The Woman He Loved Before (22 page)

I look to the table where Jack is nodding at me, as is Benji – except it’s not Benji, it’s another boy. He is Benji’s age, but he is white with the same dark hair as Eve. I look to the dog basket beside the kitchen door and a cat sits there instead of Butch.

‘I’m dead?’ I ask Eve.

‘Yes,’ she says, gently. ‘You’re the woman he was with before.

I’m the one he loves now.’

‘But you’re dead,’ I say to her.

‘No, you are. You were in that hideous crash, remember? You were in a coma for a while, then you slipped away. Jack met me a few years later.’

‘OK,’ I say to her because she sounds so convinced. And if the other two are nodding and the cat is staring at me, I must be wrong and she must be right. They can’t all be mistaken, can they? ‘If you’re sure …’

‘Why don’t you go back upstairs and lie down? It’ll all come to you and you’ll realise that I’m right.’

‘OK,’ I say, and go back upstairs to the bedroom. At least it’s still my bed in here. I climb back under the covers, pull them over me and snuggle down into the mattress. I close my eyes and go back to being de—

I open my eyes to find Butch staring at me with his little doggie head on one side. I’m sitting at the dining table in the living room having fallen asleep with my head on the notebook in front of me. I lever myself upright, ignoring the shooting pains in my torso.
Stupid
could be my middle name, falling asleep like that in my condition.

Butch is still staring at me with furry interest.

‘What, was I whimpering again?’ I ask him.

He lets out a little growl-bark.

‘You know what?’ I tell him. ‘You try being dead in your own life in a dream and see how much whimpering you do.’

Butch stares at me a bit longer then turns and walks away, padding into the kitchen for a slurp of water.

Ever since I found those diaries, I haven’t been dreaming about the crash; I’ve been having this dream, about Eve. I haven’t looked at the diaries in a few days, instead I scrawl things down on pieces of paper, snatches of things I think I remember from the crash to see if they will jog my memory. It’s almost as if Eve is taunting me with the dreams because I haven’t had the guts to go back; she is reminding me that this is all, essentially, about her and that if I want to move forwards, I need to find out more.

I’m a little scared of those diaries, if I’m honest. They are reminding me of things I’d rather forget. I know exactly what it’s like to have no source of income and to be terrified of losing your home, your dignity, your place in the world.

When I began my PhD, my supervisor had been very supportive of the subject I was proposing, especially because it hadn’t been studied at the university before. We were both confident that I would find outside funding, that some companies would be interested in it. Very few were and the ones who were … I had one meeting with one person from a company that seemed keen, and the same thing happened to me that had happened to Eve with her landlord – I found myself with a man’s hand on my thigh, offering the funds to do whatever I wanted if I was ‘friendly’ to him.

I’d stared into his blue-green eyes and his face – which I had thought wasn’t unattractive when we’d sat down in the meeting room to discuss my proposal – and felt revulsion as his hand edged a little higher up my thigh. Outside the room, on the other side of the door, were hundreds of people, but inside the room he felt safe enough to do this.

‘Are you serious?’ I’d said.

‘Research, and the funding to do it, is a serious business,’ he’d replied. ‘We, the potential sponsors, all need something to sweeten the pot, and you, the applicant, need to stand out from the crowd.’

Reading Eve’s description of that moment with her landlord had churned me up inside. Had reminded me that in that split second I had asked myself,
‘Is this what I need to do to be able to get what I want?’
before I took his hand away, thanked him for his time and left.

I realised on the way home that I’d have to stop doing my research if the only person interested in backing me wanted sex from me first. I was scared of what choice Eve had been forced to make.

It didn’t sound as if she could go home and she was so close to the wire with money: what choice did she have? I didn’t want to read those diaries in case Eve had been forced to go the other way, and I would have to face up to what could have happened to me if I’d chosen to have sex to survive.

But I’m being drawn back to the diaries. I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that the answer to all my problems – from Jack’s calling for her to my memory loss after the crash – are within the relationship that she and Jack had.
Have
. Because it’s not over, and I need to know why.

I return to the notepad. Once I’ve finished jotting down everything I remember, I’ll think again about the diaries. Because they are a path I’m still not sure I want to continue down.

libby

‘This is all your fault, you know.’ I say to Butch. ‘If you hadn’t been scratching at the door, I wouldn’t have remembered the stupid Eve cupboard was down here and I wouldn’t be doing this.’

He lets out a lazy, unbothered sound without even raising his head. He’s very good at adapting to the person he’s with. When he’s with Jack, or even Benji, he’s full of life and can’t stop moving, barking, jumping – with me, he is very slow and considered. Most of the time, wherever I am, he is too, almost as if he is watching over me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he liked me, but I get the impression he feels responsible for me.

I suppose it’s nice to have the world’s most cynical dog watching your back.

I’ve brought a cushion down here for comfort, and a small clock so that I know when I need to finish reading by and I don’t have a close shave like last time.

Feeling uneasy about it still, I unwrap the diaries and pull out the one I was reading.

Flicking through the pages for where I was, I notice that she’s back, sitting on the document boxes. She’s still wearing her dress, her feet and arms are bare, but this time she is resting back on her arms, while her legs swing over the edge of the box as you would if you were dangling your feet at the end of a pool.

‘Where were we?’
she says, that rich, smooth sweetness in her voice making me touch the scar on my head. I feel so lumbering and grotesque beside her, even though she is a figment of my imagination.

She watches me as I remind myself what I look like, and shakes her head.
‘When will you get it, Libby?’
she says.
‘It’s not about you. It’s all about me.’

I say nothing to her. Instead I concentrate on finding my place in the diary.

‘Oh, yes, that’s it. I’d just lost my job, I was running low on money and I was going to ring Dawn to see if they had any cleaning shifts at her place.’

eve

27
^th
June 1988

Went to see Dawn today. I rang her to see how she was doing and to ask about the job. She sounded so far away and disconnected on the phone I thought I’d go over, since I haven’t got anything else to do.

Had such an awful shock when she eventually opened the door. She was like a skin-covered skeleton, and her face was hollowed out with huge dark circles pressed under her eyes. Her face lit up when she saw me and I felt really bad that I hadn’t been in touch all this time, especially when she had clearly been ill.

‘God, Eve, you look so different. Did you have a wash or something?’

Her pyjamas were hanging off her and her indigo dressing gown – which used to be mine – was off one shoulder and almost dark with dirt. She obviously hadn’t washed it since I’d left.

‘Yeah,’ I laughed. ‘That, and I grew up a bit.’

‘Ah, must try it myself one day. The washing, not the growing up – that’s just not for me.’

She lay on the sofa – which had been my bed for months – and I made us tea in her tiny kitchen. It was all clean and neat, and there was tea in the cupboard but no milk. That was fine because, for lots of us, I think things like milk were becoming a luxury.

I sat on the end of the sofa, pulled my legs up under me. I wanted to ask her what had happened, what was wrong, but I didn’t want to force her to talk if she didn’t want to. God knows she was patient and kind when I wanted to talk about what had happened at home, and she never pushed me when I would clam up, my throat and mouth glued up with tears and sadness.

‘You all right, then?’ she asked, and smiled at me with her mouth closed. I knew why: when she’d laughed before I’d seen the grey and black devastation that was her teeth.

‘I suppose. Like I said on the phone, I’m out of work again. I’m so gutted.’

‘Yeah, me too. The out of work thing.’

‘Oh God, really? Sorry, didn’t realise. When did that happen?’

She shrugged. ‘Not sure. Just remember waking up one afternoon and thinking I couldn’t face another night of shaking my bum in some guy’s face just so I could get enough cash to score. So I never went back.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I suppose, deep down, I knew what Dawn did and I knew why, but because she’d never told me, and I’d never officially asked, I pretended she really did work behind the bar in a club, that she liked pretty, spangly underwear and that the sickening smell from her room was the weird incense she burned. It was easier thinking that than thinking about the alternative.

If she was no longer stripping and obviously still hooked on drugs …

My mind went back to the day I saw her getting into that man’s car.
God, surely not
, I thought. ‘How are you getting by?’ I asked her, because while I didn’t want to know I could tell Dawn wanted to talk. And after all she’d done for me, the least I could do for her was let her talk.

‘What do you think? I let men have sex with me for money.’

The first thing that came into my mind was my landlord – his face, his chubby hands, and his wobbly belly. Had he paid someone like Dawn? Had he paid someone like my friend to have sex with him because they were so desperate – for drugs or not to be thrown out onto the street?

‘God, I’m sorry,’ I said to her.

Her face creased up into a smile. ‘What have you got to be sorry for?’

‘I’m just sorry that you need your drugs so much that you do that,’ I said, feeling a bit foolish at not having anything more suppportive to say.

‘Eve, never lose that, OK? Never become so … beaten down by the world that you lose your ability to feel compassion for someone like me. When I don’t really deserve it.’

She was my friend, how else was I supposed to react? Was I meant to tell her she was disgusting and stupid and that I wanted nothing more to do with her? If I was, then something was wrong with me because I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to think that way about her. Not when her stripping had given me a place to stay for all those months and she’d been so lovely to me and given me her suits. It wasn’t easy living with her at times but it’d been better than sleeping on the streets, I think anything would be better than sleeping on the streets, which is what I’m facing now.

‘What was it like?’ I asked her. ‘Stripping?’
Was it really that bad? When it made enough money to allow her to live in this expensive area of London and to support her habit for so long, could it have been that bad?

‘It was OK but after a while you see the same old faces, and the same old expressions, and it gets boring on top of everything else. You’re kind of dancing on autopilot, you’re not really giving it your all, which is what you need to do if you want to earn lots of tips. But, you know, some of the girls loved it. They said it made them feel powerful that men would come in to pay to watch them dance. I thought it made the men seem pathetic and me in the process.’ She shook her head. ‘But I needed to get my fix, so I did it. But it’s easy money if you’re desperate.’

I was desperate, had very little money left, but the question was, ‘am I that desperate?’ Two months, or even two weeks ago, I would have said no. Now, I couldn’t say that with such conviction.

I wanted to ask her about the sleeping with men for money, but I didn’t dare.

‘It’s better than what I do now in some ways,’ she said. ‘What I do now is real desperation, but then again it’s more money for less hours and I don’t have to give anyone their cut, like I did at the club.’

‘You have to give the club a cut of the money? I don’t understand.’

‘All the strippers work for themselves and you have to pay the club to be able to dance there. Which means, every night, you have to make enough to pay the club their fee, and then anything on top of that you get to keep. Sometimes, if it’s a slow night and the other girls are more bolshie and desperate than you, you won’t make enough to cover the fee so you go home making a loss.

‘That’s why what I do now is better in some ways. I always make a profit if I get a punter.’

‘Don’t you mind?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you mind doing it with someone you don’t care about?’

Dawn’s eyes drifted away as she thought about it. ‘Dunno,’ she said eventually. ‘Never really thought about it. I sort of fell into it. A man who recognised me from the club saw me in the street and asked me if I did “extras”. I thought, Why not? and followed him to his car. It was all over really quick and I’d made a hundred quid. I just kept on from there, really. I rarely get that much now. It doesn’t feel like sex, not like it did with Robbie. It’s just letting someone stick his thing in you.’