Jennie Ensor - The Girl in His Eyes

Her thoughts shifted – Marmaduke. Where was he? She’d forgotten all about him. Why hadn’t he come to greet her? She peeped under the kitchen chair, alarmed now. Marmaduke’s bowl contained a few pieces of dried-up food. Quickly, she unlocked the back door.

‘Marmaduke! Here, kitty-kitty!’

She tapped her fingers against the glass and called him several more times, but he didn’t appear. Leaving the back door ajar, she went inside, sat down, and tilted her head back against the wall. Despair rolled through her. The emotion was bigger than she’d expected, bigger than she knew how to deal with.

This was it then, the moment of reckoning. She was alone. Her husband was dead and now her cat had disappeared. What the hell was she going to do?

She’d never been good at facing reality, it was so much easier to run away and hide. But she couldn’t hide from this pain. Once again, she saw Paul’s face as it was revealed on the mortuary slab: the long red gash across his brow, the eye misshapen and dark with blood. Had he really loved her, despite everything?

She closed her eyes. Why couldn’t he have been an ordinary man? An ordinary husband, an ordinary father to her children? That was all she’d ever wanted.

Her shoulders heaved. She began to cry, the sobs crashing out of her, seemingly unstoppable. Then something rubbed against her legs, purring noisily.

‘Marmaduke! Where have you been?’

She picked him up, stroked his back, and tickled under his chin. He was thinner, but otherwise seemed fine. Suzanne put half a tin of cat food into his bowl and watched him eat.

Laura arrived first, then Daniel. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, one or other occasionally getting up to bring cups of tea or coffee. No one said much at first. They all sounded unlike their usual selves, tentatively treading around what they really wanted to talk about.

‘So, it was suicide?’ Daniel asked at last, rubbing his chin.

‘That’s what the police think,’ Suzanne replied. ‘All the signs were there. The whisky, no seat belt, no other vehicles involved.’

‘Why? Why did he do it?’

‘I don’t know, Daniel.’ But she could guess. What did he have left to live for? He’d lost everything.

‘He must have felt terribly alone,’ Daniel went on. ‘Like we’d all abandoned him.’

‘It was shame too, I think,’ she said. ‘He always hated people judging him.’

Laura lowered her face onto her folded arms. She looked terrible: her eyelids puffy, her face greyish in tone.

‘He didn’t want to go to prison, that’s what he was afraid of. He knew I was going to the police. When we were talking in the car, he begged me not to go. He tried to stop me.’

Daniel gave his sister a hard look.

‘He hurt my arm.’ Laura glared back at her brother. ‘I thought he was going to… I don’t know what he might have done. I pushed my fingers into his face, to stop him hurting me. That’s why his eye was damaged.’

Suzanne stirred her tea. It was extra strong and made with sugar, which she never normally took. Today though, she needed all the help she could get. She tried not to think about the torn and bloody eye that had stared up at her from the mortuary slab. Why hadn’t they closed it? Perhaps it was because they were going to examine the body.

‘You did what you had to do,’ she said.

‘But did she have to tell the coppers?’

Laura’s face flushed. ‘What do you think we should have done, just sat around patiently and waited for him to find his next victim?’

‘Stop it, you two!’

Her voice was louder than she’d intended. Both Laura and Daniel stared at her.

‘Your father chose to do what he did,’ she said. ‘He chose to act like a total prick and then he chose to throw his life away. This is no one’s fault but his.’ She got to her feet, surprised by the certainty she felt.

Neither Laura nor Daniel spoke. They both looked shamefaced. Laura heated some chicken soup and Daniel busied himself with his phone.

‘I’m sorry, Laura,’ Daniel said.

‘It’s OK.’

The hostility between them disappeared, replaced by an attempt at banter. They did their best to help with the practical things and clearly wanted to be on hand should their mother fall into a pit of despair. In the late afternoon she tried to shoo them away, reassuring them that she’d be OK, she needed to rest now, but they refused to leave.

Suzanne opened the door to the bedroom she’d shared with Paul.

It was too early to go to bed, but she desperately needed to sleep. She lay on the bed, fully dressed, glancing around the room. The chair was no longer piled with his clothes and Laura had changed the sheets. Paul’s comb, watches and bottles of scent still rested on the chest of drawers.

It was difficult to believe that her husband had actually gone, that he wouldn’t put his head around the door any moment and ask what was for dinner, or did she want a glass of water. But he wasn’t coming back. She was a widow now.

The thought was too strange, it didn’t slot in anywhere. A wobble, deep in her psyche.

Katherine’s recent advice came to her. Try to think of something funny when you can’t deal with things anymore. She tried, but nothing came to mind. She noticed the tapping of her heart, louder now and a little too fast. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly to the count of five.

Five, four, three, two, one.

She repeated this several times. After a while, she was calmer.

It’s going to take a while, but you’ll get there.

A wry smile came to her lips. Yes, she’d get there. The old geezer up above had surprised her, yet again, but she wasn’t going to fall apart this time. Somehow, she would get through this latest crisis. Deep down she was a tough old bird.

The remains of the buffet lay on the dining table: dented balls of deep-fried mozzarella, nibbled sandwiches, and the crumbling remains of quiches and cake. At last, apart from her mother and Daniel, everyone had gone.

Laura went to the French windows. Outside, yellows and blues studded the flowerbeds. The sun came out from behind a cloud and went in again.

Everyone had spoken well of her father this morning, and no one had mentioned the likelihood that her father had killed himself. None of his relatives had made it to the funeral, except for a great aunt and a cousin from Canada, and they’d said little about him. But many of his friends and work colleagues had turned up. To them, her father had been a different man, it seemed. A likeable, charming man who had done many kind and helpful things, who’d laughed with them and had made them laugh. It was as if the man they were talking about wasn’t her father at all, but a good-natured imposter. Perhaps each had decided not mention the less pleasant side of him. Or perhaps, to them, he really had been a different man.

She thought back to when she was growing up, how he’d never stayed the same person for long. Every so often, the brooding silences would build into rage, for no discernible reason. Then, hey presto, the anger was put aside and a jovial, contented man would appear. In a similar way, when he touched her, he went into a sort of altered state. Once he’d finished, he’d snap out of it. As if he were a magician performing a conjuring trick, the man with glazed eyes would instantly transform, from the ogre she feared into a father like anyone else’s.

‘Hi, sis. How’s it going?’

She turned to Daniel, now standing behind her. He was wearing a black shirt and his grey suit, the jacket now removed. He hadn’t had time to buy a black suit for the funeral, he’d told her earlier. Hadn’t wanted to, perhaps.