Who Are You? Read Online Free PDF Page B

you thinking?’ and Juliet had laughed. Whenever she felt threatened by Alex she always ended up laughing, probably some weird kind of defence mechanism. And so that had really wound him up. ‘I don’t know what on earth you think is funny about this, Juliet. Just how could you have been so unbelievably stupid!’ She’d watched how he’d squeezed his hands into fists and she’d stuck her chin out and said, ‘Well you weren’t bloody here to discuss it with me, were you, and what do you want me to do all day – sit around and paint my bloody nails? I thought it might be good for the value of the property. I thought it was fun. Remember fun?’ she’d said.
    ‘And what about the security, did you think about that? The fact that all our things – paintings, silver, clocks – are all up for cataloguing by any common felon.’
    ‘Common felon. Honestly Alex. If you mean a bloody burglar it’s not as though our address is going to be printed anywhere. It won’t even say which road we’re in. If you’re so worried about security why don’t you just tear your fucking face off, and then we can all relax a bit.’ She chose not to recall what happened next. There were things she shoved into a secret drawer so she didn’t have to think about them.
    When the edition of the magazine came out towards the end of November, Juliet couldn’t believe that this was really the house in which she lived. Things had been moved in order to dress the set; for example the vase of spectacularly tall red amaryllis, circled by wired-in limes, appeared in every room, posing itself prominently in the drawing room, the dining room and grandly in the centre of the hall table. When Juliet realized what they’d done she worried, she actually worried, that people – and by people she obviously meant people she knew – would think that she hadn’t the imagination to produce more than a repeat of one floral arrangement, and as everyone knew, fruit and flowers together were becoming so last year. OK, so it might seem shallow, but the way you show yourself to the world, and how the world sees you … these things … matter. And so many bloody tea lights. Alex detested tea lights. Of course when one had old family silver candlesticks which were the real deal, what was the point of silly cheap little things that were available in sets of fifty from IKEA. She knew that Alex thought it smacked of affectedness, artificiality, attention-seeking, the sort of naffness that he attached to people who invited Hello! into their homes to show off nothing so much as an immense lack of class.
    Deep down, Juliet fears that she has gone through the wrong set of sliding doors, but having invested so much thus far, she has no alternative but to see it through. For the moment. For Ben’s sake. But if someone were to ask her when she had last felt truly happy, she would find it a struggle to answer. No. The real truth of the matter is that she feels that her life has become a kind of grand pretence, a sort of theatrical production which she has to stage for the sake of Ben, and in order to cope with Alex, and that if she lets the mask slip, she just might be capable of going out and slitting someone’s throat.
    Boy, does she have some weird thoughts. The basic Will Ben go to sleep tonight without waking up and waking me up develops into What if he goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up at all, which quickly becomes What if he dies in the night … What if no one believes it was a natural death … What if she is unable to prove that she hasn’t smothered him … What if she went to prison and then got attacked, murdered even, for being a child killer. And how awful would it be, losing a child, the terrible bereavement, and then of being falsely accused, of having to live with the horror of being labelled the killer of your own child. It happened to someone in real life, and hadn’t she committed suicide even after that so-called expert evidence was proven to