by Stephen May
But I don’t say this. Now’s not the time. I drink my own tea. I’m thinking that I need to let her have her say. I need to let her get all the anger out of her system. Only then can I start with how it all was a long time ago. How I was a different person, completely fucked up and mad. Then I can try and explain how things were. Remind her about my sister.
I can tell her that if I really am decent, normal and kind, well that is all down to her actually. Her and the kids. The whole conversation is one I have rehearsed several times in my chilly box room in Chaney Street.
‘Let me make the kids their dinner. Let me put them to bed. Then let’s talk. Properly.’
She looks away again, chin resting on her hand. Now she rubs at her nose, something she often does when under pressure or thinking deeply. We played a lot of Scrabble when we were first together, and this gesture was how I could tell when she had a rack full of useless consonants. A fistful of high-scoring but unusable Ks, Qs and Ws. It’s lucky she never got into poker I suppose.
‘They’ve had nuggets twice already this week,’ she says. ‘I need the toilet.’ She heaves herself up from her chair and leaves the room. I hear the door to the downstairs toilet close, and I shut my eyes.
28
Some of the things Eve was worried about in April 1989, the things that stopped her sleeping and sent her to the doctor asking for help: the Exxon Valdez oil spill; the approach of asteroid 4581 Asclepius; the collapse of Communism; the new local government tax; the protests in Tiananmen Square; the gang rape of a jogger in Central Park, New York; the shooting of eight transsexuals in Peru; NATO’s modernising of its short-range nuclear missiles; the tornado in Bangladesh that killed two thousand people and the way the news didn’t really report it; her GCSEs, especially maths; how hard her parents worked in the pub; the feeling that maybe her friends weren’t really her friends; the sending into space of Global Positioning System satellites. Beyond all this there was a generalised sense of dread. An anxiety that something really bad was going to happen – something worse than all these things put together.
She worried about worrying. She worried that it was a kind of narcissism to fret like this about things she couldn’t control.
Her GP, Dr Miriam Clark, had a kind nature and had known Eve since she was a baby. She wanted to help, though she also found these hypersensitive girls a little bit annoying. She definitely thought it was a kind of narcissism, though she was too nice to say so. She saw so many girls like this. Still, she would try to help. There were some new products to help, products the medical press had been enthusiastic about.
29
We have tea and the kids don’t moan at all about having chicken nuggets again. They’d have them every day. As they eat Jack relaxes enough to tell us some interesting facts: black-lace weaver spiders eat their mother before leaving the nest. Starfish don’t have brains. Honking your car horn is illegal in New York City. Human body odour is irresistible to goats on heat.
‘What does on heat mean?’ says Ella.
‘I don’t know. Dad?’ says Jack.
‘I don’t know either,’ I say. A typical teatime. God, I’ve missed all this. I could cry.
Katy has a bath. Jack and Ella play reasonably nicely together upstairs. Not too much squabbling. Not even all that much ‘your-facing’.
I read to them and for much longer than I usually do. I’ve always enjoyed this part of the day. Kids cuddled up to me, warm and smelling of toothpaste and soap. Both of them with their moppets. Ella holding her battered stuffed rabbit, Fluffy. Jack with his favourite bear, Benji. All of us, including me, especially me actually, getting lost in the stories. Today both kids are practically asleep before I stop.
As I tiptoe out of Jack’s room, there’s a rustle from the bed. ‘You haven’t said it Daddy.’
I haven’t. I’ve forgotten. I feel a sudden flush of shame.
We have this thing Jack and I where, as I leave the room and put my son’s light out, I say ‘Love you to the moon and back’, and Jack replies with ‘Love you to the furthest thing in the universe and back’. It’s a thing we adopted from lines in that children’s book Guess How Much I Love You and we’ve been doing it for years now. More or less since Jack could talk.
We’ll have to stop some time – we can’t still be doing it when Jack is twenty – but I hope we’ve got a year or two left.
We say our lines now and Jack puts his head down with a drawn-out sigh.
Downstairs, Katy seems in a better mood. Wine is open and she’s poured two glasses. She asks about where I’ve been staying, and I hesitate.
‘Don’t worry. I won’t grass.’
‘It’s not that,’ I say. Except it is. A bit. It’ll be accidental but if she’s getting into the habit of cosy chats with Syima and Alex and their colleagues, it could slip out. Anyway, it’s best she doesn’t know in case there’s some Law Society disciplinary thing waiting down the line.
Katy smiles grimly and takes a swallow. I watch her long neck flex. Then I tell her about my dark little nest at Jake and Lulu’s house.
I tell her about how my last few days have been split, bizarrely, between leading informal Italian conversation lessons while also using all the resources of the internet to try and find out where Anne Sheldon is. Trying and failing.
But she’s not listening.
So I stop there. I could tell her more about Jake and about Lulu. About Lulu’s leg and about their ridiculous plan to get married and have children. I could tell Katy about the fights they’ve had. Three in the last three days. Humdingers too and how I’ve had to listen to them make-up afterwards, which they’ve done very noisily, and how I now know for sure that the least erotic thing in the world is listening to other people have sex.
But I really don’t think she’s in the mood. So we have a long silence instead. I reach for my glass. The wine is citrusy and subtle. Hints of gooseberry. More than decent. More than ten quid a bottle if I had to guess.
I try to get eye contact with Katy, but she won’t look at me. Instead her gaze travels around the room as if she’s surprised to find herself here. She pushes her hand through her wash-and-go bob. I think it’s time to talk properly.
‘You know, I don’t think there are many people who would like to be judged by the things they did when they were nineteen, when they were at college.’
Her eyes widen and she laughs. Only it’s not really a proper laugh. There’s no humour in it. Just a short dry bark. Almost a cough. It sounds unlike any noise I’ve ever heard her make before. It’s disturbing actually.
I stop talking. Just look at her. At the beautiful full moon of her face. She eases back, wriggles a bit, stretches, her back clearly giving her more gyp. She takes another hit of the wine, places her glass carefully back on the coffee table that fills the space between us. Wriggles again.
‘Do you want a cushion? Or a pillow?’ I say. This fidgeting is getting on my nerves.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. She takes a breath and she looks right at me, fire in her eyes. ‘Mark, listen, when I was at college I drank too much lots of times. And yeah, I did stuff I wish I hadn’t. I snogged some inappropriate men and once I woke up with someone I wished – really wished – I hadn’t.’
I’m about to ask who but she holds up her hand to stop me.
‘I got the stupid tattoo on my arse.’
‘I love that tattoo.’ I do, too. A wonky, brick-coloured rose she got done in Italy after an afternoon on the prosecco and I love it. I think it’s fun, a sign of a secret silly side of Katy that only I know about. My own silly tattoo itches in the way that it does.
‘It’s stupid. Childish.’ A pause. ‘They told me how he died, you know.’
‘Katy—’ I begin, but she holds up her hand again. The internationally recognised sign for just shut up for a goddam minute. I take a slug of wine.
‘Mark, how long have we been together?’
‘Twenty-three years, more or less.’
‘Twent
y-three years,’ she repeats and she’s looking down at the floor now as if amazed to find it carpeted. As if carpets were an extraordinary invention. She looks up and holds my gaze. ‘Twenty-three years. More or less. A long time to keep a secret. Especially one like that.’ She takes a deep, deliberate swallow of her drink. Looks back at that fascinating carpet.
‘Mark, you need to know I’ve slept with three other men since I’ve been with you.’
This is absolutely not what I’m expecting her to say and it’s so unlikely, so impossible, that I laugh. Actually laugh.
In a cold, dead, wholly new voice she tells me who, where, and how. She counts the fucking ways. I want to interrupt, to shut her up. But I don’t. Because somehow I find I also want every sordid little detail. So I just sit there as she gives me all the becauses. Because she was bored. Because she was lonely. Because these men, they were really fucking keen. Because why the hell not? Because the days are long but life itself is pretty bloody short. Because the idea of waking up to my face every day for the rest of her life filled her with mortal fucking dread.
She tells me that the bike she bought for my birthday was chosen for me by one of her lovers, a cycling enthusiast. A guy who followed the Tour de France every year, a guy who knew his stuff when it came to wheels and frames and gears.
‘I got him to tell me what bike he would buy for himself if money was no object and then I got that. Two thousand pounds.’ She says this last bit with a sort of wonder.
‘And the baby?’ I say at last.
‘Oh don’t worry, the Bump is definitely yours. Is that really what you care about most?’
I get up and, taking great care not to yell or shout or slam any doors, I make my way out of the lounge, through the kitchen doors, down through the damp gloom of the garden and over the fence into the Oksanens.
I have to leave the bike, but I don’t care about that. Not now.
30
The first thing I noticed was the For Sale board. Houses usually look at their best when they’re for sale. They present shining faces to the world, stand to attention like primary school children desperate to be picked to be some kind of monitor. Not this one. The Sheldon’s house looked like it was dying. It might as well have said ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ on the board instead of the agent’s name.
This house didn’t look like it had ever been well loved. It looked neglected. Tatty. Like it had been sick for some time. There were soda cans in the garden, stray plastic bags, cat shit. All the curtains were closed. In the afternoon. This was a house beginning to rot.
I’d phoned earlier, but there hadn’t been an answer. I’d left a message, but Bim had seemed very certain that Anne would neither pick up the phone when it rang nor would she listen to any messages.
‘I’m telling you Mark old chum, she’s lost the plot big time. She’s in a right two and eight. Just try and keep the shock off your face when you see her.’
Now there was no answer to my ringing at the front door. Deep in the house that bell sounded dully. It reflected how I felt somehow. The whole atmosphere was unsettling in a dreary kind of way. I felt exposed, like there were hidden eyes watching and I could swear, right at that moment I couldn’t hear any birdsong. Nor was there wind in the trees. But at least there was the steady rumble of traffic blithely progressing down the road as it always did. Traffic, I thought, was like a river. Always changing, never changing. Timeless. Going on forever in its blind way, something beyond the comprehension of the individual humans sat listening to the radio in their individual cars. Traffic, the eddy of it. The eternal reassuring ebb and flow of it. Very occasionally deadly. Traffic did the job that God was meant to do.
I was still unsure why I’d come. It was nothing to do with Bim’s feeling that I could work a positive transformation, that was certain. The truth was, I just couldn’t help myself. I needed to see Anne again. I knew I was courting scorn and humiliation but I had to anyway.
I went around the side of the house, down the passage between it and the garage and tried the door there that lead straight to the kitchen. It was open.
I hesitated. It would be the first time I’d ever gone into a house uninvited. I was also growing nervous about what I might find. A conviction was building that inside this house I might find something terrible. A dread of something I couldn’t name.
Still, I went in. All keyed up and ready to explain myself. No need. What did I see? Nothing really.
The kitchen was messy, but not outrageously so. A box of Alpen on the kitchen table. A pot of jam with no lid but a knife poking from the top. A baccy tin, a packet of Rizlas, a bottle of milk. Two flies doing a crazy game of kiss chase with each other around the light fitting. A sink full of crockery.
The floor was coated in generalised crud it was true – breadcrumbs, mud, stray peas, bits of onion skin – and the air was slightly rancid and damp. In other words, it was in the state millions of other kitchens were in on any given Saturday morning. But here at least was something I could deal with straight away.
I didn’t go any further into the house. I put the lid on the jam, added the sticky knife to the cold, grey and stinking puddle in the sink, which I emptied and filled again with fresh scalding water.
I opened a window. Let the air stumble in. I washed up. With the determined application of what my dad would call elbow grease I got rid of all the many indeterminate stickinesses that were dotted like tiny mountainous islands on every surface. I found some furniture polish and soon the air no longer smelled like the inside of a mouldy tent, but instead of synthetic pine needles, the scent of the respectable world in 1990. As if the collective dream home of the nation was a Finnish plastics factory.
I was not quiet. I deliberately banged and clattered, sloshed and sploshed and even sung a bit but Anne didn’t appear and I was forced to conclude she was out; I didn’t want to think too hard about where she might be.
Going from the kitchen to the hallway, I found the hoover and got rid of the detritus from the floor. I thought about doing a full mop, but I was knackered now. The after-hours ales Bim and I had sunk just a few hours previously were kicking in and the kitchen looked good enough anyway, a million times better than it did when I had walked in. I allowed myself to smile for a moment at the bafflement Anne might feel if I didn’t get to see her and she came back to find this room suddenly spick and span, as if the cleaning elves had been in.
How cool to be an elf. To go through life doing random acts of kindness for poor mortals with no expectation of applause or reward.
I tried to remember the climax of the story of the elves and the shoemaker. I thought that the story ended quite tamely, even quite happily by Hans Christian Anderson standards. Did the shoemaker and his tailoress wife end up making little bespoke suits for their faery visitors? Did the elves stop coming after that? I thought that was how it ended.
It was a fairly right-wing fairy tale when you thought about it. A small business, a family firm, falls on hard times due to the necessary vagaries of the market place, and is saved by some private philanthropy, some individual giving by kind-hearted pointy-eared donors. And, when the business is back on its feet again, the recipients happily repay their benefactors with interest.
It was a conservative fantasy of how an ideal benefits system should work. I wondered what Katy would think of this theory. Perhaps I should put it in a letter for her.
It was then that I realised that Katy and Danny never gave my message to Anne, never told her why I had to miss her party. So actually, fuck telling Katy about the bloody elves. I’d love to know her reasons for not doing that simple little job.
But as quickly as my anger came, it evaporated. What did it really matter now?
Coffee. I’d make myself some coffee. I put the kettle on and I was looking for the Nescafe when I heard a noise behind me. A wet cough.
It wasn’t Anne. No, it was some middle-aged short-arse baldy beardy ginger fuck wearing bottle-green corduroy trousers and a faded denim
shirt, cringing his way into the kitchen on Argyll patterned socks, a cricket bat held loosely in his right hand like it was a stick of dynamite that might go off. Whatever else he might be, this guy wasn’t really vigilante material.
What was most annoying was how he seemed to very quickly decide I was no threat to him either. As I was taking in the corduroy mildness of him, the guy was simultaneously relaxing, breaking into a relieved smile that revealed sharp grey teeth.
‘I, er, we, er, thought you might be an intruder.’
‘I am an intruder.’
He bared his ratty teeth again. ‘Yes, well, granted, but we, er, thought you might be dangerous. A burglar, or even, Doctor, you know, Sheldon.’
‘You were going to try and batter Dr Sheldon with a cricket bat in his own home?’
‘Well, no, but, there has been some unpleasantness... Anyway, who are you exactly?’
‘A friend of Anne’s.’
‘Good. Good. Ah, me too.’ He strode towards me, suddenly resolute, hand outstretched, as if he had decided to act the part of a man being decisive and taking charge. ‘I’m Dr Masterson. James.’
I shook his hand. It was predictably limp. This bloke was really getting under my skin for some reason. Under my skin and on my tits.
‘Mark Chadwick.’
Masterson smiled again. ‘Ah yes. Anne’s mentioned you. She was hoping you’d make an appearance.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Sleeping. Well, not, ah, sleeping, exactly, not any more, not with all your, ah, activity, down here – but resting. We had rather a late one last night. You know how it is.’ He gestured towards his tobacco tin. ‘Fact is I, ah, really came down for that. It is my shameful addiction to the dreaded weed that finally drove me from our refuge to, ah, confront, whoever was in here.’