SEVEN

Emma

THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 2012

It’s lunchtime and I’m still in bed, where Paul left me this morning. The happy pills are working their magic and I am beginning to feel comfortably numb so I force myself up. I can smell the stink of stale sheets on me so I stand in the shower until my fingertips start to prune, then pull on a loose jumper dress to hide my body.

I’ve put the tranquilizers back in the bathroom cabinet and closed the door on them. I hate the pills—they mean I’m failing. I’d like to put them in the bin, but what if I can’t cope without them?

Maybe I’ll try to get a different sort of help this time—look beyond the chemical route. I almost laugh as I think it. It would mean talking, wouldn’t it? Telling someone my thoughts. Why I’m such a mess. What lies at the bottom of it all. It would mean brushing the loose dirt away and then excavating the thick clay packed deep around my memories.

My mum, Jude, once suggested talking therapy—back when the Bad Days had only just begun—but I refused to get in the car when she tried to take me to see a therapist. There was a terrible scene in the street, with her screaming at me to get in and me bracing myself against the car door. God, was that me? The thing was, I knew then that silence was—is—the only option.

I know I won’t do anything different now. It’s too late for that. I’ll just put it all away, take the pills until I get everything back under control, and get on with my work. Fill my life with other things to blot out the dread, like I normally do.

My normal.

Anyway, I’m going to go to the butcher’s to get some meat for Paul’s dinner—to make up for the burned offerings and frozen food. The word “meat” sticks in my head. Flesh and blood. And I want to throw up.

Stop it, I tell myself, twisting the skin of my stomach through the dress.

At the butcher’s, I can smell blood as soon as I enter the shop. Metallic and coating my throat. I can feel panic rising so I stand quietly in the queue practicing the breathing technique from yoga. In through the right nostril, out through the mouth. Or is it out through the left nostril?

“Mrs. Simmonds,” the butcher says quite loudly. “What can I do for you today?”

Startled out of my meditation, I blurt, “Er, steak, please. A sirloin steak.” I’ll have a salad, I think.

He looks unimpressed.

“Just the one? Eating alone tonight?” He laughs, all red faced under his stupid straw boater.

I give him a look. Then try to laugh it off to show the other women in the shop that I’m in on the joke. But it sounds fake.

“Yes, George Clooney’s let me down again,” I say.

I shove the parcel in my carrier bag, pay the king’s ransom demanded, and go home to try to get some work done.

•   •   •

It’s five o’clock and Paul will be home soon. The thought makes me type faster. I’ll carry on for another hour, then resume domestic duties. Can’t stop yet. Must keep going. If I stop I’ll be back with the baby. Distract, distract, distract.

I thank God for work most days. I got into editing about ten years ago. A good friend was working at a publishing house, and one weekend, when she was landed with an emergency rewrite, she asked me to help. I’d always written for myself—and at college—but this was sleeves-rolled-up writing, translating some fairly adolescent scribblings by a footballer into heart-wrenching prose. It appeared I had a talent and she got me more work.

Today, I’m in the midst of a marriage breakup, navigating the sorrow, guilt, and relief of a young actress over her parting from her “childhood” husband and her optimism (misplaced, as it turned out) for her first “industry” marriage. I never meet the subjects. That’s the ghost writer’s job. If it’s a big star, they spend hours—sometimes weeks—with them, teasing out their stories and feelings. I’m not in that league. I’m more X Factor winners, that sort of thing. From what I gather, most of it is based on cuttings about them from magazines and newspapers, and I tinker and polish until it reads like a fairy story. It’s never very satisfactory but when it’s a rush job for an unexpected news hook—death, scandal, success—it has to be done that way.

It’s hard work and sometimes, when I’m sweating every word, I curse the millions of people who buy celebrity memoirs just to look at the photos.

But it pays well enough and it’s my own money. Paul thinks the work is beneath my talents, but I can do it from home and I am anonymous.

No one knows who Emma Simmonds is, even though my words are sold all over the world, in dozens of languages. My name never appears on the cover of the book. And that’s how I want it to stay. Paul says I ought to be acknowledged, but I just laugh.

It always works. He’s got enough on his plate what with Dr. Beecham and his scheming. Paul is more worried than he lets on, and I try to boost his confidence. I tell him what a great teacher he is and how much his students love his classes.

And when that doesn’t work, I tell him he saved my life when he took me on and that always makes him smile. I wonder if he is remembering those early days, in the 1990s, when I was trying to get my life together. I was too old and different from the other students to join in their games. And, there was Paul. I made a pitch for him in my first term, but it was only in my final year that he fell in love with me. It was complicated, him being my personal tutor, but that didn’t matter to me at the time. I thought Dr. Paul Simmonds had all the answers to my problems.

He was twenty years older than me and wonderfully clever and funny in that dry, academic way. A bachelor, in un-ironed shirts and odd socks—and completely absorbed in his work.

“You mesmerized me,” I tell him and he laughs.

“Me? I couldn’t mesmerize anyone,” he says.

But it’s true. When he talked about things, he could captivate you. Me anyway. And it felt like he was talking directly to me. His lectures on the psychology of Shakespeare’s tragic heroines were all about me. And I would sit there and feel that he understood me and my jumbled head. I actually thought he might be able to make me better. Poor Paul. What a responsibility.

He says he fell for me immediately, but I think we both know he has romanticized the whole thing. The truth is that he was flattered at first by my interest in his lectures and then sympathetic to my struggles with essays and college life. He took me under his wing, the department’s problem child. Poor Paul. He didn’t have a clue what he was getting into.

I began following him around the campus, sitting at the back of all his lectures, just so I could be near him. The students in my year picked up on it immediately, nudging each other when they spotted me, whispering their catty remarks.

In the end, even Paul realized it was getting out of hand and tried to talk to me about my behavior, pointing out his professional responsibilities and urging me to find a boyfriend my own age. Sweet.

“Emma,” he said. “I am old enough to be your father.”

Jude would have said that that was the point if I’d told her. But I didn’t. My mother wasn’t part of my life back then. I didn’t have to tell anyone that I saw Paul as my safe harbor and I wasn’t about to let him go. He told me later it was my vulnerability that clinched it. He said I needed him more than any woman he’d ever known.

So romantic. Not like our first clandestine date in a dingy curry house with loud wallpaper and sitar music to drown out our declarations of love. Paul almost had to shout.

We had to wait until I’d finished my degree before we could go public, but everyone knew anyway. We kept the department in scandalized whispers for two terms and Paul suggested he apply for other jobs so we could have a fresh start together.

“And we won’t mention how you were still a student when we fell in love,” he said. “Best not. Mea culpa but sleeping dogs and all that . . .”

I’ve always thought that’s a funny saying. Let sleeping dogs lie. Because sleeping dogs always wake up eventually, don’t they?