Dead To Me - [28]

‘In your dreams, matey.’

‘A bit more?’ He nodded at the chocolate.

‘No. You’ll be sick.’

‘Har har.’

‘Want me to test you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Gonna watch Peep Show.’

‘You start.’

They shared a love of good comedy and there wasn’t much else they watched together. Sammy liked extreme sports and adventure stuff. Gill’s guilty pleasure was costume drama. Something a million miles away from work, that she could deride and poke fun at, but that felt cosy, comforting, the televisual equivalent of hot chocolate. She heard Sammy laughing from the other room. He was a good kid.

Three years since she and Dave split up. Sammy wasn’t doing so bad, but Gill still couldn’t tell whether he was putting a brave face on things for her sake. She had done her best not to slag Dave off in front of Sammy, always referring to him in a civilized tone, but the boy wasn’t a fool, he knew Dave had wrecked the marriage, that it was Dave who had been shagging around and who now lived across town with the uniform from Pendlebury. Sammy had been hurt; he missed his dad, although recently they had got into the routine of weekend visits together.

It was Janet who Gill had turned to for help in the wake of walking in on Dave and said uniform. Her own house, her own bed, her own so-called husband, arse in the air, blonde bimbo with a fake tan, cooing, ‘Ooh, Dave, ooh, Dave!’ as Gill stood there, sick, seething.

There had been a vase of lilies on the dressing table: big, white, waxy flowers, a heavy, thick glass vase. Gill had grabbed it, hurled with all her might before escaping downstairs and out of the house. Beside herself with fury and the pain. To tell Janet. To get drunk.

‘I can’t sling him out,’ Gill had said to Janet. ‘I’m back in Grimsby on Monday on the dock job – nearly done but I can’t blob now.’ A double murder, body parts recovered from tea chests on the dockside. North Yorkshire force had got nowhere in nine long months so asked the crime faculty for input.

‘The packing case?’ Janet said.

‘Hah!’ Gill laughed at the pun. Thinking: How can I laugh? How is it possible to laugh? Why is something still functioning when I feel so broken? ‘He’ll have to look after Sammy. But I can’t stay with him, not in the long run. I won’t.’

‘Have you talked to him?’ Janet said.

‘No.’ Gill shook her head. ‘I can’t look at him, can’t bear the sight of him.’

‘You have to talk to him,’ Janet said.

‘I know. She can’t be more than twenty-five, the whore.’ Gill groaned: ‘I feel such a fool.’

‘You’re not.’

Gill pressed her hands to her temples. Took a breath, exhaled slowly. ‘I knew.’

‘What?’ Janet had peered at her, surprised.

‘Maybe not name, rank and badge number, but… the flirting… the charm offensive. Easy to pretend that’s all it was, but-’ She thought of all the moments, little jarring moments, like missteps in a dream. Over the years, so many glances from Dave to… well, pick a woman, any woman. Then there were those occasional phone calls: Is Dave there? Her thinking, and who the fuck are you? Smelling deceit, but playing the game. Years of lies about where he’d been or who he’d seen. With Gill traipsing around the country, he had free rein. ‘You remember when I started at the faculty? Ten years ago. I thought he was having an affair then. Sammy was four at the time. I came back for the weekend and Dave had changed the sheets?’

‘You thought the nanny had done it,’ Janet said.

‘That’s right, thanked her, not part of her job. She hadn’t. I couldn’t let it go. He swore there was nothing going on. Then he got the hump. Slung his phone at me, diary, the lot. ‘Look at it,’ he said, ‘all of it.’ And I didn’t. I chose to believe him. I didn’t want to know, Janet.’

Janet nodded, a wry smile on her face.

‘Same way I’ve tuned out the gossip over the years. Little snippets. Bastard! In our bed! In our house!’ She wanted to punch something. Rip up his clothes, batter his car with a sledgehammer, superglue his cock to his arse, cut off his balls and post them to Pendlebury. She wanted to weep. ‘Did you know?’

‘That he was having an affair? No,’ Janet said.

‘Affairs plural,’ Gill asked. ‘You knew he was putting it about?’

Janet paused. Gill trusted her to be honest, they’d been through too much together not to be. ‘Like you say, there were rumours,’ Janet said.

‘But you never came to me. You didn’t think I should know?’ Gill asked her, anxious now, fearful of losing Janet, too. Of feeling betrayed by everyone that mattered.

‘They were rumours, Gill. If there had ever been something concrete staring me in the face, then I would have told you. Of course I would.’

Gill nodded, relieved. But the anger and the sense of humiliation flooded back through her. ‘I can just imagine it when word gets out.’ She dragged a hand through her hair. ‘All the clichés. I’m a walking fucking cliché. Wifey the last to know. Cat’s away and the mice – fuck!’

‘You’ll be all right. It doesn’t feel that way now, but you will.’

‘I hope she gives him herpes. I hope they get scabies too, and that everything they touch turns to shit. This is killing me. I can’t do it. It’ll kill me.’ She caught the twinkle in Janet’s eyes, saw Janet fighting not to laugh. Gill punched her in the arm. ‘I’m allowed to be melodramatic,’ she said. ‘If ever there was a time for melodrama, this is it.’