Becky goes from hot to cold, aggravated by the duvet’s shortness, its longness and finally its mere existence. Window up, window down, she cannot seem to find a simple point of balance between sweating and shivering. She lies on her front, her back, curled up, stretched out, grasping and un-grasping her wrist.
Matthew Kingsman. Oxford man. Family man. Film man. There is a waterlogged feeling in her. Perhaps it is disappointment, though that would be irrational. Matthew is a free agent in a free country. He can do as he pleases, and it is no business of hers.
She tells herself she has been naïve: that people do this all the time. Flings, dalliances, affairs, trust-bending, trust-breaking. There are of course open marriages whose openness isn’t advertised to one and all. People have sex with people they shouldn’t, all the time, particularly in her industry where everyone is looking at themselves, and if not at themselves then at each other, in the mirror or through a camera or on screen. Bodies attractive enough to sell tickets win easy lays, quick fucks, promotions. She gets it. It shouldn’t be news to her. She needs to loosen the fuck up.
Successful people are boundary-benders, boundary-breakers, and maybe it is Becky who should be taking a lesson from this rather than sitting here in judgement. She has so much to learn. She aches under the weight of it, aches at how childish she still is.
All these thoughts ricochet off the sides of her, like a ball in a pinball machine.
She considers for the hundredth time how, with the kitchen lights behind her, she must only have been a silhouette. How she turned and ran so quickly and quietly that perhaps if they were drunk she’ll be remembered as something that couldn’t have happened. A shadow in the corner of the eye, with nothing there on second glance. She was never there. If he asked – and why would he ever ask? – she would look blankly back and deny everything.
It is none of her business how two people have sex. Some people like to dress up. Some people play rough, hold each other down and tie each other up by the wrists, silence and hurt each other. She knows all that. She’s not completely naïve.
At five in the morning, and with just two hours left before it’s time to wake Maisie for school, Becky admits defeat and leaves her bed, padding quietly to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Maisie will sleep through the kettle whistle, through the smell of coffee, through all of it. Maisie rarely dreams. She sleeps like a child whose days are straightforward, which is precisely how Becky has laboured to arrange them.
Becky breathes in her home and the smell of washing powder and the ghost of last night’s chilli and tries to calm the thud-crack in her heart. She looks around her small kitchen and at all the boundaries that surround her in her old East London maisonette; at the low ceilings and narrow rooms, at the double-glazed, triple-locked door that leads out onto a paved patio. At the window grills that slide across and meet in the middle. At the moose-headed coat hook in the hallway that holds her black lycra running top and the pair of creased and dusty wide-legged trousers she’d once worn for weekly self-defence classes at the local gym.
At first, what she learnt there made her feel safer than any triple-locked door. She enjoyed making a fist in a boxing glove so her wrists didn’t snap and her tendons didn’t bruise, and how to deliver a punch with speed and precision. She had felt reassured and emboldened by the tight wrap of the gloves around her wrists and how they made her arms feel bionic, almost not her own. She had enjoyed the feeling of strength return to her body.
But she abandoned the lessons when she began using her new-found skills in unconstructive ways. There wasn’t a local gym class on earth that would teach her the skills she needed to defend her against herself.
Becky tries not to panic about how much she has to do, how she will manage a day’s work, a flight to Cannes and a couple more hours’ peppiness for all those new people who will need impressing. All on no sleep whatsoever? Back in her bedroom she lightly folds a dress and rolls up a cotton shirt and two T-shirts. Fills her washbag. Pulls out pants and socks and assembles it all in a pleasing jigsaw inside her carry-on suitcase: two carbon-scented copies of the Medea script at its base.
She makes notes on her Cannes meetings, banishing thoughts of that silken hair spilling out onto the kitchen floor, coming up with six ways to pitch her idea to six different kinds of people.
But she knows what she really wants to do and she knows that it is destructive so she fights it, at first holding her own hand lightly, reassuringly, like a friend. And then when the feeling does not subside, gripping her hand tightly, before grasping at the thin skin and raised veins of her own wrist, holding it tight, as if pulling herself back from a fight. She has agreed, in therapy, that standing up to this instinct is a good thing. Succeeding means she has taken her power back, or something like that; but without sleep all those rules are dissolving at their margins, her desires pushing away old decisions.
Surely if she just does more, the instinct will leave? She clears the washing basket. Cleans surfaces that already gleam. Lays out an array of jams and breakfast cereals despite the fact she never eats breakfast and her daughter’s favourites are firmly established and unflinching.
She means to make a cup of tea next, but somehow before the kettle boils she has opened Scott’s Twitter page and she is already on her way to losing the fight.
Becky has two Twitter accounts: one that is her. And one that isn’t.
The one that isn’t Becky is Melanie. Melanie has a line drawing of a face in the photo caption, all thick and twisty like the pen hasn’t been taken off the page. ‘Melanie Hasn’t Tweeted Yet’ but Melanie follows a few people – thirty-seven corporate accounts like BBC News, Sky News, Popbitch, and another dozen or so famous people, including a TV presenter who crossed the Gobi Desert on foot and whose dinner-party speciality is puffer fish. Then there are forty or so ‘ordinary people’, people who maybe said something funny once or do something unusual or are vocally for or against some issue or other. And she doesn’t check on anything they have to say, because all of them – the corporations, the celebrities, the nobodies – are padding to disguise the fact that Melanie is following Scott.
She knows it’s overkill, but Becky dreads the slip of a fingertip, an accidental ‘like’ or retweet of a Scott comment, anything that might tip him off that Becky Shawcross is monitoring him. Safer not to look directly at him.
Scott has changed his main picture again.
Now Scott is in fancy dress, dressed as Elvis in a maroon button-down shirt, the collar of a leather jacket pulled high around his neck and his hair styled like a whip of black treacle.
It’s not a picture she has seen before.
Perhaps he has been to a party.
She logs into Facebook, via another fake profile account. He friended her without asking questions. He already had 762 friends. Why not welcome another one? Somebody has tagged him at this party. Elvis lives! A grinning friend of his has slung an arm around Scott’s neck. Scott is pouting for the camera in aviators. Not for the first time, he has chosen a costume that allows him to wear sunglasses. He likes to hide his eyes, those giveaway windows to the soul.
She scrolls back through his timeline. She’s seen it all before, a thousand times. His whole life is in her head, or at least those parts that she can get at from the safety of her own flat.
Last year Scott purchased a large indoor fish tank. His colleagues appreciated the cupcakes he bought them one afternoon in Soho. He celebrated the birthday of his oldest house plant and 152 people put hearts by it.
Recently drank espresso Martinis with an old friend who’d flown over from Australia.
