‘Were you the woman in the kitchen?’ he says.
‘Was I the what?’
‘The witness.’
‘This is ridiculous. I’m not going to be part of a witch-hunt. Goodbye.’
The alerts come in for The Sun on Sunday online story the next morning and it’s worse than she imagined. There’s a large photo of Becky walking into work: earphones in, collar up on a denim jacket, bag slung across her shoulders. She remembers the outfit, the day, but she hadn’t seen a photographer. Where had he been hiding? Had there been others?
They write that she has denied being ‘the woman in the kitchen’. Siobhan’s had the same treatment.
She realizes that she has chosen a side, in typed and reported words she can read back to herself, that tens of thousands of others can read. She can’t be in the house any more where the air is too close to breathe and it feels like everything is watching her, listening to her.
‘Maisie,’ she calls up the stairs. ‘I have to go, I have to go for a run.’
Maisie emerges from the living room, concern clouding her face. ‘I thought we were about to have breakfast together? I thought we were making—’
‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to make toast. I’ve run out of time. I have to get out, I’m sorry, I just …’
Becky makes her way gingerly through the hallway. Laces up trainers. She doesn’t bother replacing her tracksuit bottoms with running trousers. Doesn’t say any more, just runs out into the early morning sun, past the window where her daughter is standing and watching her.
She threads through people on the pavements, going far too slow.
She has become not the woman in the kitchen. Another lifelong lie to commit to. She has done it once, she can do it again. She knows how to hide the feel of it. She can do this.
She needs to get to the park quicker than this. She speeds up, brushes shoulders with a harassed mother pushing a pram: enough for the woman to spin round and accuse Becky of terrible manners with only a look in her eyes.
She tells herself to calm down. Hears Matthew’s reasoning voice. What does she owe the newspapers? For them it’s a scoop, some sales. They don’t care. The people she owes are the boss who believed in her, the daughter whose home needs to be paid for, the film she has worked so hard to bring into life and which wants to say something important about women. These are real things and they are worth protecting.
Maybe this is OK.
A child’s scream drives itself through her skin.
Did Matthew’s PR people reach out to Amber? Did they offer her a deal for a more cheerful rebuttal, Oh that, that’s all fine! In exchange for working again? For money, maybe? A deal she maybe turned down?
Did Alex’s stories of her emotional and physical messiness only follow when she refused?
What does Amber know?
She glances around the park. The pink Lycra-clad jogger, the khaki-coated dog walker, the dog itself, they’re all judging her. Of course they are.
She didn’t know, she wants to say to them all, she didn’t know what the woman on the floor of that kitchen was feeling.
She runs faster now, fast enough for the sides of her lungs to hurt and gasp and rasp.
She had fled from the kitchen that Sunday afternoon, embarrassed to have been caught seeing Matthew with a woman who wasn’t his wife. That was all. That’s all she saw, all she thought she saw.
Becky pictures Pips in tears on his bed, his father made monstrous to him, and Matthew desperate to console him, to convince him that there are liars in the world. Liars who can reach out and harm you and who need to be fought.
She runs through the aches in her lungs. She wants to test the limits of her legs and her heart, to see how far her body can carry her before it starts to feel light and faint, for the edges of her vision to go cloudy white before everything fades to a pinpoint and then black.
Is Becky strong enough for the fight? She feels the question like a prosecutor’s interrogation. Perhaps she is. She should be. She doesn’t think she is.
Rebecca Shawcross denies being the woman in the kitchen and has launched a strongly worded defence of the man she credits as ‘investing in women as staff and in telling women’s stories on screen.’ She said, ‘I’ve never seen anything to make me doubt him.’
Once at home, she races to the bathroom. Locks the door behind her with one hand while scrolling through her phone with the other.
Twitter friends post on their timelines that they know Rebecca and believe her. She is a good woman and a talented producer and deserves better than this shit-show.
Does she? Does she deserve better? She switches to Scott’s Instagram account before she allows the thought to take root further.
Scott is modelling different outfits for THE BIG NIGHT on his feed. Monochrome suit and tie? Nothing says style like black and white. Or fluoro-green T-shirt and jacket, perhaps. Dare to stand out?
She grits her teeth. ‘Dare to stand out?’ she hisses, and types beneath his post:
I hate you, I fucking hate you so much, I hate you I hate you I hate you
But even as she watches the words appear she knows they are empty, pointless, not enough, never enough and so she stops.
Delete, delete, delete
She opens the bathroom medicine cabinet and finds the nail scissors.
She sits on the edge of the bath, eyes closed, breathing hard still from the exertion of exercise and the adrenaline tracking hot and alive through her veins.
She rolls down her joggers, then makes a tiny cut on the inside of her thigh, a V-shaped snip, the shape of a baby bird’s beak. Blood pours out of its mouth.
Chapter 18
Monday morning she wakes as dawn is breaking, after only a few hours’ sleep.
It’s not yet eight a.m. when she turns on her phone
