remind me of those Hollywood epics from the 1950s and ’60s that I used to watch with Dad. On the inside cover, an inscription reads: ‘Xmas 1994. To Catherine, with love from Nanny Dot.’
Nineteen ninety-four. My year of birth. Alice’s, too.
Nanny Dot. She mentioned her the other day, didn’t she, when we had coffee together after my scan?
I snap the bible shut and put it back where I found it. Ever since meeting up with Catherine again, she’s gone out of her way to help me and be kind to me, and here I am, snooping around in her private things. I’m so nosy, I should be ashamed of myself.
I’m on the verge of leaving when I catch sight of the little art book that used to live on a shelf in the Dawsons’ living room. Memories of Alice and me flicking through the pictures come flooding back, and I can’t resist having a quick look before I go. I perch on the end of the bed while I leaf through its well-thumbed pages.
I stop at Balthus’s Girl with Cat, remembering how Alice and I used to call it the Paedo’s Pic. I look at the girl in the picture. Her hands are clasped behind her head as she sprawls, suggestively, on a chair, one leg bent on a stool in front of her, the other on the floor, her inner thighs and white underwear on display. Something about the expression on her face reminds me a little of Catherine this morning when she looked at Ross, and of what she might have looked like as a young girl.
What was it Mum told me on the phone? That she and Dad disapproved of how Catherine used to hang around with boys on the estate. ‘She was very … precocious.’ Those were Mum’s words. Is that why her Nanny Dot bought her a bible? I wonder. Because she thought her granddaughter needed some spiritual guidance?
A horrible thought comes into my head. Maybe there’s more to Ross’s uptight behaviour than simple awkwardness at sharing his home with a colleague. A cold feeling washes through me and I can’t believe I haven’t even considered it before, or maybe I have, subconsciously at least. Maybe he fancies her. That would certainly account for his awkwardness whenever she’s around and his reaction when I told him I’d offered her a room. Of course he wouldn’t want her living with us if he was having an affair with her, or planning on one.
Now that I come to think of it, wasn’t he always bringing her up in conversation before the party? The new practice nurse this, the new practice nurse that. And it was Catherine who accompanied him on that home visit I didn’t know about till he came home late. Catherine who ate chicken and chips with him. Where did they eat it? I wonder. In his car? No, Ross would never allow someone to eat a takeaway in his beloved car.
My mind returns to the night of the housewarming party. Was there a familiarity between the two of them, an intimacy with each other, that somehow I missed? I think of when the doorbell rang and he went off to answer it, force myself to replay what I actually saw. He kissed her in greeting, I’m sure of it, but then he’d kissed all his female colleagues as they arrived. A little peck on the cheek. Nothing strange in that. He’d helped her off with her coat. Perhaps they were standing a little too close together. Did his hand linger on her shoulder, or am I just imagining that because I’m trying to make the pieces fit?
I put the book of paintings back where I found it. Why am I doing this to myself? The worst thing I can do is speculate like this. Chances are I’ve got it completely wrong. Ross has never given me cause to be jealous. Just because Catherine is an attractive woman, it doesn’t mean he fancies her. It’s me he loves. Me he’s going to marry. Not that he’s mentioned that lately. Not once. In fact, the last time I brought it up, he changed the subject pretty much straightaway. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. After all, we’ve got enough to worry about right now with a baby on the way, but still, we could at least be thinking about it. We could at least be making plans.
I should get out of here and go downstairs, stop torturing myself with all this crap, but something is gnawing away at the back of my mind and I find myself walking over to the chest of drawers instead, slowly opening the one at the top. I know it’s an invasion of her privacy, but it’s like an itch I have to scratch. A compulsion to find out more about this woman I’ve invited into my home. Invited into my life. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Some kind of evidence that she and Ross are having an affair?
What if she isn’t sorry about the past at all? My eyes drift back to the discarded bedshorts and camisole top. Has this been her plan all along, to steal Ross from under my nose as some kind of twisted revenge?
I take a couple of deep breaths to steady my nerves, but whatever I’m hoping to find, or rather, hoping I don’t find, it isn’t here. All I can see is underwear and T-shirts, balled-up socks and pairs of tights. I’m wasting my time. Letting my jealousy rear its ugly head again, just because there was a bit of tension between the two of them this morning, which, knowing me, I probably imagined in the first place.
Even so, I don’t stop looking. The next drawer is full of gym wear, everything all jumbled up and plonked in any old how. It makes me remember that time Alice and I searched through Catherine’s bedside cabinet at Riley Road, when we were looking for her contraceptive pills. She’s no tidier now than she was back then.
The bottom drawer is equally messy, and rammed full of jumpers and jeans and a couple of hats – a woollen beanie and a navy baseball cap. It’s the same one I saw in her car when she took me for my scan. Only now I see something I didn’t register before. The red letters ICL on the front.
Imperial College London. It’s where Ross did his medical training.
43
I turn the baseball cap over in my hand. I’m pretty well acquainted with Ross’s possessions by now, and I’ve never seen this before. He does have a baseball cap. A plain black one. He wore it the first time he met my parents. Dad teased him about wearing it the wrong way round. Said he looked more like a skateboarder than a GP.
I bring it towards my nose and inhale the fabric. Nothing. Just a slight mustiness. A faint trace of smoke. Stupid to think it might smell of him. Stupid to even entertain the possibility of it being Ross’s baseball cap. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It’s a coincidence, that’s all. Catherine is a nurse. She’s bound to know other people – other doctors – who went to ICL. It’s a famous London medical school, for God’s sake. She must have got it from one of them or picked it up from somewhere.
I study the cap for a little longer, then toss it back in the drawer. This stops now. I’m going to go downstairs, clear up the breakfast things, and then I’m going to go for a nice long walk and forget all about this nonsense. This is what jealousy does to you. It drives you crazy. Makes you lose your mind.
After I’ve washed up, I take the cards that Ross has left on the table, together with the framed photograph of his mother, and put them on the mantelpiece in the living room. He was really pleased with the vinyl I bought him, but I could tell that it was this photo that touched him the most. It must have been so hard for him, losing his mother at such a young age. I can’t imagine how sad he must have felt.
Now that the photo has been enlarged, I can see the similarities between the two of them. The high forehead. The long, straight nose and square jaw. His mother was what some might describe as a handsome woman. She’s not wearing any make-up and her hair is tied back off her face in a rather severe bun, but she clearly liked her jewellery, if that striking pendant round her neck is anything to go by.
I’ve left the two photos that Catherine gave me a few days ago propped up against the mirror. I really ought to get these framed, too. In fact, that’s what I’ll do now. I’ll walk to Blackheath Standard and go to that gift shop I passed a while back. I look at the photos once more and my eyes wander to the figure of Sheena Dawson as she chats with the woman in the next-door garden. I still can’t believe that Mum and Dad lived in Riley Road. Catherine said that her mum was almost back to her old self by the time Alice and I met, and then she got depressed again. I can’t see her face because her back is turned to the camera, but the woman she’s talking to is smiling broadly, which must mean they were sharing a joke about something.
That’s odd. I peer at the photo in my hand. The neighbour is wearing a pendant that’s almost identical to the one Ross’s mother is wearing. It’s a turquoise oblong that looks like it’s made out of glass or resin with swirling shapes inside, a little like a lava lamp. I look from one photo to the other. No. It isn’t almost identical. It is identical. What are the chances of that?
I study the neighbour’s face. She, too, has a long, straight nose and square jaw, and she’s the same colouring as Ross’s mother. My mouth goes dry. But Fiona Murray had been dead for almost twelve years when this photo was taken, and she lived in Aberdeen. It’s not her. Of course it isn’t. It’s obvious she’s a different woman. There is a likeness, though, and what with the pendant …
A strange and troubling thought enters my mind, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I go into the study and pull out Ross’s old photo album. He doesn’t have many pictures of his mother and the one in the frame is the clearest, from what I can remember, but it’s not his mother I’m looking for. It’s his aunt. Ross once told me that when she first took him in, he couldn’t bear to look at her, because she reminded him so much of his mother.
I turn the stiff cardboard pages that have browned with age and examine the old photos stuck under the sticky plastic. There are several of Ross in his school uniform as a solemn-faced little boy.
Something frightening is ticking away at the back of my mind. All these coincidences keep stacking up. Things which on their own aren’t particularly odd, but which taken together add up to something very odd indeed.
Catherine working at Ross’s GP practice out of all the possible GP practices in the country where she might have ended up. Mum and Sheena Dawson being best friends. The ICL baseball cap in the drawer upstairs. And now this: the neighbour who looks a bit like his mother and who’s wearing an identical pendant. It’s the sort of thing a grieving person might do, isn’t it, wear something that belonged to her late sister?
But Ross’s aunt lived in Sittingbourne, in Kent. That’s where he went to live when his dad couldn’t look after him any more. At least, that’s what he told me.
With trembling fingers, I examine every single photo in the album, making sure to look not just at the subject of each one, but at what’s in the background, too, and on the edges of each shot, to see if something – anything – jumps out at me.
When it does, it’s like a blow to my solar plexus. I double up in shock and the photo album shoots off my knees and lands on the floor with a dull thud.
44
It’s a group photo. Ross and the ‘old gang’ from ICL. He’s kneeling down at the front in the middle, his head turned to one side, mouth open wide in what looks like either a laugh or a yell. The others are gathered around him. A loosely arranged huddle of confident-looking men and women – mostly men – in their twenties.
Several of the faces at the back are partially or completely obscured by the heads and shoulders in front of them. But there’s only one figure I’m interested in right now, and that’s Ross. Because of what’s on his head: a navy baseball cap worn the wrong way round, the straight red lines of the letter ‘I’ just visible where his head is turned.
I stare at it in disbelief. There must be hundreds of those same baseball caps in circulation. Thousands, even. It doesn’t prove anything. Of course it doesn’t. So why is my heart hammering like a Kango drill? Why is sweat breaking out in the small of my back?
My horror mounting, I race back upstairs and into the spare room, pull open the bottom drawer. I pick the cap up and examine it once again. It must be pretty old, because the cotton is soft and worn. I turn it inside out and my heart misses a beat. Panic explodes in my mind. The label is small and soft as silk, frayed at the edges. Whatever was printed on it has long since faded, but two small marks remain. The capital letters R and M, written in black biro.
I dry-retch over the open drawer.
Ross Murray.
Back in the study, my mind gibbers with theories. Perhaps Catherine gave him a lift somewhere, something to do with work, and he left it in her car. Maybe it was the same night she accompanied him on that home visit. That’s where they could have eaten their takeaway. I don’t expect Catherine would mind about a few stray chips in her messy Peugeot.
