The Woman Next Door: A dark and twisty psychological thriller. Cass Green

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СКАЧАТЬ at the side of the bed and rub at the crustiness, trying to quell the heaving sensation in my stomach as I do so.

      There’s no way I can put the tissue in the bin for poor Melissa to deal with, so, shuddering a little, I fold it over as much as possible to obscure the shameful contents and push it inside the cuff of my blouse.

      When I open the door, I listen for a moment, willing with every fibre of my being that no one will be around. I will come back later, with flowers, to apologize. I simply can’t face seeing anyone yet.

      It’s as I creep towards the stairs that I hear a door opening behind me. Oh please no …

      But it isn’t Melissa, or Mark, or Tilly. It’s a man.

      I have no idea who he is. He is perhaps in his thirties and he is dressed only in his underwear. He’s not very tall but all muscled chest and arms. Then my eyes are drawn downwards and I gasp in shock; I can clearly see the tented distortion of his boxer shorts.

      He gives a deep, throaty laugh. ‘Oops, sorry, Grandma,’ he says. ‘Morning glory and all that.’

      My cheeks flame. I scurry down the stairs as fast as I can. I am sure I can hear mocking laughter behind me.

      Thankfully the front door isn’t locked. Wrenching it open, I almost throw myself down the front steps, twisting my knee a little in the process.

      Home! Please let me just get home.

      I run up my own steps. It’s as I get inside, relief flooding my veins, that I realize the tissue containing the vomit must have fallen out of my sleeve. Panicking, I quickly retrace my steps but it isn’t on Melissa’s steps either. It is obviously lying somewhere inside.

      ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,’ I whisper.

      Bertie runs from the kitchen, yapping wildly. Telling me off, no doubt. I pick him up and hug him to my chest, kissing his rough little head and murmuring my apologies, but he scrambles to be put down. When I open the back door, he darts outside and squats straight away. The poor thing; what a clever boy he is for not having an accident on the floor. He must be hungry too.

      I think then of someone else washing up my ‘accident’ on the floor, and I have to close my eyes at the poisonous sensation of shame. I go straight to bed.

      When I awake, I am shocked to see it is the afternoon already. Forcing down tea and toast, I run a bath, and ease my aching body into the water.

      It is almost hotter than I can stand, and when I lift my leg the skin is bright and mottled. I’m not at all comfortable but I feel I am being purged. If only the shame could be leached from my skin along with the traces of alcohol.

      Images from last night keep racing through my mind: talking to that woman at the start who kept laughing like I was the funniest woman ever. Saying ‘Pimm’s o’clock!’ to someone and finding it almost unbearably funny. Someone (Tilly?) speaking to me gently and telling me a ‘nice lie-down’ would ‘sort me out’.

      My mind drifts to that man on the landing this morning. Who on earth was that? He didn’t look at all like one of Mark’s friends. Come to think of it, where was Mark?

      He had tattoos. I keep picturing the coarse black hair on his chest and arms. Some men are like monkeys under their clothes. And the sight of … that. Mocking me with his lack of modesty.

      I close my eyes in disgust.

      My head still aches, despite the aspirin I forced down with my cup of tea when I got back. So much for taking my punishment. But it did hurt so very much.

      It really is odd that I should have had quite such a strong reaction to the alcohol. I’ve never been a drinker but I’m sure I didn’t have that much Pimm’s. Maybe it is just more potent than I ever realized? The memory of its cloying taste makes my stomach churn again, and I close my eyes then sink under the surface of the water, allowing it to close over my head like a baptism.

      When I emerge I am crying in great gulps. I keep picturing Terry laughing at me being in this state. Oh yes, he would have found this very amusing, I’m sure. He was always trying to encourage me to ‘have a drink and let go a little’.

      I was always the butt of his jokes. Always the ‘funny old thing’ who took things too seriously and didn’t seem to know how to enjoy herself. Funny old, silly old Hester.

      This is another reason to avoid alcohol. It causes all sorts of unwanted memories to surface. The dirty silt at the bottom of my mind has been stirred up.

      ‘Leave me alone, Terry,’ I gulp into the steamy air.

      He once suggested we take a bath in here together, in the early days. I was quite unable to think of an excuse. My parents were gone by then and the house was all mine, but it still felt wrong.

      But I agreed. It was the early days, as I said.

      We met at Bentley’s, the engineering works that has long been closed down. I was an Office Manager, having started as an assistant straight from secretarial college and working my way up. He worked on the shop floor.

      It took a year of him asking before I gave in and went out with him for a drink. At 35, I was seeing colleague after colleague leave to have babies and time was beginning to pinch.

      I went for the drink, then we had some country walks together. He told me he was ‘really falling for me’, after a couple of months. He’d been married before, but she died quite young. As for me, well, I’d never really met the right person.

      He had all sorts of ideas and he was quite unlike anyone else I’d ever met. He liked to invent things in his spare time and was always saying he would come up with a gadget that would make our fortune.

      It all turned out to be rubbish, of course, from the remote control that was also a holder for a cup of tea (for goodness’ sake) to the teddy bear that contained a ‘nappy pouch’. Rubbish, all of it. No one wanted to invest in any of his ideas, and in the end he had to set up a painting and decorating business. He couldn’t get a job anywhere else after Bentley’s closed down. I didn’t know about how weak and useless he was in the early days. He behaved like a gentleman and seemed to have something about him, so I suppose I was fooled.

      When he proposed, after a rather lovely evening in an Italian restaurant, he went down on one knee, and I think I was genuinely happy in that moment. The future seemed so rich and full of possibility.

      In those early days, I still thought that the ‘other’ side of things would start to be more enjoyable with a little practice.

      When he made the bath suggestion, I’d tried to laugh it off, saying it was far too small. Then he’d caught me up in his arms and whispered into my hair that it would only be nice and snug. So we tried it and it was every bit as uncomfortable and unpleasant as I’d imagined. He insisted that I lay between his legs, facing away from him, and I could feel bits digging into my lower back straight away.

      I closed my eyes and pictured the wonderful prize that was waiting for me after all this: a smiling, pink-cheeked baby.

      I had so much love to pour into a child. I would have been the very best mother. It had always been my goal, ever since I was small. I had a baby doll called Susie-Sue that I loved until she was merely a torso with staring eyes and a grubby grey СКАЧАТЬ