‘To visit your sister?’ Amy asks, interrupting me. ‘She lives there, right?’
‘That’s it,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve never been before, so that’s really quite exciting.’
‘He is here, isn’t he?’ Amy asks, suddenly, urgently.
‘Ben?’ I say. ‘Yes, of course. He’s upstairs playing video games with Lucy. Do you want me to get him?’
‘In a bit,’ Amy says. ‘I’d like to take him out for lunch, if I can.’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘He’s your son.’
‘Yes!’ Amy says pointedly. ‘Yes, he is!’
I’m just about to launch into a defence of the fact that we have Ben here with us – perhaps even to point out that, having checked herself into a psychiatric ward, it’s a damn good job we do have him with us – when, thankfully, Joe appears.
He crosses to the sink and starts washing his roller. ‘Well, that’s done,’ he tells me. Then, turning to Amy, he adds, ‘I didn’t know you were coming. You’re lucky we were here. We’re off to Rome next week. Another few days and you would have missed us.’
‘Yes,’ Amy says. ‘Heather just said.’
‘You could have called,’ Joe says. ‘My number’s still the same.’
‘Yeah, so’s mine,’ Amy says. ‘You could have called to tell me you were taking my son to the other end of the country.’
‘Our son,’ Joe says.
‘I’ll, um, leave you two to have a chat,’ I murmur, handing Amy her drink and heading towards the door.
But Joe frowns at me and says, ‘No, stay. Please.’ So I swallow and return to the kitchen table, where I tuck myself into the corner, hoping they’ll simply forget that I’m there.
‘So, look, Ame,’ Joe says. ‘We had to move, OK? Ant wanted the house back. We didn’t have anywhere to live.’
‘No, I get that, Joe,’ Amy says, sounding more reasonable. ‘But, you know, maybe a phone call or something? It was a bit of a shock to come home to an empty house.’
‘You were in a . . .’ Joe says, and I suspect from the fact that he interrupts himself that he was about to say something unfortunate like mental hospital or even loony bin.
‘You were in that clinic,’ I interject, hoping to help him out.
‘Exactly,’ Joe says. ‘It hardly seemed appropriate to worry you about all of this, not when you were in the middle of having a breakdown. As for coming home to an empty house, what were we supposed to do? Leave Ben there, alone, waiting for you?’
‘It didn’t seem appropriate?’ Amy says. ‘Christ, Joe! He’s my son.’
‘Our son,’ Joe says again. ‘And you’re not listening, Amy. I had no choice. Neither I nor Ben had anywhere to live.’
‘You could have lived at mine,’ Amy says. ‘You know full well you could have lived at mine.’
‘Yours,’ Joe says.
‘Ours, the house, whatever.’
‘Yeah, but you said yours,’ Joe says. ‘Which, if you think about it for a bit, is exactly why I couldn’t stay there.’
‘Oh, now you’re just being argumentative,’ Amy says.
‘I’m not,’ Joe tells her. ‘I’m really not. I’m just explaining how things were. You can’t just fuck off to Switzerland for six weeks and expect everything to stay in stasis.’
‘I didn’t fuck off to Switzerland,’ Amy says.
‘Only you kind of did.’
‘I was in hospital, Joe.’
‘Yes, you were. And if you try really hard, I think you can understand that it didn’t seem a good idea to burden you with the fact that neither Ben, nor I, nor Heather had anywhere to live.’
‘I . . .’
‘Please, just take a breath and try to understand,’ Joe says.
And surprisingly, Amy does just that. She stares into the middle distance for a moment, takes a deep breath, and finally sighs and sips at her drink. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘OK, look, I get that. I do. But what happens now, Joe? I want my son back.’
‘Our son,’ Joe says, for the third time.
‘Christ, OK, our son!’
‘I’m not sparring with you,’ Joe says. ‘He is our son. And we both need time with him. And he needs time with both of us. And I guess what needs to happen is that we talk about it like adults and decide. But you know . . . you didn’t give me a great deal of choice, Ame. I just want you to understand. We did the best we could.’
‘We really did,’ I add. ‘There weren’t a whole lot of other options.’
Amy nods at me. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘OK. Fine.’
The sound of hammering footsteps descending the stairs reaches our ears, and then Ben appears in the kitchen doorway. ‘Mum!’ he says. ‘You’re out!’ He runs to Amy and lets her sweep him up in her arms.
‘I am!’ she tells him. ‘They finally agreed to let me loose on the world.’
‘Are you better?’ he asks. ‘Or are you still mad?’ And because he’s only nine his bluntness just sounds like honesty.
‘I am much better,’ Amy says. Then, ‘Mad, indeed . . . Huh!’
‘Not from me,’ Joe says, raising his palms.
‘No, that didn’t come from me, either,’ I say.
They head out just before twelve, leaving Joe and me alone with the girls.
‘So what now, Batman?’ I ask him. ‘Do you have a plan?’
Joe, who is perched on the garden wall just beyond the open kitchen door, replies, ‘Well, I need to go and get some paint for in here.’
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ I say, smiling at him. ‘A plan about Ben.’
He runs one hand across his face like a flannel and sighs. ‘Well, I guess it has to be the same deal as with Ant,’ he says. ‘School holidays. As much access as she wants. But school holidays only.’
‘As much access as Ben wants, too,’ I point out.
‘Yeah,’ Joe says. ‘Yes, it’s going to have to be a sort of multilateral peace deal, isn’t it?’
‘And if she says no?’ I ask. ‘If she wants him in term time?’
Joe’s eyebrow twitches. ‘Do you think she might?’
‘No, no, I don’t,’ I tell him. ‘But if she does, then I think we need a plan.’
‘Then we let Ben choose, I guess,’ he says. ‘He’s nine. He’s old enough to say what he wants.’
We call the girls downstairs and eat sandwiches in the garden.
‘Is Amy going to take Ben for good?’ Lucy asks, once I’ve explained why he isn’t present.
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘No, she’s definitely not going to do that.’
‘Is he still coming with us to Daddy’s next week?’ Sarah asks.
‘No, I expect he’ll go and stay with his mum,’ Joe tells her. ‘But it’s just down the road from your dad’s, isn’t it? So maybe you’ll still get to see each other.’
‘I hope we can still use the pool,’ Lucy says.
‘Are you going to go and live with Amy again?’ Sarah asks Joe, channelling my most irrational fear. In a way, I’m glad she’s asked the question, not because I don’t know the answer, but because hearing him answer it reassures me.
‘No,’ Joe says, sounding definitive. ‘No, we’re a family now, aren’t we?’
‘Good,’ Sarah replies cutely. ‘I like playing families with you.’
‘We’re not playing families,’ I tell her. ‘We really are a family.’ Just saying it makes me feel a glow inside and I glance at Joe, hoping to catch his eye, but he’s busy tossing the salad.
‘Oh, OK,’ Sarah says with a shrug. ‘Even better.’
Amy
It was my mother’s death that did it. That’s what sent me over the edge.
I’d been doing fine, following Ant’s departure. Well, I say fine, but that’s probably overstating things somewhat. I was, I’ll admit, feeling angry, sad, lonely, and from time to time quite severely depressed. But I was still functioning, just about. I was eating and cooking and working. All things considered, that didn’t seem too bad.
Ant had left withou
t argument, and though that had clearly been what I wanted, his easy acceptance, his, ‘Oh, really? OK. Fine,’ had also been a fresh source of trauma. Because how could I ever have let myself believe in that relationship? I wondered. How on earth could I have got things so very wrong? When you fuck up that badly in life, it makes you doubt your judgement about everything else as well.
On the third of May, I got the call. Mum had died in her sleep, the warden informed me. She’d slipped ‘peacefully from this world’.
Even then, I managed to hold it together. I emailed Dad to tell him. I arranged the death certificate and drove out to Ashford to book a funeral.
Only three people attended: myself, my friend Wanda, and an old lady called Clare.
Afterwards, as we were leaving, she came up to speak to me. ‘She’s in a better place,’ she said. ‘Such a troubled soul, your mother.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘She was.’
‘You’re OK, though, are you?’ she asked, rather intensely.
I frowned and leaned towards her, unsure if I’d understood her meaning correctly.
‘It’s just . . . these things do tend to run in the family,’ she said.
‘You know that’s not true,’ Wanda told me, as I was driving her back to her flat.
‘What isn’t?’ I asked. I’d been thinking about the cavernous silence of the house back in Chislet, and was wondering if I could stay at Wanda’s for the night.
‘That it runs in families,’ she said. ‘You are fine. You know that, right?’
But neither of those things was true. That was what I knew. These things do tend to run in families. And I definitely wasn’t fine.
Back home, I went to see my GP. He prescribed benzos and put me on a waiting list to talk to a counsellor. But as the first available appointment was in September, I could barely see the point.
By the end of May I was falling apart. I felt broken, but, worse, believed that I now understood that I had always been broken. And from my fresh viewpoint of broken-ness, it struck me as inevitable that I would finish my days like my mother. Unless, that was, I got proper help. But I was terrified that returning to my GP would lead to my waking up in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – with Nurse Ratched dishing out the pills.
Wanda suggested a clinic in Switzerland she’d heard of, but though it looked to be as far from the Cuckoo’s Nest as a clinic could possibly be, the prices were absolutely astronomical. It was impossible, I told myself: selling my house would barely cover the cost of a course of treatment. But though I tried to resist, I kept being drawn to the dreamy images on their website, photos of smiling, happy people who looked somehow like better versions of me.
My father coughed up the cash without argument. He was old, I guess, not to mention obscenely rich. Plus, I can only suppose that, having been the cause of so much of my trauma, paying to ‘fix me’ seemed only fair to him. ‘It’s your inheritance anyway,’ he told me. ‘And if this is what you want to spend it on, then who am I to argue?’
The clinic, near Zurich, was incredible. It was like staying in a five-star hotel.
In morning therapy, I admitted just how traumatic my sister’s death had been, and during EMDR I remembered having told her that I hated her just a few days before she died. After a particularly traumatic hypnotherapy session, I recalled feeling jealous, of all things, that Dad had chosen my sister, not to mention guilty about that jealousy. There were layers and layers of trauma left from my childhood that none of the new-age therapies I’d messed around with had even begun to touch. But suddenly, here they were, submerging me, and I was thankful to be surrounded by smiling, well-trained staff ready to hose me down with high-pressure jets afterwards, so that I could inhabit my body once again rather than remaining lost in the horrors of my mind.
By the time I got back to England it was late July, and Joe, Heather and the kids had vanished.
It was Ant who gave me the news on the doorstep when I popped in to see my son, and the fact that I managed to cope with even that just goes to show how much better I was feeling.
Ant was back in his old house and I spotted a young woman wafting around in the background, who I could only assume was my replacement.
I wondered, for a moment, what she was like, but then decided that was really of no importance to me. What was important was seeing Ben.
That was only yesterday, but it feels like about a week ago. Time flows strangely since I cracked my mind open on the edge of Lake Zurich. There’s so much for me to think about – so much more perspective framing the present, now that all those repressed memories are back.
Right now, I’m walking along the beach with him. We’ve just eaten falafel wraps while sitting on a bench.
‘Are you happy, Ben?’ I ask him.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Of course.’
‘Are you really, though?’ I insist. ‘You have to think about it and tell me the truth. It’s important.’
‘Um . . . OK . . .’ Ben says, frowning and kicking the sand. ‘Yeah, I am,’ he says. ‘My room’s really cool and we go to the beach every day and I do PlayStation with Lucy and on Fridays we have pizza.’
‘And Heather?’ I ask. ‘Is she nice to you?’
He nods. ‘Yeah, she is, Mum,’ he says. ‘She’s really nice.’
‘Good,’ I tell him, trying to ignore the pinching sensation in my heart. ‘That’s great. Because, you know, we’re going to have to decide where you live and when.’
‘Here,’ he says, without hesitation. ‘I want to live here.’
I glance out at the horizon and take a deep breath. I tell myself I can do this. I tell myself that I am strong. I will not cry. I absolutely will not cry today.
‘OK, but when do I get to see you?’ I finally ask him. He has picked up a lump of driftwood and is dragging it along the beach behind him. ‘I love you, and I need to see you sometimes, too.’
‘I could come to yours next week,’ Ben says, as if this is obvious, as if he’s already thought about how best to solve this. ‘I was supposed to be going to Ant’s with the girls, but I don’t really want to. He’s such a knob.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘OK, that works for me. Does that mean you wouldn’t mind coming to me for at least part of every school holiday?’
‘Sure,’ Ben says, with a shrug. ‘Why not?’
‘In which case, you’d have to go to school up here during term time?’
Ben looks up at me and nods again.
‘You don’t mind changing schools, then?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’ll be in the same school as Lucy anyway,’ he says.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘OK, then. That’s the way we’ll do it.’
I reach out and ruffle my son’s hair. I’m proud of myself. I have not cried. These tears? They’re just from the wind in my eyes.
When we get back to the house, Joe has gone out, purportedly to do some shopping.
‘He’s avoiding me, right?’ I ask Heather.
She wrinkles her nose. ‘Yeah . . .’ she says. ‘Yeah, he probably is, a bit.’
She offers me another cup of herbal tea and then sends Ben off to play with the girls so we can talk.
‘I feel that I need to thank you, Amy,’ she says earnestly.
‘Thank me?’ I say. Of all the things I expected from Heather, thanks were not at the top of the list.
She nods. ‘You might not want to hear this, but Joe and me and the kids . . . Well, we’re just so happy, Amy . . . We have to keep on pinching ourselves. Being together, being here in this house . . . It’s all just so unexpected. And none of it would have happened without you.’
‘Without me sleeping with your man, you mean?’ I ask, subconsciously trying, I suspect, to provoke her.
But Heather just nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
I swallow with difficulty and have to blink another pair of tears into submission. I look out at the back garden and see Riley and then remember that Riley is now called D
andy. She’s even got my cat. Talk about winner takes all.
‘I’m sorry,’ Heather says, reaching for my wrist. ‘I’m being insensitive, aren’t I?’
‘No, it’s fine,’ I say. ‘It’s really fine.’
‘I’m trying to be more honest about things,’ she says. ‘But I don’t always get the balance right.’
I brush away the wetness with the tip of one finger and manage to smile at her weakly. ‘At least you’re not angry with me,’ I say.
‘No,’ Heather says. ‘No, I’m really not.’
‘Look, I’m happy for you,’ I tell her, and for the most part it’s true. I also hate her quite intensely, but I decide not to say that bit. Far better to appear magnanimous, after all. ‘I’d much rather Joe was happy,’ I say. ‘Even if it’s not with me.’
I start to cry, then, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. The tears roll down my cheeks.
Heather squints at me as if she has toothache and waits for me to speak.
‘I miss him,’ I tell her when finally I’m able to do so.
‘Joe?’ she asks. ‘Or Ben?’
‘Oh, both of them,’ I admit. ‘But Joe, well, that ship has sailed, hasn’t it?’
By way of reply, Heather merely sighs.
‘As for Ben . . . I don’t know how I’m going to cope without him,’ I say. ‘I love him so much. But then you get that, don’t you. You’re a mother.’
‘I do,’ Heather says. ‘But I don’t think anyone’s expecting you to cope without him, are they?’
‘He wants to live here,’ I admit. ‘He wants to live here with you and go to school up here with the girls. I was devastated when he told me, but I don’t think he noticed.’
Heather nods and looks like someone who’s trying not to look relieved.
‘So, you’ll get to see him in the holidays, then. That’s almost as long. And it’s probably better quality time than when he’s out at school all day anyway.’
I sniff and nod. ‘I know that,’ I tell her. ‘But it’s going to be so hard.’
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