A train hammered along the viaduct bordering the pitches and I shivered. I had to go home.
The problem was, I didn’t know where home was anymore. I didn’t really know anything, other than that I had to find Eddie David. No matter what this man said.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I pulled running shorts over my legs. It was 3.09 a.m., precisely seven hours since I’d stumbled away from the football pitch. My room was pungent with sleeplessness.
Sports bra, running top. My hands shook. Adrenaline was still collecting in fizzy pools around my body, dancing over the sickening exhaustion that must lie underneath. Tommy had barred the door when I’d emerged in my running gear after getting back from the football. He’d made me a hot drink and had then ordered me off to bed. ‘I don’t even want to think about what happened at that football pitch,’ he’d told me severely, but within five minutes he’d cracked and knocked at my door, begging me to tell him what had happened at that football pitch.
‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said softly, when I finished. ‘But well done for admitting something’s gone . . . well, a bit wrong with you. That takes courage.’
‘The letters, Tommy, all those letters I sent him via Facebook. Calling his workshop, writing to his friend Alan. What was I thinking ?’
‘A silent phone brings out the very worst in us,’ he said. ‘All of us.’
We sat together on my bed for a long time. Neither of us said much, but his presence calmed me sufficiently to try sleeping .
‘I’m so sorry,’ I’d said, before he went off to his own bed. ‘I’ve become a burden on you again. You shouldn’t have to spend your life rescuing me.’
Tommy had smiled. ‘I didn’t rescue you back then, and I’m not rescuing you now,’ he’d said. ‘I’m here for you, Harrington – you know I am – but I’m also certain you can sort this out. You’re a survivor. One of life’s cockroaches.’
I’d just about managed a smile of my own.
Now, three hours later, I was trying again and again to knot my laces, but my hands wouldn’t coordinate. Everything was wrong.
My airport taxi was at five. I had not slept and I wouldn’t. There was plenty of time for a run, a shower, to gift wrap the little lemon tree I’d bought for Tommy and Zoe to say thank you. And I’d only go for a short jog; just enough to help me sleep on the plane.
I slid out of my bedroom door, grateful that Zoe was away. When Tommy went up to bed, that was where he stayed, but Zoe often got up very early to answer emails from Asia, wrapped in an elegant grey silk kimono. More than once she had caught me sneaking out for a run before the sun had risen.
Although this, I knew, glancing at my watch – 3.13 a.m. – was not a run. This was a problem.
I glanced at myself in Zoe’s big mirror in the hallway, framed by wood from a tree from her late parents’ Berkshire garden. Zoe was right: I had lost weight. My arms looked stringy, and my face looked narrower, as if I’d taken out a plug and allowed some of it to drain.
I turned away, embarrassed to look at myself. Frightened, too. I had often wondered about the degree of consciousness held by the mentally ill as they began to deteriorate. How easily could they recognize a decline? How visible was the line between fact and fiction, before it disappeared completely?
Was I unwell?
I stopped in the kitchen for a quick drink of water. My leg muscles twitched impatiently. Soon , I told them. Soon.
In the kitchen doorway, I stopped dead. What? Zoe? But she was in—
‘Jesus!’ shouted the woman in the kitchen.
I froze. The woman was naked. Another naked stranger, little more than seven hours since I’d seen the last. Synthetic orange light from the streetlamp stippled her breasts and belly as she plunged about, trying to cover herself. A stream of expletives flew from her mouth.
I turned away, covering my eyes. And then I turned back, because a slender thread in my brain was beginning to unravel: This woman is not a stranger. ‘Stop looking at me,’ the woman snapped, although less ferociously now, and I felt my face slacken with disbelief as I finally recognized my oldest female friend.
‘Oh my God,’ I said weakly.
‘Oh my God,’ Jo agreed, grabbing a Bluetooth speaker from Zoe’s work surface and holding it over her pubic hair.
‘Jo?’ I whispered. ‘No. No, no. Tell me this isn’t what it looks like.’
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ Jo muttered, swapping the speaker for a cookery book and then giving up completely. ‘I told you to stop looking at me,’ she added, sinking down behind the kitchen island.
I stood, paralysed, until an angry whisper rose up from the other side of the kitchen. ‘Sarah, can you please get me something to put on?’ Wordlessly I walked backwards into the hallway, where I got a coat off a hook. I handed it to her and slumped down on one of Zoe’s stools .
‘What is happening?’ I asked.
Jo stood up, pulling on what turned out to be an enormous ski jacket. She merely huffed, rolling back the cuffs so her hands could poke through.
‘Would you like a pair of salopettes?’ I asked dazedly. ‘Some ski poles? A crash helmet? Jo, what is this?’
‘I could ask you the same question,’ she said, frowning in distaste at the coat. ‘Wealthy arseholes,’ she added, presumably about anyone who liked to ski. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m staying here,’ I said. ‘As you well know. I’m going for a run and then I’m going to the airport.’
‘It’s quarter past three in the morning!’ Jo hissed. ‘Nobody goes running at that time!’
‘You’re naked in Tommy’s kitchen!’ I hissed back. ‘Don’t start!’
Jo zipped up the coat. ‘Unbelievable,’ was all she could say.
I took a deep breath. ‘Jo, are you sleeping with Tommy? Are my two oldest friends having an affair? We’ll deal with me shortly,’ I added, before she tried to interrupt.
‘I was visiting,’ she said eventually. ‘Tommy said I could sleep on the sofa.’
‘Try again,’ I said. ‘Try again, Joanna Monk. Tommy went to bed at midnight, or so I thought. You weren’t here then. But now you are, and you’re naked, and I know how much you love your pyjamas.’
‘Oh shit,’ someone muttered. I looked up. Tommy was standing in the doorway, wrapped in his dressing gown. ‘I told you this was a bad idea,’ he said to Jo.
‘I needed a drink! I don’t drink from no bathroom taps, Tommy, you know that.’ Her voice was combative, which meant she was panicking. ‘And she should have been asleep anyway, not sneaking out for a run.’ She nodded her head at me.
I folded my elbows onto the kitchen island. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I want to know exactly what is going on here. And how long it’s been happening. And how this is justifiable when Tommy is in a long-term relationship.’ I paused. ‘Well, you too, Jo, although you’ll forgive me for caring less about Shawn.’
Tommy padded across the kitchen floor and sat at the top of the island, next to neither me nor Jo.
‘Well, you see . . .’ he began, and then paused.
The pause became a silence, which hung in the air like fog. He looked at his hands. He picked at a hangnail. He lifted his hand to his mouth and nibbled at his thumb.
‘I also want to know why I’m only finding out about this now,’ I added.
Jo suddenly sat down. ‘We’re having sex,’ she said. Her voice was perhaps a little louder than was necessary.
Tommy flinched, but didn’t deny it.
‘And I’m not convinced you care all that much about Zoe, Sarah, but – for what it’s worth – she’s been sleeping with her client. The director of that company she represents, the one that makes them fitness watches. That’s why she went to Hong Kong. He invited her. And Tommy’s fine about it,’ she added firmly. ‘He came round to my flat the night she told him and we had too much to drink and . . . well.’
Tommy looked at Jo, as if to say, Really? Then he shrugged and inclined his head, as if to confirm what she’d said. He was puce with embarrassment.