The Turning Tide by Brooke Magnanti Read Free Book Online

felt. ‘I took out a bank loan.’
    A bank loan? Was that all he would admit to? ‘What about that second mortgage you didn’t tell me about?’
    Erykah watched her husband’s mouth open and close silently and knew she had him bang to rights. ‘You forged my signature on the application,’ she said.
    ‘How did you know?’
    ‘Ha,’ Erykah said. ‘You think I don’t check my own credit history? Come on.’
    ‘Credit history?’ he said. ‘Credit history. When have you ever had to check your credit history?’ Rab’s voice raised now and creaked near its breaking point. ‘When have you even had a credit history? I’ve always been the one who provided anything you wanted. Cars, jewellery, spending money . . . Unless this . . .’ he glanced at the clothes on the bed. ‘. . . is really because you were planning to walk out behind my back all along.’
    ‘Fuck you Rab, fuck you,’ she said, her voice level calm. ‘Don’t talk to me about managing money, and don’t you try to turn this around on me! I know you’ve missed over a year of mortgage payments and that we are less than a month away from repossession.’
    ‘You could have done something to help,’ he snarled.
    ‘Oh, that’s classic,’ she said. ‘Turn it around on me. But you know what? I’ve had it. I am done. Falling out of love with someone is hardly the same thing as committing fraud.’ She hadn’t even thought the word until she said it, but it felt so good to say out loud. He was a fraud. The relationship was a fraud. Everything about their life together was a fraud. It always had been.
    Fraud . The word hung in the air between them. Her brown eyes bored into Rab’s blue ones. She dared him to make his accusations, to say whatever he wanted to say. He probably had no idea about Nicole, but would it change anything if he did? Right now she was standing and he was sitting down. It felt good. No, it felt better than that. It felt great.
    When they first married, he said he understood her need to be out of the spotlight for a while. When she tried to find work and couldn’t, he said he would support her to train and try to get back into the GB rowing squad selection. When she finally accepted that the effort she was putting into that dream was never going to work out, well, that was ten years they had been together, and by then they were hardly speaking any more anyway.
    ‘I know the truth,’ Erykah said. ‘I know you were fired from your job. Did you really think you could hide that from me? You drive down the street every morning, you park your car at the station, and you sit in the coffee shop – or sometimes, the library – until it’s time to come home.’
    ‘How did you find out?’ Rab said.
    She snorted. He wasn’t half as smooth as he thought he was. Never had been. ‘Two decades married to a man who works in the City, and you think I wouldn’t notice when his mobile goes silent? Come on.’
    Rab closed his eyes. ‘I was ashamed,’ he said.
    ‘So ashamed you couldn’t tell me?’ she said. He didn’t answer; there was no answer to give. ‘Do your family know?’
    He looked up. ‘God, no,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t bother them with this.’
    Typical. There was probably little they could offer apart from a scant equity in a pebbledash bungalow in Norwich. His head shrank into his shoulders. ‘I knew you were a liar and a sneak, Rab, but I never imagined how far you would go.’
    ‘Would you have understood?’
    ‘I haven’t understood a thing about you – about us – in years,’ Erykah said. Once upon a time it had felt like the two of them against the world. Wasn’t that exactly what he had said, over and over? She had clung so hard to that idea, even when slapped in the face with his lies and infidelity, because she had nothing else to believe in. Bit by bit, year by year, insecurity had chewed away at that. Until all that was left was what was in her bag: a roll of cash, an old book, and a change