by Claire Allan
Part of me began to doubt myself. Had I read it right? Mark. Leaving. “Not working” and “nothing personal”. Nothing personal? We’d been married for four years. How the hell could it not be personal? I grabbed the letter from Rose and read it again. He had typed it. The bastard. He had sat down and switched on the computer and opened a file and typed it.
Kitty,
I’m sorry to do this. You will never know how sorry I am. But you must have known. You must have felt it too. We’ve not been working, have we? Not for a long time.
I have tried. I’ve tried to make it better but I don’t know – something in me has changed. It’s not you, Kitty. It’s not personal. I changed. I wanted more and I just can’t go on pretending what we have is good for either of us anymore. I know you won’t understand that and that you are probably angry but, believe me, you will understand. One day. One day you won’t be angry any more. One day, you will feel relieved that one of us had the guts to admit this before we went any further. At least we have no children to complicate things. It would have been worse then, for sure.
I’ve left work. It wasn’t working either. You know I hadn’t been happy for a while. I just need to be me for a little bit – to try more and to do more. I just feel as if I’ve not lived and I want to live a little. Please don’t try and find me – even Mum and Dad don’t know where I am. But I’m safe and I think I’m going to be happy.
Don’t hate me. I’m not a bad person.
I’ll be in touch when things have calmed down a little and when you have had the chance to realise this is a good thing.
I’m sorry.
Mark
PS There is no one else.
The words were no easier to read the second time around. If anything it just seemed a little more absurd.
“A breakdown,” Rose declared, switching the kettle on and lifting two cups from the cupboard (which she got right the very first time). “It’s a breakdown. I wouldn’t be convinced he means it.”
“It sounds to me like he means it.”
“That’s because you’re in shock.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s because he pretty much says it in the letter.”
“Your dad had a mini-breakdown you know, about ten years ago. You know, that time we went to Vegas and he came back with a goatee.”
“Facial hair is hardly on the same level,” I answered, lifting the letter and glancing over it again. It sounded so . . . well . . . wanky. So “I want to live a little” . . . what the frig did he think we had been doing over the last eleven years? It felt like living to me – falling in love, getting married, setting up in business, buying this house . . . choosing names for the babies we’d not even conceived yet. It felt pretty damn real to me.
That was when I cried, when I felt my eyes prick and my chest tighten. This was awful, there were no two ways about it. And no, I hadn’t felt things were wrong between us. Things were right between us. They were always right between us. We were one of those sickening couples who finished each other’s sentences and spooned together in bed every night and he would ask “What would I do without you?” Damn it, he’d asked me that last week. Little did I know he was plotting exactly what he would do without me, and not hoping we would never be parted.
I sat down, there and then, on the floor. I sat down before I fell down and I felt the numbness which had surrounded me for the last hour ebb away totally and the screaming that had been in my head screeched forth from my lungs until I actually felt as if I might stop breathing altogether. It wasn’t possible to feel this much pain and still be. Was it? I scrambled on my hands and knees for my bag and fished my phone out and hit the redial button again as if he would suddenly answer now. Surely he would know that I needed to talk to him. He was my go-to person in a crisis. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He wasn’t supposed to be the cause of the crisis. As the ringing tone assaulted my ears I pleaded internally, and then externally and very loudly, for him to answer. He had to know how much I needed him – how much none of this made sense. He had to know that I had been happy and that I had believed in us. There were many things I doubted in this life but ‘Us’ was not one of them. Us was my constant.
“Answer! Answer! Please answer!” I pleaded before feeling Rose sit down beside me and gently take the phone from my hands. I watched as she switched it off, unable to argue with her, and I watched as she took my hand and held my cheek in her palm and told me it would be okay.
“He’s not worth it, darling. He’s really not worth it.”
And I fell into her, allowing her to hug me until I caught my breath again in large heaving motions and until the urge to throw up had passed.
“Tell me it’s not real,” I muttered.
“Sssh,” she offered because, in fairness, there was nothing else she could say. “Sssh, my darling.”
Rose was not only exceptionally calm in a crisis – which was a good thing, given my father’s uncanny ability to cause chaos everywhere he went – but she was also exceptionally efficient. Within half an hour of the return of my ability to breathe properly she had me wrapped in a blanket on the sofa with my second cup of hot sweet tea on the go. The first sweet tea I’d had since I was a child – I embraced it, feeling slightly sick at the overly sweet taste but comforted all the same. She had called Mark’s parents and indeed they did not know where he was and seemed to be as shocked as I was – if a little less hysterical over the whole thing, which served only to put me into even worse form.
“They never liked me!” I wailed as I gagged on the super-sweet tea.
“Tush and nonsense,” she tutted as she whipped together a casserole so that I would have something to eat when the notion took me – which, given how I was feeling, was likely to be in around three years’ time. Amid a flurry of tears I could see her hide a couple of particularly sharp objects – you know, just in case – and then I heard her on the phone to Cara, my cousin and former bridesmaid, inviting her over.
“I could call Ivy,” she offered and I gagged, but this time not at the sweet tea but at the notion of Ivy my sister, other former bridesmaid and smuggest creature on the planet.
“Oh Jesus, don’t call Ivy. Ivy will enjoy this far too much.”
Rose looked at me with the flicker of a glare which told me she was mildly disappointed in me but I pushed it aside.
“Of course she won’t enjoy it, Kitty. Don’t be silly. She could help.”
“Rose, I love you very, very much but Ivy never has been and never will be the person I go to in a crisis. You know that. If Cara is coming, that’s enough. Honestly.”
Rose shook her head. “I don’t understand you girls sometimes,” she said before giggling, like this was a teenage spat about who gets the poster space on the back of the bedroom door, not like this was about how my sister wouldn’t be at all supportive as my life crashed around my ears.
I stood up, strode to the kitchen and poured the super-sweet tea down the sink before reaching into the fridge and hauling out the emergency bottle of wine I always kept in the vegetable rack.
“You’ve had a shock,” Rose twittered “Alcohol might not be the best thing.”
“Rose,” I said, stabbing the corkscrew into the top of the bottle with a viciousness it didn’t quite deserve. “Once again, I say this with love, but of course this is not the best thing for me. The best thing for me would be for all this not to have happened or for me to be able to do like Superman does in whatever Superman film he does it in, and fly around the world really really fast and turn back time so that I could talk to Mark because he won’t bloody answer his phone and he’s not here.” Istabbed the corkscrew again, pushing the cork deeper into the bottle. “And I didn’t do anything wrong and I don’t understand it and my brain hurts so much from trying to understand it.” I stabbed the bottle again and the cork plopped squarely into the cool liquid below, small particles dispersing around it. I would drink it anyway. If anyone had offered me turps at that stage
I would have been tempted to knock it back.
Tipping the bottle and watching my glass fill, I continued: “And I would go and look for him but I don’t know where to start because no one seems to know where he is!” Then, “James!” I shouted and Rose looked at me, her look of mild concern now replaced with a look of mild fear. “I’ll phone James. Where’s my phone?”
Rose shrugged her shoulders but the slight twitch of her eye towards the top of the fridge gave it away. Pushing past her like a demented woman – and with the corkscrew still in my hand – I reached up and pulled my phone down, switching it on and cursing the damn thing for not being faster.
“James will know. Sure Mark could barely fart without having to fill James in on all the finer details. He’ll know and he’ll have to tell me.”
When the address book finally came online I scrolled down, found my husband’s best friend’s name and hit the call button.
“His loyalty will probably lie with Mark, you know,” Rose warned.
I glared at her and instantly felt cross with myself. She was only trying to help – and she was only speaking the truth.
He answered on the third ring – a cheery hello as if nothing at all had gone cataclysmically wrong with anyone’s life at all that afternoon. “Kitty, how are you?”
“Do you know where Mark is?” I kept my voice calm.
“Haven’t seen him since last week. Sorry,I don’t know where he is. Is he in trouble then? If he calls round should I warn him he’s in the doghouse?” He sounded chirpy, as if he enjoyed the notion of Mark being in trouble. Something told me James didn’t know that things were actually pretty serious.
“When you saw him last week did he tell youhe’d left his work?”
“Left his work?”
“Yes. Walked out. Quit. Packed it in.”
“Jesus, no. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling strangely comforted that James at least sounded half as shocked as I did. “I only just found out. And he hasn’t come home. He’s left me, James!” I wailed and the very sound of the words leaving my mouth crumpled what very little was left of my reserve.
Rose walked calmly over and took the phone from me, answering the questions James thrust at her as best she could before hanging up and steering me back to the sofa where she removed the glass of wine from the vice-like grip of my hand and replaced it with another cup of hot, sweet tea.
“It’s good for the shock,” she soothed and I lay back praying that even one hint of the numbness which had enveloped me earlier would return.
None of this made sense. None of it.
I sat bolt upright. “I need to try and find him, Rose. I think maybe I’ll just drive around.”
“Darling,” she said softly. “He’s not a dog who has wandered off – chances are he won’t be prowling the streets hiding in the shadows.”
“I can’t just do nothing,” I proclaimed. “I can’t just sit here.”
“I don’t see you have much choice.”
Chapter three
Rose left, somewhat reluctantly, when Cara arrived. She was worried, I know, that Cara and I would go all Cagney and Lacey, or Thelma and Louise and set about tracking Mark down and making him pay for his actions.
The truth was, by the time Cara arrived, any strength I had to do anything more than lie on the sofa trying to quell the increasing waves of nausea sweeping over me had gone. I cried, in five-minute bursts, before swearing and trying his phone again. Rose had urged me to just switch my phone off – to stop torturing myself – but I couldn’t do that. What if he phoned? What if he was having a breakdown of sorts and was sitting in a lonely hotel room realising just there and then how much he needed me? No, I couldn’t and wouldn’t switch my phone off.All I could do was glare at it, and lift it, and check it was working with an almost obsessive compulsion.
Cara walked in and sat beside me. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, her brown eyes filled with concern, and I allowed her to hug me even though Cara and I didn’t really ever hug.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her curly blonde head. “I’m sorry. He’s a bastard and I’m sorry.”
I nodded but a little part of me bristled. I wasn’t ready to have anyone call him a bastard. I didn’t know if he even was a bastard. He had kissed me, softly and tenderly, that morning when we woke. A bastard wouldn’t do that, would he?
“Tell me, what happened anyway?” she said, settling beside me.
Rose, who had put on her coat and was heading for the door, handed Cara the letter before kissing me goodbye and telling me she would call later. I nodded to her but one eye was on Cara. I wanted to see her reaction as she saw the words. I wanted to know if she thought this was as completely nuts as I did.
Her eyes widened and her head shook gently from side to side and then she looked at me. “And his mum and dad? Do they know where he is?”
“Nope.”
“James?” she said hopefully.
“No, he’s pretty much shell-shocked too.”
“And he’s not been at work in a week?”
“Nope.”
“And you didn’t know?”
“Nope.As far as I was aware he was coming and going as normal. It was all normal, Cara. All normal. There has to be something wrong with him. This isn’t how he behaves. This isn’t who he is. Mark doesn’t walk away from things – not that there was even anything to walk away from. We were fine, weren’t we, Cara? I mean you saw us together all the time. Did we look like we hated each other? Was there some simmering tension there that I was too stupid to pick up on?”
“No!” she said. “Absolutely no way.No way at all.”
“Then I just don’t get it. Oh God, Cara. I don’t get it.”
“Jeez,” she said, staring ahead of her and, while it would have been nice if she had said something comforting and wise, I knew myself there wasn’t much she could say.
“I’m sorry,” she added as I lifted my phone and tried his number again, listening to the tinny voice telling me I was being forwarded to an answering service.
“Mark, we can work this out. I don’t know what is going on with you. I’m worried. I love you. Please, call me.”
I went to bed with my phone on his pillow, just in case he would come to his senses and call me in the wee small hours. Cara slept in the spare room to make sure I was okay. I tried to sleep but found myself playing over the minutiae of our last few days together – trying to find some sign that something was about to go completely and utterly tits up. But I couldn’t – everything had been just as it always was. There was no awkwardness, no signs that he was depressed. He hadn’t even been distant.
I played over several scenarios in my head as the clock ticked through the hours. The first was, of course, that he had indeed had some sort of breakdown. I didn’t like that scenario – even though it pointed no blame in my direction. I didn’t like it because he was out there, alone, and could be doing something reckless and dangerous, and every part of me wanted to protect him.
The second scenario was that this was all an elaborate hoax – perhaps part of a new reality-TV show, a twisted sicker version of Candid Camera or Beadle’s About. He would show up the following day with some grinning eejit of a TV presenter in tow and tell me it was all a big laugh. I would call him a big rotten eejit and everyone would laugh and it would be only after the camera crews went home that I would cry and tell him never, ever to do that to me again because the thought of him just walking away was the most painful thing I had ever had to go through. Things would be a little strained for a while but we would get over it. That particular scenario was probably the one I liked most and around three thirty, when I was mildly delirious through lack of sleep, I managed to convince myself that was entirely plausible and totally likely and I even managed to drift off to sleep for a while.
The third scenario, which I filed under Very Least Favourite was the one which pervaded my dreams and which caused me to
jolt awake just as the sun hit the windows. That scenario was that this was actually happening, and he actually meant it, and something had been broken in our relationship, and I had been walking around with my head in the sand or in the clouds or up my arse where I hadn’t been at all aware that it was always going to go spectacularly wrong.
I glanced at the clock – it had just gone six – and then I looked at my phone which had no new messages, no secret missed calls, no big ‘I’m sorrys’ and ‘I’m coming homes’ about it. I threw it across the room and got up. There was no point in trying to sleep – not when a whole new dose of adrenalin was coursing through my bloodstream. I’d take a shower. I’d take a shower and leave my phone lying in the corner of the bedroom, therebygiving it the chance to ring without me hovering over it. A watched phone never rings and all that. Maybe if I left it, if I stopped cocking one ear and checking endlessly, it would finally spring to life.
Letting the hot stream of water wash over me, I tried to stop myself from shaking and had to bite my lip to stop myself from wailing. It was midway through my second rinse of shampoo that a whole new emotion washed over me. “The bastard,” I said, softly at first before repeating it loudly. “The bastard!” We promised we would always talk to each other and we would always be honest. We would tell each other if one of us was annoying the living daylights out of the other. We promised that. In a chapel. In front of everyone we knew and in front of God. But most of all we had promised it to each other.We hadn’t promised to just clear off one day. He couldn’t do this. “Bastard!” I said a third time, stepping out of the shower, hauling a towel round me roughly and stomping back to the bedroom where I lifted my phone, dialled his number and shouted to the silence of his answer machine. “You call me. Now. You pick up your damn phone and you call me. I’m your wife. And you owe me that. So you please call me right now!”