Sean’s response is discouraging. As welcoming committees go, this one errs on the side of scowling like a self-centered tosser. Unless scowling is a symbol of warmth and joy in some cultures.
Which Sean would know nothing about. The only culture he’s been exposed to recently is the one that revolves around our sofa and television.
“So,” he says. “You decided to come back, then.”
Tell him. Tell him you’ve only come back to explain that you have to leave.
I don’t know how to say it. It’s easier to fall into the familiar groove of petty point-scoring, at which I happen to excel. I have no experience of abandoning a partner and a shared home. Sean’s the only man I’ve ever lived with. “Yesterday evening I decided to come back,” I say in my best upbeat voice, looking at my watch. “I checked in for my flight home at six o’clock, twenty-three hours ago. It’s taken that long. Rubbish, isn’t it?” I am still smiling, skin stretched tight. “I was furious with the German weather at first, but I got over it.”
I force myself to look at Sean’s face as a way to avoid staring at his feet. I keep noticing new things about him that grate, and today it’s his socks—the same kind he’s worn since I met him, but they’ve never bothered me before: woolly, bulky as shoes, with things like “Extreme Precipice Crater Climbing” emblazoned across them. Which would be fine if he wore them for more adventurous missions than padding to the kitchen to get another beer.
“I haven’t made you any supper.” He lifts his bowl. “If you’d rung to tell me what time you’d be back . . .”
“I’m not hungry. Sleep’s what I need. I didn’t get any last night.” Why did I say that? I don’t want to go upstairs and get into a bed that smells of Sean; I want to pack a suitcase and leave. Except I might have to lie down and close my eyes for an hour first. The way I feel now, I’m not sure I’m fit to drive.
Sean knows I’m a for-better-or-for-worse sleeper. He’s watched me sleep on airport floors, in loud train carriages, in nightclubs with deafeningly loud music blaring out. I wait for him to ask me what happened last night to keep me awake, but all I get is a mumbled “Sorry if I’m keeping you up.” It isn’t a genuine apology; its sole purpose is to draw attention to the apology I’m not offering him, the one he’s convinced he deserves. He turns his back on me and heads for the lounge. There’s a lager can protruding from each of his back trouser pockets.
No. Not today. Not the beer-and-football routine.
I beat him to the remote control and mute the sound. “I got no sleep because I nearly had to share a tiny double bed with a weirdo who ended up running away in the middle of the night, but not before she’d confessed to framing an innocent man for murder.”
Sean puts his bowl and fork on the floor, pulls the two beer cans out of his pockets and stands them on the arm of the sofa. He sits down and devotes his silent attention to the equally silent television, as if he and it have arranged to meditate together.
Nothing. No response whatsoever. Unbelievable.
I shouldn’t have agreed to such a huge TV. Even switched off, it would be the most commanding presence in any room. I regret all the arguments I let Sean win in the early days of our relationship: the too-soft mattress, the wet room he’s always just had a shower in, so that the loo seat needs to be patted down with paper before I can sit on it. And last but not least, our picture-hanging policy. As a result of my lust-induced weakness when Sean and I first bought this house, each of our paintings and prints hangs from a triangle of cord that in turn hangs from a picture rail. It looks fussy and old-fashioned, and I hate it nearly as much as I hate the fact that one of the pictures, framed for a mere £56, is a poster of some guy who used to play for Chelsea that anyone with a brain would see was hideous and chuck in the nearest skip.
“Is there no part of what I’ve just said that you’d like to explore further?” I ask Sean. “Murder, et cetera? I can elaborate if you want. That was my concise introduction, not the full story.”
“Your plane landed at Combingham at eleven o’clock this morning,” he says.
“Yeah, I know. I was on it.”
It’s Sean’s turn to look at his watch. “It’s five o’clock. It doesn’t take six hours to get from Combingham Airport to Spilling.”
“No. It takes an hour and a half. Oh, hang on!” I fake a moment of enlightenment. Acting plays a central part in my relationship with Sean, in so many ways. “You’re angry that I didn’t rush home straightaway, even though you were at work.”
He’s communing with the mute television again, blocking me out. If he looked up, if he expressed even minimal concern for my well-being, I might tell him everything. The love of my life is in prison, charged with a murder he didn’t commit. I thought I’d be able to rely on Kerry and Dan’s help in getting him out, but they’re lying too. All of which has brought home to me that if I’ve only got you, Sean, then I’ve got nothing. There’s a book of poems by e. e. cummings in my bag that means more to me than you do.
It’s probably best if I keep quiet about all the important stuff.
“You got back when?” I say. “Ten minutes ago? Five? And you found the house empty. You’d looked on the Internet, found out when my plane landed, and you were expecting me to be home before you. But I wasn’t here. Which means . . . what? I’m a heartless bitch who doesn’t love you?” Is that what I am? Am I floating that description of myself to see if he’ll recognize it and identify me?
“I rang here, rang your work,” he says, tight-lipped. “No sign of you.”
“For God’s sake, Sean! I was out of touch for a while—it’s not a crime. I told you when we spoke yesterday I’d be home as soon as I could. I needed to go to the police, so this is it, now: the soonest I could get back.”
“I rang your mobile—no answer.”
I can’t take my eyes off his face. If he isn’t embarrassed to be wearing that expression then he ought to be. It’s redolent of hopes cruelly dashed. I want to scream, “Nothing bad has happened to you! At all!”
“You didn’t think to ring Spilling police station?” I say instead. There is no trace of mockery in my voice; I wouldn’t be so careless. I am a master of domestic passive-aggressive warfare techniques.
“Police station?” Sean says in a put-upon voice, as if it’s a huge inconvenience for him to have to hear about it. At times like this, I feel the presence of his selfishness as if it were a third person in the room with us, hulking and invisible: twice Sean’s size, sitting next to him on the sofa, refusing to budge.
Some people might expect a reference to murder to be followed by a reference to the police. If I relayed this conversation to an impartial witness, I’m fairly sure he or she would be astonished to hear that Sean asked no questions about the violent crime I’d referred to in passing. “None at all?” they would say, and I’d have to explain that Sean walks around—or, rather, lies around—wrapped in a thick cloak of No Concern Of Mine. It repels any kind of experience that isn’t the sort of thing that happens to sensible people like him, or that doesn’t affect him personally.
Except this murder does. If Francine Breary were still alive, Lauren Cookson wouldn’t have followed me to Germany. If I hadn’t met Lauren, I wouldn’t know that Tim was in trouble and I wouldn’t be thinking about leaving home.
“That’s right,” I say breezily, taking off my coat. “I’ve been daahn the nick,” I put on a cockney accent. “Where else would I go to sort out the whole innocent-man-charged-with-murder palaver?” I drop my bag on the floor by mistake and find I’m too wiped out to bend and pick it up.
There’s no way I can get out of here tonight. Sean would find me in the morning collapsed on the doorstep, comatose. My eyelids start to slide closed as I imagine my blacked-out self.
“That’s it, pretend you’re too tired to talk,” he says bitterly. I forgot: I’m not allowed to be too tired when I get
home from a business trip—for anything. It’s the price I pay for having been away. Sean expects me to come back full of energy for reunion sex and fighting, one after the other. I never know what the order will be.
“You couldn’t have made a quick phone call, let me know you were okay?” he persists.
My fingers itch to dig into him and gouge out chunks of flesh. On the plus side, at least the spurting fountain of venom inside me has woken me up. Maybe I’ll be able to escape tonight after all.
I sink down into an armchair. “You don’t care if I’m okay, so why would I bother?” I say.
“I don’t care?” Sean holds up his hands as if to say, “Then why am I sulking and yelling?”
“You care about a malfunction in your remote surveillance system, and you confuse that with caring about me,” I tell him.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
I’m experimenting with telling you how I really feel. I’ll probably regret it. I should stop.
“Remote surveillance system?” He shakes his head. At least he doesn’t mind that his food’s going cold—that’s a point in his favor. “Put yourself in my position for two seconds, Gaby.”
“If you want me to do that, you’ll have to shift your arse off the sofa.”
“I miss you when you’re away,” he says quietly. “I look forward to you coming back. Is that so terrible?”
I should tell him not to waste his time, that it’s impossible for the Affectionate Pitch Antidote to work at this late stage; my resentment is too far gone. The way I feel at the moment, I’d prefer almost any other man to Sean. A stranger would be nice—he wouldn’t expect too much in the way of conversation. I wouldn’t care what characteristics he had as long as the first thing he always said when I got in from a grueling work trip was, “You look shattered. I’ll stick the kettle on. Earl Grey with milk?”
Perhaps my next work project should be inventing my ideal man. I’d make sure every last design flaw was eliminated before I let him move in. If I hadn’t been so obsessed with work when I met Sean, I’d have noticed that physical attraction wasn’t a good enough reason to get stuck in a long-term relationship with someone.
And Tim? What about the design flaws there? A man who wouldn’t leave the wife he didn’t love for you, even though you begged him to? I force the thought from my mind.
“We’ve been through this before,” I say to Sean. “The me you miss isn’t real. It’s a different me from the one who has to travel a lot for work—you don’t like that me at all, do you? If you did, you’d be nicer to her.”
“Gaby, there’s traveling a lot and there’s being a fanatical workaholic who allows no room for a personal life. Even when you’re here, you’re planning your next foreign jolly: looking at hotel websites, booking plane tickets . . .”
Foreign jolly. That’s a new one.
“I’ve been away an average of three nights a week for the past six months,” I trot out. I did my diary statistics on the plane on the way home, anticipating that I’d need to have them to hand. “That means an average of four nights a week at home in the same period.” I rub the back of my neck, which aches from the strain of holding my head up. “What else can I do, Sean?”
Why do I never point out to him that my work-related gallivanting—and he’s right, I do a lot of it—led to the creation of a company that eventually sold for 48.3 million dollars and enabled us to buy this house outright as well as a house for my parents, one for my brother and his family, and a flat in London for Sean’s sister?
Sean never mentions it either. When I told him that my new company might end up selling for as much or more if all goes according to plan, he said, “If it does, will you stop starting businesses and spend more time at home?”
Sean’s work doesn’t involve any out-of-hours swanning. He adheres to a classic routine: leaves the house at seven-thirty every morning, spends the day teaching secondary school pupils in Rawndesley how to play football and tennis and hockey, and returns home between four-thirty and five. His job has the good manners to confine itself to regular working hours; he doesn’t see why mine can’t do the same.
“Meanwhile, I’m missing the football,” he says, holding out his hand for the remote control.
I think of the choirgirl who sat behind me on the coach, the one with a brother called Silas. “Let’s say I’d been pregnant, and it was a boy,” I say to Sean. “Let’s say he grew up to be a famous footballer.”
“Are you going to give me the remote?”
If Silas played for Manchester United, would you support them, or would you still support Stoke City? I never heard what Silas’s dad said in response; Lauren distracted me.
“If he played for Liverpool, would you still support Chelsea?” I ask Sean. “Or would you support the team your son played for, because he’d matter more to you than football?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Sean opens a beer and his mouth and pours. I’ve seen petrol pumps approach the transfer of liquid with more finesse. “You know the answer.”
“The answer being . . . ?”
“Are you winding me up? No one who cares about football stops supporting his team just because his son ends up playing for a different one.”
“That can’t be true,” I say, but Sean’s scornful laughter makes me doubt myself mid-sentence. Could he be right? Is the world really so crazy that millions of men would prioritize . . . what? A shirt and shorts in a particular combination of colors over their own sons? Female football fans wouldn’t, surely. I like to think women are saner.
“If we had a son and he played for Liverpool, or for anyone, I’d support Chelsea, till I drew my last breath.”
“Right.” How pathetic. “So, it’s Chelsea v. Liverpool in the FA Cup Final and your son’s about to take a penalty kick for Liverpool and possibly score the winning goal. You’d know it was one of the most important moments of his life . . .”
“I’d support my team. Chelsea. More to the point, so would he,” Sean adds as an afterthought.
What? I must have misheard, or misunderstood. I’m Lauren-lagged, that’s my problem. “So would who?” I ask.
Sean rolls his eyes. “My son. Plenty of players play for one team and support another—it’s no big deal, just . . . your team’s your team. Once a Chelsea fan, always a Chelsea fan.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Your son, the famous footballer, taking a penalty kick for Liverpool, would want to miss?”
“Much as his professional pride would want to score the winning goal, Chelsea winning’d mean more to him,” Sean says with authority.
“Because . . . he’d be such a devoted Chelsea supporter?” I think I’m up to speed, but I’d better check.
Sean’s nodding.
“How do you know?” I ask. “What if he supports Arsenal?”
“For fuck’s sake! What’s the point of all this? Give me the remote. He’d support Chelsea because he’d be my son, and I’d bring him up to support Chelsea.”
Thank you for telling me everything I need to know. This might be the most useful conversation I’ve ever had in my life. “Sean,” I say. “I don’t want to be with you anymore. Sorry to spring this on you with no warning.” I stand up and nearly lose my balance, light-headed with fatigue. “I don’t love you anymore. I don’t want to live with you, or have children with you, and even if I did, I wouldn’t stand by and let you tell those children what they are and what they’d better turn out to be.” I pick up my bag and hold it against my body, forgetting for a second that it isn’t a baby I’m protecting from its father’s mind control. “I’m going upstairs to pack some things,” I say. “Don’t follow me.”
That’s when my life explodes in tears and swearing, and I realize that, having done nothing about my relationship crisis for years, I now have to move fast. Very. Seconds later we’re both running up the s
tairs, Sean reaching out to grab hold of my hair and my clothes. I sting and burn in different places; it’s hard to predict where the next pain will come from and whether it will throb or pierce, especially against a sound track of “bitch” and “whore” and “evil” and “monster.” I keep my mouth shut so that I can concentrate on moving, slip out of Sean’s grasp twice on the landing and manage to get to the bedroom. He’s too close behind for me to slam the door, and then I’m not in our room anymore because he’s pulled me back onto the landing, and the only way I can think to stop him from really hurting me is to surprise him with words. “There’s someone else,” I scream into the arm that’s pressing against my face. “I’m leaving you because of another man.”
Sean releases me, slumps in a heap outside the bathroom door. He’s crying. Irrelevantly, I notice that it’s not sad crying; it’s angry, like Lauren’s at Düsseldorf Airport. Like all the moisture being squeezed out of a bloated grudge.
I sink down to my haunches, panting. I need to explain properly. Once Sean understands, he might not be so upset—once he realizes I’m going mad and screwing up my life rather than riding off into the sunset with a new soul mate. “Do you remember Tim Breary?”
“Who?”
“He used to be my accountant, years ago. You never met him.” And I didn’t mention him unless I absolutely had to. “Nothing happened between us, nothing physical, but—”
“So something did happen!”
“I fell in love with him. I think he fell in love with me too. Maybe he didn’t, but at the time that was the impression I had. But . . . he ended it. Not that there was anything to end, really.”
“He dumped you?”
I nod.
“Good.” Sean spits the word in my face. “I hope you suffered.”
“I did.”
I want to tell him more about my suffering. I’ll try taking all the blame and judgment out of it, as I was once taught to do on a course for company directors that one of my investors suggested I attend, one whose suggestions I couldn’t afford to ignore. “You didn’t notice that I was discreetly falling apart. I hid it as best I could, but I couldn’t hide all of it. I worked out that I was safe as long as there was football on telly. I could sit across the room from you, lean my elbow on the arm of the blue chair and cry behind my hand.” And you never noticed.
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