whenever you want to. Gobbolino is your favourite.’ She throws the magazine onto the bed. ‘The witch’s cat,’ she adds, when I don’t say anything. I don’t even like cats so I wish she’d stop talking about them. ‘If you can read, then tell me what it says on your top.’
I stare at it but the letters are upside down.
‘It says Aimee,’ Maggie says, reading it for me. ‘That’s your new name from now on. It means loved. You do want people to love you, don’t you?’
‘But I’m called Ciara.’ I look up at her.
‘Not any more you’re not, and if you ever use that name under this roof again, you’ll find yourself in very big trouble.’
London, 2017
I’m in trouble.
The detective has clearly already made up her mind about me, but she’s wrong. The only thing I’m guilty of is fraud, the relationship variety. We all sometimes pretend to love something or someone we don’t: an unwanted gift, a friend’s new haircut, a husband. We’ve evolved to be so good at it, we can even fool ourselves. It’s more laziness than deceit; to acknowledge when the love has run out would mean having to do something about it. Relationship fraud is endemic nowadays.
As soon as the detectives leave, I lock the door behind them, desperate to shut the whole world out. I guess I can now add the police to the list of people who think they know me. They’re in good company, with the press, the fans, and my so-called friends. But they don’t know me. Only the version of myself I let them see. The wheels of my mind continue to drive in the wrong direction, stuck in reverse, and I relive that night, remembering things I’d rather not. We did argue in the restaurant. Inspector Croft is right about that. I tried so hard to reassure Ben that I wasn’t having an affair, but he just got more and more angry.
Successful actresses are either beautiful or they’re good at acting . . .
The more he drank, the worse it got.
You are neither of those things . . .
He wanted to hurt me, provoke a reaction.
I keep wondering who you fucked this time to get the part.
He succeeded.
I didn’t mean to slap him, I know I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m deeply ashamed of myself. But I’ve spent a lifetime thinking that I wasn’t good enough, and his cruel words echoed my own insecurities so loud and clear, something inside me just snapped. I’ve never felt that I’m good enough at anything; no matter how hard I try, I just don’t fit. If my husband can see it, then surely it’s only a matter of time until everyone else sees it too.
My response wasn’t just physical. I told him I wanted a divorce, because I wanted to hurt him back. If he had let me have the child I wanted, I would in an instant have given up the career he said had come between us, but the answer was always the same: no. He didn’t trust me in more ways than one. We were going weeks, sometimes months, without a shred of intimacy, as though touching me might accidentally get me pregnant. I’m so lonely now it physically hurts.
I’ll never forget what he said as I walked out of the restaurant, or the expression on his face when I turned back to look at him. I don’t think it was just the drink talking, he looked as if he meant it.
I’ll ruin you if you leave me.
I head upstairs, pull off my running clothes and take a shower. The water is too hot, but I don’t bother to adjust the temperature. I let it scald my skin, as though I think I deserve the pain. Then I head into the bedroom to get dressed for work. I open the wardrobe slowly, as if something terrible might be hiding inside. It is. I bend down and remove the shoe box I found in the attic, then sit on the bed before lifting the lid. I stare at the contents for a while, as if touching them might burn my fingers. Then I remove the stack of plain vintage postcards and spread them out over the duvet. There must be more than fifty. The white cotton provides a lacklustre camouflage for the yellowing rectangles of card, so that my eyes are even more drawn to the spidery black ink decorating each one. They are all identical: the same words, written in the same feminine scrawl, by the same hand.
I know who you are.
I thought we had thrown all of these away. I don’t know why Ben would have kept them. For evidence, I suppose . . . in case the stalker ever returned.
I put the cards back in the box and slide it under the bed. Hiding the truth from ourselves is a similar game to hiding it from others, it just comes with a stricter set of rules.
Once dressed, I head back downstairs and stare at the huge bunch of flowers on the kitchen table, accompanied by the tiny card reading sorry. I pick them up, needing both hands to do so. My foot connects with the large stainless-steel pedal bin and the lid opens obediently, ready to swallow my rubbish, but also revealing its own. My hands hover above the trash, while my eyes try to translate what they are seeing: two empty black plastic bottles that I’ve never seen before. I pick one up to read the label. Lighter gel? We don’t even have a barbecue. I put the empty bottle back and push the flowers down on top of them inside the bin, a mess of petals and thorns hiding everything that lies beneath.
Essex, 1987
I wake up in the pink and white bedroom with a terrible tummy ache. I can see daylight behind the curtains covered in rainbows, but when I pull them back, there are bars on the windows and a big grey sky. I’m hungry and I can smell toast, so I creep over to the door and listen. My fingers reach up for the handle, it’s higher than the ones at home. As I slowly open the door it makes a shh sound on the carpet, so I try extra hard to be quiet.
The walls in the hallway all look as if they have peeled, and it’s very cold. Something bites my feet when I take a step forward, and it hurts. When I look down, I see that the floor out here is also covered in the green, spongey stuff I saw in the kitchen last night. Thin orange strips of wood are all around the edges, with little silver spikes sticking out of them. When I bend down to touch one, a bubble of blood grows on my finger, so I put it in my mouth and suck it until the pain goes away.
I follow the smell of toast, careful not to tread on any more little spikes, and stop when I reach the first door. It’s locked, so I carry on. The next door is slightly open and I can hear a television behind it. I try to peek through the crack, but the door tells on me by squeaking.
‘Is that you, Aimee?’ asks Maggie.
My name is Ciara, so I don’t know what to say.
‘Come on in, no need to be shy, this is your home now.’
I push the door a little harder, and see Maggie sitting in bed next to the man with the gold tooth. His smile has holes in, as though he has worn it too often, and he has little bits of white toast stuck in the black hair on his face. I see the television reflected in his glasses, and when I turn to look at the screen it says TV-am, before changing to a picture of a man and woman sitting on a sofa. The walls in this room are like the walls in the hall, all patchy and bare, and there is no carpet in here either, just more of the springy green stuff.
‘Come and get in with us, it’s cold. Move over, John,’ says Maggie, and he smiles, patting a space on the bed between them. I’m shivering, but I don’t want to get into their bed.
‘Come on,’ she says when I don’t move.
‘Hop in,’ he says, pulling back the covers.
Bunny rabbits hop. I am not a bunny rabbit.
I can see that Maggie is wearing a nightie, her skinny legs sticking out from beneath the sheets. Her long, black, curly hair is hanging down over her