The Seven Year Itch

by Emlyn Rees

  It Ended With A Kiss

  I stare desperately at Amy across the table in Milady’s.

  My heart’s pounding with adrenaline. My chest feels tight, like I’m gasping for air. All this nastiness I’ve told Amy . . . all this nastiness I’m trying to leave behind . . . it makes me feel like I’m trying to outswim a shark, and Amy’s my only hope. If she doesn’t reach out for me now, if she doesn’t forgive me, then that’s it; I’m fucked; my life’s not worth a damn.

  ‘You mean you didn’t actually do anything?’ she says.

  She’s staring at me with tears shining in her eyes.

  I knock back my glass of Dark and Stormy.

  ‘That’s not the point. I wanted to, and I nearly did. And I promised you once that I never would. Never again. Not after Sally McCullen. Don’t you get it? I thought I had Phalius under control, but I was wrong. And –’

  ‘Who the hell is Phalius?’ she interrupts.

  I screw up my face, a little drunk, a lot confused, astounded that I’ve really just said that name out loud. ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  But from the expression on Amy’s face, it’s clear that it does.

  ‘My cock,’ I admit.

  ‘Your cock.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your cock has a name?’

  ‘No. I mean, not specifically, but yes, I suppose . . .’

  Amy stares at me in astonishment. ‘After seven years of marriage, you tell me this? Who do you think you are, Jack? D H Fucking Lawrence?’

  D H Fucking Lawrence? I’m guessing that she’s not referring to a porn star, but to the famous novelist and poet who wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where the two main characters used to refer to their genitals by nicknames.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I say.

  ‘But you really do call your cock Phalius?’

  ‘Not actually call, no. Not out loud. That would be ridiculous. Not to mention schizophrenic. But, yes. That is how I sometimes think of him.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Well he’s hardly a her . . .’

  She growls. ‘Whatever. Look, I don’t want to talk about Penius –’

  ‘Phalius.’

  ‘Can you please just shut up about him – it – for one minute?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And think about the facts. Which are that you got yourself into a bad situation with Jessie – but probably only because you were stoned – and you still managed to get yourself back out. You still acted on instinct. You still came back to me.’

  She’s looking at me with the same mixture of determination, anxiety and distress you might encounter on the face of a veterinary student shoving their hand up a cow’s arse for the very first time.

  I stare back at her, dumbfounded. Why is she being this nice to me? If it was the other way round, I’d go spare . . .

  ‘You mean you’re all right about this? You mean you don’t mind?’

  ‘Well, I’m not exactly delirious about you hanging around in strange women’s bedrooms, no, but there’s nothing to forgive. You taught yourself a lesson, Jack, and everyone messes up from time to time. Everyone.’

  Everyone except you, I think

  I don’t deserve her. I really don’t.

  I feel my heart leap and I grab her hands.

  ‘God, I love you,’ I tell her.

  Exhilaration and relief run through me hand in hand, like lovers through a field of summer clover. I feel like I’m sitting here naked. I’ve said it. It’s out. I’ve got nothing left to hide. Amy was right, I realise, as I stare gratefully into her eyes. Just like Amy’s always right. The truth does heal. It does make things better, not tear them apart.

  I swallow hard, tears in my eyes. Now that I’ve got her back, I don’t want to risk losing her again.

  ‘I don’t ever want to come that close again,’ I tell her, ‘to messing things up between us. That’s why things have got to change. We’ve got to start taking more care of each other. No matter what happens. No matter what it takes. We’ve got to make our lives great again. And I swear to you now, if I’m ever tempted to do something stupid again, then I’ll tell you straightaway.’ I squeeze her hands in mine. ‘I want to be a good husband, Amy, and a good father. I don’t want to end up like my dad. I don’t want Ben to end up hating me. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to make you happy and give you everything you deserve.’

  I’m saying all this to make her feel good, but she actually starts to cry.

  Panic leaps inside me. ‘What is it?’ She won’t look at me. ‘You said you were OK . . . You said you –’

  ‘I –’ She tries to speak, but she’s too choked up to get the words out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her. I hate myself for having hurt her like this. ‘I’m so sorry. Please, Amy, please don’t cry . . .’

  She buries her head in her hands and starts to shake.

  ‘I love you, Amy. I love you and everything’s going to be all right. I swear it to you. I swear that I’ll –’

  ‘Stop it,’ she tells me, looking up. Her eyes are bloodshot and raw. ‘You don’t understand. It’s not you who’s messed things up. It’s me.’ She blinks heavily and a tear runs down her cheek. ‘Can’t you see that, Jack? It’s me.’ She looks like she’s about to be sick. ‘I’m the one who’s ruined it all.’

  I feel like all the air’s being sucked out of the room.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I ask.

  What she says, she says quickly. Her words topple over each other, like pennies falling off the shelf in an arcade machine. There’s something about an internet date. A guy called Tom who works in publishing. Trafalgar Square at night. A kiss. And then another day. Another meeting. Where she tried to break it off with him. But didn’t.

  I feel like I’m suffocating.

  Promises and assurances wash over me. Bullshit that I don’t want to hear.

  Amy did what I never did.

  She kissed someone else.

  I don’t care about the rest.

  When I stand up, I stumble and sway, like a man on the deck of a sinking ship.

  As I look down at her and she continues to speak and continues to cry, I hear nothing, and I feel nothing.

  I don’t even know who she is.

  I turn my back on her.

  I walk towards the door.

  I don’t bother looking round to see if she’s following, because I don’t want to look at her at all.

  Turn Around

  I break into a run, the second I’m outside.

  I sprint past packed cafés and bars. There’s music all around. People are laughing and drinking at tables on the sidewalk. Basketball players rush up and down a floodlit court. Cars hiss by. Sound systems blare. I pound the sidewalk until my lungs feel like they’re going to burst.

  I slump in the doorway of a diner. Then I see the light of a cab and I stick out my hand.

  As soon as it pulls over, I climb in.

  ‘Where d’ya wanna go?’ the Mexican driver asks.

  All I get is a slice of his face in the rear-view mirror, like he’s staring at me through a letterbox.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Just drive.’

  ‘What?’ he wisecracks. ‘Like in the movies?’

  ‘Yeah. Like that.’

  He shrugs. ‘Sure, man. Whatever you say.’

  He flicks on the meter and we pull out into the traffic. I curl up in my seat.

  I feel dazed, like I’ve been hit repeatedly over the head with a sledgehammer.

  I can’t believe what she’s done. I try running it through my head, but it makes no sense.

  How can this have happened? How can she have pulled the wool over my eyes like this? All this time, I thought I was the threat to our family, when all along it was her.

  I think about Ben.

  I think about Amy.

  I think about me.

  But I can’t think abou
t us together. Not any more.

  I gaze through my half-reflection in the cab window, at the neon lights of the New York stores. At the strangers all around. At the strangeness of it all.

  As we enter Times Square, I think about Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, and how it was for him when he first hit town. That’s what I’m like now. Only a lot less gay, clearly, and without a stetson on my head. But just like him, I’m lost in a place that I don’t understand. Just like him, I’m lost.

  The cab passes a subway station, and I remember the customer satisfaction questionnaire I filled out on the train journey to Heathrow Airport on the way out here.

  At the beginning, where they ask you to tick the demographic box, I’d noticed that I’d moved up an age bracket, from 25–34, to 35–50.

  Well, maybe that’s what this is: the end of the last stage of my life, and the beginning of the next.

  I wipe the sweat from my brow on the back of my hand, and I notice my wedding ring. In the gloom of the cab, it looks like a groove that’s been cut into my flesh, right down to the bone.

  I feel so sick, it’s all I can do not to spew.

  I can’t get away from the facts, and the facts are black-and-white. She’s wrong and I’m right. We’ve got nothing left to say to each other.

  We’ve got nothing left.

  For a married man, with very little money to his name, no luggage, and a free flight ticket home back at the hotel he’s meant to be staying at with his wife, I then do a very strange thing.

  But for me, after what’s happened, it’s the only thing I can do.

  I check my jacket pocket to see that both my wallet and my passport are there, And then I say to the driver, ‘Can you please turn around?’

  ‘You wanna go back to SoHo?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘Take me to the airport. Take me to JFK. As fast as you can.’

  Because that’s where I’m going: home.

  Or to London, anyway.

  Because I don’t even know what the word home means any more.

  15

  Amy

  The Everest Of Moral High Ground . . .

  It’s Tuesday and I’m in my mother’s kitchen and I’m high with exhaustion. I’m actually not sure how I’ve managed to get myself here, but if nothing else, the last twenty-four hours have proved that I’m more resilient than I thought.

  I’ve come straight here from the airport, by train and cab. I haven’t slept – except fitfully on the plane – since Jack left me in Milady’s on Sunday night. That seems like it happened in a different universe.

  At first, when Jack stormed out, I thought that he’d gone on a New York drinking bender. So I went back to the hotel room to wait for him. I sat on the bed, watching the door, paralysed. He may hate me for what I’ve done, I told myself, but he can’t hate me forever. Can he?

  By the next morning, when Jack hadn’t shown up, my fear about our relationship had warped into something else entirely. By lunchtime, I’d convinced myself that Jack had been mugged and didn’t have any way of getting back to the hotel. By mid-afternoon, he’d been brutally murdered in the Bronx. Which is when I got the hotel staff involved, and they in turn called the NYPD.

  It was only when I was about to cancel my flight on Monday night, and Officer Delancy was about to file a missing persons report, that Matt called, and I discovered that Jack was already back in the UK and wasn’t dead at all.

  Which is when I got angry.

  It hadn’t even occurred to me that Jack would ever do that. That he would be so stupid and selfish to do that.

  That he would send me to hell and back.

  Putting aside my obvious embarrassment, about having to explain the situation to the exhausted hotel staff and apologise for wasting NYPD time, I’m still incensed that Jack didn’t give me the chance to explain myself. After I’d been so understanding about Jessie, the least he could have done was hear me out.

  I may have been stupid – delusional even – in the whole affair with Tom, but Jack leaving me in New York, is worse. Much, much worse.

  How dare he walk out on me?

  How dare he ruin our trip like that?

  I must be the only person in the world who could win a trip to the shopping Mecca of America and fail to buy anything. I even came home with change.

  So I’m staggered that Jack has claimed the moral high ground – and we’re talking the Everest of moral high ground – when he’s got no right to have even made it to base camp.

  And to add insult to injury, my longed-for reunion with Ben just now was also a total disaster.

  ‘Wabby Daddy gone?’ he asked me, by way of hello.

  I tried to gather him up into my arms, but he punched me.

  ‘I want my Dadda!’

  ‘Daddy’s not here, darling,’ I said, catching his wrist, before he hit me again. ‘Haven’t you got a kiss for Mummy?’

  ‘No.’

  I stayed crouched on the floor, my arms outstretched towards him, as he stomped away from me into the garden.

  Then I burst into tears.

  Mum immediately went into action mode. Which is why I’m now sitting at her kitchen table, with a cup of tea and a box of Kleenex in front of me on the floral plastic tablecloth.

  ‘He’ll come round,’ she says, setting the teapot down. ‘He’s probably just trying to punish you for leaving him for so long. You’re lucky he didn’t bite you. Some children do that to their parents, you know. When they’ve been left.’

  Honestly, can she make me feel any worse? I detect a slight note of satisfaction that Ben has rejected me.

  ‘Anyway, I should imagine you’re exhausted. Now that you’re here, why don’t you have a sleep, darling?’ she says. ‘I can make up your old bed and –’

  ‘No, Mum. Thanks anyway, but I really have to get home.’

  I watch Ben in her back garden on the new slide she’s bought for him, next to the huge sandpit. He’s clearly been having the time of his life. He obviously hasn’t missed me at all.

  Am I really that dispensable?

  Apparently I am. The men in my life seem to think so. They’re deserting me in droves.

  ‘Just give him a few days,’ Mum says. ‘By the end of the week he’ll have forgiven you.’

  ‘What?’ I ask, homing back in on her. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’m not really upset about Ben. It’s just . . . nothing. It’s been a fraught few days, that’s all.’

  ‘Did you have a wonderful time?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  There’s a pause. I take a sip of my tea. I don’t want to tell her. I’m determined not to involve her. I’ve already lied once and told her Jack isn’t here because he had to go straight back to work, but I can feel my resolve crumbling. The need for someone to be on my side, to feel sorry for me, feels overwhelming.

  ‘So . . . do you want to tell me what happened?’ she asks, gently.

  I blow my nose. Exhaustion has left me weak and defenceless against my mother’s probing stare. ‘Jack and I had a silly row in New York, that’s all. And Jack . . . he left and came home . . .’ I describe my day from hell yesterday.

  She puts her hand to her mouth. ‘He did that? Jack really did that? Of all the mean, cowardly, ungentlemanly things –’

  ‘Mum, please . . .’

  ‘But . . . but . . . but . . . anything could have happened to you. Doesn’t he care?’

  ‘It’s OK. I’m a grown-up. I was fine,’ I lie.

  My mother’s reaction has made Jack’s behaviour seem much worse. Even more indefensible. Even less forgivable.

  But I still feel I should backtrack. Somehow, by grassing him up, I’ve crossed a boundary, taken myself out of the Jack and Amy team and realigned myself with my mother, and I’m too long in the tooth for that. Added to which, I’ve clearly trashed Jack’s fragile relationship with his mother-in-law. She’ll never forgive him for this. I can see it in her face.

  ‘I don’t want you to worry, Mum. It’s nothing. Jack
just wants . . . he just needed some time on his own.’

  But the truth is that I don’t know what Jack wants or needs. Certainly not any contact with me or his son. Apparently, he’s decamped to Matt’s house and, according to Matt, has thrown his mobile phone away. Jack has been back in England for twenty-four hours and hasn’t bothered to come to pick up Ben.

  ‘It’s another woman, isn’t it?’ Mum says.

  ‘Mum! It’s not like that –’

  ‘Because your father was the same. He had the roving eye. I know what it’s like . . .’

  ‘Jack’s not –’

  ‘But to leave you! I mean, what’s he playing at? You’re the mother of his child.’

  She puts her hand on her chest and looks poignantly out at Ben. I roll my eyes. This is what years of watching daytime soaps does for you.

  ‘It wasn’t Jack, it was me,’ I say, which stops her in her tracks. ‘I told him about something that had happened between me and another man and he . . . well, he didn’t react too well.’

  Mum looks me over, trying to take in what I’ve just said. I can’t hold her gaze. She leans across and puts her hand over mine.

  ‘Has he been hitting you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jack. You can tell me if he was. Domestic violence is very common you know, darling. You wouldn’t be the first woman to find comfort in the arms of another man. Angela Dixon down the road . . . her daughter –’

  I rub my face and sigh. ‘Mum, please, you’re just making this worse. It’s nothing like that.’

  She takes a sip of tea and looks at me. I hadn’t realised how old she looks these days. Will I look like her soon? Are those crow’s feet going to come home to roost on my face any day now? Is my brow going to become creased from a permanent distrust of the opposite sex? Is that where I’m heading?

  ‘You and this other man . . . has it been going on for long?’ Mum asks me, in the pinched, pretending-not-to-care way she does. I remember her asking me whether I’d been having sex for long with my first boyfriend, at this very table. Experience has taught me, it’s best not to answer.

  ‘No. Look. It was nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything. Please don’t worry about us. Jack and I have just had a tough few months that’s all, and –’