Further down the hill she passes the local newsagent. Here she buys a copy of theHampstead Voiceand heads back home.
Roan is late back again that night. Roan is a child psychologist and works at the Portman Centre in Belsize Park. Having a husband who is a child psychologist is not as useful as it sounds. Her husband is, it would seem, only capable of empathising withchildren who have sociopathic tendencies (sociopathy in children is his specialism). Children like their own who are a bit odd in some ways, but perfectly and utterly normal in most of the other ways, seem to confound him entirely and he reacts as though he has never before encountered a teenage child or, indeed, had any personal experience of being a teenager himself whenever either of them does something that could only be described as the stereotypical behaviour of a teenager.
This infuriates Cate, who has never felt more in touch with her own teenage self than she has since her children became teenagers, as if she has walked through a door at the far end of parenting and somehow met herself coming the other way.
‘How was your day?’ she calls out to him now, in the tone of voice she uses to lay out her intent to be pleasant. If she can start the evening’s discourse on a high note, then it can’t possibly be her fault if it all goes downhill later on. She has no idea if Roan can detect the hint of theatre in this particular tone but he responds from the hallway with a hearty:
‘Not at all bad. How was yours?’
And then he is there, in the kitchen, her husband, his shaved head covered with a beanie, wrapped up against the January chill in a padded black jacket and gloves. He pulls off the beanie and puts it on the table. Then he pulls off his gloves, revealing long angular hands. He takes the cross-body bag off his shoulder and puts it on a chair. He doesn’t look at her. They don’t really look at each other any more. It’s fine. Cate isn’t in great need of being seen by him.
His hand goes to theHampstead Voiceon the table. He looks at the headline. ‘Another one?’
‘Another one,’ she replies. ‘Next road down this time.’
He nods, just once, carries on reading. Then he says, ‘Daylight.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Horrific. That poor woman. Just going about her business. Thought it was going to be a normal day. Some sick little fuck decides he can do what he wants, decides he has the right to touch her body.’ She shudders as she thinks again of tiny Tilly, her wide eyes on her doorstep.
Georgia walks in.
She’s in her lounging gear: silky jersey shorts and a hoodie. Cate didn’t have lounging gear when she was a teenager; she had her clothes and her pyjamas and nothing in between.
Roan puts theHampstead Voicein front of her. ‘Look, Georgie,’ he says. ‘A sex attacker in the area. Last attack was just down the road. In the middle of the day. Please, please keep your wits about you. And try not to stumble about with your earbuds in.’
Georgia tuts. ‘My wits are totally about me,’ she says. ‘Remember my wits are young. Not old and shit like yours. And I bet you anything it’s that guy.’ She taps the front page of the paper. ‘The one over the road. The creep. He looks totally rapey.’
Cate shivers slightly at the mention of the man across the road and she flushes with shame. She hasn’t told Roan or the kids about calling the police and seeing them going to talk to him. She’s too embarrassed. It was such a middle class, meddling thing to have done.
‘How’s Tilly?’ she asks, moving the subject along. ‘Has she said any more to you about Monday night?’
Georgia shakes her head. ‘Nope. I’ve tried talking to her about it but she won’t. She just says she’s too embarrassed.’
‘And what do you think? Do you think she made it up?’
Her daughter considers the question. ‘In one way, yeah. I mean, it’s kind of the sort of thing she’d do? If you see what I mean? She’s lied about stuff before.’
‘What sort of stuff?’
‘Oh, just small things, like saying she knows the name of some, like, rapper, or someone on YouTube, and then when you ask her who it is you realise she hasn’t got a clue. So she says things sometimes just to fit in, to be one of the crowd. And she gets this, like, blind look in her eyes when she knows she’s been rumbled and then you feel really bad for putting her on the spot.’
‘But this, lying about something like this. Do you think she’s capable of a lie that big?’
‘I dunno,’ she says. Then she shrugs and says, ‘Yeah. Maybe. She overreacts to things. Maybe she just, you know, overreacted.’
Cate nods. It’s possible, she supposes. But then her eye is caught once more by the headline on the front page of theHampstead Voiceand she feels a dark shadow of doubt passing through her head.
7
It’s the day before Valentine’s Day and Cate is in her local shopping centre looking for a card for Roan. She won’t get him anything romantic. Indeed, there have been at least a dozen years over the preceding thirty when she hasn’t got him a card at all. Valentine’s isn’t really their scene. But something about the fact that they’ve made it to another Valentine’s Day, still intact in spite of everything that happened last year, makes her think that a card might be in order.
She picks up a card that has a drawing on the front of two stick figures, holding hands. The wording above their heads says: ‘Yay! We still like each other!’
She puts it back on the shelf as though it has scalded her.
She is not sure that she and Roan do.
Eventually she picks up a card that simply says ‘I Love You Lots’, with a big red heart. This is true. She does still love him. The love part is simple; it’s everything else that’s complicated.