The Seven Year Itch

by Emlyn Rees

  ‘I’m well aware that it’s really late, Jack.’

  ‘Sorry, babe. I didn’t realise. My phone ran out of juice.’

  Like he’s going to get away with that! ‘Oh, really?’

  Finally, Jack cottons on that I’m not in a great mood.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh . . . nothing in particular. Only that I spent all day preparing a special meal for you, because you said you’d be home, and because we’d agreed that we’d have a nice evening in together. Quality time. “To reconnect” I think was what you said. “On our own.” ’

  He looks at the kitchen table all laid up, and the penny drops. ‘Oh. You should have said.’

  ‘It was a surprise.’

  ‘Well, I kind of double-booked. We can have the meal tomorrow night,’ he says, coming forward and trying to reach out to me, but I shrug away from him and fold my arms, leaning back against the unit.

  ‘Look, I couldn’t do anything about it, I promised Matt, and I hardly ever see him, and Honey said –’

  ‘You went out with Matt and Honey? You didn’t mention that she was there.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  I can feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. Personally, I have no desire to meet this Honey person, not after she refused to come to Ben’s birthday party on the grounds that her dress might get ruined. Uh! Excuse me, but how much of a princess? But the thought of Jack and Matt and Honey, bantering away all night in the pub, fills me with indignation. It used to be Matt, Jack and me.

  ‘So what’s she like?’ I ask, drumming my fingers on my arm.

  ‘The usual. Blonde . . . big tits.’

  ‘Really? How interesting of her.’

  ‘She’s got a filthy sense of humour, too,’ Jack laughs, and he looks like he’s about to share something Honey said, but when he sees my thunderous expression, he obviously thinks better of it and the smile fades from his face.

  ‘Well, we’ll have to invite her over to dinner,’ I say acidly. ‘That’s if she can stand coming here in her designer clothes.’ And if her tits will fit through the door.

  ‘She’s not like that, really. She’s very down to earth. Her and Carmen –’

  ‘Carmen? Who’s Carmen?’

  ‘Honey’s best friend.’

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Oh, this is just getting better and better.

  ‘I see. So how come you didn’t mention her either?’ I say.

  ‘I didn’t?’

  ‘No. You didn’t.’

  Jack goes over to the sink. He takes a glass from the cupboard and fills it from the filter jug. Even from behind, I can tell he’s hiding something. His jacket seems to be radiating guilt.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Well, Carmen turned up with Honey, and she was hungry, which is why we went to the restaurant.’

  I glance across at my pan of lovingly prepared chicken fricassee.

  ‘Oh? You went to a restaurant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I’m pursing my lips so hard, I can feel them hurting. I can’t believe he went out to eat. I can’t believe I actually made him his favourite pudding (crème brûlée) and burnt my finger blow-torching the top. When all the time he was at a restaurant. Now I wish I’d blowtorched him.

  ‘Which restaurant?’

  ‘Oh. That place. You know. Park Lane. That . . . um . . . that posh one.’

  He can’t possible mean what I think he means.

  ‘You mean Nobu?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s it. Carmen works there. She managed to wangle us a table. Cool, huh?’

  I put my thumb and forefinger on my temple. I can feel my heart thumping in my chest.

  ‘So, let me get this straight. You went to Nobu. You went to Nobu – one of the most exclusive London restaurants there is. Without me.’

  Jack turns round to face me. He swallows a gulp of water and puts the glass down.

  ‘It’s not what you think. It’s all all right, you see. Matt paid.’

  ‘I don’t care who fucking paid. What I care about is that you went to Nobu without me and with some fucking girl called Carmen.’

  ‘You’re making it sound like it was a date.’

  ‘Well, wasn’t it? Because that’s what it sounds like to me. A double date. Matt and Honey. Jack and Carmen. How very fucking cosy.’

  ‘It was an accident. It just turned out that way –’

  ‘What was it, Jack? Four spoons. One pudding.’

  ‘A pudding? Are you kidding? After the chef’s tasting menu. Christ no. None of us even had room for a wafer-thin mint.’

  ‘Don’t you fucking dare make a joke of it.’

  ‘Oh, come on? Nobu? Would you have said no?’

  ‘Yes!’ I shout it at him.

  ‘Amy. Be reasonable. Please. Come on. It wasn’t my fault –’

  ‘No. You be reasonable. Last week it was clubbing all night with Sally McCullen –’

  ‘She wasn’t there. I swear it –’

  ‘And now you’re out dining in the restaurant that I’ve always wanted to go to, the restaurant you said you’d take me to, with some girl who sounds like she works in a lap-dancing club.’

  ‘So you’re pissed off about the restaurant? Is that it? You’d have been OK if we’d eaten in the pub?’

  ‘No, you moron.’ I’m shouting louder now and tears are coming. I will them away. I hate getting emotional when I’m trying to get my point across, but I can’t help it.

  Jack looks at me, totally exasperated. I can see that he has no idea why I’m upset.

  ‘I’m sorry. Is that what you want me to say?’

  ‘No. I want you to mean it, not just to say it.’

  ‘I don’t see why you’re shouting at me. I’ve done nothing wrong. It’s not a sin to eat.’

  I stare at him, and for a second he seems like an absolute stranger. Doesn’t he care at all? Does he really take me so much for granted, that he can’t see how I feel?

  I can’t bear to look at him any longer. I turn and put my hands on the side of the unit. I can feel anger boiling in my chest.

  ‘Fine. Do what you want then,’ I say.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s very obvious that you don’t want to spend any of your free time with me.’

  ‘Why would I, when all you give me is grief?’ He mumbles it, but I hear it as clearly as if he’d shouted it in my ear.

  How DARE he!

  Something inside me snaps.

  I pick up the pan of chicken fricassee, spin round, and hurl it as hard as I can on the floor. The pan clatters spectacularly and chicken splatters everywhere.

  Jack stares at me, astonished.

  Ben starts crying in the bedroom. I shove past Jack and open our bedroom door. I pick Ben up and cradle his head. I’m shaking.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ Jack asks, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Kate’s not going to be back tonight,’ I tell him, hardly managing to control my voice. My face is wet with tears. ‘You can sleep in Ben’s room.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘You’re throwing me out of the bedroom?’

  ‘Since you seem to have lost all respect for me, I don’t see why I should share a bed with you. So, yes!’

  Take Your Positions, Please

  The next morning, I wake up with a hangover, still in my clothes. When I look in the mirror, there are tramlines of mascara down my cheeks like Marilyn Manson. I think of H and what she would say if she could see me. She’d no doubt recite our favourite JR quote from Dallas: ‘Sue Ellen, you’re a tramp, a drunk, and an unfit mother, and that’s what my daddy said before he died.’

  I get up and go into the bathroom before Ben wakes up, so that I don’t scare him with my appearance. He stirs in his cot as I quietly open the door.

  In the hallway, I freeze, listening for any signs of Jack. I creep al
ong the carpet to Ben’s room, where Kate has been sleeping. The door is ajar and I peer through the crack by the hinges. The bed is untouched.

  I go through to the lounge and stop in the doorway. The cushions of the sofa have been pulled off, revealing a patina of raisins, miniature cars, loose change and one of my missing earrings on the sofa shell. The sofa cover and all the cushions are heaped up on the floor, like a collapsed kids’ den, but Jack’s no longer in his nest.

  It’s the indent of his head on a cushion that makes tears spring to my eyes. It’s not that I’m sorry for over-reacting and throwing him out of the bedroom. Or that, for the first time in our marriage, we’ve broken one of our sacred rules and gone to sleep on a row. It’s just that the dent signifies the absence of Jack, and I know what that means.

  It means that he’s taken his position.

  And when I go into the kitchen and see the chicken fricassee congealed on the floor, I know exactly which position that is: far far away in the Land of the Unjustly Treated. He’s an illegal immigrant there, let’s not forget, but he’s there all the same.

  As the day progresses and I don’t hear from him, I feel worse and worse. I have such a battle going on in my head that I can barely function. I dither in the supermarket aisles, I burn Ben’s lunch and, to top it off, I dye the white washing grey. All before midday.

  And all along I know that Jack’s at work and actively not thinking about me. How can he just switch off? Doesn’t he care that we’ve reached such a low point? We’ve never had such a sustained period of arguing before.

  Eventually, when Ben’s having a nap, I relent and call Jack to see if he’s ready to say sorry.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, when I tell him it’s me. His voice is cold and unfriendly.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘Look. Can we just sort this out?’ I ask. ‘Can we talk later? I really think we should.’

  ‘Well that depends, Amy,’ he says.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether you’re going to be able to behave rationally. I mean, how can I be sure that you’re going to be civil and not turn into a psycho and start smashing the place up?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘Because, I tell you, how you behaved last night was totally out of order.’

  How I behaved, indeed. I wouldn’t have thrown the bloody chicken fricassee if it wasn’t for him, but Jack seems to have forgotten all about the fact that he was the one in the wrong.

  I wish I’d never called him.

  There’s a long silence on the phone. My eyes well with tears.

  ‘I’ll see you later, then,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.’

  Mystery Woman

  At lunchtime, I walk up to Gracelands. It’s Ben’s favourite café and, as it’s a Friday, there’s bound to be a friendly face. Being out of the flat calms me and puts things a bit more in perspective, but as I walk up the pavement, I still feel bleak. It’s a hot, sunny day, but inside I feel cold. An arctic freeze has settled over my relationship and it’s altered everything.

  Most of all, I hate the way that Jack has twisted things round, that it’s all come down to the frickin’ chicken fricassee.

  Was it really so much of an over-reaction on my part? My head says, yes, that probably it was, but my heart doesn’t. My heart is still wounded by the fact Jack thinks that all I give him is grief. And if that’s really what he thinks, then throwing him out of the bedroom just made it ten times worse. The more I think about it, the more tied up I get. The way Jack sees it, I’m completely in the wrong. But I’m not. I know I’m not.

  The café is all high ceilings, brickwork walls, wooden floorboards and rustic tables. Behind the counter is a huge array of salads and delicious-looking moussakas and lasagnes, but because of my hangover, I can’t face anything.

  Camilla and Faith are on the far table. They wave and I go and join them. Despite their warm welcome, however, I feel like I’m gate-crashing their lunch. There’s something conspiratorial about them, as if they’ve stopped talking because I’m there. Ben shoots off to find Amalie and Tyler in the play area in the corner.

  ‘It’s nice to see you up here. We weren’t expecting you,’ Camilla says, smiling brightly as the waitress deposits two plates on the table in front of her and Faith. I order a strong coffee. It’s all I can handle.

  Camilla doesn’t look at me, but my gossip radar is up. She’s got something to say. About me.

  ‘What?’ I ask, as our eyes finally connect.

  She glances at Faith, before asking, ‘So are you meeting Jack for lunch, then?’

  ‘Jack? I wasn’t planning to. Why?’

  ‘Oh. Because we just saw him. Just a minute ago,’ Camilla says.

  My heart leaps. Is Jack here? Has he come to find me?

  ‘Where?’ I ask.

  ‘He was in a car.’

  ‘A car?’

  ‘An amazing car, actually,’ Faith chips in, nodding at Camilla. I notice mischief sparkling in her eyes. ‘A Lexus convertible. Customised. Brand new.’

  I don’t know anyone with a Lexus convertible.

  ‘We couldn’t believe it when we saw them zooming past. They looked like they were having a right old laugh,’ Camilla says.

  They?

  ‘She must have a fortune to be able to afford one of those,’ Camilla adds.

  She?

  I can feel a blush rise in my cheeks.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve just remembered, Jack’s with one of his clients today,’ I bluff.

  Faith looks at me. Then she looks at Camilla. ‘They were probably going to the garden centre, then?’

  ‘I guess,’ I say, but the truth is I don’t know where Jack was going, much less who he was going with . . .

  Accidental Skin Contact

  Elvis’s ‘Suspicious Minds’ is playing loudly, as I sit and wait for H. It’s a Thursday night in Soho and the pub is nearly full.

  How bloody apt. Jack and I can’t go on with suspicious minds, either. I’m not sure how we’ve managed to come to this stalemate. We’re having to be civil to one another because of Ben, but all affection has been turned off like a tap. I’m not getting so much as a drip of kindness or remorse out of him.

  We’re sleeping in the same bed, because Kate is back from her work trip, but Jack won’t even look at me, let alone touch me. Also despite it being furnace-like in our flat, for the first time in our whole life together, he’s taken to wearing his old pyjamas to make it clear that accidental skin contact is strictly forbidden.

  Even so, I’ve hardly seen him all week. He’s been out of the flat, claiming that he’s working long hours. I only know what he’s doing because he tells Ben when he’ll be home.

  The more he ignores me and is mean to me, the more indignant I feel. He should apologise. And explain himself. Who exactly is this beautiful client of his? If indeed it is a Greensleeves client. Or is it someone Jessie recommended to him? One of her rich friends?

  And why is he driving around in the sunshine in her convertible all the time, when I’m feeling this bad?

  I would ask him outright about the mystery woman, but since communication between us is at an all-time low, I’ve hardly had the opportunity.

  Never, ever have we sustained an argument this long and not made up – and the worrying thing is that now it’s technically stopped being an argument. It’s warped into something else. It’s more like an ongoing form of torture.

  Maybe this is how marriages go wrong. I can really see how it happens now. You have an argument. You don’t sort it out, but life keeps on happening. After a while, you lose your moment to recap and find the path together out of misunderstanding and misery. You find that you can’t access the emotions you felt so strongly when the argument started, because they’ve distilled down, evaporated into a drop of poison and, like sulphuric acid, it hisses and burns a little hole in everything that’s good and true.

  Which is why I need H. I need to hear it from her that I�
�m right not to back down – that my strategy of holding the line until Jack cracks will work – but I also need to discuss how long this might take, because at this rate, there’s every chance I’ll crack first. And if I can’t get Jack to apologise, then I need to work out a surrender plan that will minimise my losses and won’t set any precedents.

  More importantly, I just need to be out of the flat. Kate’s there tonight and I can’t bring myself to discuss my problems with Jack with her, even though I know she’s itching to. She keeps looking at me with hangdog sympathetic eyes, that make me want to punch her. It infuriates me that she thinks of herself as an expert on relationships when she’s only just broken up with someone herself.

  So I agreed to meet H after work. It was perfect timing, she assured me. She wanted me to act as chaperone for the date she’s fixed up with ‘No-photo’ Tom off the website. The idea is for us to meet before the date begins, so we can have a proper chat and then, as soon as he turns up, I leave. That is, unless he turns out, as H suspects he might, to be minging, at which point we have a pact to both run away.

  So, all well and good in theory, except that now I’m here in the pub and H has failed to show up. I’ve been sitting here like a lemon on my own for half an hour. I’ve read the Metro twice and now, as I drain my drink, I know for sure that my window of opportunity to discuss my problems with H has closed.

  Why is H doing this to me in my hour of need? I need to talk it all through. I need to tell her about the mystery woman Jack was seen with in the Lexus convertible. Who was she? What does it all mean? Should I be worried? How do I get the image of Jack laughing with a beautiful woman – who I’ve now built up in my imagination to look like a cross between Grace Kelly and Jackie O – out of my head?

  I look around the pub. There are gangs of after-work drinkers and I’m reminded of the nights I used to go out with the girls from Friers. How we used to promise each other that we were just staying for the one, but would end up crawling from bar to bar. Sometimes Jack would join us and we’d go somewhere cheap to eat. Those were the nights when I was full of beans at seven in the evening and not on my knees with exhaustion. Nights that were no pressure, because there wasn’t a babysitter at home. Nights where I’d throw on something skimpy and fun that I’d bought in my lunch break and stay out dancing until two.