Dead to Her

No, Marcie thought, looking up at the air-conditioning grille on the ceiling as she swallowed the secret contraceptive. No, I don’t want to make a fucking baby.

4

Marcie wished they’d had this late lunch at the house rather than on Iris and Noah Cartwright’s boat moored at the end of the jetty. Perhaps then she wouldn’t be forcing a smile through her nausea from the slight movement of the creek beneath them. Although it was a still day the air was humid and heavy with the endless heat suffocating the city, and even the water was lazy in its wake. Iris knew Marcie got motion sickness, but Noah loved his boat and they always entertained on it in the summer. It was a tradition and it had been clear from the start that they wouldn’t change for Marcie.

‘You have to get used to it,’ Jason had said when they’d first got married. ‘Water’s in the veins as much as blood here. We grow up on it. But I guess you’re all landlubbers back in Boise, Idaho.’ He’d smiled as he teased her and she’d wanted to point out that they had water in Boise too, but he wouldn’t have cared. That was one thing she and Keisha had in common. They were both from elsewhere. Boise could be as far away as London. Only the South mattered. In the main, Marcie liked it that way.

Thankfully, this would be the last of the boat for a while. Noah and Iris were going away to the Hamptons to visit their beloved daughter, Heather. The only girl out of their four children. She was a few years older and frumpier than Marcie, and had recently produced their latest grandson whose name Marcie couldn’t remember, though she’d dutifully bought gifts of booties, baby grows and bears for him and gushed over photos. Babies all looked the same to her and given Jason’s recent urge to reproduce she was always happier when the subject changed.

She leaned her head against her husband’s broad shoulder and breathed slowly as the queasy moment passed. Across the table, Keisha clearly wasn’t bothered about the movement of the water. She had a half-empty margarita in one hand while biting into a plump king prawn plucked from the platter of iced seafood in the middle of the table. It wasn’t her first. She ate with gusto while Marcie, Iris and Virginia sipped chardonnay and let their stomachs gnaw on their own lining, Iris occasionally feeding Midge their old tabby cat a fishy tidbit as if it made up for her barely eating herself.

‘They don’t come like this in Tesco,’ Keisha said, and Virginia, primly dressed from church, laughed, although she probably didn’t know what Tesco was any more than Marcie did. Keisha was wearing a thin summer dress and as she leaned over to kiss William on the cheek with her wet glossy lips, the curve of her breasts was clearly visible. Jason had his aviators on, and when Marcie glanced his way – was he looking? – all she could see was her own distorted face reflected back at her.

Keisha showed no signs of a hangover from the previous night’s party – if anything she was glowing with health – but William looked tired. Poor old fool. Marcie heard the words in Eleanor’s voice. Always so forgiving of her man.

‘More wine, Virginia?’ Noah refilled the glasses, wine never in short supply here, and Virginia took it gratefully. She’d had an exhausting morning at the church, she’d told them. So much to help with. Charity events to organise. She was alone; Emmett had a prior engagement with some investment client. The amount of times he took meetings on Sundays was a clue to everyone bar his wife that he wasn’t as keen on prayer as Virginia. Marcie imagined that the endless hours of fundraising and work at the homeless refuge that filled her hours could grate very quickly.

‘I called you this morning, William,’ Jason said. ‘Zelda told me you were on the treadmill.’

‘She didn’t mention it.’

‘It wasn’t important. But jogging? I’ve never known you to do more than stroll around the golf course.’

Jason had called William? Marcie hadn’t known that. When? Had she been in the shower? Had he hidden himself in one of the many empty rooms in their new house? Why would he need to speak to William on a Sunday morning when he knew they’d be seeing each other later? A thought curled like dark smoke. Had he been hoping Keisha would answer?

‘Never too late to get in shape,’ William said. ‘My new routine. Up early, down to the treadmill and then a coconut water to raise my energy. I tell you, I feel twenty years younger.’

‘Are you sure that’s the jogging?’ Iris, ever the dry wit, raised an over-plucked eyebrow and glanced at Keisha.

‘She sure helps,’ William conceded and everyone smiled. Marcie tried to imagine him on the running machine. It wasn’t a pretty image. The state-of-the-art home gym had been Eleanor’s and she’d used it religiously. Fat lot of good it had done her in the end.

‘Do you jog too?’ Marcie asked. She imagined Keisha in tight gym gear and regretted asking the question immediately. That was not an image she wanted in Jason’s mind.

‘No, I’m a night owl. Nothing wakes me before ten. Sometimes midday. But I’m trying to change. I know I’ve married an early bird.’

Marcie couldn’t imagine Keisha changing. Conforming. But then, she had. It was amazing how you could contain yourself – imprison yourself – if you really tried. If you loved someone. She looked down at her sweet summer dress from that new expensive little boutique on Broughton that all the club wives loved so much. Cuff sleeves, buttons down the front, deck shoes on her feet. Six or seven years ago she’d have been wearing cut-off denim shorts that showed a hint of her ass and wouldn’t be seen dead in something as old as this. Probably why her own store had failed. She hadn’t known back then how sedately her customer base dressed. Well, that and all the bad-mouthing from Jason’s ex-wife. Marcie should have let the dust settle before trying to do something for herself. Now she was trapped in expensive cotton and reliant on her husband’s credit card.

‘Although I draw the line at coconut water,’ Keisha continued. ‘It’s disgusting. Tastes like sperm. No wonder Billy drains the carton in one go.’ Iris nearly choked on her wine at that. Combined with the appalled look on William’s face and the flush on Noah’s, Marcie couldn’t help but laugh. Jason joined in and then so did Iris.

‘I’m so sorry! I have no filter!’

Keisha clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes suddenly nervous as they glanced at William. For a moment he looked like he might implode and then, seeing that his friends weren’t offended, his face relaxed slightly into a taut grin.

‘I’ll take your word for it on the taste.’ He squeezed her knee and looking at his fat white hand on Keisha’s young dark skin made Marcie think of that English king, the one with all the wives she’d watched the TV show about. Old and obese and with a beautiful young girl he believed loved him. Didn’t end well for the women, if she remembered correctly.

‘It’s so hot,’ Keisha said, when the titters stopped. She leaned back in her chair and looked out over the water. ‘And muggy.’

‘Welcome to the South,’ Noah drawled. He’d been virtually dozing for the past hour or so, an old beached walrus splayed on his seat, but now he picked up a piece of cornbread and tore away a corner to eat despite Iris’s side-eye. Noah could do with losing more than a pound or two himself. ‘Storms that come in fast and clear away as quick. Heat that clings to you like a needy child.’

‘You’ll learn to move slower,’ Virginia added, fanning herself with a coaster. ‘In this weather, you don’t get a choice.’

‘Oh, I love it. I can feel my whole body relaxing. But,’ Keisha said, unfurling from her chair like a languid cat, ‘I also can’t resist the water.’ She kissed William, chaste on the cheek, and then her shoulders were slipping free of her sundress, which slid to the floor, revealing a string bikini beneath it.

‘I’m going in!’ She was already pushing the ladder over the edge and climbing over the side, oblivious to the eyes on her body, William calling her back, and the look of disapproval on Virginia’s face as she declared, ‘Oh my!’

Keisha jumped from the boat’s edge, arms in the air, a whoop of joy carrying her down into the splash and by the time the others were on their feet and at the railing she was breaking the surface, treading water, face full of delight.

‘Be careful!’ Noah called, leaning over the side. ‘We get ’gators sometimes!’

Keisha ignored him and ducked under the water again, childlike in her joy.

‘She’s quite the live-wire, isn’t she?’ Iris said, but there was no hint of disapproval. If anything, she sounded surprisingly impressed. What would Eleanor make of her best friend embracing her replacement so quickly?

‘She needs to learn to control her urges,’ William grumbled.

‘Oh, she’s just young,’ Iris said. ‘So much energy. I can see why she caught your eye, William.’

Marcie could see why Keisha had caught William’s eye written all over Jason’s face. He’d pushed his glasses on top of his head and was looking down at the glittering water and the woman in it. Marcie slid her arm through his, the feel of his cotton shirt and the taut arm under it both familiar and exciting, but he didn’t respond. It was as if she wasn’t there.

Keisha, squinting in the sun, one arm shading her eyes, was looking up at him. ‘You guys should come in! I dare you!’ No one said a word, and Marcie, hot and queasy, thought how nice it would be to strip to her underwear and jump from the godawful boat, but she wasn’t a novelty like Keisha, the new pet, the unreal girl in their midst, and Virginia would have it all around the club that Marcie Maddox was basically naked on Judge Cartwright’s boat and trying to compete with William Radford’s gorgeous new wife.

‘Never mind the alligators,’ Keisha said. ‘I’m surrounded by chickens!’

William looked around the group, disgruntled and in no shape to strip and swim in the creek. ‘I’ve done my exercise for the day. One of you will have to entertain my wife.’ His eyes fell on Jason, who, as if he needed no more encouragement, pulled his arm free from Marcie’s and started to unbutton his shirt.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What does it look like I’m doing? Someone has to go in.’

‘This isn’t the office,’ Marcie hissed. ‘You don’t have to do what William says.’

‘Until he officially retires I do. It’s fine. Don’t make a deal of it.’

Marcie bit her lip. She wasn’t making a deal of it. She just didn’t see why it had to be him. ‘Maybe I should go in instead.’

‘Don’t be stupid. You hate the river. And I’m half-undressed now.’ He was unzipping his pants, kicking them away and leaving only his black Calvin Klein boxer shorts, a trail of dark coarse hair spreading from his flat stomach up across his broad tanned chest. How must he look to Keisha next to William? Desirable.

She caught Virginia’s sharp eyes registering her displeasure and she quickly turned her frown into the grimace of a smile as they joined the others.

‘I’d go in myself,’ she said, ‘but I’m not wearing any panties.’ No one laughed, all watching Jason as he dived over the side, splashing Keisha and making her squeal. ‘I’m kidding.’ Marcie picked up her glass from the table and leaned over the railings. ‘Of course I’m wearing underwear.’ She was smarting. If Keisha had said it, they’d all have found it funny. What was so different?

She drank some more wine, large swallows, as they gathered, crows on a wire, observers of the sport below. Jason ducked beneath the surface, invisible for what seemed like forever as Keisha twisted around looking for him, and then, finally, she shrieked as he pulled at her feet.

‘You bastard!’

He popped back up, laughing and coughing as she splashed water into his face. It was like watching teenagers. What was William thinking of this display? Jason was at home in the water in a way that Marcie never could be. She liked to see what was around her. The creek could be murky and that word, alligator, was never far from her thoughts. Keisha and the potential alligator merged in her mind, a predator waiting to consume her husband. She drank more wine, her thoughts hardening. Keisha might learn the hard way that Marcie was hardly prey herself.

As it was, Keisha didn’t stay in the water much longer and was soon back on deck and wrapped in a robe Iris spirited up from a cabin below, yawning happily. Jason sat beside Keisha – Don’t want to get creek water all over you, honey. ‘You should have come in,’ she said to Marcie, all nice as pie. ‘Jason’s like a fish, isn’t he?’

Yes, slippery, she wanted to answer. ‘I prefer poolside to creek water. You never know what you’ll catch in there.’

‘Or what will catch you,’ Virginia murmured with a smile. She’d been drinking steadily since she’d arrived and was now on the tipsy end of sober, her hamster cheeks shining in the heat. Was that a snipe? Hard to tell. Virginia was Marcie’s friend because she and Emmett had known William forever, and so also, by default, Jason, but there were twenty years between the two women. Marcie could fake the church thing for the sake of appearances, showing up once a month or so and helping out at the soup kitchen, but she was never going to buy into God, whatever she put in the plate. Virginia, who could be so patronising but who’d never worked a day in her life.

No, maybe they weren’t friends. Maybe they only tolerated her for Jason’s sake. For all she knew, they still spoke to Jacquie regularly. She looked at the beauty opposite her, fighting jet lag, but whose yawns were signalling the end of the afternoon. Keisha had a lot to learn about their set. Suddenly Marcie felt very alone. Out of place.

‘Home time, I think,’ she murmured.

No one disagreed.

5

It was with relief that Marcie closed the heavy front door behind them and stepped into the cool of their house, her sanctuary. Her head ached with the remnants of her seasickness, too much heat and this awful fear that she was losing her grip on everything. Plus the wine, she conceded. It was still early, but all she wanted was a shower and to go to bed. The car ride had been quiet after she’d closed down any conversation Jason tried to start. His good mood had been bubbling over, his enjoyment of the afternoon in direct opposition to how dark she now felt.

Once a cheat always a cheat. Thrill seekers seek thrills and that’s all there is to it. Just be careful, dear.

The words – said by a near-stranger, one of Jacquie’s friends, in the club’s restrooms when she and Jason first ‘came out’ as a couple – hadn’t lost their sting. Not long after the divorce Jacquie had met a retired orthopaedic surgeon and moved to Atlanta. She no longer had cheat worries, though. Her second husband had died of a massive heart attack not long before Eleanor passed away. Jacquie was now off in Florida somewhere on an extended vacation on his insurance. It almost gave Marcie a pang of envy. All that freedom.

‘I didn’t know you’d called William this morning,’ she said, kicking off her shoes, the cold tiles delicious on her hot feet.

‘Does it matter?’

‘You didn’t mention it, that’s all. Is everything okay?’

‘He wasn’t due home until after Thanksgiving. I wanted to see if he was going back to work or not.’

‘Couldn’t you have asked him this afternoon?’ She got herself a glass of water and swallowed two Advil from the cupboard. This throbbing head wasn’t helping her mood, and her stomach was tight, nervy. Did she want a fight? No, she didn’t. So why was she pestering him?

‘No business when socialising, remember? William hates that. Anyway, why does it matter? What’s wrong with you today? It was work.’

‘Like jumping in the creek was work.’

There was a long pause after that and her heart raced. Finally, Jason put his beer bottle down on the counter and stared at her. ‘Why are you acting like this?’

She stared right back at him. ‘I think you like her.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He looked so appalled she very nearly believed him, until he uttered the death knell of denial. ‘She’s not my type.’

The words were a slap in the face. He did want Keisha. And not just in a Yeah, she’s hot, I so would jokey way.

‘Really?’ The word dripped from her, heavy with sarcasm.

‘For God’s sake, Marcie, am I never supposed to look at another woman, ever? Is that how you’d like me? Castrated?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying!’ What was she saying? ‘This seems different, that’s all. It makes me feel odd and I don’t know why.’ She suddenly felt teary. She was making it worse.

‘I don’t want to sleep with her,’ Jason said, softened by her upset. ‘I find her … refreshing, that’s all.’

‘Refreshing?’

‘You know,’ he shrugged. ‘A bit wild. Young. Different from our friends.’

Your friends, is what she wanted to snap at him, but she bit it back. They weren’t Marcie’s friends, they’d simply absorbed her into them. Scrubbed her up and made her respectable. She hadn’t fought it because she loved him. She’d allowed it.

‘I’m not boring,’ she said, and he burst out laughing.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, you’re not. A bit crazy maybe, but not boring.’ He reached out and pulled her close, kissing the top of her head. A sterile kiss. ‘She’s young, that’s all,’ he breathed hot on her scalp. ‘Too young for me.’

Thought no man ever.

Later, that night when she snuck away to take her no baby thank you very much pill and had locked the dressing room door, she stood on her vanity desk chair and carefully removed the overhead vent cover. Up on her tiptoes she reached as far as she could and pulled out the small tin sandwich box she kept hidden there. She calmed a little just running her fingers over the surface.

Why was she feeling the need to look inside? Keisha Keisha Keisha, that was why. Remembering how Jason had looked at her in the water, how desperately eager he’d been to abandon Marcie and jump in to join her, Marcie wanted to kill him. It was what men never understood. The small slights hurt the most. The shift from adoration to feeling comfortable. Taken for granted. Disrespected. She had never wanted that. She didn’t want that. Her blood ran too hot in her veins.

She stared at the box. Her reminder of how far she’d come. Her anchor. Whenever this life she fought so hard for made her feel suffocated, all she needed was to look at the box. Yeah, life wasn’t the perfection she’d hoped for, but things could be a lot, lot worse. She didn’t need to open it to know that the first item, the one that covered all her other memories, was a photo of her and Jason, her arms around his neck, both laughing. Free. Back when they’d first met. When everything was passion and they’d have died for each other. God, how she missed that passion.

Thrill seekers seek thrills and that’s all there is to it.

No, she thought, that’s not true. People can change. People do change. Everything was going to be fine. Marcie and Jason Maddox were meant to be.

Weren’t they?

6

Keisha couldn’t get back to sleep. She wished she could turn off the air conditioning and feel the night heat, which might help soothe away the ants in her brain that were keeping her awake. The worries. The sense of isolation. The anxiety and dark muddled thinking that had plagued her since she was a child, now threatening to return.

Her eyes kept glancing to the corner of the room where the shadows stretched longest. When she’d woken she’d been sure she’d seen him there. A ghostly boy emerging from the gloom, as if he’d followed her from her childhood and her dreams to this place so far away from home. She’d shivered, repeating the words that had been her mantra all her life – there was no boy there was no ghost – until her breathing evened out. The panicky feeling didn’t go away though, lying motionless and awake in the night. Billy wouldn’t sleep with a night light on. He’d laughed at her when she’d asked him. He laughed at her a lot. Or shouted.

Don’t fuck this up, she told herself. Fuck. Billy didn’t like it when she swore and she’d tried hard not to speak like she had at home, where cursing was part of the vernacular. Despite the Egyptian cotton sheets, soft against her naked skin, she was consumed with a longing for home. The traffic noise, the dirt, the tiny flat on the tenth floor of a building where the lift mostly didn’t work. Where the stairwells stank of piss and the corridors were filled with broken old people trying to hold on to their dignity in a changed, uncaring world, while teenagers tried to sell you crack.

Everything was different here, and not just the way of life and the quiet, still nights. In London, her family and all the other girls at the club had laughed at Billy’s pathetic romantic overtures until they realised what he was worth and then it didn’t matter that he was old and fat. Then they’d all made sure his pursuit of Keisha was serious. The dollar signs were lit up bright in everyone she knew.

Think of the money, her Uncle Yahuba had said, eyes flashing sharp with endless greed. Dolly had said the same, teeth gritting with envy and all the other women nodding along. They were hard girls at the club, no goodness in them, grifters, graspers, making hundreds of pounds by night and none of them with the sense to save a penny. Smile, dance and take the money. Drink your way through it. More fool the men.

But Keisha, Keisha with her odd moods and erratic behaviour, had not been like that. The dancing she could do, the feeling of being lost in music under a spotlight, real life forgotten, but not the men, and so she’d become a drinks waitress, her tight clothing staying on, no hands allowed to paw at her. She certainly didn’t do afters, despite knowing she could have made so much more, enough to break free of her uncle’s control perhaps, to pay her family back what they said she owed them for raising her, and then enough left over to run somewhere her awful dreams couldn’t find her.

The air-con clicked and started to hum again, the sound enough to keep her awake without the addition of Billy’s sleeping pig grunts and snuffles beside her.

Her sleeping prince, her hero, she had hit the jackpot with him. Her. Everyone had seen. A rich lonely American widower. She’d have been stupid not to grab at it, and once her uncle and auntie had seen the gifts he’d bought her she’d had no choice. Back then, at the beginning, she hadn’t minded. Billy was kind. He was fragile almost. He was saving her and maybe she could help with his fear of being old. Dying. Rotting away like his first wife. He was a man who had been forced to look in the mirror and realise that time was no longer on his side.

Auntie Ayo had told him there would be no lingering cancer for him, after the long and awkward wedding celebration where Keisha had been forced to take him to Peckham and watch her relatives circling like sharks. They’d both drunk too much to get through it, Auntie Ayo had said he wouldn’t die in his own shit. People believed her, said she had a gift, a knowing – it shone through – and Billy was no exception, although Keisha could see that Auntie Ayo slightly scared him too.

He’d fallen for Keisha harder after that, seeing himself as her knight in shining armour saving her from her wicked relatives. He’d said she was his lucky charm. She made him feel young, as if there was clean new breath in his lungs, and she’d thought a life with Billy, even with everyone else clamouring for her to clean him out, could be good. An escape.

Her past wouldn’t haunt her. Perhaps no more dreams of the boy who was never there, the ghost boy who cursed her. She couldn’t wait to get here. But now she was living it, and everything was different.