Copycat (30 page)

This was my pain she was making her own. How could she be so mistaken to think that even now, in this dire situation, I’d be feeling sorry for her because I, Martha, hadn’t trusted her? Her self-absorption was so ugly it defied belief. And the only reason she was doing this now was to take her revenge on Sam and ingratiate herself with me.

‘Perhaps I did know all along, but didn’t want to believe it.’ I clung to my last shred of self-control. ‘That’s quite a human reaction, I’m told.’

‘But, Martha, while you keep denying it he’ll just go on and on…’

‘Who was it, Jennie?’
She was dying to tell me.

‘Tina Gallagher,’ she said.

That made sense. That added up. Tina, all curves and lips, was Sam’s type, for sure. But I couldn’t move my eyes off Jennie. I was getting tenser and tenser, near breaking point.

‘Why are you looking at me like that? The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you.’

In this roaring chasm I felt so alone. I stood up, swept the glasses off the table. They smashed to smithereens on the floor. I screamed like a savage at the top of my voice,
‘GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HOUSE…’

‘Wait, Martha…’

I could hardly bear to speak to her. ‘I said, get out of here… oh Christ, I’ve been so wrong, you evil, warped bitch from hell. Everybody was right about you but me – I’m so stupid I just couldn’t see…’

She was deathly white, half stunned, bent in half as if from a blow. She backed towards my door like a dark and ugly spider.
‘Martha, Martha, please
…
’
she cried.

If she didn’t go now I would kill her, I would bludgeon her face until she stopped speaking. I would pull out her hair, gouge out her eyes, shut that sobbing, slobbering mouth. I clawed at the air in front of my face.
‘YOU WILL NOT PULL ME DOWN. DO YOU HEAR WHAT I’M SAYING? YOU FUCKING CRETINOUS LIAR.’
And I kept on shrieking as she backed to the door, ‘You’ll stop at nothing, you’d see your kids dead just to vindicate your own sick desires…’

‘Christ! Martha!’ Sam hurried in, saw the mess on the floor and Jennie cowering at the door. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on here?’ He was naked save for a towel round his waist.

‘Jennie’s just leaving,’ I managed to hiss. ‘Aren’t you,
sweetheart
? And you’re never, ever coming back. I never want to see your face again.’ Just the feel of her poisonous name in my mouth made me want to vomit.

‘But—’

‘Shut up, Sam!’ I shook with rage. ‘Let me handle this on my own. This vicious little bastard won’t be—’

‘She’s gone, Martha. Calm down, calm down. She’s gone.
Look, Jennie’s gone.
’

Shaking like a jelly, I let myself fold into his arms. I allowed myself to be comforted. I stuttered out exactly what had happened. ‘She said… she said… she tried to make me believe that you and Tina… you and Tina…’

‘Bitch,’ snarled Sam. ‘Bitch.’

‘You were right,’ I told him as he dried my eyes. ‘You were dead right. I did, I felt guilty, I felt sorry for her and responsible in some weird way…’

‘You were never to blame for Jennie’s sickness,’ Sam said, as I shuddered in his arms. ‘It took time to realize what a freak she was and you were too involved to see. As for that evil story about her and Graham…’

I sniffed and blew my nose on a tissue Sam found on the table. ‘Poor Graham,’ I started to say, ‘and those poor, poor kids…’

‘Those kids you feel so sorry for are giving our kids hell. They’ve been sucking them dry for years and you’ve been blind to all of it.’

‘I know, I know that now.’ My voice had turned childlike. ‘And I didn’t tell you before, but Jennie has been complaining to Mrs Forest and saying that Scarlett has been unkind. And Mrs Forest has been on the phone to me about it.’

‘Shush, Martha, shush, it’s over now.’

With a rush of relief I hurried to tell him. ‘I had to go and bring Scarlett home and talk to her about it. But it wasn’t Scarlett and Harriet at all – it was Poppy, trying to get them into trouble. No wonder they were so worried and so wary of her friendship.’

Sam looked furious. ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t know.’

‘Scarlett kept trying to tell me, but I was always too busy and then Jennie went behind my back…’

‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she? True to form as ever. But now you know the truth, you can take a very different attitude.’ He was stroking my face, calming me down.

‘But how could she, Sam?
How could she lie about you and Tina?
’

‘There are no limits to Jennie’s schemings where you are concerned, I’m afraid,’ said Sam. ‘Poor cow.’ He kissed me softly, lit a cigarette and said, ‘It’s over now, Martha. Come on, come on, it’s all over and I love you.’

And I knew without doubt that he meant it.

I only wanted to sleep in his arms.

I knew I couldn’t take any more. I was an emotional wreck.

I
KNEW I COULDN’T
take any more. I was an emotional wreck.

My work was my salvation.

I needed no calm interior for that – the more tumultuous the turmoil, the better the results; the more anguish, the quicker I worked; ideas flashing like forked lightning as I formed and hewed and nurtured some sort of order out of chaos into my moonscapes of a tortured soul.

The classes were behind me since Josie said she had no more to teach me, and yes, that did thrill me then. ‘You’re on your own, Jennie. You’ll make it,’ and she held out a hand encased in red clay. ‘I envy your talent, I really do.’

But nothing could lift my spirits now.

I watched dully when Graham cleared the garage in preparation for my new firing oven, a birthday present from him. He set it up, built shelves and racks and then tiled the floor.

‘Don’t you need planning permission for that?’ shouted Sadie as she stalked past.

Graham took no notice.

There was so much ill feeling now, and all directed at me.

And then, of course, the planners came round, alerted by a petition signed by every resident which said my studio would cause local nuisance – just one of the petty attacks we endured. The chief planner, Mr Jackson, saw no problem as we weren’t changing the external aspects or putting in a window. ‘But change of use?’ he wondered aloud. ‘That could be a tricky one.’

No window. No looking out.

I worked all the hours God gave under that stark fluorescent light. I moulded, I twisted my shapes of wire, I sliced, I fashioned; I fired with the inside of my head all broken and my brain whirring round with the wheel. Of course, I had to explain to Graham about this frantic behaviour, so I told him truthfully about Tina and Sam, and Martha’s angry denial.

‘So Martha believed them, not me. She honestly imagined I made it up.’

‘But why tell her, Jennie? Christ, you kept it from me,
why not her?
’

Why?
How could I tell him? How could I explain? ‘Because she was being made such a fool of.’

‘Better that than torture,’ said Graham, with a knowing that surprised me. He drummed the table with his long fingers, concerned that I was being turned into this
persona non grata.
‘But this animosity can’t last, it’s far too time-consuming. Persecution uses up energy. The only answer is to ignore them and get on with our lives as normal.’

There was no ‘as normal’ about it.

It was never going to be that easy.

‘Don’t let them see you’re upset,’ I told Poppy and Josh with a breaking heart. ‘Just don’t give them the satisfaction.’ It was anguish to watch them being ostracized through no fault of their own, cold-shouldered by kids on skateboards and bicycles; Poppy not collected for school and coming home alone. And when, of an evening, the green turned into a playground, if Poppy or Josh crept out to join in there’d be sniggers and nudges and rushes inside the nearest unfriendly house.

Look what I’d done to my children.

Dear God, how could I answer their innocent questions? How could their mates turn on them like this? Someone had eavesdropped, as children do, as the angry gossip flew round the Close, and they must have caught on to the undertones. We were vilified as a family of troublemakers and common decency no longer applied. Intelligent and manipulative, Scarlett was a natural leader.

It was quite a shock to realize just how much I was disliked in the Close. It hadn’t occurred to me before how much Martha’s protection had meant; these women held on to their various grudges, bitter old vultures pecking at morsels, poised to pounce and drain and tear, and I was astonished to see normal adults conspiring in this vicious way.

I tried to approach them as individuals, but as public enemy number one I didn’t achieve very much. Hilary Wainwright turned, and stalked off as if I didn’t exist, Angie Ford acted the same, and I didn’t have the guts to tackle Sadie because she was the least well inclined of them all.

I went across to Martha’s house with a speech carefully rehearsed. The door stayed closed in my face.

I tried to ring her.

She put down the phone.

I sent her reasonable notes, pleading for sense for the sake of my children who Martha had always been fond of. I couldn’t get my head round the fact she was happy to see them so cruelly treated.

The men remained polite but distant. Although they took no part in the feuding they weren’t blind; they must have accepted it. When Graham tried to sort things out, man to man, across the road with Anthony Wainwright, he was told he didn’t know the half of it, that I was being taught a much-needed lesson and that I was a vindictive woman.

He was told his kids would get over it. ‘It might be easier for everyone,’ advised Anthony, ‘if you moved your family somewhere else.’

Finally, after six weeks of this, we both decided we had no choice. We couldn’t go on living like this: the children would have to be moved before any lasting damage was done.

Swimming pool, brand-new studio, a safe and stylish place to live – all down the drain through one foolish mistake. We’d had such high hopes when we came here and now we were both broken-hearted. The FOR SALE sign went up and we started looking for houses nearby within commuting distance of town. New schools for the children seemed like the sensible option – this September Poppy would have gone to the comp; she’d been assessed and placed in the C stream, two below Scarlett, with rough types not interested in learning. A private school was the obvious answer, and I felt the same about poor little Josh who already missed Lawrence so much that he cried for him every night and refused to give his Buzz Lightyear back.

The kids in the Close, hyped up by the feud, got wise to the kind of trouble they could cause. Led by Scarlett and Lawrence, the little gang consisted of Harriet and other school friends, the Wainwrights’ two boys and Angie Ford’s nephews. They were pissed off because they’d been banned from the pool – not by us, but by their parents. So when we had our first couple of viewers, these little tormentors played football on the green, making sure to kick the ball in our garden, targeting the car and the front windows, finally wedging it in our gutter.

‘This open-plan arrangement,’ mused a Mr Gregson, eyeing his wife, ‘I’m not entirely sure I’m in favour.’

His neat little wife was more direct. ‘How do you tolerate this behaviour? They’re so uncontrolled, so cheeky! They must come from that awful estate. The agent said it was improving, but obviously he was wrong.’

So we cut the viewing to daytime only, avoiding the summer evenings when the kids tended to hang about. But then some yob came up with a new ploy – and scarlet paint was tipped into the swimming pool.

‘Right,’ said Graham, ‘time for the law.’

They were useless. What could they do? they said. ‘You’re lucky if this is your first time,’ said one. ‘At least you’re insured. Some poor bastards put up with worse than this every day.’

Graham insisted, ‘But this is a personal vendetta and we’re suffering daily from petty vandalism.’ He sounded so tired, so pissed off with it all.

They had summed us up as paranoid, probably deserving all we got, because why else would the neighbours turn against us? ‘Before we can act we have to have proof and that’s not easy to obtain. Our hands are tied. Without the proof, we can’t get these buggers to court.’ I didn’t offer the two coppers tea.

They were undermanned, under pressure, the force was certainly not what it was; these two would get out when they got the chance.

Where could we turn?

We felt so alone.

We were prisoners in our own home. When they came home, Poppy and Josh crept up to their rooms and shut themselves in.

‘It’ll soon be the end of term,’ I said, ‘and then maybe we could go away.’

‘School’s not so bad as it is here,’ Josh said. ‘At school they leave me alone.’ And I imagined him in the playground, abandoned.

‘Poppy? How about you?’

My daughter was crying silent tears. Resentful and angry, she sobbed, ‘Don’t ask me, it’s hell, don’t make me go…’

‘It’s only for another two weeks…’

‘One day is too long,’ she cried, and oh how I felt for her distress. ‘Mrs Forest lets me stay in the office. Sometimes I help Mrs Gould, typing envelopes and that, and sticking stamps on.’ Unable to go on, she buried her head. God, I was angry.
What sort of education was that?
What was the point in putting her through it, but to take her away would be total surrender. I just hoped she wouldn’t start skiving and end up vulnerable in the mall again.

‘This is all my fault,’ I told Graham. ‘You just don’t know…’

‘I don’t need to know, Jennie. Nothing you did could justify this.’ Again he was my strong protector, defending me and soothing me, the way we were before I loved Martha. ‘This is an evil vindictiveness, the kind you expect from some mindless underclass. These arseholes ought to know better.’ He was pale and utterly furious. I rested a hand on his knee and we dropped back into uneasy silence.

But what if he did know?
What if they told him?
They had so much ammunition to use if they chose to annihilate me completely – all those betrayals, our private sex life, that story about our shameful first meeting, my fumbles in bed with Martha. For God’s sake, my worship of Martha, my suicide bid.