Long Lies the Shadow (19 page)
Read Long Lies the Shadow Online
Authors: Gerda Pearce
It is a sunny afternoon and the clothes will dry quickly. Viv packs another load into the washing machine and takes the basket out to the line, starts to peg up the clothes. Through the slits in the back fence she can see the neighbours’ children playing, kicking a ball, chasing each other emitting high shrieks of laughter. Her neighbour emerges onto her back step, calls to one of the children. As they go inside, the woman turns, sees Viv, and waves. Viv grits her teeth and waves back. She hangs up Kayleigh’s favourite striped shirt. She ought to get over her resentment of the woman. After all, it wasn’t the woman’s fault she had witnessed the fights, heard the arguments.
“Does he drink?” The woman’s brown eyes were full of concern, full of pity.
Viv hated her. Why had she arrived home then, and seen it all through the gap in the fence? If he drank, maybe they could understand. Maybe Viv herself could understand.
“No, I’ll be fine, thanks.” She could feel her face flush with shame.
He had not stayed out long. He stood at the door, sheepish, lost. Jonnie was always irresistible. She reached out her hand to him and he came to her, buried his face in her neck.
“I’m so sorry, Viv. I didn’t mean it to get out of control.”
She had heard it all before.
Viv hangs up the final two pieces of clothing and goes back inside. She blames last night’s dream for her reminiscence. She had spent the
night with Nick, beneath cool sheets, the windows open to the warm summer air, but she had dreamed she was still married to Jonnie.
They had moved into a new house, with no lawn. The house was one of the new-build developments, everything shining and pristine. The lawns, although laid, had yet to grow, and the house was surrounded by bare earth. Rich and brown, but bare. She had gone walking into a forest, green and shaded. The path disappeared and she found herself walking on sticks and leaves. They crunched underfoot and suddenly with horror she had realised she was walking, not on undergrowth, but bones. Human bones. Looking down, she had recognised them. Gabe’s rib, Gabe’s spine, Gabe’s skull. She woke, heart pounding, the horror sublimating to gratitude. I am awake, I am here, there is no forest, no bones. It is morning.
Viv dumps the laundry basket on top of the machine, goes into the kitchen. She will have to go shopping again. Her teenagers are like locusts, but she is grateful they are healthy and, she reckons, well-adjusted, despite the awfulness of her marriage to Jonnie. But they’d been so young, she tells herself, and she’d hidden it well. And besides, it hadn’t always been awful.
Gin had taken her in, given her somewhere to stay, and Viv realised, something to live for. Her world had died with Gabe. She was so alone, with Gabe’s child to care for. She hated people’s pity. Gin had not pitied her. Gin had lost him too. Instead they had laughed a lot together. They had given each other an odd sort of courage. Things she would not have done on her own, Viv found she could do with Gin. Chores that were overwhelming became bearable. She was healing. And then, one night, Gin had brought Jonnie home. It was the first time she had met the man Gin was clearly in love with. Viv sat across the table from him, this enigmatic stranger. And then, he had looked at her.
She could not have described the look, other than to say it had gone right through her, like an X-ray to the white opacity of her bones. It was a look that said: I know you, I know who you are, and what you are, and what is more, I know exactly what it is you want. And I can give it to you.
Viv opens cupboards, noting what is needed, makes her list for the supermarket. She had never wanted to hurt Gin but she had
forgotten
everything. Forgotten Gin, even Abbie. And for some
terrible
moments, she had even forgotten Gabe. Mostly when she and Jonnie were making love.
She will go later to the supermarket, she decides, and tries to settle to some work, but finds her attempt fractured constantly by memories of Jonnie. She cannot let it go today. She puts her head in her hands, gives herself up to her thoughts. They had become a somewhat celebrated couple, in the last throes of the old
government
, others eager to affiliate themselves with the dashing Indian doctor and his pretty white wife. She used to see the other wives looking at him, at her, envying her. She used to wonder which of them had fucked him.
She slumped in the chair, her thin red dress no defence against the glacial shock. Thinking about it then, it was almost laughable, the inevitability of it. She had not seen it, had dismissed the late nights he said he was working. She had dismissed Leila’s mild comments that all the nurses fell for Jonnie. Now the odd phone calls, the short conversations, made sense. How clichéd, she thought, that she would find it in his jacket pocket.
Viv shakes herself. His affairs had hurt as much as the beatings, if not more. Prison had changed him. The anger, the violence, had stemmed from that. Which is why she had let it go on for so long,
she understands this now. Had forgiven him, over and over, because of what he had been through. She had even initiated sex after the fights, something it had been hard to understand in herself. In the end, it had felt less shameful for her to cite his violence rather than his infidelity as reason for the divorce.
The sun has dipped below the mountain. Her work has been a write-off. She might as well go to the supermarket now. Viv sorts her files, leaves a note for the girls, picks up her keys. She is on her way out of the door when the phone rings. It is Nick.
“I’m about to go to Pick and Pay,” she tells him.
He will meet her there, he says.
They walk at a leisurely pace down each aisle, talking and
laughing
. He puts food in the trolley that she has to take out, knowing the girls will wrinkle their noses at it in distaste. When it is piled with all the essentials she needs, she heads for the queue. There are not enough cashiers and each line distends with people.
Nick has forgotten something. “Back in a sec,” he heads down one aisle.
Viv, bored, looks around. A familiar face is studying a rack of magazines. She hesitates. She has not seen Leila for some time. Friends were split in the divorce, and although she and Leila had tried for a while, the woman had been Jonnie’s friend foremost, and it had petered out. Viv feels she ought to greet her now, but the supermarket is crowded and she will have to relinquish her place in the queue. Nick is nowhere to be seen. Mostly, she is not sure what to say. Perhaps Leila will not notice her. Guilt wins, and Viv pushes her trolley over to where the woman stands, a half-filled basket slung around her forearm.
“Leila?” she says, peering at her face.
Leila looks up. “Viv! How are you?”
Her voice is the same husky honey, she wears the same lilac
lipstick
, but something has changed about her. Leila’s eyes, once so
alluring, appear apathetic and unfocused, and circled by heavy rings. Her hair, once lustrous, seems thinner, almost unkempt. And Viv detects a nervousness in her demeanour. The woman’s free hand plays with her hair. Maybe, thinks Viv, she has as little to say to me as I to her. Yet they spend some minutes catching up. Viv fills her in on the girls. Yes, says Leila, she is still at the hospital, still living in Steenberg. They avoid the subject of Jonnie.
“Well,” says Viv, at a loss for anything further to talk about, “it was lovely to see you again.”
“Yes,” agrees Leila, but there is no liveliness to her tone. Again, the nervy touch of her hair. Perhaps she is aware of her own dulled appearance.
Leila, the exotic flower, has wilted. Leila, whose many kindnesses to her when she was pregnant, when Jonnie was in prison, had helped alleviate Viv’s loneliness. The memory fills her with an
unexpected
rush of warmth and she asks, with genuine concern, “Leila, are you okay?”
Leila’s eyes widen briefly, then narrow again. She seems to shrivel. In a voice that is devoid of feeling, she asks, pronouncing each word alone, the briefest of pauses between, “Why. Do. You. Ask.”
Viv regrets her question. She was about to explain that Leila looks ill to her, but changes her mind at the coldness of Leila’s tone. “You look… tired,” she manages.
Leila’s eyes drop away. Again, the jittery fiddle with her hair. “I’ve not been sleeping well,” she offers. Her eyes flit up to Viv’s, and then away over Viv’s shoulder. Her expression changes. The woman’s face twists in a kind of terror, so much so that Viv looks around to follow her gaze.
Nick is standing in the aisle, not looking at them, but at the shelves. It cannot be Nick, thinks Viv, what motive would Leila have to look at him with such loathing? If he were in uniform, perhaps it might make sense, the leftover dislike for the police. There are three
other people in the aisle so it must be one of them or something else, she reasons.
She turns back, “Leila,” she asks again, gently, “Are you okay?”
“I have to go. Bye.” Leila moves away quickly.
Viv, too taken aback to speak, can only watch as Leila scurries away, dropping her half-filled basket near the exit as she leaves the supermarket.
How odd, thinks Viv, how very odd.
Isaac phones and leaves a message, a number where he can be reached. He would very much like to see her again, says the machine, and adds after a pause, “And Ellie.”
Gin cannot bring herself to phone him, and she deletes the message. She cannot face it, cannot face Isaac, and talk about Simon. Not now, not after what Jonnie had told her.
The inevitable post-mortem had followed.
“What the hell was that all about?” Jonnie, as expected, had demanded once Isaac had taken his leave.
Gin, out of politeness, had asked Isaac to stay for a drink but he had demurred, apologetic. He was, he said, meeting old friends for supper. She suspected that but for Jonnie, he might have accepted. She was thankful. She did not want to talk about Simon.
But then she had to face Jonnie and his ire.
Eyes downcast, she had to apologise. For putting him on the spot. For the lie. She felt she ought to explain further, but she was still digesting the fact that Jonnie had known Simon, that Simon had known Jonnie, and before she had known either of them.
“Tell me,” Jonnie asked, “Simon was Ellie’s father, was he not?”
Gin nodded glumly, her throat too thick to form the words.
His voice had risen, he had pointed at the door. “Then why must that old man go away, not knowing his granddaughter?”
She found her voice along with the reason. “Simon is – was – married.”
“I see.”
But from the way he said it, she knew he was wondering what
difference
it would make. She could not explain it all to him, the need to protect Simon’s family from the truth. What could she have said, that they had been through enough, that surely her affair with Simon, the existence of Ellie, would make it worse for them, not better? They had lost him and, she reasoned, having had more of him would mean their loss was more than hers. And besides, she thought finally: Ellie is mine. All mine. Mine alone. I will not share her, the way I always shared Simon. Even, it seemed, with Jonnie.
“You knew him.” She tried for it not to sound accusatory, and failed. She fiddled with the edge of her sleeve. She wanted then to talk about Simon, wanted to know every exchange between them. It came upon her like a thirst.
Jonnie was silent for minutes. “Yes,” he said finally, but with a
harshness
that unnerved her. As if the day had not been unsettling enough. “Yes,” he repeated, “I knew Simon Gold all right. I’m sorry, Gin. I know he was Ellie’s father and I know you must have loved him,” here he paused before adding angrily, “but the man was an absolute bastard.”
She still cannot believe what Jonnie had told her. Not Simon. A traitor. He must have had his reasons. The man Simon whom she had known and loved would have had his reasons.
But had she known him? There is so much about his life she did not know. His life, before and after her. Detective Retief had said Simon had taken antidepressants, had seen a psychiatrist. His life after her she had accepted, but his life before her? He had told her about Leila, some of it. She shakes her head. No, she
knew
Simon. Simon was Simon, and she had loved him for it. She wants to cry.
That day, and its turn of events, had its effect on her and Jonnie. She does not see him for a month. Christmas arrives and leaves, and New Year is spent alone with Ellie, and a muted television
programme
. Ellie becomes alternately fretful and lethargic. She seems
less interested in feeding, but she does not seem feverish, or ill. Gin cannot sleep. She lies awake, listening for any sound from her daughter. If anything, Ellie is even quieter. Gin gets up often to check on her. Sometimes Ellie lies so still that Gin shakes her gently; even then Ellie does not cry, only grumbles. She looks at Gin with doleful eyes, and Gin feels irritable. Surely a child that young could not miss someone so, enough to pine. Gin can barely acknowledge that she herself has missed Jonnie.
He knocks one morning in January, brings a draught of cold air inside with him. Not entirely from the weather, Gin decides.
He sweeps past her to Ellie, picks her up. Then he turns to her. “Gin, are you feeding this child enough? Do you have enough milk?”
He asks this roughly and Gin is at once astonished and offended. But then she realises that Jonnie is paying her scant attention. He is entirely focused on Ellie.
“Yes,” she says, moving to stand next to him. “Why? What do you mean?”
He looks at her, a frown furrowing his brow. His fingers edge along Ellie’s forearms, first one and then the other. He pulls her blanket aside, and examines each of her legs in the same intense manner.
“What, Jonnie? What is it? Tell me.”
His frown deepens,
“Tell me, Jonnie! What’s wrong?” Panic sets her voice high. “You’re making me worried.”
Jonnie’s face is serious, his tone concerned. “I think she’s losing muscle, Gin. I’m going to have to admit her for more tests.”