Page 118 of Someone Else's Shoes
And it’s out there. The thing she has rolled through her head in her sleepless nights. An acknowledgement that there is something between them, and that whatever it is cannot continue. The only thing she has been able to hang on tois the sense that she can somehow be a good person again. She meets his gaze. It is sad and understanding, and makes something in her turn over.
‘Are you … back together?’
‘No. I don’t know.’ She sighs. ‘We’ve been married a long time. It’s hard to just – I mean, he’s not a bad man. It’s hard to walk away from all that history without a backward look. I don’t know. Maybe he already has. Maybe I need to be by myself and work out who I am without him. It’s just hard when I’ve never really been … without him.’ They sit for a moment. ‘It’s complicated, isn’t it?’
He nods. ‘It really is.’
‘I thought I’d have it all figured out by this age.’
He lets out a short laugh. And then he looks serious again. ‘I hope he appreciates you, Sam. You’re … you’re special.’
‘I’m not. Not really. You’re probably better off with someone less … complicated. But thank you. For giving me …’
He leans forward in his seat then and reaches across the table, his palm resting gently against the side of her face. He kisses her lightly and, just for a moment, lets his forehead rest against hers, so that she can feel the warmth of his skin, their breath mingling in the space between them. They stay like that, oblivious to the gurgle of the coffee machine, the scraping of chairs and the sounds of the baby beside them, and she hears what she thinks might be a sigh.
Sam places her hand over his, and gently brings it down from her face, leaning back slowly in her chair. She gazes at his hand in hers and turns it over, surveying the scarred knuckles, the nails a few shades lighter than his skin. When she looks up, the smile they give each other is sad and true, and filled with the things neither of them can say.
Joel breaks the moment. He squeezes her hand briefly, then stands, releasing it. She is not sure what she can read onhis face: pride? Disappointment? Resignation? He turns and, without saying anything else, takes his jacket from the back of the chair, nods to her, and leaves.
Sam drives the camper-van along the narrow street to her house, and parks at the front, noting that the builders have finally finished the adjoining wall. She needs to pick up more clothes for her and Cat, who seems to get through three outfit changes a day. They will move back in tomorrow once Nisha has sorted things out with Carl. But in the moments she allows herself to think about it, she doesn’t know how she will feel about staying in this house. It still holds, in the unmoving air, the echo of the break-in, the occasional tiny crunch of something broken underfoot and lodged deep in the carpet. When she closes her eyes she sees the devastation of her little home; it wakes her up at night. ‘At least you have the terrifying guard dog,’ Andrea had said, looking at Kevin, legs splayed and snoring on her floor.
Not for the first time, Sam feels the loss of her old life like a wound. The world is full of lasts, she thinks. The last time you pick up your child. The last time you hug a parent. The last time you cook dinner in a house full of the people you love. The last time you make love to the husband you once adored who will walk away from you because you turned into a crazy, resentful hormone-fuelled idiot. And with all these moments you don’t know that this will be the last or you would be overwhelmed by the poignancy of them, hang on to them like someone unhinged, bury your face in them, never let them go. Sam thinks about the last time she curled herself around Phil’s body. If she had known it would be the last time would she have done things differently? Would she have been more patient? Less angry? If she thinks about the possibility that she will never hold him again, a hole opensup in her middle that leaves her feeling like she might just disintegrate.
In for six, hold for three, out for seven.
Sam steels herself as she reaches the front door. What would Nisha do? She would toughen up, be practical, strategize. So, she will head to John Lewis and replace the broken items tomorrow. At least there will be money coming in again in a month’s time. She’ll live off credit till then. Perhaps at some point she may even have a little over to help Andrea. She flinches as she hears a sound from inside and stops in her tracks, slowly peers around the door, her heart racing.Carl Cantor’s men.Her heart thumps all the way up in her throat. She feels a fine sweat break out on her skin.
She creeps around the side of the house to the back door and reaches slowly behind the moss-covered garden gnome for the back-door key. They must have broken in, but she can’t see where: there are no obvious signs of forced entry. Of course there aren’t. They are professionals, like Nisha said. But that doesn’t mean they can just let themselves in. Adrenalin begins to course through her, and as she stands listening to the sounds of movement inside she finds that, instead of fear, she feels only cold fury. There is someone in her house, her home. Treating it like it’s theirs to walk all over, to take what they want. Well, they’re not going to take anything else. And she’s not going to be walked over any more. Sam sees the cat in the bin, Simon’s smirk, her kitchen, smashed and desecrated, her beloved family photographs trodden into the floor, the hours it took to get everything straight. Sam Kemp has had enough.
She places her hand quietly on the handle, sees the shadow behind the glass door, and there he is, the man, bending down. To do what? Sift through what he has already wrecked? Finish what he started?
Sam does not have a plan. She knows there are a million reasons why it will be unwise for her to interrupt the intruder who is in her house, but something in her body propels her with a roar that seems to come from somewhere in the pit of her stomach, pulls her right fist back, and with a jab that would have had Sid cheering, punches the intruder full in the face, sending him tumbling backwards onto the floor.
‘But what – what were youdoing?’
‘Putting things straight.’ Phil’s voice is muffled. He is still holding some screws in his left hand and now, as she holds the ice pack against his nose, he drops them gently onto the coffee-table. They leave indents in the skin of his palm where he must have been clutching them too tightly. ‘Cat told me what happened. I came to help.’
She’d like to know what else Cat has told him but she doesn’t want to ask. She takes the ice pack off for a moment and touches his nose where the bruise is already purpling, the small cut that she has carefully covered in Savlon. His face, so familiar and unfamiliar to her touch. She puts the ice pack back, desperate for something to do with her hands. It is then that she sees the television propped in the corner.
‘Oh. Yeah. She told me they’d smashed ours so I rang around the lads and asked if anyone had a television we could borrow. This one’s Jim’s. He said it lives in his garage because his wife prefers him to watch the racing out there. He’s a bit noisy apparently when he has a horse coming in.’
‘I thought you didn’t like asking your friends for anything.’
‘It seemed daft not to. It – it sounded like it was quite a mess.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It was.’
He looks different somehow. Even under the ice pack. She realizes he has shaved. He is wearing jeans instead ofjogging bottoms and a fresh shirt. But there is something else: he seems less hunted, like he’s more certain of the space he occupies.
‘The boxing training’s working, then,’ he says, and touches his nose gingerly.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘If I’d thought for one moment it might be you I wouldn’t have –’
‘That was quite a punch.’
She feels a little weak as the last of the adrenalin leaches away and she sits heavily back on the sofa. They smile awkwardly. She looks at her knuckles. The middle one has gone a purplish colour and the skin is grazed where it may have made contact with Phil’s teeth.
‘I – I didn’t actually know I could hit that hard.’
