Jess woke at three the next morning. Her head lay sideways on the table, her neck at an awkward angle, cramp gripping her muscles, and the empty bottle beside her. In the past, in the years between leaving the care home and university, it would have taken more than a half a bottle of chardonnay to knock her out.
Where was she the last time she’d drunk too much? It had to be that little town on the West Coast where she’d been working as a barmaid. She blushed even now when she remembered what happened with the German tourist. Good looking, blond, not much English. Gunter? Gandolf? It was his suggestion they do shots, but she had been the one who had insisted they buy the second bottle and take it back to his campervan. She’d woken up two days later, alone and in her underwear on the outskirts of a town she didn’t recognise. That had been her low point. She had no one else to blame. No sleazy Mr Brown taking advantage of the girls in his care, to defray her guilt.
With her hands on the edge of the table she pushed herself upright, unwinding her head above her spine inch by painful inch until she was looking straight ahead. Squinting in the brightness of the overhead lights, her teeth chattering with the cold, she got up and shuffled to the fridge, took out a bottle of sparkling Evian, cracked the top and drained it. She opened the second bottle in her bathroom, where she found a bottle of aspirin, took three, finished the water, and went to bed.
At seven-thirty she was woken by the cheerful alarm on her phone. She took more aspirin, had a shower and washed her hair. She’d developed what she called her hangover management system in her drinking years — the years she’d pushed to the back of her mind. Not that she would have been able to remember much about them, even if she tried. Apart from the tourist. There were no words to describe what happened with him.
After towelling off, she walked naked into the kitchen, snapped a Diet Coke and gulped it down. While the coffee brewed, she did a number of stretches, shook her arms and legs, then indulged in several deep squats until the pills kicked in and she could forget about the pain.
Had Andrew ever seen her messy drunk? Not socially tipsy-drunk as she was after a couple of wines with dinner, or after an exotic cocktail on the beach, but completely pissed — staggering, blathering, sobbing then crashing into darkness — drunk. Jess had binged to such an extent that she was unable to stop drinking until she passed out. She rarely vomited, which was good in one way because it saved her teeth from stomach acid. Not good in another way because she had to wait for her liver to process the alcohol, one unit an hour until it was all gone, before she could function again.
In her late teens, with no future, nowhere to be, and no one to answer to — worse, no one to notice her mistakes and offer to help — binge drinking was her solution to loneliness. Meeting Gunter had been the slap in the face she needed to break free from the shadow-life she had fallen into after leaving the care home. Gunter and his cruelty forced her to become an adult, someone who was wholly responsible for all her mistakes. It hadn’t been easy, but there on the roadside, she made the decision to stop drinking. She wanted to be the person her mother knew she could be.
Andrew would never have married her if he’d seen her messy-drunk. Fastidious about loss of control, he would have been disgusted by her self-induced chaos. And yet he’d read the file. Ross had made a point of saying he had. What had he read? She couldn’t look — not yet. Seeing her past life written in black and white when she’d managed to put it behind her for so long — she wasn’t ready. With her eyes shut, she rocked against the bench feeling the cold marble edge against her pelvis. She didn’t want to know what he knew — not yet. She wanted him to only know the Jess in front of him, the Jess she was — Jess Gordon — the woman who was worthy to be his wife. Not Jessica Davidson.
The coffee pot bubbled on the stove, spitting hot water on to her bare skin. She jumped back, brushed it off her arm and filled her mug, carried it to the bathroom and sat down to pee. A moderately pretty brown-eyed blonde, her centrally parted straight hair tucked behind her ears, stared at her in the mirror above the basins. When she stood up, Jess saw that the woman in the mirror had lost weight, her shoulders seemed less broad, her normally pert breasts less full, her tummy hollow, the curve of her hips flattened. The white lines of her bikini blurred where her tan had faded, the burnt skin on her shoulders no longer flaking. Who is this person? More to the point who had Andrew seen when he looked at her? Jess Cullinane, Jess Gordon, or Jessica Davidson? A rose by any other name is still a rose. Isn’t it? If you pinch me, here, here and here, hard like this, I’m the same person. Almost. What’s in the file didn’t matter, can’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have married you, all three of you, if it had. But why did he never talk about it?
Clean underwear, clean shirt, clean jeans and sneakers, no socks. Dressed. Make-up. The downside of being blonde, pale eyebrows. She pencilled over them, but they weren’t even. She wiped them off and started again. Eyebrow pencil, eyeliner, mascara. None of it helped. Her eyes, bloodshot and squinty, her skin mottled and dehydrated, she looked as bad as she felt. But not as tragic as the bedroom. Five minutes tidying up wouldn’t hurt. She opened the windows, reeling as a sudden blast of fresh air blew in. She pulled back the duvet, exposing the sheets to the sun. She’d read that UV light was as good as a wash. She put away yesterday’s clothes and her evil shoes. The bags from her honeymoon, still unpacked, lay against a wall, where she’d dumped them. She dug through her backpack, and hauled out Andrew’s laptop, his phone and keys. In the kitchen she grabbed another Diet Coke from the pantry and shoved it with his stuff into her satchel along with her stuff and the papers Ross had asked her to sign.
The file was still on the table — waiting — she wasn’t ready. She grabbed it and pushed it out of sight under one of the sofa cushions, and slung her satchel over her shoulder. She needed to be outside in the sunshine and fresh air and among people who didn’t know her. She craved the safety of strangers. She took the stairs rather than the lift, galloping two at a time, all the way to the bottom. As soon as she escaped the building she took a deep breath of sea air. Revived, she felt alive for the first time in days.