Читать книгу The Island Escape - Кэрри Фишер, Kerry Fisher - Страница 8

By the time I knew I was going to be released, I’d been swabbed, fingerprinted and photographed like a common criminal. I’d explained everything to a solicitor, then again to yet another policewoman who kept telling me that she knew how difficult this was for me.

Actually, she didn’t have the faintest clue. Everything about Scott had been complicated: meeting in Italy when he was on a gap year and I was an art student, the ensuing courtship that survived to- and fro-ing from Australia to England, our differences in culture, manners and upbringing.

Not to mention everyone else’s opinions on the subject.

I’d tried to be that obedient girl, destined for a future with a City boy. But I was no match for Scott’s persistence. He’d torn through my staid world, bringing spontaneity and irreverence. Springing out on me in the university library, straight off the plane from Australia. Spraying ‘I love you’ in shaving foam on the Mini my dad bought me for my twenty-first. Asking me to marry him in Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery, overlooking the sea.

This softly-spoken DC Smithfield probably thought I was a spoilt housewife, clinging on to a wealthy husband so I could shop for shoes every day. I didn’t have the energy to explain that we’d toiled away together, building up Scott’s property business, renovation by renovation.

By the time I signed the caution, accepting my guilt, I was punch-drunk, too exhausted to care about anything as long as I could lie down soon on a bed that wasn’t in a cell.

DC Smithfield told me that they’d have to finish processing me outside the custody suite because they were dealing with some ‘violent detainees’ in there. I wasn’t about to start splitting hairs over my preferred exit location. She led me into the normal part of the police station, where I’d once come to report the lawnmower being stolen from our shed.

And to my delight, Octavia was sitting there. My whole soul lifted as though I’d been staggering along with a box of encyclopaedias and had just found a table to rest it on.

She rushed over. ‘What the hell’s going on? Are you okay?’

I threw my arms round her, breathing in a trace of White Musk, the perfume oil she’d been wearing since we were about thirteen. I’d be able to pick her out blindfolded. Octavia was quick to prise me off her. She preferred the Swiss Army knife approach to drama.

She stepped back to look at me, taking in the boiler suit. ‘Jesus. Didn’t know you’d be dressed as Frosty the Snowman. Did you get the T-shirt I brought in?’

I shook my head. The detective constable looked apologetic. ‘I’ll check what happened there. Anyway, you can get changed back into your own clothes now.’

‘Have they finished with you already?’ Octavia asked. ‘I thought I might be here all night.’

‘They did me first while they were waiting for the others to sober up.’

DC Smithfield gestured for me to wait while she found the paperwork.

I sat with Octavia, relief flooding through me. She leant into my ear and whispered, ‘Tell me you didn’t kill him.’

I glanced towards the desk and kept my voice low. ‘God, no, nothing like that. It’s all resolved now. I just need to collect my belongings. Things got slightly out of hand. It was six of one and half a dozen of the other.’

‘So what did happen?’ Octavia said.

‘Same old, same old.’ A sudden weariness engulfed me. I was tired of talking about what had happened, of thinking about it.

Octavia was shaking her head. ‘Hardly same old. You’ve never been arrested before.’

‘Same old, but one step further. Scott was furious because I’d let Alicia wear an off-the-shoulder T-shirt to go to the cinema. It wasn’t a sexy thing, just an ordinary T-shirt. He thought it was too tarty.’

‘So?’

My stomach clenched as I remembered Scott shouting in my face, his Sydneysider accent becoming more pronounced.

‘The Australian side of the business isn’t going well and he’s been a fight waiting to happen recently. I carried on cooking dinner, refusing to get dragged in. He wouldn’t let it drop, kept on and on, right at me, how I’m so self-obsessed I can’t see that my daughter is turning into a little floozy, and I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t disappear back to Australia with her, the usual stuff. I tried to push him away but he was standing there, holding me back with one arm and laughing.’ I paused to stop the sob leaking out into my voice. ‘Then he said it was probably a good job that we hadn’t had any more kids as I was such a hopeless mother and I just lost control.’

A look of disgust flashed over Octavia’s face. ‘Vicious bastard.’ She squeezed my hand. She was one of the few people who understood how much my two miscarriages still hurt, over a decade later.

‘I picked up the frying pan and cracked it into the side of his head. The edge caught his forehead and it poured with blood. You know me, I was lucky not to faint. I shouldn’t have done it. Though if I’d known he was going to send me here, I’d have cracked it a bit harder.’

Octavia flickered out a smile at that. ‘Whoo-bloody-hoo. Poor little Scott got a bit of a bang on the head, bless his little cottons. Presumably he didn’t bleed to death and stain the limestone?’ As the words left Octavia’s mouth, I saw her lips twitch. I started to giggle too, a spirally sort of laughter that made a good alternative to crying.

Octavia grew serious again. ‘So how did you end up here?’

‘He phoned the police. Said I’d assaulted him. So Watermill Drive had the glorious spectacle of blue lights flashing outside our house and me being escorted away in handcuffs. No doubt the Surrey grapevine is quivering as we speak.’

‘He called the cops on you? Did they not look at the fact that he’s about fifteen stone with arms like hams and you are, what? About eight stone? Bloody hell. I suppose they don’t count all the times he’s locked you out or sworn in your face? Talk about a piss-up in a brewery. No such thing as common sense in British policing, then.’

Octavia’s shoulders went back. For one horrible moment, I thought she was going to march off and start grabbing a few ties over the reception desk. I was poised, ready to grip her arm. Luckily, they were busy dealing with a drunk who was complaining that his bike had been stolen and collapsing into hysterics every time he tried to spell his name.

I attempted to answer her. ‘Scott’s behaviour has never been serious enough to report. And I shouldn’t have hit him.’

‘He bloody deserved it. Anyway, it doesn’t take a brain box to work out that he could probably stand up for himself. What was it? A scratch? I’ve got a plaster in my bag. Perhaps I’ll pop over there and put some ice on his little head while I’m at it. Maybe he’ll piss off back to Sydney and do us all a favour.’

‘Don’t. His mother arrives tomorrow for Christmas.’ I looked at the floor.

Octavia stared. ‘Tomorrow? Make her stay in a hotel. You can’t go home as if nothing has happened after this.’

‘I have to. It’s Christmas and I am not ruining it for Alicia. When it’s over, I’ll work out what I’m going to do. If anything.’

Octavia was shaking her head. ‘You can’t stay with him now. You just can’t.’ It was astonishing how much disapproval I’d managed to engender in my life.

I shrugged. ‘It’s not as though I’ve got a proper criminal record. It’s just a caution.’

‘A caution? What for?’

‘Actual bodily harm.’

‘Actual bodily harm? For a scratch and a bit of a bruise? That’s bloody ridiculous. What an arsehole.’

‘I shouldn’t have allowed him to antagonise me. I’m sure he didn’t mean what he said about the babies. You know how devastated he was at the time. And a caution doesn’t mean anything unless I want to work in a school. Which obviously I don’t.’ I tried to smile. I loved my own daughter but had nothing like Octavia’s natural affinity with kids.

‘Could you have refused to accept the caution?’

‘Yes, but if he didn’t drop the charge, then it would have gone to court.’

‘Scott wouldn’t have done that, surely? Maybe he liked the idea of you sweating in a cell for a bit. He should have married some brainless drip, who never stands up to him. What would all his beefy business mates say if they found out his missus had clouted him one with a frying pan? He’d be a laughing stock.’

Octavia knew that Scott had a quick temper but I’d been economical with how often and how ferociously we’d argued. She simply wouldn’t get it. She’d always seen marriage as a pie chart of household chores, parenting and work, with the tiniest sliver of romance and passion. The rollercoaster ride of love and anguish that I’d experienced with Scott was alien to her, though we’d never plumbed these depths before.

Octavia had her hands on her hips, waiting for me to explain.

‘Scott made a statement. He said he would definitely press charges, so the solicitor advised me to admit “the offence”, as he called it, and agree to the caution. I just wanted to get out of here.’

Shock washed across Octavia’s face. She spoke in a low voice. ‘Robbie. Where is all of this going to end? Are you going to stay with him until he’s sucked every last bit of joy out of your life? Perhaps next time he’ll get you sent to prison. You can’t go on like this.’

‘I know that.’

Octavia was expecting me to be like her. Make a decision, there and then, pack suitcases and be gone. I owed it to Alicia to get through Christmas, at least one more time. It was a massive leap from accepting that I couldn’t live like this to separating from Scott permanently. If he went back to Australia, I’d probably never see him again. My growing- up history, the bedrock of my adult life, would be wiped out at a stroke.

There would be plenty of people celebrating that.

‘Do your mum and dad know you’re here?’ Octavia asked.

‘No. I decided I didn’t need to burden them with this latest escapade. I think I’ve probably heard enough “Oh darling!” to last a lifetime.’

‘You wouldn’t consider going to stay with them for a few days?’ Octavia asked.

‘Definitely not.’ There wouldn’t be enough room in Surrey to accommodate such a vast quantity of ‘I told you so’s.

‘Come and stay at mine, then. Bring Alicia. I’ll put Immi in with Polly. You can have her room,’ Octavia said.

‘I won’t, but thank you. Alicia’s been looking forward to spending Christmas with her grandmother for months and I’m not going to disappoint her. Scott probably didn’t mean to push it this far. It’s a cultural thing. You know how he feels about people respecting him. I suppose smacking him over the head with a frying pan wasn’t quite the adulation he thought he deserved. I imagine he’ll be grovelling apologies when I get home.’

Octavia rolled her eyes. ‘Respect. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Whatever he says now doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s downright bloody cruel. Are you really going to go home and act like nothing’s happened? Cup of tea, darling? Polish your shoes?’ She was throwing her hands up in frustration. ‘Blow job?’

Black. Or white. That was Octavia. I usually envied her decisiveness. And I loved her for her loyalty. But right now, I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture on the absurdity of my life. I could see her point. I didn’t know how I was going to go home and put my Happy Christmas face on.

But going home I was.