If I Could Say Goodbye

by Emma Cooper

  ‘Daddy YouTubes a LOT.’

  The knowledge that Ed has tried to plait her hair is like a sparkler in my hands, something new and dazzling, but I know it will burn me if I get too close to it. Oscar runs over to the pool, his chubby legs are less chubby I notice, his shorts a little less snug.

  ‘Does he?’ I ask. My lips are smiling at Ed, trying to tell him how proud and how sorry I am all at the same time. I stretch out my hand towards him; he has the same hesitancy around him as my daughter but moves towards me regardless.

  ‘Yep. He YouTubed how to make a dippy egg runny.’ Hailey tiptoes across the lawn; she has always walked on her tiptoes, not like with the confidence of a ballerina, more like she’s afraid to make a noise, too scared to leave a mark on the ground.

  Ed’s hand is warm in mine: it feels so familiar, but it doesn’t fit the same way as it used to; his fingers feel too long, my hand too small. His lips brush my cheek, his free hand resting at the back of my head. I wonder if he can feel that my hair is softer; I spent two hours walking around with a conditioning mask on it this morning. Nessa laughed and said I was behaving like a teenager before a first date. Nessa’s hands are unsuccessfully trying to fit the two sides of her bikini strap together; I release Ed’s hand and help her. It’s only for a second but Ed has already left my side and has followed the kids to the paddling pool. The loss of his hand in mine feels different from what I’m used to, like the loss is actually a relief. I open my mouth to speak but close it again; I don’t know what to say to him. Conversation that used to fall like rain is barren.

  I follow him to the water’s edge. ‘Have the kids got sun cream on?’ I begin. ‘Only Hailey burns so easily—’

  ‘Yes. I bought some factor fifty from Boots.’ His tone lands somewhere between disappointed and resolved.

  ‘Oh, I thought I told you where the spare sun cream was? In the blue box in the garage?’

  He looks away from me, seemingly focused on something much more important.

  I try to make light of it. ‘Oh. Maybe it was Elvis I told . . . we’ve been getting on like a house on fire.’ It is supposed to be a joke, but his face is telling me a different story . . . it’s a split second before he can rearrange his features into mock amusement, but it’s there. For that split second . . . he believed me. I place my hand on his arm carefully, ‘I’m joking, Ed.’ I don’t know if I’m trying to reassure him or myself.

  ‘Oh.’ Ed looks back at the kids, shielding his eyes from the sun. ‘I know, of course you’re joking.’ He turns his back on me. My hand goes out to reach him – it hovers between his shoulders so close that I can feel the warmth of him through his shirt – but the muscles beneath are tensed and I let my hand drop.

  ‘Besides, if I was going to start talking to dead rock stars,’ I prattle on, ‘I’d have gone for Jim Morrison, he’s more my type.’

  He turns to me and gives me a smile that is normally reserved for chatty supermarket cashiers, the ones that want to talk to you rather than get on with the job as quickly as possible. A smile for strangers.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Ed

  I’m pissed off. I know I’m pissed off, but I also know that I shouldn’t be pissed off.

  I’m saying pissed off too many times . . . and that’s pissing me off too.

  We let ourselves in through the back gate where Nessa and Jen were lying on sun loungers listening to music. Nessa was lying on her front, her back bare and shining from the sun cream. That bothered me, because Jen had probably put that on for her . . . all slippery and shiny. And what is Jen wearing? She looks like she’s trying to look like Audrey Hepburn. My mood has swung from happy to see my wife to something else. She’s wearing red lipstick.

  It doesn’t suit her.

  We’re both distracted and looking over to where Nessa is asking Daniel what time he is dropping off Erica.

  ‘Mummy, look! I can hold my head under the water for twenty seconds, count!’

  But Jen is walking back to Nessa. Hailey watches her go and starts counting. I try to give the kids my attention, but I hone into the conversation.

  ‘He’s on his way. Honestly, I’ve never known anyone who is always so late . . . he’ll be late for his own funeral.’ She flinches and catches Jen’s eye. ‘Too soon?’ Jen shakes her head and rolls her eyes.

  Oscar erupts from the water at the count of nine. ‘Nine,’ Hailey says in a bored tone.

  ‘It was not. It was twenty.’ Oscar is indignant. ‘I counted one-two-three-four-five—’

  ‘You don’t count like that, silly. You have to go one Mississippi, two Mississippi.’

  ‘What’s a misterzippy?’

  She shrugs her shoulder. ‘Mrs Park always counts Mississippis when we’re getting changed for P.E.’

  ‘Hey, Ed! Why don’t you take your gorgeous wife out while I play with the kids for half an hour? Dan will be here in a minute with Erica.’

  Jen leans forward and kisses Nessa’s cheek.

  ‘Marvellous idea!’ I reply; my voice sounds more pleased about it than I feel, for some reason.

  I try to ignore the lipstick imprint that Jen has left on the side of Nessa’s cheek.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Jennifer

  Nessa has suggested Ed and I go for a walk together, giving me a wink that said she knew exactly what my hair treatment and red lips meant I was after. Ed is grumpy: I’m not surprised; I suppose I’d be grumpy if the roles were reversed and he was the one who was psychotic. I Googled it last week: ‘Psychosis is a mental health issue that can cause patients to interpret things around them differently from others. This can be through hallucinations or delusions.’ See? Psychotic.

  I finish the strawberry ice cream that Ed has just bought me, and we walk hand in hand as we approach The Nook. The Nook is a part of the park that is hidden almost, an overgrown archway leading into a small square courtyard. Off to the right, through another barely visible archway, is a hidden garden. The kids think it’s magical; we told them it’s not even visible to other people and there is some truth in that, you could almost miss it. We duck beneath the ivy that hangs down and almost obscures the small patch of mossy grass. Trees arch over the hidden space protectively, the leaves hanging beneath a pentagram of sky. Fragments of sunlight skittering through, giggling in quiet whispers as they dance and court the silver of the birch tree trunks. We lie back – hand in hand – in the centre of the grass. The ground beneath us is mossy and warm and I feel it yield against me, cushioning my frame. Kerry has left; it’s just the two of us. The tablets have relaxed me: my breathing is deep and calm, my skin tingles and fizzes. The Nook is working its magic.

  ‘Is she here?’ Ed’s breathing is quicker than mine, his body tense, his limbs balancing on the moss rather than sinking into it. I prop myself up on my elbow and look down at him, brushing a stray piece of hair away from his forehead.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are the tablets working?’

  Kerry – shaking and pale – in the bed next to me last night, shimmers, the image just out of reach, like a dream that you try to remember.

  ‘I think so.’ I lower my lips and kiss him. His taste and the softness of his lips swallows me; I lower myself into the moment, the magic of The Nook, the fire inside, the fizzing of my skin . . . I wonder if this is what heaven feels like.

  ‘Is this heaven, do you think?’ I question against his mouth, my hands slipping beneath his shirt, my leg hooking over his. I feel so alive . . . is that what heaven is, feeling more alive than when you were living?

  His hand reaches for mine but holds it firm. ‘Stop, Jen. We need to get back to the kids.’

  ‘The kids are fine, they’re with—’

  ‘The kids are not fine, Jen.’ He looks up at me, concerned. ‘Is that what you think?’

  His words fire like bullets, each one shattering part of the scene, pulling back the curtain. The ivy loses its luscious greens and instead is ropy and framed by nettles. The moss-lik
e grass feels hard; patches of it are sunburnt yellow and are dry and itchy across the back of my legs.

  ‘I’m getting better, Ed. I promise I will get better, she’s hardly here at all any more.’ I try to kiss him again. I want that feeling, to be loved and cherished by my husband. I lean over him, letting my hand glide down his body towards his flies.

  ‘Jen, please . . . stop. We can’t.’

  ‘Shush, there’s nobody around,’ I giggle. His hands hold mine firmly, though.

  ‘It’s not that. You’re not well and I—’

  ‘I feel fine.’ I straddle him and go in for another kiss, but his head turns from me. This startles me and I sit back in shock. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing, I just, I . . .’

  I lift my legs off his and face him. My skin still holds the fizz, but it’s more than the gentle popping of lemonade in a bottle; my skin feels the sting of electric, the burn as it slices through the hairs on my arms.

  ‘You’re not well and I’d feel like I’m taking—’

  ‘Advantage of me?’ The words tumble from my mouth, the hurt behind them sending my body reeling, The Nook suddenly cold and dark.

  ‘Yes. NO. It’s not like that, you, you’re, you’re acting differently, it would be like I’m being unfaithful.’

  ‘Unfaithful?’ My voice is tinged with disbelief. ‘To whom? The woman who washes your clothes and cleans your house? The woman who picks out furniture and irons tea towels? That woman? Is that who you’re being unfaithful to, Ed? Is that who you’re missing?’ I can hear the hysteria in my voice as I stand up.

  Kerry is leaning back against the tree like she hasn’t a care in the world. ‘Go easy on him.’

  ‘You’re just as much to blame for this,’ I tell her; I don’t even try to hide her from Ed.

  ‘He’s trying his best.’

  ‘Oh, shut up! You’re not even here!’

  ‘The devil convinced the world he didn’t exist . . . it was his greatest trick.’

  ‘You’ve never even watched The Usual Suspects,’ I reply from under my breath.

  I should have died. The words float around my head, but I grab hold of them.

  ‘You should have let me die!’ My anger sends the dancing light scurrying away, hiding in the shadows and cooling the air. ‘I’m supposed to be dead.’ The light ducks its face around the corners of the shadows.

  ‘What?’ Kerry asks, looking affronted. ‘I saved you. I saved you and look at you . . . Look at how you’re behaving!’

  A family have found their way into The Nook and are making a hasty retreat back through the archway.

  ‘It’s because of you that I’m shouting at thin air!’

  ‘Stop it, Jen, take a breath,’ Kerry says.

  ‘Stop telling me what to do!’ I bend down and rummage into my handbag, pop open the pill bottle, fire two to the back of my throat and swallow.

  Kerry holds her stomach and raises an arm to the sky dramatically, falling to the floor like the Wicked Witch of the West. ‘I’m melllllttttting!’

  I raise my eyebrows at her and bite my tongue as she sinks. At least I know she’s seen The Wizard of Oz . . . we loved it when we were little.

  She breathes deeply and smiles up at me. My anger dissipates. I know what she’s doing, she’s goading me into taking the pills just like she would when we were kids and I didn’t want to do something. I take a step towards her, an apology on my lips. But Ed is behind me and is pulling my hand back towards him. I look away from Kerry and meet the worry in his eyes. I return my concentration to where Kerry was lying, but she has gone.

  ‘Let’s go back home.’ Ed avoids my eyes and picks up our things from the floor.

  ‘Home?’ I question; my thoughts are becoming muggy, warm and sticky.

  ‘Back to your parents.’

  I shake my head. ‘No. I want to go back to Nessa’s . . . she’s the only one who doesn’t make me feel like I’m insane.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to make you feel like you’re insane.’

  ‘I know.’ I gulp down the rest of the sentence: you may not have wanted to, Ed, but you did.

  ‘You OK?’ Nessa asks.

  I flash a glance in Ed’s direction and bite my lip. He’s apologised over and over on the way back. But I can’t seem to forget the way he turned away from me as I tried to kiss him, how he didn’t want to ‘take advantage’.

  Nessa reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze. I stroke her thumb in thanks, putting on a brave smile, and ask Hailey to help me; I glue the wrapping paper onto the inside of the cardboard box. Nessa, Erica and Hailey are making it into a house for the woodlice that have been collected and deposited into a Chinese takeaway container. I glance over to Ed, who is towelling Oscar down; my son’s fingers are pruned and there are grass cuttings sticking to his bare legs. He is completely naked, but Oscar hasn’t a care in the world. I try to catch Ed’s eye, to communicate without talking the way we always used to. But he doesn’t look at me; instead, he averts his eyes. His gaze is fixed to where Nessa and my hands are entwined.

  ‘Did Kerry really like to do this when she was a little girl?’ Erica asks as I smile and pass her the glue stick.

  ‘She did.’

  ‘What else did she do when she was a little girl, Mummy?’ Hailey waits for Erica to finish gluing her wallpaper.

  ‘Hales, time to go, sweetheart,’ Ed interrupts. Erica quickly passes the glue stick to Hailey. My time with them has gone so quickly, and the tug of longing for my old life almost takes my breath away.

  ‘Well . . .’ I reach forward and wipe a blob of jam away from Hailey’s cheek.

  ‘I liked to blow bubble gum.’

  ‘She liked to blow bubble gum,’ I continue, trying to hold on to the last few minutes before Ed takes them home. ‘Great big bubbles, not your usual ones. She would try out lots of different types and record them in her notepad. There were pictures of the wrappers and a chart of how big the bubbles were, if they popped on her nose they only scored a five. If they hit her nose, that was a ten, and if they made it all the way to her cheeks, they got fifteen. She even started mixing them – adding quarter of a stick of Juicy Fruit was her winning combination.’

  ‘You never let me have bubble gum, Mummy.’

  ‘Ah . . .’ I tap the end of her freckled nose and she wrinkles it, her freckles hiding beneath the creases, ‘that’s because once . . . just once, she scored a twenty. She blew and blew, but because she was concentrating so hard on blowing her bubble, she couldn’t speak and she wanted to show me. Aunty Kerry ran towards me, her cheeks were red and the bubble was bouncing up and down, but she tripped and fell. Her face hit the slabs and the bubble gum was all over her nose and she couldn’t breathe. I remember pulling it and pulling it free . . . I was so scared.’

  ‘What did Aunty Kerry do?’

  ‘Well . . .’ I pull Hailey onto my knee and stroke her face. ‘She was really scared too, and her chin was all grazed and bleeding, but do you know what the first thing she said was?’

  ‘Did you see? It was a twenty,’ we say in unison.

  ‘Did she get another twenty?’

  I shake my head. ‘No . . . Grandma wouldn’t let us have bubble gum after that. She loved making those lists, there was one about her insect houses, whether her ladybirds preferred purple or pink.’

  ‘Hales!’ Ed shouts again, and again disappointment pinches the edges of my smile.

  ‘Right then, poppet. Let’s put this somewhere to dry and next weekend we can paint the doors with proper grown-up paint. What colour would you like?’

  ‘Yellow, please.’

  ‘Yellow it is.’ I kiss the top of her head as she shimmies off my knee and runs over to her dad. I follow her, passing the cardboard house to Ed, careful not to let it fall into the chasm. I hop over and bend down to give Oscar a nose-to-nose kiss. He smells like summer, like plastic, water and cheap ice lollies.

  ‘Be good for Daddy and I’ll speak to you later. Shall I read
you the rest of A Dinosaur Ate My Homework?’

  ‘No, it’s OK. Daddy has read it to me and tonight he’s reading me . . .’ he cups his mouth and leans into my ear, ‘Captain Underpants.’ And then he dissolves into a fit of giggles.

  I stand, and Ed gives me a brief kiss on the cheek, the type of kiss he would give my mother, both of our feet teetering close to the edge of the rift that slices the ground between us. My skin feels cold where his lips have been.

  ‘I’ll see you at the doctor’s on Wednesday?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh, um I thought we were going for lunch on Tuesday?’

  ‘I can’t, Jen. I’m taking too much time off work as it is.’

  ‘Right, yes, of course. What time shall I be ready?’

  ‘Can I meet you at the doctor’s?’

  ‘I can go with her if you want?’ Nessa offers. ‘I’ve got a screening at eleven but I’m free after then?’

  ‘No.’ The abruptness of his tone smashes through the sounds of summer, through the pop music on the radio, through the wind-up sound of the crocodile who is lopsidedly circling the inside of the pool.

  Nessa holds her hands up defensively. ‘Oh-kay . . . I was just offering.’ She rolls her eyes and after the kids hug goodbye she takes Erica inside to get changed, ready for when Daniel picks her up.

  ‘She was only trying to help,’ I say quietly, folding my arms across my chest.

  ‘I know. Sorry, I’m just tired and . . .’ I can’t see his expression behind his sunglasses. ‘Never mind. I’ll see you Wednesday.’ The cold kiss is applied again as I watch my family walk away from me, pulling a part of me with them.

  Nessa’s hand lands on my shoulder as the gate closes and I reach up to hold it. Daniel arrives moments later, early for once, and I excuse myself, lock myself in the bathroom and cry. I hear the engine of Daniel’s car quieten down the road, blow my nose and return to the garden.

  I should have died.

  The words float amongst my blurred vision, the end of the sentence becoming hazy, the words becoming weaker, disintegrating and scratching against the inside of my eyelids.