‘Hi, Dad,’ Harry sang as if it was just a normal day.
JP turned around from the fridge. ‘Harry, Robyn, can you sit down for a second…’
My heart fell down to my feet. This was it. He wasn’t even going to wait until they had eaten breakfast or dressed. The kids looked at me to see what was going on.
‘Your mammy and I need to talk to you about something,’ he continued.
No, I screamed in my head, it’s you – you need to talk to them. I don’t need to talk to them about anything. I don’t need to destroy their lives – you do.
‘Are we going to Disneyland?’ Harry asked, taking a seat at the table. His eyes were full of excited hope and a big grin spread across his face.
I felt an enormous pang in the pit of my stomach.
JP looked at me in bewilderment, wondering what was going on. I groaned internally. The ads were on TV again, squashed in between episodes of Pokémon and Peppa Pig, the ones where serious-faced parents sat their children down and then announced grandly that they were actually taking them to Disneyland, resulting in much cheering and whooping from the kids. My heart felt as though it was being squeezed in a vice grip; Harry’s voice was so small, so innocent, and I wanted to scoop him up off the chair, run out of this room and keep him in a world where your parents sitting you down to talk was because they had an exciting surprise for you, not because your dad was leaving the family home. I wanted to lock both children away somewhere where I could stop their universe from being shattered.
‘What the hell is he talking about?’ JP muttered. Harry had clearly put him off course.
‘I think he means the ads on TV where the parents sit the kids down and tell them they’re going to Disneyland…’ I mumbled.
‘No, Harry,’ JP said, shaking his head and looking mildly irritated. ‘We’re not going to Disneyland.’
‘Oh,’ Harry replied, sinking down again with disappointment. ‘Then what is it?’
‘I need to go away for a while,’ JP said.
‘With work?’ Harry asked, wondering what the big deal was. They were used to their dad travelling with his job.
‘Not exactly,’ JP replied. ‘I need to go and live in another house. Now, you’ll still see me all the time, but I just won’t be living in this house any more.’
‘But why do we need two houses?’ Robyn asked.
‘Sometimes grown-ups need their own space,’ JP said.
A fat tear rolled down my cheek. I tried to catch it with my fingertip, but it landed instead on my Christmas jumper that I was still wearing from the day before. The smiley reindeer face with its red light-up nose beaming up at me suddenly felt mocking.
‘Mam? Why are you crying? What’s going on?’ Harry turned to me and demanded an explanation.
‘We love you,’ I said, and then I couldn’t hold it together any more. Tears coursed down my face. ‘We both love you so, so much.’
‘You’ll still see me,’ JP said, glaring at me, his face angry and full of warning for me to keep it together.
‘I don’t want Daddy to go away,’ Robyn stated. ‘Kiss and make up,’ she ordered.
That’s what I always said to her and Harry whenever they fought about something.
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart.’ I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand.
JP shoved his chair back with a screech and got up from the table. I heard his footsteps climbing the stairs.
‘What’s going on, Mam?’ Harry asked as he began to cry.
‘Your dad loves you so much, he just needs a little bit of space,’ I soothed as I cuddled my two sobbing babies in close to my chest.
JP came back down the stairs a short while later with a large suitcase in his hands. It was part of a set that we had got as a wedding present. We had taken them on honeymoon with us, and every family holiday since.
‘I think I have enough to keep me going for a while here,’ he said sheepishly.
‘But where are you going to stay, JP?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure yet…’
‘Don’t go, Dad,’ Harry said, running over and grabbing on to his father. ‘The Liverpool match is on today – we can watch it together.’
My heart tore into shreds. Harry was putting his best case forward to get his dad to stay, but he was too young to understand that, if we weren’t enough, a Liverpool match wasn’t going to cut it.
JP made for the door, but Harry gripped him tighter.
‘No, Dad,’ he said, clinging to JP’s leg. ‘I don’t want you to go. Neither does Mammy or Robyn. Isn’t that right, Mam?’
Tears choked in my throat and I couldn’t answer him. How could JP be so heartless?
‘Tell him, Mam!’ Harry begged, ‘Tell him you don’t want him to go!’ His eyes were beseeching me to stop all of this craziness.
‘It’s okay, Harry,’ JP said. ‘I’ll see you both really soon.’
‘Please, JP, just think about it. Think about what you are doing! Think about the kids – if you can’t stay for my sake, stay for theirs at least!’ I stepped forward and placed my hand on his arm in a last-ditch appeal.
‘Don’t make this any harder than it needs to be, Sarah.’ He brushed off my hand and headed out the door to his car. We all followed after him, watching as he opened the boot using his key fob. He rejigged his golf clubs to make room for the case. Then he slammed the boot shut and climbed into the car. He didn’t look at the three of us as he reversed out of the driveway and out of our lives.
Harry
I don’t know what is happening. Dad has gone away and I don’t know how long he’s going to be away for. He said it’s just for a while, but he even took the suitcases that we always take on our holidays. I asked Mam if he was gone on holidays too, but she shook her head and started crying and said she didn’t know, so I think it’s really bad. If Mam doesn’t even know what’s happening, then how am I supposed to know what is going on? Robyn thinks he’s just gone to work, but that’s because she’s only four, so she doesn’t really understand things like I do.
Mam was crying again today. She’s always crying, and she thinks I can’t see her when she hides in the kitchen or she pretends she is getting something out of the fridge, and her voice goes all funny when I ask her a question, but I’m not stupid. I’m way better at hiding when I cry than she is, she never sees me crying in my room.
It’s all Dad’s fault that everyone is crying. The house is all weird now and I don’t like it. I just want him to come home and then everything can be the same again.
5
When I woke the next morning, it hit me fresh again. It was surreal, like I was an actor in a film. This wasn’t my life. This wasn’t JP – this wasn’t my JP.
St Stephen’s Day had gone past in a blur. I don’t know how long I had stood on our cobblelock driveway for after he left, but it was long enough to see our next-door neighbour’s blind twitching as she wondered what was going on. We lived in Seaway Close, a small housing estate in Malahide, a suburb on the north side of Dublin, where neat, detached, red-bricked houses fronted onto a small green. Our neighbours were mainly older couples whose children had flown the nest. I would invite them all around for barbeques every summer, but other than exchanging polite greetings when I met them on the street, I didn’t know them well. I had brought the children back into the house and we had all sat shell-shocked on the sofa. Usually, we spent the day with just the four of us taking it easy after the pressure of hosting our families on Christmas Day. We would eat the turkey and ham leftovers, then the kids would chill out with their selection boxes by the fire and watch a movie, while JP and I shared a bottle of red wine and ate cheese, but instead the three of us had stayed in our pyjamas all day, curled up together on the sofa.
The children had so many questions for me; questions that I wasn’t able to answer. Where had Daddy gone? When would he be home? Why did he take our suitcases? Had he just gone on a holiday? I had my own questions. Did he just need space away from his marr
iage for a while? Or had he fallen out of love with me? Perhaps it was stress. I knew he was under a lot of pressure in work, the company hadn’t met their targets for the financial year and as the person responsible for reporting directly to the US, it was weighing heavily on him. Had it all got on top of him and this was his way of coping? I was wracking my brain for a reason for all of this. More worryingly, a voice in my head kept asking if there might be someone else involved, but no… I really didn’t want to let my head go there…
When the children had eventually stopped crying that evening, they had fallen asleep on the sofa, their small faces sticky with tears, and I had carried them up to my bed to sleep because I couldn’t bear to be alone.
JP was the only man I had ever loved. We had met when I was seventeen years old and I was a shy first-year student in Trinity college. We had both studied economics – I still thought it was funny to have worked so hard for that degree and now all those macro and micro theories that I had sweated so much over were so irrelevant in my daily life as a stay-at-home mum. I had known JP to see from lectures; you couldn’t miss him, he was very good-looking and my two friends, Linda and Mel, and I had nicknamed him ‘Johnny-Popular’, because he always surrounded by a crowd.
JP and I had been paired together for a project and one day, while we were working on the assignment together, I got a call from Fiona to say Dad had taken ill suddenly at work and had been rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital. JP had listened as I had taken the call and, after I hung up reeling from the shock that had been foisted upon me, the words ‘Dad’ and ‘hospital’ tumbled from my mouth. He took control while my head was spinning; he ushered me out to the car park and drove me to St Vincent’s. I don’t think I even said goodbye to him as I hurried out of his car and ran through the sliding doors of the hospital, but Dad was already dead by the time I got there – the result of a massive heart attack. He was just fifty-three years of age.
At the funeral, I was shocked to see JP in the long line of mourners who queued to shake our hands. He called me the next day to see how I was and then the day after that and every day until I returned to college. When I went back to Trinity, still stunned by my new reality, still grappling with the shock of how fast my world had changed, he would sit with me and put a mug of hot, sugary tea between my hands when I was too full with grief to eat. It was as if my dad had passed JP the baton as he had been leaving this world and sent him to take care of me.
So, you see, I had always felt connected to JP on this level. We were more than just boyfriend and girlfriend; we were soulmates. My dad had brought us together. That’s why this was all so shocking. It was as if I didn’t recognise him any more. The whole thing was ludicrous. I still harboured hope that he might have had a change of heart overnight. A night away might have given him enough space to realise all that he was leaving behind, but when I checked my phone to see if he had called or even texted, there was nothing there.
I suddenly felt a wave of anger warm my body. He owed me – no, not just me, the kids, us – he owed us an explanation. You can’t just get up and walk out on your family without telling them why. How could he do this? How could he walk out on them – the most beautiful, precious little people on the planet? I had always believed that our kids were our world, so when did his world change?
What was I supposed to do now? What was I supposed to say to them? I felt I had no words to explain it. I couldn’t even fathom it myself. It wasn’t as though I had had time to prepare myself. As a mother, whenever there were things I was unsure of, I would turn to Google or online support forums. When Harry had had silent reflux as a baby, or when Robyn wouldn’t sleep and when toilet-training threw up problems, I would go online and seek out the best advice. But this was the biggest parenting challenge ever to come my way and I was thrown in at the deep end. I had no idea how I was supposed to handle it when I wasn’t even sure myself what was going on. Was this just a temporary thing for JP? Did he just need some space for a few days and then he would be back again with his tail between his legs? Was it a midlife crisis that, in a few weeks, we would both sweep under the carpet, never to be referred to again? I didn’t want to think of the alternative… God, if he would just come home, I could sort it all out. I knew I could fix us.
As I lay in bed that morning, I could hear the sound of laughter, from some cartoon the kids were watching, squealing up from the living room. I needed to see them, I needed to feel the reassuring weight of their arms around my neck or the touch of their silky skin against my own. I pulled myself out of bed and headed downstairs.
I stuck my head around the door to find them eating from cereal bowls sitting in front of the TV. Their routine was reassuring.
I went into the living room and wrapped my arms around them, burying my face into the smooth skin of their necks and breathing them in. They wriggled out to get a view of the TV again. I was relieved to see that it was almost like they had forgotten yesterday’s events. They knew JP as well as I did, and it was as if they knew this whole thing was just temporary and their dad would be back soon. The dawn of a new day had fortified me – this was utter madness. JP would be back, he wouldn’t leave his children – whatever he felt about me, I knew he loved the bones of those children. He would come back.
I left them alone to watch their TV programme and went into the kitchen and began clearing up yesterday’s dishes that I hadn’t been able to face the day before and stacked them in the dishwasher. As I worked, my eyes landed on the collage of family photos that hung on the wall in the dining area. There was one taken the night JP and I had got engaged. We had gone on holiday to Thailand and had been both bedraggled and jet-lagged when we finally landed in Bangkok. As soon as we reached our hotel room, I had just flopped down onto the bed, feeling tired down to my bones as the rickety air-conditioning unit lost the battle against the dead heat of the city, but I had felt a presence at the side of the bed, and when I opened my eyes, JP was on his knees, looking terrified. In his hand he had a small black box, where a diamond solitaire was perched on a cushion inside, and I think I had agreed to marry him before the words even left his lips. He had laughed then and explained how he had had grand plans of proposing at Maya Bay because I had been obsessed with the book The Beach and the movie adaptation had been filmed there, but he had been too excited to keep it a secret any more. I could see in his eyes just how much it meant to him to get it right. It was the sweetest proposal and I told him it was a million times better than any perfectly executed, well-rehearsed proposal on a white-sanded paradise could have been.
Suddenly, I came undone at the memory; my heart felt as though someone had ripped it from my chest and trampled all over it afresh. The breath snagged in my lungs and I fell to my feet beside the open dishwasher. How had I gone from being that girlfriend he desired so much that he couldn’t wait to spill a proposal from his lips, to the wife that he no longer loved or needed?
Just then, Harry and Robyn came into the kitchen and dumped their cereal bowls in the sink.
‘What’s wrong, Mammy?’ Harry asked, his brow furrowing downwards.
Tears streamed down my face, and I couldn’t stop them. They were pouring out of me, and I could see that the children didn’t know what to say to me. I hated the look of fear and helplessness on their young faces, but I just couldn’t stop the tears from falling.
‘Nothing,’ I said, sticking my head inside the dishwasher.
‘Daddy will be back real soon, Mammy,’ Robyn said. ‘He’s just gone to work.’ She explained it in a voice like she was the mother and I was her child.
‘Are you mad with us?’ Harry asked.
I wiped my tears away and turned around, but they kept on coming. ‘Of course I’m not,’ I said, trying to wipe the damn things away again.
‘How long is Dad going away for?’ Harry continued.
‘I’m not sure, pet.’
‘But when is he going to come home to our house?’ Robyn asked.
The question b
lindsided me. I knew Robyn meant it as an innocent enquiry, but it was her innocence that made it all the worse. She thought this whole arrangement was temporary and that he would be back home with us all again soon.
‘Well… eh… sometimes grown-ups fall out of love with each other and they just want to be friends and when that happens, they have to live in different houses.’
‘But Dad loves us, doesn’t he?’ Harry asked. ‘He hasn’t fallen out of love with us, has he?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Well, if he loves us then, why doesn’t he want to live with us?’ Harry said.
I was stumped by the line of questioning. I could see the natural logic of a child who had yet to experience unquantifiable things like feelings and attraction.
I fumbled for the right words. ‘I know this is hard for you both to understand right now. I think when you’re grown-ups you might. But I need you both to know that your dad and I love you so, so much, more than you will ever know.’ I wrapped my arms around them, burying my hot tears into the smooth skin of their necks. And at that moment, I almost hated JP. I hated what he was doing to me, but I hated what he was doing to our family even more.
Just then, my phone rang, and my heart somersaulted. I scrambled to answer it, but, with a sinking feeling, I saw that it wasn’t JP. Instead, it was my sister Fiona.
‘Sarah, is everything okay?’ she asked before I even had time to say hello. Her voice sounded thin, like stretched elastic, like she was holding something back.
I took a deep breath. I wasn’t ready to admit yet that JP had left, even to Fiona. Somehow, I thought he might still come back and we would keep what had happened between ourselves, only ever referring to it in some secret code such as ‘JP’s moment of madness’. In my fantasy, I even imagined us laughing about it over a glass of wine together. I wouldn’t ever need to tell anyone, and we could go back to being JP and Sarah again, the way everyone knew us.
The Last Days of Us Page 3