Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel

by Dorothy Koomson

  So I couldn’t share this with him. It hurt him enough that he wouldn’t be a father—he hid it, but I knew it was something he wanted—so why burden him with something that was my fault and was only now starting to hurt?

  Gray has a sound, you know that?

  It has a sound and it has a texture. It sounds like a noise so loud you can only hear it when you’re quiet. It feels like huge bales of cotton wool and it smothers you. It fills up every orifice and smothers you so you drown on dry land. It deafens and drowns you.

  Black is not so hard to figure out. Black isn’t as bad as people make out. Blackness is just dark. Grayness is around all the time. When it’s light out, when it’s dark out, gray is still there, waiting to slowly, carefully, gently creep over you. To make you not exist. You never know it’s happening until it’s too late. Until you can’t breathe and you can’t see and you can’t hear and you can’t feel.

  My life was gray.

  I had to stop it.

  I had to stop the grayness from taking over.

  No one understood, of course. It was happening to them, I could see the gray around the edges of their lives, but they didn’t notice. Or they didn’t want to notice. They pretended everything was fine. They would stand by the photocopier, talking and laughing, and pretend they couldn’t feel the grayness hanging over their shoulders. I could see it. I would stare at them, willing them to notice and to do something; I would stare at the grayness and will it to go away. It had already taken hold of my life, I didn’t want it to take over theirs.

  I didn’t tell them, I had to help them. Show them the best way to do things. I wore red and yellow and green to work. I wore blue eyeshadow, red lipstick. I wore my red dress. I wore my yellow shoes. I wore my green headscarf. It showed them that they didn’t have to give in to the gray. Even I, who had been invaded by it, could escape.

  I didn’t fit in, apparently. That’s what they said when they “let me go.” I had been a wonderful office manager for five years, but my interests obviously lay elsewhere so they were paying me a lump sum and wishing me luck in my future endeavors. It didn’t matter. I was losing the battle against the gray there anyway. At home, I would be able to concentrate on my battle.

  I could win against the gray.

  If I didn’t have to worry about other people, I could remember why the gray had started to pick on me and I could fight it. I could win if I had the time to fight back.

  There was a lot of gray in the cemetery.

  It stretched for miles. I walked around the place, looking at headstones. Reading them. Seeing who had lost the fight. How their battle was explained away in a few lines. A life reduced to a few lines chiseled into stone. It didn’t seem right. The headstones should be proclaiming how these people lived, how they died, how they made a difference in the world. What was the point of trying if this was all that you were reduced to in the end: meaningless words on a stone.

  I always lingered over the stones that said “loving mother.” I would never be that, would I? If the gray won, they would never say that about me. What would I want them to say about me? Would I want them to even bother?

  CHAPTER 13

  I want normal again. I want OK again. Is that really too much to want? For everything to be normal?

  Maybe it is, because the way Leo came about was not normal in the everyday sense. Maybe this is happening because Leo was never meant to be mine.

  BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

  BUZZZZZZ! BUZZZZZZ! BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

  My eyes snapped open, startled awake by something. The main light was on, my sweaty cheek was pressed up against the pages of a psychology tome I’d been making notes from and half the duvet was on the floor, half of it twisted around my leg. I looked at the clock: 2:07 a.m. Had I been woken up by a sound, or a dream? Sometimes my dreams did that, forced me upwards into wakefulness, where it took me a while to get my bearings.

  BUZZZZZZZZZZZ! came again and I sat up, my eyes wide with shock. I untangled myself from the duvet and, tugging on my dressing gown, I rushed out to the wide corridor of my flat and snatched up the intercom phone.

  “It’s me,” Mal said.

  “Oh,” I replied and pressed the key button to let him in.

  Mal hadn’t visited me at 2 a.m.—actually, past midnight—in years. Rarely since he’d met Stephanie and never since they’d moved in together and then went on to get married. It wasn’t so much that I was dispensable, or that he wouldn’t if the mood took him and he had something pressing to tell me, but I had explained to him at length that Stephanie wouldn’t appreciate it. Keith didn’t mind if he was on night duty because it would mean I wouldn’t be alone. But Stephanie wasn’t as secure about my friendship with Mal as Keith was. Even now, I knew, she occasionally gave me sideways looks that told me she was suspicious of me; sometimes waves of doubt about my feelings for her husband would tumble off her.

  Opening the door to Mal told me that it wasn’t a social visit.

  He could barely stay upright. His hair stood on end, his tie was loosened and lay lopsided around his open top button. His suit jacket and trousers, although navy blue, were stiff with dark patches; his light blue shirt was also stiff and darkened. Blood. Dried blood. I reared back internally, bile gushing to my throat, my stomach spinning in on itself.

  “Steph’s had an accident,” he said, his voice a fragile whisper. “She’s in the hospital.”

  “I’ll make you something to eat,” I said as I brought him inside.

  I knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything else because he knew nothing else. We had a shorthand for speaking about such things. From the incidents with Aunt Mer, we knew we had to give the important pieces of information as soon as possible. If he knew she was going to be OK, he would have said she was fine as soon as he told me she was in the hospital; if she wasn’t going to make it, he would have told me straightaway. He didn’t know anything more than he had told me.

  I didn’t ask what had happened, why there was so much blood, if he had been there when it happened, because it wasn’t important. He needed comfort. He needed a good feeding.

  While I put on the rice, he stood in the corner of my kitchen leaning against the fridge. All the while I breathed through my mouth so I wouldn’t have to inhale that sickening, dirty, metallic stench of blood. I defrosted frozen vegetables, I opened tins of tomatoes, I fried onions, I mixed in the tomatoes, I squeezed in tomato paste, and, in between, I talked. I talked about my current assignment, I talked about finishing with Keith only to get back with him hours later and start thinking of finishing with him again. I talked through my worries about who was misappropriating stock at the restaurant. I talked and talked because I talk too much. I talk too much because I had learned from a long time ago that the last thing Mal needed in times of crisis was silence.

  We didn’t eat.

  The plates of freshly cooked food sat on the wooden side table in the living room, while I sat on the sofa, Mal curled up with his head resting on my lap. I stroked my hand over his hair, and I talked and talked until we both fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 14

  I noticed his eyes first.

  Clouded over, a storm of pain and agony rolling in them.

  I knew then, instantly, that something had happened to his mother. Poor Mal. I moved to comfort him, to climb out of bed and into the inviting well of his lap, to wrap my arms around him and cuddle him and love him better. I couldn’t. Couldn’t move. Something was holding me back. Down.

  When I looked, around my forearms leather straps were secured, holding me back, holding me down. Around my wrists, bandages, holding me together. I flopped back onto the bed, stared up at the white ceiling. Sighed. Oh. Right. That. Here.

  His eyes were still on me. I could feel them, resting gently on my profile, like he often did with his hand before he kissed me.

  I don’t know why you bothered, I thought at him. I couldn’t say it out loud, they listened to everything you said here. Listened, wrote it down, mad
e a big deal of it. Even throwaway lines that someone would laugh at somewhere else became as important as the Holy Grail here.

  I knew what he was thinking: What?

  Not why? What?

  He knew why, he was thinking what? What was the trigger? What made me do this? He knew why I did it, but not what made me do it. Yup, that was what my loving husband wanted to know: not why, what?

  “I found the chocolate. And the cigarettes,” he said. He made it sound as if he’d found class A drugs or something. Every woman needed chocolate. Everyone knew that. It didn’t mean anything. And if I wasn’t smoking in the house, around him, if I wasn’t making him inhale secondhand smoke, what was the big deal about me smoking? They were only cigarettes, not wacky baccy or anything.

  “I should have noticed,” he was saying. “I should have noticed the signs. I was so wrapped up in work and trying to get the promotion, I didn’t realize how much you needed the serotonin and the nicotine. I’m sorry.”

  Were you always this dramatic? I asked him inside. He made this sound like a big deal.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’d left your job?” he asked.

  I didn’t tell you because I knew you would react like this. You wouldn’t understand about the gray. You would think something was wrong and you’d bring me here.

  “You’ve been pretending to go to work for six weeks, Steph. I don’t understand why. If you weren’t happy there, I wouldn’t have made you stay.”

  No, you would have watched my every move.

  My wrists were throbbing now I was awake properly, fully ensconced in the conscious world. I hadn’t done the job properly. If I had, this wouldn’t be happening. I wouldn’t be feeling guilty and like a failure on top of everything else.

  “What can I do, Steph?” he asked.

  “Water,” I croaked. I didn’t realize until I tried to speak that my throat was parched, scratchy. They’d probably stuck a tube down there to purge my stomach of the undigested pills. They were never gentle. I’d watched it being done, and a couple of times I’d been mostly conscious when it’d been done to me, and it’s as if they didn’t realize that the lining of your throat was really rather delicate and would be raw and sore from having things brutally shoved down it like that.

  The water glugging into the glass was theatrically loud, it hurt my head in deep-down places. I wanted to cover my ears, but the restraints wouldn’t let me. He held the straw in place so I could raise my upper body and take a few sips. The water was warm—room temperature—but good considering how dry I felt. Desiccated. I felt so dry that I might blow away like dust particles on a small gust of wind, or if he breathed a little too heavily near me.

  “Did you read my diary?” I asked him carefully through my scratchy throat. If he had found the chocolate, my secret supply that kept me going, kept me happy, he must have found my diary. Tucked away in shoeboxes on the top shelf of our wardrobe. He never looked in there. He occasionally made a comment about the number of shoes I owned, but he never knew until now that along with the shoes, each of them had a few bars of chocolate, most had a packet of cigarettes, and the box with my leopard skin boots also had my diary.

  When he didn’t reply, I turned my head to look at him. He was fiddling with the straw in the glass, his head bowed. He was avoiding my eyes because he was ashamed.

  “You had no right,” I said to him.

  He continued to play with the straw, ignoring me. “They want you to see a psychiatrist,” he eventually said.

  I frowned, shook my head in disbelief. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said. I had been trying to tell the doctors, nurses and orderlies this every time I woke and found I was in here and bound to a bed, but they wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t let me free. There really is nothing wrong with me. Over the years, they’d been trying to do this to me. All of them, my mother, my doctors, and now Mal. They’d all been trying to make me go and see someone who would shrink my brain, make me talk to them and make me seem crazy. When I wasn’t. I just felt things. That was all. Everyone felt things. Psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, the whole lot of them all made a big deal out of nothing.

  “They won’t let you out until you talk to someone,” he said.

  “They can’t keep me here against my will,” I said. My voice, although raspy, sounded weak and insubstantial. I was raging against this, but I couldn’t express that. I was tied down. And my voice wouldn’t express my indignation.

  “I signed you in here,” he explained. “Remember, you said I should if this happened again? So I did. And I want you to comply with the treatment they suggest. I know that’s what you’d want as well. If you could see clearly enough.”

  One thing was certain. I was trapped here. Stuck.

  “Who have you told?” I asked. I had to find another way out. But I couldn’t let Mal know that. I had to play along for now.

  “Just your family,” he said casually.

  Just my family. JUST my family. “Oh, shoot me now,” I said. My mother would come here and try to clean the place, in between crying and praying and wondering what she’d done to deserve this. My father would think I was wasting everyone’s time and I was a willful brat who he hadn’t beaten enough when I was a teenager. Mary would sit and glare at me, resentful that I didn’t do the job properly and that she’d had to take time out of her busy life to come here—like I’d asked her to come or something. And Peter would show up in a few weeks, probably after I’d been discharged, and would be genuinely surprised that the world hadn’t waited for him to catch up.

  “They were really worried. I told them to come in a few days, when you’re feeling stronger.” I suppose that was something. “I ring them every day and tell them how you are.”

  “Have you told Nova?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t told anyone except your family. I won’t tell anyone else.”

  “OK,” I replied, feeling my body relax. “Thank you.” It was odd thanking someone for not gossiping about me.

  “What about me, Steph?” he asked quietly, his voice as small and weak as mine was. I turned my head to look at him. He had shrunk in on himself a little; sudden anguish and torment were gouged deep into every part of him. “I know you didn’t want to be here anymore for that moment, but what about me? What am I supposed to do without you?” He pressed his forefinger and thumb on the bridge of his nose, tightly screwed up his eyes. “How am I supposed to carry on if you’re not here?”

  I swung my head back to look up at the ceiling; his words were seeping into me like the gray had begun to do. What I did wasn’t fair to him. But it wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about anyone except me. Like everyone else, he couldn’t see that. He couldn’t understand that. You never could until you were here. Where I was. Until the gray had so taken over, you had to stop it. And sometimes, the only way to stop it, to stop the slow, agonizing suffocation, was to leave. To walk through the door marked Exit, knowing gratefully that there was no way back.

  It was the end.

  “I need some sleep,” I whispered and closed my eyes.

  I heard him stand, place the water back on the table on the other side of the room. He came back to me, pressed his lips to my forehead. “Love you,” he whispered and left.

  When I opened my eyes again, I looked at the door, wondering how I’d be able to get out of here. He was still standing there. Tall, silent, strong. He stood by the door, staring at me. He smiled at me with his lips curled into his mouth before he turned around and left.

  CHAPTER 15

  F or two weeks I made him dinner every night.

  I rearranged my shifts so I only worked days, so every night I could make him dinner. It was always a Ghanaian meal: beef stew; rice with kidney beans; plantain; fish soup; fu-fu; gari; black-eye bean fritters; jelof rice. The food of our childhood, the food Mum would feed us up with during good times and bad.

  I did it because I loved to cook. And I did it because I could see that the smell of the
food, the taste of it, would relax him. Would pull him out of the fog of fear that surrounded him when he arrived at my flat after having seen Stephanie. He didn’t tell me what was wrong with her, I didn’t ask. Instead we ate and we talked, and we fell asleep on the sofa.

  On the sixteenth day he didn’t turn up, so I knew she was home. I knew she was fine.

  CHAPTER 16

  I want a baby,” I told him.

  It had been bubbling away for a long time. It was the last trigger and I could see that I could prevent it happening again. Talking about this trigger would make it less scary. He could do what he always did, he could try to face it with me. Of course he couldn’t, not completely, but knowing he’d listen and understand made me feel less alone in all of this.

  “I’ll pick you one up at the supermarket next week. Or do you want me to go down to that new delicatessen? They’re organic and ethically sourced.”

  I laughed, despite myself, and then punched him lightly on the arm to ask him to take me seriously. “I’m being serious,” I said to him. “I want a baby.”

  His footsteps on the walking trail stopped and he paused. He said nothing for a while, just stared off into the vista, a breathtaking tessellation of green that made up the Welsh countryside.

  “How long have you felt like this?” he asked.

  “Six months, maybe a year.”

  It clicked in his mind, behind his eyes: What.

  Loss and disruption, two huge triggers for me. When I was thirteen, our dog, Duke, died and six months later we moved from London to Nottingham. I was lost up there, I found it hard to make new friends and I missed Duke so much. Nothing was ever really the same after that.