by Sophie Duffy
I should be telling Steve all this but he knows it already. We were in it together, only we came out of it differently. He found his life. A new life. And sometimes I hate him for it. And then I hate myself for hating such a good man. I don’t tell Shelley. I don’t tell anyone. I’ve only just got round to telling myself.
Later, a rare hour on my own at home, after I have cleaned the loo and done the washing and am about to hoover the stairs, there is a ring at the door. There’s something about the ring that suggests Amanda. When I approach the door I can see an Amanda-shaped head through the frosted glass.
‘Hello, Amanda. Come in.’
‘I will if you don’t mind, Vicky.’
She bustles through the door, scarves swaying, bringing in a bundle of cold with her.
We go through to the kitchen where Amanda accepts a glass of water after much persuasion. She asks after the feeding and I reassure her it is going fine, just the one at bedtime now since Imo has discovered the delights of strawberry porridge for breakfast. But I don’t think that is why Amanda is here.
‘Is there anything in particular I can do for you, or is it just a social call?’ I join her with a glass of water only I indulge myself and have a splash of Ribena in it.
‘Actually, this is a pastoral visit.’
‘Oh?’
‘I wanted to check all’s well with you.’
‘I’m fine. The kids are fine. Steve’s fine.’
‘Where’s Imo now?’
‘Out with Roland and Dorota.’
‘It’s good that you let them help.’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Well, I know you found it hard to let people take care of Olivia when she was a baby.’
‘I liked looking after her.’
‘We all need a break.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘That’s good. Only, how’s the whole... curate’s wife thing. I mean, I know it can be a bit of a culture shock.’
‘I’m still trying to get used to it. There’s a way to go.’
‘A marathon not a sprint.’
‘Something like that.’
‘And Steve. Is everything alright with him?’
‘In what way alright?’
‘Well, you know, it’s hard, this new life,’ she sips at her water. ‘You must let me know if I can help. And make sure Steve talks to Desmond if he gets in too deep with anything.’
‘In too deep?
‘Some parishioners can be overbearing. They can demand too much attention.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Just watch who you spend time with.’
I remember the young girl that haunted Amanda and Desmond’s early marriage. I remember the warnings but that was then, a different time. ‘I don’t think either of us would put ourselves in a vulnerable position.’
‘Well, then,’ she says. ‘That’s good.’ She finishes her water, the hedonist, and wafts back down the hall, off on another mission. On the doorstep, she turns and says: ‘Don’t let the Devil get to you.’
I look at Amanda for a moment; her earnest rosy face. ‘He’ll have to join the queue.’
She manages a smile and then is gone, swaying down the street in a haze of clashing colour.
When I return to the kitchen I notice one of her scarves draped across the seat. I pick up it up and fold it neatly. The smell of Charlie is so overpowering I feel quite nauseous.
Thoughts for the Day: Do I leave a smell behind me when I leave the room? Is it Harpic? Flash? Cillit Bang? Is that my legacy?
March 5th 1978
Martin has gone to tea with Heidi. He brushed his hair because Heidi’s parents are posh and live in a big house in Blackheath. Heidi’s mum does French cooking because she is French and they are having orange duck. We are having shepherd’s pie (my favourite!) and there will be more to go around. Hurray.
Heidi’s dad came to pick Martin up. He beeped his horn. Mum said ask him in but Martin said there wasn’t time and ran out the house. Mum, Dad and I watched out of the window as the car pulled away.
Nice motor, Dad said.
He should have introduced himself said Mum. He couldn’t wait to get off.
Martin has fallen on his feet there, Dad said.
Mum went into the garden to empty the potato peelings.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Monday 10th March
The story according to Steve:
It should have been like any other Saturday. A day off from plumbing, unless I got an emergency call-out. Vicky would usually have a list of jobs for me – a wobbly door handle, a blocked waste. Then we’d go out somewhere. The park. Swimming. A trip to Bluewater. We hadn’t done much of that yet, what with a new baby, but we could always manage the park. Pushing Rachel on the swings, feeding the ducks. Crystal Palace or Greenwich. Sometimes we’d drive over to Dulwich and see Martin and Claudia but that could be stressful. Martin was always pleased to see me, some job he needed doing, too tight to call out a plumber and pay the going rate. I didn’t mind. He’s family. I just wished he and Vick didn’t argue so much.
Sometimes we’d go down to Worthing for the day, though that would usually be on a Sunday. Saturdays were better off staying in London where we only had to battle with local traffic and we could do all the stuff that needed doing – shopping, washing, all of that. Vick was on maternity leave but I did my fair share. It’s not easy with a new baby and a three-year-old but we were getting into a routine. Thomas was great, fitting into our family, and we were chugging along quite nicely.
We woke up late. I was checking the time on the bedside clock – 8.43 – when Vick sprung out of bed like a ghost was after her. She leapt from the room, her feet barely touching the carpet, the door rattling behind her, an empty coat hanger on the back of it. I hate that; the clanging gets you right in the stomach. A few seconds later and I heard her scream. A terrible noise. Far worse than any stupid coat hanger. Animal-like. It went on and on and I never want to hear that sound ever again, as long as I live. But what was to come... I found her in the box room, the pink nursery. I was supposed to paint it. Blue for a boy. It was on the list. I’d almost made a start the week before but got a call out to Lewisham. A leaky loo. Not an emergency at all. It could just have easily waited till the Monday but it was an old dear and not wanting to make a drama out of a crisis I fixed it in ten minutes. But then there’s your travelling time, there and back, and sorting your stuff out, getting changed and washed up. It all takes time, precious time, so I never got started but we decided, because he was doing so well, we’d put him in the room anyway, in his cot, and we said the painting can wait, let’s go with it, go with him on this one. And as I went into his room that morning, I was telling myself I’d make a start today, I’d make it all right, all good, but then Vicky’s scream was still echoing, colliding off the pink walls and I saw her, standing there but her face belonged to someone else and she was holding someone else’s baby. A blue, still, dead baby. Not our Thomas. It couldn’t be him. Surely he was still sleeping in his cot. I couldn’t help myself: I looked in the cot. It was empty. Did I really have to touch the place where he’d been lying? Did I have to pull back the covers and check he wasn’t there, hiding? I went to Vick instead, and touched the boy in her arms and he just lay there. Not the usual gurgle or frog-kick of a leg. His eyes were all wrong, half-open and staring at nothing.
I can’t even bring myself to talk about the next part. Except that Vick had calmed down somehow. She handed him to me and went to phone an ambulance because that was what had to be done, she knew that somehow. He was cold. Lifeless. It was clear that Thomas, the Thomas we were getting to know, had left his little body behind and gone somewhere else. And in the slow, agonising days that followed, that was the part that was killing me: I had no idea where he had gone.
Two weeks later, after the funeral, after the endless official stuff, after we’d had a few days away in Worthing to give Rachel some support from her grandparents, I had to go back to work. W
e had to try and get back to some kind of pretend normality but I suspected that was never going to happen for me. Vick was so strong, getting on with things, making food for us, making me eat, making herself eat, though I could see she was losing weight and her colour wasn’t right. But she was carrying on, getting Rachel to and from preschool. It was all I could do to drink a cup of tea or get in the shower. But she told me I had to go back to work. It was the holidays so Vick didn’t have school for a few weeks, back from maternity leave, with no baby. She said it wasn’t good, both of us moping around the house. I needed to work. So I accepted a job. A callout to Dartford. What happened next changed things again. Changed things completely.
Steve tells Karolina this as she calls round for a cup of tea and a chat, an Alpha follow-up, because she’s still got questions. (Haven’t we all?) I leave them to it and go and sort out the airing cupboard.
The story according to Rachel:
They don’t talk about him. Sometimes I wonder if he was like really here or whether, for a bit, I just had this imaginary friend. But deep down I know he lived. I remember how he smelt of cream. Uncle Martin uses it for his scaly skin. I’ve seen him rub it in his hands, round his wrists. I smelt it when he wasn’t looking. He’d left it on the coffee table and I unscrewed the lid and sniffed it and Thomas like floated back to me so I knew he’d really been here, in our house, up in Imo’s room and lying on his mat on the carpet under a baby gym, a different one to the one we’ve got now. Where Imo’s always getting wedged cos she’s like so fat.
Rachel tells Jessica this in our front room, after school, while they are playing a game on the laptop. My laptop. A laptop that I almost forgot existed. An old, clumpy paving slab of a techno-thing that used to be so precious to me. They are playing a golf game. Yes, golf. Jessica is a big fan of golf and drags Rachel down with her.
I am unseen to them, behind the half-opened door, scrubbing – as quietly as possible, not easy – at a patch of hall carpet where Jeremy has trodden in dog poo. But I can hear their every word. And I scrub all the harder, not caring if I am detected, not caring about anything except stopping the tears, stopping the pain in my chest, the sick in my stomach that threatens to pull me over and knock me into a ball, like a hedgehog. A prickly, stupid, flea-ridden hedgehog.
The story according to Dorota:
I may not do church but I do God. He is there when you cry out, listening, even if you think he is far away, stuck on a cloud. He hears you and he feels your pain. But you cannot lie on the carpet in the hallway. Your children will see you and think you have gone round the bend. And it smells of dog mess. Where is your ‘Shake-n-Vacky, Vicky?’
Dorota tells me this while sitting me down at the kitchen table and pouring me a glass of her sherry, the bottle still untouched from Shrove Tuesday which shows she does ‘do church’, keeping those promises.
She and Roland have called by on some pretext, hand in hand and all loved-up. Is she checking up on me?
‘Are you checking up on me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
My heart, now calmer, has another blip. So. I need to be checked up on, do I?
The story according to Jessica:
I remember your baby brother. He was so cute and your mum let me hold him once on your sofa, the old one with the flowers. We were watching Dick and Dom and your mum was looking after me because my mum had a headache and Dad was at work. I remember holding onto him really tight because I didn’t want to drop him on the floor and you told me to be careful, I was squashing him and your mum said I was doing good. I was dead jealous of you cos you had a baby and I didn’t. I was jealous of your mum cos she never shouted. And then Thomas wasn’t here anymore and I wasn’t jealous. I was really sad. But then my mum left and I was jealous again that you had a mum and I didn’t. But then I got Tamarine. She can be bossy sometimes but that’s just cos me and dad are slobs.
Jessica is sitting at the kitchen table drinking milk with Rachel, and eating her way through a packet of Rich Tea. Imo has gone up for a bit of shut-eye and Olivia is glued to Raven, along with Jeremy, who has taken a liking to his younger cousin as she tidies up after him. So this allows me, once again, to eavesdrop on a private conversation, on this occasion under the pretext of changing a hoover bag outside in the poky hall. But I feel justified in my snooping if it gives me such insight into an otherwise closed shop. On hearing her words, I want to wrap my arms around Jessica but then she and Rachel will know what I’ve been up to.
Dorota has left, taking Roland with her, still hand in hand, feeling she has put the world – my world – in order. But there is only one way I know how to put things in order and that is with my hands, a cloth and some kind of cleaning implement, electrical or otherwise.
As I put in a new hoover bag, I wonder about three things:
If I had been a passenger in Steve’s van that Saturday morning he got a call-out to Dartford, would I have shared in his life-changing experience? Or would it have affected me differently? And I know it is stupid to wonder that, because I wasn’t a passenger in Steve’s van that Saturday morning. I was here, at home, with Rachel, changing a hoover bag or the sheets on a bed. I was carrying on my life as normal, as normal as it can be when you are recovering from the death of a child. If you ever recover. Steve says he is in recovery, like an alcoholic. It will never be over but it will get better than it was. Life without a drink, without Thomas, will be more bearable. Because of what happened that day, and what has been happening to him every day since then on his new walk with God.
Shall I go in the kitchen and ask Jessica if she wants to see her mother? Shall I talk to Bob or would he be offended? I don’t want to aggravate neighbourly relations. Maybe Tamarine.
Shall I get a Dyson and be done with bags?
The first of these three things I can’t do anything about. The second and third will have to wait.
Thoughts for the Day: Where do hedgehogs catch fleas from? Why aren’t fleas put off by those spikes? I wish I had the tenacity of a flea.
Chapter Thirty: Tuesday 11th March
So where is Martin? Bill (or his wife) has kicked him out and he has crawled back home. Not to Claudia. Not to me. But down to Worthing, to Dad. The term is over for him and he is taking advantage of the break to crack on with his research. Only he does find time to come back to London for a night, squeezing in a visit to his son as an afterthought. The main reason he comes is to attend tonight’s Alpha meeting.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw him there, Vick. I never thought the day would come when Martin willingly stepped foot inside a church.’ Steve is making Ovaltine while I sit at the table darning socks, one of my gifts that few people in this country still have. But at the mention of Martin’s name I stab myself in the finger with the needle, cursing inwardly.
‘Don’t tell me it’s a miracle,’ I sigh, sucking on my finger.
Steve gives me a sympathetic look. ‘Poor Vick.’ He rummages in a drawer for a plaster and once found takes off the wrapper and wraps up my finger. He is gentle but my finger throbs, its very own heartbeat. ‘I wouldn’t dream of using that kind of language with you, Vick. But God is working here somehow.’
‘What did he say?’
‘God?’
‘No, Martin, you muppet.’
‘Ah, well. Not a lot. He was making notes.’ Steve hands me a mug, sits down opposite me. It’s a quiet evening. No wind, no rain, the kids sleeping peacefully above. The monitor blinking on the dresser.
‘Notes?’ I remember Martin that day in church, creeping in at the back, scrawling in his book. ‘And did he give any clues as to what he was doing there?’
‘He made the odd flippant comment to try and put a spanner in the works. There’s always one like that. And that’s good. That’s what Alpha’s about, daring to throw up questions and admitting we don’t have all the answers. Only God has all the answers.’
And where’s Martin now? He has left his son, and whizzed bac
k down the motorway to his father. Our father. Who lives in Worthing.
I’m simmering over this when the phone goes. I barely hear it, barely register that Steve has left the room. He re-enters a couple of minutes later and I switch back on.
‘Who was that? At this time?’ According to the clock it’s gone 10.30, the cut-off for being worried when the phone goes and my heart doesn’t even jump. I don’t know what I should be more worried about, the call or my non-responsive body.
‘That was Desmond.’ Steve sits down quietly at the table and takes a deep breath, practising what he preaches, inhaling and exhaling, from his stomach not his chest, to maximise energy, to keep calm and focused. His face looks slack, loose, like it’s struggling to keep its shape. Its Steve-shape.
‘What is it?’
‘Desmond’s had a call.’
‘Who from? Has there been an accident?’
‘No, no. No-one’s died. Nothing like that.’ He takes my hand; to reassure me or himself, I’m not entirely sure. ‘It’s Karolina.’
At the sound of her name, I get a flash of her languishing on the sofa, surrounded by all that gumph and wonder if I should have done more to help her. Maybe she’s got really ill and turned to Desmond and Amanda. Maybe she’s in hospital. Maybe... what... ?
‘... Why would Karolina phone Desmond?’
Steve breathes in and blows out his breath so I feel its warmth in my face, smell the malt of his Ovaltine. ‘You’re not to worry when I tell you,’ he says, worrying me straightaway. ‘It’s all a bit weird. I only saw her tonight.’
‘So she came? She’s not ill?
‘She looked a bit dishevelled. Loads of make-up, like a Goth sort of thing. A blonde Goth. She was very quiet, subdued and I’m not sure Martin helped. He was sat next to her and snorted when she did speak up once about suffering.’
Martin.
‘What’s Martin done? Has she made a complaint about him?’