The Lying Game

And he picks up his plate and goes out into the living room without another word.

I feel something twist inside me, a pain in my gut like a real, physical pain. And for a second I want to run after him and blurt it all out, what has happened, what we did, the weight that is hanging around my neck, threatening to drag me down …

But I can’t. Because it’s not only my secret – it’s theirs too. And I have no right to betray them.

I swallow it down, the confession that is rising inside me. I swallow it down, and I follow Owen into the living room to eat our supper side by side, in silence.

What I learn, in the days that follow, is that time can grind down anything into a kind of new normality. It’s a lesson I should have remembered from last time, as I struggled to come to terms with what had happened, with what we’d done.

Back then, I was too busy to feel constantly afraid – and the whole business began to feel like a kind of vague nightmare, something that had happened to someone else, in another time. My mind was taken up by other things – by the effort of establishing myself at a new school, and by my mother, who was getting progressively sicker. I did not have time to check the papers, and the idea of combing the Internet for information never occurred to me back then.

Now, though, I have time on my hands. When Owen leaves for work, the door closing behind him, I am free to obsess. I don’t dare search Google for the terms I want – Body Salten Reach Identified – even a private window on a browser doesn’t mask your Internet searches completely, I know that.

Instead I search around the edges, terms carefully designed to be explicable, non-incriminating. ‘News Salten Reach.’ ‘Kate Atagon Salten.’ Headlines I hope will bring up what I want, but without a digital trail of bloodstained fingerprints.

Even then I erase my history. Once, I consider going to the Internet cafe at the bottom of our road, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Freya and I would stick out like a sore thumb among the earnest young men in their white robes. No. No matter what, I must not draw attention to myself.

The news is released about a week after I return, and in the event, I don’t need to search for it. It’s there on the Salten Observer website as soon as I log on. It makes the Guardian and the BBC news too, albeit a small paragraph under ‘local interest’.

The body of local artist Ambrose Atagon, celebrated for his studies of coastal landscapes and wildlife, has been discovered, more than fifteen years after his unexplained disappearance, on the banks of Salten Reach, a beauty spot close to his home on the south coast. His daughter, Kate Atagon, did not return calls, but family friend and local resident Mary Wren said that closure would be welcome after so many years looking for answers.

It’s a shock – as I stand there, reading the paragraph again and again, I feel my skin prickle with it, and I have to steady myself against the table. It has happened. The thing I’ve spent so long fearing. It’s finally happened. And yet, it’s not as bad as it could have been. There’s nothing about it being treated as a suspicious death, no mention of coroners or inquests. And as the days wear on, and my phone doesn’t ring, and there are no knocks at the door, I tell myself I can relax … just a little.

And yet, I am still tense and jumpy, too distracted to read or concentrate on TV in the evenings with Owen. When he asks me a question over dinner my head jerks up, torn from my own thoughts and unsure what he said. I find myself apologising more and more.

God, how I wish I could smoke. My fingers itch for a cigarette.

Only once do I crack and have one, and I hate myself afterwards. I buy a packet in a rush of shame as we pass the offy at the corner of the road, telling myself that I am going in for milk, and then – almost as a pretend afterthought – asking for ten Marlboro Lights as I go up to pay, my voice high and falsely casual. I smoke one in the back garden, and then I flush the butt and shower, scrubbing my skin until it is pink and raw, ignoring Freya’s increasingly cross screeches from the bouncy chair just inside the bathroom door.

There is no way I am feeding my child stinking of smoke.

When Owen comes home I feel riven with guilt, jumpy and on edge, and at last, when I drop a wine glass and burst into tears he says, ‘Isa, what’s the matter? You’ve been weird ever since you came back from Salten. Is something going on?’

At first I can only shake my head, hiccuping, but then at last I say, ‘I’m sorry – I’m so sorry. I – I had a cigarette.’

‘What?’ It’s not what he was expecting, I can tell that from his expression. ‘Blimey … how, when did that happen?’

‘I’m sorry.’ I’m calmer now, but still gulping. ‘I – I had a few drags at Kate’s and then today, I don’t know, I just couldn’t resist.’

‘I see.’ He takes me in his arms, rests his chin on my head. I can feel him thinking what to say. ‘Well … I can’t say I’m thrilled. You know how I feel about it.’

‘You couldn’t be more pissed off at me than I am at myself. I felt disgusting – I couldn’t hold Freya until I’d had a shower.’

‘What did you do with the rest of the packet?’

‘I threw them away,’ I say after a pause. But the pause is because this is a lie. I didn’t throw them away. I have no idea why not. I meant to – but somehow I shoved them into the corner of my handbag instead before I went for my shower. I’m not having another one, so it doesn’t matter, does it? It all comes to the same thing. I will throw them away, and then what I’ve said will be true. But for now – for now, as I stand there, stiff and ashamed in Owen’s arms … for now it’s a lie.

‘I love you,’ he says to the top of my head. ‘You know that’s why I don’t want you smoking, right?’

‘I know,’ I say, my throat croaky with tears. And then Freya cries out, and I pull away from him to pick her up.

He is puzzled though. He knows something is wrong … he just doesn’t know what.

Gradually the days form a kind of semblance of normality, though small touches remind me that it’s not, or at least if it is, it’s a new normal, not the old one. For one thing, my jaw hurts, and when I mention it in passing, Owen tells me that he heard me last night grinding my teeth in my sleep.

Another is the nightmares. It’s not just the sound of the shovel on wet sand any more, the scrape of a groundsheet across a beach track. Now it’s people, officials, snatching Freya from my arms, my mouth frozen in a soundless scream of fear as she is taken away.

I have coffee with my antenatal group as usual. I walk to the library as usual. But Freya can feel my tension and fear. She wakes in the night, crying, so that I stumble from my bed to her crib to snatch her up before she can wake Owen. In the daytime she is fretful and needy, putting her arms up to be carried all the time, until my back hurts with the weight of her.

‘Maybe she’s teething,’ Owen says, but I know it’s not that, or not just that. It’s me. It’s the fear and adrenaline pumping through my body, into my milk, through my skin, communicating themselves to her.

I feel constantly on edge, the muscles in my neck like steel cords, perpetually braced for something, some bolt from the blue to destroy the fragile status quo. But when it comes, it’s not in the form that I was expecting.

It is Owen who answers the door. It is Saturday, and I am still in bed, Freya beside me, sprawled out frog-legged on the duvet, her wet red mouth wide, her thin violet lids closed over eyes that dart with her dreams.

When I wake, there’s a cup of tea beside my bed, and something else. A vase of flowers. Roses.

The sight jolts me awake, and I lie there, trying to think what I could have forgotten. It’s not our anniversary – that’s in January. My birthday’s not until July. Crap. What is it?

At last I give up. I will have to admit ignorance and ask.

‘Owen?’ I call softly, and he comes in, picks up the stirring Freya and puts her to his shoulder, patting her back as she stretches and yawns, with catlike delicacy.

‘Hello, sleepyhead. Did you see your tea?’

‘I did. Thanks. But what’s with the flowers? Are we celebrating something?’