Living With It

by Lizzie Enfield

  ‘Are you going to watch the football with me?’ he’d asked Harvey earlier. He likes having a son to share it with, and Vincent, though he likes to kick a ball around, is not interested in watching it.

  ‘I’m tired today, Dad,’ Harvey had replied, and I could see that Eric was a bit disappointed. Shouting at the TV, telling the linesman he made a wrong decision, is clearly more fun when you’ve got a twelve-year-old boy to back you up.

  So I feel bad that I am about to disappoint him further and spoil his favourite part of the week.

  Eric is relentlessly positive, but deep down I think he hates his job. He finds comfort in the odd moment – a joke shared with a colleague, the occasional pat on the back from the editor – but he’s not doing what he wanted to do. His aspirations to be an investigative reporter fell by the wayside, given the need to support a wife and three children. ‘Making sure chip wrapping is accurate’ is how he jokingly describes his job, but it’s not far from the truth. His news is largely whether the women in the Cabinet have put on weight or what they are wearing. A major headline could be the prime minister snapped going for a swim on a holiday – hold the front page! It’s not exactly groundbreaking investigative journalism.

  If I’d found a way to go back to work, after the children were born, he’d probably be doing something less well paid but more rewarding now. But he never complains, always tells me I’m doing a great job with the kids, and reassures me he’s happy enough doing what he does.

  So he doesn’t deserve what’s coming, and I wonder if I should wait till the morning.

  But the boys will be around then, demanding and distracting. I need to tell him now.

  ‘What’s up? Is someone ill or something?’

  ‘Yes, sort of.’

  He puts the remote down and gives me his full attention. ‘It’s not Maggie, is it? Is there something serious?’

  I can imagine what he’s thinking when he asks this. He’ll be feeling concerned, and worried for Ben, the man he’s known since they were eleven and to whom he’s been a loyal friend ever since. He’ll be putting two and two together – the fact that Ben and Maggie were not at the party and my ‘funny turn’ – and making five. Or maybe four and a half, because he’s on the right track. He’s just got the wrong family member.

  And he’ll be thinking that, if Maggie is ill and it’s serious, it’s unfair because Ben has been on his own so long and only just recently, after meeting Maggie and having Iris, seemed to be really happy for the first time in his adult life.

  And Eric hates unfairness. He doesn’t have the ‘life’s unfair so we shrug and get on with it’ gene. He wants to make it fair. That’s why he wanted to be a campaigning reporter and put the world to rights. That’s why he’ll already be thinking about what can be done to make Maggie better, if she’s ill, wondering if maybe his paper could highlight whatever failings in the NHS might contribute to her not making a full recovery.

  ‘It’s not Maggie.’ I don’t know what to do except come straight to the point. ‘It’s Iris. She’s deaf.’

  ‘Oh, no, that’s terrible. But it’s not the worst thing,’ Eric says, his optimistic streak coming immediately to the fore. ‘I mean, she could have hearing aids, or cochlear implants if it’s really bad, or learn to sign.’

  ‘You don’t understand – ’ I begin, but Eric is still in full flow.

  ‘It can’t be that bad because she seems, well, such a responsive baby; maybe it’s only partial. It’s not the end of the world, Bel, though it’s rather touching that you feel so cut up for them.’

  He puts out his arm to draw me to him and kisses me and I wish he weren’t in this state of unknowingness. Or I wish that I were too, and this moment of kindness from the man I love could be as reassuring as he means it to be. But I have to break it – the moment.

  ‘No, Eric, listen to me.’

  ‘OK, sorry.’

  ‘Iris wasn’t deaf when you last saw her. She was fine. There was nothing wrong with her hearing.’

  I pause because knowing what I know is one thing, saying it out loud quite another. I wonder now if Eric has an inkling. He’s a phenomenally bright man. His mind works in leaps and bounds. I imagine it’s computing now, making the connections, reaching the conclusion without my having to actually tell him, but it appears I am wrong.

  ‘What happened?’ he asks.

  ‘It was having measles that caused it.’

  There, I’ve said it, and I start to let it all out. ‘She’s completely deaf in both ears, no hearing at all, not any more. She was perfectly healthy before and now she can’t hear a thing. And it’s my fault, Eric. It’s all my fault.’

  Eric removes his hand from my shoulder, as I feared he would, and looks hard at me. Now I can almost hear the computing going on, although he says nothing. The silence is unbearable. Why can’t he reassure me? Why can’t he say, ‘It’s not all your fault. You mustn’t blame yourself.’

  ‘Say something, please.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ He picks up his glass and drains it, as if it were a beer not a large red wine.

  Because Eric can’t reassure me, I start trying to reassure myself. ‘I should never have left Gabby alone with Maggie and Iris that day we went to the dune,’ I begin. ‘It was just that the boys wanted me to go and Maggie said she was happy – ’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Isobel!’ Eric interrupts me. ‘Is that where you think the fault lies? It wasn’t the fact that we left her that day that led to this. It’s because you didn’t have the kids vaccinated. I told you it was ridiculous not to.’

  I am taken aback. ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No! We discussed it at the time. You knew my concerns. It’s not like I kept them from you. We went over it all.’

  ‘But it was your decision,’ Eric says.

  ‘How can you say that?’ I’m beginning to feel angry.

  ‘Because it’s true.’

  ‘But we discussed it when Gabs was little. You knew I was worried about it. You knew I’d decided not to take her. You can’t go along with decisions I make about the kids and then blame it on me when things go wrong.’

  ‘I didn’t “go along with it”, Isobel.’ Eric raises his voice, something he rarely does. ‘Yes, we discussed it. I knew you were worried. I told you I thought you were wrong. I told you everything was being blown out of proportion and there was nothing to worry about.’

  ‘But you said it was up to me in the end,’ I shout back. ‘You accepted it. That’s the same thing.’

  ‘The same thing as what?’

  ‘As going along with it.’

  ‘No. It’s different.’ Eric adopts a calm and reasonable tone, which makes me feel like hitting him. ‘I brought back fistfuls of information from work assuring you that the MMR was perfectly safe, but you chose to ignore it and listen to the hippy mums you hung out with instead.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. They’re not hippies. They were just parents too, and I hung out with them because I had small children and no one else to be with. You still have no idea what it was like for me, when they were little. You just went off to the office every day, as usual. My life changed completely, and while you were worrying about whether someone had put a comma in the right place I had to make difficult decisions about our children, and sometimes the only people I could go to for advice were other parents. And anyway, it wasn’t just “the hippy mums I hung out with”. You know how much coverage there was in the press at the time. Everyone was worried about it.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ Eric is so self-righteous when he wants to be. ‘I had my own opinion, which I told you, often enough. You refused to hear it. The only opinions of mine you want to hear are the ones you’ve already told me first.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘That half the time, especially where the kids are concerned, you only ever ask my opinion if you want yours validated.’

 
‘I do not. That’s so unfair.’

  ‘You do, Isobel. You bloody well do. If I have a different view from yours, you never want to hear it. You always think you’re right.’

  I’m livid with Eric now but I’ve backed myself into a corner. If I go on insisting he’s wrong and I’m not, I’m doing what he says I do.

  ‘You know I’ve always had strong opinions,’ I say, taking a different tack. ‘It was one of the things you used to like about me.’

  ‘You used to have strong opinions about things that mattered,’ he replies.

  ‘And our children don’t?’

  ‘Of course they do. You know that’s not what I mean.’

  ‘Then what do you mean, exactly?’

  ‘I mean that I told you I thought the MMR thing was all a lot of fuss over nothing. I told you the scare would all blow over and I thought our kids should have it. But yes, you’re the one who looks after them on a daily basis. So I let you make the decision not to vaccinate them. That doesn’t mean I agreed with you.’

  Eric glances briefly back at the TV. There’s a report from Afghanistan. ‘Can you imagine what a woman in Afghanistan would say?’ he continues. ‘A woman who probably has to walk across mountains for two days to get to a vaccination clinic, risk being raped by the Taliban on the way and then pay a fortune for the privilege when she gets there. Can you imagine what she would say if she heard that all we have to do here is walk to the end of the road at an appointed time and yet people choose not to?’

  I sigh. ‘We’ve already had this discussion.’

  We’ve had it several times. When he rushed off to the local doctor in France to get the boys immunised immediately. Again after we heard Iris was ill, and on various occasions since, when there’s been stuff in the news about measles outbreaks.

  ‘And that just proves my point,’ he says.

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say? Your best friend’s baby is deaf and, yes, we are partly responsible for that. Does that make you happy? Because it proves your point?’

  ‘Of course it doesn’t make me happy, Bel. Don’t be so fucking ridiculous. Christ knows how Ben and Maggie must be feeling. I’m just saying I told you it was selfish not to have the kids vaccinated. It was bad enough seeing Gabs get so ill, and then hearing about Iris too, but now this!’

  ‘Selfish?’ I am furious again now. ‘Selfish to try to protect my kids – no, our children? You think I was being selfish when I spent hours agonising over whether to have them protected against one form of illness but put them at risk of another? You think I was doing that for myself?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant!’

  ‘Then what do you mean, Eric? What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘I mean the decision wasn’t just about our kids, was it? It was about the wider public good.’

  ‘You are so fucking smug sometimes,’ I spit. ‘It’s all very well worrying about the wider public good, but when it’s your own children you think of them. At least, I do.’

  ‘And look what happens when you do,’ Eric says.

  ‘And look what might have happened if I’d done exactly what you wanted,’ I counter. ‘It’s all very well with hindsight to tell me I was totally wrong, but at the time I was really worried about the link between MMR and autism.’

  ‘There is no link.’

  ‘But at the time, Eric. At the fucking time, I thought there was. I thought there might be. Virtually the only other parent I knew before I had Gabs was Yasmin, and she had Conrad, and you know what? – Conrad scared me. I didn’t know if I could have coped with a child like that. I didn’t know if we could have coped with a child like that. I didn’t want to do anything that might put my lovely daughter at risk of turning out like that.’

  ‘So instead,’ Eric begins, and I think to myself that if he says ‘you put someone else’s child at risk’ out loud, even if that’s what he’s thinking, I might just throw something at him.

  But he stops mid-sentence and begins again. ‘How long have you been there?’

  And I realise Gabriella is standing in the doorway, hovering, and I too wonder how long she’s been there, how much of what I said she has heard. The look on her face tells me it was all of it.

  ‘Gabs,’ I say. ‘Come and sit down.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit down,’ she begins and, while Eric appears lost for words, she lets out a torrent. ‘See what you’ve done? It’s all your fault! And it’s my fault too, because you let me get ill and you let me play with Iris when you knew what might be wrong with me.’

  ‘Gabs, I didn’t – ’

  But she won’t let me get a word in.

  ‘You knew. You knew the risks. You must have done. You know this stuff. Everyone does, for fuck’s sake.’

  Normally I’d pull her up for using bad language, but it doesn’t seem appropriate now. She continues, ‘It’s all out there. I’ve looked it up. You let me get ill. For some weird reason you thought you wouldn’t protect your own daughter from a disease that everyone else in the world wants to be protected from. And…’

  She pauses, almost deliberately, as if to emphasise what she is about to say next.

  ‘And you let me play with Iris and now – now…’

  She stops and waits for me to say something.

  ‘Gabs, I didn’t think – ’ I begin.

  ‘No!’ she shouts at me. ‘You didn’t think, did you? You never do.’

  Ben, Saturday evening

  Sometimes Eric texts me before Match of the Day. It’s our male way of keeping in touch. I look at the texts Maggie gets from her friends sometimes and wonder how they find the time. Busy women – the lead violinist in her orchestra, for example – will send texts as long as War and Peace – letters, in all but the means of delivery.

  ‘We’re just keeping in touch,’ Maggie will say, if I comment on the plethora of beeps coming from her phone.

  Sometimes members of her orchestra even seem to text during performances. ‘There’s a very slow section with no horns,’ Maggie will say, if I question the acceptability of doing this.

  I guess the Facebook messages, the text missives, the phone calls, all make her feel she’s not missing out on anything while she’s on maternity leave – which has now been extended owing to Iris’s condition. She hasn’t actually seen many of her colleagues since she stopped touring, but she knows exactly what goes on in all their lives, whereas I could go to the pub all evening with mates and come back knowing nothing about theirs.

  ‘How’s Moira?’ Maggie will ask, if I’ve been for a drink with Matt Green, head of maths, one of the few teachers at school I count as an actual friend.

  ‘I’m not sure. I didn’t ask,’ I’ll tell her, and she’ll roll her eyes, exasperated.

  ‘What did you talk about, then?’

  ‘We were too busy moving beer from the table to our lips to talk,’ I’ll reply, which is partly true.

  I can drink with mates without going over the minutiae of their lives. We pass the time of day, but never seem to elicit any of the facts which women regard as salient. I don’t feel the need. If I don’t see Eric for months on end, but he sends me the occasional text asking, Are you watching the match? I feel as if we are in regular contact. I know he’s watching the match. I know he’s OK. He knows I am. We just cut out the chatty crap in the middle. You watching the match? means, ‘Hi, Ben. It’s Eric here. I’m just settling down after a long week at work to watch the football. The kids are all fine. Bel’s good. How’s everything with you. Fine too? That’s great. I do think about you, even though I don’t get in touch to let you know. I hope Liverpool win.’

  We don’t need all that extra information. It’s implicit.

  But today, I check my phone as I plonk myself down with a beer, half expecting there to be something more, something longer – a missed call, even. Because they must know by now – Eric and Isobel. They’ve been at a fucking party all day, while Maggie and I have been sitting at home, not feeling celebratory or up to se
eing anyone because we’ve got a deaf daughter and the last time we saw them all she could hear perfectly.

  I thought one of them would call, text, say or do something. But my phone is, as usual, devoid of social activity, unlike my partner’s.

  ‘I’m going to have a bath and go to bed now,’ Maggie says, putting down the ‘Family’ section of the Guardian, which she’s been holding but not reading. She reaches to pick up How to Live with a Deaf Child from the floor beside the sofa.

  ‘Why don’t you just get some sleep?’ I say to her. I’m irritated that she keeps reading the bloody books, but I try to disguise it as concern. ‘You look really tired.’

  ‘I probably will,’ she says, taking the book with her anyway. ‘Will you turn everything off?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply.

  I always do. I tend to go to bed later than Maggie at the moment. Her nights are still broken by Iris waking, so the nightly routine of switching off lights and making sure the back door is bolted falls to me. I never forget, but Maggie always reminds me. Perhaps it’s like the texting with her friends. She needs things to be said, even if I think they are understood.

  But right now I am the one who needs things to be said. I need Isobel and Eric to say something. Their silence is laden with bad intent and, if they don’t break it, I’m going to force them to.

  I pick up the remote and switch the TV on. There’s ten minutes of news left and the newsreader is informing me that a date-rape case involving a footballer has just been thrown out of court. The woman who had accused him had lied about the fact that she’d been stalking the footballer for months, mostly via Facebook and Twitter but also in person, hanging around in the clubs and bars he was known to frequent.

  There’s a brief studio interview afterwards but I’m not really listening. I keep checking my phone, angrily. Why aren’t they fucking contacting me? Have they got nothing to say?