PSYCHOPHILIA: A Disturbing Psychological Thriller (12 page)

I
had rather hoped that Marianne didn’t know about the past, but her table
selection would suggest she is fully appraised.  When you walk into Lakeside
Cafe, you are naturally drawn to the windows.  Nobody chooses to sit in the
middle of the room on the poorer, view starved tables.  I had harboured a hope
that her desire to get me into town or to a hotel far away from the lake had
been a personal preference, but sitting here as far as she can away from the
water’s edge, I know she knows.  It makes things a little harder, as she too
will assume I am crazy.  Once you are crazy, you are always crazy.  Nobody
trusts you anymore.  You always have to be careful with what you say, nothing
too outlandish, and as for the telling of secrets, people will always assume
you have just pulled them from your imagination.  How to play it?  Perhaps I am
the crazy woman looking for friends during recovery.  Perhaps the lonely wife
who has just given up work.  Maybe I can tell her about the pregnancy.  Any of
these would be suitable reason for our meeting.  As I sit, I settle on friend
who wants to understand and help her difficult situation.  She is after all a
mistress, and very few will sympathise with her position.  She must be due a
bit of support.  Why not from me?

“Oh
Marianne, it is
so
cold out there today.”  I flick my coat out behind me
as I drape it over the arm of the incoming waiter.  I keep my gloves on but
realise she notices this, and so I draw attention to it myself to negate her
thoughts like a fire blanket over the initial sparks.  “My fingers are so
cold.”  She nods, accepting my reasoning.  She stands politely and I air kiss
her on the cheek whilst holding her arms, careful not to get too close.  She
looks relieved.  We have never spent time together alone.  I see she is
thinking that I sound like a normal person, in touch with the world.  Her eyes
drop into a more relaxed position, her forehead slackening off.  She might as
well pat me on my gloved hand and say
Thank goodness, I thought you were
going to seem crazy but you seem normal enough.
  Fortunately she doesn’t.  She
doesn't have Mr. Wexley as a security blanket today.  She is just Marianne. 
Apparently, the Marianne that I don’t know orders wine in the middle of the afternoon. 
There is half a bottle left.  The other half is already onboard.  Perhaps a bit
of Dutch Courage.

“Oh
yes,” she says in her best voice, trying hard to stifle the accent which she
has no idea that I love, or that it reminds me of my mother.  “It’s very cold.”

“What
are we drinking,” I say as I take a hold of the bottle.  It’s the Chardonnay.  I
know that this is the cheapest on the menu.  “Lovely.”  I hate this wine.  It
is acidic and lemony, sharp on the palate and will guarantee to suck the ability
to sleep right out of me.  I consider the baby and that the wine is a bad choice,
but I have already got pretend excited about it, and to refuse the wine now
will either seem odd - like a crazy person might act - or she will realise that
I am pregnant or perhaps an alcoholic in recovery.  I do not want to tell her about
the pregnancy because Gregory still seems very reluctant and I certainly do not
need another label such as recovering alcoholic.  I pull a plastic Ziploc bag
out from my handbag and take out a small plastic beaker.  Setting it down onto
the table in front of me I pour myself a small glass and pretend to sip from
it.  I top her glass up too. 
Get her drunk,
I think.  I order another
bottle of the cheap Chardonnay.

“Oh,
it’s my favourite.” She says giggling, although I notice that she cannot take
her eyes off my plastic cup and she sips with a bit more enthusiasm from her
brimming glass.  She does however seem relieved at the ease with which we can feign
friendship.

“It’s
nice to get together like this,” I say. “You know, we haven’t done this in all
the time I have known you.”

“I
never realised that you wanted to.  If I had known I would have asked you
before.  Sometimes my days are very empty, and I am always free.”  Up until this
moment, I have seen only a few things regarding Marianne.  They are; hanging
from Wexley’s arm like an accessory, showing off the latest accessory he has
purchased for her, or her standard arrival and departure patterns as dictated
by those of Mrs. Wexley.  She accessorizes him and he does the same to her.  I
expect the reciprocity ends here, and that most of the relationship is more of
a one way provision to Wexley.  Now I see that she does at least have some sort
of personality, and at least a smile that flourishes when not under his command,
which is more than most people would say about me.

We
chit chat about nothing in particular for a while.  Safe subjects whilst we
skirt around the idea of actually talking about us.  We discuss the severity of
the winter, the danger of driving through the difficult roads, and how an
incredible amount of snow has closed the Kirkstone Pass for several weeks now. 
I add in how Gregory had to go the long way around to get to his other hotel,
in Glenridding.   We broach easy topics, and I learn how she adores Beatrix
Potter, and owns a collection of stuffed animals of all her favourite
characters including Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny.  She tells me how each
week she passes by the shop dedicated to these happy little characters just to
have a peak through the window.  I find it rather strange, but smile along at
the concept of a grown woman being obsessed with such activities and hope in my
boredom such interests do not find me.  I tell her about my decision to leave
work, and how I think it is the best for my position as Gregory’s wife.  She
smiles back at me, unquestioning.  Her head tilts to the side as if she feels
sorry for me.  Such difficult decisions I have had to make, she thinks.  What
with being post suicide.

“It
is hard when you have to make difficult choices like this, but if it’s for the
best, then…”  She fiddles with her bread knife and nibbles at the chunk of
bread that she ordered to help soak up the wine.  She is on glass two, since I
got here.  She swallows hard, as if whatever difficult choices she is referring
to have stuck in her throat, something half regurgitated from the past.  She
looks a bit sad, perhaps tearing in the left eye and I see that she wants to say
something.

“Do
you want to talk about it?” I ask.  Of course she does.  She is well on her way
to being drunk, and in the midst of having an affair with an extremely wealthy
married man and virtually lives at his house.

“It’s
just, my life feels like it is full of difficult choices just lately.”  I nod
sympathetically, wondering what they are.  “My divorce, the lack of a job, my
house, and now,” she looks at me for permission, “with John.”  I couldn’t care
less about her divorce or house, and although I thought she had a job and must
remember to find out why she doesn’t anymore, it’s the bit about John that I am
attracted to, like a gem to the eye of a miner.

“It
must be very difficult, the situation that you are in.  Especially at the
weekends.”  She looks around the room, her alcohol soaked eyes swimming in
their sockets trying to focus on who is around us.

“It
is.  We spend all week together, and then at the weekend, nothing.”  I want to
say that’s because his wife comes home.  I want to say that she is no better
than Ishiko and tell her the things I think about doing to her so she
understands who I am and who she is talking to so freely but I don’t want her
to clam up so I swallow the lump in my throat and start counting in my head. 

“So
difficult,” I say between numbers, agreeing that her life is an endless charade
of hardships.  I get to twenty eight before I feel well enough to carry on.  I
crouch in a little as if to whisper a secret and I can see her eyes have
started to turn red, like mine did when I was at my craziest and most like the
Devil.  “What are you going to do, you know, long term?”

“Well
we talk about being together on a permanent basis, but how?  When I cannot be
there at the weekend, it’s very hard to move forward,” she smiles, her accent
coming out loud and clear because she is getting drunk, “but at some point this
is going to have to change.  At some point it has to end.”

The
way she speaks makes me think that she assumes Wexley’s wife to be a bit
stupid, that she has judged her in some way for not allowing their 'relationship'
to flourish.  I have to say I have judged her too.  I even agree with Marianne
that indeed this situation must shift in order to abide by the laws of
reality.  Perhaps this will occur sooner than she thinks, depending on how easy
I find this.  For me, Marianne is like the warm up band that enlivens the crowd
before the main act appears.  By using her I will learn what could happen, what
potential there is in my plan, and how bad it could really be for Ishiko.  And
for Gregory by seeing just how bad I can make things for Wexley.

“The
situation is simply crazy,” she states as she slams her palm down onto the
table.  A few eyes look around at us but she remains drunkenly oblivious.  It
is as if she has just drawn a line underneath the whole situation and summed everything
up with one word.   I expect as soon as she has said it for her to realise what
she has said and to feel guilty for the use of the word, sort of like it was an
unintended insult that struck me like a curve ball.  Crazy.  But she doesn’t
say anything.  “How can he put an end to this craziness,” there it is again, “with
all that’s going on?”  Most people avoid talking about
crazy
with me,
and her blatant refusal to skirt around the subject and make allowances almost
endears her to me.  Almost.  I think of how Ishiko might sit at a table like
this with her friends and regale the same sorry tale of a misguided mistress,
the assumption that she holds the power, and that she is just being patient
rather than played.  It sounds so pathetic, and I feel a degree of sympathy for
them both, but it is short lived.

I
ask, “Why, what
is
going on?” realising that I almost got carried away
with an over-analysis of her use of the word crazy, when she had gifted me the
chance to ask for more details. 

She
sighs, guilty or frustrated I’m not sure.  “We are fortunate that the new job
takes her away for the week, otherwise the weekdays would be affected as well.” 
She looks at me with her lips turned down, her head jutting forwards and
nodding slightly, assuming my understanding.  “But the mother is still alive.” 
She is still nodding, like she has let me in on an unbelievable secret, where
now all of a sudden I should understand where she is coming from.  “She has Alzheimer’s
and is in a home here in the town.  Acorns.  You know it?”  I don’t, so I shake
my head.  “Anyway.  So, you know, he feels like he has to be there for that. 
For support.”  She rolls her eyes at this fact as she sloshes her wine glass
backwards and forwards to an extent that a little bit escapes onto the bread on
her plate.  She doesn’t notice.  I feel like scratching out my own eyes just so
I don’t have to watch her, but still I can’t look away.  She has taken the
place of a woman whose world is collapsing.  Like a vulture who swooped in to
pick at the carcass of Mary’s life, a fly resting on another woman’s meal.  She
is saving bits for herself, poisoning that which is left with her own nasty presence,
the rancidification of a life until there is nothing left but rot. 

“When
did you meet?”  I fight the urge to grip her hand and push the knife through it. 
I pick it up through, run my thumb over the blade, sharp even through my
gloves, but she is too drunk to notice. 

“About
eight months ago.  He used to come in to the garage where I worked, fill up the
car.”  She said this in a hushed voice, the kind you would use around a
sleeping newborn, eager to hide the shame of a normal, job filled, moneyless past. 
“Eventually he took me out.  We went to Lancaster.”  She says it like I should
be impressed by the effort, the luxury of a trip to another part of the map,
which I think we both realise had everything to do with the necessity of
deceit.  She is on a roll and spills it all.  The meal, the wine, nothing like
Chardonnay.  He ordered the expensive bottle from half way down the wine list. 
She is all smiles now.  She has forgotten all about her divorce, her lack of a
job, her house, a dying mother of the woman she betrays.  She is high on the
lie, consumed in her false reality, in which the real world only penetrates
from a distance.  But the real world always gets back in.  Reality pushes and creeps
like rot in a damaged tree after a fungus takes hold, rendering it barren and
unable to bear fruit.  Dreams dare to grow like weeds in a forgotten garden,
believing that they will be allowed to flourish.  But one day when the sun
shines and the cover of winter has passed, somebody will come along and rip
them up.

I
finish listening to the story and eat the rest of the bread.  She doesn’t notice
that my wine is untouched.  She has had a little cry about the injustice of her
situation and those that noticed looked at me with sympathy.  I look sane and
healthy today in comparison to the tipsy snivelling mess at my side.  I look so
good next to her right now that not even a suicide attempt could mark me.  I
consider letting her drive home, enjoying the prospect of what could happen,
but instead I insist on taking her back myself.  It’s a wobbly walk back to the
car, but she manages with my help.  We pull up outside the Wexley’s house, and
I see that Gregory is home, and just thinking about him in there with her
forces me to squeeze Marianne on the arm until I feel my finger nails dig into
her skin.  She complains but without much effort, her pain numbed.  She hands
me the keys to the Wexley’s house, a key chain with a little heart on which I
assume he purchased for her.  I manhandle her up the stairs and drop her into
Mrs. Wexley’s bed.  There are a few used tissues at the side, a few glasses of
water, half drunk with a small layer of dust on the surface and white rings
marking the glass where the water has evaporated.  There is a picture of Mrs.
Wexley staring back at me smiling, oblivious.