‘I don’t feel too well and I don’t want to spoil dinner, so the three of you should go without me.’
‘Aaron...’ His dad stood in the hallway, hands shoved in his pockets, confusion and sadness on his face.
‘It’s all right, Dad. I’ve been trying to ignore this headache all day, but I think it’s going to be a bad one. I’ll have an early night and we can catch up in the morning.’
He glanced past his dad to Cathy, forcing an empty smile. ‘I don’t mean to be a party pooper. Make sure they spoil you properly, okay?’
She managed a faint look of concern, but it didn’t disguise the flicker of relief in her eyes. ‘Do you need anything before we go?’
‘I’ll grab a couple of tablets and a drink of water.’ Avoiding the suspicious gaze of his brother, Aaron shooed them out with repeated assurances, then closed the door with a sense of finality. After thirty years, it was time to acknowledge the truth. This house wasn’t home any more. It was time to make his own.
If anyone had asked her two weeks previously, Kiki would’ve told them she was an honest person. She’d never learned the art of lying, even as a self-defence mechanism. If she’d taken to heart the lessons in deceit her mother had demonstrated to her, perhaps things might have turned out differently. But no, Kiki had had to be the one to try and see the best in everyone, to build bridges and mend fences, taking on the blame more often than not in the process. How she’d envied Mia’s determination and Nee’s fiery spirit. When they’d been dishing out backbone, Kiki had somehow stood in the wrong queue.
The change, when it came, was so sudden, so surprising to her given all the times she’d turned the other cheek, she understood what people meant when they talked about reaching ‘breaking point’. Even at his worst, when the words he spat wounded her deeper than the occasional slap or punch, she had assumed Neil loved her. A twisted, ugly kind of love, but love just the same. So, she’d convinced herself that trying a little harder, finding another excuse for him when he had none of his own to give, would nurture their stunted relationship into something beautiful.
But she was like the little pig in the storybook, building her house of love from straw, stacking the fragile stalks into piles to be blown down again and again. Fear, doubt, and not a little jealousy had prevented her from examining why Mia’s relationship with Jamie had been forged in brick and stone, solid enough to stand against everything except the cruelties of fate. She listened instead to the other mothers at the school gate, who moaned about their husbands and convinced herself all relationships had troubles.
Two words.
Two words had been all it took for the scales to fall from her eyes. Two stupid little words. Two precious little words she’d tucked away in her heart the first time Neil had whispered them into the ear of an innocent, lovestruck girl. My Helen. Having been raised on the tales of the Ancient Greek heroes, there was only one Helen. The woman so beautiful that men had burned the world for her. When Neil had likened her to that mythical siren, it had turned her head and won her completely. Two words meant only for her, she’d assumed until she’d read those bloody awful emails and seen the truth—her husband was a liar, his declaration of true love nothing more than a tawdry cliché designed to get her, and God only knew how many other women, into his bed.
And so, for the past two weeks, she’d smiled her way through the frantic preparations for Neil’s trip, washing, ironing and packing his clothes. Not a word of dissent had passed her lips as she collected the lists of books he left her, marking the sections that would most help with his research. It was like the old days, when she’d given up her own studies to help him through his PhD. Only this was no labour of love. Volunteering to help him gave her the perfect excuse to spend precious hours in his study without raising suspicion.
For every piece of information she prepared for him, she squirreled away one of her own. Passwords, account details, balances; all the things she’d been ‘too stupid’ to deal with, according to Neil—she made them her own. For every shirt of his she neatly folded, she packed something belonging to the kids into the boot of her car. Like the little mouse everyone believed her to be, she burrowed and sneaked around, a dull little thing, not worthy of notice. Soon, the little mouse would roar.
Being underestimated by everyone had turned out to be the perfect cover. Clad in her usual tidy uniform of a matching skirt and blouse, hair rolled into a discreet bun at the nape of her neck, she sat on a visitor’s chair in the school office and waited for the head teacher to be free. She clenched her fingers around the handle of the bag resting in her lap to prevent herself from fiddling with the hem of her skirt.
‘She shouldn’t be too much longer.’ The secretary offered an apologetic glance at the clock on the wall as the minute hand clicked loudly to mark quarter past the hour.
All those years of being subjected to her mother’s play-acting were finally paying off. Kiki pictured Vivian supine on the small couch beneath her window, a soft blanket over her legs, and an empty glass resting on the table beside her. ‘Mummy needs her special drink, darling. I’ve got such a terrible pain in my head.’
Kiki gripped her handbag until her knuckles turned white. With hindsight, the catch in her mother’s voice, the flutter of her hand as it gestured to her glass, had been a performance worthy of the stage. To a worried six-year-old girl, though, it had been all too real. Vivian could even cry on demand—nothing too drastic in case it spoiled her delicate complexion, just enough for a few tears to shimmer on her lashes as she whispered, ‘You want to help me, don’t you, Kiki? You want to be a good girl for Mummy.’
Swallowing the bad taste in her mouth, Kiki fixed her mind on her end goal and let her voice drop almost to a whisper. ‘I hope not. We still have so much to put in place.’ She returned the woman’s sympathetic smile with just the right amount of wavering in her own. Vivian at her manipulative best couldn’t beat the performance she’d been laying on since she’d hurried into the office. Angela Baines was a pleasant enough woman, but a notorious gossip—always had been. If you wanted a rumour to race around the playground, a word dropped in her ear was all it took.
Angela had lapped up Kiki’s tale with alacrity. A contemporary of theirs, she remembered the details of Jamie’s death, ‘so young, such a tragedy’. It hadn’t taken much to convince her Mia was struggling to come to terms with it still. Swallowing down the lump of guilt, Kiki had taken her sister’s name in vain, dropping enough vague hints for Angela to fill in the gaps and assume Kiki had no choice but to carry out a mercy dash to the coast before the very worst happened. She could only hope Mrs Wilson was as gullible.
The inner door swung open and Kiki stood. She paused to place a silent hand of thanks on Angela’s shoulder, and to accept the returning pat of sympathy, before following Mrs Wilson into her inner sanctum. Nothing appeared to have changed in the twenty years since she and her sisters had been pupils here. The carefully drawn pictures pinned to the noticeboard were different, but the sentiment behind them struck a chord of memory.
Following Kiki’s gaze, Mrs Wilson cast a glance over her shoulder. ‘I had one of Nee’s drawings up there back in the day. It’s in the cupboard somewhere. Perhaps I should dig it out and boost my retirement savings.’
Kiki allowed herself to smile. She couldn’t image Mrs Wilson cashing in on any of her beloved mementos. ‘You might need to hang on to it for a few more years, but we have great hopes for her. She’s studying in New York, did you hear?’
‘No, I hadn’t. How exciting for her.’ Mrs Wilson sat back and folded her arms. ‘I understand Mia is making a new start for herself.’
Kiki