He was heading for the outer office, thinking he ought to show willing and actually do some work, when his phone rang again.
Karla.
Swallowing back his now almost overwhelming guilt, Jason picked up.
‘Do you love her?’ she asked immediately, sounding tearful. ‘Jessie, do you love her?’
Jason stumbled over his answer.
‘Are you going to tell me it’s not what I think it is?’ Karla went on, before he could formulate any sensible thought.
‘No,’ he said, no idea what else to say. ‘I…’
‘I want you to tell me it’s not what I think. You have to!’ Karla cried forcefully. ‘Youcan’tlove her. You love me!’
Thirty-Nine
KARLA
The rain is relentless, drumming bullet-like off the pavement, icy daggers slicing into my clothes and wetting me through to my skin. My body is shaking. It’s uncontrollable. My stomach lurches as I heave. I’m not sure what happened. One minute I was drinking, dancing, in another place, happy, bubbly me. The next I was crying as the walls tilted and the world seemed to close in on me. I tried to stay calm, inhaling deeply, exhaling slowly. It didn’t help. My legs almost buckled beneath me as I blundered, disorientated, to the exit. Now I am bent over in the street, wearing a body-con dress that clings to my flesh and shows too much of my thin body, and I am so sick, so very sick. This time, I know I am in deep trouble. The rotating blue light that skims the shop window beside me confirms it.
The police are patient, though their despair is thinly veiled. The female police officer who assists me into the patrol car and seats herself next to me seems particularly unimpressed. ‘Would you like to repeat that again, sweetheart?’ she says, clearly struggling to understand my gabbled explanations as to why I’m wandering the streets in the dead of night, vomiting into the gutter. ‘But a little bit more slowly this time, hey?’
I take a tremulous breath and try to articulate, desperately try to quash the queasiness rising inside me. She thinks I’ve taken drugs. I know she does. I can see the accusation in her eyes. But I haven’t.I think it was the last drink I had, which I left unguarded on the bar. But I can’t be sure. I can’t remember whether I drank it, or how many drinks I had. I can’t think. I can’t remember.
I don’t want to remember. I wish I could disappear into the dark, friendless night. That the rain would wash me away.
‘Karla?’ she prompts me, as another shudder shakes through me.
‘My father, he’s driving my husband away.’ I try again to explain: why I’m here; why I’ve drunk so much; why I’m upset. Inside my head, I can hear myself saying it, but the words emerge from my mouth in a hiccupping, unintelligible slur. ‘He’s destroyed my marriage.’ I try harder, grope for some coherence. ‘He’s stealing my children!’
‘Who is, my lovely?’ the officer asks, concern in her voice as she reaches to stop me attempting to open the car door, which refuses to budge.
‘My husband,’ I mumble, wrapping my arms tight around my midriff, trying to still the incessant shaking that seems to be rattling my body down to my bones.
‘He’s a bit of a git then, is he?’ she says, taking hold of my shoulders and steering me towards her, peering narrowly at me.
‘I won’t let him.’ I attempt to focus, but her eyes, her nose, her features all blend into one, and there is wet cotton wool in my head, and my own eyes are so heavy. So very heavy.
‘Don’t blame you, sweetheart,’ she says, now sounding definitely unimpressed. ‘Station or accident and emergency?’ I hear her ask her partner, as if through a tunnel.
‘The latter. Why not fill A & E with bloody drunks?’ he mutters moodily. And my chest constricts as I drag another ragged breath in, try to stop the fresh tears erupting – tears of shame, pathetic self-pity and anger.
Forty
DIANA
Noting that Karla still looked deathly pale when she went in to check on her, Diana’s heart ached. It had almost splintered inside her when Karla had rung in the middle of the night from the hospital. She’d sounded so distraught; Diana had been terrified of what she might find when she got there.
Seeing her stir at last, she walked across to her. ‘Feeling better?’ She smiled, smoothing Karla’s fringe gently from her forehead as she lowered herself to sit on the edge of the bed.
‘Much.’ Karla nodded and attempted to lever herself up.
Diana moved to help her. She didn’t look better. If anything, she looked utterly exhausted, and so young and vulnerable, suddenly, that she could almost be the child who’d lain in this same bed twenty-five years back, not eating, unresponsive and unsmiling. She’d gone into herself after they lost Sarah, hardly talking for several weeks. In her sleep she would talk, cry out, her voice filled with anguish as she called Sarah’s name. In her nightmares, Karla relived the horror of the bleak morning she’d discovered her sister lying dead, over and over. All Diana had been able to do was rock her gently back to sleep, try to softly reassure her, be there for her; hope that, even if she could never forget it, she would come through it. That she would eventually stop blaming herself. And Karla had come through it. Diana had been proud of the way her girl had pulled herself up, determined to live life to the full and make something of herself.
When she’d first brought Jason home, confided she was pregnant by him, that she was in love with him and that they intended to have the baby and marry, Diana had worried for her. She’d hardly been able to sleep. Seeing that she’d found someone who quite clearly loved her back, who cared for her, someone who could make her smile again, she’d buried her worries. She’d thwarted Robert’s attempts to interfere, and prayed that things would work out for them; that her daughter’s marriage would be a better one than hers – a happy one, filled with love and, importantly, trust. And now this. Her marriage destroyed. Her confidence and belief in herself shattered, thanks to Robert, a man who imagined he was so important he was infallible, untouchable; that he wouldn’t reap what he sowed. He would. If Diana hadn’t achieved much in her own life, she was determined to succeed in one thing, and that was to ensure Robert’s abominable behaviour caught up with him.
‘Thanks, Mum.’ Leaning back, Karla smiled sadly. ‘For everything, I mean, as well as coming to collect me. I didn’t know who else to call.’
