I bridled at this. Jude, who didn’t have any kids of her own, always knew best about other people’s.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, testily. ‘He’s going halfway round the globe to be with this girl he’s not even bothered about!’
‘How do you know he’s not bothered?’
‘I can just tell. He feels obliged, because he owes her money. And she’s told him she can get him a job when he gets there, but…’
‘Maybe that’s OK.’
‘How can it be OK? She’s manipulating him.’
‘Maybe he’s manipulating her…’
‘Well, that’s no better. I just think, what if it all goes to shit and he’s miles from anywhere with no money to get home?’
‘He’ll work it out.’
‘Jude, he’s nineteen!’
‘Exactly!’
She had been so kind to me – dropped everything, stumped up for the best massage I had ever had, so how come I wanted to slap her? Maybe they were right about me. Maybe I was possessed by demons.
All the same, when we hugged goodbye at the entrance to Covent Garden tube, I found myself holding back tears.
‘Hey!’ she said, pulling back and looking into my face. She tidied a wisp of hair behind my ear.
‘You’re doing great,’ she said, ‘you’re doing fine.’
‘You’re doing great, Karen,’ my psych said, her eyes round and earnest.
Really? I wondered, was this what ‘great’ looked like? Sitting on the edge of my seat, a nerve twitching in my cheek, my eyes glazing over with the effort of trying to focus.
‘You’ve made a lot of progress and shown great resilience, bearing in mind how unwell you were when you first came to us.’
Nick’s eyebrows shot up. I suppose, considering the state I’d been in when they’d admitted me, ‘unwell’ was a bit of an understatement. The psych turned to him and smiled tolerantly.
‘As I say, considering how symptomatic Karen was when she joined us, for us to be contemplating discharge as early as this…’
‘It’s been five months,’ Nick interrupted.
‘… Which, as I say, represents remarkable progress,’ the psych insisted.
Right on cue and as if to amplify her point, a kerfuffle broke out somewhere in the corridor – another patient presumably.
‘So,’ the psych turned to me, once the brouhaha had died down, ‘I feel that the next stage for you, Karen, should be one of re-engagement.’
‘Re-engagement?’ I must have looked alarmed.
‘Yes, sorry – what I mean is, we’re comfortable, if it’s what you want – and I can’t stress how important your own agency is in this – for you to go home now. We can devolve your care to the outpatient clinic most local to you, which in this case will be…’
She glanced at the computer screen, ‘… Muswell Hill.’ She looked me in the eye and smiled. ‘They have a really excellent self-help group which I think you’ll find very supportive.’
‘Will you er…?’ Nick swivelled his chair towards the psych and murmured, sotto voce, ‘… be stepping down the anti-depressants? Because she’s not really herself when she’s on them and I gather dependency can become a bit of an…’
‘Yes, I do understand your concern,’ the psych interrupted him, her professional smile not quite disguising her irritation, ‘And Karen’s being “herself”’ (did I imagine it or did she give Nick a sharp look as she said this?) ‘has, as you know, been very much the guiding principal of our entire care package, since admission…’
‘Yes, I’m not saying go cold turkey just…’
‘Karen,’ the psych turned pointedly to me, ‘how are you getting on with the Fluoxetine?’
‘Yeah, it’s OK. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be on it for ever or anything but it keeps things at a manageable level day to day. I don’t feel like killing anyone.’
They both did a simultaneous double-take, for, I imagined, rather different reasons and then, seeing that I was being humorous – and humour indicating a level of social engagement that suggested my drug regimen was in fact doing the job – laughed heartily and with some relief.
‘Kaz… Karen…?’ I gave a little involuntary shiver at the touch of Jude’s hand as she rearranged my hair and refocused on her concerned face.
‘Yeah,’ I said doubtfully, ‘thanks…’
She braced my shoulders but I didn’t trust myself to meet her eye again, so I turned abruptly and hurried away towards the tube.
I got a seat, unusually, and found myself sitting opposite a mother and daughter who had obviously been on a spree together. They were a golden pair – not ostentatiously striking, but with an understated not-quite beauty that made it hard, once you noticed it, to look away. They didn’t talk to each other, just stared straight ahead, in an attitude of repose, as though they had done all their chatting and were quite comfortable in their bubble. As the train rattled out of Covent Garden station, the mother pulled back the top of the daughter’s carrier bag with one finger, glanced inside it and met her daughter’s eye with a look of complicity. I felt for a second that if I could have glimpsed the contents of that expensive-looking paper carrier it would have yielded the secrets of the universe. In there was everything I lacked: self-assurance, wit, style, allure. Everything Nick’s ex had had in spades. The mother noticed me staring and I gave an apologetic half smile and raised my gaze to the triangle of dark glass between their shoulders. There I was, reflected in the carriage window, hair limp from the steam room, my face amorphous and blotchy, hanging between these two sirens like a poltergeist. It was a relief when a couple of shift workers in hi-viz donkey jackets got on at Regent’s Park and stood between us.
Catching sight of Ethan from a distance on the concourse at Paddington, I could see that he was no longer a Londoner. With his tanned skin and bleached hair, he was a citizen of the world – a bum. A handsome bum, a privileged bum, but a bum nonetheless. All the other people were tethered to their lives, scanning the departure board, eager to get home, while Ethan was floating free, headphones in, a vacant expression on his face, as if this place were as good as any other. How I envied him. Our train came up on the departure board so I shouted and waved frantically to get his attention and then gestured towards the platform. He rolled his eyes as if he’d been wondering where I’d got to and we converged on the barrier.
The train was crowded, most of the seats were reserved and everyone was doing that British thing of waiting with exaggerated patience for the slow-coaches to stow their luggage when what they really wanted to do was shoulder-charge them out of the way and bag a seat. I noticed a man and woman take up neighbouring reservations at a sociable four-seater across the aisle. Ethan and I had only been able to find single seats, one behind the other. I leaned forward and whispered to him that they might not mind swapping with us as they obviously weren’t travelling together, but he just shrugged as though he didn’t really care.
I settled into my seat and stared blankly out of the window, watching the platform, empty now except for a few scavenging pigeons. A woman came barrelling through the carriage with a lot of carrier bags and accused someone nearby of occupying her seat. By the time the mix-up had been resolved and both parties accommodated, the train was moving and London was slipping away from me in a blur of council flats and flyovers and advertising hoardings. I pressed my head against the glass and watched the reflection of Ethan’s thumbs in the darkened window, flying like pistons over the keyboard of his phone. Before I knew it, I wasn’t just watching, I was reading.
‘Are you kidding me?’ – thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb – ‘fucking gagging for it’ (tongue hanging out emoji).
I sank back into my seat, sick to the stomach both at what I had read and in shame that I had read it. Well, I had brought it on myself. No wonder he couldn’t get there soon enough. Who wouldn’t travel ten thousand miles to escape an overbearing mother? At least I wouldn’t be able to read his texts from there.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head on the window. A tear squeezed its way from beneath my eyelid. Pathetic.
By the time I’d sighted my first cow, standing lugubriously beside a pylon in a field, all the therapeutic effects of my day trip seemed to have evaporated and a great despondency had settled in their place. The sights that were supposed to be balm to the soul – rolling hills, big skies, hedgerows, sheep – flicked past my gaze with such regularity that I began to think the scenery was on a loop, like the backdrop in an old black and white movie. That tractor I had seen before, I’d swear it; those walkers with their dog; that flock of crows massing in a tree. Crows. I closed my eyes, felt briefly the flurry of feather on cheek, smelled the sour-sweet stench of eviscera. I shuddered. Paranoia. These were the symptoms. Thinking oneself conspired against, imagining one’s life controlled by hidden forces. I should have to buck up – keep my wild imaginings at bay, or I’d end up back at the funny farm…
I started typing a text to Nick. ‘Wonderful day, thanks for organizing. Train on time’… I stopped; deleted it. Too needy. He’d said he would be there to meet us and he would be. In the small things, he was unfailingly reliable.
The Range Rover hunkered in the Arrivals car park like a Sherman tank. Nick was studying The Times crossword, impervious to the unfriendly gesticulations of a woman in a Nissan Micra whom he had blocked in. He looked up when Ethan opened the rear door.
‘Good time had by all?’ he asked.
I climbed into the front passenger seat and he leaned across and gave me a peck on the cheek.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘lovely.’
‘Get some good gear, Ethe?’ Nick asked him.
I glanced doubtfully over my shoulder, at Ethan’s one flimsy carrier bag.
‘Uhuh,’ he replied.
It was damp as we drove back through the valley. Bruised-looking clouds hung low over our hill.
‘Has it been wet all day?’ I asked Nick.
He looked out of the window as though he had only just noticed.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ he said. ‘Good for the garden, though.’
There was something in his tone, a coolness.
‘Jude OK?’
‘Yeah, not bad,’ I said. I considered telling him about the domestic wrangles between her and Dave, but it seemed inconsequential now.
What was this aloofness? Had I done something wrong? Or just cramped his style by coming back? I closed my eyes and tried to banish the images that came to mind of phantom infidelities. I was meant to be over all that.
He looked across and gave me a pensive smile.
Dusk was falling. We were almost home. Nick was signalling right, ready to take the turn into our lane
‘Hey, Dad,’ Ethan piped up from the back, ‘can you let me out here?’
‘Why, where are you going?’ I asked, in surprise.
‘I think I left my denim jacket in the pub,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder as a passing car honked its disapproval. ‘Just gonna check if it’s been handed in.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late for…?’ But he had already slammed the door. I watched, perplexed, as he set off alone along the dark footpath.
‘There you go,’ said Nick, his tone faintly reproachful. But I wasn’t sure whether he meant ‘there you go, you’ve made your kid into a boozing ne’er do well,’ or ‘there you go, despite your neurotic imaginings your son has turned out perfectly normal.’
Nick made a grinding gear change and coasted down into the hamlet.
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, as we passed Prospect Cottage. ‘I nearly forgot. There was a bit of a drama this morning. An ambulance came.’
‘Jean!’
Nick turned his head sharply.
‘How did you know?’
How did I know?
‘What happened?’ I asked. I saw Gordon’s raised hand, the glint of fury in his eye.
‘She had a fall,’ Nick said. ‘Nasty black eye but no bones broken, thank goodness. She’s back home now.’
I bit my lip.
‘I know,’ Nick said. ‘Awful, isn’t it?’
‘I feel terrible.’
‘Why should you feel bad?’
‘Well, I’ve been meaning to call round and see her, but I’ve just… I don’t know. Place gives me the creeps. I always think it might be him who answers the door and…’
Nick shot me a disapproving frown.
‘You’re putting some dodgy spin on this, and I don’t know where you’ve got it from,’ he said grimly, then after a beat he murmured, ‘Well, I do…’
He glided into our pull-in and switched off the ignition. We both sat in silence, listening to the ticking of the engine as it cooled down.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked sullenly. ‘Oh, I get it. It’s like the bird in my studio. You think I’m making shit up again, don’t you?’
‘Not making it up, no, just…’
‘… Fantasising. Hallucinating. Losing the plot.’
He turned to me then and laid a consoling hand on my thigh.
‘None of those, no. I just think…’
He looked into my eyes, and in the half light of the car his expression was sweet and regretful.
‘Doesn’t matter…’ he said removing his hand and making to open the driver’s door.
‘Nick!’ I clamped my hand on his to stop him.
Suddenly we were kissing. He clambered on top of me and reclined my seat with one deft movement of his hand. I heard myself gasp, then groan, and then we kissed some more while Nick ground his pent cock against the sturdy double seam of my denim crotch like a randy schoolboy. Just when I thought I might die of wanting to be fucked, he reached down and fumbled first with my button, then my zip, rearing back briefly to brace his knees against the seat, before yanking my trousers down as far as my knees. I unzippered him in turn, and shuffled his jeans over his hairy thighs, then he dropped onto me, and, thrusting blindly, found his way in.
There was something so illicit, so thrillingly amateurish about this set-up. If it hadn’t been for my gaping wetness and Nick’s staying power, we might have been a pair of teenage virgins at a drive-in. I was getting to the point when I no longer cared where we were, or what I looked like, or how sore I was going to be afterwards; had just felt, in fact, the embryonic quiver of my first orgasm, when a flicker of movement outside caught my attention. Turning my head I saw a blur through the windscreen, which, by the time I had identified it as a person, was already disappearing into the darkness.
Nick was still rutting away on top of me, oblivious.
‘Nick,’ I said urgently.
He groaned and shuddered and collapsed on me like a corpse.
‘Nick!’ I pulled his hair sharply and he recoiled, staring at me like an angry baby.
‘I just saw someone…’
‘Big deal.’
‘Nick, you don’t think he was… what if he was watching us?’
‘What do you want me to do, call the cops?’ Nick said. ‘“Officer, we were just doing a bit of dogging in the lane and some pervert had the cheek to walk past.”’
‘There’s no need to make it sound so sordid.’
‘It was sordid,’ said Nick, cheerfully. ‘We should do it in the car more often.’
‘Stop it,’ I said, cracking a smile in spite of myself, ‘this is serious. Someone saw us. Someone was watching.’
‘Baby, lighten up. Birds do it, bees do it. This is the countryside. We’re man and fucking wife. If some pervert wants to get off on it, good luck to him. Now I don’t know about you but I need a drink. Are we going inside or what?’
14
Nick had tidied up. Not that the cottage ever really got messy in the way our house in London used to, with sports bags and skateboards and shoes all over the place. But as I walked in, I felt as though I were seeing it through the flattering fish-eye lens of an estate agent’s camera. The trail of clutter that I tended to leave in my wake – junk mail catalogues and odd earrings and headphones
and keys – had been tidied away. He had restacked the log pile and lit a fire in the stove. The coup de grâce was a huge bouquet of flowers on the dining table. He had put them in water, but they were still in their cellophane, in case, I supposed, I overlooked the fact that they had not been picked, but purchased at great expense, from a florist.
‘Gosh, they’re lovely,’ I said going over to take a sniff, although they were the kind of flowers – roses and lilies and variegated carnations, hot-housed out of season – that did not have much scent.
‘Aren’t they?’ he said, with the same coolness of tone I had noticed earlier in the car.
‘Are they not from you, then?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘No need to be afraid,’ I said, ‘I just thought…’
‘… I might have made a spontaneous romantic gesture?’
‘Well, no, only – I was upset, wasn’t I? About… that thing in my studio.’
‘Oh, the bird, yeah. So you were.’
What was going on? I didn’t like this. I was somehow being invited to feel complicit in a gift of flowers that was as much a mystery to me as it was to him.
‘Doesn’t it say who they’re from?’
‘You tell me.’ He shrugged as though it were a matter of inconsequence, although when I went over and found the little gift card in its envelope, I could tell it had already been opened.
‘From an admirer,’ I read aloud. ‘That’s a bit creepy.’
‘Is it?’ said Nick elliptically.
He uncorked a bottle of red wine and switched on the telly, flicking through the channels until he found the news. It was as though our adolescent slap and tickle had never happened. I cast him a wary glance.
‘Well, I think it’s creepy,’ I said. ‘Who round here would be admiring me?’
He poured himself a glass of wine.
‘You really can’t guess?’ he said, sipping it, and staring at the screen.
I found myself blushing furiously. On the one hand, I was a bit disturbed, especially after the other weird stuff that had been happening lately. On the other, Nick seemed – jealous was too strong a word, piqued, perhaps – and this was new. He looked at me, eyebrows raised in amused reproach as if it were obvious who the sender was – as if I were just being coy.
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