I place my hand against the wall to steady myself. My legs are shaking. I’m winded, like someone has hit me in the tummy.
I was only coming round to see how she was. As I got to the French doors I heard Saskia’s awful voice. Their conversation drifted out like dirty smoke. I feel it fill my lungs, choking and poisoning me.
Such cruel words. And the laughter. Openly laughing at me. I can’t take it in. The vile friend isn’t a surprise. She’s nothing but a trollop. But Melissa? After everything we’ve been through. How could she speak about me like that? As though I were nothing to her? After what I did for her?
Some masochistic urge makes me want to stay and hear more but after they’ve purged themselves of their mirth, Saskia begins to witter on about her idiot man-child. I clench my hands so hard into fists my nails cut my palms. I picture her open mouth, with those big teeth laughing and swallowing all the air around her. Sucking Melissa into her orbit. Turning her against me. I imagine grabbing that thick, dark hair of hers and pulling it, pulling it until she begs me to stop. Oh yes, that would surprise you, wouldn’t it, Saskia?
I have to get away from here. Stumbling a little, I hurry back to the garden gate and back towards my own house.
Bertie whines when I come back into the kitchen. He can always tell when I’m distressed. I pick him up and hold him tightly to my chest as I go into the sitting room and slump into my armchair. I feel as though I am a thousand years old.
We sit together, my little friend – my only friend – and I, stroking him until he falls asleep in my lap, his small chest rising and falling. I lay my hand on his warm, coarse hair and sit, immobile with misery.
The betrayal feels like cold mud sludging through my veins. When I think of what I have done for Melissa. She doesn’t deserve a friend like me. I should have left her to sort that Jamie man out on her own. Ha! I’d like to have seen her dealing with things the way I did!
The pictures tumble into my mind now, so vivid I can almost smell her kitchen and feel its walls erecting themselves in a dreamscape around me.
***
When that bubbling sound drifted up from her kitchen floor, it gave me quite a start. I’d honestly believed he was already dead, as Melissa had said.
As I cautiously walked towards him I could see that he was looking right at me. A froth of spit formed and broke at his mouth. His lips moved the tiniest fraction as he tried to speak.
I stared down at him.
I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It may have been ‘help’, I suppose. But my mind was racing. If I called an ambulance he could make a full recovery. But no one would have believed Melissa hit him as an act of self-defence. No one ever believes the victim of this sort of crime.
The thought of Melissa being led away in handcuffs was so terrible, so entirely wrong, that I was suddenly quite resolute. I knew that I couldn’t let it happen.
His eyes flared with hope when I sat back and regarded him.
All I could see in my mind’s eye was his filthy ape-hands pawing at Melissa’s soft skin, trying to soil and hurt her.
But it wasn’t just that. It was the sight of him early that morning. Striding around in his underpants. So arrogant. As though he had rights over Melissa. As though he had a central place in her life. Calling me Grandma! And I’ve not even had the good fortune to be a mother.
And I suppose everything that had happened with that Nathan boy boiled up inside too.
Rage is meant to be hot isn’t it? But it filled me with a cleansing white light – pure and cold. Shushing him gently, I placed my hands over his nose and mouth. Weakened as he was, he bucked and kicked but with little strength. Still, I had to press my torso down onto his face. And it seemed to go on and on … I closed my eyes, begging him just to let go, to accept things.
A powerful happiness coursed through me. At last, I thought, I can show Melissa what she means to me. And yes, I’ll admit it; all the way through this I was seeing that other day in my mind, when I finally became free of the useless man I had married. There had been a delicious sense of freedom then too.
It is crossing a line the first time that feels like such a big step, you see. Once you have done it once, it’s no distance at all. So I pressed down until it was over.
We all have dark impulses sometimes, I’m sure.
Melissa doesn’t know what I did for her.
Well, I’m not going to let it go.
When I lift Bertie gently to the ground, he eyes me and thumps his tail happily before going back to sleep. My dear boy. He’s the only one I can rely on.
I go into the kitchen and pick up the little shepherdess ornament from the windowsill. I’ve always loved her blonde curls and the tiny dog at her feet that reminds me of Bertie.
Her crinoline skirt is hollow and, underneath, Melissa’s spare back door key nestles there comfortably.
I set my alarm for 3 a.m. but I’m not really asleep when it beep-beep-beeps into the darkness. I’m too stirred up to sleep. I’m shivering, with nerves, with the chill of night but also, perhaps, with a little bit of excitement as I slip on my dressing gown and slippers and make my way out of the bedroom. Bertie wakes and I whisper sternly that he is to stay. With an obedient little flick of the tail, he lays his old head down again to sleep.
I switch on the garage light, smelling the old paint tins, dust, and white spirit that still fill some of the shelves in neat rows. Terry always did keep it very tidy in here. A draft curls under the doors and I hear the wind bash against it, as though longing to be allowed inside.
The shelf is high so I reach for the step stool I bought for Tilly when she was too little to reach the table. It’s a lovely thing: white wood, with blue lambs and chickens gambolling around the bottom. She used to love clambering on and off that step in my kitchen. Such a sweet image.
Stepping onto the upper step of the stool now, my knees complain and creak. I reach up to the shelf above my head and push aside the box of nails and the pile of plumbing catalogues I really must get round to throwing out.
Feeling around blindly in the space behind, my hand touches the crackly plastic bag and I draw the item to the end of the shelf and down. My heart always quickens when I do this. Oddly though, it somehow gives me a feeling of strength and peace.
Holding the wrapped object, I climb down and sit on the top step. I cradle it in my arms, feeling the heft, the potential force of it. I imagine the sound as it connected with hair and skull and swing it through the air, testing how it might have felt.
I won’t unwrap it, because I am not wearing gloves.
I’m still not entirely sure why I kept the blood-and-hair-smeared pestle. Nestled in pieces of kitchen towel, it was placed on the side until I had donned some brand new Marigolds and was able to hide it away properly. I then took one of my spare ice packs and wrapped it firmly in another bin bag. I feel rather tickled by the image of myself throwing that other package into the well.
Some instinct told me I needed insurance.
The pestle’s unpleasant residue is now a deep rusty brown. I can’t face cleaning it (and why should I? I didn’t hit the man with it, after all) but neither can I bear to carry it like this. I rip off a piece of the blue paper that Terry used to keep for wiping his hands as he worked on the van and wrap it around the pestle’s base.
The night air is sweet and cold on my face when I open the back door. They lock that side gate at night, but luckily there is a piece of broken fence (which I have asked Mark to mend to no avail) that should be just about big enough for me to squeeze through.
I hesitate as I contemplate the damp grass and, taking off my slippers, I hold them to cross the garden. My heart pitter-patters a little bit but I am becoming adroit at doing things that intimidate me these days. The cold dampness of the grass under my toes makes me shudder.
The piece of fence comes away with difficulty and I squeeze through the gap, gasping as a nail snags my dressing gown. I extricate myself, grimacing at the aching in my knees as I manoeuvre myself to the other side of the fence.
I walk quickly across the grass, my toes scrunching in protest until I get to the French doors, where I slip my chilled, wet feet into my slippers again.
I have this all planned out but my hands shake as I turn the key in the lock.
Mark’s car isn’t in its usual spot out front. I don’t want to run into Tilly, but I am banking on the fact that teenagers sleep like the dead. And Melissa, well, she’s no stranger to sleeping pills. She told me herself.
The kitchen is bathed in the milky under-lights of the cupboards, along with neon slashes of green from the cooker and microwave. How typical of Melissa not to turn off energy-guzzling appliances at night. The room smells sharply of cleaning products with a very slight hint of cigarette smoke.
My eyes drag to the spot where the body lay and for a horrible second I think he is still there. I swear I can see a lumpy shape, black blood spreading across the floor.
But then the vision clears. I am just being silly.
I go to the ornate metal grate over the air vent in the corner of her kitchen. It’s a quirk of these buildings. I have the same one.
The grate comes away easily and I place the object inside. It makes a metallic screech of protest as I push it back into place. I wait for a few moments, checking there is no sound coming from upstairs, before I get to my feet and dust myself down.
The strange thing is, now I am inside, I am not really afraid. I feel a sense of power, if anything. And I’m not ready to go home yet, to Bertie and my own quiet house.
My eyes stray then to the glint of Melissa’s knife rack on the wall and I wonder how it would feel to use one of them. How hard would you have to push? Would it slide in easily, or would the muscles offer resistance? I imagine the soft gasp of pain and her eyes meeting mine. We would be united by death once more.
Something frantic inside me stills.
Then I am a little shocked at my own imagination. I am a good person and there has been enough violence. I will get my own back my own way.
I’m a small, slight woman and in soft slippers I make no sound as I ascend the staircase. I watch each foot press onto the stair as I rise, acutely aware of the smooth wooden banister under my hand. My nerve endings seem to sing and fizz like a broken fluorescent light. I am electrified with the thrill of this act. More alive perhaps than ever before.
I reach the landing and listen to the gentle sighs and ticks of the sleeping house. A dog barks somewhere outside. Not Bertie. It feels like a night-time companion.
I know which room is hers, of course. The door is pulled over, but not closed. I push it slowly and the door seems to gasp as wood rubs on carpet.
Stepping into the room, I pause and allow my eyes to adjust to the gloom. There is a sour sleep smell in the air, mixed with some sort of perfume I don’t recognize. Hair products, perhaps. The curtains are heavy and at first I can’t make out the bed. Then I see it and – after a second or two – the hump of her body beneath the duvet.
My heart begins to pulse and thrum in a pleasurable way as I pad on silent feet across the room. Melissa is on her side, her face a pale moon, hair a tangled halo on the pillow. I see a hand reaching out – bone-white in the dark, warm room – and realize it is mine. Snatching it back, I feel a little dizzy with the sense of my own power.
I could do anything.
Melissa makes a sound: a groan mingled with an unintelligible word. And where closed lids had been I am looking into the shine of her open eyes. I fancy I can see a tiny version of myself reflected in them. I don’t move a muscle. She mumbles something in her sleep and closes her eyes again.
It’s as I get to the bottom of the stairs on shaking legs that I hear the sound. Urgent whispers are coming from the landing. My heart seems to stop beating as I pad quickly to the kitchen door and try to dissolve into the shadows.
It’s only now that I really think about what I am doing. How this might appear to others.
The voices are coming down the stairs now, getting closer.
I bunch the sides of my dressing gown in my fists and try to quell the panic inside me. I think I might be having a heart attack. My chest is tight and I want to run, run away from here, but I must be silent.
I can’t be discovered.
‘I didn’t mean to drop off!’ says a familiar male voice in a low, sleepy murmur.
There is a giggle. Tilly. ‘I know! Me neither!’ she hisses. ‘But my mum would go mental if she found you here! Go on, go home.’
I move my head very slightly to the left to see Tilly pressing her body up against Nathan’s. He slides his hand down her back. She is dressed only in her bra and knickers and he grabs and squeezes her bottom as though it is made of putty. I want to look away, but cannot.
‘Call you tomorrow, okay?’ he whispers and she nods and kisses him on the lips before opening the front door.
When the door closes, she runs back up the stairs, rather heavily.
I am feeling quite calm again now. I did the right thing, coming here.
A few moments later I am squeezing through the fence and back into the safety of my own garden.
All in all this has been a most useful neighbourly visit. I’m sure Melissa won’t think so much of her friend when she discovers her son has been sleeping with her fifteen-year-old daughter.
And now I must get some sleep. Tomorrow, I have a busy day ahead of me.