The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya

Author:Jo Hamya [Hamya, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

THREE:

CORPSING

Pork and lemon sole, barely touched, have been cleared from the table. In the restaurant, Sophia and her mother have justified their continued presence with a large, round plate of carpaccio. It sits between them, in the midst of two other, smaller plates. It glistens redly. Neither woman has much interest in it. They have started to grow tired of the ordinary screams chair legs around them give when pushed out for old guests to exit.

I got so angry with him after I read what you wrote, Sophia’s mother says abruptly. She observes the small, empty plate in front of her, traces a finger round its rim. I don’t doubt he brought strange women back to where you were staying while you were on holiday with him, underage. It sounds exactly like him. I didn’t even need to call you and ask. But then I got angry with you, because you never told me. I had to find out about it through your bloody play after I’d promised you not to tell him anything about it.

Sophia looks up. You didn’t, she says. She means this in thanks; she means it as a gesture of hope.

Her mother groans in her chair. I didn’t. I wanted to, and couldn’t. What was I going to do about it ten years after the fact? I kept you with me for almost eighteen years without him interfering and he still managed to ruin it at the very end. There were days when I was staying with him where I couldn’t look at him after reading your play.

In order to read her daughter’s work, Sophia’s mother had printed the emailed script at a stationery shop close to her ex-husband’s home. She had taken it to a café selling artisanal bread and iced buns, and gone through it in one sitting. Paranoia had seized her after reading. To think of it lying on the bedside table in the guest room. To think of Sophia’s father finding it there. Unable to imagine anywhere she could hide it safely from his grasp, she had paid £2.90 for her espresso and ditched it in the first bin she saw.

When Sophia’s father had greeted her on her return, she’d felt sure something in the pages she’d read had clung to her. He seemed to smell it on her. Late June. They had been bickering already, but after Sophia’s mother had read the play, a new distance between them had formed; less courteous than the one before, more remote. He liked to pick at it when bored. I must be keeping you away from all your lovers, he’d sulked by the front door one night, after she’d spent the evening out. It had been as though he’d waited for her to come home. The next morning, when he’d seen her hungover, she explained she had been with friends, enjoying sparkling wine and olives in one of their gardens. He had looked pointedly at her, in her unironed cardigan and her house slippers with peeling soles.

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