by Rebecca Done
‘I’m not upset about Seb,’ I say, because I’m not really – these days it’s all about Alex. Last night, after a tetchy weekend, we battled over what to eat for supper after he decided that the same chilli I’ve been cooking for the past three years looked disgusting. He insisted on ordering an Indian takeaway, which turned into a fight about money – namely, that we don’t have any – which swiftly became an argument about him not being at work. (I say ‘argument’. Most of it was a fairly vicious tirade directed at me by Alex while I pretended to be really absorbed in folding laundry.)
I understand that it gets him down, staying in the cottage all day while I’m here. He’s bored, so he starts out most mornings with good intentions, only for motivation simply to fail him. He determines to try a session in the gym, or do some gardening, or the weekly shop, or some DIY, but his brain just won’t let him move to the next level. It’s frustrating to watch and I know it upsets Alex more than anyone else in the world. He finds it impossible to understand why his mind won’t let him do what needs to be done.
But the worst part is, he no longer cares about taking it all out on me. Before the accident, on the rare occasions he’d unwittingly done anything to upset me, he’d have asked me what was wrong, brushed the hair from my face, asked me to talk to him. But he no longer has the patience or the empathy for that.
‘This is what it must be like when they get yard time in prison,’ Dave says after a few moments. ‘Do I wish I was by the river right now with a nice cold pint.’ He tilts his face up to the sun and briefly shuts his eyes before glancing over at me. ‘You?’
‘Swap the pint for a G&T and I’m there.’
We both sigh in unison. In the car park below us, a couple of kids are circling on pushbikes, shouting at each other, laughing. I envy them simply for being kids with a strength that surprises me.
‘Oh, how was Friday?’ I ask Dave suddenly. ‘I never even asked.’ He’d been planning a second meeting with a recent blind date, Carole.
‘Great,’ he says, shaking his head, like he still can’t quite believe it after his recent run of disastrous dates. ‘We had almost too much in common.’
‘Ooh, such as?’
‘Well, we both love tapas, hate our jobs, support Everton and know absolutely nothing about wine. That already puts her leagues ahead of anyone else I’ve met recently.’
‘That’s great!’
‘I know. I’m seeing her tomorrow night. Some sort of nineties indie rock group I’ve never heard of, but her taste in everything else is pretty damn-near perfect, so …’ He smiles across at me. ‘Let’s just say, I’m hopeful.’
I sigh contentedly. ‘Oh, Dave. I can live my life vicariously through you now.’
He smiles a little uncertainly. ‘Not … the being single bit?’
I catch myself, swallow. ‘Of course not. I meant … being carefree, that’s all.’
We are interrupted then by a head appearing round the fire-escape door, which unfortunately belongs to Seb.
‘What are you doing out here? This is an emergency fire escape.’ He turns his attention to me. ‘Did you get that coffee you needed, Molly?’
‘Oh, lay off her, Seb,’ Dave says. ‘Give her a break.’
Seb makes a point of checking his oversized watch. ‘Er, it looks as if you’ve both already had one.’
Dave clears his throat as I slip past Seb back towards the office. ‘Seb, I didn’t want to bring it up in front of everyone before, mate, but … did you know you’re flying low?’
Somehow I manage to keep my smile under wraps until I’m back at my desk. Would you believe it, these little exchanges keep me going. Alex used to be quick-witted like Dave. It’s one of the things I miss about him most.
I’m home just before six after popping into the shop for bread and orange juice. Evening sunlight dapples the cottage, and I indulge a silent fantasy that I might find Alex in the back garden, ripping up weeds, top off, back glistening with sweat. I imagine for a moment he will turn to look at me, break into his whole-face smile as he heads over to greet me, smearing mud across my cheeks as a joke, before we collapse against the wall laughing. Maybe he’ll have picked me a posy of poppies. He hasn’t given me flowers since the accident.
But it’s also Monday, and Mondays are the day he’s supposed to cook, another proposed activity. Nothing complicated – beans on toast would do it – but just something I can eat when I get home. Because he used to love cooking so much.
‘Hello?’ I head through to the dark cavern of our living room, put my change down on the side. What a contrast to my fantasy – Alex is in front of the television, staring at his phone. I wonder for a stupid moment if perhaps it’s one of the apps I’m always trying to get him to use – they’re a useful way of recording tasks – but he’s yet to be convinced he needs something like that to improve his life.
I hesitate, on the brink of speaking but for a moment afraid. What kind of mood will he be in? Will we have a fight?
It’s warm and close in here, but Alex wouldn’t think to open our half-rotted windows – he just sheds layers instead. I head into the kitchen to put the groceries away before going back into the living room and throwing the windows open, acting breezy.
I have learned not to go straight in and ask what he’s actually done with his day – he interprets this sometimes as a complaint, nagging, the fuse to start an argument. So I rephrase it slightly. ‘How was your day?’
‘Boring,’ he says eventually.
‘Oh. Did you see anyone? Did you text Charlie back?’ I scribbled it up on the kitchen whiteboard this morning, where he’s supposed to check for daily tasks (I eventually figured something physical might be better than an app), but rarely does.
No response.
‘It’s Monday night. Did you think about cooking dinner?’ I say gently. ‘It’s on the whiteboard. I texted you when I left the office.’
‘Nope,’ he says curtly.
‘What are you looking at?’ I ask, kicking my shoes off and sitting down next to him. I am relieved to almost squash an empty water bottle – his hydration’s important, and he doesn’t always remember to drink enough.
I lean back into the sofa, reach out, set my hand against his leg, but he doesn’t notice. Or if he does, he chooses to ignore me.
‘Just clothes.’
‘Clothes?’
‘Yeah.’
Alex has had this thing recently about polo shirts. He’s wearing one right now. Maybe it’s something to do with the hotter weather but he simply can’t get enough of them. They would not have been his style at all before – in fact I don’t think he owned a single one – but now it’s all he can think about, and of course, he needs to buy one in every single colour of the rainbow. And in duplicate too, in case they shrink or get stained.
It was watches before, then a particular cut of a particular brand of jean. The obsessions last for a few weeks before he starts fixating on something else. It’s a cognitive side effect of his injury, obsessing about certain things, unable to let go. And it’s probably quite a neat way of staving off his boredom too.
The particular problem with these shirts is that he likes the designer ones, the ones that cost fifty quid a pop. I try not to panic that he’s just emptied his account on something he already has more than enough of.
When Alex first came home from rehab, we’d give him cash to pay for things. But his brain couldn’t cope with the mental calculations – he’d simply empty his pockets at the till and tell the cashier to take however much they needed. A debit card was easier for everyone, so I cancelled the overdraft on his current account and gave him a monthly budget, at the same time cancelling my own overdraft and credit card. I just couldn’t take the risk of him going on a massive spending spree – it’s still one of my biggest fears that he’ll apply for a credit card off his own back and do exactly that.
‘You don’t have enough money in your account to buy those shirts, Alex.’
He push
es the hair back from his eyes where it has flopped forward. ‘So put some money in there. I need them.’
‘We can’t afford it.’ I strain to see the screen of his phone but he tilts it away from me like a teenager.
‘You’re always complaining, Molly. Stop bloody complaining for once in your life.’
Shooting out of nowhere, his comment doesn’t so much sting as gently bruise, because I have almost become used to his casual character assassinations. But they are not his fault. He tells things how he sees them.
‘I’m not complaining,’ I say evenly. ‘I’m just telling you the truth.’
‘I need them, Molly. It’s okay for you to spend money on clothes then?’
Last weekend I bought a summer jacket because my old one fell apart. It’s possibly the only item of clothing I’ve bought in six months.
‘I don’t buy clothes,’ I tell him, my voice heavy. ‘You know I don’t.’
‘What about that jacket, Molly? I know it’s new. You’re wearing it now! So there’s enough money in your account then?’
He is staring at me, eyes hot with injustice. I stare back, willing the veil to lift for just one second.
It does, sometimes. I call it the glimmer. Sometimes, just sometimes, my old Alex returns to me. The veil in front of his deep-green eyes lifts, and once again he is there, speaking as he used to, looking me right in the eyes, smiling his whole-face smile.
It might only last for a moment, or it might last a little longer, but when it does happen it’s as if he’s trying to say, I’m still in here. Don’t forget about me, Molly. I still love you.
But tonight, the glimmer doesn’t come. His face remains set, his eyes dark.
‘So, what about dinner?’ I ask, a way to change the subject, but it’s a dangerous question when he’s irritated, sure to elicit the response, Can you just get off my case for two seconds?
‘Can you just put some money in the account please?’
I take a breath. ‘Okay, okay. I’ll put some money in next week, I promise.’
‘Just do it now, Molly. Why do you have to be so awkward all the time?’
‘I don’t get paid until next week, Alex. You know that.’
‘How am I going to pay for these then?’ He lifts his phone right up to my face. ‘You don’t ever want me to have anything nice. Haven’t I got enough to deal with?’
‘So you didn’t play golf today?’ I ask him, desperate to change the subject, refusing to look at his screen. ‘I thought Darren said he’d go with you.’
He lowers the phone. ‘I’m not a baby, Molly. I don’t always need someone with me.’
‘Okay.’ Pause. ‘Well, why don’t you text Charlie back? You were supposed to let him know about …’
‘I’m doing something,’ he growls at me like a teenager. ‘Go away.’
I nod, swallow, say nothing for a few moments.
‘So what’s for tea?’ he asks me.
‘You were supposed to do it,’ I remind him sadly. ‘It’s Monday, remember?’
‘Well, I didn’t check the planner.’
I swallow. ‘Fine. We’ll have curry.’
‘I’ll order it,’ he says, suddenly animated.
‘No, Alex … we had takeaway last night. I’ll cook one.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Molly, I’m not waiting for you to cook one! I’ll order it.’ And then he turns his attention back to his phone, navigating clumsily to the food delivery app.
And even though we definitely can’t afford it, I don’t have the strength to fight with him about it tonight. I’ve had a bad day, it’s hot, I’m exhausted, and all I want to do is sit here together without fighting.
A minute or so later he throws his phone down on to the sofa.
‘What did you order for me?’ I’d been waiting for him to begrudgingly ask me what I wanted.
He hesitates, and straight away I know he’s forgotten me. ‘You said you’d cook.’
‘I meant … I meant I’d cook for both of us.’
He sighs heavily, his face already turned away from mine, bored of my nit-picking. ‘Well, you should have said that then.’ Conversation over.
The curry is quick to arrive and Alex, unusually proactive, insists on answering the door. I lurk in the background like always, ready to jump in if there is a misunderstanding of any kind. He’s already paid online, so simply taking the bag should be reasonably hitch-free.
The delivery person is female and young, and from what I can see at a quick glance, pretty. Alex is laughing, asking her flirtatiously if she found the house okay. His dad always used to ask us that when we turned up, a long-standing family joke, apparently.
‘I know where you are!’ The girl laughs, like his question is outrageously cheeky. She must have been here before.
‘Well, I didn’t want you to get lost,’ he laughs back.
‘Here’s your food.’
She passes him the bag, and I see him hand her something in return. ‘I got you a tip.’
It’s a bloody fiver, my change from the shop earlier. He must have swiped it off the side when I wasn’t looking.
‘Oh,’ she murmurs, her lowered voice a measure of her pleasure, since I doubt she very often gets tipped at thirty per cent. ‘Thank you. That’s really generous of you.’ It’s hard to know if she has any idea about Alex, or about me, or about who he really is. Catch him at the right moment and you’d never even know. ‘Eating on your own tonight?’ she asks him then, and for one horrifying moment I think she’s angling to come in.
He sighs. ‘Yeah. Unfortunately.’
I swallow a bite of rage, consider stepping out of the shadows to shut this little role play down, but thankfully, she’s off.
‘Well, enjoy,’ she giggles. I can just about see her flirty little wave as she makes her way back to her car.
The words of Alex’s first psychologist – also a one-time target for his charm – brood low in my mind like storm clouds. It’s very common for social awareness to be severely impaired in this way, Molly. Don’t take it too personally. But I’d have to be superhuman not to take this personally. He does it with infuriating regularity – with waitresses, ticket conductors on trains, in fact anyone who’s obliged to take a temporary interest in him. He’s even, on occasion, turned his attention to my friends. He was never like that before, but this strange new overly charming side to my husband is yet another unexpected and unwelcome result of the accident. In fact, I hate to say, he’s become much more like Graeme in this respect.
So as Alex enjoys his takeaway I cook myself beans on toast on our ancient hob – a far cry from this afternoon’s fantasy of Alex’s famous steak fettucine. We eat silently and apart, him on the sofa and me at the table at the opposite end of the living room. Then he puts a box set on – some American action series I’ve never heard of, presumably a recommendation from Graeme, who’s into that sort of thing – and promptly falls asleep.
An hour or so later, having cleared up the dishes and put a load of washing on, I shake him awake, hand him a fresh bottle of water and manage to coax him upstairs to bed. He’s grumpy, uncommunicative, tired to the point of delirium.
When I come back downstairs I start robotically clearing things away. As I move a pile of magazines (Three whole magazines about fishing? Since when have you been into fishing, Alex?) I discover wedged between them Alex’s old work sketchpad and pencil. Absent-mindedly I flick it open, and to my surprise discover several pages of fresh line drawings. They’re dated within the last few weeks, and they are spectacular. Alex was a good artist before, but these … these are truly special. As impressive as anything you’d find in a gallery, mounted and framed with a price tag of five hundred quid.
The realization that he has not lost his ability to draw, that most precious of skills, strikes me square in the chest, a direct hit to my heart. He’s still in there.
I examine the drawings, though I feel as if I’m intruding, trespassing on some hidden part of his mind like I’
m reading his diary. There’s one of the cottage, one of the cafe in the village, even one of Graeme. Is it the drawing of Buddy the puppy that brings tears to my eyes? Or the fact I was hoping, deep down, that in amongst these drawings I would find one of me?
I go outside to sit alone in the long grass of the garden. Around me, the countryside has fallen asleep. The trees have stopped whispering and even the birds are in bed. And it’s only so long before the silence and stillness become unbearable. I take a few deep breaths to make sure my voice won’t shake before phoning my mum, but we chit-chat for just ten minutes before she has to go off with my dad to a church social (yes, even my parents now have a more interesting life than me). So I decide to dial Phoebe, my oldest friend in the world. I’ve known her since primary school, and over the years we’ve always simply slotted into each other’s friendship groups as our lives have changed and our social circles have expanded. She still lives only a couple of streets away from Mum and Dad with her parents, she’s saving for a flat and has just met a new guy, Craig. I know she found it particularly tough, dealing with the new version of the Alex she thought she knew so well (and the new version of me, who was unable to talk about anything other than how the new Alex was doing). Suddenly, my priority was always Alex, and understandably, she wasn’t quite sure where that left her.
But right now, Phoebe’s in a pub with a group of friends and can barely hear me. So I find myself calling Graeme.
I actually don’t know why I do it. Maybe it’s because in so many ways he is the replica of the Alex I lost, who disappeared without saying goodbye.
‘Hello?’ Graeme sounds breathless. Probably running for a bus. Or away from someone he owes money to.
‘Hey,’ I say heavily. ‘Sorry, I just … I just wanted to talk to someone.’
There is a pause that sounds muffled, like he’s put his hand over the mouthpiece. Then, after a moment, he’s back. ‘Oh yeah? Everything okay?’
‘Yeah. It’s just been such a long evening, but then I found these –’