The House Swap

by Rebecca Fleet

  Just before she comes in I get up and look in the mirror that hangs over the mantelpiece. I don’t know who I’m expecting to see in it. Not this man with the greying, puffy skin and the grooves of worry sunk deep into the corners of his eyes, his face familiar yet strange, like a surreal caricature of myself. For a brief moment, I imagine tapping on the glass. Reaching in to pull him out and hold him up to the light, work out who he is. I see him the same way others seem to see him. Friends with baffled faces, trying to put their fingers on exactly when I stopped giving a shit. You all right, mate? Seems like it’s been a while … My fellow therapists at the clinic lightly sidestepping into corridors to avoid the kind of idle chit-chat they apparently used to live for. My brother Greg, the last time he visited. Francis, I barely even recognize you. What have you done with my brother? Glancing out of the window every so often at his banker-wanker Porsche gleaming smugly on the pavement, as if he was worried someone was going to key it. Riffling through his overstuffed wallet, fanning out his platinum credit cards like a conjurer. How’s business?

  The anger flares and fades, a tired old torch I can barely be bothered with any more. I’m sitting back down, and the door is being flung open. Caroline heads across the room and stands in the spot I have just left, checking her make-up and straightening her tailored dress. Her skirt is tight and comes halfway up her thighs. I watch the fabric move and stretch across her skin, and there’s a brief, pointless stirring of desire.

  ‘I’m off in a minute,’ she says, her reflection looking at mine in the mirror. It seems that a lot of our conversations are conducted this way, these days. We’re staring at each other, but she isn’t even facing my way. ‘I’m dropping Eddie off. I’ll pick him up and bring him back for dinner, and then I’m going out again, yeah?’

  ‘Where are you going again?’ I ask, but I don’t really care what the answer is, and five minutes later I can’t remember it.

  At twenty past ten I step out of the house into the frost-bitten air and think about going inside to find a warmer jumper or coat, but it feels like too much effort and before I’ve decided either way I find that I’m walking down the street towards the station. Everything is too bright. The sharpness of the trees against the skyline sets my teeth on edge and there’s a sickly clarity to the piled-up buildings around me. I can almost taste it, bitter and metallic. On days like this the die already seems cast. Just have to get through.

  The train journey usually only takes ten minutes but there’s some problem on the line and it crawls along, lurching to an abrupt standstill every so often. Opposite me, a young woman wearing furry headphones mouths along to whatever song is blasting into her ears. Her mouth is red and sticky with lip gloss. There’s something disgusting about it. Once or twice, she glances up, appraises me warily through shuttered eyes. I know I’m not smiling. I could diffuse the tension, look away, or at least soften the frown I can feel is creasing my forehead, but I can’t be bothered. No room for social niceties today.

  At the stop before mine she collects her bag and sweeps out of the carriage, muttering something under her breath. The old biddy on the next bank of seats gives her a quick look of sympathy, then stares at me pointedly for a few seconds before settling back into her seat. More and more these days I notice that the tide of public opinion is turned against me without me even speaking a word. In a way, it’s funny. It’s certainly not something I’m about to fight. In fact, sometimes I find myself playing up to it.

  I remember hearing once about a celebrity – Madonna, I think it was – who could apparently switch her ability to be recognized by passers-by on and off at will when walking down the street, one minute blending into the crowd, the next radiating some indefinable superstardom that makes people sit up and take notice. It’s like that with me, only what I’m radiating isn’t stardom but a kind of oppressive, prickly dissatisfaction with the world that pulls uncomfortably on people’s coat-tails and makes them draw back for a second look. Right now, that aura is switched on at full blast.

  ‘Morning, Francis,’ Sara sing-songs, as I come in, barely looking up from her notes. She’s one of the other therapists who regularly use this centre, and sometimes I look at her sharp, ferrety eyes and the keenness of her gaze and wonder how much she sees through the mask I prop up every time I come in here. I prefer not to think about it.

  ‘Morning,’ I throw back over my shoulder, as I head to my consultation room. I find my notes, try to think about what I’m about to do. It’s a new patient, a man in his early forties. The notes from his assessment are dancing in front of my eyes and I can’t hold on to the words. Giving up, I push them aside. I’ll start fresh. Better that way.

  My hands are trembling again, and I pour myself a glass of water, cursing as it splashes over the table beside my armchair. Time to get it together. I can do this as easily as breathing. Used to love it. It makes less sense now than it used to. Now that I’ve cut down my commitments so much, Caroline’s salary outstrips mine by three or four times. By comparison, my payslips are hardly worth the paper they’re written on.

  These thoughts are like little needles, jabbing uncomfortably at my skin. Only one way to blunt them, and I can’t do that yet. Focus.

  He’s lingering awkwardly at the door, a small, unassuming man with a thinning hairline and round, amber-rimmed spectacles. Nice enough face, but I can see from ten paces that it’s been metaphorically stamped all over by some woman’s stilettos. I’m rising from my chair, approaching with an outstretched hand. ‘Mark? Come in.’ My voice is measured, authoritative. I’ve had enough practice to know how to sound right when I need to.

  A first session is often about little more than listening and prompting, and this is no exception. It’s a relief to absorb myself in it, to switch everything else off. He’s a reluctant talker, often stopping mid-sentence or scratching the side of his face in embarrassment, but once he’s under way the words come pouring out fast, a half-whispered torrent of dissatisfaction. It’s standard stuff, mostly – an underwhelming job, a lack of social activity, unfulfilling relationships with family members. He doesn’t mention his wife until thirty minutes in, despite twirling the wedding ring on his finger every few seconds while he speaks. When he does, it’s hesitantly at first, talking round the houses, qualifying everything he says with caveats and assumptions.

  ‘She doesn’t seem to want to spend time with me.’ His eyes behind the glasses blink fast and erratically, as if the thought is giving him a minor electric shock. ‘I mean, I don’t know. She has a stressful job, works late a lot. It’s understandable, I suppose, if she just wants to relax. But sometimes I wonder if there’s something more to it. Another factor. I’m probably wrong.’

  It takes another ten minutes for the truth to emerge: the late-night text messages that he hears arriving on her phone, the new clothes he’s seen in the wardrobe which never seem to be worn at home, the growing lack of interest in sex or intimacy. Each new detail seems to drag him deeper down into a pit he doesn’t want to enter, but they keep coming. It’s as if he’s assembling the evidence, waiting for a verdict. When he’s finished, he spreads his hands helplessly wide out, palms up. The tips of his fingers are very soft and pink, like a child’s. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Do you think she’s having an affair?’

  The answer is as easy as falling off a cliff. But it’s not my place to say it, and instead I say, ‘Do you?’ and watch as he measures his own inward certainty against the reality it will become if he says it out loud.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, at last. He doesn’t seem to want to say anything more.

  I could interject at this point, try to force the issue. But sometimes silence is what works and, besides, my head is buzzing, my own personal thoughts trying to surface. I’m thinking of Caroline at the mirror this morning, twisting this way and that, evaluating her reflection in her short, tight dress. I’m thinking how strange it is that I can analyse the relationships of other people with such acumen, even now, and yet, when i
t comes to my own, I keep so much boxed up and out of sight I can’t even acknowledge the things I know to be true.

  Physician, heal thyself. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

  ‘I suppose I’ve known it for a long time,’ he says, after a couple more minutes, ‘but I didn’t really want to admit it. Now, I have to do something, and I don’t know what the right thing to do is.’

  I nod, and our eyes meet, a little moment of connection that cuts through the construct that keeps me sitting in this armchair and keeps him paying me for my presence. ‘Well,’ I say mildly. ‘Sometimes it can be useful not to do anything for a while.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he says eagerly, grasping the lifeline. I can already tell the way this is going to go. There’ll be five to ten sessions of angst and repeatedly kindled suspicion which he tries to dampen down with hope and denial, then some revelation or climax that will force him to accept the reality of the situation, and then we’ll have to start all over again. Sometimes it’s better to turn a blind eye and save your sanity.

  ‘I love her,’ he says, as he stands up to go. ‘I really do.’ There is something proud, almost defiant, in his tone. I want to tell him that there’s nothing noble about loving someone. It’s there, or it isn’t. It happens, or it doesn’t. And trying to talk yourself in or out of it is usually as futile as pissing in the wind. But instead I give a solemn, respectful kind of nod and tell him I’ll see him next week.

  When he’s gone, I stand at the window for a few moments and Caroline comes into my mind again. This time, it’s as I saw her last night when I lay on the sofa half asleep: struggling to unzip her boots, steadying herself against the wall as she peeled them off. Afterwards, she stood in bare feet and looked at me for a moment in the dim light. I could tell she was trying to decide whether to wake me. I thought at first she would come over, but then she just folded her arms and leaned back against the wall for a few seconds, her head tipped up intently, as if she was listening for something, and then she left the room so quietly that, in the semi-dark through my closing eyes, I couldn’t even be sure she had gone until I felt the coldness and the stillness of the room without her. And when I slept, I dreamed of our wedding day. Her face clear and shining against the summer sky, her eyes looking into mine and the crack in her voice as she said she loved me. It was real, but it wasn’t. So little difference between dreams and memories.

  These thoughts are rising up again, and I don’t want them here. Time to go home.

  Caroline comes back with Eddie at quarter to six and makes his dinner, then sits down with him at the table to watch him eat it. Every now and then, she darts out of the room then returns subtly changed. New nail varnish, a cloud of perfume. She thinks I don’t notice these things about her, but I do. I always do.

  ‘Better get going,’ she says, looking at her watch. ‘Get him to bed on time, OK? I’ve got my phone, so call me straight away if there’s any problem.’

  ‘Where you going again?’ It’s difficult to get the words out. The fog is already starting to descend and my thoughts are gently squashed up against each other like cotton wool.

  She wheels round, frowning. ‘I’m meeting up with Jess,’ she says. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I say. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ve told you loads of times,’ she says, and there’s something about the way she’s looking at me that makes me want to hurt her, the anger swelling from its readily tapped well.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say again, thoughtfully. ‘Well, I don’t listen to you that much. I guess a lot of what you say just isn’t that—’ I think carefully about the next word. Important. Interesting. ‘Worthwhile,’ I finish, and I can’t help but feel a little smug at the instant reaction she gives, the little wince that tells me the word has hit home.

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Thanks. Well, I’ll be off, then.’ She lingers a few moments longer, biting her lip, trying to work out if there is anything more to say. It’s unsettling looking at her, wondering what exactly she means to me. Sometimes, I think she’s so precious tears come to my eyes, make me want to protect her from the world and never let anyone hurt her. Other times, I can’t actually imagine giving that much of a shit if she died.

  She drops her gaze, shrugs and crosses the room quickly to kiss Eddie goodnight, and waves vaguely in my direction before hurrying out. A few moments later I hear the front door slam.

  ‘Just the two of us,’ I say to Eddie in the silence. He looks up at me, alert and half smiling, unsure of my tone. I get him into his pyjamas and open his book where we left off last night. ‘“The prince drew his magic sword and made the castle sparkle,”’ I read.

  ‘“Sparkly”,’ Eddie says softly, correctively.

  I look at the page again. ‘“Sparkly,”’ I say. ‘That’s right.’ The brightly coloured pictures and crudely formed words are blurring in front of my eyes and, all at once, I really need to sleep.

  I stumble through a few more pages then wrench myself up from the sofa and take him through to the nursery, get him to lie down and push his favourite toy into his arms. ‘Goodnight,’ I say, and I bend down to kiss his forehead. He makes some little noise of acquiescence and curls himself tightly into a ball. It’s going to be easy tonight, thank God. I uncurl his fingers from where they have crept around my hand and, as I do so, I feel a rush of love rising up from somewhere deep inside, and it doesn’t feel great. It feels fucking painful, and I don’t want to think about why.

  Back in the living room, I turn the main light off and sit down on the sofa, reach for the pill packet. Just one more tonight. The foil creases and splits under my fingernail – a tiny, almost inaudible sound that never fails to calm me. I ease the small blue pill out from its casing and hold it between the tips of my fingers. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the thought flickers that perhaps I don’t need this. Perhaps I can cut down, maybe cut them out altogether. But the fuzziness from earlier is already wearing off and there is a faint, sharp-edged nausea bubbling beneath the surface fighting to erupt, and before I know it I’m throwing the pill down my throat and swallowing hard without water, and following it with another, then another. And that’s it until tomorrow. Over and out.

  Caroline’s laptop is red and shiny, covered with fire-engine stickers stuck on at awkward angles, presumably by her son. She keeps it in a drawer by her bed, and she’s helpfully written down the password in the back of the appointments diary she uses for even more mundane thoughts than the ones in the notebook I burned yesterday. I fire it up. There’s nothing much on the desktop, bar a few close-up photos of herself tucked away in an unnamed folder. I look at that inscrutable face for a while – her eyelids smudged with shadow the colour of gunmetal, her lips dark pink and slightly parted. I don’t think these are for the husband. Actually, I think they’re for her.

  I have better luck online. Caroline clearly doesn’t bother to vary her passwords much; I can’t open her email, but her Facebook page unfurls eagerly when I enter the same log-in details I used for the laptop. I go through her private messages, reading each one carefully. Everything before the past twelve months has been deleted, but there’s a little goldmine in the form of the messages between her and her best friend, Jess. From these, I learn that Francis is – for the most part – sticking to his promises, that things are much improved between them, that, nonetheless, she isn’t completely sure they have done the right thing. I learn that she still has trouble sleeping, and that sometimes she has dreams which drag her back to a place she hasn’t been able to forget.

  There are even a couple of references to what happened on 9 July 2013. Nothing explicit, of course. She isn’t a fool, and she knows that you can’t really trust anyone. But all the same, it’s enough to tell me that she’s desperate to talk. Against her better judgement, she’s half hoping that someone will have the ability to crack her open and pour her secrets out. She wants them out of her head. She wants them gone.

  Before I log out, I decide to m
ake a change to her profile picture. Currently, it’s a safe, soft-focus shot of her and her son walking hand in hand along a sunny seafront. It takes me a few minutes’ searching to find the kind of picture I want, but eventually I stumble on one that is just right. I save it on to her desktop, then upload it. I wonder how long it will take for people to start noticing, commenting, speculating. What’s this all about, Caroline? Are you OK? From what I can see, she doesn’t let the mask slip much. She preserves her image for the people around her, because she’s scared. She needs some help to rip the scales from their eyes and show them who she really is.

  Away

  Caroline, May 2015

  IT’S NOT EASY to make this place cosy, but we collect together all the cushions we can find in the house and dump them on the sofa, light some candles and put some background music on the stereo. I step back and consider the room, realizing that it does make a difference. These small changes alter the atmosphere of the house, robbing it of some of its faceless unease. They make it easier to shrug off the thoughts and reminders that have been oppressing me. If only Eddie were here, it would almost feel like a normal family evening.

  I glance at the photo my mother sent me earlier in the day: Eddie smiling broadly at the camera, pointing to the ‘Good work!’ sticker on his coat. I can’t help wishing I were there, but I push the thought aside, determined to enjoy the evening ahead.

  Francis has cooked a curry, explaining in painstaking detail exactly what he has put into the spice mix and why. It’s a bit too hot for my liking, but I eat it anyway, gulping down vats of water in between mouthfuls, even though he warns me it won’t help. After dinner, we clear the plates away and decide to play one of the games we brought down with us in the car. Predictably, Francis chooses Scrabble, and we settle down around the pristine glass coffee table.