Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  I don’t like teeth. The crunch of them when people eat, the way people pick food from between them, and even the way my children’s teeth – teeth I should love unconditionally – look like fractures of skull dripping in their hands.

  Our kids are all about the tooth fairy. I think it’s a fairly revolting idea but I go along with it for them. They find it charming, the idea of a little fluttering Tinkerbell building her palace out of teeth. It turns my stomach. I can almost smell the decay when I imagine that outsider-art palace made from stolen enamel, its walls covered in yellow stains and left-over crumbs.

  I didn’t have the tooth fairy growing up. I didn’t need the money but I’m pretty sure it was more that my parents didn’t need the hassle. Because it is a hassle. Fumbling around for the right coin (who has cash any more?), staying awake and remembering to tuck the money under their sleeping heads, extracting the carefully wrapped tooth, disposing of it.

  On the other hand, I really like Father Christmas. It’s a role I enjoy. The Dutch have an untranslatable word: Gezelligheid. It roughly means cosy, convivial, the kind of feeling when you go ‘hmn’ and snuggle into a cushion and feel affection for the people around you. I think this word applies to the Father Christmas myth. And I definitely remember stockings when I was little, pillowcases with chocolates, oranges, bracelets and little toys. The idea-cum-memory makes me feel cosy. I didn’t know who put them there and certainly didn’t give my parents the credit at the time. By the time the myth burst for other kids at school, Christmas stockings had long stopped for me.

  It’s different now. Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, for fuck’s sake.

  It’s non-stop gift-o-rama, non-stop delight and surprise and myth. While I’m sure the kids don’t believe it for as long as they used to, they expect the presents nonetheless. It’s an almost joyless transaction by the time they reach Harry’s age.

  Do I sound jealous? Perhaps I am a little bit, but I don’t begrudge my children. Perhaps the better a parent I am, the more of the list I manage to tick for them, the angrier I feel for the girl I once was. Perhaps that’s it.

  With dinner done and the kids in bed, after two glasses of wine I do fall asleep on the sofa and wake up at 11 p.m. to the calypso trill of my alarm. Paul is sitting on the armchair facing me, a second bottle of wine sits finished next to him. He has his head in his hands and doesn’t flinch at the sound of my phone. For a moment, I think he must have nodded off too but then he looks up, tugs his fingers through his greying hair and pinches the bridge of his nose.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ he says slowly, feeling for the words with his tongue.

  ‘Alarm for tooth-fairy duties,’ I say. ‘Want to do the honours?’

  ‘How about I pay the money and you do the parenting?’

  ‘Just like usual then,’ I say, smiling but he doesn’t smile back.

  ‘Oh God, I thought you were joking,’ I say. He ignores me.

  ‘I didn’t imagine myself like this,’ he says.

  ‘Paul?’

  He staggers a little as he stands up and reaches into his pocket, scattering loose change as he pulls his hand back out.

  ‘What’s the going rate?’ he slurs.

  I’m surprised that he’s drunk, and feel alarmed and left out all at once.

  ‘How much?’ he says, sharply.

  ‘A pound.’

  ‘Here you go.’ He passes me the coin and then drops to his knees to pick up the rest.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to do it?’ I say gently, even though he’d probably tip her out of bed if he even attempted to find the tooth under Izzy’s pillow. He doesn’t reply.

  ‘Paul,’ I say, a rising sense of panic in my chest. ‘I’m sorry she showed me first, I should have thought, I should have—’

  ‘Should have what? You’re her mother, it’s normal.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Just be a fucking tooth fairy,’ he spits, and then throws a handful of coins into the far corner.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  1989

  Paul and I had prepared for our GCSE exams together, so it seemed strange that we weren’t actually taking them in the same school hall.

  My father had stopped coming home for weeks on end by 1989 and Viv’s house could sometimes feel scrunched up with bitterness so Paul started to come to mine that spring and summer.

  From May onwards, we didn’t have to go to school as we were expected to revise at home. Most of Paul’s schoolmates had already peeled away from classes long before that. We’d sometimes spot them on the swings in Castle Cary, smoking and jumping off onto the tarmac while little kids looked on. Or eating chips as they swaggered around town.

  Most of my classmates from Sunnygrove were taking extended holidays in the south of France or America, some of them with a tutor in tow. Paul and I didn’t aspire to joining either group. We liked the solitude, the long days stretching out in front of us. We liked being together.

  In some ways, 1989 felt like that very first summer eight years before, transplanted to my domain. I would wear shorts and sit on the grass by the horse-head fountain, enjoying the fresh smell and the tickle of the bright-green turf on my legs. Paul would sit under a big sun umbrella, pasty arms sticking out of his Talking Heads T-shirt, thick jeans boiling his legs. We’d revise, while Mrs Baker brought us drinks of lemonade and sometimes, bizarrely, boiling hot cups of sweet Camp coffee – at our request. Even now the smell of chicory will zoom me back there so that I almost remember Pythagoras’ theorem or the exact process of photosynthesis.

  Paul never slept at my house, though. It wasn’t just that Mrs Baker would report back to my dad, who, even while absent, was very old-fashioned. It was also that Paul had never slept at my house in the years before, so it would be a new thing, an almost exotic thing. A thing that would have to be acknowledged. Rules that would have to be established, unmentionables that might have to be mentioned.

  That summer, we revised like revising was our job. We studied every day, for the whole day. And only at the end of the working day would we ‘play’. And our play was mostly drinking a few Italian beers from my dad’s cellar and reading until Paul bid me goodnight. Italian beers and reading! I look back and just think, God, we were so old.

  All the revising was worth it. Paul did better than me in his GCSEs, the best in his school by far. He scored six A stars, two As and a B in French. We have the local paper clipping somewhere from when we went to collect his results together, though he hates to see it. Me, smiling at the camera and holding up his results. Him out of shot, refusing to take part because of that B.

  After the bell went at the end of my last exam, I never stepped foot inside Sunnygrove School again. I even waited the extra day to receive my results by post instead of collecting them in person like we had with Paul’s.

  My father was packing for a flight to Poland the morning my results arrived. I hovered by the door to his bedroom as he opened his suitcase and lay it on the bed. I read my grades to him as he moved slowly and deliberately between drawers, wardrobes and case.

  He nodded and ‘mmned’.

  ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘that’s a relief. Well done.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, picking at a knot on the doorframe and avoiding his eye. ‘So anyway, I’d like to go to Yeovil College’.

  ‘College? Why not sixth form at Sunnygrove?’

  ‘I really don’t want to go back to that school. I want to do proper modern art and textiles but they only do fine art at Sunnygrove.’

  ‘But it’s a much better school, and you’ll need more than art to do well in your life, you need to think about the wider picture.’

  ‘I’d rather not do A-Levels at all if it means going back to that school.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I won’t go back to Sunnygrove, no matter what.’

  My father placed the last of his starched shirts into the case and clipped it closed. The clicks were rhythmic and con
trolled. I balanced on one foot and then the other, unsure whether to storm off or apologise.

  ‘Do you know how old I was when I left school?’ he said, eventually.

  ‘No,’ I said. I should know that, I thought.

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘Oh.’ I moved my weight back to the other foot but that one didn’t feel right either so I swapped again.

  ‘And do you know what qualifications I left with?’ he asked, as he went into his en suite bathroom.

  ‘None?’

  ‘None,’ he said, as he returned holding a toothbrush in a travel case and then reopened the suitcase slowly, all the clicks in reverse. ‘And I’ve worked hard to overcome that deficiency ever since.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘I’ve worked this hard so that you don’t have to overcome that kind of handicap, Kate.’

  I paused a moment, drinking in the sound of his voice saying my name. Dancing, just briefly, in his parental gaze. He’d never said anything like this to me before and I, unfortunately, was about to burst the bubble by arguing. ‘But I’ve got GCSEs now, I’ve already done better than you did at school. I did well.’

  ‘I heard what you said. You got three As and six Bs, you think that’s enough to take your foot off the pedal?’

  ‘I got six As and three Bs.’

  ‘It’s not about these exams, it’s not even about the next ones. It’s about university, who you know, which circles you mix in.’

  ‘Mum went to art college, so why can’t I?’

  He stopped clicking his case shut again and looked up. Not at me, at the wall in front of him. I saw his shirt tighten as he took a deep breath.

  ‘She did,’ he said. ‘And look how that ended.’

  Autumn 1989

  My father never relented and I never backed down. Instead, when I was home, we slid around the house avoiding each other or made polite small talk in communal spaces. Like colleagues. He left for the Eastern Bloc during the week when my college enrolment was due. I took that as implicit permission and the subject was never raised again. I realised this was a glimpse into my parents’ marriage. When difficult decisions arose, one or both of them left.

  So I got my way and made my very first life choice. I went to the local college to do A-level art and textiles. But I also took business studies and English literature, my love of books still strong. Business was a compromise no-one had argued for, but I thought my dad would be relieved. Maybe even proud of me, on some level. And I was saving him eight grand a year in school fees too, which must have been good timing given the late-night hissing I heard from his office.

  Paul also applied to Yeovil College to do English literature, English language and history. We filled in the forms together, me making a mess of my first copy. I still struggle with forms, the pressure of the neat little boxes sending my handwriting sprawling. Paul says I have Form Dyslexia and we laugh, but I’m actually quite embarrassed about this specific brain fart. But we made it, the forms were filled in, handed in and accepted.

  We talked about what we’d wear on the first day. Just the idea of wearing ‘own clothes’ rather than – in my case – a royal blue blazer and ridiculous boater hat was intoxicating. I felt like I could reinvent myself, paint myself in new colours. The only sticking point was Paul. He had borne witness to exactly who I was. Even without my uniform he could still place me in it. I wondered if he felt the same, as I’d suggested a full outfit for him that he said he agreed with, but then showed up at the bus stop on the first day, wearing the same old Smiths T-shirt and jeans.

  We’d gone to Yeovil on the morning bus together for the first registration, coughing through the cigarette smoke that thickened as we approached the back seats. I looked at the cool kids with their Embassy fags and their peroxide hair and their acid-house smiley face T-shirts. I looked at Paul with his fey gestures and eye rolls and for a split second, I wished he’d go away. Just for a beat, swaying as we found seats, I wished I could sit with those cool kids and turn away from Paul for the rest of the journey.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  November 2012 – Friday morning

  I leave Paul sleeping. He has a silvery sheen on his skin that he only gets when he’s hungover. His throat rattles as he snores, his mouth wide open.

  After my cat-nap yesterday evening, I ended up awake for much of last night, running over the strange spat we had just before bed. Each time telling myself that Paul was just drunk and it meant nothing, then starting the cycle again.

  ‘I didn’t imagine myself like this.’

  Well who did? Whoever does? I tried to brush it off and file it away last night but instead I kept working at it, chewing it like a jagged fingernail.

  I was still weaving in and out of sleep when Izzy screamed with delight at 6.30 a.m. this morning.

  ‘The tooth fairy came!’

  Now she and I are downstairs as Izzy sits tonguing her gap and staring at the TV screen, nightie stretched over her knees. Harry is still asleep. He used to be up with the birds but just recently there has been some teenage foreshadowing. Grumpiness, hormonal spikes, sleeping in. I miss little Harry.

  I make another pot of coffee, my senses sludgy. I briefly consider taking Paul a cup, sitting on the bed and asking him to explain himself. But I won’t. I doubt he even remembers. In the grand scheme of things, it’s less than nothing.

  Ten years tomorrow.

  Despite everything I have to say tomorrow, everything that might happen, I still hope Paul likes his presents. Especially the Dylan Thomas book. I know he doesn’t have it already, I checked and checked again before I bought it.

  He started his collection when he was still at university. Tucking the books into their protective covers, squirrelling them under his bed, away from his flatmates. Those books numbered significantly among the few belongings he brought up on the train from Bristol when he moved. They were lumped into the back of a taxi at Paddington and then carefully positioned in his small room in my flat.

  That first night together again, he’d unwrapped them, gingerly but deftly. Told me about their backgrounds, how to keep them dry and not snap their delicate spines. I remember the smell of their protective perfumes. So unique then, and so familiar now.

  His growing collection now has its own little room, which we grandly and only half-jokingly call The Library. I’d narrowed the anniversary gift options down to three other books but then I stumbled across a brief article about Dylan Thomas’s Mousehole connection in a Time Out guide to Cornwall. It felt too serendipitous to ignore.

  So I opted for Under Milk Wood. I’ve always loved the name but never really took to the play inside. The beauty of The Library, of course, is that there is no expectation that I should read through it. In fact, touching the contents is positively discouraged.

  I checked so many times to be sure Paul doesn’t already have this book, because it seems like one he would have prioritised. He’s always loved the dark romance of Dylan Thomas.

  Of course, not all of the titles in The Library are rare or even particularly old, but I can’t help feel they’re all chosen, the whole collection curated and guided by some private part of Paul that I’m not privy to. Every one of those books is there because they mean something.

  Ten years tomorrow. Ten years of quiet, solid marriage. But really, it’s been so much longer.

  1999

  Paul’s rise at TMC throughout 1999 and into 2001 didn’t bring out the best in me. And I’m not proud of what it stirred, a kind of sibling agitation. I was proud of him and how well he did, which was patronising. And I was jealous of how easily it came to him, which was petty. I felt like I’d handed it to him, which I had and I hadn’t. And I secretly smarted that I hadn’t been given constant thanks and recognition, which would have been ridiculous and uncomfortable for both of us. If I’d been accused of any of that at the time, I’d have denied it to my grave, seething at the accuser but it weighed on me, the realisation a little too late that I wanted to keep this part of my life, th
is new life, to myself.

  Back then, at the turn of the millennium, my own career at TMC was at its peak. To be rattled by someone so junior to me was beyond silly but it wasn’t just anyone, and it was clear early on that Paul would not stay in the little leagues. The month that Paul was boosted to copywriter, shedding his junior stripes, I became group account director. I celebrated with other execs at the top of the Oxo Tower. The following week Paul was taken to the Fitzrovia pub in Goodge Street after work by Colm and the rest of the creative team to celebrate his own promotion. When I heard his key in my lock late that night, I made a point of flouncing into my room and banging the door just as he arrived to hear it. Had I actually wanted to be invited? Looming over the creative team like some unwanted dark apparition from the ‘other side’? God knows. We never mentioned it the next day or beyond but I think of it often, when I’m struggling to sleep and spending the time berating myself for a catalogue of past fuck-ups.

  When Paul had first arrived in London, with his small collection of neatly packed belongings, it had been fun. For the first few weeks we’d slipped into an intensity much like our old summer holidays. Playing each other CDs from the intervening years, remembering old jokes and Vivisms, talking about university, all the stuff we’d missed.

  Neither of us had stayed in contact with any of our college friends and neither of us had any school friends to keep in touch with, so we talked a lot about ourselves. We played with young Kate and Paul like they were little marionettes we were watching, controlling with our remembered and partly constructed narratives. Remember when? And then you? And then your mum said. . . and then, oh I can’t breathe, I can’t stop laughing.

  For those early weeks, I’d been happy to spend all my evenings with Paul because we had so much to catch up on, and because he wasn’t going to be staying for long. And he really wasn’t.