The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS by Carol Anne Davis

FROM THE START, I did everything in my power to split them up, to make him exclusively mine again. But the bitch just wouldn’t let go so I had to kill. The psychologist here at the prison thinks that I overreacted but she clearly hasn’t loved enough…

I met him, of all places, on a sponsored walk for breast cancer. Both his mother and mine had died of the disease and it created an immediate bond between us. We were both forty, both divorced, both had one grown-up child who lived far away. Even our names sounded good together – Jack and Gill. My work as the assistant headmistress at a girls’ school brought me into contact with very few men and his job as an aeronautics engineer meant that he worked with very few women. Neither of us had been dating for years so we were ready for action, fell hard.

Jack praised everything about me at the start – my looks, my figure, my somewhat dry sense of humour. He said that I was cute, that he loved my body, that I was very entertaining and that he loved spending time with me. I reciprocated with ardour, forever hugging and kissing him. He was always freshly showered and sweet-scented, so there was nothing that I wouldn’t do…

And, at the onset, it seemed enough. He appeared to set out his stall, telling me that if he remarried, his wife would get his sizeable pension. He was disappointed that his first wife had had so little interest in his work. Many women hear the word “engineer” and turn away – they want a man with a job which they can understand, someone in sales or teaching. But I’d had friends in the engineering faculty when I studied English at university, simply because one of my sister’s boyfriends was an engineer.

Throughout my course, I came to know these youths well, found that, if you looked beyond the initial awkwardness, they had good hearts and grounded personalities. They wanted what we all want, love and mutual support. They were the type of men who would hold their beloved in high esteem and would never cheat. Or so I thought…

I remember the first time I knew that something wasn’t right. I’d been dating Jack for six months, and we were in love, when he went on one of his regular works nights out. By then, I’d met and socialized with most of his colleagues. Indeed, I often picked him up from the pub at the end of these evenings, sometimes joining him for the final round. But, on this particular evening, he was vague about exactly where they were going and said that he’d get a lift back from a mate.

The following day, I asked him which of the usual suspects were there. He reeled off a few names, hesitated, said “Becky”, then added another few male names.

“Becky?” I asked. I mean, women in engineering are rarer than hen’s teeth or at least they were when I was at uni.

“Mmm, she joined us about a month ago.”

“Any good?” There had been one female engineer on my sister’s boyfriend’s course and she’d only survived by getting various blokes to help her with her course work. She was beauty without the brains. Her father had persuaded her to try engineering as she was his only child and he needed someone to take over the family firm.

“Yeah, she’s okay.”

We were curled up on the settee and I’d just switched on the television and was about to leaf through the TV magazine. All of a sudden he was staring intently at the screen, yet it was showing EastEnders, a programme we both despised.

“There’s a documentary just starting on BBC4,” I muttered, picking up the remote control but still watching him out of the corner of my eye.

“I’ll make us a cuppa,” he said, and catapulted off the couch.

I felt a growing unease as I waited for him to return. He’d always told me that he was a one-woman man and had given me no reason to doubt him. But the way he’d hesitated before mentioning her name…

“So, what does Becky do?” I asked when he returned with two overfilled mugs.

“She works for me.”

“Did she come from Ashton’s?” I knew that another engineering firm had recently paid off their staff and that several of them had been taken on by the company which employed Jack.

“No, she’s straight out of university.’”

“A mere foetus!” I laughed, and waited for him to say that she was hopelessly callow.

Instead, he merely muttered another, “She’s okay.”

It would be a month before I saw them together but I knew that she was my rival long before that. Put bluntly, he changed, became more distant. He stopped holding my hand when we were out walking and he went from greeting me with a “Hi, gorgeous” to a mere “Hi”. He also started to find fault with my appearance, pinching my waistline and asking if I’d gained weight. Ironically, I’d lost a few pounds as I was terrified of losing him, was often too upset to eat.

I decided to go to the gym and tone up, though it was a horrible thought after a day spent dealing with overwrought teachers, pushy parents and hormonal pupils. But I was suddenly competing with a girl of twenty-two.

What with skipping meals and working out on the ski machine after school, I went from a size fourteen to a twelve in a fortnight. Then I waited outside Jack’s work one day and saw him leave, laughing, with Becky and she must have been a perfect ten. She had long blonde tresses which caught the light and danced around in the summer breeze – mine’s a brunette pixie cut and I have my share of bad hair days. She also had the straight white teeth of an American actress, whereas I have molars courtesy of the NHS.

It hurts to get your teeth straightened. It really does. They play that part down when you go for a private consultation. Instead, they take your photo and show you what you’re going to look like after your pegs are realigned. I signed up there and then and spent the next four months in pain, and still have ongoing discomfort. But they did look better, they really did. Even Jack said so, but he still didn’t want me to pick him up from his works nights out.

I was getting slimmer, prettier, fitter, yet it wasn’t enough. “It’s surprising that you still get spots at your age,” he said one day. In the bathroom a moment later, I looked in the mirror at the small red bump next to my gloss-enhanced lips and marvelled that my future happiness could depend on it. Dermabrasion helped, as did a lighter foundation, but I began to dread the run-up to my period when my complexion would be at its worst.

If you’re a feminist, I bet that by now you’re urging me to leave. And I should have done, I know, but he’d been so wonderful to me at the beginning. I kept thinking that if I tried hard enough, I could get the man who had loved me back. I mean, it’s not as if he was nasty all the time – he still took me out three times a week and made love to me as if he really meant it. And he still made future plans.

So, for the first eight months after Becky arrived, I convinced myself that he merely had a crush on her, that it wasn’t reciprocated. After all, what would a twenty-two-year-old blonde beauty see in a forty-two-year-old man who was beginning to lose his hair?

She saw something, the bitch – maybe it was the thought of his pension or maybe she had a thing about father figures. Who knows? All I can say for sure is that I followed them from work one night and saw them go into an Italian restaurant. No boss. No colleagues. Just him and her, with their arms around each other’s waists as they walked along the road and disappeared into the Venetian. I stood outside for a moment, feeling ill and afraid.

At first, I resolved not to mention it. I mean, what if he wanted to finish with me but just didn’t have the guts? I’d be making it so easy for him to bring things to a swift conclusion. Instead, I decided just to hang on in there in the hope that she would find a guy of her own age and he’d return all of his affection to me.

My resolve lasted for two whole days, then I burst into tears.

“What’s wrong? You’re usually so calm,” he said, taking his hand from my left breast where he’d been sending thrill after thrill through my nipple.

“I saw you holding hands with a blonde girl.”

“Christ,” he said, looking shocked, “I never wanted you to know.”

I took a deep breath. “I thought that we promised to be exclusive?”

He swallowed visibly. “We did.”

“So?” Don’t end it, don’t end it, don’t end it.

“She… she’s just so young and lively. She really gets under my skin. But at the same time, she can be overwhelming. I love being with you, it’s so nice and restful here.”

He made me sound like a day spa, but it was a start.

“At her age, her hormones must be all over the place?” I hoped against hope that she had wicked PMS.

“Tell me about it. For one week out of every month she snaps my head off and sometimes throws things at me!”

“And is that what you want?”

He shook his head. “It’s exhausting. But the rest of the time, she’s…” He seemed to realize belatedly who he was talking to. “I’m sorry, but she’s really got to me.”

“It’s probably just lust,” I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking again.

He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe I’m having an early mid-life crisis.”

I tensed every sinew in my body. “I’d like you to give her up.”

“I can’t.”

“But we were so good together!”

“We still are. I don’t want to lose either of you.”

I took the deepest of breaths. “And if I issued an ultimatum?”

He looked down and played absently with my pubic hair. “I’d choose her.”

So, there it was.

“Because she’s new?”

“And different from everyone else that I’ve ever gone out with. I mean, my wife and girlfriends have always been traditionalists.”

“But you are, too.”

“I was, but she’s made me think about things differently. She’s sort of New Age but she’s somehow tied it all in with quantum mechanics. It’s fascinating stuff.”

“I was something of a hippy at university,” I said, somewhat desperately. In other words, I’d owned a couple of tie-dye outfits and an Afghan coat.

“She likes all these esoteric things, believes in the supernatural.”

“But you’re an atheist. We both are!”

“I think that I’d consider myself an agnostic nowadays.”

I should end this, I thought, then breathed in his aftershave and faint manly sweat and knew that I couldn’t. I wanted him in my bed and in my life every single day. Surely three days a week was much, much better than nothing? He made me laugh, made me think, made me orgasm twice in one night. She was offering the hurly-burly of the futon whilst I gave him the deep, deep peace of the king-size bed.

I made the next three months so peaceful that it’s a wonder he didn’t die of bliss. We had weekly home-cooked meals at my place, washed down by the finest wines and brandies. We lay in my Jacuzzi and listened to whale music, made love using a vibrating relaxing massager which I’d purchased online. On other nights, we went to see feel-good movies or enjoyed weekend trips to bird sanctuaries and nature reserves.

Would he really enjoy going clubbing with her once the novelty had worn off? Was being the oldest swinger in town truly his preference? Surely he’d tire of her monthly aggression and choose comparatively laid-back me?

“Shall we go to the Eden Project this weekend?” I asked. Eve had tempted Adam with an apple but I was using greenery and pastoral music as my offerings.

“Can’t – Becky’s no longer going to her parents’ at the weekend so I’ll be taking her dancing instead.”

I felt as if I’d been hit.

“What’s changed?”

“They’ve moved abroad.”

“But she’d been seeing them every weekend?” I’d always thought that he mainly saw her straight from work, that he’d made an active choice to spend every Saturday and Sunday with me.

“Uh-huh. They were running a struggling bed and breakfast and she was helping out.”

“So now you’re going to switch between the two of us?”

He looked away then mumbled, “Not sure.”

“What if she has PMS?”

“Oh, she’s switched to a different pill. She’s much better.”

“Is she really?” I said, and a little acid came back up from my stomach and burned my throat.

Have you any idea how difficult it is to fill an entire weekend when you know that the man you love is having fun with your much younger rival? Oh, I resurrected my old social life with the hillwalking club and went for meals out with my neighbour, but nothing brought me pleasure any more. Now I lived for Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights which I spent with Jack, sometimes socializing and sometimes staying in. I tried so hard to please him on these nights – my conversation sweet, my laughter ready, my tongue bionic – but he still went to her every weekend and maybe even saw her on Tuesdays and Thursdays too. Plus they were together all day at work, had hours in which to build up shared jokes. I couldn’t compete.

Eventually, it began to affect my health so badly that I’d lie there in the mornings unable to get out of bed. I felt literally weighted. This was particularly strange as by now I’d lost two stone, looked pale and weak. I also lost concentration when I did finally arrive at work, was called in front of the board of governors and warned that I had to shape up. But he was still touching her, licking her, doing all of the things that he was doing to me but doubtless preferring her silkier and perkier body. It was driving me mad…

After the sacking, I signed on but the Job Centre didn’t offer a new start.

“Once you’re over forty…” one of the other jobseekers said sadly.

“Everything’s aimed at people in their twenties,” I said savagely.

She had it all. I had less and less. We were reaching a showdown. It was then that I realized I had to kill.

It wasn’t difficult. After all, I knew where they worked and lived, their day-to-day movements. I simply aimed my car and watched the body fly through the air. Afterwards, I ran over the cadaver as it lay on the ground, reversed and ran over it again numerous times. I was taking no chances, had to eliminate every breath.

I received a life sentence for his murder, of course. Does that surprise you? I mean, that it was Jack that I killed, my beloved? It surprised the prison psychologist.

“Why didn’t you kill Becky, your rival?” she asked.

“Because there are new female graduates going into engineering all the time nowadays,” I said sadly, remembering my recent research. “There would always be other young women tempting him away.”

“So why not let him go?”

“I loved him too much, he meant everything to me. This way he’s mine for ever. No one else can ever have him now.”

“But you’ve given up everything in the process,” she said sadly.

I was so glad that she cared.

She’s right though – life can be pointless in here unless you have someone to think about all of the time. Fortunately I realized within days that she and I are meant to be together. We talk easily during our sessions and she always looks pained when she admits that our time is up. She, too, used to work in an all-girls school so we share a history. I imagine she’s also had secret crushes on the older girls, just like me. And there’s a synchronicity in our names – she’s Lilian and, if I use my full moniker, I’m Gillian. It’s rhyme and reason. It’s fate.

There’s only one problem: Raisa, who is on the extended privileges programme, likes Lilian too. She has more independence than me as she’s a trusted prisoner, has free rein of the building. She’s probably popping in to see Lilian whilst I’m in the workshop, stuffing soft toys.

Not for much longer, though. I’ve bought a knife from one of the metal-shop workers, had it honed to the sharpest point imaginable. I reckon it’ll only take thirty seconds, during my one-to-one therapy, to cut the psychologist’s throat. Lilian will always endure in my memory, alongside Jack, and neither of them will ever again be unfaithful. It’s the ultimate ownership – I take their lives and they become mine.