‘I want to be loved! I want passion; I want to feel alive!’
He flinches. Good. And he says, ‘Is that what you got then? Wherever it is that you’ve been – did you get passion, Rachel? Did you get loved?’
He is mocking me. There is a bad, insidious flame burning up inside me. I blank out of my mind the shameful, sordid image of Simon handing over that cheque, and push into my head instead the thought of his lean, beautiful body and his expensive clothes, and I cling to that memory.
‘Yes,’ I say to Andrew just to hurt him. ‘Yes, I did.’ And I watch the sneer slide right off his face. I am horribly lightheaded. All shackles are loose now. ‘I did find love and I did find passion.’ Again that image of Simon putting his hand to his jacket pocket, taking out his wallet and pulling out that cheque springs into my head, but I bat it away. Bat it away. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t? Did you think I’d just stick here forever, condemned to rot and die with you, when you are the coldest, the most emotionally fucking frigid person I have ever met?’
At some point he has moved closer to me, or me to him, close enough for me to hit him. And I do hit him, slapping at his shoulders with my hands, the left and then the right, the left and then the right again, slap, slap, as I spit out the words. ‘Did you think this was it for me? Did you really think nobody else would want me?’ His hands are on my arms now, holding me off, but still I slap at him. His face is rigid with anger. His fingers are digging into my skin; I twist and wriggle in his grip and hit out at him all the harder. ‘Well, let me tell you, someone else did want me.’ I am crying now, and shouting. If words were rocks, I would be throwing them. I want to break him. I want to hurt him as I am hurting. ‘Oh yes, someone else wanted me all right. And guess what? I finally found out what I’ve been missing all these years!’
And then he cracks. For years I have wanted him to crack. He lets go of me for a second and his body recoils as if his soul’s been ripped out, and then he lunges at me, striking my flailing hands out of the way with his fist. Striking me, on the side of my face. I feel the heat of his fist burst against my cheek and my head rolls back, but he doesn’t even realize he’s hit me. He’s grabbed me by the shoulders again and he’s shaking me now, shouting into my face, ‘Is this what you want? Is it? Is this what you’ve been missing?’ He is rattling me like a rag doll. I feel his breath on my face, hot, fast. ‘You want me to show you how I feel? You want to know what it’s like, knowing how much you resent me, how much you blame me for everything—’
He stops shaking me for a second and holds me there, gripped in his arms. Dizzily I see that he is crying. I have only seen Andrew cry once before; once, when our baby was born dead. I do not want to see him cry now. I cannot see him cry. I shut my eyes and tilt my head away. From somewhere he gets a second wind; he starts shaking me again. Shaking me and shouting, You want to know how I feel . . . you think I don’t care . . . Shaking me as if he doesn’t know how to stop now he’s started; back and forth, back and forth. My head is spinning and pounding and there are lights, bursting in my eyes. I’m going to be sick. My stomach is tight, cramping. I’m going to be sick—
‘Stop it. Stop it,’ I manage to say, and I’m coughing, choking as my stomach heaves. ‘Stop it. Please. I’m pregnant.’
Did I say it to stop him shaking me, or did I say it just to hurt him; one last, piercing strike? I do not know, but instantly his hands still.
I hang there, limp in his grip, and I throw up, a viscous, acid spill, straight down my front. For seconds he still holds me. I catch my breath and see the expressions cross his face: the bewilderment, the disbelief, the horror. And then he lets me go and I slump down onto my knees.
‘My God,’ he says. ‘My God!’ His hands are on his face, then his head; he’s clutching at his hair, pulling at it, trying to rip it from his head. ‘My God,’ he cries again, ‘what have you done to me?’
And then we hear something, a persistent, dull knocking sound. We both hear it; simultaneously we turn around and there is Jono standing in the doorway, banging his head repeatedly, rhythmically against the door, knock, knock, knock. For how long has he been there? What has he seen?
‘No,’ Andrew says in desperation when he sees him. ‘Please, no.’
And I try to pull myself together. ‘It’s okay, Jono,’ I manage to say, but Andrew jolts and starts pacing the room.
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, it isn’t okay.’ And he staggers over to the doorway, and Jono flinches and ducks out of his way.
Andrew walks straight past him. He doesn’t stop. He goes down the stairs and I hear him pick up his keys, and then the front door opens and slams shut again. Moments later I hear him start up the car.
I am still on my knees. Jono is still in the doorway. I look at him and our eyes meet.
‘Jono—’ I say, but he turns away from me, goes back to his room, and slams the door.
TWENTY-FOUR
He has to come back. He’s taken nothing with him except the car. His wallet is next to the toaster in the kitchen, along with his phone; I see them there when I go downstairs to get a glass of water. I see them and I am flooded with a mixture of trepidation and relief; he has to come back.
I want him to be okay.
Somehow, deep down in some locked, suppressed part of me, I wish that we could be okay.
I know it is just guilt making me remorseful, making me sorry now that I have done my worst, now that I have taken all the hurt inside me and thrown it at Andrew. But I want him to be sorry, too. I want him to come back.
I shower, but feel unable to go to bed, and so I put on clean clothes, loose clothes that I know I will end up sleeping in. My movements, my thought processes are slow, and fragile. I creep along the corridor to Jono’s room. His door is shut and I can hear no sound; I think he must be asleep. Carefully, as quietly as I can, I turn the handle and push open the door. Jono is lying on his side with the duvet pulled up around his ears. I move a little closer and see that his eyes are squeezed shut. I stand there, and watch him, and then he screws up his face and pulls the duvet up higher.
‘Go away!’ he snaps at me and turns his face into the pillow.
‘Jono, I’m sorry—’
‘Go away!’ he roars again. ‘Go away!’ And he keeps on yelling it, his voice damp and muffled by the pillow, until I back out again, and close the door.
‘Go away,’ he yells one more time, and I hear his voice crack and turn to sobs.
I lean my back against his door and listen to him crying. It is the saddest sound in the world.
How did it come to this?
We’re a family, Andrew said, but I stopped thinking of us like that a long time ago. Families pull together, but we three, we’ve just pulled each other apart.
I stand there, listening, till his sobs gradually subside. What have we done to him, our poor boy?
What have I done?
There is a full moon tonight and the sky is clear. I turn off my bedroom light, but leave the curtains open; it is not dark. The moon floods the room in a weak parody of daylight. I lie on my bed and stare through the window at the night sky, and see it black filtered through with silver, like the burn of a white fire. The house is horribly quiet. Outside I hear the screaming of a fox; the scratching of a cat at my neighbour’s bin. A car goes by and my heart picks up its beat, but the car does not stop, it is not Andrew. I stare at the sky. I stare and I stare as the hours slide by, and into my head creeps a multitude of fears.
I am woken by Jono, slamming his school bag down the stairs with the force of an elephant. Instantly I am alert; I look at my clock and it is a quarter past seven. Andrew didn’t come home.
Jono throws his bag down the last steps; it hits the floor with a hard smack and skids across the wood.
‘Jono!’ I say, coming out of my room and down the stairs behind him. ‘Jono, your books – don’t throw them like that.’
How mundane, how trivial it seems to care about books right now. Jono turns and glare
s at me, and his face says it all. And I see how tired he is, his eyes puffy from crying. He grabs his blazer off the banister and shoves his arms angrily into the sleeves, wrenching the material across his back. I try not to flinch as I hear the lining rip.
‘Jono,’ I say gently, ‘you don’t have to go to school today.’
He glares at me a moment longer, then shoves his feet into his shoes, squashing down the backs, forcing them on without undoing the laces.
‘You haven’t even had your breakfast,’ I plead. ‘Jono, you don’t have to go in today.’
He picks up his bag. ‘It’s better than staying here with you,’ he mutters, and opens the front door and leaves it open, and stomps his way up the path.
There is a coil of fear knotted and twisted from my stomach to my heart. What if Andrew has done something stupid, what if he has crashed the car? But Andrew is too sensible, too restrained to do anything rash. And bad news travels fast; it would have reached me by now.
More likely he has driven to his mother’s for somewhere to stay. And she, of course, will have welcomed him in. I picture him, sitting on her floral pink sofa in that room stinking of cat, while she plies him with weak tea and the stale biscuits left over from Christmas, and tuts and shakes her head in self-righteous, satisfied sympathy. And the thought of it stokes up the remnants of my anger again; the thought of him telling her.
But what will he tell her? That I’m pregnant with another man’s child? That we fought? Or simply that our marriage is over.
And it is over. How can it be anything else, now?
I look in the mirror and try to see a mark on my face where Andrew hit me; I search for evidence of his wrongdoing, of his guilt. I am a little pink maybe, along my cheekbone. I hope that it will come to a bruise – and then his guilt will lessen my own.
But he’d need to see it, for that. He’d need to be here.
I sit at the kitchen table, and watch the clock. He will not go far without money. I am tense, my senses wrought, stretched out, listening for his car in the street, his key in the door.
Another half-hour, I think; another half-hour and he will come back.
I think about phoning his mother, just to see that he is there. But what if he isn’t? What would I say to her then? What would I do?
And what about work? Andrew never misses work. Maybe he’s there. Maybe he’s sitting at his desk in yesterday’s clothes, having already shoved me out of his mind. I could call him. I don’t need to speak to him; I could just wait for him to answer, and hang up. But what if he doesn’t answer? What if I get his secretary? What would I say to her? Oh, hello there, Vicky, have you seen my husband?
The minutes drag by. It is half-past ten now, only half-past ten.
And then the phone rings, jolting my heart on a burst of panic. I jump up from the table to answer it, and Janice says in my ear, ‘Well, you’ve really excelled yourself this time.’
It takes me a second to comprehend what she is saying. I just didn’t expect it to be her. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask and she laughs a nasty, humourless laugh of disbelief.
‘Come on, Rachel,’ she says. ‘Pregnant? How could you do that to Andrew?’
My heartbeat is booming in my ears. ‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ I say, and how feeble that sounds, how childish. ‘But how do you know?’ I ask. ‘Did he phone you? Is he there?’
‘I’m at work,’ she says coldly. ‘I’ve had about four hours’ sleep. Andrew turned up at my flat at about one o’clock last night. Distraught. How could you do that to him, Rachel?’ she repeats, in disgust.
The condemnation in her voice has my hackles rising. ‘It isn’t all me,’ I say.
‘I’m sorry, Rachel, but I think it is all you. Andrew has been nothing but loyal to you, and you repay him by sleeping with someone else and getting pregnant.’
Her words strike me like a slap in the face. So certain, so critical is she of my failings. I am so angry I can hardly breathe. ‘Do you not think there might be a reason why I slept with someone else?’ I manage to say. ‘Do you not think Andrew’s coldness might have had something to do with it?’
‘Rachel,’ she says, as if I am stupid, as if I have no idea, ‘do you realize what you have done to him?’
‘What about what he’s done to me?’ I retort. ‘But anyway, it’s got nothing to do with you.’
‘Oh, but I think it has,’ she says straight back. ‘When your husband spends the night crying on my sofa, I think it has a lot to do with me.’
Jealousy flashes up inside me. ‘I suppose you liked that,’ I say spitefully. ‘Having my husband on your sofa.’
For a moment she is silent, except for the steady in, out, in, out of her breathing. And then she says, ‘You have stooped to some pretty low behaviour lately, Rachel, but this really does cap it all. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.’
And yet again, Janice gets the last word.
I am so incensed that I don’t know what to do with myself. How dare he go running to my sister? I picture him, turning up at her flat, looking for sympathy. And I picture her, wrapped in just her bathrobe, letting him in. How cosy they must have been, slagging me off into the night. And how much sympathy did she give him exactly?
I bet he didn’t tell Janice he hit me. Oh no. He wouldn’t look so good in her eyes then.
I call her flat, wanting to speak to Andrew, but not knowing what I will say. He doesn’t answer anyway. How do I even know if he is still there? But then I think that he must be; he won’t have gone to work from there, surely. He won’t have gone to work if he has spent the night crying on her sofa, and he has no money with him and no clean clothes. I phone again, but still no answer. I picture him, mooching around her flat feeling sorry for himself, and letting the phone ring and ring, knowing it is me. Because he will know it’s me.
My anger gets me through the day. It stops me having to think and face things. But at five o’clock Jono comes home. He puts his key in the lock, opens the door, slings down his bag and stands there in the hall. I see him listening to the silence; I see his shoulders tense and slump.
‘Has Dad come home?’ he asks and my anger fails, washed away on a wave of guilt.
I make him pasta for his tea, and loiter in the kitchen while he prods miserably at it with his fork. I am reminded of when he was a toddler; he’d have the same expression on his face then, when things went wrong. When he couldn’t fit all his toy animals into his barn, for instance, or when he bit into a biscuit and found out the chocolate drops were raisins. His mouth would turn down, just as it does now, and that frown would wrinkle up the softness of his forehead.
But how easy things were to fix, back then.
‘Jono,’ I say gently, when I can stand him pushing his pasta around the plate no longer, ‘please eat up. Things . . . will be okay.’
‘No, they won’t be,’ he says and pushes his plate away, hard; so hard it skids across the table and nearly falls off the other side. ‘You’re lying. You always lie.’
Later, Janice calls me again.
‘Rachel,’ she says in a quiet, icy-polite voice, ‘there is something I think you need to know.’
And of course I think she is going to tell me that she is screwing my husband, now that she has got him on her sofa. I especially think it when I hear her take one deep breath and then sigh it out, slowly, over a count of eight seconds. I am braced, waiting to hear it, ready to hate her, ready to hate them both.
But she says, ‘When you lost your baby – and refused to talk about it, and refused to even acknowledge that there was a baby – Andrew had to deal with that all on his own. He had to fill in the form for the death certificate. He had to arrange the funeral. And yes, there was a funeral. Andrew wanted to say goodbye to his daughter properly, whereas you didn’t want to know. A priest blessed her body in the hospital chapel. You weren’t there, Rachel, but I was. I know what that was like for Andrew, whereas you, I assume, only know what it was like for yourself.’
‘Andrew didn’t want to upset you, Rachel, any more than you were upset already. But did you ever think how upset he was? Because believe me, Rachel, he was upset. But you shut him out. You shut everyone out. Andrew had to deal with the funeral and the grief and everything else – and as far as I can see, he’s been dealing with it ever since; but you – we all had to protect you.’
Again she pauses, and again I’m silent. And maybe now she feels a sense of betrayal, of regret, or something, because she says, in a softer voice than I have ever, ever heard from Janice before, ‘I’m sorry, Rachel, but I think you need to know this. Andrew is not cold. He grieved the loss of your baby just as much as you did, and for you to go home and tell him you’re pregnant by someone else – just think what that did to him, Rachel. Just think.’
I can’t think. I don’t want to think. If I think I see the shadow in my head that will always be there; and that shadow is Andrew, holding our baby daughter in his arms as tenderly as if she had lived and breathed. I shut my eyes at the time, and I shut them again now, but still I see it.
He held her; I didn’t.
And then I see him properly; I see the anguish pulling at the contours of his face and the bleakness filling up his eyes. I see his pity, and I don’t want to see his pity. I don’t want to see him tiptoeing around me, being so patient, trying to pretend that everything is okay. And I don’t want to see him gradually giving up on me, and retreating into himself. I don’t want to see any of it. I don’t want to see him.
‘I told him he can stay here for a couple of days,’ Janice is saying. ‘I don’t see what else I could do. But please, Rachel, don’t insult him or me by suggesting that either of us is enjoying the situation.’
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