Lifesaver Read Free

occurred to me that perhaps lying had always come more easily to me than I’d thought. I used to believe that those sorts of lies were simply words that made things more palatable for other people, as if I was doing them a favour by lying—the ‘no, of course your hips don’t look wide in that dress’ school of white lies. I genuinely hadn’t wanted Lil to know that I’d be going back to an empty house. But now I realized that lies were just lies. They started small, like two rubber bands twisted together, and got bigger and bigger until the bundle became a ball the size of a grapefruit, and each lie had to stretch further and further around its circumference.
    Lil stood up too and clasped my hands in hers again. That had been the thing I’d dreaded most about seeing her - I’d thought I’d never be able to cope with the raw emotion of seeing those large hands again; the hands which, in the end, couldn’t help the one baby she’d most wanted to usher into the world.
    But as we stood at the door saying goodbye, I felt instead an overwhelming wash of gratitude that Lil had made that false emergency call and physically got me round there.
    It wasn’t her fault anyway, I thought as I left, really believing it for the first time ever. Holly just hadn’t been ready for us, that was all.

Chapter 2
    When I got home again, the house was still and empty. Of course that’s what I’d been expecting, but I wasn’t sure why it always gave me a split-second’s worth of bafflement, as if people ought to have crept in in my absence and decorated the place for a party, and should be hiding behind sofas and chairs, streamers and balloons at the ready, about to jump out and shout, ‘surprise!’ Wishful thinking, I decided miserably, trailing up the stairs and peeling off my clammy running gear at the same time.
    It wasn’t only Ken’s absence which I felt so keenly in the silence—after all, I was used to that. My abiding impression of my husband, at least for the past four years of our lives, had been of a man on his way out of the door. He always seemed to be leaving the house: going to work, to tennis, to a gig; as if home were some kind of mandatory holding pen to be escaped from as soon as possible, so that his real life could begin. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that his family had been asylum seekers; in the 1970’s they’d emigrated to England from Uganda, to get away from Idi Amin’s regime.
    ‘I’ve got to run,’ he said, only that morning. I sometimes thought he never stopped running, and it had got much worse since Holly died. We didn’t talk about her, although I’d have liked to. ‘I’m going to squeeze in a quick set with Chris before I get my train. Take it easy today, OK?’
    As I put the plug in the bath and turned the taps on full, I thought of Ken on the tennis court, his lovely legs dark brown and muscular in his white shorts and his top riding up to expose his hairy tummy when he served. We used to like making love in the mornings, but that hadn’t happened for a long time—more often than not, Ken left the house while I was still asleep.
    Then I imagined him on the train, showered and glowing with slick black wet hair, his Blackberry bleeping quietly in his jacket pocket like a small electronic animal, or a Clanger perhaps. I thought of him getting newsprint on his fingers from somebody else’s abandoned copy of Metro. What I didn’t like to think of was all the female office workers who might be staring at him with admiration, surreptitiously checking to see if he was wearing a wedding ring, and then feeling disappointed when they saw that he was.
    I climbed in the bath and lay there for a long, long, time. The only sound in the house was the slow steady plink of the cold tap dripping into the water, and a bluebottle whizzing around the bathroom, so fast it was a blur. I tried to focus on it for a while, watching it zigzag, and then fly in concentric circles, as if being