The Rose Petal Beach Read online

  ‘Did you go to her house and check?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Did you believe her?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  The policewoman’s smile returns. ‘Why indeed?’

  I look down, still worrying at the cuff of my sleeve. More of the sleeve is unravelling. Unravelling. Everything unravelling.

  ‘Overslept. Go without me.’

  is written in large letters in my mind.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mrs Challey,’ Detective Sergeant Harvan says, holding out her hand. ‘That’s all for now.’

  The words of Mirabelle’s last text swim before my eyes. I stand and accept her hand. It is a firm handshake, one that challenges me to show what I am made of – am I wimp or am I strong woman? I return the handshake in the spirit it is given, I am not a wimp.

  ‘I’m sure we don’t have to remind you to stay away from Ms Kemini,’ Harvan says.

  ‘If she is threatened in any way we will be forced to take action,’ Wade adds.

  ‘Why would I threaten her? I know Scott’s innocent.’ That sounds hollow to me, probably sounds even worse to them. ‘I know the truth will come out eventually.’

  ‘You’re right there, Mrs Challey,’ Harvan says.

  ‘But still stay away from her,’ Wade ends.

  Tami

  I am watching the equivalent of hell on film.

  After Harvan’s question, the look on her face as she asked me if I was sure he didn’t masturbate to this stuff, I thought I’d better have a look. After all, I had been equally sure he would be faithful and he had confessed he hadn’t been.

  When I came home and went from room to room, searching for him, but couldn’t find him, I decided this was as good a time as any to take a quick peek: I was in the loft room – the last place I looked for him – so I might as well refute the ridiculous thought that Harvan had planted in my head.

  The folder wasn’t that well hidden, but it had over a hundred sub-folders. And each sub-folder had over a hundred images or video clips.

  I clicked on one movie without a proper title and began this nightmare. I kept choosing random movies, random files, hoping that they would be different, they would be ‘tame’.

  Instead, I am watching the end of my marriage played out on the screen in front of me. This is hell. This is what hell would look like to every woman I know. And it looks real. It feels and plays like what is happening in front of me is not happening to an actress, someone who is performing and will be paid for her trouble, it is actually happening to a woman who looks like an ordinary person. Someone like me. Someone like me is being brutalised, battered, raped on film.

  And my husband has downloaded this ‘film’ so he can watch it whenever he likes. He has downloaded film after film after film of this. The ones I have seen are playing in loop in my head. And it is there: that act, what happened the night of yes that felt like a no. And it is there: what Mirabelle described to me.

  He did it.

  My stomach spikes as it twists painfully and I wrench the cable from the back of the computer, hoping I have fried the hard-drive, fearing I haven’t, before I have to run through the house to the toilet and throw up everything I haven’t eaten. My retching is dry and painful, my stomach almost cut in two with each one, but eventually there is nothing, not even pale, slimy bile, and I collapse on the floor beside the bath. I put a trembling hand to my mouth, and scream into the silent void. It’s over. He did it. They weren’t having an affair, he did it. He tried to rape her.

  Fully clothed, I step into the shower and turn on the water. I want to wash this away too. Like last night, like what I did, I want to remove all this filth clinging to me, I want to feel clean again.

  Tami

  The shaking is getting worse.

  Everything I do, I have to will my body to settle itself so I won’t shake. The horror of what I saw on the computer earlier has lodged an unmoveable ball of nausea firmly in my solar plexus. I have tried making myself sick again, I have tried drinking water, I have tried forcing down food but it is still there. It is embedded behind that smooth, flat piece of skin equidistant from each of my breasts, in front of my spine, cleaving apart the prongs of my ribs.

  The girls are talking ten to the dozen. They have been talking since I pulled together the pieces of myself and collected them from school. It was a burbling I couldn’t decipher, I smiled and nodded in what I hoped were the right places and said, ‘Is it?’ a lot. They might have told me they had visited the moon, but I could not have understood.

  I keep looking around at our house, at the items we own, the knick-knacks and things that we have collected over the years that have slotted together to make our home, and I wonder why? And when? And how?

  How has Scott become the type of man who can do that? Not even the crime, how can he orgasm to moving images – faked or real, I do not know – of women being brutalised? When did he progress to the real thing? Why didn’t I notice? Why, why, why?

  ‘Burble, burble, burble,’ the girls continue at the table behind me. We need to leave. I need to pack up and take the girls. Now. Right.

  I cut the flame that is heating water to cook pasta. I need to be quick. I will pack the bare minimum and when we get to wherever it is we’re going, we can—

  ‘Hello everybody!’ He beams at them and I know with absolute certainty that I have got it wrong: he can’t have done it.

  ‘Hi Dad,’ they say at different times.

  ‘Come on, get ready, I’m taking you all for a slap-up dinner,’ he says. And I know with absolute certainty that I have got it right: he did do it.

  ‘Yeah!’ the girls say as they jump down from their chairs and hurry to get changed.

  ‘They haven’t done their homework,’ I say, trembling, still trembling.

  ‘It’s one time. They can start it when we get back and finish it in the morning.’ He can’t have done it.

  ‘Well, you mind they do, because it’s me who has to deal with any letters home from the Head.’

  ‘They’ll be fine. I was always having letters sent home from the head, never did me any harm.’ He did do it.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Look, Tami, about yesterday—’

  I raise my hand to halt him. ‘I don’t even want to think about it.’ I don’t want to think about whether I had sex with a … ‘I just want to concentrate on the girls. Anything else is not important.’

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ he mumbles.

  ‘No you’re not, you’re only sorry you got caught. Now leave me alone.’ What has he been caught for, though? Cheating or rape?

  I go to leave the room and he grabs my arm. ‘Do you still think I did this thing? Do you still believe I’m a rapist?’

  I tug my arm free. Glaring at him but saying nothing, I leave the room.

  Nearly three years ago

  ‘Are you sick of me, Scott?’ I asked him once the girls were tucked up in bed and, having finished our meal, he was about to head out to the gym.

  Pocketing his mobile, he stopped walking through the door and revolved slowly on the spot to face me. Irritation slithered over his features, answering my question more clearly than his words ever could.

  ‘Why would you ask me something like that?’

  ‘Because …’ My courage failed me. We had barely spoken during dinner, just like every night he was home in time for us to eat together – he seemed to be here but not here. He was busy, he had visitors from America he had to entertain, he had a project that could make the company millions if he pulled it off, his life was away from me. But it’d been like that many times in the past and it hadn’t felt like this. I had to know if it was me that he was sick of, fed up with. If it was me that needed replacing. I wanted to know, but after I asked, I thought of all the things that would end when he answered that question. No more seeing the girls every day, no more ticking the married box on forms, no more financial security, no more house probably because
it’d be hard to keep it going on just my earnings. No more having someone who came home to me. No more looking at the sleeping face of the man I loved and wondering who he had become. The answer would lead to the end, I was sure of that. Was I ready for that?

  ‘Never mind,’ I replied. ‘It’s not important.’ I picked up the salad dressing, the homemade hot pepper sauce and the low-fat mayonnaise from the table and returned them to the fridge. ‘I’ll see you later. Have a good time at the gym.’

  ‘Is this about going to counselling again?’ he asked, his disdain as apparent as daylight.

  I kept my head in the fridge, the air cooling my burning, humiliated skin; tranquillising the raw edges of my nerves. ‘No. It’s nothing. Ignore me.’ Like you often do.

  ‘TB, I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘I’m saying nothing. Nothing at all. I think I need an early night or something.’

  ‘Do you want me to stay home and not go to the gym tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely not. You go. I’ll see you later or tomorrow if I manage to get an early night.’

  Scott did nothing for a few seconds, he seemed to be deciding something. Eventually he came to me, still hiding in the fridge, and pressed his lips against my cheek. ‘You try to get some sleep, OK? Take good care of yourself, you belong to me, don’t forget.’

  My face found a smile but I couldn’t look at him, nor leave the fridge until I heard the front door click shut behind him. After he was gone, I picked up my black Mulberry bag and returned to my place at the table. I had the almost full glass of water I’d poured with my dinner. From my bag I retrieved the white paper pharmacists’ bag. Curling back the top, I took from it the box of citalopram, the antidepressant my doctor had prescribed. I sat staring at it, knowing what I had to do.

  The sadness, the anxiety, the hopeless had to stop. It was no good for the girls, it was no good for me, it was no good if I wanted to rescue my relationship. I couldn’t help but look at the door, seeing the Scott-shaped hole that he’d left when he departed. I was trying to save that all on my own, though, wasn’t I?

  ‘Mama,’ Cora called from upstairs. ‘Mama, I need some water.’

  Stuffing the box and paper bag back in my bag, I decided that tonight wasn’t going to be the night I started these. I’d give it a little while longer and if I still felt like this, if the despair and hollowness continued, I’d take them. I’d claw my way back to normality and then deal with things from there.

  ‘Mama!’

  ‘Coming, Cora, coming.’

  This is my third large glass of wine since we’ve been home, the only thing that will stop the shaking.

  ‘Where were you earlier? I waited and waited to see if you’d come back before I left, but you didn’t.’ Scott asks. His approach has been silent, as if to try to catch me at something.

  Was it this morning I went to see Mirabelle and defended him? Was it this morning I went to the police station and defended him again? I know it was this afternoon that I found out that he likes to watch criminal sexual acts upstairs in our house.

  ‘Tami, where were you?’ Scott asks.

  ‘At the police station,’ I say on the crest of a sigh as I lower the glass from my lips. His eyes alight on the glass but he says nothing. Then his eyes alight on my ring finger. It is missing its ring. I took it off this afternoon. Affair or attack, there was no way I could stay married to him now.

  ‘Why were you at the police station?’ he asks.

  ‘They saw me walking down the road and asked me to come in for a chat. They wanted me to verify your story for the night in question, among other things.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘How could I verify your story when you have no story except she’s out to get you but it’ll all go away so you don’t need a solicitor?’

  ‘Right. Right.’

  ‘But it was super fun to be questioned about our sex life and your porn habit. I think I’m going to ask to have that happen again and again.’

  ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that,’ he says, quietly.

  ‘Are you, are you really? Or is that simply something for you to say in this situation?’

  ‘Tami, if I had known it would turn out like this … I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry.’

  I rest my head back, close my eyes. I would love to feel the sun on my face, I would love for it to warm me up. I would love for it to make me believe that he couldn’t have done this thing, I would love for it to burn away the images my husband’s porn has put into my mind.

  ‘Did they … Did they give you any idea of where they are with their investigation?’

  ‘No, but they seem to be looking at this from all angles. From the way they were acting, I think they may have some proof.’

  ‘How can they have proof when it didn’t happen?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m only telling you what I thought after the conversation.’

  ‘I’m not telling you I have seen that act carried out on one of your films, nor that I know the date now so it could all be verified.’

  ‘Do you think I did it?’ he asks.

  My eyes fly open. I stare up at the ceiling, a bright white that hasn’t been coated with deposits from food condensation.

  ‘Your silence speaks volumes,’ he says after a while, his hurt evident.

  ‘What is it that you want from me, Scott?’ I continue to stare up, to wonder how I can escape into the world up there. ‘The best-case scenario right now is that you were cheating on me. That’s the very best-case scenario.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer the question. Do you think I did it?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think you did it.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do think you did it.’

  ‘Well, at least I know where I stand,’ he says. The sound of wood on tile fills the air as he stands. ‘I didn’t want to do this,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to show you these and I didn’t think I’d have to because you’d believe me. But here. Proof of what I’m saying. Proof that we were … together.’ The clatter of his BlackBerry on the wooden table. ‘They’re in the saved messages folder. I’m sorry for what you’re about to read. It’s not … I’m sorry.’

  He leaves me then. He leaves me alone to go through another life-changing agony.

  7 January 2012

  I love you. I have never loved anyone like I love you. Why can’t you see that? M x

  21 January

  I’m not asking you to leave the three of them behind, I would never ask that of you, I just want more of you. Is that too much to ask? M x

  4 February

  I can still taste you. M x

  7 February

  I can still feel your fingers inside me. M x

  15 February

  I would never look at anyone else. Why can’t you understand that? I’m yours. Always. M x

  15 February

  Always. M x

  25 February

  Please stop saying that. It’s you that I love. It’s you that I want. M x

  1 March

  Of course I want us to be together, but I’m not going to ask you to leave. I’ve left before, it’s a horrible thing to do, I’d never ask another person to do that. Not even you. M x

  3 March

  Do you know what I was thinking about today? Our first kiss. I could actually feel your lips on mine, the way you gently bit my bottom lip. Pleasure and pain, wasn’t that what you said? You’re pure pleasure, no pain. M x

  6 March

  You tasted incredible yesterday. I just wanted you to know that. M x

  9 March

  You’re mine. Don’t care what you say, you’re mine. I’ll fight to keep you. M x

  15 March

  I’ve never been fucked like that before. No one who fucks me like that will ever be out of my life. M x

  20 March

  I know it’s wrong but I can’t help feeling how I do. I know you’re married, but I’m willing to wait. I’d wait a lifetime for you to be ready
to be with me properly. It’ll cause a lot of hurt, and I’m not proud of that, but I love you. M x

  I keep checking back, I keep calling up her number on my phone and it’s hers. It’s hers. She sent these little notelets of love and lust and sex. To Scott. To my husband.

  My husband was having an affair with my best friend. They were in love. She was trying to get him to leave me.

  My best friend was having an affair with my husband. They were in love. He fucked her like she’d never been fucked before.

  My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

  My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

  My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

  My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

  My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

  My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

  I have to keep saying it until I can believe it.

  Tami

  I want to go for a run. I want the unyielding ground beneath my trainer-covered feet as I pound it with all the strength I have in my legs, and I want the wind, usually strong and unforgiving on the seafront, to slam into me, clearing my head and freeing my body.

  I want to feel each knot of anxiety untwisting itself as I run down the streets to the seafront, then run on with the Pier in my sights, then the hills of Rottingdean as my destination and then keep on running to whatever lays beyond. I have only run to the Marina before, then turned back to run the 10km to Shoreham Lighthouse. Today, I want to run and run and not turn back. I want to keep going until my body collapses, until the physical pain erases all the emotional agony that is excavating my heart.

  Instead, I walk around my office, trying to tidy up. My office was once the smallest bedroom on the first floor, but now it is my space. It has a huge noticeboard that takes up one wall, upon which are newspaper cuttings, postcards, images I like, font examples, a timetable and deadlines of work that is to be done and pictures of my family. On my desk are piles of mess: unopened trade magazines, invoices I have produced but not posted, letters – probably some containing cheques – and ordinary post. Things that I have been mentally brushing aside to get through the last few days.