It Could Have Been Her(20)

“Show me a picture,” I say. “Of this man. This remarkable man who has taken your heart to Istanbul.”

She looks at me sideways. Then she picks up her phone and scrolls through, with an air of slight impatience. “Hm,” she says, “no. Not that one. This one…”

She turns the phone. There’s a vague-looking man in a gray shirt and jeans, limp white hair combed to one side, trendy glasses, a pained smile.

“Jesus. How old is he?”

“Sixty.”

“Sixty! You’re losing your shit over a sixty-year-old!”

“Well, he wasn’t always sixty, was he? He was in his late forties when I met him.”

“So you were…?”

“Eighteen. He was my boss when I was temping.”

“Ha, yeah. Of course.” I smile and lean in toward her. “You’ve been dragged down the wrong road, Jessamine. Imagine,” I say, “how different everything would be now if that dirty old bastard hadn’t persuaded fresh-faced little eighteen-year-old you that he was a good idea, that fucking around with a married man was going to somehow improve your life.”

I see a shiver of discomfort run through her. Then she shakes her head. “What’s going on here?” she says. “What’s your deal?”

“No deal. Just had a great Christmas at my brother’s place, lots of people, lots of fun… kept thinking about you.”

One of her fine eyebrows shoots up her forehead. “What the fuck,” she mutters, but I see it again, that flush, a sudden rush of something through her system.

“Not necessarily in that way,” I counter. “I mean, just thinking about you being alone down here in the last house at the end of the world, with your mum and your kid. I wanted to see you. Make sure you were OK. That’s all.”

She shrugs again and tries to look as if that’s exactly what she thought I meant. I feel bad for her, so I smile, a sly, flirty smile. “I might also have thought a bit about how pretty you are.”

“Ha!” Her response is so loud it makes me jump. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says.

“Why?” I say. “Why is that ridiculous? Doesn’t he ever tell you you’re pretty?”

“No,” she says sniffily. “Because I’m not.”

I pull my chair roughly across the terra-cotta floor and it squeaks horribly. I reach her side of the table, and I stare at her. “You,” I say, “are pretty.” I stare a bit longer, enjoying the array of mixed emotions passing across her face. Then I push myself back again. “Listen,” I say. “If I’m making you feel uncomfortable, I’ll leave. I have no interest in making you feel weird, I promise. Just say, and I’ll be on my way.”

“No,” she says, her eyes suddenly dark and urgent and on me—fully. “No. Don’t go. Please… just… stay.”





chapter seventeen


JESSAMINE

Granny died two days after her seventieth birthday. Daddy was frantic about everything. He saw Mummy hanging laundry one day and nearly cried. He talked about getting a housekeeper, but Mummy said we couldn’t afford one. Then a few weeks later Daddy told us that a nice girl was coming to stay to help look after us. “An au pair girl,” Daddy had said. But Sandra didn’t look like an au pair girl and Daddy wasn’t talking to her like an au pair girl. I glanced across at Mummy, who was watching Sandra with her arms folded across her chest and her jaw set tight. She seemed angry. But she wasn’t doing anything about it. Just watching… I didn’t know what to make of the girl. She looked cheap, rough. I didn’t understand what she was doing here, in our home. I followed my father into the other room and said, “She doesn’t look like an au pair girl.”

“Well, she is.”

“Aren’t they meant to be foreign?”

“Not always.”

“It feels weird having her here.”

“You’ll get used to it, poppet.”

I shook my head. I knew already that I never would.

But Daddy was right, I did get used to having her around. By the time she’d been living with us for a few weeks I almost liked her.

She was so different to Mummy and Daddy, so modern compared to them. It was the year 2000 but Mummy and Daddy still acted like it was the olden days. They were very private, they didn’t have friends or go to parties, they just wanted to be with each other, or with us. They told us we were better than everyone else, and I decided to believe them. But with Sandra around, I started to see the world differently. It wasn’t bad, I realized, to wear cheap clothes. It wasn’t bad to leave the ends off your words or not brush your hair three times a day or have bare feet indoors. It wasn’t bad to have a loud laugh, or fillings, or to bite your nails. None of these things made you a bad person. Sandra was a good person, I could see that, and I wanted at that young age, just in the grip of adolescence and in my second year of high school, to be more like Sandra and less like Mummy.

Mummy noticed the changes in me. She saw the badly painted fingernails in a color called Wild Cherry, she saw me change the way I did my hair; I didn’t want tight plaits anymore, and hard-scraped-back ponytails. I wanted small braids in my hair, cute clips. Sandra bought me things from Claire’s Accessories, including a pair of clip-on earrings that I pranked Mummy with one afternoon. “Look!” I said, entering the kitchen. “Sandra took me to have my ears pierced!” I pulled my hair away so that Mummy could see.