Free The A-Z of Us by Jim Keeble Page A

whirlpool dreams and daytime eddies, never to be rescued from the water.
    But I’ve been keeping quiet about so much. It’s inevitable something would seep out, break free.
    â€˜I don’t love you.’
    It started nine months ago. I remember the day, or at least the day I’ve chosen to represent the beginning, plotting it on the chart in my head. It was getting late and I was waiting, yearning for Raj to come home. Eventually he came in after eleven, only to start his usual thirty-minute diatribe against his boss and general working conditions. The difference, on this night, was that I had my own news – the contract for the Soho bar redevelopment, project leader Gemma Cook, which had been announced that afternoon (I’d been unable to get my husband on the phone to tell him how excited I was). When he’d finished his monologue, I took a deep breath and informed him of my thrill and pride in being awarded my first solo project, to which he’d smiled, said, ‘That’s wonderful, darling. Maybe my office could book its Christmas bash there when it’s all completed,’ before loping upstairs to run himself a bath.
    My anger boiled up, steaming spite, but I kept it in, because he’d had a terrible day and I knew he’d continue to have terrible days for the coming weeks and months, and my work was not as important or well paid.
    I lay in bed that night, on the edge of the mattress, blood simmering.
    Looking back on it, I think this was my fatal mistake.
    The small malignant anger from that evening, diminutive, unnoticeable almost, grew (a fury of cells dividing and multiplying), until it had infected both my mind and body. If only I’d cut it out at the outset. Perhaps I could have saved Raj. Perhaps I could have saved myself.
    â€˜You keep things pent-up inside,’ my mother told me after my father’s death, ‘and they will kill you.’
    Outside, a car engine coughs, dies and is resurrected once more. A man shouts. I sneak to the window and glance outside, pulling the wedding present sheets and duvet around me, for warmth and protection.
    When we first moved in, I used to love curling up in this old window seat, surreptitiously spying on the comings and goings in the street below. It was a new area of London to me, the notorious East End, which, if I was honest, I found a little intimidating – the many different ethnic faces, the hard skinny teenage boys smoking cigarettes in expensive tracksuits, the old men sitting on park benches sipping cheap beer, the police cars wailing in the distance. My mother, West End woman number one, thought we were mad moving east, but as I watched from my fourth-floor spy hole, I began to realize that this was just like any other part of London, with its proximity of rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, inherited and self-made: the welfare and Range Rover families, the champagne and Special Brew alcoholics, the lonely of every creed and colour.
    As I’d sit in the window seat watching the middle-class mummies pushing their prams into the park across the road, I’d imagine Raj returning in the Audi, with twolittle girls skipping from the car up to our front door. They would look up, see their mummy in the window, and wave.
    I used to imagine.
    I glance out of the window but the street is empty, which is perhaps unsurprising considering it’s 2.42 a.m. I focus on number 22, two houses along the terrace, with black railings and a newly painted black front door which shines luxuriously in the soft light from the streetlamp. Raj is obsessed with this house, or more accurately with the man who recently moved in there. He’s in his forties, thin as a rake, with slicked back dark hair and sunken eyes. He usually appears on the doorstep to greet the postman or early morning couriers in a silk dressing gown and white bare feet. At night there are always people coming to the house – wealthy looking men and women