The Road to Zoe

by Alexander, Nick

  Instead, he simply unplugged his phone and put the charger back in his briefcase. He slipped the phone into his lapel pocket and then gently lifted his keys from the kitchen counter.

  ‘You’re going?’ I asked, flabbergasted.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘OK . . . Um, where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Linda’s place, I guess,’ he said, flatly, sadly. ‘That’s her name, by the way. Linda.’

  ‘And what? You’re just . . . going to . . . to leave? You’re going to go there right now?’

  Ian shrugged. ‘Well, the cat’s pretty much out of the bag now, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘And you’re going to . . . just walk out?’ I asked again, through a mixture of sour laughter and rising tears. ‘You don’t have anything you want to say to me about any of this before you go?’

  ‘Nothing that can’t wait.’ And then he swivelled on the smooth soles of his polished brogues and was gone.

  That, then, is how my marriage ended. I didn’t get to scream or shout or plead. My husband gave me no explanations or excuses. He simply turned and walked out of our (now my) front door.

  I phoned him a few times over the next few days in varying states of mind – sometimes calm, reasonable, placatory even; on other occasions hysterical or raging. But Ian simply never picked up.

  I had no answers to any of my questions. (How long had this been going on? Was he ever coming back? Did he want an actual divorce? And who would get the house we lived in if he did?) And I had no real answers for the kids either.

  I’d told them that first evening their father had gone away for a while, and because they’re clever kids, they’d pretty much worked out the rest themselves.

  This was cruel to them and I think it was cruel towards me, too. But in retrospect, I don’t suppose it was any worse than the traditional months of screaming and shouting at each other with which most marriages end.

  Ten days after he’d left, Ian phoned and asked me to meet him for a ‘walk and a talk’ up at Solomon’s Temple, the Victorian folly on the ridge above Buxton. It was about twenty minutes from the house and, other than a few dog-walkers, was likely to be quiet enough for me to scream without being overheard, so I agreed.

  It was a cold spring day with a cutting icy wind, but it was sunny and dry, at least.

  Ian was dressed in all-new clothes – that was the first thing I noticed. He had new jeans, new trainers, a new jumper and coat. A new partner, too. I remember wondering if he was in any way still the man I’d married.

  We said hello timidly.

  ‘I thought you’d want some answers,’ Ian said, as we started to walk.

  ‘I suppose I do,’ I agreed.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  And because I was unsure about quite how much I needed, or indeed wanted, to know I said, ‘What do you think I want to know?’

  ‘If I’m coming back?’ Ian offered.

  I laughed out loud at this. It was spontaneous and genuine if rather bitter laughter. Because if there was one thing I had decided, it was that he wasn’t coming back. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I think I already know the answer to that one, Ian. You’re not.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ian said. ‘Because I love her.’

  I gasped at this and turned to look away at the horizon.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ian said, ‘but it’s true.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that’s unexpected,’ he continued. ‘I mean, you and me . . . Well, it hasn’t been right for years, has it?’

  Even though I had known no such thing until that moment, I said, ‘No, no, of course it hasn’t.’ Because if he’d said it, it had to be true, didn’t it? Shame on me, I thought, for not noticing.

  ‘I don’t need my share of the house for the moment,’ Ian said. ‘So you can just carry on living there for a while. I guess that’s probably better for the kids.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  ‘But I’d like to come and get some stuff,’ Ian said, gesturing at his attire. ‘While you’re out at work, maybe? If that’s OK?’

  I nodded. ‘Monday’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’m out all day.’

  ‘Monday, then,’ Ian said.

  ‘We need to tell them something. They need to know what’s happening.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ian said. ‘Do you want to . . . ? Or shall I?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you can have that honour.’

  ‘Right,’ Ian said. ‘On Monday, then, I guess. When they get home from school.’

  ‘I’ll stay out till seven,’ I said. ‘So you’ll have time.’

  ‘Oh! You don’t want to be there?’

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Right, then . . .’ Ian said, with a shrug. ‘OK.’

  ‘I think I’m going to go now,’ I announced, stopping walking and glancing over my shoulder, homeward. A rage was building within me. A storm was brewing and I needed to get away from him before it broke.

  ‘OK, then,’ Ian said. ‘I am sorry, you know.’

  I stared at the ground and nodded. It was the best that I could manage.

  ‘But we deserve to be happy,’ Ian continued. ‘We both do.’

  I was happy, I remember thinking. But, ‘Right,’ was what I said. ‘Of course.’

  And then, just before the tears started to trickle down my cheeks, I turned and walked away.

  I kept all the drama out of sight, and of that, at least, I’m quite proud.

  When the kids were out, I’d sit in my bedroom and run the phrase I’m only thirty-three and I’m separated through my mind over and over to make myself cry. For some reason, the fact that my marriage hadn’t lasted until I was thirty-five seemed particularly unfair to me at the time. And once I was crying, I’d work myself into a frenzy and punch pillows and scream. But only ever when I was certain that no one could possibly hear me.

  I never insulted or denigrated Ian in front of the kids. I never tried to get them to hate their father, even though that would, I think, have been a fairly easy thing to do.

  On the Monday evening when I got home, they were sitting in front of the TV. Onscreen, Homer Simpson was running away from a power station. The sound, unusually, was muted.

  ‘Dad came and took all his stuff,’ Jude said.

  I nodded slowly and ruffled his hair. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘He said you both agree,’ Jude said. ‘He said you’re not angry or nothing.’

  ‘Not angry or anything,’ I corrected him gently, thinking, So, that’s what we’re telling them, is it? And then, Sure, I can run with that.

  ‘That’s right,’ I managed to croak. ‘We both agree that it’s for the best, really.’

  ‘Not for us,’ Jude said. ‘It’s not best for us, is it?’ He glanced at Zoe, who shrugged sullenly in reply. ‘It’s rubbish is what it is,’ Jude added, sounding momentarily close to tears.

  ‘It is,’ I agreed. ‘It’s rubbish. That’s the perfect word for it.’

  Jude sighed and then, spotting an opportunity, asked, ‘Can we have pizza tonight? I mean, proper pizza, from Domino’s?’

  ‘We can,’ I said. ‘You can phone them and order if you want.’

  ‘Great,’ he said, jumping up and crossing to the bookshelf, where the pizza menu was stashed. ‘Margherita?’ he asked Zoe.

  Zoe shook her head.

  ‘What, then?’ Jude asked, crossing the room and thrusting the flyer in her face.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Zoe said.

  ‘What about you, Mum?’ Jude asked, turning to me.

  ‘I’m not hungry either, sweetheart,’ I said.

  ‘You have to eat something,’ he said, looking between Zoe and myself, and for a moment I believed he was concerned for us, and my heart did a little somersault at the thought that my ten-year-old was trying to look after me. ‘Otherwise we have to pay delivery,’ he continued. ‘Delivery costs almost the same as a pizza, so . .
.’

  ‘Margherita, then,’ I said. ‘A Margherita is fine. Zoe and I can share it.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Zoe said again.

  I went upstairs to see just how much of his stuff Ian had taken. The fact that his side of the wardrobe was entirely empty, the fact that not a single suit, shirt, tie or cufflink remained, made me gasp in shock.

  In a way, clues to most of what was to come were present in those first few exchanges.

  Jude would bounce through most of it with almost shocking resilience while Zoe would alternate between anger, sullenness and sadness. And Zoe, my lovely Zoe, would almost never be hungry again.

  Looking back, Zoe had always been difficult about food so, in a way, the fact that food should become the primary focus for her discomfort was predictable. But until Ian left, she hadn’t seemed that much worse than most of her peers. Food phobias are a very adolescent-girl kind of thing and to start with, at least, though she’d suddenly decide she hated tomatoes or cheese or mushrooms, within a week she’d almost always forgotten which thing it was she was pretending not to like. So we’d got into the habit of saying nothing and simply waiting for each new phobia to pass.

  We’d had the inevitable vegetarian thing, which, given I’m a keen cook, hadn’t fazed me at all. Meat – or more specifically meat rearing – was apparently terrible for the planet anyway. So it was good for all of us, I told myself, if I cooked – and we ate – a little more variedly.

  There had been a moment, a few weeks before Ian left, when the vegetarian phase had coincided with a hatred of all things tomato, and that, I admit, had been a challenge. But then Jude had spotted Zoe in McDonald’s eating a Big Mac, which had calmed things down for quite a while.

  With Ian gone, twelve-year-old Zoe’s food phobias went into overdrive. As she wouldn’t admit to being upset or sad, or to having any emotional reaction of any kind to Ian’s departure, I suppose food was just how she expressed her angst. But Zoe’s diet had been a feature of our family landscape for so long, it took me longer than it should have done to react.

  I was perhaps, if I’m honest, too busy licking my own wounds to notice. I was worrying about my own weight, as well. It had a tendency to fluctuate in the exact opposite direction to Zoe’s in times of stress, so eating tiny portions of whatever was on this week’s restricted food list suited me, in a way. Or at least, I was able to convince myself that it suited.

  Jude, as ever, was happiest when eating pizza, so as often as not, I caved in to the easy solution for making at least one member of the family happy by letting him do exactly that.

  The watershed moment when I realised things had got out of hand happened about six months after Ian left.

  I was in Morrisons one Friday evening doing the weekly shop, and I walked along the vegetable aisle picking things up and then putting them back in accordance with Zoe’s current list of prohibited foods, which I carried around in my head. When I reached the end of the aisle, I looked down at my trolley and saw I had only two packages: potatoes and beansprouts. I froze and looked back down the aisle. Something had changed, I realised, and that something was that Zoe’s phobias no longer replaced each other. They had become cumulative. And without being able to use fish or meat or beans or tomatoes; without dairy, onions or mushrooms, without rice or gluten, I couldn’t think of a single thing I could cook for her.

  I marched back down the aisle, slinging colourful vitamin-filled ingredients into my trolley. She would eat, I had decided, whatever it was that I cooked. I would starve her into submission and we’d become a healthy happy family again.

  My battle plan lasted for just over two weeks. For two whole weeks, I cooked delicious nutritionally balanced meals and watched my daughter pushing food around the plate. For two weeks, I scraped whatever I had served her into the dustbin. And then, after a few phone calls, I booked us an appointment with Dr Belcore.

  I picked Zoe up from school one day and drove us to the town centre. She asked me where we were going a few times, and I pretended it was a mysterious surprise. ‘You’ll see,’ I said with a wink.

  Dr Belcore was in a shared practice on Broad Walk. It was in one of those big stone houses overlooking the park and it had a plaque on the door that read Broad Walk Therapy.

  ‘I don’t know what this is,’ Zoe said, the second she saw the plaque. ‘But I’m not going.’

  ‘He’s really nice, apparently,’ I said, gently taking Zoe’s arm and steering her towards the door. ‘And I just want us to have a chat.’

  ‘A chat? About what?’ Zoe asked, her body rigid as the door buzzed open.

  ‘About how things have been since your father left.’

  I got her as far as the reception desk, but when I gave our names to the receptionist, she asked, ‘And Zoe, your daughter. Is she with you?’ And I realised that she no longer was.

  I stayed for the appointment anyway.

  I was hoping for some pointers for how to deal with Zoe, but other than advising me to de-dramatise the food situation (by basically letting Zoe eat whatever she wanted) and asking whether perhaps I didn’t need to be in therapy myself, he didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know. He suggested I get Ian to make Zoe eat as a condition of seeing him while I myself stopped mentioning it at all. He thought this kind of role reversal might be helpful. And as I was leaving, he told me that if I wanted Zoe to come and see him I’d be well advised to negotiate that with her, rather than trying to trick her into coming, which was as obvious as it was impossible.

  I only spoke to Jude about Zoe’s food issues once, and it was his considered opinion that she was doing it for effect. ‘She eats at night,’ he told me. ‘You do know that, right?’

  ‘She eats what at night?’ I asked him.

  ‘Cornflakes, mostly,’ he said. ‘Bowls and bowls of the stuff.’ And the second he said this I knew it was true. We were getting through three boxes a week at that time. ‘Sometimes she puts a banana on top, too,’ he said. ‘But don’t say you know about it or she’ll stop. Honest, Mum, if you stop caring, she’ll start eating. It’s just to wind you up. It’s just, you know, Zoe being Zoe.’

  So for a while, that became my new strategy. I followed my now-eleven-year-old son’s advice, which was surprisingly similar to what the shrink had suggested. I stocked up on fortified high-vitamin cornflakes and extra-protein soy milk (now with vitamin D and calcium!). I did my best not to show that I cared about, or even noticed, what Zoe ate.

  And it seemed, for a bit, that this was a winning strategy. Zoe put on some weight. She even deigned to eat a jacket potato with beans from time to time, as long as she could do it alone, in her room, without anyone watching to see how much she ate.

  Things with Ian got messy for a few months. He started to intimate that he might need his share of whatever the house was worth. But then suddenly they eased up again, for the saddest of reasons.

  His mother, who I had always rather liked, had died unexpectedly. This meant that not only was he no longer strapped for cash, but he was far too busy clearing and selling his mother’s house to care about ours. So the pressure that had been building around my own living arrangements simply fell away. We found ourselves getting on quite reasonably, which, considering the circumstances, was a surprise.

  Zoe’s mood, always somehow linked to how well I was getting on with her father, seemed to perform a brief upswing around then, too. It wasn’t going to last long, because something was going to happen that would truly upset the balance. But around then, I was feeling quite proud of myself and how I was coping with it all. And I had no idea whatsoever just how bad things were going to get.

  Two

  Jude

  My iPhone starts warbling at six in the morning, and for the first few seconds I can’t remember why. But then it comes to me, and my first coherent thought of the day is, This is a mistake.

  I throw back the quilt and all the hairs on my chest stand up on end. The room is freezing. I stand and head through to
the bathroom to pee. The floor tiles are icy cold, and around me, the flat is silent. None of my flatmates ever get up before eight.

  ‘Stupid, stupid idea,’ I mutter, as I head through to the kitchen, pausing to peer out at the garden as I pass the hall window. But I can’t even see if that’s snow out there or just frost. The window is misty and beyond it everything’s still pitch black.

  By seven, I’m at East Croydon station, my backpack wedged between my trembling legs. I’m wearing my thickest suit and my longest overcoat. I have a woolly hat and a scarf on. But all of that’s still not enough for this sub-zero January morning.

  The platform opposite, the one I usually stand on for the 8.35, is already packed solid with commuters heading into London. But then a train slides into the station, hesitates for a moment, and then slides on out again, taking the entire contents of the platform with it. It crosses my mind that it looks like a magic trick. Now you see them, now you don’t.

  And here it is, the 7.03 to Gatwick. I scan the windows until I see Jessica jumping up and down, gesticulating madly.

  ‘I’m so excited!’ she says, the second the door slides open. Then, ‘Hello!’

  Jessica is always excited. It’s pretty much her default state, whereas I tend to cultivate an attitude of restrained, defiant cynicism.

  ‘I’m so cold!’ I say, aping her tone of voice, as I follow her through the carriage to two seats she has spotted.

  ‘I could hardly sleep last night,’ she says, once we’re seated.

  ‘It’s Bristol, Jess,’ I say. ‘It’s just Bristol.’

  ‘And then Cornwall!’ she says. ‘And I’ve never been to either. Can you believe it?’

  ‘Well, let’s hope they live up to your expectations,’ I say. ‘And I hope you have some warmer clothes with you.’ Jess is wearing an incredibly cute woollen pink coat and a pink bobble hat, but down below she’s in a polka-dot skirt, stripy bumblebee leggings and yellow Dr. Martens boots.