Beneath her chest, her heart knocks and beats. There is a light fluttering in her throat, as if a wide-open space has opened up in her gullet.
Jake is blushing. He is actually fucking blushing. His eyes are flicking to the left and right and he is unable to look at her. His shirt is untucked, four buttons undone from the neck.
Kate, wild-eyed, is now cross-legged on the sofa in the half-gloom. She stares at Marisa and the way she looks at her feels like a challenge. The light is so dim that Marisa can’t make out the individual features of her face, just the sparkle of her blackened eyes and her lips, blurry and pink, as if something has been pressed against them. As if someone has been kissing her.
Marisa has not moved from the stove. She wonders if she is still, in fact, dreaming. If this is part of a nightmare. Or one of those violent, surreal visions that have been creeping up on her lately. Whatever it is, the truth – if it is indeed the truth – of what might have just happened is too big for her to digest. She will leave it for later, she thinks. She will deal with it then. For now, she just wants things to be normal. To be as they were before she walked down the stairs. After all, she didn’t see anything. She has simply imagined the worst. Yes, she thinks, that’s all that has happened. Her imagination has run away with her. That’s it.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘It’s the only thing I feel like eating.’
Jake walks over to her then, his face beaming.
‘Wonderful,’ he says. ‘Then a baked potato you shall have.’
Kate stays sitting on the sofa. Marisa meets the lodger’s gaze and smiles at her. It is a lethal smile. Kate looks away, and in that single moment she knows.
I’ll fucking destroy you, Marisa thinks. She is still smiling when Kate leaves the room.
10
She starts following her.To begin with, it is almost a joke. Marisa tells herself she’ll do it once, to set her mind at rest, in the same way that you might expect a spurned wife to trail her husband’s suspected lover in a television soap. She is aware of the absurdity of it, and yet this doesn’t stop her on the first day from putting on a beanie hat, pulling it low over her eyes, and wearing a pair of plain glass spectacles and an oversized army jacket bought from a charity shop for just this purpose. She feels swaddled in the anonymity of her new clothes and when she glances at the hallway mirror on the way out, she is satisfied with what she sees. From a distance, it would be hard to make out any distinguishing features.
She listens from the study for the sound of Kate’s footsteps and the click of the front door as the lodger leaves the house. Jake, as ever, has gone to work hours before either of them, so there is no one to ask Marisa what she’s doing as she runs down the stairs and into the street. She spots Kate about 200 metres away, walking briskly towards Vauxhall tube. She waits until Kate gets to the end of the road, turning right through the council estate housing, and then she follows, walking briskly but not too quickly. She trails her across the pedestrian crossing on Fentiman Road and into Vauxhall Park where Kate cuts across the grass. There are building works going on around the children’s playground. Bulldozers hulk over the tarmac like dinosaurs.
At the exit from the park, Kate stops and checks her shoe. Marisa, several paces back, also comes to a halt. She pulls her hat further down over her ears. She is breathing heavily. Excitement twists in her chest. She hasn’t felt this energised in weeks.
They get on the same tube but in different carriages. Marisa sits near the glass so that she can watch where Kate gets off. The intersecting window has been pulled down and she faces the breeze, grateful for its coolness under the warmth of her beanie.
After four stops, Kate stands and holds on to a railing as the tube shudders into the station platform. Oxford Circus. Marisa steps onto the platform, zig-zagging in and out of the crowds, keeping sight of Kate’s bobbing head in the melee. Kate’s hair is shiny and freshly cut and she has tucked it behind one ear and it stays there, obediently, as if advertising itself to be particularly good hair.
Beneath the beanie, Marisa’s forehead is sweating, her hair sticking to her scalp and frizzing at the ends. She hasn’t showered for a couple of days. Kate’s neatness seems an affront.
Marisa stands to the right on the escalator, hunkering down behind a meaty-shouldered man in a high-vis jacket. Kate is standing a few steps ahead of her, but then she decides to walk the rest of the escalator, her hair swishing side to side, reliable as a metronome. Marisa can’t risk walking too. She’ll be noticed immediately if Kate decides to turn around.
Instead, she stays on the escalator, feet planted wide because she notices now that she feels dizzy and off balance. She reaches out a hand, trying and failing to find something solid to cling on to.
‘Are you all right, darling?’
The woman behind her, a grandmotherly type carrying a rumpled Sainsbury’s bag, is looking at her with concern.
‘Yes, fine, thank you so much.’
‘You want to be careful. I remember that stage.’
The woman points at Marisa’s stomach and when she looks down, she realises the pregnancy has started to show. Her jacket has flapped open and her tummy protrudes from the gap: a tiny, swelling mound.
‘Don’t worry. You’ll feel better in the second trimester.’
Marisa tries to smile. They’re at the top of the escalator now and the woman seems intent on making conversation.
‘Thank you, I should …’ She gestures towards the ticket barriers.
‘I used to be a midwife, you see.’
Marisa nods.
‘Oh, how interesting! Well, anyway …’
By the time she has shaken the woman off, Kate is nowhere to be seen. When Marisa emerges into the light of Oxford Circus, she squints and feels a leap of apprehension when she sees the familiar outline of Kate’s trench coat. She has crossed the road onto the other side of Regent Street. Marisa surges forwards, pushing people out of her way to make the crossing before the traffic lights change – ‘Oi, watch it!’ she hears one man shout angrily – but it’s no good. She watches from the kerb as the red turns to green and the cars and buses start streaming past. People crowd around her, jostling for space, and she sees Kate disappear into the busy London morning.
