Page 57 of Mad About You

When we got home, I waited in the front room while he packed a couple of bags. I didn’t quite believe he’d go. He eventually emerged, and hefted his belongings onto the back seat of his car. Our only shared possessions were kitchen things and a pine bed. ‘I’ll pay you for them,’ I said, but he sneered at me. Keep your fucking money.

He came back into the front room, once the car was loaded.

Get some help, Harriet. I mean it. You need it. Get it for your sake, and before you put someone else through this.

I looked at his angular face that I’d once thought was so beautiful and saw only ugliness. You can’t easily love someone you’re scared of; I knew I hadn’t loved him for years. His way of leaving, his incapacity to say a single caring thing: it finally confirmed what I’d known but spent years trying not to face. He wasn’t the love of my life, he was an abuser. To confuse the two things seemed impossible.

I later found out that he’d told everyone we knew that he’d left me, made up a story about me throwing the lamp at him and breaking it, how he’d been hiding for years that I was a nasty drunk. I didn’t care. I really didn’t care. I was free.

His friends melted away immediately, his family took his side and cut me dead. They know Scott, but they don’t know him. The thing with abusers is they’re a percentage of a nice person. If the nice percentage is the only part their friends ever see, they don’t know he’s other things as well. If the abuser gets accused, they reflexively defend them, as any good friend would, if they hear something that doesn’t chime with their experience.No, no way, not Scott, he’s sound!

They’re right, they know the nice part and the nice part is nice. No one is seduced by someone showing their worst traits upfront. Scott is a showman, and a con artist. His friends don’t realise that they’re part of the show, and the con.

I don’t doubt I’ve been erased from Scott’s history. His sister once referred to a ‘bad break-up’ that predated me, and Scott gave her a look like he was going to strangle her. He scrubs us from the record. It’s supposed to be, I think, an act of extreme scorn, but to me it might be the one sign he knows he has victims, not exes.

Why write to you and tell you all this, instead of hope Scott might’ve changed, that he’s different, that you’re different, that you’re happy? After all, your life is a complete unknown to me. I was going to. Believe me, involving myself with Scott Dyer’s life again is the thing in the world I least want to do.

Then I saw you, and it was like seeing a past version ofmyself, seeing myself the way others must’ve once seen me. Maybe you are a reserved person, I don’t know you. But when I saw you, outside the bar, it was like you were sticking your head out of water to gasp a breath.

I know that feeling.

Please understand I’m not telling you what to do regards the man you want to marry. I only want you to know all this before you do. And that if you have been made a victim of Scott Dyer, you’re not alone.

Best wishes,

Harriet

26

There was a throb of light and music coming from the house as Harriet pulled into the drive, in the dusk. She belatedly remembered it was Cal’s birthday tonight. He’d asked her if it was alright with her to have ‘a do’ in a very punctilious manner, given it was his house, his thirty-third birthday, and entirely not for Harriet to veto. He’d also said she was welcome and she was relieved to say thanks, but she was covering a steampunk Goth wedding in Whitby and would be late back.

She slotted her key in the door as quietly as possible and hoped to slope upstairs and disappear into her room, unseen. She’d put her noise-cancelling headphones on, read her Kindle for a bit and drift off to sleep in the cocoon of her duvet, like a content OAP. It was almost a full week since she handed over the letter. If she made it to a fortnight without reverberations, she had arbitrarily decided, that would mean she didn’t have to worry. RIP, the memory of Scott Dyer.

‘Harriet? Harriet!’ Sam bellowed from the kitchen, with the unmistakeable brio of the half-cut. ‘Join us!’

‘Hi Sam!’ she said, stopping with hand on the banister, ducking her head to the side so she could see them in thekitchen. Multiple curious faces behind Sam’s looked on. ‘I’m alright, thank you.’

‘Let her be, Sam,’ Cal said, appearing next to him, ‘Harriet has her own Saturday night to be having.’

This was kind, if obviously untrue.

‘Happy birthday, Cal,’ Harriet said, and he raised his glass to her, winked.

‘Aw no way, you can’t go sit up there on your own, that’s tragic!’ Sam said. He held up his glass: ‘One of my margaritas! C’mon! Just one, then I’ll let you go!’

Cal mouthed, ‘Sorry,’ behind his back and grinned his leading-man grin. Harriet weakened.

‘OK, down in a sec.’

After a minor make-up touch-up and brushing her teeth, she found them still in the kitchen. The back door was open to the garden, where young women were shimmying half-heartedly around a portable Sonos playing Haim. Harriet could’ve changed out of her jeans, but everyone knew she’d got in from work, so why bother.

Sam poured her a grey drink in a glass with a salted rim and Harriet did the rounds ofhi nice to meet you’swith attractive people whose names she wouldn’t remember. They seemed to be a mixture ofYorkshire Poststaff, city council colleagues and miscellaneous shiny individuals, in the age twenty-seven to thirty-four bracket.

Approximately four drinks behind everyone else, Harriet was free to observe the dynamics. Cal, while one of four men present, was clearly the prime object of female interest. There was a lot of coy pawing of his shirt and squealing in mockoffence, in his vicinity. Although you’d expect a birthday boy to be key to proceedings, she felt their orbiting around him, performing for his attention. Clearly, his treatment of wives-to-be was no deterrent.

Sam was also flirting hard.

‘I’m from a small place outside Richmond. Tougher area than Cal’s,’ he told Mia, who was in leather trousers so closely fitting they looked like body paint.

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