Page 57 of We Live Here Now

“That style really suits you,” I add.

She’s had a fair amount cut off, three or four inches, maybe more from the look of all the hair littered around the chair, and a bunch of choppy layers cut in. It’s a supercool look. Let’s hopewholeSally likes it. It feels surreal thinking that some of this woman’s essence is stuck in my house. Maybe I am mad—maybe more than maybe—but I still believe it.

“Thanks.” She saunters over to the counter and Joe follows her, reaching for his credit card as a junior takes the robe from his wife and fetches her coat.

“Get that floor swept please, Sasha,” a stylist calls across to the junior, who nods, and my stomach does an excited flip as I look down.Hair. Sally’s. A lot of it.

I lift my keys from my pocket and accidentally drop them at my feet, and as I lean down to pick them up, my back to the others at the counter, I also quickly grab a few cut locks and wrap them in a tissue, stuffing them away, hopefully before anyone sees. When I turn, head thumping with a rush of blood, Joe is still at the counter chatting and Sally has joined him. One item down.

“Lunch then, ladies?” Joe says as we go outside. I take one arm and Sally takes the other as he leads us to the restaurant, where we take a corner booth, Joe between us.

I study their dynamic as they talk me through the process of the artwork and the percentage they’d pay to me as a model. It’s not a small amount. Joe reallyisa sought-after artist if they’re making that much. Sally’s constantly looking at him, adoration in her eyes. Maybe that’s what he needs from women. Adulation. Maybe that’s why he fell in love with her in the first place. She had her wit and charm and she adored him. But the downside was that she couldn’t ever share him.

As the plates are cleared, I surreptitiously take the wet towel that Sally wiped her hands and mouth on after her garlic butter prawns and pocket it. Two items down. Then when we leave and Sally pops to the loo and Joe pays despite my protests, I sneak her napkin too. I don’t need or want to go back to the cottage really, but I don’t have a good excuse not to, so I impatiently drink my tea, have an obligatory toke on a joint as Joe rummages in their record collection for something to play, and then make my excuses, saying I need to get back before Freddie’s home from work.

“I can walk you to your car, if you like?” Joe says.

“I’ll be fine. It’s barely fifty feet from here. But thank you. I’ll talk to Freddie about the painting. See what he thinks.”

I leave them to it, Sally already swaying to the music, mildly stoned, and I know that as soon as I’m out the door they’ll be dancing together and probably very quickly fucking. I let myself out, taking the silk scarf she was wearing at lunch, now draped on a coat hook, and get back out into the icy air.

Fuck it. By the time they notice anything is missing, it will be too late. The strains of music drift out to me as I walk away. Some seventies folkie-sounding band I don’t know.Enjoy it while it lasts, Joe, I think.Your chickens are about to come home to roost.

The drive home is uneventful. When I get home, without giving myself any time to think, I go to the kitchen and grab a roasting pan, matches, and firelighters before heading straight upstairs. It’s getting dark already, and who knows when Freddie will get back.Even with the lights on, the upper landing is edged in suffocating shadows. As I push open the door to the primary bedroom, there’s an awful chill hanging in the air, and the floorboards creak heavily under me as I walk to the center of the empty space. I don’t stop though. I know what I have to do.

Seated on the floor, I empty my Sally collection into the roasting tin and add the firelighters. It takes two goes for my trembling hands to light a match, and I throw it straight onto the firelighters before any draft can extinguish it. The flames appear immediately and shoot up unnaturally high toward the ceiling, and I sit back, heart racing, and watch it start to burn.

I know straightaway that something strange is happening. It’s like all the air in the room is being sucked into the roasting tin like a whirlpool and expelled as the flames, bright white with a swirling black smoke. The smoke expands and expands, filling the room fast, dark, sulfuric, and ashy, and I scuttle backward, my eyes already burning and watering. I try not to breathe in, but I have no choice, and the hot smoke goes into my lungs and suddenly—

72

I’m not in the upstairs bedroom. I’m not anywhere and yet I’m everywhere, watching the action. I’m the house perhaps. The power that was built into the house sensing what’s about to happen.

They’re fighting in the bedroom. They look so different, so young, but it’s them. A small suitcase is open on the bed, and while Sally, red-faced from hysterical crying and rage, still launches accusations at him—I know there was something happening! I could see it in the way you looked at her. How was I supposed to sit by and watch that and not say anything? How could you do that to me?—he’s yanking her clothes out of a chest of drawers and putting them in it. He looks wild, his pupils so dilated his eyes are nearly entirely black.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he finally says when her tirade of anger and jealousy and insecurity pauses for breath. “You’re exhausting me. I need to breathe.”

“I thought you loved me.” She tries to tug a sweater out of his hands, but he pulls it free and folds it into the case.

“I did love you. I do love you. But I can’t deal withthisyou. All these questions. I barely knew Georgina and you’ve run her out of town. Do you realize how crazy that is? I can’t go the rest of my life without talking to another woman, Sally. I can’t go through the rest of my life without sleeping with another woman. I won’t. I’m an artist. I need that freedom. You said you needed it too!”

He storms out, slightly unsteady on his feet, and I’m pulled with him, tugged through the air like a balloon on a string as he goes to the bathroom and clumsily gathers up her toiletries.

“You can’t do this! I’ll change.” She’s followed him, and the rage hasturned to fear and upset as she realizes he means business. Her heavy eye makeup—a look that I somehow know, maybe because Joe does, isn’t her usual but is Georgina’s that she’s made a pathetic attempt to replicate—has streaked down her face, a tragic rejected clown.

“You say that every time.” He pushes past her and back out onto the landing, dragging me with him.

“I mean it this time!” She rushes out of the bathroom and clings to his arm. “Please, Joe. Please. I’ll kill myself if you leave me. You know I will. Please…”

It’s too much for him though, this ritual that they’ve been through so many times in their relationship. His love is never enough for her, and it never will be. That black hole of jealousy andneedjust gets bigger and bigger. This time, this final time, her fingers clinging onto him, and her tears, do nothing but disgust him. The weed is strong and he’s still tripping a little from the acid he did in the studio last night, the light and color and emotions glitteringly surreal. Her fingers turn into dirty talons digging into him and momentarily her face contorts. She’s a vulture that won’t let go. Why can’t she just be the Sally who he loves? The Sally who was so cool with everything that he is in a way that made him love her so much more. He’s at breaking point. Even the drugs can’t calm him down. It’s all snapping inside him, and as she tries to pull him toward her, he pushes her hard away. “Enough!”

He pushes her too hard.

Surprised, she stumbles backward, trips over her own feet, and falls flat on her back.

“Oh.”

It’s the only sound she makes, and then nothing. She just lies there, silent and still.

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