The Woman Next Door

HESTER

I’ve had such a wonderful time but I think perhaps I should have stayed away from all that rich food.

My tummy is churning and when I look around Melissa’s kitchen, it’s like all the edges of things have run in the wash. Everything is a bit blurry.

I’m not feeling too clever.

That’s one of Terry’s expressions. ‘Not feeling too clever, old girl?’ he’d say and it annoyed the heck out of me because he was eleven years my elder.

‘Bugger off, Terry,’ I say out loud and it surprises me so much that I belch, to my horror, really quite loudly. I mumble an ‘excuse me’ and realize a strange woman is standing very close to me. I think we spoke earlier but darned if I know what about.

I don’t know where she came from now.

She’s there with her big wobbly face, saying, ‘Are you all right? Are you okay?’ I can smell her perfume and it makes me think of the inside of old handbags that we would get in Scope, which contained all sorts of disgusting things. Old tissues. Sanitary ware. Sweeties stuck to the lining like tumours. This image is so horrible it brings bile into my mouth and the ground does a strange shift sideways. I clutch the table. The woman says, ‘Do you need to sit down?’

It’s the second time today someone has spoken to me like this.

I look her squarely in the eye. Hers are large and very dark. I think she is probably foreign. With all the dignity I can muster I say, ‘I am absolutely tickety-boo’, and then wonder why, because this is another irritating Terry expression. But the words skid and skate into each other like cars on an icy road. ‘Going to the bathroom,’ I say and this time it comes out a bit more clearly.

I am on the landing upstairs now. I remember, too late, that there is a downstairs toilet that would have been closer.

My head is swimming and my insides feel wrong. Maybe it was the pâté on those tiny blinis. It smelled so very meaty. Sometimes I am eating a chop, or a piece of pork, and I remember that it is a dead thing on my plate. It puts me right off. Then all I can think about are tumours and carcasses, which makes my stomach squeeze and relax like a big fist.

Oh dear.

I can’t quite remember which room is the bathroom.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been upstairs here in all these years of living next door. It’s certainly very different to mine. It really is twice the size. But how silly that I don’t know where to go! A small laugh turns into another belch. ‘Whoops, pardon me,’ I say to no one.

I can hear Melissa’s voice, pitched low, at the front door. Melissa! I’m so very happy and relieved that we are friends again. I think I will offer to help tidy up later. There will be such a lot to do. But I may need a small rest first.

If only I could find the bathroom.

I lean over the stairs, intending to ask her where I might find it, but there’s something strange about the way she is standing. Despite my fuzziness I can tell she is somehow braced. Her feet are apart and her shoulders seem to be high. She’s clutching the side of the door like a lifeline. How very odd.

Maybe it’s one of those Chuggers. Chugger buggers! I must say this to Melissa later when we’re clearing up, maybe over a well-earned cup of tea. It will really tickle her.

I lean over the banister a little further and somehow knock my ribs, quite hard. The pain makes me even more queasy. And now something strange is happening to the walls and landing, which tip and pulse around me.

I really must find …

I shove open the nearest door.

Sweat breaks out all over me, greasy and cold. My stomach turns inside out.

I’m staring into Tilly’s face. She’s saying something but I can’t hear because the sour sickness rises up, engulfing me and then spurting out onto the soft pale carpet.

I stare down at the small pool, pink with Pimm’s.

Things have gone terribly wrong.

MELISSA

‘Hello, Mel. Well don’t just stand there, gawping. You going to invite me in, or what?’

Melissa clutches the doorframe. Viscous shock floods her spine.

She can’t think of a single word to say.

He can’t be here? On her doorstep?

He’s laughing; enjoying the moment. Immersing himself gleefully in her distress like a dog cavorting in a filthy puddle.

When she manages to find words, they tumble out messily.

‘What are you …? Why …?’ It feels imperative that she doesn’t say his name aloud. If she does, it will make this all the more real.

Jamie? At her house?

‘Come on, aren’t you even a little bit pleased to see me after all these years?’

Blind instinct makes Melissa try to close the door, but he is too quick for her and pushes his white trainered foot into the gap. She immediately feels foolish.

‘Really? Come on!’ he says, head cocked to one side, not smiling now.

Of course, she can’t just slam the door in his face. Can she?

‘This is a bit of a surprise.’ Her voice sounds very far away to her own ears.

‘I bet.’

Jamie holds out his arms, as if to say, ‘this is me!’, and she looks at him properly now, registering that he is both unchanged and yet completely different.

The dark brown eyes are feathered by lines but the features that once crowded his teenage face, gawky and out of proportion, now suit him. His face is thicker, more square-jawed, but it is his body that is quite transformed. Although still on the short side, the skinny, concave-chested boy now looks like someone who works out with dedication. A broad chest and arms rounded with muscle are showcased in a tight t-shirt. His hair is cropped short.

The last time Melissa had seen him, his face was covered with snot and tears. He’d looked like the little boy he still was inside: sixteen to her seventeen.

He has a large holdall slung across one shoulder and an expectant tilt to his eyebrows. Surely he can’t think …

‘What the fuck are you doing here, Jamie?’ she says in little more than a whisper. Saying his name makes it all feel worse, just as she’d anticipated. ‘How did you …’, she swallows, ‘find me?’

Jamie shifts position, moving the bag onto the other shoulder, and his expression slackens. He’s always done that puppy dog thing to guilt trip her, but then his eyes and mouth thin and harden and she feels a flash of something else. The back of her neck prickles. This is new.

‘That’s not very welcoming, is it?’ he says, shifting the holdall in a way designed to emphasize how very heavy it is. ‘After all we’ve been through together? Can’t a girl make an effort for her own brother?’

She’s about to speak when she feels a hot, clammy hand on her bare arm.

‘Mum!’

Tilly has materialized at the front door. Her eyes are wide, shining, and she bristles with appalled excitement.

‘You won’t believe what’s happened! Hester has been sick! All over my …’

She stops speaking abruptly, staring openly at Jamie. ‘Did you just say, brother?’ Her mouth drops open and she seems to shed years. She’s once more the tiny girl who has just discovered Father Christmas has ‘been’.

Jamie chuckles easily. His gaze drifts up and down Tilly’s entire length.

Tilly flushes. Melissa wants to lean over and rake her newly done nails across Jamie’s face. Instead she steps in front of her daughter, creating a physical barrier. She wants to erase this moment from history. She wants to make it all un-happen.

‘He’s not my brother.’ She tries to laugh dismissively but her face is too rigid. It’s all she can do to spit words out through tight lips.

‘Well, foster brother, so close enough,’ says Jamie with a twinkle, holding out his arms. ‘I’m Jamie. And who are you? No, hang on … I reckon you should be called something like Aphrodite, or Kate Moss, or something.’

Tilly emits a shrill giggle, still blushing furiously. Melissa’s head feels like it’s going to explode. How could her privately educated, clever daughter lap up such bullshit?

Why is he here? What does he want? She has to clamp her lips together to stop a soft moan from seeping out.

‘What is it, Tilly?’ she snaps. She’s distantly aware of some other issue she must absorb. ‘What did you say about someone being sick?’

Tilly starts at her mother’s tone. ‘Oh … Hester’s puked on my carpet.’

‘What?’

Melissa opens her mouth and closes it again. Her head throbs.

The light is almost sepia now. Bruise-coloured clouds have gathered over the low sky and seem to roil and move too fast. Everything has a sickly, unreal feel. The sticky air presses in all around her and sweat breaks out along her hairline.

‘What on earth do you mean?’ She has to grasp this information, she knows this, yet cannot.

Tilly mimes throwing up, expressively. Jamie hoots with laughter and Tilly beams at the appreciation. ‘She’s totally rat-arsed,’ she says cheerfully. ‘Now she’s flat out in the guest room, snoring her head off.’

‘Wow, it sounds like some party you’ve got going on here, Mel!’ says Jamie.

Tilly, still glowing in the heat of his attention, shoots him an arch smile. It looks all wrong, like a toddler wearing its mother’s shoes. ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you?’ she says.

No. This has to stop right now.

Melissa opens her mouth to tell Jamie he has to go when a clap of thunder as loud as a gunshot cracks the still air. All three flinch in surprise. Fat raindrops plop onto Jamie’s head and confetti the step around him. He cartoon cowers, arms up to fend off the rain. A hot concrete smell wafts upwards.

‘Mum! Let him come in! What’s wrong with you?’

And then somehow Jamie is crossing the threshold and here he is, inside.

He’s in her house and she has lost control of the situation.

‘Jesus,’ says Melissa. ‘All right! Just go and … wait in there.’ She gestures to the sitting room. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can dealing with this. Just don’t … move.’ What she wants to say is, ‘Don’t touch anything. Don’t steal anything. Piss off.’

Jamie walks quickly past her and flumps down onto the plush sofa. He strokes its arm luxuriously, stretching out his legs, before turning to flash a grin that seems to say, ‘I should have all this too.’

The band of pain tightens around Melissa’s head.

***

As hot water thunders into the bucket in the bathroom upstairs, she sits on the edge of the bath and holds her head in her hands. She squeezes her eyes shut and moans softly, a long sibilant hiss. ‘Shit-shit-shit-shit.’

She and Jamie had been separated before her days in Asquith Mansions but it’s too close for comfort. Was that why he was here? And how did he find her? Holding her breath and scrubbing at the foul pink mess, she thinks about doing this before, many times over, back when she was Melanie Ronson. But then it was cheap scratchy carpets pocked with fag burns that rubbed your knees raw, or lino that was cracked and sticky. Not this oatmeal-coloured pure wool, which Tilly’s bare toes scrunch into every day and which is proving to be astonishingly absorbent to vomit.

However hard she scrubs, she can’t stop the pictures that start flicker-booking through her mind:

– Her mother slumped, weeping, at the yellow Formica table, smelling bad. Melissa, then Melanie, hiding behind the sofa and pick-pick-picking at the swirly green and black wallpaper. She’d seen a programme about Narnia on telly. They don’t have any big wardrobes but she is obsessed with hiding places just in case;

– The purplish grey swelling of her mother’s eyes one morning that made her think of lizards and dinosaurs;

– Lying in bed, pulling the sour-smelling Barbie duvet up to her face when her mother flings open the bedroom door. She is silhouetted against the yellowish landing light. Flecks of spit fly from her mouth as she screams that she could have ‘made something’ of herself and that she should have ‘just dealt with it’ when she had the opportunity.

And finally.

– Coming into the dark living room, a little unsteady after too many Bacardi and Cokes and a little sore from pounding against the bonnet of Gary Mottram’s Vauxhall Viva in the Camelot car park, to find her mother dead in the stripy brown and orange chair that always smelled musty.

She had been fifteen then.

No one would believe that she had been looking after herself for years. That she had found money around the house and bought the chips for dinner, spreading margarine on slices of bread and, once, putting some dandelions in a jar in the centre of the table because she had seen something like it on telly. Mum had taken one look and then burst into tears, so Melanie never did it again.

Melissa sits back on her heels now, staring down at the damp carpet. She hopes she won’t have to replace it.

Rain patters against the sash window where Tilly has hung a blue feathery dreamcatcher that Melissa has never seen before. Getting up with a sigh, she lifts the bucket of dirty water.

She will get rid of him.

It’s going to be okay.

HESTER

I’m looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling.

The inside of my head thrums and pulses in sickening waves. Have I had an accident? Maybe I was hit by a car and I’m in hospital.

I run my tongue over my dry lips, grimacing at the terrible taste in my mouth.

As I turn my head and look to the right, I can see a pale blue wooden bedside table. It looks far too pretty and upmarket to be in a hospital. That’s not all. The wallpaper is textured with roses and looks like raw silk. Gauzy curtains shimmer and flutter at a window where a light breeze drifts in. The light is the pale bluish milk of very early morning.

My brain scrambles to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of jagged information.

Computer club. A party.

Laughing and then feeling peculiar.

Oh no, oh no, oh no …

Memories crash into my mind with the violence of bumper cars. I’m talking too loud to the couple whose faces are frozen with embarrassment. I’m on the landing, feeling queer. And then I’m in Tilly’s room and …

Oh my goodness. I start to cry a little, but am so dehydrated I don’t seem to make any tears. All I can do is a strange sort of mewling, like a cat in distress. That’s when I remember poor Bertie. My darling boy has been alone all night long. My guilt and horror increase tenfold.

I groan and turn onto my other side. I wish I could hide in this room forever but I can’t leave my boy any longer. I have to get up. I have to face what I have done. Peering at my watch with eyeballs that don’t seem to fit the sockets anymore, I see that it is only 5 a.m. in the morning. I must leave, but I will somehow have to make amends later.

It’s then I notice the glass of water next to the bed and a packet of paracetamol. The kindness of this simple act twists my insides with more guilt. I don’t deserve it. I start to cry again. But my head hurts too much for that so I stop.

Almost without realizing I’m doing it, I reach for the soft skin of my inner arm and pinch myself viciously. The thin, tender skin burns and the pain makes me gasp but I deserve the pain after what I have done. I won’t take the medicine or the water. I will take my punishment, at least while I am still at the scene of my crime.

Clambering out of the big soft bed, my balance wobbles and I almost fall back down again. Nausea rolls over me, coating me in a clammy layer of sweat, and I try to breathe steadily for a moment. I mustn’t be sick again!

Finally steady, I walk to the middle of the floor. There’s a full-length mirror on a stand in one corner but I can’t bear to look. I try to rake my fingers through my hair, knowing it to be a futile gesture. My hair feels dirty and matted with sweat and I can taste something horrible. Sweetish and rotten.

Slowly, with shaking hands, I make the bed and try to rearrange the beautifully soft cushions on the floor, presumably tossed carelessly there by me last night. But I don’t really know what to do with them. They are imprinted with a river scene like something from a Chinese painting, with tall herons standing proudly in water. But they look all wrong however I arrange them. I don’t have a flair for that sort of thing, like Melissa does. Frustrated, I give up and just lay them in a neat row.

A throw made from heavy cotton in a deep turquoise colour lies half on the floor and it is so lovely I can’t help but hold it to my throbbing forehead for a moment. I hope to catch some kind of comforting scent from it. But it is curiously without any odour at all. I place it neatly along the bottom of the bed. This, at least, I can do because I have seen it on decor programmes on television. The bed is so perfect, even with the cushions out of place, that it fills me with a strange sense of longing, and then, another hot blast of shame.

Poor Tilly. And poor, poor Melissa. She must hate me for this. I can’t understand how it happened. I don’t even remember the last time I was under the influence. It must be years ago. Any tolerance I once had must have completely disappeared.

Miserably, I slip my feet into my court shoes and that’s when I notice a globule of something pink and lumpy on the toe of my right one. Disgust ripples through me as I reach for a tissue from the neat metal container at the side of the bed and rub at the crustiness, trying to quell the heaving sensation in my stomach as I do so.

There’s no way I can put the tissue in the bin for poor Melissa to deal with, so, shuddering a little, I fold it over as much as possible to obscure the shameful contents and push it inside the cuff of my blouse.

When I open the door, I listen for a moment, willing with every fibre of my being that no one will be around. I will come back later, with flowers, to apologize. I simply can’t face seeing anyone yet.

It’s as I creep towards the stairs that I hear a door opening behind me. Oh please no …

But it isn’t Melissa, or Mark, or Tilly. It’s a man.

I have no idea who he is. He is perhaps in his thirties and he is dressed only in his underwear. He’s not very tall but all muscled chest and arms. Then my eyes are drawn downwards and I gasp in shock; I can clearly see the tented distortion of his boxer shorts.

He gives a deep, throaty laugh. ‘Oops, sorry, Grandma,’ he says. ‘Morning glory and all that.’

My cheeks flame. I scurry down the stairs as fast as I can. I am sure I can hear mocking laughter behind me.

Thankfully the front door isn’t locked. Wrenching it open, I almost throw myself down the front steps, twisting my knee a little in the process.

Home! Please let me just get home.

I run up my own steps. It’s as I get inside, relief flooding my veins, that I realize the tissue containing the vomit must have fallen out of my sleeve. Panicking, I quickly retrace my steps but it isn’t on Melissa’s steps either. It is obviously lying somewhere inside.

‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,’ I whisper.

Bertie runs from the kitchen, yapping wildly. Telling me off, no doubt. I pick him up and hug him to my chest, kissing his rough little head and murmuring my apologies, but he scrambles to be put down. When I open the back door, he darts outside and squats straight away. The poor thing; what a clever boy he is for not having an accident on the floor. He must be hungry too.

I think then of someone else washing up my ‘accident’ on the floor, and I have to close my eyes at the poisonous sensation of shame. I go straight to bed.

When I awake, I am shocked to see it is the afternoon already. Forcing down tea and toast, I run a bath, and ease my aching body into the water.

It is almost hotter than I can stand, and when I lift my leg the skin is bright and mottled. I’m not at all comfortable but I feel I am being purged. If only the shame could be leached from my skin along with the traces of alcohol.

Images from last night keep racing through my mind: talking to that woman at the start who kept laughing like I was the funniest woman ever. Saying ‘Pimm’s o’clock!’ to someone and finding it almost unbearably funny. Someone (Tilly?) speaking to me gently and telling me a ‘nice lie-down’ would ‘sort me out’.

My mind drifts to that man on the landing this morning. Who on earth was that? He didn’t look at all like one of Mark’s friends. Come to think of it, where was Mark?

He had tattoos. I keep picturing the coarse black hair on his chest and arms. Some men are like monkeys under their clothes. And the sight of … that. Mocking me with his lack of modesty.

I close my eyes in disgust.

My head still aches, despite the aspirin I forced down with my cup of tea when I got back. So much for taking my punishment. But it did hurt so very much.

It really is odd that I should have had quite such a strong reaction to the alcohol. I’ve never been a drinker but I’m sure I didn’t have that much Pimm’s. Maybe it is just more potent than I ever realized? The memory of its cloying taste makes my stomach churn again, and I close my eyes then sink under the surface of the water, allowing it to close over my head like a baptism.

When I emerge I am crying in great gulps. I keep picturing Terry laughing at me being in this state. Oh yes, he would have found this very amusing, I’m sure. He was always trying to encourage me to ‘have a drink and let go a little’.

I was always the butt of his jokes. Always the ‘funny old thing’ who took things too seriously and didn’t seem to know how to enjoy herself. Funny old, silly old Hester.

This is another reason to avoid alcohol. It causes all sorts of unwanted memories to surface. The dirty silt at the bottom of my mind has been stirred up.

‘Leave me alone, Terry,’ I gulp into the steamy air.

He once suggested we take a bath in here together, in the early days. I was quite unable to think of an excuse. My parents were gone by then and the house was all mine, but it still felt wrong.

But I agreed. It was the early days, as I said.

We met at Bentley’s, the engineering works that has long been closed down. I was an Office Manager, having started as an assistant straight from secretarial college and working my way up. He worked on the shop floor.

It took a year of him asking before I gave in and went out with him for a drink. At 35, I was seeing colleague after colleague leave to have babies and time was beginning to pinch.

I went for the drink, then we had some country walks together. He told me he was ‘really falling for me’, after a couple of months. He’d been married before, but she died quite young. As for me, well, I’d never really met the right person.