Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  ‘We decided to go this morning, love. No need to wait if we weren’t fitting London in.’

  I took a breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. She held out longer than me and I started to cry into the silence until the pips went.

  ‘I know you are,’ she said finally. ‘I was just disappointed.’

  I pushed another coin in, took a breath and shook my tears away. ‘How did it go in Bristol, then? Was Paul alright?’

  She softened as she talked, telling me about Paul’s halls of residence and the ‘big bugger’ in the room next to him. She complained about Mick driving too fast on the way home because he’s ‘a man and they don’t know how to handle emotions’.

  ‘Was he alright?’

  ‘He’ll live. I’m sure a few pints will be helping tonight.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I miss the bones of him, Katie. And you, love.’

  ‘I miss you too. I miss you all.’

  I gave her my address and said I’d call again. My money ran out fast, the pips going far sooner than they did with local calls. We hastily said goodbye, my eyes prickling with fresh tears, and I marched back up to Tottenham Court Road and then into Leicester Square, watched over by the looming cinemas.

  I pushed against the wind, head down, and marched through Coventry Street into Piccadilly Circus. The iconic Fosters, TDK and Sanyo signs bigger and dirtier than they’d seemed on the TV. Back in 1991, I hadn’t known what Sanyo was; a few years later my agency worked on their account.

  There were crowds of people bustling about. Despite it being night-time, I felt like nothing bad could possibly happen somewhere so constantly illuminated. Maybe it was better that I hadn’t spoken to Paul that morning, I decided. That the Loxtons didn’t get to bring me here.

  I wanted to look forward, in a place that was just mine. I hugged my coat tighter to me. I felt a sense of relief and contentment spreading underneath the sadness. This was it, yeah, I was finally here. Adulthood.

  I had just turned nineteen, brave and free. I was ready to start living.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  November 2012 – Saturday morning

  We decided before we came to Cornwall that we’d go to visit the Eden Project during our stay. Everyone who has ever been to Cornwall bangs on about it so much that going there is practically a legal requirement. Naturally averse to tourist attractions but beholden to the kids, we’ve been putting the trip off all week. It ends up being our ten-year wedding anniversary before we’re agitated and sweating, wearing November clothes in a Mediterranean biome.

  It took an hour and a half to get here, the last couple of miles a grumpy car crawl. It’s easy to forget how vast Cornwall is.

  I woke up this morning feeling harassed. There was tension in my bones and my muscles were twitchy. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I just wanted to crawl somewhere quiet and lick my wounds. But at the same time, I’m agitated to just get on with it. Rip the plaster off.

  ‘What animals are there?’ Izzy had asked over and over on the drive here. In the end, after explaining the premise of the Eden Project ten thousand times, I snapped and said, ‘It’s not a fucking zoo, Izzy! How many times?’

  There was a horrible cold silence in the car after that. Izzy was tearful and chastened, looking at the back of her dad’s head for reassurance and solidarity. I could tell that Paul was unnerved by my mood, juddering the brakes once or twice but not saying anything directly. Meanwhile, Harry looked uneasy and fidgety. He was old enough to know that rips in the fabric of a family are often identified first through snapping and swearing. And he’d had more than one or two tense and tragic drives under his belt and those were to the south-west too.

  We didn’t hear about Viv’s illness until it was too late. Two years ago, our household seemed to fold in on itself at the same time that she did. Izzy was two and far too little to understand, but Harry had watched Paul and me warily, his dark brown eyes tracking us as we kicked doors, snapped at each other and swore over the tiniest misdemeanours. And then, worse, we were silent.

  We’d not seen Viv for a few months, not since Izzy’s birthday where she’d sat down in a garden chair and nodded off. We’d not called, or Skyped, or really even thought of her much since then, which I hate to admit. Harry was particularly bombastic around then, pumped up with little kid testosterone, and Izzy was still essentially a baby koala, gripped to me for hours at a time. And I have more hollow excuses too. Paul had been recently promoted. He was working longer and longer hours and all we wanted to do when he got home was share a bottle of wine, bitch about our very different days and then watch whatever box set we were working through at the time. I was going through one of my yoga phases, and also spending hours a day pointlessly fretting over which distance-learning course I should take to make myself feel like a whole person. (I applied for none in the end.)

  It wouldn’t have taken much effort to just pick up the phone, but it was still easier not to.

  And then the phone had rung just as Paul was coming in the door from work, earlier than usual. I had Izzy on my hip while Harry ate chicken dinosaurs and veg at the kitchen table, firing green-pea bullets all over the floor. The clatter of the landline by the door was so unusual that Paul jumped and I came out of the kitchen and into the hall to investigate.

  Paul lifted the receiver like he’d never seen it before and I danced from foot to foot trying to interpret the one-way conversation.

  ‘Oh, hi Dad. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, really, why?’

  ‘What is it?’

  And then his voice had grown small.

  ‘What? Mum?’

  Then he’d sagged like a dropped sack. ‘When?’ he’d whispered, strangulated, into the receiver.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘But we could have—’

  ‘But, Dad—’

  ‘I know. I know. We’ll be straight down.’

  ‘Okay. Dad?’

  ‘Tell her I love her too.’

  He ended the call and stayed there like a droopy sunflower. He lifted his head and, as I approached, he reached out and swooped Izzy from me and onto his chest, spinning around on his heel and walking into the lounge with her, his face buried in her hair. I trailed after them.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s Mum,’ Paul said, cut off by a crash from the kitchen. ‘I’ll tell you when the kids are in bed.’ I was stung by the arbitrary watershed and desperate to know. Instead I did as I was told, walking back to clear up after Harry, who had dropped his drink.

  ———

  The kids were finally in their beds before Paul spoke to me. He’d spent the evening either chastising or negotiating with them and as I came down the stairs from tucking them in, nerves squirming in my belly, he’d already opened a bottle of red wine and was holding a glass ready for me.

  ‘Mum has cancer,’ he said.

  ‘Cancer? Is she?’

  ‘Stage four. Lungs. It’s too late.’

  We drove down the next day. I don’t think Paul slept at all, he still hadn’t cried and I’d spent the night creeping away from the bed and into the bathroom to gulp tears into balled-up toilet paper. I didn’t get to cry first, that wasn’t fair.

  I offered to drive down but Paul wanted to; I think he needed to focus on the road and not the destination. I put the shared bottle of wine and his sleep deprivation out of my mind with gallows confidence. We were already living through The Bad Thing, we weren’t going to crash and die as well. I know, I know.

  The journey was slow and almost silent, even Harry – my fidgeting, chatty, sunny boy – knew to stay quiet. And Izzy had slept for hours in that dribbly, pink-cheeked toddler way. We’d got to the hospital mid-afternoon. The hospital in which Viv had worked her whole adult life. She was on the oncology ward, part of a new glass chunk on the side of the old building. She looked so tiny in the bed that I wanted to look away.

  ‘My boy,’ she croaked when Pau
l walked in. His knees buckled and he crumpled into the chair at her side and held her arm, sobbing. I hovered, Izzy in my arms and Harry huddled to my legs. Eventually, she looked up and searched my face with her violet eyes, ‘Hello, my lovely girl,’ she smiled. ‘And who is this beautiful little lady you’re carrying? This can’t be my Isobel, she’s huge!’

  Viv insisted that Harry and Izzy should lie on the bed either side of her. She asked about our journey and clung to their robust little bodies like life rafts.

  Harry brought her up to speed on his latest dinosaur information and Izzy sat on the en suite toilet with the door open to rapturous approval, then fell over, yanking up her training nappy and nearly sliced her forehead open.

  Paul attended to her while Harry swung his legs on the visitor’s chair. ‘These new rooms are nice,’ I said, unsure what the hell else to say.

  ‘Better than the crumbling old corridors we had when I first started here,’ she croaked. I reached over urgently and put my hand on hers, she closed her eyes and moved her other hand up to her chest, pressing it flat to her little gold necklace as brief tears scribbled out of her eyes.

  Mick arrived just as the kids were getting too fractious to ignore.

  ‘I’ll take them for a walk,’ I said to Paul but he looked panic-stricken.

  ‘No, I will,’ he said, scrambling up from the visitor’s chair to wrestle Izzy into the stroller.

  She’d writhed and twisted and turned and Mick had tried to entertain her by grabbing her toy cat, which was a disastrous idea. ‘My cat!’ she screamed, lurching back out of the stroller and onto the floor, while Harry jumped onto his knees to play with her. Viv tried to get out of bed to break everyone up so we left in a hurry, promising to be back tomorrow.

  ‘I don’t want to be a burden, love,’ Viv had said. ‘I know how long these things take, remember?’

  We stayed in a Travelodge outside Yeovil, which had been a Happy Eater in our day. Paul had walked up to the reception desk with his credit card in his hand when we first arrived. ‘How long would you like the room for?’ the woman behind the desk had asked, smiling and polite, the familiar Somerset voice sounding pantomime-ish to our London ears.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Paul said, suddenly looking at me. ‘I don’t know.’

  I told him to sit down and he nodded dumbly, doing as he was told like a child. I held Harry’s hand and plonked Izzy next to her dad, her head resting on his lap, thumb in her mouth. Her toy cat was tucked in the crook of her elbow, fluffy and clean back then. ‘Can we book for three days at the moment, and see if we need more? Do you have space?’ I asked, my voice low.

  ‘We always have space,’ she said – Rebecca, by her name tag – ‘just let me know what you need.’

  Viv died six days later, just after we’d left her for the day. We checked out of the motel and I drove us back to London in near silence.

  Before we left Somerset, Paul handed Mick a blank cheque for the funeral directors and gave him permission to make every decision. Permission that was more of a request. Mick had stood there with the cheque still in his hand, watching us leave. ‘Bye, Grandad,’ Harry had said, waving. ‘Bye, bye, bye,’ Izzy had sung as we wrestled her whirly legs into her car seat.

  Paul returned to work the next day and I was glad. I could cry and wail in secrecy, taking a subdued Harry to school, plonking Izzy in front of CBeebies, and just bawling my eyes out. I cried far more for Viv than I had for my own mum. Then in the afternoon, I cleaned myself up, made up my face and went to collect Harry from school. Paul worked until the kids had gone to bed. He returned home wild-eyed with commuter rage and grief, and then stared at the TV in silence.

  Mick called to let us know the funeral would be the following Tuesday. We trudged through the weekend, agonising over the logistics of travel and whether the kids should go.

  In the end, we left the kids with friends and drove down. We set off in the early hours, a cold black silence enveloping the car so totally that the sound of shutting the doors sounded like gunshots ringing through the street. We travelled in our funeral clothes, plunging down the M5 as the day grew blistering hot, the sky bright orange once the sun emerged.

  We arrived stiff and creased with gritty headaches from the sun. Agitated and angry. At ourselves, each other, her, Mick. It made no sense. Funerals are there to help it all make sense, but the moment just before the service starts is the very apex of confusion.

  Viv didn’t have a will, but as the house had been Mick’s all along, it just reverted to him. Viv had changed the locks after the storm of 1987 but she’d given him a new key long ago. We went there with him after the funeral. He wouldn’t stop babbling about nothing and no-one until the key went in the lock, then he fell silent and took an audible breath. It was the first time he’d been inside since she was admitted onto the ward for the last time. A huge hospital-style bed in the small lounge made me jump.

  It was Mick who’d taken Viv to hospital for the tests a few months earlier, Mick who’d been there when she got the news, holding her hand and asking questions for her. He barely left her side after that. His on-again/off-again girlfriend had left and he’d not really noticed. Said he didn’t care.

  Viv had found out she was ill earlier in the summer. Mick visited her daily, sitting and watching TV on the sofa in the lounge, later sitting on the edge of her divan upstairs and then next to the bed downstairs once she’d moved down there for good. He started staying over, telling the morning Macmillan nurse how Viv had been through the night. When the time came to move into the oncology care ward at the hospital one afternoon, Mick had carried her into the ambulance. And then he’d called Paul.

  Until that point of no return, he’d spent their time together making endless cups of tea, washing her face and reminding her about her medicines. He even did her laundry. She’d tried to teach him how to use a washing machine decades earlier. It had been a running joke. ‘When will I ever need to know that?’ he’d mock-grumbled, continuing to dump his concrete-crusted work clothes on the floor in front of the machine. He’d never had a machine of his own after they broke up, he said. He just used a laundrette when he was between girlfriends.

  The funeral Mick had planned and Paul had paid for was perfect. It was far better than if we had done it. Everyone had to wear something purple – Viv’s favourite colour – and they played sixties songs instead of hymns and had brightly coloured flowers spilling out everywhere, where we would have had prissy lilies and tea lights. The church was packed with colleagues from the hospital, patients and people from the village. None of her gypsy family came. I was disappointed on her behalf but relieved for Paul. He wouldn’t have been able to cope with an existential crisis on the same day that he buried his mother. To this day, he doesn’t acknowledge his Romany blood. Afterwards, there were sandwiches, pickled onions and Scotch eggs in the pub. That time, it was perfect.

  When the well-wishers and village nobility left, I helped collect up plates and made awkward small talk with Lorraine while Paul and Mick went to have a moment together by Viv’s grave.

  She was buried officially in her birth name, Vivian Priscilla Lee, but her gravestone, thanks to Mick, read: ‘Viv Loxton, devoted wife, mother and granny, missed by all’.

  If I can pinpoint a moment that things shifted between us, it was then. Unspoken questions formed in the back of my throat, which I swallowed back down to concentrate on being a perfect wife. A better mother. And still the questions remained. Perhaps I was looking for something when I found that letter after all. Perhaps way down in a secret part of me, I knew.

  It’s only just gone noon at the Eden Project but everyone’s blood sugar is dangerously low and if we don’t stuff the kids full of food soon, it’ll be carnage. We go to the Eden Bakery and I see Paul’s jaw jut at the sight of hundreds of people. But the food smells amazing and we all relax a bit once enough carbohydrates and dairy fats have been absorbed into our systems. I surprise myself by eating a huge doorstep sandwich and a
scone.

  ‘This is nice, Paul,’ I say, trying to focus on the moment and not the evening that awaits.

  ‘Yeah, it is quite nice,’ he says, and fiddles with some salt packets.

  ‘Happy anniversary,’ I say, but it’s almost a question.

  He kisses me on the lips, still frowning. ‘Happy anniversary, Kate.’

  ‘Eurgh,’ says Harry.

  2002

  In retrospect, I never recovered from the embarrassment of my bleeding belly derailing a creative meeting. And I never regained John’s respect. I could never recreate the cut-glass demeanour I’d spent years chiselling in front of the more junior staff, either.

  Paul promised that no-one outside of the room knew about my bleed but I didn’t believe him. Why would anyone keep quiet about something like that? Illness and gross incidents are bread and butter in a gossipy office. And besides, it must have raised questions: why was I bleeding from my guts when I’d been supposedly off with a stomach bug? I’d have asked questions.

  Once he bundled me out of the room that day, Paul helped me into a taxi and took me straight back to A&E. He called John on the way to let him know I was still ill and he was taking me home. I know full well that John must have heard all about the blood.

  At the hospital, after a long, embarrassing wait during which I covered my lap with a magazine that kept slipping from my sweaty hands, I was told I had a nasty infection. I was given a prescription for another bag of pills and stronger painkillers and told to rest.

  I had to take another week off, and actually take it off properly that time. The antibiotics and painkillers cleared up the bad flesh but I was feverish and struggled to sleep. Jugs of coffee and not much else got me through each day but it’s fair to say I wasn’t operating at full capacity.

  The daytime is the preserve of mums. Every TV show I flipped to was either for children or about children. Earnest doctors on morning TV talking about vaccinations or nappy rash. Strollers jamming the pavement if I shuffled out to buy milk. Everywhere I looked, the little ghost.