The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

  ‘For God’s sake, Sam,’ Melanie said. ‘Why don’t you just move?’

  And he scowled, and shuffled over a little, to the side. He was listening to us too, though I paid no heed to that at the time.

  Melanie poured some more wine into our cups.

  ‘Your trouble,’ she said to me, ‘is that you can’t move on. And you’re on edge all the time. Worrying about your kids. Worrying about everything. He’s got you right under his thumb, even now.’

  He being David, of course. I sipped at my drink, too cold and too numb to argue. Besides, why would I argue? What she said was true enough.

  ‘And it’s wrong,’ she said, uncurling one finger from her cup and jabbing it at me. ‘Do you think he worries about his kids? Do you think he even thinks about them while he’s off shagging his mistress? No. Because he doesn’t need to. You’re doing it all for him.’

  ‘Helloo!’ Ella cried, sticking her head out of the tent.

  ‘Shut up!’ said Sam.

  Max smirked and neatly rolled himself over, moving himself closer to Melanie and me.

  ‘You want to loosen up a bit,’ Melanie said.

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘What more can I do?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Melanie muttered under her breath, and louder, ‘Don’t make it so easy for him.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are.’

  Oh what it is to be criticized when you are already so low. To be picked over like a chicken carcass, your character dissected bit by little bit, all in the name of friendship. I stared at the middle distance, tears stinging my eyes. How bleak, how miserable, how utterly grey the English landscape can be at dusk with the rain driving in. And this was supposed to be fun.

  ‘Look at you now,’ Melanie said. ‘You’re all pent-up. Your husband is out having a wild time thinking about no one but himself . . . but you . . . you’ve no idea how to enjoy yourself.’

  Accidently, I caught Max’s eye. And oh what big eyes, so wide with sympathy. I was uncomfortable talking like this with the boys listening, though for Melanie there were no such boundaries. Take me as you find me, she’d say, and that dictate applied to her kids too.

  ‘What you want,’ Melanie said, ‘is to get yourself a new man.’

  Max laughed a gentle little ho-ho-ho, and Sam’s entire body jolted as if he’d sat on a nail. He twisted away from us, not wanting to hear any more, then instantly twisted straight back again, unable to stop himself listening in.

  ‘The last thing I want,’ I said, ‘is another man.’

  ‘But why not?’ Melanie said. ‘It would do you good.’

  ‘It would not,’ I said.

  ‘Yes it would. And besides which, it would show him.’

  ‘Show who?’ asked Ella, sticking her head out of that tent.

  ‘No one,’ hissed Sam.

  ‘Show him you’re having fun for a change,’ Melanie said. ‘See how he likes it then.’

  ‘I am having fun,’ I said.

  Max rolled onto his back, chuckling to himself, and Melanie said, ‘Oh please.’

  We’d finished that bottle of wine, and she heaved herself out of her deckchair to reach inside our tent for another, and opened it, and filled up our mugs. ‘I swear,’ she said, ‘you are going to have a good time if it kills me.’

  She balanced her cup down on the grass next to the wine bottle and disappeared into the tent, and started poking around in the little holdall in which she’d brought her few clothes. She muttered to herself, rummaging through knickers and socks and T-shirts. Then, ‘Ah! Here we are,’ she said. And out she came again, grinning, and holding something hidden in her hand.

  Max clearly knew what it was. ‘Aw, mum,’ he said, a little too gleefully.

  ‘Courtesy of Colin,’ Melanie said, unfolding her fingers to reveal a knotted-up plastic sandwich bag, filled with what could easily have been chopped herbs. ‘Thought we might be needing it.’

  Max was laughing properly now, a kind of what-is-my-mum-like? laugh, as he lay on his back, staring up at the absence of stars. Sam on the other hand sat there rigid as a stick, his face dark with fury, tangibly emanating . . . what? Hatred? Then hatred of whom . . . of me? I looked at him and I looked at Max, or rather I looked at Max and how he was with his mother, and I felt so overwhelmed with sadness and with envy. Why couldn’t Sam be like that with me, so at ease, so accepting? The affection between Melanie and Max was palpable, yet she didn’t spend her life fretting over him, worrying for him, moving halfway across the bloody country for him. Oh no, Melanie’s take me as you find me mantra stretched both ways. She was totally uncritical of her kids, and, it seemed, they of her. Apparently, she had got it right. Whereas it seemed I had got it all so wrong.

  She sat hunched over in her deckchair, balancing a Rizla paper on her knees, doing her best to shelter it from the wind, and rolling us up a nice fat joint as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, suddenly turning to look at me and smile reassuringly, ‘it’s home-grown. Perfectly harmless,’ as if remembering what kind of a person I was.

  Oh me, me. I so didn’t want to be me.

  ‘There we are,’ Melanie said. ‘Done.’ She lit up, and took a long slow drag. ‘Lovely,’ she said, and handed the joint to me.

  ‘Mum!’ Sam hissed.

  ‘Oh be quiet, Sam,’ Melanie said. ‘You can’t tell me you boys don’t like a little smoke now and again.’

  And Max laughed, and rolled a little closer to us, big brown eyes like a puppy’s, awaiting his turn.

  And do you know how exciting it was, how thrilling, to be doing something really bad? This wasn’t about Sam, or Ella, or David or the confines of my ordinary life. This was just about me, trying to let go. Being only me again, not mother, not wife. So I ignored Sam sitting there glaring at me, and I took a puff on that joint. It was no big deal to Melanie; it need be no big deal to me.

  And oh how we laughed the next time the girls popped their heads out of their tent to see what was going on, and we had to hide what we were smoking from them because they were too young. How funny it all seemed, then. And how funny Sam was too, all bug-eyed with outrage, scolding me like he was the parent.

  ‘You want to leave your mum alone,’ Melanie said languidly, waving the joint at him. ‘She’s been the good little wifey for far too long. It’s time for her to let her hair down.’

  Let my hair down I did. I had not smoked dope since I was a student. Combined with the wine, and my poor state of mind, it slammed me.

  Vaguely I remember the boom-boom in my head as my eyes tried to focus, the chair that I sat in and the tent, the drizzle in my face and my kids’ distorted bodies whooshing in and whooshing out again. I remember Sam’s face up close to mine, his mouth moving, popping like a fish’s, yelling senselessly. And Max laughing that high-pitched crack of a laugh, saying, ‘Sam you’re so square, you’re like a fucking old man.’

  And Melanie, God damn her to hell and God damn me too, saying in that jokey-jokey way of hers, ‘Well you know he is just like his dad . . . ’

  Sam threw up his arms and stormed away from me. I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d tried. I was stuck in that old deckchair, limbs boneless and heavy, beyond use. And there was Ella now, crying about nothing in particular, her face frightened, as if this was some kind of a row, an upset. In my heart I screeched for them both, but also, oh, how I longed to be free.

  I was sick. I know that. The little pile of it was still there in the morning, at the side of the tent. And at some point in the night it started raining, properly, soaking its way through that rotten old canvas as quickly as if through a sheet. Water dripped on my face, rousing me. And squeezed in between Melanie and me was Ella, squashed up close to me and shivering with the cold, her hand on my arm. She was whimpering in her sleep.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The rain that started in the night carried on into the next day, heavy, relentless. Our stuff was soaked, as were we. We’d no choice but to pack
up and leave, and thank God for that. Melanie and Max thought the events of the previous night were hilarious, but I didn’t, and neither did Sam nor the girls. Sam would not speak to me; he would not even look at me as he tried to squeeze the water out of his sodden sleeping bag before rolling it up and miserably dismantling the tent poles. The girls whispered to each other as they pulled the pegs out of the ground, and repeatedly stared at that pile of sick with wide-eyed horror, fascinated by its slow spread and disintegration in the rain.

  My shame was absolute. I had the hangover to end all hangovers and felt like my head was splitting in two, but no physical suffering could alleviate how bad I felt in my heart. Fixed behind my eyes was the image of Sam, stamping his feet, shaking his hands at me, pleading with me to just stop. But we three, Melanie, Max and I, had just laughed at him. And surely that is the lowest of the low.

  Sam did not speak all the way home. He sat in the back, staring out the window, mouth locked shut with fury. Ella, who was tired and tearful and didn’t understand what was going on, whined the whole way. I drove that car feeling like shit. I gripped the steering wheel with shaking hands, straining my eyes through the rain, the steamed-up windscreen and the hell inside my head. No doubt I should not have driven at all.

  Sam’s silence didn’t end when we got home. He kept it up for a good few days. We were home on the Friday but had expected to be camping till Sunday, and so I’d put David off coming – I had that small grace at least. He phoned though, to speak to the children. I loitered within earshot, dreading what they would say when he asked if they’d had a good time, as he would, of course. Yet each of them replied in the same way, as they did to all his questions on the phone. Just, ‘Yes’, and ‘Fine’, and occasionally, ‘OK’. These conversations crucified me, as they did the children, and no doubt David too. Sam and Ella hated being questioned, and they responded to David as if to a teacher at school or a stranger. But how else was he to know what was going on in their lives, to show an interest? I listened in, and I recognized the similarity to how I had responded to him when he used to phone me from work, asking how I was, how the children were. Resentment had driven me monosyllabic, too. I had held back, deliberately, and Sam and Ella now did the same. Never believe that stupid saying about distance making the heart grow fonder. It doesn’t. It just takes the person you love away.

  But how glad I was, right then, for my children’s unwillingness to talk.

  They were starting back at school the coming Wednesday, Ella moving up, now, to Renfree Park. There were things to buy and organize and sort; I threw myself into the tasks. I did my best to be a good mother again, seeing that clothes were labelled and folded into piles. I wrote notable dates on the calendar and polished shoes; I fussed about. I tried to make up for my failings by being subservient, hoping they would forget, hoping I would please them despite the awful memories.

  Yet still Sam would not speak to me.

  I tried to talk to him, often – too often. I tapped on his bedroom door and walked in, uninvited and unwanted. ‘Understand what it is to be me,’ I said, ‘to feel as I do, to have to go through what I have been going through.’

  He didn’t, of course. He didn’t want to. Nor did he want me barging into his room, railing at him. To him I was just his mother; I began and ended there.

  The memory of our camping trip entertained Melanie and Max for weeks. ‘Oh what a laugh we had,’ they’d say. ‘Didn’t we, Jane? Didn’t we have a laugh?’

  I’d met with their approval, at least.

  A new standard had been set in my house now. Boundaries can only be breached when boundaries exist. By getting stoned and behaving as I had in front of my kids and their friends, I’d shown that I had none. Anything went, now, in my house. Oh sure, Max would do me the honour of not lighting up indoors and he was discreet around Ella, but who was I to complain now if he and perhaps Will and Tommy nipped out the back for a smoke when they were round? Especially as they always took care to offer me a toke, although I did, please note, always refuse. Oh no, I’d joke, not after last time.

  In my effort to please Sam again, I courted his friends. I was nice to them, thinking that then they would be nice to him, and so he in turn to me. If Sam was popular, Sam would be happy. That was what I told myself, and that is what, in my desperation, I believed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘We need to sell the house.’

  How gently David said those terrible words. I knew it would come to this, sooner or later. But I didn’t want to face it. I didn’t want to see ahead because there lay only emptiness, an unbearable end.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Jane, we have to. I’m sorry.’

  Again I said, ‘No.’

  We were sitting in the living room, late on a Sunday afternoon, David at one end of the sofa, me at the other, both of us perched forward on the cushions. He leaned towards me slightly as he spoke, as if in empathy, as if in concern; in truth just to soften his words. He had taken the children out earlier to gather the last of the blackberries and now they were dispatched to their rooms to finish homework so that he and I could have time to talk. The silence in the house was ominous.

  Slowly, he said, ‘I need to get a place near work, just a flat, just something small . . . but I can’t afford it as well as this place.’

  How reminiscent of previous conversations; and of last winter when he sat glued to his computer searching through London flats for sale and rent; all those grotty, forbidding little dives that drove him to shack up with Diana. How strangely life just goes round and round, mirroring itself.

  ‘You want to sell my home,’ I said, ‘our children’s home, so that you can get yourself a nice little London flat? Why can’t you just stay where you are? Is her place not big enough?’

  Carefully, he said, ‘I’m not . . . it’s not like that between us any more. It hasn’t been for a while. We’re friends’ – he added this last quickly, as if he needed to make the point – ‘but we’re not . . . together.’

  I stared at him, dumbfounded.

  ‘There is nothing between us now,’ he said, as if he thought I had not understood. ‘Diana’s been very good letting me stay so long, but I need to find a place of my own.’

  ‘You mean you broke up our marriage for nothing?’ I should have been pleased. I should have been delighted that things hadn’t worked out with Diana; I should have been sitting there gloating. But emotion is a funny thing. Instead of all the things I would have thought that I would feel I was struck by an icy outrage. It started in my heart and spread outwards, tingling into my fingertips. I felt cheated, and then cheated again. ‘You put me, and our children, through all this for nothing?’ I said.

  Part of me wanted him to plead to come back to me now, so that I could have the pleasure of refusing him, if nothing else. But he didn’t. ‘Diana was the result,’ he said. ‘Not the cause.’ And oh how that hurt. ‘This whole thing’ – he threw his hands out expansively – ‘has been a disaster.’

  ‘So you want to sell up and be done.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I do not.’ I threw myself back into the sofa, as if pinning myself to the house.

  ‘Jane, I cannot afford two homes,’ he said, keeping his voice down, though I was not so careful.

  ‘Then stay where you are. Stay with Diana.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’ He was struggling now, to stay so calm. ‘We have no choice. I cannot keep paying the mortgage.’

  ‘You’re blackmailing me.’

  He flushed, two dark streaks on his otherwise pale face. ‘I’m not,’ he said.

  ‘Yes you are. You’re forcing me and our children out of our home.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Jane. I have to live somewhere too. This isn’t sustainable.’

  I remember sobbing then; this weird choking sound catching in my throat. It was the absolute finality of it; the dismantling of all my dreams. Clear as a picture I could see the day we first moved here; the
exact moment when we pulled up outside in the sunshine, and the children ran, whooping, from the car. ‘We can’t just move,’ I said. ‘What about the children? This is our home.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jane,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll find somewhere nearby, if that’s what you want. I’ll help you all I can.’

  ‘I don’t want your help!’

  ‘I’ll help you tell the children, I mean; we’ll tell them together.’

  ‘I don’t want to tell them. I don’t want to move!’

  ‘Jane,’ he said, spreading his hands out to me, hands full of nothing but air. ‘What else can we do?’

  We have no choice, he said. No choice. That was the way things were, in his eyes. He had gone, and moved on from us, with or without his Diana.

  He did not want to come back. Not to me, not to this place.

  We didn’t need to tell the children. They’d heard most of it through the door. That night, when David had gone, they skulked around me, loitering as I made supper.

  ‘Are we moving?’ Sam asked, doing his best to make his voice sound bored.

  ‘Not at the moment,’ I said briskly, tipping spaghetti into a pan.

  ‘Will we go back to London?’ Ella asked, adding quickly, ‘If we move.’ And then, as if she’d realized what it would mean, ‘But I’m friends with Abbie now.’

  ‘We’re not moving though are we, Mum?’ Sam said. ‘You just said so.’

  Then Ella said, ‘But what about Dad? Could we live with him again if we moved?’

  ‘God,’ Sam said. ‘You are so stupid.’