Chapter 3
I found the letter the following Thursday and nothing was ever the same again.
I’d spent most of the week fretting about Bryonie and Tallulah Phillips. Of course I had. I was a champion fretter. I ruminated for days about things most people wouldn’t give a second thought to. Neurotic, highly strung, skittish, a born worrier – I’d been described as many things over the years. Apparently now my way of being had a name. It was called “mild to moderate anxiety”. I’d been both bemused and relieved to learn it had been classed as a medical condition. I traced its roots back to Dad dying. I was a happy little thing before then. Life with Tess afterwards was unstable and chaotic, and the world was no longer a safe place without him in it.
I lay awake every night replaying the events of the fundraiser, thoughts racing round my head like greyhounds on a track. Bad thoughts. I worried about Joe. He’d been keeping his distance. He’d opted for a boxing class at the gym instead of our usual Sunday-night curry and he’d barely said goodbye when he left for a meeting in Warsaw on Monday. Was he as ashamed of me as I was of myself? That was all we needed. Our marriage was going through a rocky patch. I tossed and turned and sat up in bed, imagining Bryonie embellishing tales of my inebriation to Tallulah in the huge kitchen of their mansion in Chorltonville. I saw Tallulah surrounded by first-year students, cackling and tapping on her phone with her pink talons, flinging off messages to more students on WhatsApp groups, Facebook and Twitter. Why oh why did I do it? I drank too much when I went out because I was socially awkward and nervous. This led to me to do idiotic things and then I beat myself up about it for ages afterwards. As the week went on I managed to work myself into a right state. There really was no end to my fretting talents.
I offloaded to my friend Mary at work on Wednesday. We were in the staffroom having lunch and trying to get some marking done. I couldn’t concentrate. I was fidgeting, constantly checking my phone and sighing loudly.
Mary looked up from her laptop. “Everything OK, hen?”
Barrell-shaped and Glaswegian, Mary Duffy had a doll-like face with large baby-blue eyes, a mane of soft black curls and rosebud lips. But there was nothing soft or innocent about her. An expert in the twentieth century novel, she was bawdy, brilliant and as tough as rawhide.
“Remind me never to drink again, Mary.”
“I’ll do no such thing. Why? What did you do?”
I glanced furtively around the room. “Tell you another time.”
“Sounds intriguing. Tell me now.”
I leant over and lowered my voice. “I got really bladdered at Mikey’s anniversary do and made a show of myself. Tallulah Phillips’ mum saw me. I fell on top of the table where she was selling raffle tickets but I can’t remember a thing.”
Mary hooted with laughter and a couple of the other teachers glanced over.
Then her face fell. “You don’t mean Tallulah ‘you better give me a first or else’ Phillips?”
I nodded.
“Christ.”
“I know. I’ve really got to stop this drinking malarkey. I’m nearly forty for God’s sake.”
“Och, bollocks to that!” She tore the wrapper off a Mars Bar. “As the man said, ‘Ageing can be fun if you lie back and enjoy it’.”
A cheer erupted from the corner of the room. Someone had got the photocopier working.
“Oscar Wilde?” I asked.
She bit off a large chunk of chewy chocolate and shook her head.
“Irvine Welsh?”
“Close.
“Martin Amis?”
“Nope.”
“I give up.”
“Clint Eastwood.” She grinned and showed me her caramel-smeared teeth. “How’s Joe?””
“Alright. He’s a bit mardy by times.”
“How so?”
“Tell you another time.”
I didn’t want to go into my marital problems in the staffroom, but I knew I could tell Mary anything. She was a wise old owl and I found myself increasingly confiding in her about a lot of the things I’d normally tell Karen. Joe and Mary got along well. Joe was a United fan, Mary a Liverpool season-ticket holder and they slagged each other about football. Mary’s long-term partner, a Swiss lawyer called Monika, was serious and introverted and preferred tennis.
I put my head down and got on with my marking. Little did I know that by the end of the week all my anxieties about Bryonie and Tallulah Phillips and Joe would be completely forgotten. What I was to discover would blow everything out of the water and make my all my fretting look trivial and insignificant.
Thursday was a strange, unsettling kind of day. As I drove to Tess’s house in Brantingham Road, a weak sun dipped in and out of slate-grey clouds and half-hearted gusts of wind rose and fell away. I put Morrissey’s “Back to the Old House” on the CD player – a mournful tune about someone who has mixed feelings about revisiting their past – and the song was still echoing around my head when I parked outside at about eleven. Armed with black binbags, I was about to do a final sweep of my childhood home before the house-clearance people arrived and I was dreading it.
The red-brick thirties semi where I was raised was the sick old lady in a healthy-looking street of identical houses. Luckily for us, Tess and Dad had paid off the mortgage early on, which meant we always had a roof over our heads after he died. But there was never any money for maintenance and the place had been in a state of ill-repair for decades. Clumps of concrete had fallen from the porch, the frosted glass in the front door was cracked and tiles were missing from the roof like gaps in a row of rotting teeth. The one thing Tess had taken care of was her beloved garden. She’d have turned in her plot at Southern Cemetery
