But as I watch it a second time, in less settled waters of my own, it strikes me as the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever seen.

32

29 December 2019

Sunday. Kit has been missing now for six days and I honestly don’t know how much longer I can live with this strain. Suspense is fine in a novel or a movie – just a few hours and then you can decompress – but in real life it’s corrosive, cumulative; I swear it shaves time off your life expectancy.

I try to get to grips with my financial position, but am immediately fearful of the string of notifications I’ve received from the bank confirming the cancelling of direct debits from our joint account. Clare must have switched them to her individual account and I can safely assume no longer intends paying a penny of her salary into the joint account.

I log into my individual account and see it for what it’s been this last year: pin money. There are not enough funds even to cover the river bus season ticket due to be renewed in a few weeks’ time. If and when I set up domestic life alone, I will be in the same predicament as Regan and millions of other residents of this brutal city: sleeping under faulty boilers, sharing a bed with shift workers, eating customers’ leftovers. Reading avidly of victims of violent crime, perhaps because it feels as if they’re the only ones left who have even less than you do.

*

It is exactly three o’clock when I stroll up to the high street and catch sight of a visibly tearful Melia in the window of Rosie’s Café. She’s with a friend, a half-familiar face, and by the time I’m through the door I’ve remembered her square jaw and overgroomed eyebrows from the wedding party – she’s the girl who was dancing with Melia on the river path. Her head is bent towards Melia’s in earnest attention. No need to ask why Melia is upset, but is she close enough to this friend to have confided the complication of her affair with me? Have I been naïve to trust that no one else knows? No one besides Clare, of course – and the police.

It’s loud inside, the acoustics crashing, but I weave through the tightly packed tables to reach her. ‘Melia, do you have a second?’

‘Jamie!’ She cringes, as if I’m going to whip out a baseball bat and start beating her. Recovering quickly, she motions to the other woman. ‘You remember Elodie from the wedding?’

‘Nice to see you again,’ Elodie says, but her automatic smile has already frozen: she senses Melia’s fear and my instability. She notices the scratches on my face from Clare’s attack and no doubt forms her own opinions as to how I came by them.

‘I want to talk to you about Kit,’ I say grimly. ‘On your own.’

Elodie shoots Melia an uncertain look and the edges of her eyebrows draw closer together, a bulge of pale skin forming between them. ‘Should I leave you two . . . ?’

‘No,’ Melia tells her. ‘Please stay. I don’t want to talk to him about Kit. Have you been following me, Jamie?’

‘Of course not!’ My protest is animated to the point of parody: ‘I saw you in the window and I just wanted to find out what the situation is. Have you heard from him? Is he still AWOL?’

‘I said I don’t want to talk about him. Please leave!’

‘I think you should do what she says,’ Elodie tells me, fierce with disapproval.

‘But if there’s any news, I have a right to hear it. I’m being hassled by—’

But Melia interrupts me with a sudden escalation of emotion: ‘Why won’t you just leave me alone?’ She begins weeping noisily and Elodie is on her feet, trying to edge past me. Anyone would think we were shooting a movie, the actorly way people pretend not to be listening, but I know they are. I certainly would be.

‘Melia? Are you okay?’ Elodie asks, an arm around her friend’s shoulders. She regards me with indignation. ‘Don’t you think she needs some privacy at a time like this? If you don’t go right now, I’m dialling nine-nine-nine.’

At this, the other customers fall silent and several faces turn in our direction, with varying expressions of inquisitiveness and alarm.

‘It’s all right, El, really.’ Melia wipes away her tears with the backs of her hands, before noticing the paper napkins and taking a handful. ‘He’s going, aren’t you, Jamie?’

‘Fine. If I’m not allowed to be concerned for a friend.’ I leave with a bodily impression of the fear I’ve left in my wake, fear I don’t fully understand until I see my face in the mirrored glass of the doorway.

There are the scratches, yes, but that’s not nearly the most disturbing thing. It’s the look in my eyes: wild, guilty, almost depraved. I may not have killed a man, but I look exactly like someone who has.

*

It fills me with both terror and relief when Clare returns late the same evening. She will, of course, have appointments tomorrow, a business to run. As her overnight bag drops heavily onto the tiles and her keys clunk into the dish on the hall table, I emerge from the depths like a house cat overdue its feeding time.

‘Oh. You’re here,’ she says, scarcely glancing. She’s kicking off her boots, straightening them on the shoe rack. I’m lucky she hasn’t yet purged it of my footwear. ‘I thought you might have gone to shack up with her by now.’

This was not a suggestion made before she left and so must have struck her while she was away. I fear she’s in a mood to withdraw her offer of accommodation, the last thing I need, and I must do as little to provoke her as possible.

‘Of course I haven’t. We’re not together. You saw yourself how she feels about me now. You heard her say she hates me.’

An inadvertent reminder that she repeated the sentiment.

‘On Friday, yes.’ Still she won’t look at me. ‘Who knows what might have happened since then? I think we’ve established that whatever it is I’ll be the last to know.’

It’s true that Friday feels prehistoric. If this is how time is going to be now, every beat slower and stickier than it should be, I don’t know if I can bear it. I think of that anguished little foray to the river yesterday, how I looked for Melia and thought I’d found Kit. Then, earlier today but already feeling surreal and distant, that ugly altercation in the café. ‘How are your parents?’

‘How do you think?’ She shoots me a ferocious arrow of a look, and I answer for myself: deeply upset to be having to console their only daughter, her faithless cunt of a partner having destroyed the holidays for everyone. They must be regretting every last drop of fine wine they served me when I was their guest for Christmas.

‘I take it Kit hasn’t turned up?’ She stands in front of me, hands on hips. Her sweater – ivy green, with a gold thread running through it – is new, one of the presents we opened together under Rod and Audrey’s tree, Nutcracker decorations rocking above our heads. A week ago, I would have said how beautiful it is, how well it suits her, especially with the ruby-red lipstick, which has bled into the lines around her mouth.

I half-shake my head. ‘Not that I know of, no.’

‘It’s genuinely bizarre, isn’t it?’

I think ‘bizarre’ is maybe a bizarre word to describe a man’s disappearing without trace, but I know better than to voice this. Those slaps and punches she inflicted on me, I deserved them, yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m looking to repeat the punishment.