‘Thanks,’ Joe said. ‘That would be good. Because my mind’s going crazy here.’
I gulped down a few glasses of tap water. We were out of the bottled stuff, but it didn’t seem to have done me any harm to drink it previously, so I assumed I’d probably survive.
Back beneath the group of trees, I sat on the ground and switched my phone on. I waited for a minute, but no messages appeared.
I thought about calling Ant, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I started to send a text message asking if he’d got home all right, but, again, couldn’t bring myself to give the impression I cared.
I tried to think of some neutral question I could ask about home. In the old days I might have reminded him to feed Dandy. I thought about asking what the weather was like, but that struck me as overly casual, considering the circumstances.
Finally, I had an idea. ‘If you’re home, can you look on Google for a taxi company in Orce?’ I texted. ‘Amy’s not come back and we’re stranded.’
I lowered my head to my hands as I waited for his reply. I was starting to feel quite awful.
A few minutes later my phone buzzed, but the message contained nothing more than a name and a number: Ramon Batista Alcazar: +34 67657 2042.
This was useful, but it wasn’t going to help Joe.
‘Is everything OK with the house?’ I asked, hoping that this implied I cared about the house more than I did about my philandering absent partner.
‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ he replied. Then, ‘Talk soon.’
‘Everything’s fine!’ I muttered, as I stood. The cheek of it!
‘He’s home,’ I told Joe when I got back.
‘Well, that’s something at least,’ he said. He was sitting in the shallow end of the pool, where the jet squirted out. If you sat in that exact spot it massaged your back rather nicely.
‘I got a taxi number from him too,’ I said. ‘I thought that might come in useful.’
‘Here?’ Joe said, climbing from the pool. ‘Can I have it?’
‘In Orce,’ I said. ‘And yes, of course.’
He noted the number in his own phone, and then I returned to my bed to lie down.
At one, Lucy woke me to ask if I wanted lunch. She was excited because we were eating in the jacuzzi. I thought she’d probably got that wrong somehow, but when I got outside, I saw that Joe had set up a little plastic table in the middle and even positioned a parasol to provide shade. It was there, the water up to our waists, that we ate our hummus sandwiches.
Over lunch, he explained the plan: he was going to get the taxi to nearby Huéscar, where the taxi driver had said he could hire a car. On the way home he’d pick up supplies.
‘We can probably get by until tomorrow, if you prefer to wait,’ I told him.
‘Actually, we can’t,’ he said. ‘Why do you think we’re eating chickpea sandwiches?’
Eight
Amy
I don’t imagine for one instant that anyone wants to hear my point of view. I know how society judges women. It judges us all the time for everything, after all.
We’re judged because our dresses are too long or too short, because our heels are too low or too high. We’re labelled frigid, or weak, or sluts, whether we’re following the ‘rules’ or not and whether the rules in question say we should be wearing a mini-skirt or a crinoline, or a burkini.
But the ones who cheat on their husbands? Well, everyone knows we’re the worst of all.
Joe could sleep with another man’s wife and his friends would say, ‘Did you? You dirty so-and-so! Good on ya, mate.’ But me? Well, you can answer that one for yourself. Because I’m pretty certain I know what you’ve decided.
But would it really be too much to ask that you take a second to know me first? The universe is big and messy – it’s both beautiful and ugly. And part of its beauty is the very fact of our capacity to see that ugliness, and care.
So this is me. This is Amy. The temptress, the whore, the bitch. And these are the keystone events that made me.
I was born in Toronto, the daughter of a woman and a man who disliked each other pretty intensely. Why were they together in the first place? I guess we’ll never know.
When I was twelve, my sister killed herself. She sat down in a bath full of warm, scented water and slit her wrists – she didn’t make a sound. Downstairs, watching Friends, we were completely unaware. Friends! It sounds like the punchline to a joke. Only it isn’t.
She didn’t leave a suicide note, so officially no one knew why. Except we all knew. We all knew, without actually knowing, that it was my father’s fault. And if there had been any proof, then we could have told the cops and prayed for him to go to prison for a very long time. Only we didn’t have proof. My sister’s death was the only hard fact, and without a suicide note it proved nothing at all. It didn’t even really point a finger.
After the funeral, Mum told me she was going to leave him. We would move back to England together, she told me, whispering the words excitedly into my ear. I was so relieved that I wept. I didn’t even want to be in a room with my father by then. I was terrified that, with my sister gone, I’d be next.
But instead of saving me, instead of protecting me, Mum slipped off the edge of reason. She’d been at the end of her tether for years, but when Jemma died Mum lost her grip entirely. And once she let go, she just fell and fell and fell.
Until she was well enough to return to England, I was left alone with him. And that process took almost two years.
To defend myself,
