Still puzzled, he executed the neat sideways roll he’d perfected over the years, which enabled him to vacate the marital bed in the early hours without waking Sylvia. Landing softly on the carpet in a stress position, he moved silently out the room. He then crept downstairs to the loo where he peed in the dark because switching the light on triggered the extractor fan.
They’d been in the house over two years, but in the dark mornings, half awake, the layout sometimes caught him out. He aimed his pee as best he could in the glow from the sitting room sidelights that were on timer switches and programmed to come on at five in the morning. Not flushing the chain was also part of the morning’s silent routine, one that contributed to the sometimes overwhelming feeling in Bill that he had in fact died without realising it, and was haunting rather than living in his home.
He padded through to the kitchen, put the cooker hood light on and poured himself a glass of milk, which he drank standing in front of the fridge where there was a diary kept up with magnets that had survival maxims for life as a woman written over them—that Sylvia, drunk, read out to him like he hadn’t heard them a million times already.
He checked the diary every morning, with a fledgling curiosity at this early hour for the insight it gave him into the lives lived by his wife and daughter during the week. There in front of him was a list of cryptic biro scrawls that held the key to everything happening in this house he’d paid for and that he felt like no more than a squatter in. It occurred to him that all he would ever need to surmise about these two people—one to whom he was bound because of a religious ceremony, and the other through genes—was contained here in this diary.
Today’s list was long:
5km / hair @12 / POKER / flowers—Panino’s / Tel. Tom re. nxt w/e—Ali coming?
Then, in caps, with an asterisk either side:
* POKER PARTY *
Then, in lower case and without asterisk:
rem. Bill
It was strange seeing his own name written in the diary. Puzzled, but not particularly concerned, he put his empty glass down on the surface and stared around the kitchen. He was forgetting something. He’d stood in this exact spot the night before and Sylvia had asked him to do something first thing in the morning when he got up; something important, and now he couldn’t remember.
He went through to the sitting room, still trying to recall what it was, and attempted to operate the pulleys that opened the curtains—curtains that had cost them more than a month’s mortgage payment.
They swung heavily apart, not responding to his touch as they did Sylvia’s, and there he was all over again in the pyjama bottoms and T-shirt he wore to bed. The T-shirt infuriated Sylvia, who couldn’t understand why he refused to wear both parts of the two-part sets she bought him. Even when he explained that he didn’t like to end his day in the same way he began it by doing up a row of buttons. She still didn’t understand.
He enjoyed observing himself hovering above the lawn’s dark outline while simultaneously suspended in a fragile replica of the sitting room.
This morning he looked like he was standing in a cloud and it took him a while to realise that nothing untoward had happened to the outside world; it was only fog.
He waved at himself and smiled, then, suddenly embarrassed, went back upstairs to the spare bedroom where he kept his minimal wardrobe of mostly suits, clothes to play golf in and a couple of outfits he wore when they went out socially as a family. These were the outfits he stood in while listening to people whose names he forgot as soon as they told him, talking about operations they’d had or cars they drove. Sylvia’s people.
He dressed without looking at himself in the mirror, shaved in the downstairs bathroom where he kept his shaving soap and cologne, then left the house, tiptoeing across the gravel that marked the threshold between him and the dawning day.
Two Fridays a month he went up to London to do a day’s auditing at Pinnacle Insurance’s Head Office.
Today was one of those Fridays.
Sylvia Henderson was between diets, and sleeping badly. She woke about thirty minutes after Bill Henderson left for work, and couldn’t see anything when she opened her eyes because of the black-out blinds she’d bought to ease her irregular but persistent bouts of insomnia. She knew, instinctively, that Bill wasn’t there. The smell of him in the bed was always stronger once he’d left it. After unconsciously processing this fact about Bill—that he’d left for work—she stopped thinking about him.
They’d been married too many years for her to think about him when he wasn’t physically present.
In fact, even when he was it was sometimes difficult.
Tomorrow night, Sylvia was having a poker party.
Nobody in Burwood had ever had a poker party before.
If only Bill would stop creeping and shuffling about, and start acting like the sort of man who was married to the sort of woman who held poker parties for forty people.
The Hendersons had been to hell and back, which wasn’t to say they’d been to the Congo, but was to say that Bill Henderson had lost his job—unexpectedly—and had a breakdown. Leaving Sylvia to conceal this fact from just about everybody they knew (including themselves) while simultaneously attempting to sell the 1.2 million London home in order to get rid of the 600k mortgage, pay Vicky and Tom’s final terms’ school fees (£8,500), and put together the Henderson re-location package.
She’d been looking for somewhere they could shine—after The Crash, the Hendersons needed to shine—and chosen Burwood after seeing an article in the Financial Times ranking it as fourth highest in the country for male life expectancy, and eighth lowest for teenage pregnancy. These figures spoke affluence, and with the proceeds from the sale of their London Life, the Hendersons bought number two Park Avenue—the largest house on the street—and set about making arrangements for their own Second Coming.
The house had been undervalued for a quick sale—messy divorce, the estate agent who showed her round explained, with as much polite regret as he could muster.
Bill got the job she persuaded him to apply for at Pinnacle Insurance after pumping him with Prozac until he was well over the limit, and in spite of the fact that he was holding out for a job teaching maths at a school in Malawi, which she knew he wouldn’t get because she’d shredded his completed application after promising to send it recorded delivery.
Sylvia’s rise to top of the pile here on Park Avenue had been—much like her daughter Vicky’s at Burwood Girls’—astronomical. Most of their neighbours had been easily won over by her Phoney Femme Fatale persona —everybody, that is, apart from the doctor’s wife at number five, who had an unsettling sense of humour, and the two retired diplomats who lived with their Down’s Syndrome daughter at number seventeen.
Both the doctor’s wife, however, and the two diplomats, had accepted invitations to her poker party.
Sylvia was going to win.
While Sylvia lay in bed not thinking about Bill, Bill moved slowly through the fog on Hurst Road in the same direction and with the same frantic plod as the other commuters—towards the station that connected