The House Swap

by Rebecca Fleet

  I nod. ‘Got that early appointment.’ It’s a new patient, a last-minute request. I’ve been building back up slowly. A new clinic, new practice. Another clean slate. Not taking on more than I can handle, not caring what other people think. Giving myself the space to breathe. I’m doing this right. It hasn’t been perfect, but it’s still moving in the right direction.

  ‘Well,’ she says, going over to Eddie and taking his hand to pull him out of bed into a cuddle, ‘I’ll be around when you come back. Day off, remember? I’ll take him in to nursery and then maybe we can have lunch together or something?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I say. There’s an unexpected stinging across the bridge of my nose, the hint of approaching tears. My emotions aren’t always predictable. Sometimes, I have no idea where they have come from or what they mean. I’ve learned to sit back and let them take over when they want to, and then to pack them carefully away in their box. Take your feelings out to lunch, my sponsor said to me a while ago, and then tell them to fuck off. That’s what I do. So I give myself a moment, let the strange tenderness and sadness linger, and then I toss them away.

  Caroline comes with me to the front door and winds her limbs around me, pressing her body up against mine. She’s clingy at the moment, desiring. I don’t mind. It makes a change from all those months back in the dark times, when she was slippery like mercury and shrank away from my touch. ‘See you later,’ she murmurs.

  ‘See you,’ I say, kissing her. I pull back and look at her, taking her in. There are lines on her face that weren’t there a few years ago and I can see the tiredness in her eyes, but she’s still beautiful. More so to me than ever, really, now that she’s mine again.

  I stride down the main road towards the station in the bright sunshine. The trees are still laden with lush green leaves and the sky is blue and cloudless. It’s a film set, a picture of perfection. I’m thinking of Caroline and the smell of her perfume as she wrapped her arms around my neck. Something tremors at the edge of the image. I let it stay there, knowing I shouldn’t ignore it. These memories are still there, and it’s useless to deny them. Now and again, it still comes in a rush of bitterness and surprise: the knowledge that another man has been inside her and made her believe that she loves him. Every time, it feels like the first time. It isn’t going to go away. It has to be lived with, just like everything else.

  I carry on walking, and now I’m thinking about that July night, so long ago, when she came back crying and wouldn’t tell me why. Standing in the middle of the lounge with tears streaming down her face, lost in some private space that she couldn’t explain and which I had no way of reaching through the fog that was suffocating my every breath. It should have been a wake-up call but it only drove me further underground. The few weeks that followed were a disjointed montage of broken sleep, slurred insults, abortive attempts at reconciliation, punctuated by the pills at every hour, until I had completely lost any lingering sense of who or where I was. And finally, the calm stillness of the September evening when she came to me and told me she was leaving. I’m taking Eddie down to my parents in the morning, and I’m leaving you. I’ve had enough. I don’t want this life any more.

  What cut through was the relief. Hidden in the pale, tense lines of her mouth, the half-defiant lift of her chin. She’d made her decision, and at least part of her was happy. Strange that that’s what it took for me to see that I couldn’t let her go. I stayed up all night and I didn’t take any more pills. It was the first time I’d gone more than a couple of hours without in weeks. I’ll never forget that bizarre, dreamlike sense of surfacing – the first bubbles of air popping into my body and dragging me up and out, skinned and reborn.

  It took hours to persuade her not to go. Hours of talking in the grey dawn, convincing her that now was the time for change. But as soon as we began to speak I could tell that, although the decision was made, it could be undone. She hadn’t managed to sever the bonds as entirely as she thought, and I could see almost at once that, even though she didn’t really believe what I was saying, she wanted to, and that was half the battle.

  Six a.m., and I had unfolded myself as much as I could physically bear. The pounding in my head, the weird starkness of the objects in the room around us, revealing themselves to me after weeks of sitting amid them and seeing nothing but shadows. And when I had finished talking, she began. If there’s any chance of us doing this, then I need to tell you something, too.

  The affair with Carl was hard for her to speak about. I’d never seen such sadness in her eyes, such reluctance. It was more serious than I had thought. It had been months, and in her head she’d worked it up into a grand passion. I didn’t know – still don’t – how real it was. But I knew she felt it was, and that was enough. It had ended, though she wouldn’t tell me how, but it was clear she wasn’t over it. It didn’t matter. There was no pain, no anger. That came later but, in that moment, there was nothing but the sweetness of revelation. We had spent more time talking to each other in those few hours than we had in months, maybe years. The facts were out on the table for inspection and our marriage was a fucking mess. But the air was sharp and clean and I was breathing in and out and we were both still alive.

  I’ve been so lost in thought it comes as a surprise to find that I’m sitting on the train and we’re pulling away from the platform. The sun against the window shines on to my hands folded in my lap. My wedding ring is much too loose now, but I’m still wearing it. For now, at least, we seem to have survived.

  The woman who enters the counselling room is in her late forties: dark hair cut into a bob, a slight, narrow frame, smart, neutral clothes. I’ve had barely any chance to skim the notes I’ve been sent from her assessment. It sounds like fairly standard depression. And yet as soon as I see her I get a strange feeling that nothing about this is going to be standard at all.

  Maybe it’s the way she stops when she’s halfway across the threshold, looking intently at me, and then around the room. People don’t usually focus their attention on these things. They’re driven by their own suffocating concerns – that’s why they’re here. But she looks around so carefully, and her gaze lingers on my desk: the small, red-flowered pot plant, the framed photograph of Caroline and Eddie. I keep it turned inwards towards me, so all she’s staring at is the back of the frame, but she looks at it as if she really wants to know what’s on the other side. Her hands are twisted together in front of her and I can see the tension in her jawline, like she’s gritting her teeth.

  ‘Good morning,’ I say. ‘Sandra, isn’t it? Come in. Take a seat.’

  She edges further into the room and her gaze flits around the couple of chairs available to her. At last, she chooses the one closest to mine and draped with the purple throw, next to the window. She slides into it in silence. Her eyes are dark blue and unblinking, steady as glass.

  ‘If it’s OK with you,’ I say, ‘I like to start by just letting you talk. Telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been going on.’

  Almost imperceptibly, she nods, as if this has reconfirmed what she expected to hear. When she starts to talk, I have to strain to hear her at first. Her voice is level and soft, almost hypnotic. She sketches a picture of a fairly unremarkable life. She and her husband were divorced several years ago, but she speaks about it without passion or regret. Since then, it’s just been her and her daughter, Robyn.

  It takes a while for me to realize that the way she speaks about her daughter is strange. She refers to her at times in the present tense, at others in the past. She slips between memories, blurring the years. When she tells me that Robyn has been dead for over a year, it’s almost like an afterthought. She doesn’t think she needs to spell this out, because to her it’s part of her DNA. It’s written across every second and every breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, to fill the brief jagged silence, but she doesn’t respond and she begins to tell me how her daughter died. I’m listening, but at the same time a trickle of panic is slipping dow
n the back of my neck, stiffening my muscles. I’m not a bereavement counsellor. I specialize in relationships, family tensions. How the hell has this woman been assigned to me? I’m almost certain there was no mention of any of this in the assessment notes I hastily scanned. But it seems hardly conceivable that she wouldn’t have mentioned it in her first appointment. Clearly, this is why she’s here. Why would she hide it?

  ‘I spent a long time looking for sense in what happened,’ she’s saying. Flatly, without apparent pain. ‘But I was looking for something that wasn’t there. The car had been coming too fast around the bend. It must have been. But there was no reason why Robyn was there at that precise instant. No reason why a few moments of inattention ended up destroying her life, and mine. You can only go so far down that road. It leads nowhere.’

  I nod. I think about saying something around the idea of acceptance and how this realization can be part of it, but something tells me to stay quiet. Besides, whatever she’s feeling, acceptance isn’t it. I can see it in the set of her muscles, the strange way she’s half bent forward, as if she’s poised for flight, and in the haunted look in her eyes that seem miles away from me, even as they’re looking straight into mine.

  ‘I watched the man who was responsible in the dock,’ she says, ‘and I thought, he’s barely started to live his own life, and already he’s ruined mine. Does that sound unfair?’ I say nothing, moving my head to one side in non-committal encouragement. ‘He was young. Repentant – shell-shocked, even. He didn’t seem like a boy racer. I wanted to hate him. I did hate him, in a way.’

  She stops for a minute and looks intently out of the window at the drifting clouds. When she speaks again, it’s with her gaze still trained there, spilling her thoughts out into the open air. ‘He got six months, but he was out in three. It’s not surprising, really. It was an accident, a mistake. But still. It was laughable. Nothing could have compensated, of course, but that … it didn’t even scratch the surface of the pain he’d caused. I don’t mind telling you,’ she says, with mild, disarming frankness, ‘I became a little obsessed with him. Let’s just say I’ve followed his progress. And it’s taken a long time, but I’ve seen enough to know that I don’t think he’s happy. Not really. I couldn’t have borne that. I was starting to think it was time to let it go. I don’t mean forget her, or forgive him. But it seemed that there was nothing more to think, nothing more to feel. I’d got to the end of it.’

  ‘But something changed,’ I prompt, because she’s looking at me again now and I can see the expectancy in her face and the command for me to speak.

  For the first time, she half smiles. It’s a strange, shifting experiment of a smile, and it looks wrong on her, but it briefly transforms her and I can see that she would have been attractive once, charming. ‘It did,’ she says. There’s a note of praise in her voice; I’ve picked up on her unspoken implication. It’s not the first time a new patient has tried to test me this way, but it’s the first time I’ve felt such intense eagerness radiating from another person in response to my passing the test – a real hunger to reward me with her secrets. ‘Like I say, the sentence was negligible, but when I heard it, I thought, well, it’s something. At least it’s something. But recently, I discovered that things weren’t as they appeared. I discovered that the whole thing had been built on a lie. The man who had been held responsible – he wasn’t alone. In fact, he wasn’t even the one driving the car. There was a woman. His lover. He lied to protect her, I suppose. I don’t really care why he did it. But I do care about justice. And it seems that’s something neither of them know much about. Especially her.’

  Her voice is louder now and she’s speaking with passion, violence – her eyes burning, her hands clenched hard on her knees. ‘Do you think that’s something that should be allowed? To turn your back on the mess you’ve created and slip back into your own life with barely a ripple? Do you understand what I mean? Do you understand why it’s wrong?’

  These aren’t hypothetical questions. She’s firing them at me like gunshots, and I’m wondering if she’s actually deranged – a complete fantasist – and how much, if any, of what she’s saying is true. ‘I understand what you mean,’ I say at last. ‘And I can see exactly why you would feel that way.’

  As soon as I’ve spoken, I see her visibly relax. The fury that has been pulsating from her shrinks and disappears. She leans back in her chair and takes a long breath. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I thought you would.’ There’s something uncomfortably personal about the way she’s looking at me. ‘I don’t think she deserves what she has,’ she says. ‘This woman. This Caroline.’

  When I hear the name there’s that tiny reflexive jolt of familiarity, the same way there is when anyone says a name that means something to you, that runs through your own life. On this woman’s lips, it’s tinged with reflective bitterness. It hangs in the air between us before she speaks again. ‘I think of her often,’ she says. ‘Her, and her lover. Carl Jackson.’

  This time, the name hits like a blow to the head. Over the years, I’ve learned to keep my expression composed in the face of the most outrageous and wild pronouncements patients have thrown at me. I’ve received tales of obsession and betrayal, deceit and insanity, with studied neutrality. But right now, I can’t stop myself from flinching, and the fierce glint in her eye tells me two things. First, she knows exactly who I am. And second, she’s not lying. This is real.

  In the few seconds of silence that cycle lazily through the room before I speak, a lot of thoughts flash through my head. I’m thinking of those weeks and months after Caroline came back crying, the way she often got up in the middle of the night and I’d find her standing in the hallway, staring at nothing. I’m thinking about the feel of her limbs, feverish and slicked with sweat, when she used to wake up from dreams she couldn’t or wouldn’t share. I’m thinking of the way she told me she was selling her car because she didn’t want to drive any more, bluntly and without explanation. And yes, it fits. But I have absolutely no idea yet how I feel or what it means. All I know is that this can’t continue.

  ‘Our time is up,’ I say. The clock still has twenty minutes to run, but we both know what I mean. I stand up, moving towards the door. ‘If you would like to make another appointment, please talk to reception. But I’m afraid I won’t have this slot in future. In fact, I’m completely booked up.’

  She stands up slowly, her small figure neat and composed. ‘I don’t want another appointment,’ she says. ‘I’ve done what I came here to do.’ There’s no vindictiveness in her tone any more. Just a flat encroaching sadness, as if, even in this moment, she’s realizing that it hasn’t measured up to how she thought it would be. That it won’t ever be enough.

  She shakes her dark hair behind her ears, and she leaves quietly. As she passes me, she turns her head quickly back towards my desk, and I can see her gaze seeking out the photograph, taking it in for a cool instant. The last I see of her is her face in profile as she turns away, moving out of my orbit and down the corridor. Her pale skin is stretched tight across her high cheekbones and the planes of her face are oddly beautiful.

  When she’s gone, I lock the office door from the inside and sit down again. I stay there for a long time. Thinking about my wife and the life she’s led away from me. The secrets she keeps holed up inside her because she doesn’t trust me with them. Wondering if things would have been different if she had driven in another direction that night, and if it would have taken her right out of my life, away from me.

  I want to feel angry, but I don’t. I feel sadness, and pity. And there’s something else – a surge of conviction, rising from somewhere too deep inside to pinpoint: the knowledge that what this woman thought might break us will have the opposite effect. I’m strong enough now. I can carry a burden without it destroying me. I can understand my wife better than she knows. And I can wait for her to be honest with me. However long it takes.

  Caroline’s mother is back in the room and everything is sp
eeding up, a jerky roll of film sputtering in front of my eyes. She’s moving fast towards Eddie, taking his hand, and snatching the hamster’s cage with her free hand – standing there in the doorway with her possessions, her eyes wide and uncomprehending. I think she asks if there’s anything she can do. I can’t speak through the tears and, in another moment, she’s pulling Eddie away, hurrying with him down the staircase. She closes the front door softly, as if she wants to escape as quietly as she can.

  I stand and wait. Maybe she’s calling the police right now and telling them to come here to take me away. Funny, the rush of calm that thought gives. Someone to take control and sort everything out. I can see us now, me and Robyn, watching the policemen march up to Buckingham Palace when we visited for her fourth birthday. ‘Who are those men?’ she asked, and I told her that they were the police, that they were in charge. Her little face, earnest and accepting, her head nodding under her woolly hat, the faint steam of her breath escaping into the cold air.

  I wish I could forget her. I want to be purged and to wake up mindless and new. Instead, for two years, I’ve been picking around the edges of these people’s lives, playing with fantasies that won’t come true. Watching Carl and his new girlfriend go about their daily business. Sitting opposite Caroline’s husband in the therapist’s office. At first I hoped that somehow I could change things just by being there. Just by existing near them. But I couldn’t, and even now, when I’ve spent this time in her house, and thrown my pointless little grenade into her family, I still can’t.

  Somehow, I’ve fetched the little piles of photo print from the bedroom and I’m back kneeling on the living-room floor, looking at the tiny slices of her face. I reach into my pocket and pull out the crumpled yellow letter I’ve carried around for months. I look back and forth, from her smiling mouth to the desolate words she wrote to him, trying to match them up. I think about what happened every day, she wrote, and I can hardly bear it, and without you I’m not sure I can bear it at all.