His Other Life

‘Is your mum OK?’ I stupidly asked Adam after the first time I met them. That time she had been almost entirely silent and extremely distractible. Adam’s step-dad, Ray, had cooked a lovely roast lamb and was serving it at the table while Julia threw three glasses of wine into herself. She was leaning for the bottle to refill again when her hand suddenly froze, mid-reach. I glanced at Ray and Adam, to see if they’d noticed, and they were both locked in position – Ray carving the joint, Adam pouring drinks – but had turned their heads to stare at her. Ray had even said, ‘Julia,’ quietly, almost like a warning. Eventually she dropped her hand, and the two men relaxed again and continued with what they were both doing.

At that point in our relationship, I still expected Adam to be open with me about himself and his family. I thought he would put his arms round me and tear up while he told me sorrowfully that she had some syndrome or other, something on ‘the spectrum’. Or that she was maybe bipolar or clinically depressed. On medication for something at the very least. Probably not a very tactful way of asking, but we’d been home for an hour by this time and he wasn’t volunteering it.

‘Yes, she’s absolutely fine.’ He flashed a brief smile at me, then turned directly back to the film we were watching.

Alarm bells started clanging instantly. He’d shut down – what became his go-to response for any enquiry at all into some part of his life that wasn’t to do with me. A solid and unyielding rebuff. A dead end.

‘Oh. Well that’s good,’ I said weakly. His closed-off demeanour – arms folded, head turned pointedly away – told me not to pursue it, so, mystified, I let it go. But I dreaded the next time we went and was very relieved that it didn’t come up again for several months.

But she’s his mum and I’m his wife, it’s almost a requirement that we meet up and console each other in these circumstances. I wish I knew how to behave around her, especially now, but Google has been utterly useless in that respect. Of course Julia will be missing him too, and may even look at me as the last remnant of her vanishing son. Oh God. I hope she doesn’t think that I think about her like that. That I’ll want to snuggle in her arms and talk about ‘Adam the baby’ and ‘Adam the handyman’ and ‘Adam the party animal’ and laugh and then cry together. I have no inclination whatsoever to see her, but it would look odd if I don’t go. So go I must.

From upstairs there’s a thump followed by a kind of groaning sob. I grab a glass of water and go quickly up to the spare room to find Ginger kneeling in front of a small pool of red wine. There’s a glass on its side beside her. She looks up at me like a dog in front of a fouled rug.

‘I’m so sorry, Gracie,’ she says quietly, and closes her eyes.

‘No point asking you how you are today then?’

She answers very softly without opening her eyes. ‘Let me sort it out. Got any white wine?’

I smile. ‘Thank you for the thought, but I’m not bringing wine anywhere near you today.’

‘Alka-Seltzer might be a better idea.’

‘Haven’t got any I’m afraid. Oh Ginge, what were you thinking?’

‘I know, I know, I’m an effing idiot, don’t tell me. How long had that bottle of wine been there anyway?’

‘No, you’re not blaming the wine. It’s Adam’s—’ I pause, correct myself – ‘it was Adam’s, so it was definitely a good one.’

‘Good God, Gracie,’ Adam’s voice says in my head, ‘what the hell have you bought?’

‘It’s wine. I thought it would be nice with the—’

‘No it isn’t. Jesus, this will probably taste like nail varnish remover, not wine. How much was it? A fiver? We’re not drinking that.’

I smile at Ginger now. ‘You tipped nearly the whole lot down your throat all by yourself. And half a bottle of gin.’

‘Don’t talk about it.’

I get her cleaned up and put her to bed on the sofa with some dry toast, a jug of water and the bucket. The shop will have to stay closed today. Penny won’t mind; it’s more of a hobby for her anyway, her husband is a multi-millionaire businessman supplying toner ink to dry photocopiers around the country. Besides, she’s in Italy.

‘What’s Fletch up to today? Can he come and look after you?’ Simon Fletcher – known affectionately as Fletch by anyone who has any affection for him – is Ginge’s current boyfriend. She always introduces him like that – ‘This is Fletch, my current boyfriend’ – even though they’ve been together over three years.

‘What? Aren’t you looking after me?’

‘No, you know I can’t. I’m going to see Julia and Ray today, then Mum and Dad. Shall I call him?’

She pouts from the sofa. ‘No point, he’s working.’ Fletch sells drugs for a living. He works in telesales for a large pharmaceutical company. She rolls over and faces the back of the sofa, so I start walking out of the room to go and get dressed. A whispery voice reaches me at the door: ‘Can you get my phone, please? I’ll text him later.’

I wait until after I’ve showered and dressed before ringing Julia and Ray. Ginger is snoring on the sofa so I take my phone out into the kitchen to call, but spend almost half an hour procrastinating with the washing up and cleaning first. Eventually I give myself a mental slap and am just about to dial when my phone starts ringing all on its own, making me jump.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello? Sarah?’

I puff out a ‘Huh.’ Haven’t been called that for a long time. Ginger and I became best friends virtually on day one at secondary school because her nickname was Ginger and mine was Grace. Long story, but there was a legendary incident when I was about nine when I knocked an entire display of soy sauce over in Sainsbury’s. Kind of tripped multiple times. Hey, it got very slippery very quickly. My dad dubbed me Grace at that point, and it stuck. Ginger and I both corrected our Year Seven teacher at first registration, then caught each other’s eye and grinned. I don’t think anyone at school ever even got to grips with our real names, we used them for such a short time.

But no one calls me Sarah any more. Not even my family. I haven’t gone by that name for sixteen or seventeen years, at least. I literally don’t associate with anyone who still calls me that, and apart from my passport and marriage certificate, everything I have is …

Suddenly I feel cold tendrils snaking up my spine and my heart rate speeds up. There’s something off about this call, and it can’t be coincidence that my husband vanished into the night five days ago. This is it, I think to myself. This is the moment when I find out what’s going on and my world crashes around me.

My fingers wrap around the phone more tightly and I press it to my head. ‘Yes, speaking. Who is this?’

‘It’s Leon, Sarah. I’m a friend of your husband’s. Is he there, by any chance?’

Ice-cold air seeps out of the phone and sends chills all the way through me. I think furiously about what this means. Should I answer him? Tell the truth? Lie? I have no idea. I had thought that Leon was involved in Adam’s disappearance, because of the message left on the answer phone the day he vanished; but now he’s ringing asking for him again, apparently not realising that he’s disappeared at all. Is Leon just a coincidence, then?

Or is Leon lying?

‘Hello?’ the voice comes again. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Um, yes, sorry, I’m here.’ I run my hand through my hair a few times as I think. What should I do, what should I do? Then something occurs to me. ‘How did you get this number, Leon?’

There’s a deep, throaty chortle. ‘Sarah, you’re starting to sound a bit suspicious of me suddenly. What do you take me for, some kind of criminal? Your husband gave it to me, of course.’

‘Oh, right. Of course.’ Now I’m thoroughly panicked. If Adam did give this person my mobile number, surely he would have said my name was Grace? He knows my real name of course, but only because I told him. He has never known me as Sarah, or called me that. It would be unnatural for him to tell someone his wife was called Sarah. That would just be weird, and of course nothing Adam did was ever weird. Ha ha.

But now there’s a tremor starting somewhere in my belly and I’m not sure if it’s anger, fear, desperation or hunger.

‘I’m afraid he’s not here at the moment,’ I say, if only to end the awkward silence that’s growing larger by the second. Leon must be thinking something’s up by now. If he wasn’t already. Which he obviously was. ‘Can I give him a message?’ God alone knows why I’m saying this. I can’t give Adam a message any more than I can give him a punch in the kidneys.

There’s a long pause from the other end, accompanied by some deep, slow breathing. ‘I don’t think so,’ Leon rasps eventually. ‘I really need to see him myself. When is he going to be in?’

I can feel my eyes widening and my breathing starting to quicken as fear-fuelled adrenalin floods my system. ‘Um, I’m not sure …’ I know I’m in fight or flight mode. Even though the perceived threat is on the other end of the phone, in an unknown location, the fear I’m experiencing is no less real just because Leon isn’t in the room with me. Everything about this call feels like a threat, and I start to glance around me, planning my escape. Or looking for a defensive weapon. My eyes land on the knife block and just as my hand is closing round the large bread knife, there’s a robust knock on the front door. I practically scream out loud where I am, right there by the toaster, and the knife block falls over with a clatter. I spin in place, heart thudding, to face the door. Through the opaque glass panels in the door I can see a dark, formless shape, indistinguishable as either man or woman, hunched and heavy. The top part of the shape swivels slightly as I watch, turning to look around it, observing its surroundings. Yet again it feels like the undead Adam, returning to me grey and cold and dripping with lake water.

‘I’ll get him to call you,’ I manage to croak. I need to be free of this call so I can focus on my fear of the front door. One frightening thing at a time is all I can handle. If that, actually. ‘What’s your number?’ I’m staring at the door as I advance slowly towards it.

‘No, don’t do that,’ the gravelly voice says. ‘I’ll call again. Soon.’ And finally, thankfully, the phone clicks off. I put it quickly down on the kitchen counter like a ticking bomb, then turn to face my next fear. I want to take the bread knife, but it could be awkward to answer the door holding it if it’s the postman, so I leave it there. As I walk down the hallway, my gaze is fixed on the lumpy shape behind the glass, and when I reach for the door catch, the image of a bloated, sallow-skinned Adam comes back into my head, and my hand hesitates in mid-air. I close my eyes. It won’t be him at all, in any condition, I tell myself, least of all a walking corpse. I’m just being ridiculous. My hand trembles a little as I’m opening the door, so I grab my arm with my other hand.

As soon as the door opens fully, I see it’s the female police liaison officer that was here before, Linda. She smiles at me, then frowns as apparently I go a bit pale.

‘You all right, Grace?’ she says, stepping nearer. ‘You’ve gone a bit pale. Are you poorly?’

‘No, no, I’m fine. I just thought, when you knocked …’

She smacks her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God, I’m so insensitive. I’m really sorry. Missing husband, unexpected visits from the police, of course you thought the worst.’

She has no idea.