Page 45

FORTY-FOUR

I jump to my feet and put my ear to the door.

I can’t quite make out what’s being said at first, but then I catch Tara saying the name “Jonathan Truscott” and I start to panic.

I can hear Amanda warbling; she sounds scared.

I open the door a crack, just in time to see Tara push past Amanda and peer into the living room.

“I know he’s here,” she spits. “Jonathan!”

“I told you,” Amanda says. “I don’t know anyone called Jonathan. There’s nobody here of that name.”

“Look.”

I see Tara show her phone to Amanda.

“This is Jonathan. And this is the man I just watched walk into your home about fifteen minutes ago.”

I see Amanda’s shoulders crumple slightly. “I don’t understand,” she says. “That’s Damian. My husband.”

“Your husband? No. This man is Jonathan Truscott. He’s my husband.”

I know that this is the moment to make my appearance, and I know exactly what to do. I throw open the door and I say, “Amanda, get in the other room. I’ll deal with this.”

Tara looks at me in disgust. “Jesus Christ.”

I bark at Amanda again. “Get in the other room. Now.”

“No,” says Tara. “Stay. You need to see this. You need to see what this man who you think is your husband, but who is actually my husband, was doing this weekend. Look!” She shows her phone to Amanda and I bundle Amanda physically into the living room, but not before I see a photo on Tara’s phone of me and Martha getting out of my car outside our boutique hotel on Friday.

Amanda stands in the living room with wide eyes, her chest heaving up and down, saying, “What the hell is going on? Is this that woman? Shall I call the police? Damian?”

I see Tara roll her eyes. She looks like a meme of a woman of a certain age who has run out of fucks to give. I can tell that she is completely calm, not producing any adrenaline, or at least if she is, her system is handling it like a trouper.

“Yes, Damian ,” she says. “Let’s call the police. That’s a brilliant idea. And I can tell them about the fact that you appear to be a bigamist.”

“A—what?” Amanda’s eyes are wide with shock. She comes to the door of the living room and I push her gently back again. “Who is she?” she asks.

“My name is Tara Truscott,” says Tara, waving her phone toward Amanda. “At least, I thought my name was Tara Truscott. But it turns out that it probably isn’t. That actually I’m probably not even married at all. And neither, probably, are you.”

And then it happens. Something that has never happened to me before.

All my life, I’ve been able to control my responses to stress and threats.

I have a very slick internal switch, or handle, that glides smoothly into gear whenever I feel the fight-or-flight instinct arrive.

I recognize the feeling, and I respond to it with elegance and cool.

But in this moment, where the unthinkable has happened and two heavily compartmentalized parts of my life have collided in this tiny, claustrophobic space, with evidence of a third compartment on Tara’s phone, one person has to be removed from this situation in order for me to think rationally and talk calmly to the other person, and for a moment I want more than anything for that person to be me.

I want to pick up my coat and storm past these two awful women, walk out of the flat, get into my car, and drive and drive and drive until I hit the sea, the edge of the world, whatever.

But I can’t leave, because I need to manage these two women right now before my whole life unravels and I lose Martha.

As all these conflicting and uncomfortable concepts rush through my consciousness, I feel it happen, I suppose what other people might call a red mist, but what I would call a total loss of control, and I hurl myself at Tara and her stupid fucking phone with its stupid fucking photographs.

(How, I think, how on earth did I not know we were being stalked and watched and photographed?

I have such good instincts, finely tuned antennae, for things being wrong, out of place, off .) I grab it from her with one hand and with the other arm slam her against the wall, and I say, “Get out of here, before I do something we’ll both regret. ”

She looks at me with pure hatred and says, “It’s too late, Jonathan—or Damian—or whoever you are . It’s over. You’re done.”

And then I know there’s only one way to stop her talking and that is to stop her breathing, and I press my forearm hard against her esophagus, pushing her throat into the wall.

I feel her hands, her fingers, tugging at the fabric of my shirt, I see the color in her face change from a hot red to a bruised blue, even her eyes change color, and I find myself mesmerized by her face as it fills with blood, her eyes bulge out of their sockets, and I feel a sense of calm swell through me, a dreadful certainty about what I’m doing, which is that I am killing her, and I want to kill her and she deserves it, she really does, but just as the certainty begins to build into a wave of pleasure, I feel her fight back harder, her fingernails have made contact with my flesh, she is kicking me in the shins, she is wriggling and writhing, and I can feel her begin to break out of my hold and I call out to Amanda, “Help me, stop her, now.” And I can feel Amanda falter behind me, sense her breath holding, and then I shout, “Fucking do something, Amanda! Help me, for fuck’s sake! ”

And then Amanda is there in her fleecy shawl, holding Tara’s arms down by her sides, and she’s screaming, “Who is she, Damian? Who is she?”

But I can’t answer because I don’t know what to say, my thoughts are preoccupied with the act of starving Tara’s brain of oxygen and I don’t have the headspace to explain to Amanda what is happening here, and it feels as though it takes another hour, but really it is only a moment or two before Tara finally gives up her fight, a small rattle issues from her defeated lungs, the tendons in her neck soften, her knees buckle, and she falls toward me in a deathly slump.

“Fuck,” I say, cortisol suddenly replacing the adrenaline in my bloodstream, the shock and awe of it pulsing through me, the truth of my actions registering inside my head like a hand grenade going off.

I drop to my knees alongside Tara’s spineless form and Amanda collapses alongside me onto her haunches and we are both breathless and pulsating and wide-eyed and I look at her and she looks at me and she says, “Is she dead?”

I feel around Tara’s dainty wrist, the wrist she used to dab perfume onto before I took her out to dinner, clasp delicate bracelets around, that I would hold tenderly above her head when we were having sex sometimes, and I push my thumb against her pulse and there is none.

I have killed her, I have killed my wife, she is dead and her body sits slumped against the wall next to my other wife, my first wife, who is panting like an overheated dog and staring at me imploringly, waiting for me to answer.

I drop Tara’s wrist and I nod and say, “Yes. Yes, she is.”

“Jesus Christ, Damian. Who is she? Who the fuck is she? What are we going to do?” She sounds like she might cry.

“Don’t,” I say. “Do not cry. It’s fine. It’s OK.

” I pull myself back from my feelings of slight revulsion and make myself be nice to her.

I take her hands and I stroke them soothingly.

“This is the woman I was telling you about. The stalker. The one who stole all my money, who’s been terrorizing me.

For fifteen years, Amanda. Fifteen years.

And I’ve had restraining orders taken out on her and I’ve changed my identity twice and I’ve moved, and I’ve moved, and I’ve moved, and I really thought, Amanda, I really, really thought she wouldn’t find me here, but she did, and I am so, so sorry for putting you in danger like that.

So, so sorry. I can’t believe she found me.

I can’t believe she came here. If only the police had done a proper job.

Damn. ” I yell and thump the floor with my fist. “But nobody takes you seriously when you’re a man, especially not a man like me. ”

Amanda nods, her eyes still wide. “But what are we going to do? What the hell are we going to do with her? Can we call the police? We can say it was self-defense. They’ll have it all on record, will know she was a danger to you?”

“No! God, no, Amanda. Absolutely not. Jesus. I don’t want to go to prison, and I really, really don’t want you to go to prison.

No. No, we have to deal with this. Just us.

Nobody else. OK?” I look deeply into her eyes and squeeze her hands gently and I see her nod, just a fraction, enough to know that she is onside.

“Right,” I tell her. “This is what we’re going to do.”