The Soulmate, page 10
He took so much time off work I worried he might lose his job. But, perhaps due to his relationship with the boss, he managed to get by doing the bare minimum. I still had Max’s business card. Several times I’d picked up the phone to call him, then I’d put it down again. After all, the man was a media tycoon! He had enough to worry about without the wife of one of his executives calling him. I almost threw the card out a couple of times, but I always ended up tucking it back into my wallet – just in case.
One night, while watching a British police procedural on Netflix, Gabe started to cry.
We were tucked up in bed with cups of tea. Freya was sleeping soundly. It was the first time Gabe had stayed up late enough to watch a movie in weeks, and I had been thinking how remarkably normal I felt, like the other new mums in my mothers’ group, watching TV with their husbands.
‘What is it?’ I asked him. ‘What’s wrong?’
He didn’t answer. The tears weren’t alarming in themselves; Gabe was a crier, especially in movies. What disturbed me was the fact that it wasn’t a remotely sad film, combined with the fact that the crying continued after the credits had rolled and went on for four days after that.
‘I think you’re depressed, Gabe,’ I said. ‘It happens to a lot of people. I think you should see a psychologist.’
In fact, I’d started to wonder if I should see a psychologist too. I was battling the sleep deprivation of new motherhood and Gabe’s moods simultaneously. The littlest things had started to annoy him. As he lay on the couch, he’d complain that the cars outside were too loud. Freya’s sweet snoring was too loud. It was all interfering with his sleep and that’s why he was so . . . damn . . . tired.
All day long the curtains were drawn, the windows were closed. I forgot what natural sunlight looked like; it felt as if we were living in a cave. If I tried to let air and light in, Gabe recoiled like he was in pain.
More and more, I felt trapped by Gabe’s moods. I mourned our old happy life, and I had no idea how to get it back.
‘Let me make you an appointment,’ I suggested.
But he was adamant in his refusal. ‘I just need to ride it out, Pip,’ he said. ‘I will come good again. Trust me.’
But he didn’t come good, apart from the odd proclamation of love for me or Freya that felt worryingly incongruent with his mood. ‘I’m so grateful to you,’ he’d say. ‘I’d do anything for our family. I really am the luckiest man alive.’
Freya was my solace. I built a little world just for the two of us, structured around Freya’s naps and mealtimes and evening routine, her play dates, doctor’s appointments, first words and first steps. I made friends with other mums and we met in parks and libraries and play centres, where we talked about breastfeeding, baby-led weaning, gross motor skills – new, interesting, distracting things that required a lot of my time and attention. At night, if Gabe had fallen asleep on the couch, I’d bring Freya into our room, bathed and sleepy, and fall asleep to the sound of her rhythmic, steady breath.
The days were full and, for the most part, fulfilling. It was surprisingly easy to forget for hours or even days at a time that there was something very wrong with my husband. Besides, what was the point of thinking about something I was so powerless to change?
Once, I came home at midday to find Gabe at home. It was a Wednesday, and he should have been at work.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’
‘I couldn’t stay there,’ he said. ‘I tried, but I couldn’t. It was too loud.’
The noise was becoming more of a problem. The day before, he’d told me he’d unplugged the photocopier because he couldn’t bear hearing it outside his office all day long. He’d also complained that the lights were too bright. Recently he’d petitioned to HR to get dimmers in the offices. I hadn’t heard how that campaign had gone.
‘Was it the photocopier?’ I asked.
‘It was the voices. All day long, voices. They reverberate in my brain.’ He sat on the couch and dropped his head into his hands. ‘I can still hear them.’
I sat beside him. ‘You hear them now?’
He nodded. ‘In my head.’
‘What do the voices say?’
He threw up his hands. ‘You know. You’re not good enough. You’re not working hard enough. Your ideas are crap.’
I relaxed a little. ‘I think everyone hears those voices. When I hear them, I just remind myself that they aren’t real. And I tell myself that I am good enough.’
His eyes were narrowed, and he was leaning in as if he was listening hard. But when I finished speaking, he seemed dissatisfied. And I started to suspect he was hearing a different kind of voice.
27
PIPPA
NOW
We get up just before 6 am. Neither Gabe nor I have slept. My head aches and I feel that slightly surreal, off-balance feeling I used to get after a rough night with Freya when she was a tiny baby. The girls are still fast asleep, so we stumble down the hallway in darkness towards the living room. Halfway down the hall I crash into our fiddle-leaf fig, upending it and cracking the terracotta pot. It lands on my toe.
The pain is breathtaking.
‘Fuck,’ I shout-whisper. ‘Fuck.’
The floor is covered in dirt and shards of the pot. The sad-looking (and surprisingly expensive) plant that I have nurtured for months lies on its side, its roots exposed. It feels like a metaphor. Particularly since, like my life, I have no idea how to clean it up. Gabe turns on a lamp then drops to his knees, gently manipulating my toe in his fingers. Yesterday’s frenetic energy is gone and suddenly he seems almost Zen-like in his calm.
‘Don’t think it’s broken,’ he says. While I hop to the couch, he goes to the kitchen and returns with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel. He kneels before me, places it on my toe. ‘You okay?’
I nod. But I’m not. A tear slides down my cheek.
‘What happens if I stub my toe and you’re not here?’
Unlike the broader vision of life without him, there’s something about this specific situation that fills me with loss. Gabe is the first-aid man, always has been. He’s not squeamish about blood or pus. When the girls hurt themselves it’s Daddy they run to. Daddy, who is calm in the face of chaos and distress. But if Gabe is in jail, the girls will shout for me when they have a bloody nose or a grazed knee. I’ll be the one to get out the first-aid box, the frozen peas. It’ll be up to me to bandage them up and send them on their way. And I will do it. But I’ll do it with a broken heart.
Gabe is quiet for a long while. ‘What if I didn’t go to the police?’
It feels like a trick question. ‘But you have to.’
‘Maybe not. I’ve been thinking: if the police discover the connection, I could just say I didn’t recognise her. We’d only met a couple of times; it’s plausible. The rest of my story stands. She came to the cliff because Max cheated. She jumped.’
I try to work through the ramifications of what he’s saying, searching for gaps in his logic. But my thoughts are so tangled I don’t know which way is up. ‘But –’
‘The thing is,’ he continues, ‘we’re assuming that if Max knows, he’ll tell the police. But I’m not sure he will.’
‘Of course he will,’ I say. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’
‘Max Cameron isn’t the nice guy everyone thinks he is, Pip. He has another side to him. You don’t get to where he is without making a few deals with the devil.’
I’m reminded that Max filmed us. It felt out of character with the Max I thought I knew. What else don’t I know about him? Maybe Gabe is right. Maybe Max won’t pursue this.
‘Think about it. Amanda was furious with him. This has saved him a messy, expensive divorce. He might not be interested in where she died or who she was with.’
‘But what if someone else makes the connection? The police?’
‘Like I said, I didn’t recognise her. I’m as surprised as they are to find out who she was. Besides, Max and Amanda have a beach house here and it’s a well-known suicide spot; it’s not unfathomable that she would come here to take her life. It’s a coincidence, pure and simple.’
I’ve never wanted to believe anything more. And yet I’m afraid to believe that it could be this simple.
Down the hall, a door opens and two little girls in pyjamas scurry out, teddies in hand.
‘Daddy!’ they cry as they break into a trot. We turn to face them, pasting false smiles on our faces.
‘Can I have strawberries for breakfast?’ Asha asks.
‘Okay,’ I say to Gabe quietly as Asha runs headlong at me. ‘We won’t say anything.’
28
PIPPA
THEN
‘Dada.’
Freya was one year old. It was 7.30 am. She was in her highchair playing with a piece of toast that I’d put on her tray. That was when she said it. Two clear syllables. Da-da. But Dada wasn’t here.
It had been twenty-four hours since I’d seen him.
When his energy had started to return a few weeks earlier, I’d allowed myself to hope that things might be getting better. And indeed he had stopped sleeping around the clock. Unfortunately, things quickly went the other way. Now, as far as I could tell, he wasn’t sleeping at all.
The speed of the transition was what alarmed me. One day, out of the blue, he mentioned something about going out for drinks after work. He went out the next night too, and the one after that. I knew he was drinking on these nights; it was impossible to hide it. I began to wonder, though, if that was all he was doing. I knew some of his younger colleagues did cocaine, but Gabe was in his thirties, he had a child. He also had an addictive personality, I realised.
I started to nag him about it. ‘Gabe, it’s nearly six in the morning,’ I’d said to him last Saturday morning when he crawled into bed after a night out. ‘Where have you been?’
‘We don’t have plans today,’ he said testily. ‘What does it matter?’
‘I was worried.’
‘You worry too much.’
Now, as I listened to Freya’s first word, the question came to me: How long will you live like this?
It felt like a betrayal even to think it. Obviously, I could never leave Gabe. The idea was as ridiculous as leaving Freya. Eventually, he’d come back. After all, his adolescent black periods had ended eventually. This phase would pass too. I just needed to wait it out.
After Freya finished her breakfast, I glanced out the window, checking again for Gabe. It was a workday for me, and Freya was going to child care. I didn’t need his help. I had our routine down pat. Each morning, we showered together and got ready for the day. I packed our bags, while she sat on the kitchen floor and banged the pots and pans. It wasn’t terrible. We had a roof over our heads, money in the bank.
When we were ready, I picked up Freya and our bags and headed out the door just in time to see Gabe pull up in an Uber.
‘Off to work?’ he asked cheerfully, taking the steps up the porch.
He kissed Freya’s cheek, then mine. He reeked of whisky. He was wearing his suit from the day before, but his shirt was buttoned up wrongly and untucked. One trouser leg was rucked up and his sock was missing.
‘Why are your clothes like that?’ I asked.
He looked down and, seeing the state of himself, chuckled. ‘I’m a mess, aren’t I?’ He reached for Freya, but I yanked her away.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
My gaze was still caught on the missing sock. I couldn’t look away from it.
‘Have you been with a woman?’
At first, he looked confused, amused even. Then he looked down at himself.
When he looked up again, his expression was blank. It was as though he couldn’t think of another explanation for his missing sock, even though there must have been one, surely. After everything I’d put up with, every blind eye I’d turned . . . he couldn’t have been with another woman. He couldn’t because I didn’t have the capacity to withstand it.
Gabe still hadn’t spoken, but his expression had become resigned. Resigned. The most hateful of all emotions.
Freya put her arms out towards Gabe, and I pulled her away. How long had it been since she said ‘dada’? How long had it been since I wished that Gabe was here with us? It was astonishing how much your life could change between locking your front door and getting into the car.
Gabe dropped to his knees. ‘Oh God, Pip. Oh God.’
‘Oh God what?’ I demanded. ‘Were you with a woman?’
Like a fool, I was still hoping desperately it wasn’t true. Part of me wanted him to lie to me, so that I could keep lying to myself. Perhaps all of me wanted that.
But he nodded.
I thought of all the other nights he’d stayed out. When was the last time I’d asked him about it? Why hadn’t I asked him? What was wrong with me? Was this my fault?
It was strange, then, the way we snapped into our roles. There was no emotion, just an exchange of facts. For two emotional people, perhaps it was the only way we could get through it.
‘Who?’
‘A bartender. At Young and Jackson.’
‘Do you love her?’
‘No.’
‘Then why did you . . .?’
‘I don’t know.’ He went quiet and still. Then, suddenly, he smacked himself in the face with his hand, once, and then again. He made his hand into a fist.
‘Stop it,’ I said. And he did.
I closed my eyes. It felt undeniable. That this was it. All the problems we’d had – all the nights out, the drinking, the ups and downs – they had been terrible but, ultimately, they hadn’t broken our vows. They hadn’t breached our marriage contract. But this . . . this was different. Our one non-negotiable had always been loyalty. And what was infidelity if not a lapse in loyalty?
Still on his knees, he grasped the hem of my shirt. ‘It will never happen again, Pippa. I swear. I will kill myself before I’ll let that happen.’
It wasn’t the first time he’d used that kind of emotive language. It worked to throw me off balance.
‘You were right – I need help. I haven’t been okay for a while now. I need to see a psychiatrist. Something is wrong with me; I know it is. Normal people don’t cheat on the woman they love with a barmaid they don’t care about.’
He knew the buttons to press, the things I needed to hear. It was cruel and comforting and humiliating in its mind-fuckery.
‘Let me prove how sorry I am by getting help and becoming the man you deserve. The father Freya deserves.’
It’s shocking how easy I made it for him. How, despite what he had told me, I actually felt hopeful. He wanted to get help. He needed it. And so, at what should have been the lowest point of my life, I felt my heart lift. This was what I’d been waiting for.
I made an appointment for him within the hour.
29
AMANDA
AFTER
I am starting to wonder where I am. It’s not heaven or hell. Not even purgatory. I’m still on earth, but removed; everywhere and nowhere at once.
It makes me question . . . what’s next? Or is this it? Will I spend eternity like this, suspended between life and death? I wonder if it’s to do with the suddenness of my demise. The unexpectedness of it. Perhaps someone upstairs is scrambling to complete the paperwork? Or maybe I won’t be going upstairs at all.
I am, after all, no angel.
Max is in my wardrobe again. It’s the second time he’s been in there today. I’m not sure what he’s doing, and judging by his uncertainty he feels the same. He opens a drawer, pushes my underwear to one side, closes it again. What does he expect to find? Then he just steps back and stares at my dresses, my jeans, my neatly folded T-shirts. He’s already looked through the photographs on my camera and those I saved to my computer recently. Clearly he hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
He hasn’t been in the office all week. Not surprising, some might say, given his wife’s unexpected death, but it is surprising to me. The office, after all, is Max’s church. His yoga studio. His place of work, but also his place of equilibrium. In the past twenty-five years, the only time I’ve seen him spend this long away from it was when we were on holiday and after his hernia operation. I wonder if I should be flattered.
It’s the visit from the police that’s got him rattled. The young officers, a man and a woman, arrived a couple of hours ago with my wallet and jewellery and other personal effects. They told Max my car would need to be collected, and they provided its location.
‘It’s on a small residential street, but the residents have been informed that it is there, so there’s no rush. And there are car collection services you can use, if you don’t want to do it yourself.’
They handed him my keys, a heavy bunch made heavier by the brass penguin-shaped keyring I’d added to make it easier to find them in my handbag. Max always laughed at my keys.
‘One day the ignition will fall out under the weight of those things,’ he said, even though it had been years since I’d driven a car that required me to insert keys.
As he took them from the police, he turned them over in his hand. It must have looked like he was examining them with sadness, but I knew better.
‘Where is the USB?’ he asked.
The keyring USB had been a present from Max. It was silver and engraved with my name and had enough capacity to store all of my photographs. USBs had always eluded me; they were impossible to find when you needed them and then lost a moment later. How many times had I strode around the house, asking Max where my USB was?
‘Now you’ll always know where to find it,’ he’d said when he gave it to me. ‘And everyone will know it’s yours.’
The ladies at tennis had laughed at the gift. That’s what you get for your birthday when you’re married to Max Cameron? I understood the joke. It was funny. But it was also perfect. I never took it off my keyring, unless it was plugged in to my computer.
