“I don’t want anything,” she said “I’ll just have a packet of peanuts or something.”
“No way. You can’t live on that stuff,” he said, jabbing at the wine bottle.
“Don’t knock it over,” she said, grabbing it. “Peanuts will be fine.”
“Chris, you promised me you’d start looking after yourself and eating properly.
“I am, I had salad and jacket potato in work. I’m just too tired to eat.”
“But not too tired to drink,” he muttered, while nevertheless still pouring the wine.
“Don’t start,” she said, going into her bag to find her mobile phone to check texts.
“No texts please,” he said, still angry, “I haven’t seen you all day.”
“Sorry,” she said dropping the phone back into her bag. “So what have you been doing today?”
“Not much,” he said sitting back. He still looked angry but was trying to make an effort. “Only had two clients so it was pretty quiet. Did the shopping.”
“Oh yes,” she said absently.
He looked at her as if he wanted to say something but after a second he looked away and instead opened the menu.
“Well I’m having the lasagne,” he said. “Are you sure you’re not interested.”
She looked at him and for a moment, a split second, she realised it wasn’t him she was seeing but Matt. Matt staring at her with the same intense, hungry expression she had seen earlier that evening. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Damien was looking at her, a strange expression on his face.
“Where were you then?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” she replied.
“You just seemed to drift off, as if you weren’t really here.”
“Just thinking about work,” she said.
“You work too hard,” he replied and then went up to the bar to order his meal.
CHAPTER THREE
The rest of the week passed uneventfully. Of course she deliberately avoided any chance of running into Matt by sending a deputy to a meeting she thought he might attend and using the stairs rather than the lift. She knew the mature thing would be to ring him, ask to meet and find out what he had meant - but she couldn’t. The thought of having that conversation with him made her feel queasy. She'd rather just forget about it. And so she avoided him. And by the end of the week the encounter began to feel somewhat unreal, a dim and distant memory.
By the time the weekend came she was feeling more like herself, looking forward to a morning working out at the gym and an afternoon catching up on her reading. Damien would be at the football.
She had been working out at the gym for over a year now – gradually getting fitter and stronger. Mostly she ran – pounding away at the treadmill, lost in the world of her iPod. Starting to run had been hard at the beginning. She had nearly given up several times but had somehow stuck with it, the memory of an unfortunate tagged photograph on Facebook a good motivator. At the same time she had started watching her calories and each week had seen a steady decrease in her weight. Over six months she had lost four stone.
People were still reacting to her weight loss. In work it was common not to run into some people for months on end (indeed she was hoping for this very thing with Matt). When she saw someone she had not seen in a while she always saw a look of uncertainty cross their faces – was it her? Then came recognition followed by surprise and finally they would usually (but not always) say something.
“You look fantastic!”
“How much weight have you lost?”
“How did you do it?”
And more recently –
“Stop now.”
“Don’t lose anymore.”
“You’ve lost enough.”
“You don’t want to look ill.”
She usually just smiled and said thank you, told them that she had watched her calories, taken up running at the gym, was just maintaining now. But she always felt awkward. To look pleased suggested arrogance, big-headedness, vanity. But deep inside she was pleased. She felt losing four stones had been an achievement. At night she would sometimes run her hands over her hip bones and delight in their sharpness. If she ran her hands under her breasts she could feel her rib-cage. And the muscles in her thighs were now hard and defined.
But was she living a healthy lifestyle? No not really. In fact not at all. She skipped meals, felt guilty if she ate anything high in calories and cut back further on food for alcohol. Always ongoing in her head a mental bargaining – if I skip this I can have that extra glass of wine tonight.
She knew this was wrong. In fact not only was it wrong it was self-sabotage. Because she and Damien had been trying - sort of - for a baby for some years now. But nothing had happened. In the beginning they put it down to the fact that both of them were overweight. But then they lost the weight and still nothing happened. She knew stress could be a factor and yes she was stressed. But she also knew alcohol could prevent conception. Yet still she found herself unable (unwilling) to make that change in her lifestyle. Work is hard, she’d rationalise. I need a little something to wind down. But it annoyed Damien. She knew that. He didn’t exactly have a problem with her drinking alcohol - he’d sometimes suggest a bottle of wine himself. But his frown of disapproval when she suggested a second glass (bottle) of wine, which she always did, was appearing more and more often.
And she knew she had to be careful. Alcoholism ran in her family and various studies she had read suggested it was genetic. Her grandmother on her father’s side had been an alcoholic, her uncle on her mother's side too. And her father had had his difficulties. Indeed both her parents still drank more than they should, her mother weepy when drunk, her father moody. Christine knew it was something on which she had to get a grip. But she had yet to do so - at least not in the evenings and weekends when the need to wind down and chill out was overpowering.
But at least she was fitter now, she said to herself as she left the gym after her workout. She had run for forty minutes and rowed for twenty and the endorphins were starting to flow.
Damien hadn’t come with her to the gym today although he usually did. He was taking his father to the football and had left early to drive over to his house. So Christine had walked to the gym, enjoying the unexpected warmth of the bright winter sun.
Later on she would blame tiredness from the gym for what happened on her way back to the house. She had waved goodbye to the receptionist and stepped outside. Rummaging in her bag she had found her sunglasses and put them on. She crossed the road and started walking down the main road back to the house.
“How much longer Mum?” said a voice beside her.
She looked around, expecting to see a mother and a child behind her. But what she saw was a small dark-haired girl, no more than five years old, walking beside her. She looked behind her. There was no one there.
The little girl smiled up at Christine and reached out to hold her hand.
Teresa
The word flashed in Christine’s mind the second their hands touched. She snatched her hand away. Who was this girl? The girl looked up at her, confused, a flash of hurt across her face.
“What’s wrong Mum?”
Christine stopped walking and the girl stopped too. They stood looking at each other.
“Who are you?” asked Christine.
The girl didn't reply but started to laugh, the confused hurt look had vanished from her face and she now seemed to find it all funny.
“Oh Mum, you’re doing it again!”
“Doing what? Where’s your mother?”
“Mum stop it!” The girl was laughing harder now. “Dad told you not to do that anymore. I’ll tell him.”
Christine felt her head grow dizzy. There was something strangely familiar about the girl. She had grey blue eyes. Her face was small and pointed. Her dark hair gleamed in the winter sun.
The girl went to grab her hand again but Christine pulled back. From the corner of her eye she saw a car pu
ll up beside them and a figure get out. She looked to see who it was but the sun was in her eyes. And suddenly it was back, the piercing pain that had seized her on the doorstep less than a week ago. She put her hand to her head as she tried to steady herself. She closed her eyes for a second to see if it would pass. Mercifully it did. She opened her eyes. She was alone on the pavement, no sign of the girl, the car or the shadowy man. She leant against a wall taking breaths. What had just happened?
“What are you doing?”
The front door of the house she was leaning against had opened and an elderly woman was looking at her with a mix of fear and concern on her face.
“Sorry,” said Christine, “I just felt a little faint.”
The woman’s face relaxed a little.
“Can I bring you a glass of water?”
“No I’m… I’m… fine. I’ll get going.”
Christine felt the woman looking as she picked up her gym bag and resumed walking down the road.
By the time she got to her house she felt sick. Unlocking the door she entered the house and ran up the stairs, just reaching the toilet in time before the nausea overwhelmed her.
Afterwards exhausted she lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. What had happened? Who was that girl?
She thought again about what had happened when she came home Tuesday evening. And then that incident with Matt on Wednesday. What had he said? “Are you seeing her yet?” Was this connected?
No don’t be stupid, she said to herself. Some strange child comes up to you on the street to play a practical joke that’s all. And on Tuesday your eyes just played tricks on you. And Matt… well that was just something random and odd, maybe he’d been feeling unwell or something that day.
There is no connection, she said to herself again, more firmly this time. Apart from maybe her own tiredness – tiredness today from the gym, tiredness in the week from work. Her mind was doing strange things because she was exhausted.
But what if it was something else? What if she was seeing things because she was unwell? Christine tried to ignore that thought but it refused to go. Damien's grandmother had once started to see things and to have strange conversations with people who were not there. They had taken her to the hospital for tests and a tumour had been discovered. What if what was happening to her was the same?
She turned over and buried her head in her pillow. Not now. She couldn’t be ill.
Should she tell Damien?
No. I’ll see if anything else happens, she said to herself. She didn’t want to worry him. In fact he would be terrified. He had loved his grandmother. The thought of something like that happening to someone else he loved was already one of his worse fears. It would be too much for him.
I won’t tell him, she decided. But she would talk to her mother about it and see what she thought.
Having decided on the next course of action Christine began to feel a little better. She got up from the bed and began to run the bath for a post-gym soak. But unbidden the image of the little girl looking up at her came into mind. That face. Where had she seen it before? It was so familiar.
CHAPTER FOUR
She managed to arrange to see her mother the next day by getting herself and Damien invited for Sunday lunch. In the car on the way over she thought about how she was going to broach the subject and, more importantly, how she was going to broach it without Damien knowing.
As it happened her mother gave her the perfect opportunity. When she opened the door Christine and Damien could both see that she had been crying.
“Mum what’s wrong?” asked Christine at once.
“I need to speak to you,” whispered her mother, darting a glance at Damien.
“Damien, can you go in the living room?” said Christine, taking her mother by the arm, “We’ll go in the bedroom.”
“Sure,” said Damien, looking relieved not to have to get involved. He walked into the living room and Christine heard her father say hello.
She and her mother walked into her parent’s bedroom, across the hall from the living room. Her parents had moved into the bungalow three years ago. Christine still found it strange visiting her parents here. She missed her old childhood home. This house was too new and had no associations with her childhood. Her old house, in contrast, had resonated with them. But her parents had grown tired of the old house when the children had moved out. Every room had seemed empty without the children’s voices. Their lives seemed emptier too. Maybe if there had been grandchildren it would have been different for them. But that hadn’t happened and so the two of them had decided to move on, have a fresh start in a new home. Christine still passed the old house each day and had to restrain herself from asking Damien to stop the car so that she could get out, knock on the door and ask to go in. She dreamt of revisiting the old rooms - the bathroom, her bedroom, the kitchen. She yearned to touch the walls and the doors and to feel all the same feelings she had felt when living in that house.
But what were those feelings? They weren't happiness. It hadn’t really been the happiest of childhoods. Money was tight, both her parents worked long hours, she barely saw them and when she did they were arguing, always arguing, about money. But for much of the time it was just Christine and her brother Paul. And then Paul started staying out too, leaving Christine alone. All she could do to fill the time was study. And so she did. And eventually she no longer noticed how lonely she was. The house and her text books were her company. And now as an adult she missed the comfort they had given her. These days she couldn’t seem to find that same comfort anywhere else.
Her parents had separated once too. She remembered them gathering Christine and Paul in the living room one Saturday morning. Her father began to talk in a broken voice. He was going to get help. He had hurt their mother too much. He had a problem with alcohol. He had lost his job. But no more. He would get help. He would change.
Christine’s mother had just stared at the floor. It was difficult to tell whether she believed him or not, whether she even cared anymore. But they got through it. Somehow. Christine's father moved out for a few months, managed to get another job and cut down on his drinking. Eventually he moved back home. There was no fanfare, no big announcement. One morning Christine got up and he was there, downstairs, eating his breakfast. No one said anything so she kept quiet too. Sometimes that was best.
There were far less arguments from that time on. Her father was quieter though – more prone to reflection. Where previously he had been the life and soul of the party, now he preferred to sit quietly on the sidelines, just observing. And Christine’s mother seemed to welcome this – the quietness, the stillness. The arguments had worn her out. Worn them both out.
And that was why her mother's tears this morning alarmed Christine. That wasn't how things were these days. Things hadn't been like that for a very long time.
“What’s wrong Mum?” she asked again.
“Your father’s had a letter,” said her mother, her lip trembling and her eyes looking ready to cry some more. “They’re finishing him in work.”
Her father had worked on the buses since the time of the separation. Indeed it was that job that had marked the turning point in her parents’ lives- brought the separation to an end. He had been there years and had only just turned sixty. He wasn't ready to retire.
“Why, what’s happening?”
“Cut backs, cut backs,” said her mother angrily, “They’ve been threatening it for ages. But he won’t get his full pension. He wasn’t going to finish for another five years yet.”
Christine didn’t know what to say. Her mother had always worried about money. But her father’s job had made things much easier for them.“How many years have you got left on the mortgage?” she asked.
Life Shift Page 2