The Bottle of Tears

by Nick Alexander

  She sits at the dinner table and watches Bertie, who only a few months ago was full of beans, as he miserably pushes his food around the plate. And she remembers, as if his life were flashing before her eyes, every major milestone, from the first time she held him to her breast, through his first day at school, to this moment of sadness, of failure, here at the family dinner table. ‘What’s wrong, Bertie?’ she asks him over and over in her mind. ‘Just tell me, for crying out loud. You can tell me anything.’ And sometimes the effort of not saying those words, of not shaking him until he speaks, of not locking him in his room without food until he simply lets her love him again, makes her weep – something she manages to do silently, in their bedroom, out of sight.

  So, in a way, she’s grateful, she’s hopeful, even, when Martin dares to ask the forbidden question, even if she knows, with the logical part of her brain, that he shouldn’t. And she watches Bertie every time: she holds her breath and waits to see if, this time, he will crack – if, this time, he will say something. Because there is truly nothing she wouldn’t fix, nothing she wouldn’t do, in order that this child, her son, her flesh, should get his smile back.

  But Bertie, in his misery, is seemingly more determined than any of them. He shuts himself in his room (though the lock is broken and won’t be coming back). He slumps sullenly at the dinner table. He sits zombie-like in front of the television set or stares disdainfully at Martin as he tries to buddy him, or with sad hopelessness when his father attempts to bully him instead. And his only answer to any question is ‘boarding school’. He hates it here, he says. He needs to get away. And still he won’t say why.

  It’s so sudden and hurtful, and so inexplicable, that it drives Martin to the edge of insanity. Victoria has never seen her husband look so tired, so confused, so broken.

  Victoria, for her part, was at the gates of lunacy before this happened, and now feels, if anything, a little less mad than before. Bertie’s pain takes her out of herself, it would seem. It gives her something real to think about, something urgent to focus upon. It has reminded her of her one true purpose in life, and she stops thinking, for whole days at a time, about the menopause, about HRT, about cancer.

  But remembering one’s purpose is not to know how to achieve it, and she’s failing – she knows she is. The low-key atmosphere the psychiatrist advised is anything but present and, in fact, as the days go by, the family home comes to feel a little more like a pressure cooker every day. With Martin’s mood swings becoming almost as difficult to manage as Bertie’s misery, she begins to wish that Martin would go on holiday on his own.

  She understands his resentment against the boy, of course. She feels his mounting fury as if it were her own. But the mixture of so many emotions, the seemingly mathematical product of three people’s mood swings at this time of crisis, begins to feel overwhelming, and she starts to long for simplicity instead. She starts to believe that, alone, with her son, she would perhaps stand a chance of finding out what is wrong. Alone, maybe, she can fix this.

  What’s more, she can’t help but notice that Bertie’s alienation is more marked – far more so, in fact – towards Martin than it is with anyone else. And she can’t help but wonder, though she hates herself for it, exactly why that would be.

  She has always had nightmares. They have polluted her sleeping hours so faithfully since childhood that they mostly feel like normal. That these have increased in intensity and regularity since Bertie’s suicide attempt strikes her as little more than inevitable. But these last few days they have morphed into horrific scenes involving not only Bertie, but Uncle Cecil as well. Could her subconscious be trying to tell her something?

  When, on the fourth morning after Martin’s return, she wakes from one nightmare involving Bertie and Cecil, only to doze off directly into another about Cecil and Martin, and when the simple fact of Martin laying one arm across her makes her scream as if her life were in danger, both in the dream and apparently outside of it, too, she knows she needs to act.

  She has to find a way to convince Martin to go away, to leave them alone for a while. She needs time with her child to find out what is happening here or, at the very least, to find out if she can find out what is happening here.

  Martin feels ashamed, not of anything he has done but of his feelings themselves.

  Because, as Victoria drives away, and as he heads towards the airport entrance, his overwhelming feeling, other than shame, is a sense of relief.

  He feels utterly, shockingly, almost ecstatically relieved to be escaping the family home.

  There no longer seems to be a single aspect of his life at home to compensate for everything that is lacking. And this is not, he thinks, how married life was supposed to be.

  His wife, once young and fun (if never actually funny), is turning, before his eyes, into a zombie. Her face, once smooth and beautiful, now looks permanently pinched. Her eyes, once so green he wanted to dive into them, look glazed or vacant or, occasionally, both. And when she doesn’t look vacant, she looks as if she is worried about some secret thing which can never be discussed.

  He has no idea, he has realised only recently, what she actually does all day. The years of nappies and feeds are long gone, so, other than shopping and bleaching worktops, both of which she does assiduously, he really can’t work it out. Even sex, once the thinly spread glue which held them together, has run dry.

  Now his son, his beautiful baby boy, apparently hates him as well. Could there be any rejection more painful for a man than rejection by his wife and his son?

  He feels cheated, really – that’s the thing. He feels as if he signed a contract for X, only to find himself with Y. Or, more specifically, he feels as if he signed a contract for X, Y and Z, only to find himself with nothing whatsoever.

  He works hard at his job, he really does. He works long, gruelling hours for hateful clients who have no respect for anything or anyone except money and those who have more of it than themselves. These rich Saudis, these billionaire Kuwaitis, who want British nationality not because they respect anything British, not because they see value in an ancient civilisation or a three-hundred-year-old democracy or in a thousand years of English literature, but because British nationality is another thing they can buy, therefore why not buy it?

  So he works long, hard hours, yes. He has worked long hours for years, and the truth of the matter is that, if he didn’t have a wife who likes Valium and shopping, and if he didn’t have a son who hates him so much he prefers the horrors of boarding school to home, he would be rich enough to never work again. What’s the point of them? he wonders, hating himself a little more for thinking it but thinking it all the same. What’s the point of Victoria? What’s the point of Bertie? What do they contribute to the family, to the country, to anyone?

  If it weren’t for them, he could buy a little open-topped Jeep, he thinks, hitching his backpack up a little higher, and spend the rest of his life driving around Asia in shorts. It’s so bloody unfair.

  The doors of Gatwick Airport slide open to greet him, and as he steps inside, he glances back to check that the BMW really is out of sight, that Victoria isn’t even now swinging back to tell him she’s changed her mind. But no, the car has vanished. He really has escaped.

  So he feels relieved, yes. Utterly, shockingly, shamefully relieved.

  Two weeks in Spain, alone. It’s going to be incredible.

  And perhaps, just perhaps, by the time he gets back, a little of the nonsense which has been swamping his life will have blown over.

  As Victoria drives home, she runs a tiny movie over and over in her mind’s eye. It’s nothing more than her last few seconds with Martin, that moment when he waved goodbye, when he blew her a kiss and turned away.

  He had looked sad, of course, but it had been a lazy, fake kind of sad which had almost made her laugh. And as he turned and hitched his backpack higher, there had been a youthful ease to his movement which she had understood and recognised. That’s the troub
le with living with someone – it becomes impossible to dissimulate. After twenty years, you can read each other like a book.

  He’ll leave her when he gets back – that’s the next thought that comes to mind, and a lump forms in her throat and her eyes mist as she imagines the scene. ‘Being in Spain gave me time to reflect,’ he’ll say, ‘and I think we’d both be better off if we went our separate ways.’

  ‘This hasn’t been working for either of us,’ he’ll say, and how could she argue with that?

  She had dreamed of so much for them, once upon a time. She had actually believed that their life together would be fun, would be an adventure. But fun and adventure turned out to be challenging for her, though she doesn’t know why that’s the case. So they have settled into this life which is not a life, which, as time goes on, becomes less and less like a life and more like a facsimile of a life – a work of fiction or a piece of theatre, and not even a very good one at that.

  She thinks, for no apparent reason, of a video that Max had shown them all a few Christmases ago. It had been an advert, on YouTube, and Max had liked the music.

  The video, a three-minute advert – or an ‘infomercial’, as the Americans would call it – had been for a brand of motorcycle, or perhaps for camping equipment, she can’t quite remember which. It had shown a group of friends on motorbikes riding through pine forests, the sun slanting through the trees. It had shown them camping by streams, and the film had seemed realistic – these were not particularly young, or particularly beautiful people – and, in fact, the woman in the film, who looked a lot like herself, had even seemed distinctly worse for wear as she washed her face in the stream, in the cold morning light.

  ‘Isn’t that cool?’ Max had said once it was over. ‘I love that song.’

  And they had all agreed that, yes, it was cool. ‘It’s very pretty,’ she had commented. ‘I wonder where they filmed that?’

  But that little film had troubled her for weeks. It had even invaded her nightmares a few times, yet she hadn’t been able to work out why; she hadn’t been able to decode what it was about that film that had unsettled her so profoundly. Because she had never liked camping and had certainly never dreamed of going anywhere on the back of a motorbike. She is, if anything, terrified of the things.

  But today, suddenly, unexpectedly, she understands. She doesn’t know why that film has popped back into her mind but, today, she gets it.

  She pictures Martin with his backpack, hiking enthusiastically away, and she understands that the film upset her because it was about dreams – not dreams of comfort, or dreams of wealth, or dreams of safety; not dreams of cars or furniture or luxury, not dreams, in fact, of any of the things they have spent their lives pursuing. No, what the film had shown was a dream of . . . of . . . being there, perhaps – of simply being present. Dreams of riding through a forest and shivering, dreams of seeing your breath in the early-morning air, dreams of waking up to too-cold feet and washing your face in an icy river, of being alive, quite simply.

  It’s been so long since she’s felt alive, that’s the thing.

  She should have gone with Martin, she thinks, briefly. They all should have gone together. Only she couldn’t go with Martin. She isn’t the hiking, camping, stream-washing kind of woman, is she? She doesn’t even have the capacity to be that person momentarily, even if Martin, apparently, does.

  So yes, she thinks, he will leave them. He will come home and say, ‘I’ve had time to think and I’ve realised what’s been missing. I’ve realised I haven’t been happy, I haven’t been living. I haven’t been alive. So, I’m leaving you.’

  And who could blame him for that?

  It’s just after eleven when Victoria gets home. Marge, who has stayed the night, is bashing the vacuum cleaner into the skirting boards and doesn’t notice her arrival.

  ‘Mum?’ she calls out from the doorway to the kitchen. ‘Mum!’

  Marge jumps visibly and turns to face her. ‘Lord, you nearly gave me a heart attack,’ she says as she struggles to balance on one foot in order to kick the off switch on the Dyson with the other.

  ‘Why are you hoovering, Mum?’ Victoria asks, once the machine has whined to a halt.

  ‘Oh, I spilt a little sugar,’ Marge replies. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Right,’ Victoria says as she shrugs her way out of her jacket. ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry too much. They’re coming round later today to rip those worktops off.’

  ‘They’re coming today?’

  Victoria nods. ‘I’ll be so glad to see the back of them. We’ll have brand-new ones by Saturday. And then the new washing machine and dishwasher are coming on Monday. It’s going to look lovely by the time Martin gets home.’

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ Marge says. ‘But what’s wrong with this dishwasher?’

  Victoria shrugs. ‘It’s looking a bit tatty,’ she says. ‘I thought it would be nice. Plus, the new units are grey, so the new one will match. I thought Penny might like the washing machine, to be honest. I think hers has been playing up. It is a good one, after all. Maybe you could ask her for me?’

  ‘Maybe you could ask her yourself,’ Marge says. ‘But, to be honest, she’d probably just be insulted. You know what a chip she has on her shoulder about inheriting your cast-offs.’

  Victoria nods. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. She’s so prickly these days.’ She notices some grains of sugar lurking beneath the kitchen table and can’t help herself. She takes the handle of the Dyson from her mother and kicks it back into life.

  Once the floor is clean and the vacuum cleaner has been stowed, she fills the kettle. Marge, now sitting at the kitchen table flicking through Elle magazine, asks her if Martin got off OK.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Victoria says. ‘I just left him at the drop-off point. He was in a hurry. We were running late. But I assume so. Any sign of Bertie?’

  Marge shakes her head. ‘No, he’s still sleeping,’ she says. ‘Chloe’s the same. She sleeps all the time. I wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘Hard not to worry,’ Victoria says, ‘the way things are.’

  ‘I did peep in on him. He’s OK,’ Marge reassures her.

  ‘Good,’ Victoria replies, pouring ground coffee into the glass pot of the French press. ‘I’ll wake him up in a bit. He has his hospital appointment this afternoon. Coffee?’

  Marge nods. ‘That would be nice. Is this appointment with the . . . the . . . um . . . doctor?’ she asks. She refuses, for some reason, to say the word ‘psychiatrist’.

  ‘Yep,’ Victoria replies, ‘with the shrink.’

  ‘Are you going to talk to her about this boarding-school nonsense?’

  ‘I’m certainly going to try.’

  ‘I suppose you do need to at least know if they think it’s a good idea,’ Marge says, ‘though it all sounds like madness to me.’

  ‘I was thinking about it on the way home, actually,’ Victoria says. ‘I mean, if that’s what he really wants, well . . . I’m tired of fighting everyone about everything. I was thinking about Penny, too. I need to phone her. This whole . . . thing . . . has gone on too long.’

  Marge smiles serenely and nods. ‘That’s a good idea,’ she says. ‘Forgive and forget.’

  ‘I don’t know about forgetting,’ Victoria says. ‘But we can’t not talk to each other for ever. It just gets silly after a point.’

  Marge nods. She chews her bottom lip, a gesture that Victoria knows from experience means that she’s considering saying something delicate.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks, leaning back on the worktop and tipping her head sideways.

  ‘It’s just that . . . well . . . if you are going to phone her, there’s something you perhaps need to know.’

  Victoria’s brow creases. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, but if you’re going to phone her . . . well, she might tell you. And I don’t want you getting angry – not when you haven’t spoken for ages.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘
The thing is, I spoke to her the other day, on the phone, about Bertie.’

  Victoria screws up her features and shakes her head. ‘Oh, Mum!’ she laments. ‘You didn’t tell her? I specifically told you—’

  ‘Not about . . . you know . . . the hospital,’ Marge interrupts. ‘I didn’t tell her that. I know you don’t want her to know about that.’

  ‘So what, then?’

  ‘I just said about Bertie wanting to go to boarding school.’

  Victoria closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. ‘Oh,’ she groans, ‘I can just imagine how that went. I can just imagine how smug she was about our own son wanting to leave us.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Marge says. ‘But the thing is, she knew already.’

  ‘She knew what?’

  ‘That he wanted to leave home.’

  Victoria straightens her body, suddenly alert. ‘She what?’

  ‘Penny knew that Bertie wanted to leave home,’ Marge says again.

  ‘But how? Did he tell Max?’

  ‘No,’ Marge says confidentially. ‘And that’s the thing.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Well,’ Marge says, leaning forwards and glancing down the hallway towards Bertie’s bedroom. ‘Apparently, Bertie asked Penny if he could go and live there.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Bertie asked them if he could go and live with them. In their house. In Whitstable.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘It was when we were down. In October.’

  Victoria opens her mouth to speak but then closes it again and shakes her head. She rubs one finger lightly across her lips as she struggles to take in this new information. ‘God, so now I have to phone her.’