‘I think he remembers more than you think.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘Bianka. Please. Let’s stop this, right now. I’m sorry for my contribution. I don’t want to fight with you.’ She opens her mouth to say, well, perhaps you should have thought of that before you said what you said, but she stops herself. Bianka works hard at her self-control these days. It’s something she’s had to learn. Picking her battles, too.
‘Ok, fine,’ she says.
‘Can I ask you something?’
Bianka feels suddenly irrationally stressed, as though he’s going to ask her something to do with Maxime, although it is, of course, impossible. Every time she closes her eyes, there he is. The long hair floating up toward the surface. The tattoos, smashed to a pulp. The gaping abdomen taped shut. The violence of it seems to have become part of her, constantly inserting its imagery into her mind.
‘Sure,’ she says, focusing on looking calm and relaxed.
‘Did something happen between you and Charlotte?’
‘Excuse me?’ Bianka’s voice bursts out shrilly and she can feel her face burning with the sudden adrenaline.
‘Yeah, sorry, I felt like I needed to ask—’
‘What do you even mean by that, Did something happen?’ Could Charlotte have come clean to Andreas? An image appears in her mind, of gently twisting Charlotte’s hard nipples beneath her fingertips. Yes, she thinks to herself as she makes herself meet Emil’s eyes defiantly, something happened between me and Charlotte.
‘As in, did you have an argument or something?’
‘Oh.’ Bianka consciously backsteps after jumping down his throat, making her voice soft to disguise her racing heart. ‘Of course not. Why would you think that?’ Emil avoids her eye. ‘Emil? Talk to me, what made you think that?’
‘Just… I’m sure it’s nothing. And I know you don’t need me to tell you to tread carefully with one of my employee’s wives—’
‘Indeed. I don’t.’ Emil looks stricken, and exhausted.
‘I heard they had a, uh, thing, on Sunday night and I thought it was a little weird that we weren’t invited.’
‘A thing?’ The fury again, like a beast roaring to life. Sunday night – the day after she got back.
‘Yeah. It was only a barbecue I think but a couple of other guys from work were there, and Linda with her husband. And Anette. So it struck me as a little odd.’
‘Oh. Of course, the barbecue. Oh, honey, did you think we weren’t invited to that? Of course we were.’ Bianka releases a loud, trilling laugh, but even she feels its unpleasant pitch.
‘But – why didn’t you tell me?’
‘To be honest with you, you’re right – I’m exhausted after Ibiza. They’re quite wild those girls, you know. Nothing sinister; they just know how to party. Charlotte called me a couple of times to try to change my mind about going, but I simply couldn’t face it. And the truth is, I wanted some time together, just me and you.’
‘I guess I just thought it was odd that Andreas didn’t mention it at work, not yesterday or the day before. In fact, he was a little cool with me today.’
‘Honey. You know what they’re like. I don’t think Andreas gets much of a say in the party planning in that house, do you? Seriously, don’t worry about it. Charlotte and I are like this.’ She winks at him and holds up her intertwined index and middle finger.
‘I’ll see her tonight, actually, at Scandi ladies’ drinks.’
‘Oh, is that tonight?’
‘Well, yes, it’s every other Wednesday.’
‘Ah, yes, of course. I’ll drop you off.’
‘Seriously, I think you need to go to Oslo. You have plenty of time to catch one of the evening flights. Surely you can work from home tomorrow?’ Emil nods pensively.
Bianka picks her freshly made cortado up from the kitchen counter and smiles at Emil before heading back upstairs. She closes the door to the bedroom softly, and locks it – she’d insisted to Emil when they got to Wimbledon that they get locks fitted, like they had at home in Oslo, though he’d objected, saying he hadn’t grown up in a family with locked doors.
Well, I didn’t grow up in a family at all, Bianka had thought to herself, so forgive me if I get it wrong sometimes. She crosses to the window and looks out at the rain-lashed park across the street. She’s still trembling with fury and knows she needs to bring this under control before drinks this evening. She’ll come face to face with Charlotte then and will have to find a way to speak with her alone. How dare she pull back from Bianka after what she did for her in Ibiza, and after the incredible closeness they’d shared?
She wants to open the window and unleash a bloodcurdling scream, or better still, to jump from it; if she were lucky she’d strike her head on the stone slabs of the paved front garden and die instantly. No, she whispers, using her full focus to regain control of her shallow breathing. Not yet, she thinks, finally managing to slow her breath down to even, deep inhalations. It’s not me who’s going to bleed.
*
She walks the couple of hundred metres up the road to the cosy iconic pub on the edge of the common beneath a pink umbrella, trying to save her blown-out hair from stray droplets of rain. There are patches of indigo blue in the early evening sky in spite of the rain, and a fading rainbow stretches across the sky above the village. People are smoking and laughing outside the pubs, the air is heavy with incoming planes, cars crawl up Parkside toward Putney, and in spite of everything, Bianka loves this place, a beautiful village surrounded on all sides by the metropolis.
She had to psych herself up to coming out tonight, to sitting across from Charlotte, Anette, and Linda and the other Scandinavian ladies now that she knows they have wilfully excluded her from their little fucking barbecue. She did a line of coke in the bedroom and thank God for it – she feels ready to hold her head high and put these bitches back in their boxes. She’s wearing a fabulous outfit – a tight royal blue silk trouser suit which shows off her slender frame and long legs; Bianka has always found it’s better to power dress than to dress to blend in.
It’s her third time at these drinks with the other expat wives, and the other two occasions were surprisingly fun – she’d been pleased to see that there were all kinds of people, from the posh, groomed crowd including Charlotte, to a couple of scientists, a group of doctors on exchange with Kingston Hospital, as well as many stay-at-home wives like herself. She pushes the heavy door to the pub open and scans the room for the group. The pub is completely packed, but she can’t make out anyone she knows. A girl working at the front of house comes over carrying a clipboard.
‘Hi, there. Do you have a reservation?’
‘Ah, yes, I think so, but not sure which name it would be under.’ Bianka cranes her neck to look past the girl into the far corners of the pub, but there is definitely no sign of Charlotte or the other Scandi ladies. ‘It’s the Scandinavian Ladies group? We meet every other week on Wednesday at eight.’
The girl scans her list, then seems to remember something. ‘Just a minute,’ she says, disappearing behind the bar, where she confers with a man pulling beers at the tap. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she says when she returns, the pale skin on her neck reddening with embarrassment, ‘my boss just told me that, uh, the Scandinavian ladies’ drinks were moved this week and took place last night…’
Bianka stares at the girl for several long moments, as though her words hadn’t quite registered, then the enormity of what has happened dawns on her. She turns away from the girl and is about to storm from the pub when she stops in the doorway and takes a picture of the heaving room on her phone. She sends the picture to Charlotte on WhatsApp with the caption fuck you, then she blocks her number. She runs all the way home, not bothering with the umbrella now, and the rain has gotten heavier, dragging her mascara down her face in black streaks.
At home, the house is empty – Emil texted to say he caught the seven o’clock flight to Oslo. She begins to sob and pours herself a huge glass of red wine, drinking it in gulps. She goes through to the living room and picks up the TV remote control, opens Streamstar and selects Viking Keto. She clicks on Charlotte’s beaming face, proudly proffering a huge, bloody steak in the preview picture. Bianka clicks past the intro with its infuriatingly upbeat theme song, to the start of the newest episode. She mutes it, but watches Charlotte’s face, and is entirely transfixed by the way she moves and speaks and throws her head back in laughter, as though depriving yourself of essential nutrients for a living is that fucking funny.
