I force myself to keep my temper. I remember every moment of that night, including that one. I was upset, I had to be comforted, but it was nothing like the apocalypse Melanie’s describing.
“Of course I remember, I just didn’t realise… look, I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare her. I love Grace so much, you know that. I was upset but I never meant to frighten her. Please forgive me.”
Melanie sighs. “Okay. Forget it. Shit happens.” In the distance, I hear a shocked and joyful shriek. “Oh, for goodness sake, Thomas, stop listening in.”
“Mother! You swore! You said—” His voice is high and husky with cold.
“Oi. Enough out of you. You’re supposed to be in bed sick, remember? I can still take you up to school at lunchtime if you’re feeling better.”
“How am I supposed to learn not to swear if you swear?”
“You’re cleverer than me, you’ll figure it out. Susannah, I’d better go, Thomas needs me.”
I wish I could ask her to leave the call open, carry her phone in her pocket as she goes about the beautiful banality of a morning at home with her children. When I visit them, I feel the household subtly reconfiguring as it always does when a visitor comes: the television going off, the standard of everyone’s manners going up a notch, sweet wrappers straight in the bin or shoved sneakily down the side of the sofa. But sometimes, if I stay long enough and sit quietly enough, they begin to forget again, like experimental subjects in a psychology project. Thomas and Grace giggling in a corner over a drawing that Grace has done and Thomas has embellished. Melanie and Richard snapping crossly at each other over the dishwasher, then giving each other a biscuit to make up again. I had all of this once too.
Instead, my Thursday morning will be spent on self-imposed household chores, in a house that stays unnaturally clean because only I live here. Thursday. Clean-sheets day. I always change the sheets on a Thursday.
Joel’s room is waiting for something. It’s in the breathless way the dust motes hang in the air and everything around me is frozen, waiting for time to begin again. It feels like the moment at a party when the music stops and every child freezes in place, and you stalk cautiously between them, watching out for a wavering arm or wobbly leg. I catch myself humming a tune as I move through the room. Nothing is wrong here. Everything is fine.
On the shelf beneath the mirror, the little pot of hair wax has long ago dried out and turned unusable. I lay the duvet cover carefully down on the bed, take the lid off the hair wax and breathe in. My nose fills with the greasy smell of candles, laced with the fading ghosts of chemical flowers. Joel liked to tousle his hair into thick lank waves around his face, and begged to be allowed to dye it black. I would have let him, but John’s flat no was law. I consoled Joel by reminding him that Kurt Cobain was blond.
As I replace the pot on the shelf, I catch a glimpse of movement in the mirror. There’s someone standing behind me.
“John!” My voice is shrill and shocked. “How did you get in here? Are you all right? Is there any news…”
My voice trails into silence, because there’s something wrong about the way John looks. His skin is pale and unhealthy, as if he’s standing under a different light to the thin grey gloom that creeps through the lowering grey clouds. His head is bowed. His hands hang heavily by his side. When he takes a step towards me, there’s a jerky quality to his movement, as if he’s pulling hard against something that’s holding him prisoner. And there’s a smell about him, too, a terrible damp earthy smell, as if he’s been buried alive and has dug himself up to freedom.
“Help me.” His voice is slow and thick. “Help me. I need you. Are you there? Please don’t leave me.”
“John, what’s happened? How did you get in here? I didn’t think you had a key any more—”
He raises his head then, and when I see the dreadful brightness of his eyes I understand that I am in terrible danger, because John, my gentle, rational, cardiac surgeon ex-husband, has somehow become mad.
“Look at the mess you made,” he says, and picks up the duvet cover. “This place is disgusting. It makes me sick. How dare you make us live like this?”
“I was just about to change the bed, that’s all, I’ll have it tidy in a second, I promise.” John is between me and the door. “Does… does Nathalie know you’re here?”
Mentioning his new wife makes John angry. He snarls and lurches closer to me, invading my space so I can feel the size and heat of him.
“We’re not discussing anything until we’ve talked about this great big filthy fucking mess! Look at it! Look! Mud everywhere! And it’s all your fault!”
“John, please, I’m sorry. Let’s go downstairs and talk. Sit down and be comfortable?”
“Oh yes. I like downstairs. Let’s go downstairs, and you can suck me off in the living room.” His free hand fumbles at his belt. “Suck my prick, and make the daddy-monster go away for a while. I used to like that. Let’s do that again.”
“No! Don’t do that, please don’t do that. Not in here, not in Joel’s room, let’s go downstairs at least, we can’t do that in here—” I think about ducking beneath his arm and making a run for the door, but he takes a step to the left to block me. “Come on. Let’s go downstairs and have a cup of tea or something. Shall we?” I try to smile but the muscles of my face are too frozen to move properly. “John, please, I’ll do whatever you want, but I don’t think you’re well, you’re not yourself—”
“Of course I’m not myself! I’m the man you made me into. I tried to be a good father and a good husband, I really did, but you took away all my choices!” He’s wrapping the duvet cover round his hand, round and round until his fist is fat like a boxing glove. “I loved you, though. That was the only thing that mattered by the end. So I’ve come to warn you. You’d better stop all of this shit while you still can. What the mud swallows, it holds onto for ever. But if you dig deep enough you’ll find something I don’t want you to find, and then I will be very, very angry!”
“John, what are you saying? What did you do?”
“What did I do? What did I do? I did what you made me do, Susannah, we all did!”
His bunched fist, wrapped in faded blue cotton, slams out with a strength I’d never imagined. It connects, not with me, but with the mirror behind my head. The sound of my scream blends with the high tinkle of the mirror shattering. I cover my head with my arms and drop to the floor. John stands over me, an angry giant. He pulls the wrapping from his fist and drops it contemptuously to the floor. Despite the protection he gave himself, his knuckles drip with blood.
“Do you see yet?” he roars. I hide my face in my hands, but he pulls them away and grabs at my face, smearing my skin, forcing me to look at him. “Do you see what you made me into? You blame me for what happened to Joel, but the truth is it was all your fault!”
“John, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
And then, just as suddenly as he appeared, he’s gone. He doesn’t leave. He just vanishes. One moment he’s standing over me, his tall shape blotting out the light, his blood dripping onto me, that terrible rotten-earth smell pouring off him in waves, his breath hot and loud against my cheek. And then the next moment…
“John?” My voice quavers in the calm, clean silence. The duvet cover that lies crumpled by my feet. When I pick it up, I feel a thin pain and then the warm trickle of escaping blood. “Oh, damn it. Ow. Ow.” Something’s tickling my forehead. I reach up to touch it. Glass. There’s glass in my hair. No, not glass. A long slice of silver, like a dagger or an icicle. Joel’s mirror is broken.
I don’t want to wrap my bleeding hand in Joel’s duvet, so I bunch my T-shirt around it and clench my fist tightly, trying not to panic at the size of the stain that leaks out into the cotton. When I stand up, five more long glittering spikes tumble to the floor. Thank God I’m wearing shoes.
In the centre of the mirror, a raggedy circle of plywood has appeared, surrounded by cracked fragments of silvered gla
ss. It looks like a prop from a movie. I touch it wonderingly. Am I dreaming this? What’s going on?
John was here. I’m as sure of that as I possibly can be. In every way, he was here; I felt him, heard him, saw him, smelled him, his hands touched my face. And then he was gone. I’m alone in the house. But what if I’m not? And what if he’s still angry? Am I safe? Where’s my phone? Should I call someone? And who can I call?
My fist clenched tightly in my T-shirt, I creep out of Joel’s room. The door to my bedroom is half open. From a safe distance, I peer into it. Then I study the gap between the door and the door frame, trying to judge if someone’s hidden in the space behind. Nothing. I push the door hard just to make sure. Nothing. There’s no one under the bed. When I fling open the wardrobe, the rattle of coat-hangers makes me shriek, but there’s nothing in there but my clothes. A trickle of blood crawls around the curve of my wrist, ready to drop onto the carpet. I wipe it against my stomach and keep going.
Nothing in the little office box room, so empty and sterile now it no longer holds John’s books and papers. Has the chair moved a fraction since I last looked at it? I give it a tiny push, notice the resistance as the wheels leave the grooves worn into the carpet. When I take my hand off the back of the chair, it rolls back into place.
Nothing in the bathroom, No lurking shadow behind the shower curtain, no ominous reflection in the mirror. My fingers pulse with pain. Standing over the sink, I unwrap the T-shirt and inspect the damage.
Oh God. Is that bone? Can I see bone? Tendons? I put my good hand to my mouth, press hard to muffle the scream. No, it’s just the whiteness of my cut skin, that’s all. It has to be. I don’t want to go to hospital. I just want this to be over. I turn on the cold tap, force myself to hold my fingers underneath. The flow of blood accelerates again, turning the water pink, but at least now I can see what I’m dealing with. Once the wound is purged of the mess surrounding it, it turns out to be smaller than I’d feared. I’m going to be fine. I fumble for a towel, blot blood and water from my skin, open the medicine cabinet and clumsily rummage for dressings. It’s hard to bandage your own palm and fingers, especially with your non-dominant hand, but living alone forces you to learn all sorts of unexpected skills. When I close the cabinet, I glimpse my face in its mirrored front and see that it’s smeared with blood.
I look into the mirror for a long time. John smashed the mirror. His knuckles were bleeding. He touched my face. Then he was gone. I cut my hand. I came into the bathroom. I saw the damage, and I put my hand to my face. So whose prints are on my skin? Are they mine? Or my ex-husband’s?
My phone is charging on the table in the hallway. Sitting on the third step from the bottom, I scroll through the list of my contacts, trying to hold myself together long enough to make the call.
My fingers are slow and clumsy as I stab at the screen. The phone rings four times, five, six. Then, a brief fumbling sound and Nick’s voice, low and blurry, as if he’s speaking to me from beneath deep water. I must have woken him from sleep.
“Susannah? Is everything okay?”
“Is this a good time? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you.”
“No, please don’t be sorry, it’s fine. What’s happening? Any news? Have you had another message from JoelMoel?”
“No. Nothing like that. Is it your day off? Have I rung you at home? I’m sorry, I’ll leave you in peace.”
“Shush. If I minded, I wouldn’t have taken the call. Now tell me what I can do to help you.”
How do I begin? I can hear Nick’s breathing. I wonder what he wears to sleep in. If he’s alone in the bed or if Bella lies warm and comfortable beside him, her hand on his back as a sleepy reminder that she’s still there, he still belongs to her. Through the window I can see the faint muzziness in the air that tells me it’s begun to rain.
“I was in Joel’s room this morning,” I say at last. “Changing the bedding. I know it’s stupid but I do it every week, I want there to be fresh sheets on the bed just in case he—”
“It’s all right, you don’t have to explain. And what happened?”
“I was thinking about when he first disappeared. And I wondered… I thought… I don’t know why I even thought it, but I just wondered… is there any chance that John might have…”
“John? Your husband, John?” Nick is instantly alert.
“Oh God, I know that’s stupid. I know he wouldn’t. I don’t know why I even thought it, I shouldn’t have bothered you with it. I’m wasting your time. I’m sorry.”
“Susannah. It’s all right. Stay on the line. It’s all right. Can you hear me? Are you still there? Okay. Now, I tell you what. How about I come round later and we can have a chat about things?”
“No, you don’t need to do that. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you.”
“Not up to you. I’ll be round about two, okay?”
“You don’t have to do this. I don’t want to ruin your day off.”
“To be honest, you’ll be doing me a favour. Bella’s got her book group coming over. They all met in therapy, they call themselves the madwomen in the attic. They scare the shit out of me.”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind—”
“About two, okay? Make sure you’ve got the kettle on. Two spoons of coffee, two spoons of sugar. And get some biscuits in as well. I’m horrible when I’m hungry.”
I’ve just called a police officer and told him I suspect my husband, and all the evidence I have is an experience I can never discuss with anyone. I’m wasting police time and making trouble for John. I should be terrified. But all I feel is a strange weightless happiness. Happiness, and a strange cracking feeling in the skin of my face, as if I’m wearing a face mask and it’s time to wash it off. I’m still smeared with blood. But whose fingers put it there?
Perhaps I should treat my body as a crime scene, preserve the evidence for when Nick arrives at my house for his mug of strong sweet coffee. Instead, I go upstairs to the bathroom and, working carefully with my one good hand, wash the blood from my skin, then apply a thin sheen of tinted moisturiser. Later I will come back and apply make-up, to make sure I at least look human. In the meantime, I have to clean up Joel’s room.
The Sonic duvet cover is still bunched on the floor. I pick it up gingerly and, holding it by the edges, shake it to dislodge the scraps and shards of broken mirror. Fragments of light tumble onto the carpet. There’s a long smear of blood across Sonic’s face. I’ll have to wash it again. I carry the cover down to the sink.
Hot water, Lux, a gentle but firm submersion. It’s hard to wash anything with just one hand but I’ll manage somehow. If John was here he’d tell me I was making work for myself. He often said that about the things I did for Joel, not understanding that, after waiting for so long to become a mother, I did even the most mundane tasks with joy. Something scratches lightly at my palm, and I feel delicately around and pull out another huge shard of mirror, long and deadly like a dagger. I pull the plug out and lift the cover to let the water drain away. The weight of water drags at the frail fabric and I can see what’s going to happen, grabbing uselessly at it with my bandaged hand, not caring about getting it wet. But it’s too late. The thin fabric gives way, leaving a ragged hole right across the centre, a tear that I can already see will be impossible to repair.
Perhaps the fabric was always flawed, and this is an inevitable accident that has been waiting for years for me to handle it with just the right degree of clumsiness. Perhaps it was the broken mirror, starting with a tiny little slit that the water has stretched out into a giant hole. Perhaps it’s my fault, for washing it so diligently, each round of hot water and detergent nibbling away at the fibres of the cotton until at last there was simply nothing left to hold it together. The reasons don’t matter. All that matters is that it’s torn. Joel’s favourite duvet cover is torn. And nothing I can do will ever fix it.
Life Without Hope:
Why I Was Lucky
If we’d met
and talked when we were young, you probably wouldn’t have liked me very much. This won’t make me sound very attractive but I’ll say it anyway because it’s true; I was the kind of woman other women often secretly hate, because I was born lucky and I knew it. I knew I was good-looking, I knew I was clever enough but not too clever, I knew I was good at making men like me, and making them keep liking me even after they’d got used to my prettiness. Most of all, I knew I was lucky because what I wanted (work for a few years, get married, have children and stay at home with them) was all achievable for me with what I had. If a man went shopping for the kind of wife I wanted to be, I would be the picture he’d have in his head.
And for a long time, that’s how it went. I passed my exams. I got a job I quite liked but wouldn’t mind quitting when the time came. At just the age I wanted to settle down, I met my lovely husband. We fell completely and sincerely in love. Our wedding was perfect. Our honeymoon was perfect. We started trying for a baby on our wedding night, and when I checked my dates before the wedding, I knew we’d be lucky again because our wedding night fell right in the middle of my fertile window.
Except I couldn’t get pregnant.
I think I knew the very first month that my luck had run out and this was going to be a struggle. John, being a doctor, kept telling me not to be so silly, it took most couples around six months or so, I’d been stressed to the eyeballs with our wedding, and what with strange food and jet-lag and so on, it would have been a miracle if we had got pregnant.
And I knew he was right. But I also knew he was wrong. And he was wrong. Six months later, we still weren’t pregnant.
So I went to see the doctor, who told me to come back if we still weren’t pregnant in a year, and six months later I was back, and then we started the investigations, and they found… nothing. John’s sperm count was good. My tubes were open. I was ovulating. We were having plenty of sex, at the right time of the month. We were officially unexplained.
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