Pompomberry House (31 page)

How strange, neither Dawn nor Montgomery could write a
believable murder novel between them, yet their orchestrated death of Biff had
been entirely convincing.

“Talk me through it again,” I urged Biff. “You pretended to
die, and you were only allowed to let Dawn and Montgomery know that you weren’t
really dead. Then you left the island on a boat and Annabel, Rafe and Danger
were there.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“At what point did they find out that you were still alive?
Rafe seemed very convincing when he was running around the island looking for
your killer.”

“I was very touched. Particularly when you started yelling.”
He smiled a little smile, and winked with one of his bright eyes.

“This isn’t funny!”

“I’m not laughing! I
was
really touched!”

“Why would Dawn and Montgomery pay you ten thousand pounds
to pretend to die, only to reveal the hoax to virtually everybody right
afterwards.”

“Virtually everybody isn’t everybody though, is it?”

“Everybody except me.” Prickles began to infest my body. Why
was I any different? “Do you think this was about tricking
me
?”

“I don’t know.”

It was too much to take in. First Biff wasn’t really dead,
then I’d found out that Dawn and Montgomery had paid him, and now I’d found out
that everybody besides me knew about it. Was this all about fooling me? Had
those two monsters paid ten thousand pounds just to make a fool out of me?

What possible advantage could there be in making me believe
that a handyman was dead? None of it made any sense. I needed to talk it over
with somebody smart. I needed to talk it over with Gareth.

Suddenly, I had a moment of clarity. I looked at the man
opposite me — arguably one of the most beautiful men ever carved by God — yet
he wasn’t the one I wanted to spend my evening with. And it wasn’t just about
needing answers. Gareth gave me so much more. He made me laugh, he made me feel
safe, he made me happy. The reasons to leave him seemed to have evaporated now.
He was no longer lazy, jobless or selfish. Over the last few weeks, he’d been a
rock —
my
rock.

“I have to go,” I said, hurrying up from the table and
sending ice flying as I knocked over both glasses.

“But I was hoping we could get another drink. Perhaps go on to
another bar? It really is great to see you again, Dee.”

I looked at him, his eyes so steely and intense. Were those
lustful eyes? Was this tasty hunk looking at me with lustful eyes?

“No thanks,” I said, giving him a dismissive kiss on the
cheek.

He turned towards me and I had to pull away quickly before
our lips brushed. He
was
doing lustful eyes! I had the chance to bed a
man who looked like a prototype love robot from a future without biological men.
Yet I didn’t want a prototype love robot, I wanted my bumpy, saggy, big-eared,
lanky husband.

“Perhaps another time?” he asked.

I smiled politely and deposited myself on the street
outside. It was raining heavily and people were running for shelter, but I didn’t
care about being dry. There was only one thing that I wanted to do, and I
wanted to do it now. I grabbed my phone and made it dial Gareth’s number.

Why had I been so blind? I’d never stopped loving the big,
lanky idiot. So, we’d had a rough patch. He got a bit depressed, he spent more
time smoking weed and playing computer games than he perhaps should have done,
but they were temporary problems. And yes, the amount he went out drinking had annoyed
me, and spending my money on a Scooby-Doo costume had irritated me, but that
was the man I married, and I loved him, warts and all.

Until
she
delivered the crushing blow. Penny, or
Little Miss Grating Giggles, as she might more suitably have been called,
smacked me in the face with a sledgehammer.

A female voice answered Gareth’s phone.

A female voice?

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“It’s Penny!” she giggled, as if I should know who that is.

“Are you one of Gareth’s friends?”

“Um ... I wouldn’t say that exactly. Do you want
to speak to Gazza?”

Gazza?
“Well, yes, I did call
his
phone.”

“I’m afraid he can’t come to the phone. He’s ...” then
she erupted into more fits of excited giggles, “freshening up.”

Freshening up?
What? Gareth freshens up when he’s
just ... 
Oh
. The giggles ... the freshening up ... the
access to his phone ...

I let my handset drop to the floor, splashing deep into a
puddle. It was an expensive smartphone, but I didn’t care. My marriage had
combusted. Our separation was no longer theoretical. We were no longer
experimenting with ending the marriage, but lowering it into a six-foot hole
and layering it with earth.

Freshening up? There were only three occasions when Gareth ‘freshened
up’ — morning shower (or lunchtime, as had been the case in recent months),
after playing football, or after ... 
Oh God
.

It didn’t bear thinking about. Gareth and somebody else ... Somebody
else and ... I felt sick and hungry, and hot and cold, and heavy and
light-headed. It felt as though a herd of elephants had trampled on my life. My
future turned to sawdust. Irreparable. I couldn’t even be entirely sure that I
wasn’t dead and I was too devastated to bother checking for a pulse.

What I did next, I did on autopilot. Perhaps I was dead,
because I felt like a zombie. I must have retrieved my phone, but I can hardly
remember. I walked, step by step, back into the bar. I grabbed Ricky by the
hands and guided him up out of his seat until he stood before me, then I
pressed my lips against his and began the process of letting him seduce me.

Chapter 17

I walked home in a hazy daze. Daylight was nothing but a
promise from the amber sky, but I had to get away — away from Ricky’s bed. Doing
the horizontal hustle with the hottest guy in London had only served to make me
feel even worse than I did already.

Ricky wasn’t Gareth. He didn’t kiss like Gareth, he didn’t
touch like Gareth, he didn’t cuddle like Gareth.
He wasn’t Gareth!
There
was nothing technically wrong with the sex, but there was no spirit to it
either. We may as well have been working out at the gym, for all the pleasure
it brought me. I wanted a shower or bath — anything to get rid of that piny
Biff stench.

My new status as the most recent sexual partner of a
God-like man did not bring the increased confidence you might have expected, but
disgust. Why had I allowed myself to have sex with a man I hardly knew, a man
who had deceived me into thinking that he was dead?

And why we had to do it to Chesney Hawkes, I will never
know. The irony that the song was called ‘One and Only’ didn’t fail to escape
me. The lyrics served as a painful reminder that Ricky was not the one and
only, he was the runner up, the booby prize, the silver medal.

I let myself in through the front door that Gareth had once
carried me through, wondering which one of us would get the front door in the
divorce settlement. I didn’t really care either way. It was just a door, a
silly door. A door that had one day opened, allowing Gareth to leave and shag
some floozy called Penny. Why hadn’t the door jammed or something? Damned door.
Bloody door. You’ve destroyed my marriage you crappy piece of ...

As I slammed the door, a breeze caught my face and my cheeks
suddenly felt cold. What was wrong with my cheeks? I touched them and realised
that they were wet. I was crying? Flaming hell!

I began wailing. It wasn’t like me. I needed to calm down. I
looked around me. Where was my relaxation CD? Where was my yoga mat? Then my
eyes fell on something on the table — a flat, metal tin with the Jamaican flag
on the lid — Gareth’s weed. He must have left it here accidentally when he
unloaded the DVDs.

It had been a long time since I’d touched the stuff — three
years, four maybe. I might have dabbled again, but in recent months Gareth’s
over-usage had sent me stubbornly anti-drugs.

Now, at what was almost certainly the lowest point of my
life, the tin felt like an old friend.
Please don’t be empty.
I opened
the lid. Resin. Well it was better than nothing, and what did I expect?
Obviously Gareth had remembered to take the good stuff.

I began skinning up. It’s one of those things you never forget
how to do. I sat back on the sofa and caught a glimpse of myself reflected in
the television screen.

How had it come to this? Rolling a spliff in the living
room, like a student. Just two months before, I had had a husband, a budding
writing career and a squeaky-clean conscience. Now, my husband was gone, an
unedited story had been published in my name, and I had caused a young woman’s
death.

Things had begun spiralling out of control from the moment I
had kicked Gareth out. I’d enrolled on the writers’ weekend to distract myself.
I’d started a war with an entire species of bird. I’d let some truly disturbed
people into my life. I’d trespassed on private property. I’d slept with a
virtual stranger. And now I was using drugs.

I had to wonder, would any of these things have happened if
I’d never driven Gareth away? If I’d just carried on the way things were? Sure,
Gareth would still be a sloth, and I’d still be frustrated up to my teeth, but
Amanda might still be alive, Gareth wouldn’t have slept with Penny, and I
wouldn’t have engaged in genital exercises with a man I believed to be dead.

We had seemed so close to sorting out our marital
differences. Gareth bringing back some of the DVDs had really felt like a move
towards reconciliation, when actually he had been on the verge of sleeping with
some cow.

I looked at the coffee table in front of me, covered in
notes about the writers, printouts from the internet and chopped up news
articles. None of it made any sense.

Then, I glanced at the pile of DVDs —
American Psycho
,
Alice in Wonderland
,
Vanilla Sky.
What did all of those films
have in common?

Holy potatoes!

Suddenly, everything was abundantly clear. I flopped over
the edge of the sofa and threw up in the wastepaper bin.

Why hadn’t I realised the truth before now?

These people, these crazy, stereotypical, inconsistent
people were crazy, stereotypical and inconsistent because they were not real! I
had imagined them all and I knew exactly why. They were characters in my new
book, just fictional creations. I wasn’t the detective in a murder mystery — I
was the writer!

* * *

I rearranged the papers on the table. These weren’t really
printouts from the internet, they were character notes and plot threads. The
reason that I could control the future was that I was writing it.

All these questions, all this speculation ... it wasn’t
to save two more lives, it was part of the process of deciding how my story
should end. No wonder the police found ears of wheat next to the victims. The
wheat was my subconscious trying to get through to me, trying to bring me back
to reality.

How could this have happened? How could I have become so
engrossed in my own story that I truly believed it was real? Did I have some
sort of unspecified mental health problem? Perhaps the stress of ending my
marriage had sent me into withdrawal, making me believe that I was living in an
alternative fantasy world, thus protecting me from dealing with reality. Only
now, my fantasy world was falling apart and forcing me to face the reality that
Gareth was gone for good.

I began laughing. Fancy me thinking that Rafe Maddocks was a
real person! He was ridiculous! Fancy me thinking I could pull somebody as hot
as Ricky! Heck, people as hot as Ricky don’t even exist.

The doorbell rang and I started. I needed a little longer to
get used to this new realisation. For weeks, I’d believed that I was a
detective trying to solve the mystery of the crazed copycat, and now I had to
readjust to being Dee Whittaker, plain old, dull, single ... 
mad
 ... Dee
Whittaker.

Almost as soon as the doorbell rang, the door opened. It was
somebody with a key. It was Gareth.

Why was he letting himself in? How much time had passed
since I had asked him to leave? How long had I been submerged in my Pompomberry
House delusion?

“Hey Dee!” he said, chirpily. “Woah!”

I was disorientated to say the least.

“What’s up?”

“I had a peculiar dream, I think ... A delusion ... A
big delusion.”

“Any news on the copycat?”

“What? You
know
about the copycat?”

“Are you alright, Dee?”

“A bit disorientated. I think I might have a schizomatic
disorder or something.”

How did Gareth know about the copycat? Had I involved him in
my delusion? Suddenly, it was all clear. I hadn’t imagined Pompomberry House to
protect myself, I’d created it to force Gareth to become the person I needed
him to be. I hadn’t only convinced myself that this ridiculous saga was real, I’d
convinced Gareth too.

The saga had begun the very week I asked him to leave. It
gave Gareth opportunities to be heroic, active and mature — the very things he
was lacking. I’d made up a murder story to see if he would rise to the
challenge. I’d lied, subconsciously of course, but I’d been deceitful. How many
lies had I told?

“I’m so sorry,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck.
Would he ever forgive me? Would he understand that I was unaware that I was
lying?

“Dee, what have you been smoking?”

“What makes you think I’ve been smoking?”

“You’re holding a spliff. Besides, the air hit me the moment
that I walked in.”

“I need to tell you something ...”

“Okay ...”

“I made it all up. Pompomberry House,
The Book of Most
Quality Writers
, the whole lot!”