There are hundreds of messages. She scrolls back and back and back to see where they start, but the screen keeps offering to ‘load more’. Her heart collapses in on itself. Her chest empties.
‘I love you,’ Kate wrote on 2 June. That would have been a few weeks after she moved in, Marisa calculates. But the messages go back far longer. They already knew each other. This whole thing – pretending she was a tenant; telling Marisa they could no longer afford the rent without outside help – has been a sham. She has been set up. Jake has exploited her unquestioning love for him to move his mistress in. How could she have been so stupid?
Her throat fills with a metallic taste. She swallows, then gags. She hasn’t eaten for hours, maybe even days, who knows, who fuckingcares? The dry heave of her stomach does not release anything. She covers her mouth with her hand, keeping it all in, tamping down the fear like coffee grounds in a filter.
‘Baby I can’t stop thinking about you,’ Jake had written on 15 July. ‘Wear that lingerie tonight.’ He’d signed off with a winking face and an aubergine emoji.
‘Haha OK but what about Marisa?’
‘We’ll find a way.’ Another winking face emoji.
‘Just want to make sure she’s OK.’
‘She’s fine,’ Jake had typed. ‘Trust me. We don’t need to worry.’
It was so cliched, that was the worst part. She had thought more of Jake. She had believed him to be different: honest, plain-spoken, straightforward. Not passionate, but dependable. It turns out that she doesn’t know Jake at all, this man she is supposedly in love with. It turns out he is an overgrown adolescent schoolboy in the throes of illicit passion and that he communicates with crude sexual innuendo and emojis. It turns out he has been patronising Marisa, in the foulest way possible. He has been treating her like a fool because she has been acting like one, blinkered and uncomprehending, as he continues shagging their lodger. All this time, Marisa has thought he was buttoned-up and emotionally distant but undeniably in love with her – she is pregnant with his child! It’s everything he said he wanted. But now there is a clattering realisation that his detachment is not a sign of steadiness or integrity; it’s because he has been deceiving her for months. Maybe even from the moment they met.
What was the point of it? To show that it can be done? To use her as a brood mare while he gets his kicks elsewhere? Perhaps he is a psychopath – she read a book about them once and knows that one of the signifying factors is a lack of empathy and glib, superficial charm. That’s Jake. She believed he was so deep. But he is a hologram of a person. A fake. A fraud. A phoney who doesn’t care who he hurts.
Her wrist is aching. When she looks down, she sees she has been scratching at it with the fingernails of her other hand and has drawn blood. Automatically, she stands and goes to the cupboard underneath the sink where there is a box of tissues. She presses a tissue to her wrist.Red-brown dots appear through the white. At the sight of her own blood, Marisa feels a pure, violent rage. In front of her is a fruit bowl containing four lemons, the ceramic painted and intricately patterned. It was brought back from one of Jake’s backpacking trips to Morocco as a student and she knows he adores it because it makes him feel young.
Without thinking, she lifts the bowl and throws it towards the opposite wall. The lemons fly out and bounce on the floor. The ceramic slams and breaks, making a noise like a scream but then she realises the scream is coming from her. She is shouting, but there are no words. She screams, clutching her distended belly, feeling the imagined weight of her pregnancy against her hands, and then she screams again, until her throat is ragged with the effort of it, until all she can hear is the ringing of her grief in her own ears. Grief for the love she so foolishly believed in. Grief for the child she is carrying who will not now be born into the embrace of two loving parents. Grief for her own ridiculousness in believing she was worthy of Jake’s love, in believing any of it. She understands it now – the lesson that life has been trying to teach her. It is that she will never be enough. The world is laughing at her for thinking, however briefly, that she might be.
‘You fucking cunt!’ she screams, drawing out the vowels of the final bleak syllable so that it becomes a caterwauling echo of the original sound. She doesn’t know, when she screams it, whether the word refers to her or to Jake or to Kate.
Marisa leaves the shards of the fruit bowl scattered on the black floor. She remembers the first time she saw this kitchen and how impressed she was by the largeness of it. She was cowed by its grown-up beauty: the sleek surfaces, the matt-painted floorboards, the dishwasher that you knocked on twice, sharply, to open the door. Now it looks unreal, like a bad dream. The room is taunting her. The walls are closing in on her fevered thoughts, squashing them into a tiny, painful cube. A sharp bolting headache grips her temples. The cookery books, stacked neatly on shelves by the cooker, are spilling out their distaste for her. The wine glasses in the cupboard, bulbous and sparkling, are clinking their congratulations for having tricked her. And outside, thetall council estate stairwell is looming ever larger, blotting out the slivers of her internal light – those popping pixellations of hope studded against the darkness of her mind, each one extinguishing itself as the blackness leaks into her thoughts. Who was she to have hope? Who was she to believe that life was on her side?
She exhales, unclenches her fists and counts to ten.
‘When I get angry or upset or I think no one is listening to me, I count to ten,’ her mother once told her. Marisa, who must have been five or six, was lying on her bed, breathing heavily with hot cheeks. ‘Try it, darling.’
She imagines her mother now as she counts – six, seven, eight – and as she pictures her face, undimmed by age in her memory, she becomes calmer.
She returns to the laptop open on the table. Her fury has been replaced by disconnection. Her actions are now governed by a shocked coolness, and she finds she can examine the texts more dispassionately, almost as objects of historic curiosity.
‘Did you see her this morning?’
Kate’s last text, hanging in the ether. And then: three dots, appearing one after the other in quick succession. Jake is typing.
‘No. She was in her room. Didn’t want to disturb. x’
Even when he’s being unfaithful, Jake is particular about his full stops and grammatical sensibility.
Then: three more dots, shimmying across the screen like a caterpillar. Jake is typing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jake texts. ‘It’s all going to be fine. And soon we’ll be a proper family. Love you xxxxx’
She feels sick. So this isn’t just a fling. Clearly Jake and Kate are planning for the future as a ‘proper family’. But how, exactly? She’s the one pregnant with his child … unless … no … the thought was too vicious. They couldn’t be thinking … could they …?
‘Can’t wait,’ Kate replies. ‘Love you too x’
Unless … they were planning to wait until Marisa had given birth and then get rid of her? They wouldn’t. It would be too cruel. After everything she has told Jake about feeling abandoned by her ownmother, the idea that he could willingly enact the same on their unborn child makes her want to rip off his scalp. What a callous fucking bastard.
Think. She has to think. Think, Marisa. Think, think, think.
But again and again, she keeps being drawn back to the text messages.
5 July
