The Sunday Girl Read online

  But then, after a few months, the night set in.

  A tapestry of darkness began to weave itself around us. It started with the prostitutes in his internet search history, the silent treatment and the realisation that his ‘occasional line’ was actually a daily habit. Then came the slap, the mind games and the affair with Kim. The sex became rougher and I let it happen, so maybe that’s why he thought it was okay to grab me by the throat when we fought. Soon it was all just apologies. Excuses. Make-up sex and tears. But every time I went to leave I’d catch a glimpse of the man I’d fallen in love with and be stung by the certainty that it was at least in part my fault; because I knew how wonderful Angus could be if he was happy. And so I’d stay.

  Until one night everything culminated in a final, irrational argument and the choice was taken out of my hands.

  It was the night before our ski trip. And in the beginning it was about stacking the dishwasher: he preferred the handles facing upwards, and the fact that I consistently didn’t comply was proof I didn’t respect him. But it had escalated quickly and before long he was delivering the news that ‘we’ as a concept was shot to shit. I didn’t argue – he needed time to calm down – I just gathered my things, he picked up my suitcase (already waiting by the door), and we carried them in silence to his car. What followed was a tense drive to my flat, a tearful late-night phone call to my best friend, Charlotte, and an emergency rescue mission.

  When morning came, I didn’t know what else to do, so I dragged myself to work. Told my boss that the ski trip had been cancelled last minute. Tried to gloss over it – surely we’d make up – and waited for his call. But when I received the sex-tape link, my focus shifted entirely. I no longer wanted him back, I no longer wanted to talk about ‘us’.

  Because he’d begged me to make that film and I, wanting to be more exciting to him, hoping it would curb his wandering eye at least for a bit, had complied. I’d been frantically emailing the site since I’d received that link. Imploring them to take it down. Calling Angus and pleading with his voicemail. But nobody answered.

  By the time Sunday rolled around I must have clicked on that link at least a hundred times, checking to see if it was gone yet. But it wasn’t. And then Charlotte pointed out that every time I clicked on it I was probably pushing it up in the rankings. So I stopped.

  Chiara, the neighbour’s cat, was meowing at the front door. So I put down the book and let her in. She wove a figure eight through my legs and followed me back to my purple notebook and The Art of War.

  Step 1. Reputation.

  This seemed like the best place to start because our lives had been so intertwined – I knew so many of his secrets. Surely there was something I could use against him: I knew his work credit card details, his email password, his PayPal password, where he kept his cocaine, who his friends were, where his parents lived and that he’d gone to prostitutes …

  Prostitutes.

  That had to be it.

  We’d been dating for five months when I first found them in his search history. I’d hoped that I was wrong, so I confronted him about it. He got angry, so very angry – a side of him I’d never seen before – and told me I was impinging upon his privacy. That it was just free porn. I accepted that and apologised – maybe I really was overreacting. He was wonderful in so many ways, and nobody is perfect. He didn’t speak to me for ten days after that. When we finally did make up, he told me that was how he coped, that he shut down when he was deeply hurt and waited until the hurricane passed.

  I told myself that the anger was probably just embarrassment: he’d been caught looking at porn. That there were always bumps along the road to intimacy, that passion was a double-edged sword, and that if I wanted the intensely loving parts of Angus, then I needed to accept the darker parts too. But that was the first time I experienced as an adult the gnawing pain that only a sudden silence can impart. And all it did was make me more certain of my love for him. My need for him.

  But I never really trusted him again after that. Instead, my paranoia grew: I started going through his pockets and glancing over his shoulder under the guise of giving him a neck rub every time he sat down at the computer. Carefully watching which keys he tapped. Piecing it all together, letter-by-letter. Until soon I knew that his email and PayPal passwords were one and the same: Supercock88.

  The next time I found prostitutes in his search history, I kept it to myself: it was just porn, after all. Nothing important. Nothing worth causing a fight over. But the third time was soon after I’d found out about his affair with Kim. And so that time I clicked on the pages. All of them. I just couldn’t help myself: I needed to know why he needed them. Why I wasn’t enough. That was when I noticed that they were all from the same service, located just around the corner from his flat. We’d been dating a little under a year by then. And while I still didn’t mention it – what was the point, it wouldn’t change anything – I took down the details. Phone number. Address. Email. And the names of the three girls whose pages he had visited the most: Christy, Madeleine, Heather.

  Just in case.

  And now I finally had the chance to use them. But as I sat there listening to the rain dripping down from the upstairs gutters in thick loud streams as Chiara purred beside me, I was filled with a poisonous and bubbling frustration. Because even after everything Angus had done, even with everything I knew about him – even with the girls’ names and the agency details – what could I do about it? I couldn’t just tell people about them. Firstly, if I did that he could simply deny it. His word against mine: he’d say I was unbalanced, vindictive, making things up. Secondly, who was to say anybody would even care? No, I needed to get a bit more creative. I needed to make them care. To make it something they couldn’t just ignore.

  A bit like I couldn’t ignore a sex tape uploaded to the internet.

  tuesday

  Master Sun said: ‘I have heard that in war haste can be folly, but have never seen delay that was wise.’

  7 FEBRUARY

  I shut the door quietly behind me and slipped off my shoes. It was 7.01pm. I had half an hour until the night-time stairwell CCTV switched on and Jake came on duty.

  Jake was the most astute of Angus’s doormen and seemed out of place so close to the handbag dogs and navy blazers of Sloane Square. He was an aspiring DJ with tattoos peeking out the end of his shirt sleeve and a first-class degree in Philosophy – he’d mentioned the latter twice. He had the eyes of a dreamer; they had that kind of sparkle. But the mind peering out from behind those eyes – fuelled by a steady diet of conspiracy theories and Red Bull – was razor sharp.

  And he watched those security screens like a hawk. So, the moment he clocked on, a portion of the stairwell became officially out of bounds.

  And that would factor into my exit strategy.

  Nine hours earlier I was at my desk recovering. The Tube ride in had been brutal: fluorescent lights, a lack of space, the combined smell of body odour and takeaway curry and newspapers made damp from wet umbrellas – all amplified tenfold by my hangover.

  I worked as a research analyst for a property company just off Berkeley Square, and so a vast spreadsheet detailing house-price growth across London over the past five years glared back at me from my brightly lit screen. It was making my head throb: what I needed was coffee, two paracetamol and a time machine – to be able to go back to that night we met Holly and say: ‘no’.

  I switched to my inbox, my nausea deepening as I scanned the subject titles. Nothing more about the sex tape. Maybe it had dropped in the rankings.

  ‘How’s the Turner report coming?’ That was Val. Valerie. My boss. Although she sat a mere metre away from me, we were separated by a blessed cubicle partition. And so she couldn’t see me staring blankly at my screen, trying not to cry.

  ‘Coming along well,’ I lied. It wasn’t – I’d barely started. And it was getting urgent. There was a promotion to Senior Analyst I wanted – I needed the money – and Val was immovably in
my corner on that front. I didn’t want to let her down but I was finding it hard to concentrate on anything other than Angus, the sex tape and the icy loss that pumped through me with every heartbeat.

  ‘Okay, well, I need to send whatever we have across to his office this afternoon,’ Val’s voice continued, ‘for tomorrow.’

  The photocopy machine buzzed behind me. ‘Sure,’ I replied. Shit. Tomorrow. The meeting. I needed to focus. To find an idea. But instead I pulled up a browser window and did the one thing I’d promised Charlotte I wouldn’t do: I signed into Facebook.

  It was the only social media platform Angus used and my last remaining window into his life. I knew it was dangerous, but I couldn’t stop myself. After eighteen months of talking to him almost every day, the silence was excruciating.

  I wonder if he’s changed his relationship status yet.

  My jaw clenched at the thought of the steady stream of emails – mostly from people I hadn’t seen in the flesh in over ten years – that would follow that click of his mouse: I’m so sorry … I thought you were so happy … That’s too bad, my marriage is going great.

  And to an outsider, Angus appeared too picture-perfect for our demise to be his fault, so everyone would presume it was mine, something I’d done wrong, some fundamental flaw within me. I couldn’t even tell them otherwise – I couldn’t tell them about the video, or any of our other secrets – without humiliating myself in the process. No, all I could do was stay silent and hope the conclusions they drew were less damning than the truth.

  Eyes narrowed and forehead tensed, I typed his name into the search function: A-N-G-U-S H-O-L-L… A moment later there he was.

  Angus: my Facebook friend.

  I clicked on his little face – I’d taken that profile photograph. We’d just come back from five days in Gran Canaria. Sand beneath our fingernails. Sunburned shoulders. And me, in the orange string bikini he always loved me in, my legs wrapped around his waist as he carried me through the waves. His skin was tanned, his whiskey-coloured eyes bright and his dark hair still smelled of sunscreen when I’d taken that shot – and we were happy.

  ‘Do you want to chat about it, see if I can help?’ Val asked. Her head appeared above the partition. I minimised the browser and glanced at the time: It was 9.43am.

  ‘Sure, I can walk you through what I’ve got at around 2pm?’ I suggested, willing her to leave me alone to focus. Walk you through. That was an Angus-ism if ever there was one – whenever I did something he didn’t like, he’d gently ask me to ‘walk him through’ what had happened just so he could walk me through why I was wrong. It had fast become my least favourite phrase. And yet there I was, using it like I owned it.

  Val smiled and her grey head disappeared once more. My eyes, hungry for information, returned to my screen. And as I glanced down past his birthday and place of work, I saw it:

  In a relationship with Taylor Bishop.

  He hadn’t changed a thing.

  My forehead softened. My lungs relaxed. And all the thoughts I’d worked so hard to push aside flew back at me with renewed force: Maybe he still loves me … Maybe this is just a phase … Maybe Charlotte is right and he has that attachment-issue thing – the one that makes you push people away when they get too close … Maybe he uploaded the tape because he was angry and upset when we broke up and he’ll take it down. Soon. People do all sorts of awful things to those they love. Especially to those they love.

  Yes, avoidant attachment style. That was a mainstay of Charlotte’s rookie diagnoses of Angus. She’d been psychoanalysing the world since the day we met: first day of First Form at the boarding school her parents could afford and mine couldn’t. I was there on an academic scholarship (I was always the girl with potential) and over the past year and a half we’d spent many evenings analysing Angus and his behaviour. Or rather, she had. I’d spent many evenings drinking too much pinot grigio and listening to her with what I liked to think of as a healthy dose of scepticism. Her diagnosis always bounced between three main hypotheses: avoidant attachment style, malignant narcissism and the fact that he was an Aquarius. For some reason the latter held the most weight with her. But then, I hadn’t told her everything. I’d skirted around the darker details and only mentioned his garden-variety offences: the affair with Kim, the drugs, the lies, the silent treatment. There are some things that you can’t un-tell, and I didn’t want her looking at me – at us – that way.

  In a relationship with Taylor Bishop.

  As I re-read that phrase my resolve softened, my respiration slowed and my desire to destroy him, so overpowering just hours before, began to cower. My feelings for Angus were always like that: tangled and complicated. Love tinged with fear. Rage laced with longing. And the sadness of what we’d become always giving way to the hope that we might somehow find our way back.

  Maybe it all just got out of hand. I need to talk to him.

  I stared at the screen, trying to make sense of everything. But then something bright blue and sparkling caught my eye. It was right at the bottom of the page. I scrolled down further.

  And there it was: a bright blue sky above a sparkling white snowy slope. And there he was, grinning back with those bleached white teeth of his that glowed in the dark like a Halloween costume whenever we went to a nightclub. And there she was. Grinning alongside him.

  His ex. The one he ‘never spoke to’ anymore. Kim.

  Which is how I ended up breaking into Angus’s apartment that evening. Did I know I was doing the wrong thing at the time? Absolutely. Of course I did. I just didn’t care anymore.

  The first thing I needed: gloves.

  I hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare (it was Tuesday and he was due back on Thursday), so I’d overlooked the issue of fingerprints. In hindsight, mine were probably still justifiably strewn throughout the apartment – we’d been a couple just a week before – but there are some lessons we learn from TV crime shows that we simply can’t unlearn: fingerprints are bad is one of them. Never leave an e-trail is another.

  I left the lights off: I didn’t want anything drawing a neighbour’s attention to my presence. But I knew that flat well – the creaky spots in the floorboards, the sharp edges to be avoided. And there was just enough artificial light streaming in through the balcony window to allow me to make out shapes in the dark: the coffee table, the cold marble kitchen counter and the black leather sofa we used to binge-watch TV series on. I could still feel his arms wrapped around me, the warmth of his breath in my hair as I leaned back into his chest and told him who I thought the bad guy was. I’d learned a lot from those bad guys. From their mistakes.

  I slid towards the kitchen, opened the stainless-steel fridge door for extra light and peered into the cupboard beneath the sink. Kneeling on the cold floor, I found what I was looking for: the box of surgical gloves he kept for dirty jobs. I put a pair on.

  A low, dark shuffle. Movement. Behind me, to the left.

  I swivelled my head.

  My heart ping-ponged in my chest and my eyes searched for a form in the darkness.

  The shuffle came again; it was coming from the window.

  My breath stopped. I froze. And then he moved through a beam of light.

  Ed. Angus’s pet parrot.

  His large cage was periodically moved around the apartment, and its current position was on the living-room floor by the window. He was standing in a spotlight cast by the globe outside: a rash of green and yellow feathers and two black eyes. And he was staring at me. He knew I wasn’t meant to be there.

  The beeping of the open fridge drew back my attention, and my eyes scanned the brightly coloured bottles, dirty sponges and scouring pads beneath the sink. A plan was forming in the back of my mind, but I didn’t know what it was yet. My eyes landed on the white piping that wove its way down like a fat snake from underneath the sink – it gleamed in the fridge-lit darkness.

  There’d been a leak in that piping the previous November. It wasn’t a big job – it only took f
ive minutes to fix – but the plumber had charged a £150 call-out fee. And so I’d watched carefully how he’d fixed it. Just in case it ever happened in my flat – I could barely afford toothpaste.

  It wasn’t complicated and he was a willing tutor: there were three nuts on the pipe, one of them was loose, and it just needed to be tightened a bit. Easy.

  So, in theory, in order to create another leak, all I needed to do was loosen it again. I reached towards it, and with the same force and determination required to open a stubborn jar of strawberry jam, I unscrewed it. The middle nut. Not entirely, just enough to let a steady trickle free. Then I nudged the bucket of cleaning products to the left so it wouldn’t catch the drip.

  I watched a small puddle begin to form at the base of the cupboard. With a little luck that steady stream would find its way through to the apartment below long before Angus got back from skiing, pissing off his already angry downstairs neighbour Mrs Clifton – the vice chairperson of the tenants’ board.

  That may seem like a petty way of inflicting revenge, and my being there may seem crazy – but I had to do something. I couldn’t just let him get away with it all. And I wasn’t crazy per se – there’s a reason ‘crime of passion’ is considered a viable defence – I was just pissed. Really pissed. Can’t-see-past-the-haze pissed. The photograph I’d seen of Angus and Kim, the realisation that he’d taken her away on our holiday while leaving me in London alone, heartbroken and bitter and writing streams of emails to RedTube while he ignored me, had left me seething in a way I hadn’t known since I witnessed my father betray my mother.

  And so my plan (concocted that afternoon while staring at a spreadsheet through a blur of tears) was simple: break into his apartment and get a key to his building while he was away.

  That way when they changed the access code to the side entrance of the garage – something that happened every month for security reasons – I’d retain access. Not only would that allow me to use the key I still had to his apartment, should I need it, but it would also grant me access to his post box, located just inside the door that led to the garage. And that would open up all sorts of avenues for mayhem.