THIRTY-FIVE
Carla only wanted to hear him deny it.
That Friday night at Theo’s house, a couple of days after she’d read Daniel’s notebook, she fell asleep early, dead drunk, only to jerk awake a few hours later. Her head aching and her mouth dry, the scenes Daniel had drawn ran like a newsreel across the ragged screen of her mind. Beside her, Theo softly snored. She got up. No point just lying there, she wouldn’t sleep again. She dressed quietly, picked up her overnight bag, and softly padded down the stairs. She drank a glass of water, standing at the sink, and then another. She’d had more than a bottle of wine the night before, more than she’d drunk in a single sitting in years, and the pain behind her eyes was blinding. She found a box of paracetamol in the downstairs loo and took three.
Back in kitchen, she looked for pen and paper to leave a note. Couldn’t sleep, gone home, something like that. He would be hurt, he wouldn’t understand, but she didn’t have space for his feelings now; she didn’t have space for anything. Only Daniel.
She couldn’t find a pen. It didn’t matter; she would call him later. She’d call him in a while. They’d have to talk about it sometime; she’d have to come up with some sort of story for why she’d been feeling the way she had, acting the way she had.
You look shell-shocked, Cee, he said to her when she turned up, as usual, for Friday night dinner. Are you having trouble sleeping? She’d told him she was and he’d pressed: When did it start, what was the trigger? She hadn’t wanted to talk about it. After a drink, she said; she drank two gin and tonics before they started on the wine. Didn’t eat a thing. No wonder she felt like this.
No wonder.
She could see, looking through the kitchen doors, that there was frost on the lawn. It was going to be cold out. She put on her gloves and grabbed from the hallway one of Theo’s old scarves, which she draped around her shoulders. As she walked back through the kitchen, she noticed that the knife Theo had been using to slice the lemons for her gin and tonic was still there. Just lying there, on the chopping board.
She only wanted to hear him deny it.
She let herself out the kitchen door, drawing the scarf tighter around her neck as she went. She unlocked the back gate, stepped out onto the deserted towpath, and turned left, toward home.
A gentle mist, silver in the moonlight, rose off the water. The lights of the narrowboats were all out; it must have been four thirty, five perhaps? Still dark. Carla walked slowly, with her hands dug deep into her pockets and her nose tucked into the scarf. She walked a hundred yards, two hundred, she passed the steps she would usually climb to take her home, she kept going.
Her mind seemed to clear in the cold. She could go to him now. She would hear him deny it, hear him say, This isn’t true, it’s not real, it’s just . . . just what? What could it possibly be? A fantasy? A nightmare? What did it mean that sometime over the past few years he’d sat down and drawn those pictures, of himself, of her? Of her boy. What did it mean that he’d drawn them all like that?
All she wanted was an explanation.
As she approached the boat, she was surprised to hear voices, raised and angry. Instead of stopping and knocking on the window as she’d planned, she quickened her pace, kept walking along the path and up the steps to the bridge. She stood there, looking down on the boat, her breath quick and hot, clouding the air in front of her. After a moment or two, she saw him, saw Daniel climbing out onto the back deck of the boat. Dressed in jeans, he pulled a sweatshirt down over his naked torso as he stepped onto the path. He seemed to be saying something, but his words were snatched by the wind, spirited across the water. Carla watched him, rolling his head from side to side, pressing his hand to his neck. He took a few steps toward the bridge and then paused to light a cigarette. She held her breath, willing him to look up at her. He took a few drags from the cigarette and then flicked it away. Pulling the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, he passed beneath the arch on which she stood.
A few moments later, a girl emerged from the boat. Young, too young, surely, for Daniel, and disheveled. She stood for a moment, her back to Carla, looking this way and that, as though not sure which way to go. She glanced momentarily up at the bridge and then she spat on the ground and shuffled away in the opposite direction of the one Daniel had taken, laughing as she went.
It was starting to get light. The first, most committed runners of the day had laced up their trainers and made their way to the water. One or two had already passed beneath Carla’s bridge, and soon there would be more. It was cold and she had no desire to wait. She wanted to go back—not home, but back to Theo’s warm bed, to coffee and comfort. There would be another day for this confrontation.