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35
April 2017
Rachel put down the phone and stifled an urge to laugh out loud. She clapped her hands over her mouth and then pulled them away again. Her smile was so wide it felt almost as if she might swallow herself. She picked up her phone again and pressed in her dad’s number. No reply. Her finger loitered momentarily over Michael’s number in her contacts, but she removed it. No, she thought. No. This moment was so precious she did not want to risk Michael tainting it in some way by making it about him. Instead she called Paige.
‘What are you up to?’
‘Why?’
‘I just had some amazing news and I want to drink champagne with someone.’
‘Well, you’ve come to the right place. Give me half an hour. I’ll be here waiting for you!’
Rachel locked her studio behind her and headed up the road to Marks & Spencer where she bought a bottle of champagne and a six-pack of Colin the Caterpillar cupcakes. In Paige’s studio she popped the cork, poured the champagne into water glasses and passed one to her.
‘So, what’s the scoop?’
‘The scoop is that …’ Rachel mimed a drumroll in the air. ‘… Liberty have just phoned to confirm that as of October the seventeenth, they will be stocking a bespoke Rachel Gold Jewels range in their jewellery lounge, right between Dinny Hall and Annoushka.’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’
‘Oh my God. Oh my goodness,cheers!’ Paige pressed her glass against Rachel’s and then leaned in to hug her. ‘That is the most, most amazing thing. I mean, justwow! What did Michael say?’
‘Oh. I haven’t told him yet. I was going to wait ’til I got home.’
‘He’ll be so happy. Oh my goodness! It’s just awesome! You’ll have to get a bigger studio.’
‘Yes. I guess I will. I mean, lots will have to change. I’ll need a bank loan. An assistant. More stock. More space. Yes. But fuck it, I’m not going to worry about that right now. Cheers!’ They knocked glasses again and Rachel finished her glass in three large swigs.
Her phone vibrated then, and she saw her father’s name on her screen and held the phone away from her ear as his excited screams whistled down the line. She absorbed his excitement, his pride,his absolute certainty that this was always going to happen, that he’d known all along.
‘What took them so long?’ he said. ‘What took them so long?’
Through the rusty, metal-framed windows of Paige’s studio she saw the day darkening. It was gone six. Around now she would normally let Michael know what sort of time she’d be home. It had started as a form of bonding behaviour, tied in with the novelty of having someone to go home to, but was now tied into the logistics of planning meals which was all Michael seemed to concern himself with recently. She couldn’t face it today though. She was halfway through her second glass of champagne and the delight of success was so pure and so golden and the thought of Michael resentfully trudging out to the shops without a consensus on dinner was not one she could currently entertain. She didn’t want to tell Michael what time she was going to be home. She wanted to be home when fate took her home. When she felt like going home. When she was ready to go home, not when Michael was placing food on the table, food, frankly, she didn’t even really want to eat.
As she thought this her phone vibrated and there it was.What time are you back? What do you want to eat?
She sighed. She didn’t want to eat. She wanted to drink champagne and eat Colin the Caterpillar cupcakes and then go to a bar with Paige and talk about boys and maybe order some chips later on to soak up the wine and then roll home and kick off her shoes and snuggle up to Michael and tell him her news and watch some TV and go to bed with him and have proper sex, the sort of sex she didn’t have to micro-manage, that just happened and was silly and sensuous and glorious.
She stared at the message for a few seconds, then turned off her screen, topped up her glass with more champagne and said to Paige, ‘Fancy going out somewhere?’
Rachel got home at ten o’clock. She had finally replied to Michael’s text at about eight thirty and said,Sorry, only just seen this, I’m out with Paige, won’t be eating. See you later!He hadn’t replied which she’d found strange. In the hallway she took off her shoes and left them by the door. The apartment was in darkness. She walked to the end of the hallway and into the kitchen. Immediately she felt something skewed. A sense of things not being where they should be. She felt for the light switch and turned on the overhead halogens and there behind her, like a strange abstract painting, was an ugly splat of food, crawling slowly down the wall towards the skirting board. On the floor beneath were six jagged shards of white china. Closer inspection revealed the food to be some kind of risotto dish. Pumpkin maybe. The rest of the kitchen was absolutely spotless. The dishwasher hummed gently in the background. The chrome tap gleamed. The tea towel was folded neatly and hanging from the oven door.
For a moment Rachel stood and swayed slightly, both with the effects of four hours of drinking and with the shocking ugliness of the tableau confronting her. And then, unexpectedly, she laughed. She laughed because she was picturing Michael, sitting, brooding, forking risotto into his mouth, slamming her plate into the wall and then carefully picking his way around the aftermath as he cleaned his kitchen, making sure to leave it for her to see, and she found it strangely and painfully ridiculous to think of it, almost as though she were watching a clip on YouTube, postedfor comedic value: Husband Goes Crazy When Wife Misses Dinner.
She decided to sleep on the sofa. She couldn’t bear to face Michael. She pulled off her sweater and her jeans. Her pyjamas were in the bedroom but she did not want to go into her bedroom so she decided to sleep in her underwear. She brushed her teeth quietly in the bathroom and pulled a throw from the back of the sofa. She plugged her phone in to charge and pushed a cushion under her head. The curtains in the living room didn’t quite meet and for a while she stared at the stripe of shimmering navy-blue light sluicing through the gap. Her thoughts shimmered in rhythm, a slightly nauseating dance between the excitement of her good news, the wine in her bloodstream, the imprint in her mind of the food smashed against the kitchen wall, the gleaming chrome tap, the humming dishwasher, the sickening, furious silence pounding at the bedroom door.
At some point later that night she awoke with a start, the feel of thick flesh against her mouth, her nostrils jammed painfully up her face. She felt weight on her hip bones, on her femurs, on her ribs. And then more flesh and sinew against her throat.
She pushed but it was like pushing against a metal girder. For a brief moment she thought it was an intruder, something spirited into the third-floor apartment via a drainpipe, up and over the balcony, through the slice in the curtains, liquid, shimmering, turning to flesh and bone against her own flesh and bone. But the smell was too familiar. The smell of her husband. She wrenched his hand from her mouth and said, ‘What the fuck, Mi—’
But the hand came back to her mouth, this time harder, and the other hand was on her underwear, yanking at the waistband.Rachel tried to sink her teeth into the flesh of Michael’s hand but couldn’t open her mouth wide enough against the pressure. And then he was in her, and his hands were around her throat, his head up, his gaze somewhere on the ceiling, pushing her head further and further inside the cushions of the sofa with each thrust, and Rachel counted the thrusts to calm the roil of her emotions and it was fourteen. Fourteen thrusts. His hands around her neck. Her eyes pulsing and watering. Her legs cycling against the force of him. And then he was done. He was out of her. Off her. His hands gone from her throat. He stood over her, his hair ridiculous, his chest pumping, his eyes burning dark.
Rachel got to her feet and stood eye to eye with Michael. Her breath came fitfully through the tears burning her throat. ‘You raped me.’ Her voice didn’t sound like hers. It was broken and raw. ‘Michael. You raped me.’
Michael’s lip curled. ‘Your breath stinks.’
