The Lying Game

‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’

‘You mean they’re not from you?’ I take a sip of the tea and frown. It’s lukewarm, but it’s wet, and that’s the main thing.

‘Nope. Take a look at the card.’

It’s tucked beneath the vase, a little anonymous florist’s card in an unsealed, unmarked white envelope. I pull it out and open it.

Isa, it says, in handwriting I don’t recognise, probably the florist’s. Please accept these as an apology for my behaviour. Yours always, Luc.

Oh God.

‘So, um … who’s Luc?’ Owen picks up his own cup of tea and takes a sip, eyeing me over the top of the cup. ‘Should I be worried?’

He makes the comment sound like a joke, but it’s not, or not completely. He’s not the jealous type, but there is something curious, a little speculative in his gaze, and I can’t blame him. If he got red roses from a strange woman, I would probably be wondering too.

‘You read the card?’ I ask, and then realise, instantly, as his expression closes that that was the wrong thing to say. ‘I mean, I didn’t mean –’

‘There was no name on the envelope.’ His voice is flat, offended. ‘I read it to see who they were for. I wasn’t spying on you, if that’s what you meant.’

‘No,’ I say hurriedly, ‘of course that’s not what I meant. I was just –’ I stop, take a breath. This is all going wrong. I should never have started down this track. I try – too late – to turn back. ‘Luc is Kate’s brother.’

‘Her brother?’ Owen raises an eyebrow. ‘I thought she was an only child?’

‘Stepbrother.’ I twist the card between my fingers. How did he get my address? Owen must be wondering what he’s apologising for, but what can I say? I can’t tell him what Luc really did. ‘He – there was a misunderstanding while I was at Kate’s. It was silly really.’

‘Blimey,’ Owen says lightly. ‘If I sent roses every time there was a misunderstanding I’d be broke.’

‘It was about Freya,’ I say reluctantly. I have to somehow tell him this but without making Luc sound like a psycho. If I say – bluntly – that Luc took my child, our child, away from the person looking after her without permission, Owen will probably want me to call the police, and that’s the one thing I can’t do. I have to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. ‘I – oh, it’s complicated, but when we went out to the dinner I got a babysitter, but she was a bit young and she couldn’t handle things when Freya kicked off. It was stupid – I shouldn’t have left Freya with a stranger, but Kate said the girl was experienced … anyway Luc happened to be there so he offered to take Freya out for a walk to calm her down. But I was cross he hadn’t asked me before he took her out of the house.’

Both of Owen’s eyebrows are up now.

‘The guy helped you out and you chewed him out, and now he’s sending roses? Bit over the top, no?’

Oh God. I am making this worse.

‘Look, it was a bit more complicated at the time,’ I say, a trace of defensiveness coming into my tone. ‘It’s a long story. Can we talk about it after I’ve had a shower?’

‘Sure.’ Owen holds up his hands. ‘Don’t mind me.’

But as I grab a towel from the radiator and swathe my dressing gown around me, I catch him looking at the vase of roses on the bedside table, and his expression is the look of a man putting two and two together … and not really liking the answer.

Later that day, when Owen has taken Freya out to Sainsbury’s to buy bread and milk, I take the flowers out of the vase, and I shove them deep into the outside bin, not caring how the thorns prick and rip my skin.

On top of them I shove the week’s rubbish in a plastic sack, pressing it down as though the accumulated garbage can cancel out the presence of the flowers, and then I slam the lid down and go back inside.

My hands, as I rinse them under the tap, washing away the blood from the thorns, are shaking, and I itch to call up Kate or Fatima or Thea and tell them what Luc has done, unpick his motives. Was he really trying to apologise? Or was it something else, more subtle, more damaging?

I even go as far as picking up the phone and bringing up Kate’s number – but I don’t call. She has enough to worry about, they all do, without me adding to their fears over what could be nothing but a simple apology.

One thing that bothers me is how he got my address. Kate? The school? But I am in the phone book, I realise with a sinking sensation. Isa Wilde. There are probably not that many of us in north London. It wouldn’t be that hard to track me down.

I pace the flat, thinking, thinking, and in the end I realise I have to distract myself from my thoughts or I will go mad. I go up to the bedroom and empty out Freya’s clothes drawer, sorting out the too-small Babygros and rompers from a few months ago. The task is absorbing, and as the piles grow I find I’m humming something between my teeth, a silly pop song that was on the radio at Kate’s, and my heart rate has slowed, and my hands are steady again.

I will iron the outgrown clothes and put them in the loft in plastic boxes for when – if – Freya has a baby brother or sister.

But it’s only when I come to pick up the pile and take it downstairs to where I keep the iron that I notice. They are stained, with minute pricks of blood from the roses.

I could wash them, of course. But I’m not sure if the bloodstains would come out of the fragile, snowy fabric, and anyway, I realise as I gaze at the spreading crimson spots, turning to rust, I can’t bring myself to do it. The things, the perfect, innocent little things, are ruined and soiled, and I will never feel the same way about them again.

I LIE IN bed that night, listening to Freya snuffling in her crib and Owen snoring lightly beside me, and I can’t sleep.

I’m tired. I’m always tired these days. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since Freya was born, but it’s more than that – I can’t seem to turn off any more. I remember the mantra of visitors when she was a newborn – sleep when the baby sleeps! And I wanted to laugh. I wanted to say, don’t you get it? I can’t ever sleep again, not completely. Not into that complete, solid unconsciousness I used to have before she came along, the state Owen seems to slip back into so easily.

Because now I have her. Freya. And she is mine and my responsibility. Anything could happen – she could choke in her sleep, the house could burn down, a fox could slink through the open bathroom window and maul her. And so I sleep with one ear cocked, ready to leap up, heart pounding, at the least sign that something is wrong.

And now, everything is wrong. And so I can’t sleep.

I keep thinking about Luc, about the tall angry man in the post office, and the boy I used to know so many years ago. And I am trying to join them up.

He was so beautiful, that’s what I keep remembering. Luc, lying out on the jetty in the starlight, his fingers trailing in the salt water and his eyes closed. And I remember lying beside him, looking at his profile in the moonlight and feeling my stomach twist with the sickness of desire.

He was my first … well, crush, I suppose, although that word doesn’t do justice to the way the feeling hit me. I had met boys before, friends of Will’s, brothers of my school friends. But I had never lain in the darkness within touching distance of a boy beautiful enough to break your heart.

I remember lying there and putting out my hand towards his shoulder – my fingertips so close that I could feel the heat from his bare, tanned skin, silver in the starlight.

Now, as I lie in bed beside my baby and the father of my child, I wonder. I imagine putting out my hand, and Luc turning in the quiet moonlight, and opening those extraordinary eyes. I imagine him putting out a hand to my cheek, and I imagine kissing him, as I did once, all those years ago. But this time he would not flinch away – he would kiss me back. And I feel it again, welling up inside me, the kind of desire you could drown yourself in.

I shut my eyes, pushing down the thought, feeling the heat in my cheeks. How can I be lying in bed beside my partner, fantasising about a boy I knew nearly two decades ago? I am not a girl any more. I am an adult, a grown-up woman with a child.