The next few days follow a similar pattern. She gets a little bit further each time. On the third day, she trails Kate to an office block in Soho that has tinted glass and a reception area with a neon sign that spells out ‘Do What You Love’ in aggressively bright blue. By the following week, she has taken to spending the morning sitting in the cafe opposite, a healthy fast-food place that serves baked eggs in cardboard pots and small tubs of hummus. Their straws are paper, ringed red and white like candy canes. She checks her phone, sends the odd email. When she gets bored, she takes out a notebook and starts to write: observations, thoughts, anxieties. She finds the process cathartic. At midday, she waits to see if Kate will come out for lunch, but she never does, and by mid-afternoon, Marisa makes her way back home, dejected.
Her work suffers. A backlog of uncompleted commissions piles up. Jake tells her she seems ‘distracted’ and asks if anything is wrong.
‘Not at all,’ Marisa says. ‘Just, you know. Pregnant.’
The pregnancy becomes her excuse for everything: for early nights to avoid three-way conversations; for not having sex with Jake; for no longer cooking his favourite meals because raw food makes her feel nauseous. In this way, she effectively removes herself from the discomfiting atmosphere of the house when Kate is in it. Jake has been attentive ever since the incident in the kitchen, and she notices that he stands at the opposite end of the room from Kate when she is nearby,giving Marisa frequent reassuring smiles. Kate, by contrast, is quiet and calm in the evenings, reading her book or watching television with the volume turned down.
‘Is it OK if I watch something?’ she will say, settling herself into the kitchen sofa area and Marisa shrugs.
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘I guess I just thought … you know … you might prefer to watch something else,’ Kate will reply, biting the edge of a thumbnail.
‘No.’
‘OK then,’ Kate will say, and there is always something passive-aggressive in her tone, as if it’s Marisa being the unreasonable one.
She watches the interactions between Jake and Kate with morbid fascination. She tells herself she doesn’t want to find any further evidence of their closeness and yet, at the same time, she is compelled to do so. She wants her suspicions proved right, while at the same time knowing that this will undo her. It will smash everything she has ever wanted apart. It will destroy the only relationship she has ever been able to trust. But she keeps returning to it, a freshly formed scab that she starts to pick at with the tip of her fingernail, worrying the edges as if to test the strength of the rust-dried platelets, the web of fragile new skin.
Perhaps I truly did imagine it, she tells herself. After all, it was dark, and she had just woken up. She is making a fuss out of nothing, winding herself up because of all the pregnancy hormones running amok inside her. Her insecurities are heightened. That’s all it is. Of course there’s nothing going on between Jake and Kate.
But then again. There was the incident with the music – the two of them dancing like teenagers just one floor beneath where she was working. There was Kate’s easy intimacy with Jake, that strange possessiveness she’d had from her first moments in the house, the way she assumed this place was hers and had taken up space in it, leaving her belongings scattered around different rooms. She sees Kate brush the back of Jake’s hand as she walks past him in the corridor. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as Kate squeezes his arm when he brings her a cup of tea. They think she doesn’t notice but she does. Marisa lets them believe shedoesn’t suspect. She allows time to pass until she can work out what to do next. She watches. She takes notes. It feels as if she is putting together a case and that, one day, she will be called upon to present it.
At night, she stays up while Jake and Kate go to bed. She says she wants to get ahead with work before the baby comes, but instead she sits at her desk and writes furiously in her notebook. ‘I think he’s having an affair with Kate,’ she writes, over and over again on a single page until the paper is dense with scrawling and she feels better for having stated it so plainly. The idea, in its transference, has lost some of its power to hurt her.
During the third week of trailing Kate to work, there is an unexpected burst of sunshine. By the time she gets to Oxford Circus, Marisa is so hot that she takes off her beanie, sweeping back her hair so that it sits smooth against her scalp. She unbuttons the army jacket and ties it around her waist. Kate, as usual, has got off the tube before her. Marisa watches her walk up the escalator. She waits on the side as usual because she knows, by now, that this gives her just enough time to catch sight of Kate before she leaves the station.
At the top of the escalator, Marisa steps onto the concourse. She walks towards the barriers, fumbling in her bag for her phone when someone grabs her by the arm, twisting it with such force that she spins on her heel and yelps with pain.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ she says, trying to shake herself free. When she lifts her head, she sees Kate, inches away from her face.
‘Why are you following me?’ Kate is saying, her mouth so close that Marisa feels spittle against her cheeks. Her breath is warm and smells of coffee. ‘Why the fuck are you following me?’
Marisa is too shocked to think. She has become so used to her routine that she has forgotten to justify it to herself, let alone Kate. She has nothing to say to her, no way to explain.
‘I want you tostop, do you understand?’ Kate’s eyes are blazing, the skin around her lips puckered with anger. Kate is still gripping her arm, fingers pressing into the tender flesh above her wrist so tightly that Marisa imagines bruises beginning to form: pink then bluish then purple indentations.
‘It’senough.’
Acid rises in Marisa’s throat. She could see now how easy it would be to make it seem that she was the one overstepping boundaries rather than Kate. It was another trap, and there was no way out of it.
‘Yes, OK, yes,’ Marisa says quietly. ‘Sorry.’
‘You’re lucky I haven’t called the police.’
‘Please don’t do that.’
Kate lets her hand drop. Marisa shakes her arm, letting the blood back in. When she looks back up, she sees that Kate’s face has softened. Her eyelids are powdered dark brown with shadow at the corners and she has perfectly applied kohl and mascara that is smooth of any clumps. Kate isn’t wearing lipstick. This morning, Marisa slicked her mouth with gloss and now strands of her hair are sticking to it. In comparison to Kate’s distilled, distant elegance, Marisa feels stupid and lumpen. The baby is heavy in her belly, twisting her own self out of shape.
‘Please don’t tell Jake,’ Marisa whispers, blinking back tears she had not known were there. Her voice constricts. She sounds whispering and pathetic.
Kate sighs. Behind her, a uniformed man collecting for a military charity rattles his collection tin. The sound jangles, indistinguishable from the noise in Marisa’s head.
‘I won’t,’ Kate says, belting up her coat. She brushes down the coat fabric with the palm of each hand, as if ridding herself of dust. As if ridding herself of me, thinks Marisa. ‘I wouldn’t want to bother him with it.’
Marisa bites her cheek until she tastes blood. Tears are replaced with fire in her veins. Fury draws itself back within her, a tightening sling ready to slam its shot into target. She nods, then turns and goes back down the escalator, unsure whether her anger or her humiliation will win out.
But by the time she gets onto the tube, she knows. Anger.
