Mum died unexpectedly when she was fifty-two, and the shock of it almost killed Dad. He was older than her and a smoker and a drinker, whereas Mum was a healthy-eating, teetotal hillwalker. I don’t think any of us ever imagined that she might go first. But hearts are unpredictable, it would seem. No one can tell when a heart is going to stop.
For six months Dad barely left his bed, and I thought he’d decided to die. With effort, I even understood how logical willing his own death would be. They’d been everything to each other, after all. How could life without the other be imagined?
But then about nine months after the funeral he started reading again, and at the one-year anniversary he tidied the house. I can only assume that something in one of his books enabled him to make sense of it all.
We never spoke about what had changed, but one weekend I went to visit and there he was, looking spritely, painting walls. I have never felt so relieved.
The only person I ever met who raved about her parents as much as I do was Amy, but in the end that all turned out to be lies.
Perhaps I went overboard telling her about my own amazing parents, so she felt she needed to get competitive about it. She was always pretty driven about most things.
I met her at a yoga retreat, which might sound weird from a bloke like me. Yoga isn’t necessarily something that you expect a kitchen fitter to be doing, I guess.
But all that humping flat-pack kitchen units around – all the squeezing myself beneath countertops – was doing terrible things to my vertebrae, and one of Dad’s Buddhist mates suggested yoga might help.
As by then I was on painkillers 24/7, and because they were playing havoc with my guts, I was ready to try anything. I’d reached the end of the road with the local NHS; acupuncture hadn’t worked, and nor had my sessions with the osteopath. I’d recently split up with my girlfriend, Gemma, as well, so was at a loss to know what to do with my summer holiday. So I booked myself on to a yoga course down near Malaga. I’d combine beach, sunshine and fixing my back; or at least, that’s what I hoped.
Amy was the first person I spoke to. In fact, she greeted me as I walked up the dusty path from where the taxi had dropped me off. She had a great figure and perfect poise – she walked like a ballerina, if you know what I mean – and because she greeted me and led me to my room, I assumed that she was the organiser.
It wasn’t until next morning at breakfast that I understood she was just another punter. I was even more surprised when it dawned that she was chatting me up.
Now, I don’t have any kind of downer on myself – I don’t think I’m a monster or anything. But I knew I was no James Dean either, and Amy seemed out of my league from the start. I never quite got over my surprise that she wanted me in her bed. Then again, every person present: the other students, the teachers, the cooks and cleaners . . . every single one was female. So maybe, at the beginning, that’s all it was.
The yoga retreat turned out to be a great holiday, and though it didn’t provide an instant solution to my back problems, it did set me on a long road to recovery. By the end of my ten-day stay I was tanned, relaxed and, through eating their ultra-healthy vegan fare, I’d lost a few pounds as well.
On top of this – mega bonus – I came home from the trip with a new girlfriend. And not any old girlfriend, either: a witty, stunningly sexy, surprisingly bendy girlfriend. And that was totally unexpected.
Until the final morning, when she asked, ‘So can I come with you?’, I truly hadn’t believed that Amy was anything more than a holiday romance.
She had dual nationality, it transpired. She was both Canadian and English, and had alternated, since her parents’ divorce many years before, between Toronto and Kent. She had a boyfriend back in Toronto too, though I suppose ‘she’d had’ would be the correct tense. Because other than to collect some things during her single trip back to Canada, she never saw him again.
Amy was so bright and funny and sexy that none of my mates could believe she was mine. Even Dad was under her spell. ‘Well done, son,’ he told me. ‘You’ve surpassed yourself this time.’
But no matter how much everyone liked Amy, Amy didn’t seem to like Whitby at all.
‘Do you have to live here?’ she asked me, halfway through our second week of living as a couple. ‘Or would you consider moving down south?’
‘Why? Don’t you like it?’ I asked her, feeling quite shocked.
She shrugged and pulled a face. ‘It’s a bit . . . you know . . . gritty.’
‘Gritty?’ I said.
‘It’s a bit like living in a documentary.’
‘Well, my dad’s here,’ I pointed out, doing my best to ignore the slur on my home town. ‘And he’s not getting any younger. My mates are here, too. My business is here . . .’
‘Yeah, and my mum’s in Kent,’ Amy said, ‘and she’s even older. My friends are all in Canterbury.’
‘I thought they were all in Toronto,’ I said.
‘Not really,’ Amy replied. ‘Not my real friends.’
And I was in love with her, wasn’t I? It wasn’t the calm, deep, meaningful kind of love that my parents had either. It was the hormonal, raised-heartbeat kind of love, where you struggle to work out where sex ends and love begins, where you end and the loved one begins . . . And there’s not much you can do to fight that kind of love. It makes everything seem possible. It makes nothing seem unreasonable.
So we moved south. What else was I going to do?
We rented a flat in the north of Canterbury, and Amy introduced me to her friends. They were all crystals-and-homeopathy kind of people, and I didn’t feel I had a huge amount in common with them. If I’m honest, I struggled to convince myself that they were particularly good friends to Amy, either, but I never would have said that out loud.
I found work easily, and putting up kitchens in Kent rather than Yorkshire made little difference; if anything, I was simply better paid. There was more money down south, that much was clear.
I made some new drinking buddies through work, and though these weren’t the deep friendships I’d left behind, they were enough to stop me feeling lonely. Amy found work teaching Pilates and jazz dance at the local gym, so between us we started to live quite well. For a while, everything seemed fine.
But Amy wasn’t happy in Canterbury, either, it transpired. The people were superficial, she said. City life was too aggressive. She wanted to get closer to nature.
We started visiting villages around Canterbury, but none of them really suited Amy.
They were too small, so she’d never be able to earn a living. Or they were too big and didn’t feel like the country at all. It was the same with the houses we looked at: too big, too small, too draughty, too new . . . The hormones that had fired up our relationship for two years were finally wearing off as well, so I was starting to be able to see Amy more clearly. I was beginning to understand she had a problem. Nothing was ever enough.
Amy had skeletons in the closet, too. Something about her fabulous family wasn’t quite right.
Her mother lived in nearby Ashford, and Amy would visit her most weeks. But me? Though Amy would tell me often how kind or clever or funny she was, I didn’t seem to be allowed even to glimpse the woman, nor did I ever speak to her on the phone. I began to wonder if she existed; wondered if Amy wasn’t seeing another man.
The day I challenged her about it was the day we had the biggest row we’d ever had. But though there was lots of shouting, it was an argument that provided no answers.
‘She’s my mother!’ was all Amy would tell me. ‘She’s not your mother.’
‘You’ve met my dad,’ I pointed out reasonably. ‘And he loves you to bits.’
‘So what?’ Amy asked, her voice trembling. ‘I mean, for fuck’s sake, Joe. It’s up to me, isn’t it?’
Eventually, I scratched my head and conceded. It was up to her, wasn’t it? And if she didn’t want me to meet her amazing mother, then who was I to complain? ‘Think yourself lucky,’
a joiner I worked with told me one day. ‘My mother-in-law’s an absolute bloody nightmare.’
The next time Amy returned from Ashford she showed me a photo she’d taken on her Blackberry. It pictured her wearing the clothes she’d left the house in that morning, next to a grey-haired woman. They had the same shape of nose, the same distinguished jawline . . . It was obvious they were mother and daughter.
‘Happy?’ Amy asked. ‘Convinced?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Fine. Whatever.’ My business had really taken off by then, and there was far more work than I could manage. So Amy’s mother wasn’t that high on my list of priorities anyway.
I took on a twenty-year-old apprentice, who, amusingly, was also called Joe. Our clients began referring to us as ‘the Joes’, and eventually that’s what we painted on the side of the van.
In 2008 we bought a house, a red-brick doer-upper out in Chislet. Actually, though I did all the work on the place, it was always more Amy’s than it was mine. Her dad, in Toronto, had retired and sold his business, sending her a chunk of money in the process.
It had been Amy’s idea to buy the place, too. What with the financial crisis and everything, she didn’t trust the banks, she said, so buying a house was the logical choice. In theory, she was going to grow organic vegetables in the huge garden. We were going to be self-sufficient – as if that was ever going to happen. Like most things, digging didn’t turn out to be as much fun as Amy had hoped.
It was about then that she read The Power of Now. I mention that book specifically because it was a turning point in Amy’s life, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I never read it myself – after seeing how it affected Amy, I was a bit scared, I suppose. But Dad skimmed it and told me it all seemed quite reasonable, so it remains something of a mystery as to why it messed so badly with Amy’s head.
Amy had always been a woman who wanted things, and I’d come to see that this was a big part of why she was never happy. Being happy, it seems to me, requires wanting what you have, whereas being unhappy requires wanting something different. So, yes, she’d always been a dissatisfied sort of person, and these days, looking back, I can see much of our story as little more than an expression of that dissatisfaction. Amy had wanted to bed the only guy on the yoga course, then she’d wanted to see if she could make him her new boyfriend. She’d wanted to change countries; change towns; change houses . . . It was all part of an ongoing process.
But when she read The Power of Now the whole thing went into overdrive. ‘Everything is possible,’ Amy started insisting, something she’d ‘learned’ from the book. ‘Anything’ could be achieved, as long as you believed it was possible. And if anything was truly possible, how could anything ever be enough?
She started ploughing her way through the self-help section of Waterstones. She bought so many self-help books I had to put up new shelves just to hold them all. There were books on mindfulness and meditation; there were tomes on manifesting happiness and overcoming limitations.
Dad, who in an attempt at making sense of his life had read some similar ideas, albeit in somewhat heftier, more traditional volumes, convinced me for a while that this was healthy. But like everything else in Amy’s life, nothing was ever enough. In fact, I started to see her obsession with mindfulness, with living in the now, with manifesting success, as obtuse escape routes to avoid ever being present. Because whenever she was talking about her latest craze, or reading about a new one, whether she was following an online course or listening to a guru on the Internet, she was always anywhere but here.
‘I want a baby,’ she announced, one January day, looking up from the book she’d just finished reading. It was The Secret, and the fact that the book was still on her lap made me doubt the profundity of this revelation about what, after all, was not an insignificant matter.
‘OK . . .’ I said dubiously, reluctantly dragging my attention from the chilling Scandi crime novel I’d been enjoying and trying to recentre myself in the here and now of our overheated lounge.
‘Don’t be like that!’ she whined. ‘I want a baby.’
‘Right,’ I said, trying to find a way to frame the question: was this real? Or was this just the latest thing Amy ‘needed’ to be happy?
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she laughed. ‘I’m not crazy, you know. I’ve been delving into the depths of my psyche for weeks here, and I’ve finally worked out what’s missing from my life.’
‘And that would be?’ I prompted.
‘Dependence,’ she said.
‘Dependence,’ I repeated.
‘Yes, someone I can depend on, and someone who depends on me.’
‘You can depend on me,’ I said, feeling a little affronted.
‘Yeah, but if we were married, with a child, then I’d really know that, yeah? Deep down. In my soul.’
‘If you say so,’ I said.
‘And I need someone who depends on me,’ Amy continued. ‘I need to feel that unconditional love in order to feel whole. It’s the point of all existence.’
‘Are you sure that’s healthy?’ I asked. ‘Using a child to feel whole about yourself?’
‘I’m not using anyone,’ Amy said. ‘Jesus, Joe!’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just, well, a kid . . . It’s a biggie. Maybe we can think about it for a bit?’
‘I already have,’ Amy announced. ‘I stopped taking the pill three weeks ago.’
We got married on the twenty-eighth of February. It was a simple service: half an hour in the register office, a new suit from Moss Bros for me, a plain white dress from French Connection for Amy. A few mates came from Whitby on my side, and some yoga girls from Canterbury primped and puffed Amy to perfection. My dad came too, obviously. And so did Amy’s mum.
Valerie’s appearance was by far the biggest surprise of the day. She was a tall thin woman with wild grey hair and mad blue eyes, and whenever I tried to speak to her, she replied as if she was answering someone else’s question.
So when I told her it was nice to finally meet her, her reply was, ‘Rain, probably, dear.’
When Dad commented how beautiful Amy looked, she said, ‘Almost certainly, but with rose petals.’
‘She’s barking mad, that one,’ was Dad’s verdict, and I couldn’t really find grounds to disagree.
At the reception in our local pub, afterwards, I asked Amy if her mother was OK.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, sounding annoyed. ‘Why wouldn’t she be?’
‘Um, well, the conversation with her seems a bit strange,’ I explained. ‘A bit off-key, that’s all. I was just wondering if she’s always like that?’
‘Well, she’s a very original woman,’ Amy said. ‘A poet, if you must know.’ When she saw that this hadn’t entirely convinced me, she added, ‘Plus, she’s drunk and on Valium. It’s just nerves, don’t worry.’
An hour into the reception, a car arrived to sweep the poetess back to Ashford.
‘She didn’t stay long,’ I said, as we waved at the departing black Prius.
‘It’s better that way, trust me,’ Amy said. ‘Especially when there’s a free bar.’
For our honeymoon we went to Madrid, where we alternated between museums, eating tapas, and shagging. So by the time we got home Amy was pregnant. And being pregnant transformed her. It made her into somebody totally different.
From the edgy, nervous bombshell of a girl she’d always been, she suddenly oozed calm femininity. She seemed more powerful somehow, and for a while at least, more centred. It was as if conception had infused her body with some ancient Mother Earth magic, and my love for her, which had all, I now saw, been about sex, became transformed into a deeply felt respect for her womanhood, the power of which was demonstrated by the fact that she was carrying our child. In a way, I suppose you could say that I fell in awe of her.
She gave birth to Ben on the eighth of December, and almost immediately I began to worry something was wrong. It will sound as if I’m criticising her, and that
’s totally not my intention – I really am just trying to describe how things felt . . . But she seemed uncomfortable in her role as a mother. She looked awkward when she held him, as if he didn’t fit properly in her arms. Breastfeeding, she said, was too painful, and so she expressed her milk into bottles instead. And when he cried, sometimes she didn’t seem to notice. She’d be staring into the middle distance, looking sad, while he was screaming in his cot beside her. And not one of her features would move in reaction to our son’s obvious distress – it was truly as if she couldn’t hear him. When prompted, she’d appear to wake up, as if from a trance, and snatch him from the cot.
She did the best she could, don’t get me wrong. She fed him, changed him, cradled him, and if anyone was watching she’d mutter sweet nothings in his ear. But it always looked a bit as if she was acting. She always seemed to be playing a part.
I tried endlessly to get her to talk about how she felt, but all I ever got was more of the same. She was fine, she insisted. She was enjoying being a mother. She was happy.
Only once, because I caught her actually crying – her tears dropping on to Ben’s forehead – did she ever admit anything was wrong. But even then she didn’t give much away.
‘I didn’t think it would feel like this,’ she told me, through sniffs.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘I suppose I didn’t think it would feel so ordinary.’
Six months in, I’d convinced myself she was suffering from postnatal depression, but as Amy wouldn’t even discuss that possibility with me, I eventually phoned one of her mates to ask if she’d intervene.
From Something Old Page 8