From Something Old

by Alexander, Nick

  Amy nodded and licked her lips. Her expression was impossible to read.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m scared,’ she said.

  ‘Scared?’

  ‘I’m scared he’ll choose you,’ she said quietly, her voice gravelly with emotion. ‘If we give him a choice, I’m scared he’ll just choose you.’

  ‘Oh, Amy,’ I told her. ‘You’re his mother. He adores you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Maybe not. So do you want to talk to him about it, or shall I?’

  ‘Both of us together might be best.’

  Amy nodded and brushed a forming tear from the corner of her eye. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s get him down here and see.’

  I poured a packet of Cheesy Wotsits into a bowl. I’d read somewhere that bad news is easier to accept while you’re eating, though – like most of what we read these days on social media – I have no idea if it’s true.

  Amy spelled out the dilemma for her son. She was missing him, she said, and she needed to know when she could see him.

  Ben shrugged and filled his mouth with Wotsits.

  ‘Basically, your choices are weekends or school nights,’ I explained.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Ben said, in a weird unemotional voice that I hadn’t heard before.

  ‘OK, well, what works best for me is if I have you at weekends,’ I told him. ‘Because that’s when I have time to actually do stuff with you.’

  ‘OK,’ Ben said.

  ‘But that means staying with your mum on school nights.’

  ‘OK,’ he said again.

  ‘Not here, though, yeah?’ I explained. I suspected that he wasn’t really getting the picture. ‘In the flat.’

  ‘In the flat?’ Ben repeated. ‘With Ant?’

  I swivelled slowly to face Amy and indicated with a nod of the chin that she could continue the conversation. I couldn’t bring myself to discuss Ant with my son.

  ‘Yes, with me and Ant,’ Amy said. ‘You like Ant, though, don’t you?’

  ‘What about the girls?’ Ben asked. ‘What about Lucy and Sarah?’

  Amy shook her head. ‘Not yet, but hopefully soon, once we have a bigger place.’

  Ben pulled a face.

  ‘You told me you liked him the other day,’ Amy said.

  ‘He’s OK,’ Ben said. ‘But it’s boring there. There’s nothing to do. And where would I sleep?’

  ‘You can have our room,’ Amy said. ‘Ant and I can sleep on the sofa bed.’

  ‘Eww,’ Ben said. ‘That’s rubbish. I don’t want to sleep in your stinky bed. I want my room.’

  ‘I know,’ Amy said. ‘But it’s all we have, because for the moment I want to let you and your dad live here.’

  For the moment, I thought. I had a self-destructive urge to say, ‘You know what? I’ll just leave.’ But I managed to restrain myself.

  ‘Only you don’t. You want me to live with you in that stupid flat,’ Ben said.

  ‘Yes, but at weekends, you’d be here with your dad. Do you understand?’

  Ben nodded but looked utterly miserable. ‘Are you with Ant now?’ he asked her, surprising me, and, by the look on Amy’s face, confusing her. ‘Are you with him, like, for ever?’

  Amy chewed her bottom lip and swallowed. ‘I’m, um, not sure about for ever, darling,’ she told him. ‘But for now, yes, I’m with Ant.’

  ‘Don’t you love Dad any more, then?’ Ben asked. ‘Not at all?’

  Amy rolled her eyes towards the ceiling and took a deep breath before replying, and I looked away out of the kitchen window and tried to think about something else – anything else. ‘No, I do, Ben. I love your dad very much,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to live with him any more. I want to live with Ant.’

  ‘I’ll just stay here then, I think,’ Ben said matter-of-factly, as if the subject was now closed.

  I heard Amy stifle a gasp.

  ‘The flat is a bit small for all three of you,’ I suggested, turning back to face them, trying to help Amy out by making this about the flat rather than about her. I could see she was close to tears. ‘Why don’t you leave Ben with me this week and see if you can get the other place sorted? You can take him out on Saturday or Sunday instead until you get a bigger place.’ I turned to Ben and asked, ‘Would that work better for you?’

  Ben shrugged, but deigned to nod vaguely at the same time.

  ‘And then, once they’ve got a place where you have your own room, you can take some stuff over and make it your own, and stay there on school nights so that I can work late. OK?’

  Ben took a fistful of Wotsits and stood without replying to the question. ‘Can I go now?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, reaching out to ruffle his hair, but failing because he flinched from my touch.

  The cat jumped up to take Ben’s warm seat the second he was gone, and as Ben left the room Amy stood. ‘I need to go now, as well,’ she said, giving Riley a brief stroke.

  But as she moved towards the door, I jumped up and caught her by the sleeve. ‘Amy,’ I said. ‘Are you sure about this?’

  She paused and looked back at me. ‘Am I sure?’

  ‘Yeah, are you sure?’

  ‘Well, it’s not ideal, is it?’ she said. ‘But I don’t really see that we have a choice.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ I told her. ‘I mean all of it. Are you sure this is what you want? Really?’

  Amy shook her head. ‘No, Joe,’ she said, sounding sad. ‘No, I’m not. I’m not sure about anything any more. But for now, this is where I’m at, so . . .’

  Once she had gone, I grabbed a beer from the fridge and necked it straight from the bottle. I thought about the fact of her not being sure any more and wondered if that opened a window of hope for our future. I hated myself a little for still wanting it. If I had more pride, I thought, I’d have closed that window myself.

  I went upstairs to Ben’s room. He was playing Pac-Man on his new Atari console.

  ‘You OK, champ?’ I asked him.

  He nodded, but didn’t pull his eyes from the screen.

  ‘Do you want to talk about all this, because I do get that it’s all a bit messy and difficult to understand.’

  He shook his head and carried on playing.

  ‘I’m here for you, that’s all I’m trying to say.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I’m pretty good at Pac-Man, you know,’ I said, trying to sound chipper. ‘Do you want to challenge me?’

  But again, my son just shook his head.

  So that’s how things stayed throughout September. Ben lived with me, meaning that I had to come home early, and on Saturdays, while he spent the day with Amy and Ant, I’d do my best to catch up on work.

  I worried constantly about my living arrangements, wondering why there had been no news of Amy’s move and expecting every crossing of our paths to be the one where she’d announce I had to leave.

  I needed to knuckle down and find a place of my own to live in, I knew I did. But I was working like crazy, and my only day off – Sunday – was the day all the estate agents were closed.

  The Internet, of course, remained open, and I did half-heartedly look at rentals on the laptop from time to time. But I couldn’t imagine myself in any of them. Moving out would seem like driving the final nail into the coffin of our marriage. As long as I was living here with Ben, there was something for Amy to come back to. Once I moved, it would be well and truly over.

  On the last Saturday in September, news arrived that they had moved. It was Ben who told me, while Amy was turning her car around in the driveway. He was angry, confused and tearful. He didn’t want to stay there, he insisted.

  I did my best to reason with him and I tried to get him to express why he was so upset. But the truth was that both were pointless because what Ben wanted was what I wanted: for everything to go back to the way it was before. And it simply wasn’t within my power to make that happen.

  Finally, as I put him to bed that night,
I told him to try it for a week, and if he really hated it, I’d call a meeting with his mother to see what could be done.

  ‘But I will hate it,’ he told me.

  ‘Then we’ll have that meeting and talk it all through together,’ I said. ‘We’ll come up with a different solution, but you have to try it for a week. Deal?’

  ‘You promise?’ he asked.

  ‘I promise,’ I told him solemnly.

  In the end, not only did Ben not mind staying there, but I think he rather liked it. He never would have admitted that, though.

  Ant and Amy spoiled him rotten, letting him buy pretty much anything he wanted for his room, and by the end of October this had become nothing more than routine: weekends with Dad and week nights with Mum and Ant. It never ceases to amaze me how resilient kids are about change – perhaps it’s because their brains are still growing.

  My own brain had long since lost all flexibility. I hated the new set-up with a vengeance. My lonely evenings stretched before me like deserts to be crossed, and the only way I could seem to get through them was to drink.

  Sometimes this was ‘social’ drinking down the pub with Marius or Joe, but mainly it consisted of a lonely stream of beers from the fridge, consumed with lacklustre ready meals from the freezer. When I took the recycling out and saw the sheer number of empties, it scared me.

  The alcohol wasn’t helping, either. Sure, it made the evenings slip by in a blur, and that was preferable to minutes that felt like hours and hours that dragged by like weeks. And it certainly made the telly more entertaining, or, at the very least, less dull. But it did terrible things to my sleep patterns, and I started waking up to pee at three in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. This lack of sleep, plus the inevitable hangovers, left me feeling tired and irritable by day, and ruined my concentration at work. Worst of all, as the weeks went by, the drinking left me feeling even more depressed than before.

  My roll-with-it personality was gone, and I caught myself ranting about politics or Brexit or Boris Johnson – ‘going off on one’, as my dad would say, about pretty much anything. By mid-November, Joe and Marius had begun declining the invitations to my fun-filled evenings down the pub as well. Life had just got even lonelier.

  I needed to get a grip on myself – this much I knew. It’s just that I had no idea where to start.

  Eleven

  Heather

  I felt happy and I felt surprised. In fact, feeling happy was the surprise. After all, you’re not supposed to feel great about being dumped for a neighbour, are you?

  But I did – in fact, sometimes I felt ecstatic. I’d wake up in a good mood, and snuggle against whichever of the girls had crawled into my bed. Downstairs in the kitchen, as I made breakfast, I’d notice that my body was tingling with joy, and occasionally I’d even dance around to whatever song was on the radio. It felt a bit like being in love, only it wasn’t that. It was simply no longer being in hate.

  I felt guilty, too, about feeling happy, so it was a complex set of emotions. I tried to temper my joy, preparing myself for an inevitable rebound, for the wave of misery and sadness that would submerge me once I came to my senses. It’s just the rebound never came.

  Or course, I had plenty of concerns about my situation. I was living in the house Ant had bought, and he was still paying for everything. I was only too aware how dependent I was on my ex, and so I started looking for work. But finding any kind of nursing job that fitted around the girls’ out-of-school hours and the local bus schedule seemed to be impossible. If I was going to work full-time again, we’d have to move as well, and that was, by a long shot, more upheaval than I felt ready to face.

  Ant surprised me with his generosity. He took his responsibilities as a father seriously, it transpired. Perhaps he felt he was paying off a debt incurred by his infidelity, or perhaps he thought he owed his daughters some stability because he’d broken up our family. Maybe the idea of our dependence on him soothed his fragile ego. Actually, it was probably all of those.

  Whatever the reason, he made staying on in the house easy.

  But as time went by, I couldn’t help but suspect this was his way of continuing to control me. As long as I was entirely dependent upon him, I remained exactly that – dependent on him.

  So when a postcard advert popped up asking for part-time help at the local farm shop, I jumped at the opportunity. The pay was only minimum wage, but the hours – 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. – fitted in perfectly with the girls’ schooling, and the owner, who I already knew from having been a customer, was a ruddy-faced man who laughed a lot. He gave me the job straight away.

  Now that Ben was living with Ant and Amy during the week, I crossed paths with Joe far less than before. I think he worked late most nights and certainly there was never any sign of him when I walked past the house with the girls. During the autumn term I only bumped into him twice, once at the school one Monday morning as he dropped Ben off, and once at the farm shop as I was arriving for work. But two momentary sightings were enough to see that he wasn’t happy. With dry skin and bloodshot eyes, he looked so shocking that on both occasions I asked if he was OK – and he insisted that he was. I asked him if he was eating properly and even invited him round to dinner, but he declined both times. He was busy, he said. He was fine.

  Working made me feel so much better about myself, it shocked me. I found myself chatting and joking with Peter, the farmer, and whistling as I washed and packed the veg. What I was doing was hardly earth-shattering, but it was indisputably useful and being useful felt good. People were happy when I handed them their boxes of veg, and Peter even more so when he emptied the till at the end of the shift. My days felt shorter and less pointless, and I found myself feeling saner, physically stronger, and more the way I’d always imagined ‘normal’ adults might feel. I even had to open my own bank account to receive my wages, and it was only when I received my debit card – with my own name on it, rather than Ant’s – that I realised just how much of my identity had been erased over the years. I bought jeans and wore trainers for the first time in a decade. I got my hair cut shorter and cooked curries and Thai noodles instead of endless rounds of steak and chips. I found myself watching less TV and listening to more music. In a nutshell, I felt more like myself than I had done in years.

  On Sundays Ant would collect the girls and take them out for the day, and these empty Sundays were the only times my new-found sense of well-being faltered. Most Sundays, especially if it was sunny, I’d be fine: I’d clean the house or do the washing, and then I’d go for a walk. Sometimes I’d stop somewhere and eat a burger, or down a glass of wine, and I’d tell myself how lucky I was. But a couple of times – and for some reason this only ever occurred when it was cold and rainy – I found myself overwhelmed by loneliness. And this wasn’t any ordinary kind of loneliness either. This was an all-encompassing sense of void that left me feeling as if I’d been gutted with a fish knife.

  It was as though, in the absence of anyone to see me or hear me, I was ceasing to exist – I felt like I was actually disappearing. I’d phone Kerry, in Rome, and if she answered, I’d be fine – the day was saved. But if she didn’t, if she was busy, then I’d start to feel scared. I’d try to read, only to find myself skimming the page. I’d watch a film and be unable to concentrate on the complexities of the plot. Finally, I’d end up lying on my back on the sofa, my heart thumping in my ears. I’d stare at the ceiling, counting the minutes until my girls would be returned to me and life could pick up where it had left off.

  On one of these terrible Sundays, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and was shocked to see how awful I looked. It was something about my eyes – there was a deadness in them that scared me. My soulless face reminded me of the way Joe had looked when I’d seen him at the farm shop.

  In November, Christmas ads started appearing on TV, and the website where I ordered food began offering me baubles and tinsel as well. I started to worry about Christmas, specifically about wh
o would have custody of the girls. Because the twenty-fifth without my girls seemed unimaginable.

  I phoned Kerry to see what she was doing – I was hoping that she’d come and stay, just in case I ended up childless and alone. But she had to work on the twenty-fourth and the twenty-sixth, she said – there was no way she could get away before Easter. She was strangely detached from my problems these days and I knew that was entirely my fault. I’d spent too long pushing her away.

  Eventually, one Sunday after he’d dropped the girls back home, I plucked up the courage to broach the subject with Ant.

  ‘Dunno,’ he replied, with a shrug. ‘I suppose I just assumed we’d just spend Christmas together.’

  ‘Together?’ I repeated. ‘You mean, you and me and the girls, together?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he said, with another shrug. ‘Why not? It’ll be weird for them otherwise, won’t it?’

  For some reason, out of shock mainly, I said, ‘OK.’ But even as I was saying it, I felt sick.

  I didn’t sleep a wink that night – instead, I lay staring at the wall, running a film of Ant and me pretending to still be a family across the cinema screen in my head. It was a horror film, and by around 3 a.m., it had upset me so much that I was finding it difficult to breathe. I was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, and I seriously considered phoning for an ambulance.

  The next morning, first thing, I texted Ant. ‘Christmas together isn’t going to work,’ I typed. ‘Couldn’t you take them for NYE instead?’

  ‘Not sure,’ he replied almost immediately. ‘I’ll talk to Amy and get back to you.’

  It was December by the time he replied. He had come to pick up the girls, and once he’d strapped them into their car seats, he returned to deliver the verdict quite casually, as if it was really no big deal.

  ‘Oh, by the way, for Christmas, you’re all right,’ he said. ‘You can have them.’

  I was so relieved that I almost kissed him. I say almost, because clearly that was never going to happen again.

  ‘But I’d like to take them for the New Year’s Eve weekend if that’s OK?’ he continued. ‘Amy’s having Ben over too, so we’re going to try to rent somewhere with a fireplace or something, or maybe even find somewhere with snow. Make it special, like.’