by Holly Seddon
There was a rising tide of anger all around us that autumn. Maybe there always was and we just started to see it, or the adults ceased to hide it. When my dad was home, he would hiss angrily into his office phone, chastise his staff for the smallest of indiscretions and stalk the halls, rubbing his temples. Luckily, he barely spoke to me. Business was bad, that’s all I knew. I didn’t even understand what his business involved, but I knew the high tide had passed on it. His company made its money from countries in the Eastern Bloc. Looking back, the upward march towards German unification and McDonald’s in Moscow must have been visible on my father’s horizon then, although his business didn’t fully implode until years later, after I’d gone.
The Loxtons’ house also felt smaller and more pressurised than before. Paul and I learned when to scurry out of the way and when to turn the music up. Mick was flush from building work, which had also made many of his friends richer than they would ever have expected to be. Mick was frequently taking wedges of notes to the pub after work, coming back later and later. I remember agreeing with Viv, a little reluctantly, that it was unseemly at his age. He was younger then than we are now! Viv started referring to it as ‘Mick’s midlife crisis’ but it soon stopped being funny. She started to cry a lot, and openly. He started to be cruel.
It unravelled so quickly, it was dizzying. One day a family, the next day lots of broken bits. I wish I hadn’t played a part in that. To paraphrase a Polish saying that my father once told me: it was not my circus and those were not my monkeys.
The incident occurred during the massive October storms that had thrown trees across our village roads and slashed roofs with lightning.
Paul and I had spent the evening drinking. Our childhood preparedness for extreme weather, with our canned goods and torches, had given way to drinking beer and moving Paul’s bed away from the window. We half-heartedly propped the Z-bed in front of the curtains like a barricade. The electricity had gone out. The only sound was our lips and tongues on the glass, the hard swallows and the clink of each finished bottle joining the others.
I’d had a horrible day at school and was determined to get drunk to forget it.
I’d arrived at school in the morning to find every girl from my year on the front lawn in hysterics, pointing at a huge image being projected onto the school clock tower with one of those overhead projectors on wheels, an extension cord trailing into a nearby classroom.
It said ‘virgin 4 life’ across the top in pen and ‘who would fuck that?’ across the bottom.
Me.
Me with pig-pink eyes, yellow lips, dirty freckles. My red hair clashing and garish.
The photos Harriet had taken of me after my mother died, blasted across the pale bricks of the tower, eight foot high.
I didn’t say a word. I shifted my bag onto the other shoulder, forced myself to lift my head high. I marched away from the lawn, back out of the gate and walked several miles to Greenfinch Manor.
Back home, I watched daytime TV and ate toast in silence, waiting for the afternoon to roll around so I could meet Paul. No tears, strangely, just a resolute acceptance. Mrs Baker had watched me walk past her window and chosen to leave me to it. I wasn’t her circus or her monkey.
When I went to meet Paul, I left my house swinging a bag of booze from the larder. Bottles of continental beer, some half-finished whiskey.
So that night we had plenty of booze and drank most of it, right through the storms and into the power cut. Mick was nowhere to be seen and Viv had gone to bed as soon as the power went and the TV stopped working.
Around midnight, I’d popped downstairs to the loo. My mind was still churning angrily about the photos, my body was swaying with the booze. If I hadn’t known the house so well, I’d have tumbled over in the dark. I was about to climb back up the stairs when I felt a hand grab my arm. I inhaled ready to scream and another hand clamped over my mouth.
‘Sshhh, shhh,’ a voice said in my ear, breath hot and wet from drink. ‘It’s okay Katie, it’s only me.’
Mick, himself three sheets to the wind, making his way home from a lock-in at the pub.
He took his hand off my mouth and I turned to face him, squinting to see the outline of his face. I felt his breath mingle with mine.
‘What time do you call this?’ I whispered, giggling.
‘Don’t tell Viv, will you?’ he asked in that very loud shouty whisper that only the very drunk can achieve.
‘Okay!’ I whispered back, louder than intended, and started to amble up the stairs. I tripped, probably on Mick’s foot and landed on the floor.
Just as Mick foraged around for me and grabbed my arms, pulling me up to him, a thin light flooded the hall and there was Viv, standing at the top of the stairs with a torch. She ran down the stairs towards us and hit Mick hard on the head with the torch, so the light bounced all around the small area, highlighting the family coats, the shoes, the pile of newspapers to be used on the fire.
‘No, Viv!’ Mick said, and as he lifted his hands to protect himself, I lost my balance and fell over again all Bambi-legged.
‘It’s not what it looks like!’ he yelled. He couldn’t have chosen his words more poorly, more stereotypically. Mick was pushed back to the front door that he’d just come through and Viv slumped next to me. She found the torch, and shone it on me, running it from my head to my toes as I shielded my eyes.
‘Katie, are you okay?’ she asked, her voice strangled.
‘I’m fine,’ I said unconvincingly.
‘What was he doing to you?’ she asked quietly.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He was just pulling me up from the floor.’
She swung the torchlight onto Mick’s face, and he threw his hands up to his eyes.
‘What’s wrong with you, woman?’
‘What’s wrong with me?!’ she growled and then started to cry. I put my arm around her, instinctively and heard Mick step away.
‘How could you?’ she said into the dark.
‘I didn’t bloody do anything,’ he said.
‘I’m fine,’ I added. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Is that what you think of me, Viv? Eh?’
Viv swung the torch back into his face.
‘You’ve never been able to keep it in your trousers,’ she spat. ‘I don’t know what to think any more.’
Mick swung the front door open and stormed outside, slamming it behind him. We stayed in the dark, me swaying, until eventually Viv led us into the kitchen and I went to the loo while she boiled water for tea on the old gas hob. She looked so much older in the torchlight, her shoulders hanging heavily with deep shadows tugging at her face. We drank in near silence and after I had sobered up a bit, she helped me upstairs. She must have known we’d been drinking, but I think she was too preoccupied to care. I went back inside Paul’s room and stumbled around. The Z-bed was still in front of the window, the wind still whipping at the glass. Paul’s bed was against the opposite wall and I stubbed my toe and swore loudly.
‘What happened?’ Paul asked and I heard him sit up in bed, his mattress creaking.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened.’
‘I heard Mum shouting. Did Dad come home?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He was drunk and he’d been out late and he—’ I stopped myself. ‘Paul?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Your mum thought he’d tried it on with me.’
‘What?’
‘He didn’t. I promise. No-one ever has and no-one ever will.’ I started to cry. Horrible drunk indulgent tears.
‘All those girls are getting boyfriends and having sex and they’ll go on to fall in love and get married and what about me? Will anyone ever love me?’ I sobbed, surprised by what I was saying, the drama of it.
‘Of course you’ll get a boyfriend and have sex and get married. Look at you. What about me? I’ve never had a girlfriend, never even had anyone interested in me.’
‘Your time will come,’ I said.
‘W
ill it? Because what if it doesn’t?’
‘What if it doesn’t for me?’ I asked, sitting down next to him on the bed, trying to get things back to my own little slice of drama.
Paul reached down to the floor and fumbled to find his half-finished bottle of beer.
‘Alright then,’ Paul said as he raised his drink in mock toast. ‘Here it is: if we’re not married by the time we’re thirty, let’s just marry each other.’
I snorted and found an empty bottle to knock into his. ‘Yeah, right,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’
He stayed silent for a moment. ‘I mean it, Kate. Let’s just do it. Let’s make a vow, right here.’
‘Really? Are you sure?’ I asked as my hollow laughter faded into a wavering smile.
I heard him move. ‘Deadly. Are you?’
I thought for a few moments, the blackness in the room somehow swirling. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, why not?’
For a moment we said nothing.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘if we’re going to end up together anyway. . . maybe we should just get it over with?’
‘It?’
‘Yeah, it.’
Paul didn’t say anything for several long seconds. Eventually he took a huge gulp of his beer.
I undid my jeans. I wriggled out of them and tripped over slightly as they fell to the floor. I heard him hold his breath but he didn’t move so I took off my T-shirt as well.
‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked, and I didn’t know if he hoped the answer was yes or no.
‘If not you, then who?’ I said, and unclasped my bra.
‘Always you,’ he said, and he pulled his T-shirt over his head. ‘Always you.’
The next day, after having sex with the best and only friend I’d ever had, I left at first light without saying goodbye. Trees lay across roads like they’d been ripped apart by giant hands. The stream, churned black with mud, lay flat and still. The bodies of fish dotted the surface.
I walked home, stomach lurching, overflowing with liquid. I climbed between the starched sheets of my double bed and stayed there, occasionally shuffling over to my basin to throw up.
I didn’t visit the Loxtons’ house for a week. I knocked on the door, unsure how Viv would view me. Paul opened up and immediately coloured red, right through to the tips of his ears.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Alright?’ he asked, looking at his socked feet.
‘Yeah, you?’
‘Yeah. Want to come in?’
Paul told me Mick had gone for good. He was staying with a woman in Taunton. ‘What choice do I have, Vivian?’ he’d apparently said.
‘Did your mum tell you what she—?’
‘Yeah,’ Paul grimaced. ‘He didn’t really try it on, did he?’
‘No, he really didn’t. I fell over, that’s all.’
‘I don’t think that really mattered to Mum. She says she’s been in denial about his “womanising ways”,’ Paul used air quotes. ‘But when she actually thought that he could have done that, with you, she was like, God, if I think he’s capable of that, I can’t do this any more.’
‘Fuck. I can’t believe it.’
Paul shrugged. ‘I guess it was always on the cards, but she’s never actually booted him out before so. . .’
‘Yeah,’ I said, rerunning the stupid mishap in my mind. ‘He really didn’t do anything. He was drunk but. . .’
‘And you? How drunk were you?’
I paused. ‘Not too drunk to remember what happened.’
He looked at me, just quickly. ‘I wasn’t sure when you’d come back.’
‘Sorry. I just—’
‘Felt really fucking weird?’
‘Felt really fucking weird!’
Paul and I did not repeat the activities of that stormy night. Whether Viv knew what had happened between us, or just recognised me as a growing young woman thanks to the confusion in the hall, she no longer thought it was appropriate for me to stay on the Z-bed. And this was fine with me. It had taken time for Paul and me to find our feet on the new ground. It had taken time for me to stop seeing him in a painfully naked light, to forget how he looked with no clothes on in the dawn light as I crept out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
November 2012 – Thursday afternoon
We have the heating on full but the wind whipping around outside makes me shiver. Earlier we went for lunch by the harbour, sheltering from an angry, churning sea, foaming and frothing and spitting so hard it hit our feet. I’m glad to be tucked away inside now, back in my lounging-around clothes.
Paul comes in and stands watching me in the kitchen as I grab our local bits and bobs out of the fridge and rummage for knives and chopping boards. He doesn’t say a word or make a sound, but the air shifts slightly. A twig scratches at the window and I shudder, imagining a chill despite my socked toes grinding down onto the heated floor as I reach up to the highest shelves. I know he’s still there. I move self-consciously, awkward under his gaze. I try to imagine his thoughts as he looks at me, his wife of nearly ten years.
Paul has always been a watcher. He has incredible stamina for just waiting it out. I had to have an operation under general anaesthetic years ago. The nurses told me gleefully that he had sat and watched me the whole time. From the moment they brought me back up from theatre, to the second I woke up. They said he didn’t move.
‘I don’t think he even blinked!’ one of them had laughed.
‘You’ve got a good one there,’ another said, overstepping a mark that I was too foggy to care about.
At the time, I doubted he did blink.
I can still sense the silent shape behind me, but it’s only the increasing volume from the kids in another room that gives away the fact he’s no longer watching them. By the time I’ve turned around, unsure what I want to see on his face, he’s gone again. And the distant hum of a bollocking bubbles through the walls.
‘But she—!’
‘Daddy! He—!’
‘Dad! She said—’
‘Izzy, you’re not a baby any more, you can’t—’
I bend down to get another chopping board out of the cupboard. Paul comes back in and hovers just behind me as I stand up. I hear him take a breath before he places his hands on my hips and moves close to me. He murmurs into my hair and I can’t make out what he’s saying.
‘Hmn?’ I breathe, turning my head just slightly.
His lips touch my ear as he whispers, ‘This weather reminds me of The Big Storm.’
I close my ears, lean back into him just a little. I’m not quite sure what to do because he never normally initiates anything like this when he’s sober. It’s always me. It’s always been me, even when it’s his idea. The thought catches me, the thought that maybe it wasn’t like that, and he was just going along with it. But he seems to mean it now. I wonder if someone else has awoken this in him. I don’t know what to believe, the handwritten letter scrolling through my mind like unwanted subtitles.
His breath feels hot even through my shoulder-length hair. I push back against him again ever so slightly, surprised by how much I don’t want him to move away from me. It’s been a long time and it could be the last time. His hands move up from my hips and I hold my breath. I can’t help but wonder if it makes it easier for him that I’m facing away. My eyes cloud with tears, just as he moves one hand up under my top and traces my bra.
Just then, an explosion of noise comes down the hall and bursts into the kitchen. Paul pulls his hands back and jumps away from me as Izzy tears in and leaps up at him. He catches her, bewildered.
‘Dad,’ pants Harry.
‘What did you do?’ Paul snaps at Harry.
Izzy’s smile drops.
‘Nothing,’ Harry says, furrowing his brow just like his father and looking down at his feet. ‘There’s a seagull,’ he almost whispers. ‘It landed on the windowsill and we thought you’d like to see it.’
‘Oh sh—, I’m sorry Harry,’ Paul says, following th
e kids back out of the kitchen without saying a word.
I exhale and stand still for a minute or two, catching my breath before I start to slice pieces of cheese and arrange them on the slate board I found.
1999
It was a kitchen encounter that changed things between me and John Silver, by then my boss. I’d worked at TMC for six years at that point, moving from eager junior to trusted senior. He’d replaced Andy Dowell as head of client services after the former left to spend more time with his family, i.e., was fired following an argument with the CEO.
Our team had been working late on a pitch, but the others had gone home as nothing useful was being suggested by then and we were just getting steadily drunk on company booze.
I went into the kitchen to make a coffee and sober up for the journey home. Then I saw him in the doorway with that look on his face. A kind of hunger. A look I saw many times over the next year or so.
John was handsome, late thirties, slightly greying at the temples, married. He was thickening around the middle but gym fit with big shoulders, big arms. He was taller than me, and many men weren’t. Aren’t.
He’d mentored me early on in my career and I’d always enjoyed his attention and guidance. I know, it doesn’t take Freud to unpick that one.
Well, anyway, that was how our affair started, in the kitchen at the office while working late. Never feels like a cliché when you’re in it. From there it was winks in the foyer and fabricated client meetings in a hotel an expensed cab ride away. Sex in the office kitchen and the disabled toilets. Kissing in the lift. And the best part was, he expected nothing more from me and could give nothing more to me.