Everything and Nothing

by Araminta Hall

  She blushed and he noticed how with the sun on her hair it was much more auburn than brown. She ruffled Betty’s hair. ‘And she was so helpful I literally couldn’t have done it without her.’

  ‘I was so good Aggie bought me chocolate.’

  ‘Anyway, you two, bath time,’ said Agatha, taking them both by the hands.

  Christian knew he should want to give his kids a bath after not having seen them all day, or at least offer, but they both looked so happy trailing after Aggie that it was too easy to let them get on with it. If you could get rid of the guilt, he felt as he opened a beer and took it into the evening sunlight in his garden, this would be perfect parenting.

  The vegetable patch was undeniably ugly and it rankled him in a way he knew to be stupid. He dialled Ruth’s number again, but it was still on voicemail.

  ‘I just got home,’ he said into the phone, ‘to find that the kids have destroyed the garden. You could have told me before you agreed to let them dig up our lawn.’ He pressed the red phone and immediately felt like his father.

  Agatha appeared at the kitchen door. ‘They both want you to say goodnight to them. I’ve made chicken for dinner, by the way.’

  Christian stood up. ‘Great. Oh, I forgot to say, Ruth’s out at some awards do. So I’ll probably eat in front of the telly. There’s a match on I want to watch anyway.’

  ‘Fine.’ Agatha had to keep her voice cheery. She felt a surge of resentment. Didn’t he realise how long it had taken to stuff that lemon-and-garlic mixture under the chicken’s skin without breaking it?

  Ruth hadn’t been able to place the air of excitement in the office all morning. But then Sally had asked her if she thought the red or black heels were better and she had immediately remembered the awards ceremony that night. She had to rush out at lunch to buy a dress, which was infuriating because they couldn’t afford it this month and she’d already decided on what she was going to wear. Recently everything was slipping out of her mind; she felt as though life was getting faster and leaving her behind. Maybe she should see a doctor. Maybe she should get a bigger diary or just write in the one she had. Which reminded her that she hadn’t called the plumber about the fact that they kept on having to reset the boiler to get hot water.

  The younger section of the magazine started raiding the fashion and beauty cupboards at four. By five they were drinking. Sally seemed to effortlessly be able to combine joining in with staying aloof, while Ruth remained glued to her computer, pretending she had some copy she had to finish. By the time she got into the loos to change it smelt like she presumed a brothel would. She didn’t look good in the dress, she had chosen it too quickly and the blue didn’t sit right on her olive skin. She tried tying her hair up, but felt she looked jowly. The expensive concealer did nothing to hide her bags.

  They were getting a coach to Alexandra Palace where the awards were being held. The noise as she got on hit her like the sound generated by her children’s parties, so loud it almost took you out of your body. She wondered if Betty and Hal were in bed yet. Nobody had answered the phone at home all afternoon, which had created a little knob of panic deep in her stomach. She hadn’t been able to get hold of Christian either and now she had no reception on her phone, but Carol had assured her that she’d give him the message and, of course, Aggie was infi nitely capable. She’d find a payphone when she got there if her signal hadn’t come back.

  Ruth sat next to Sally by the window near the front of the coach. Sally kept turning her back on her to listen and laugh at her team, as she called them all, which was fine with Ruth as a headache had settled round the top of her head, squeezing pain into her body. She rubbed her shoulders and could feel the tension nestling there like snarling dogs. It was going to be a long night.

  Her signal had returned by the time they got there, so she hung back. She noticed Kate, the only other woman in the office with children, doing the same, a concerned frown on her face. She could hear her telling whoever was on the other end that the Calpol was on the top shelf of the third cupboard to the right of the cooker in the kitchen.

  Ruth’s message symbol was bleeping. Christian’s voice came through, moaning about the garden. It stirred an immense anger in her that made her want to walk all the way home just to rub his smug face into the dirt he was complaining about. She jabbed a message out to him, not trusting herself to speak to him directly. If you were ever available to take calls about vegetable patches from your kids you would probably have said yes as well and then it would have been a great idea.

  Christian received Ruth’s message as Arsenal equalised and he was finishing his third bottle of beer. He’d meant to send Ruth a text saying sorry for sounding so pompous, but after reading Betty three Charlie and Lola books he’d lost the will to live. ‘Did you know,’ he’d said to the cat after returning downstairs from Betty’s bedtime ritual, ‘that Charlie has a little sister Lola. She is small and very funny. Except of course she isn’t. She is annoying and precocious and due to total parental neglect has transferred all her negative attention complexes onto poor Charlie, who should get some sort of medal from Carol Vorderman.’ His outburst surprised him so much he had completely forgotten about anything other than lying on the sofa, shouting abuse at eleven men on a grassy pitch.

  Ruth’s sanctimonious tone irritated him and made him glad he hadn’t apologised. He texted back: Get over yourself. It looks ugly. His phone bleeped: It’s not all about aesthetics. He wrote: Have a good time at your party. I’m too tired to argue, having just got our daughter to sleep. He nearly couldn’t be bothered to read the next text: Aren’t you wonderful. Don’t wait up. Arsenal scored again, but Christian couldn’t raise a cheer. Often his life felt pathetic.

  Ruth knew she was drunk before she stumbled into the taxi and felt her head reeling. The jolts of corners taken too fast and a spicy smell she couldn’t place were conspiring to make her feel sick. The driver had a small symbol of an Indian god on his dashboard; it was shameful that she didn’t know its name, didn’t even know which religion it represented. Still though it comforted her, reassured her in some indefinable way. She looked at the tiny icon, cheap in its fluorescent plastic, and envied its sense of stability, its ability to inspire wonder. So many hopes and dreams and wishes had been prayed into that image, it made Ruth smile.

  Viva had won Best Design and Editor of the Year, so the champagne had been flowing all night. Sally had been in her element and Ruth had felt an unsisterly stab of jealousy watching her old friend so graciously accept her award and make a funny speech about Roger asking her whether she loved him or Viva more. ‘I simply answered that he was my husband, but Viva was my baby. What I didn’t add was that women always love their children more than their husbands, don’t they.’ Sally didn’t have children.

  Ruth’s phone was vibrating, but the message she saw was an old one from Christian. Did you call the plumber? There’s no bloody hot water again.

  ‘No,’ she said out loud. ‘I bloody didn’t.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said the taxi driver.

  ‘No, sorry, nothing.’ Ruth threw the phone down next to her and stared out of the window at the grey streets, passing by like a dreary dream. She found it strange to think of all the sleeping bodies shielded behind all those front doors, encased in walls which felt so familiar and comforting to them, if they were lucky, but would be alien and frightening to her. It reminded her of going on holiday and how you walk into the apartment or cottage or room and feel so out of place you almost want to go home, but within days those new four walls suddenly feel cosy, like you’ve always lived there. Which in turn made her think about that old cliché, There’s no place like home, which she pictured as an appliqué scene in a wooden frame, sitting in her granny’s kitchen.

  ‘Thirty-four sixty,’ the driver was saying as they pulled up outside her front door. She shoved two twenties at him and only remembered her phone still lying on the back seat after she’d let herself in. She was too tired to feel upset.r />
  Ruth went into the dark sitting room and saw Christian’s plate and four empty bottles of beer by the sofa. It roused a fresh spasm of defeat in her. She picked them up and carried them into the kitchen, wondering who he thought was going to do it. Her husband had a habit of leaving cupboard doors flailing, drawers open at hip-hitting height, wet towels languishing on beds, dirty pants multiplying on the floor. What did your last slave die of ? she’d shout, sounding like the sort of woman she had never wanted to be.

  As Ruth stood up from putting Christian’s plate in the dishwasher she caught sight of the tiny fence circling what must be the new vegetable patch. She felt a complete desire to see it rush at her heart, making her open the back door and step into her garden made yellow by the light pollution of night in the city. The patch was a perfect rectangle and she could see the grooves of the beds under a fine meshing. At the end of each bed was a white plastic stick with writing on it. She squatted in the grass and worked her hand inside the mesh to pull out one of the sticks. Betty’s inexpert hand had written carrots and just below it Hal had scribbled something orange.

  Her heart contracted so that she wondered if she might be about to die from all the alcohol and cigarettes she had uncharacteristically consumed. But really the problem lay with the image in her head; both her children as they had been as newborn babies, sucking at her breast. She would look down on them as they fed and marvel at the seriousness, the urgency, which accompanied their tugging. It used to feel like her breasts were attached to her heart by a series of thick ropes and that until that moment the ropes had lain slack and dormant. With each suck the ropes grew more taut, so that in the end her heart felt as though it had been pulled free, released like a sail on a ship. Both Betty and Hal had woken all night, every night, and when she had picked them out of their cribs, only half awake and smelling that indefinable scent only possessed by newborns, they had sighed with such contentment that she had sworn to never, ever let anything bad happen to either of them.

  Then the wonder of it all. Watching a blank face smile for the first time must be more wonderful than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the pyramids; because don’t all wonders occur only within your own world, really there’s nothing else. Hearing a gurgle turn to a sound, feeling strength in limbs that only a day before had seemed so weak. You wait and wait as a mother at the start, wait for these minuscule miracles which make you writhe with excitement. But then those tiny bodies catch up with their whirling minds and all the things you’ve been searching for suddenly tumble out of them, so that you even miss some things. And then it stops being so precious and you forget, only for something like this to smack you right back to the impact of the beginning.

  How had Ruth gone from falling so absolutely in love that she realised exactly where her heart was in her body, to missing the creation of something so fundamentally marvellous as this garden? Surely it was too mean of life to make her choose between herself and her children? The stick dropped from her hand and Ruth sat back heavily onto the already damp grass, covering her mouth with her hands to stop her sobs from waking anyone in the house.

  Her crying didn’t last long; self-indulgence never sat easily with Ruth, she became too aware of herself. Instead she made herself stand up and get upstairs to bed. She was drunker than she’d realised and she tripped as she pulled her clothes heavily over her head, worrying already about how she would feel in the morning. Her pillow was cool but her head spun when she closed her eyes.

  Christian rolled towards her and draped a hand across her stomach, something she still hated him doing. ‘Did you win?’ he asked.

  ‘Not personally. Sally did though.’

  ‘So you celebrated.’

  Ruth knew what he meant. ‘Don’t lecture me about drinking.’

  ‘I’m not.’ His hand moved down her body, stroking her thigh. ‘I like it when you’re drunk.’

  Ruth knew how easy it would be to roll into him, to let go and feel good for a moment, but a sickness that existed both physically and mentally had taken hold of her. It seemed like too much of an effort; recently she’d even begun to see it as too much of a relinquishment, although she wasn’t sure what it was that she was losing. She pushed his hand away. ‘I’m knackered.’

  Christian turned heavily from her and Ruth was sure she heard him sigh.

  Christian had an early meeting so he was up and out before anyone had woken up. He found Ruth’s mobile phone on the door mat with a card from a taxi firm. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to work out what had happened and it annoyed him that she should always get away with her drunken nights out when he was made to feel like an alcoholic home-wrecker whenever he came in the worse for wear.

  It was a beautiful spring morning but Christian had a headache and the sunlight glinting off all the expensive cars made him feel woozy. He’d been feeling peculiar since his disastrous interview with Sarah. The whole encounter had left him off balance. The difference in their circumstances had been so marked as to be grotesque. In the three years since they’d last seen each other he had a smart new job, a beautiful son to go with his amazing daughter and put a floundering marriage back on track. Sarah, on the other hand, was applying for a position beneath the one she’d had when he’d known her and looked as if she’d had some sort of breakdown. He’d checked her CV and it said single. He was not enough of a shit to feel good about any of it.

  Then two days ago she’d phoned him. She’d sounded so faint and weak that when she’d asked if they could meet up, nothing serious, but it had been odd to see him in those circumstances and she didn’t want to leave it like that, he had said yes. Christian had desperately wanted to decline as the whole situation seemed too dangerous, but he felt oddly responsible for how she had turned out and so had agreed. He was due to meet her the next day.

  Christian was unused to feeling confused; normally he got on with things or asked Ruth what she thought. He texted Toby, the only school friend he still saw regularly and asked if they could meet for a drink that evening. He was relieved that the reply was yes and didn’t even care that Toby suggested an impossibly trendy Notting Hill pub in which he’d feel completely out of place.

  The day dragged. He had a long and boring phone conference with some stiff Americans, one of his staff called in sick for the third time that month, Carol was in a bad mood and the sushi he had for lunch was over-priced and tasteless. He called Ruth at four to say that Toby had rung because he was having a crisis with his latest girlfriend, so he was going to meet him for a drink, knowing she couldn’t shout because of what she’d done the night before.

  Toby was already at the bar when Christian arrived, looking like he owned the place and knew everyone there, which probably wasn’t far off the mark. It was bad luck, Christian felt, that his best friend should make him feel so inadequate with his ridiculously glamorous lifestyle. He couldn’t remember how or even when Toby had got into the music business or why he had made such a success of it. Either way, standing by the curved bend of the polished wooden bar, ordering two pints of Guinness from the barmaid, he felt wrong and out of place in his suit.

  Toby was texting furiously on his iPhone. ‘Fuck, I’m going to have to run in about an hour. We’ve got a band showcasing tonight and it’s all gone tits-up.’

  ‘Right.’ Christian resisted an urge to ask himself along.

  ‘Anyway, what’s up? Why the urgency?’

  Christian didn’t know who Toby was sleeping with at the moment, but he’d lay money on her being as fit as a butcher’s dog, as Toby would say. Life sometimes came too fast, you couldn’t be sure if you were right or wrong, stupid or wily, pathetic or sophisticated.

  ‘D’you remember Sarah?’

  ‘Of course. Please don’t tell me you’re seeing her again.’

  Christian waved from behind his pint. ‘No. No. But this really weird thing happened . . . ’

  ‘I need a fag for this,’ said Toby, standing up. They shuffled onto the pavement, no longer pretendin
g at what they were doing to their bodies. Christian helped himself to one. ‘Thought you’d given up.’

  ‘Only when Ruth’s around.’

  ‘So?’ His friend leant against the grimy wall of the pub and Christian momentarily wondered what he was doing there.

  ‘She came for an interview at my work.’

  ‘Shit. What, you were interviewing her?’

  ‘Yeah, and I hadn’t bothered to check the CVs, so I was totally unprepared when she walked in and Carol was in the room and it was fucking awful. She looked terrible.’ Christian flashed an image of Sarah in his mind. Sometimes he felt as though he was watching his life on TV and that nothing really mattered. ‘No, she looked amazing. But, sort of, I don’t know, wasted.’

  ‘What, drugs?’

  ‘No, more like life hadn’t been good to her.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re thinking that’s your fault? That she’s been spending these last three years pining after you?’

  ‘No, but you know, what with the baby and everything . . . ’

  Toby’s phone bleeped again. ‘Sorry, I have to get this.’ He answered and walked to the kerb, balancing on the rubbish-strewn lip of the pavement as a child might. Christian checked his phone for something to do and saw that Ruth had texted, asking him to get milk on his way home.

  ‘Sorry about that. Let’s go back in,’ Toby said as he returned.

  They sat at the round table they had been at before, their own puddles of spilt beer still reflecting the lights from the bar. Christian hoped they would have been cleaned up.

  ‘She called me a few days ago and I’m meeting her for lunch tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Christian was surprised to see anger on his friend’s face, in the turn of his mouth before he could hide it. ‘You know Ruth will leave if you do it to her again. Fuck knows how you got her to stay last time, but she’s not going to take it a second time.’

  ‘I’m not planning anything. But I couldn’t say no. I feel guilty.’