Chapter 8
There was a pin-drop silence to end all pin-drop silences, only broken by an eventual snigger that had Vicky’s stamp all over it.
‘What?’ asked Marnie, hardly hearing the words above the sound of her heartbeat which had both transferred itself to her ears and acquired the speed of a bullet train.
‘Oh, don’t play the innocent you . . . you . . . bitch.’
‘I knew it. Didn’t I say?’ Vicky’s voice again, in a delighted, barely covered whisper.
Marnie noticed how tight that swinging frock looked around the woman’s middle. She wasn’t fat, she was pregnant. Heavily pregnant. Her brain started spinning in stark contrast to everything around her which had frozen into stock-still mannequin mode. Even Dennis looked like a waxwork of himself.
‘But . . .’ Inside Marnie’s head, some clear, no-nonsense part tried to take command of the situation and find some logic in this surrealism.
Suranna? Is this Suranna? Or a stray nutter who didn’t like the look of her. The first option seemed more viable on quick reflection.
‘Suranna?’ Marnie asked.
‘Don’t you dare use my bloody name.’ There were four jagged red stripes raising on her cheek.
‘Is that a baby?’ Marnie’s finger stretched forward.
Suranna gave a bitter hoot of laughter. ‘What do you think it is – blocked wind? I’m pregnant with my husband’s child, you . . . you . . .’
More names ensued. A whole thesaurus-worth of insults. Many of the older ones in the department probably didn’t realise there were so many words for a tart.
Marnie’s brain switched into calculator mode. She heard Justin’s voice in her head: I haven’t had sex in fourteen months, but whatever was in Suranna Fox’s belly had got there during the last nine.
‘You’re not with him any more,’ said Marnie, blood hissing and pounding in her ears.
Suranna indicated her stomach. ‘Er, I obviously am.’
‘Someone fetch Justin,’ Roisean said.
‘You’ve split up,’ said Marnie.
‘No we haven’t,’ countered Suranna, pulling a face.
‘Stupid bitch.’ A voice to her right. Elena. Marnie turned her head and saw the Olympic gold medal of smirks gracing her mouth.
‘Apparently Justin’s not in the building,’ someone else said.
Marnie was in shock. Nausea gripped her stomach with hard bony fingers and squeezed. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know.’
‘Course you didn’t,’ Suranna sneered, her teeth bared. Her cheek looked terrible, as if she’d been clawed by a tiger. Then suddenly she seemed to deflate between the two men holding her and started to cry.
‘Come on, love,’ said Arthur, pulling a chair over and pushing Suranna Fox down onto it. Someone else handed her a tissue so she could dab at the blood peeping from the scratches; someone else dropped to their knees at her side, took her hand and began talking softly to her. She was enclosed in a circle of warmth and sympathy whereas Marnie stood alone, banished to a hinterland of coldness and disgust.
Burned by her shame and with a compulsion to get out of the building before she was poisoned by the air in it, Marnie reached down to the side of her desk, grabbed her handbag, snatched the coat from the back of her chair and cut through the assembled crowd, conscious of the attention on her, aware of their sniggers and chatting and judgements firing into her back like Robin Hood’s arrows. Eyes fixed forward, she was glad that her legs worked independently of her brain because she would have fallen to the floor like a marionette without a puppet master if she’d had to consciously move them.
She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, as if Suranna Fox and her compassionate entourage had sucked all the oxygen out of the immediate area. Shame powered her stride. She stole a glance into Justin’s office but it was empty, his chair pushed backwards against the wall as if he’d vacated it in a hurry. All sorts of horrible thoughts were crowding her brain, demanding further examination and answers and she was afraid to let them sharpen into focus. As she approached the door which led out onto the upper floor of the atrium, it swung back in her face too quickly for her to avoid it hitting her squarely on the cheekbone. The man on the other side started to apologise profusely but she raced past him, down the escalator, past the reception desk, through the door and out into the car park, tears stinging her eyes. For a second or two she couldn’t remember where she had parked her car. Left, or was it right? Think, Marnie, think. Right. It was right. It’s there. Her hands were shaking as they fumbled in her bag for her key. She unzapped the car, threw herself inside, fired up the engine and willed herself to calm down, uttering words of self-comfort because on top of everything else she didn’t want to bloody crash. You’re okay, Marnie. You didn’t know. It’s not your fault. Keep calm. Breathe.
She pulled down the visor above her head and looked at herself in the vanity mirror to find that her own cheek was swelling up thanks to clumsy door man. She nosed the car carefully out of the car park and felt a wash of blessed relief as it blended with the anonymity of the city traffic. As she waited for a red light to change, Marnie scrolled through the names on her Bluetooth car phone directory until she came to JF. She rang him, for the first time ever, and it went straight through to voicemail. She disconnected the call. Should she leave a message, she asked herself. The answer came flying back at her, Yes of course she bloody should.
Straight to voicemail again. ‘It’s me, Marnie. Can you please ring me back. I need to speak to you. It’s urgent.’ She tried to keep the emotion out of her voice but failed as a fat hiccupping sob broke out of her throat just before she quit the call. The lights changed, she pressed down on the accelerator and stalled. The BMW behind gave an impatient beep on his horn which set Marnie’s nerves jangling. Pull yourself together and ignore that swanky wanker, she told herself sternly and set off as smoothly and calmly as she was able, homeward bound. Except it wasn’t her home, it was a rented semi because she had sold her lovely flat last year so she could move in with another luggage-laden twat.
She rang Justin again to find that his line was engaged. Three minutes later his line was free but he didn’t pick up. She suspected he wasn’t going to ring her back after all. She parked the car securely in the garage, rather than leave it on the street as she usually did, just in case she woke up in the morning to find SLUT written all over it in red paint.
Once inside the house, she locked the door behind her, closed the vertical blinds at the front window until they were mere slits and finally felt her nerves begin to stand down. She made herself a coffee, aware that her hands were shaking and then slumped onto a chair at the kitchen table. Her brain felt as if it was a multiplex cinema. On screen one, IMAX, 3D with Dolby surround sound was Suranna Fox holding on to her hair with her limpet grip. On screen two, Vicky and Elena standing like two old fishwives, arms crossed over their bosoms, lapping the spectacle up. On screen three Justin, a pastiche of all his best convincing lines flowing out of his lying gob. He hadn’t had sex in well over a year. Details of the painstakingly slow conscious uncoupling. How could she have been so stupid? Sorry, amend that – how could she have been so stupid again? Why didn’t she ever learn? Why was she so bloody selective with what she believed? Why hadn’t she seen that the only real reason why they screwed in her car, why he never stayed over, why they couldn’t be seen in public together was because he was still very much married to a woman he was still sleeping with. Her mother was up there on screen four: You have no one but yourself to blame, you stupid, unthinking, unfeeling girl.
What the hell was she going to do? She couldn’t go back to Café Caramba. Ever. She couldn’t walk into the office, shrugging off the judgements and opinions of everyone around her and carry on as if nothing had happened. She wasn’t Sharon in the canteen who had been caught having sex in the lift with a temp during a drunken office party (Laurence had outlawed them since) only to walk back into work the next day as if shagging in a moving box was a standard part of the job description. If anyone new joined the company, Shagger Sharon was always pointed out as an interesting feature: Those are the toilets, that’s the coffee machine, there’s Shagger Sharon who was caught flattening the lift floor buttons. Until today, Marnie had never appreciated how much of ballsy – or barmy – woman Sharon was. But Marnie’s misdemeanours wouldn’t be treated so casually. She would get all the blame, she knew. She was the scarlet woman, the seductress. All claims that she had no idea Justin’s wife was pregnant would be greeted with disbelief and scorn. People like Elena and Vicky would fuel the fires of her fornication.
She didn’t know she was crying until she felt a wet drop on her hand. Followed by more, much more. She began to think that the flow might never stop.