by Megan Hunter
5
It was the worst-case scenario: he was back past eight o’clock, the boys asleep, me wide awake, curled in Ted’s bed, my arms around him for comfort. It is wrong to look to your children for comfort, I knew that. And yet I had so many moments like this: after a bad afternoon, a bad year, his body against mine, his sleep the most soothing rhythm I could imagine. I had sung Ted to sleep that night; he’d asked for it, even after Paddy clamped his hands over his ears and howled Shut up! Both boys, in fact, had lain down quietly in the end, and I had sung until my throat was sore and the phone message seemed abstract, only very distantly dangerous, like a firework alight in the sky.
I heard the scrape and accordion-like breath of the door, so familiar, Jake’s steps, his bag going down on the chair beside the table. I didn’t move. Jake called out, softly, from the bottom of the stairs. He might have thought I was still wrestling with the consciousnesses of our children, pushing them into the softness of sleep. Too often, he had come up just at the point when Ted’s eyelids were drooping, and I’d had to start the whole process again. So he only called once. I heard him go into the kitchen, shut the door, put his dinner in the microwave.
I think my parents were liberal with television too, because all I saw when I imagined dramatic scenarios in my life were those in TV shows: certain episodes I’d seen over and over, that seemed to have greater texture than my own existence. I could not think of a way to confront Jake that did not feel scripted, stilted, too cheesy or on the nose. I could fling myself at him, pummel his chest with my fists, demand that he tell me everything. I could, carefully and without crying, cut every single one of his work shirts into shreds. I could—
Ted stirred, his arm surprisingly heavy and strong in his sleep, falling backwards like part of a sail turned by the wind. He moaned something indecipherable, made an attempt to stretch out on the whole bed. I was going to have to leave. I thought of creeping upstairs, to our room, pretending to be asleep, but the thought was too lonely, too cold somehow, as though I could already feel the emptiness of the sheets, the particular creak the bed would make when Jake eventually came up, found me with my eyes closed.
As I started down the stairs, I briefly considered acting as if I didn’t know, but the precariousness of this was obvious – she would tell him. And at the thought of her – the name had become unbearable, suddenly – something changed. Something became untethered inside me, as I had often feared it would, one organ seeming to break free from the rest, left to float, uprooted, around my body.
For as long as I could remember, I’d had a terror of my own heart. As a ten-year-old, I insisted that it was missing beats, ended up with my flat chest covered in circular plastic suckers at the doctors. My heart, it was proclaimed, was healthy. At sixteen, wracked with exam stress, I was even given a heart monitor, a hidden plastic visitor meant to record the incidents I kept feeling, my heart fluctuating, squirrelling, trying to break free.
I had been given the all-clear that time too, and no longer felt I could mention the things my heart did, all of its dives, its inversions, its battle for release. I gripped the railing of the stairs, feeling wrongness squirm and flip somewhere unseen. By the time I was standing in front of Jake, I was sweating, breathing quickly: I hardly needed to say a thing.
6
Jake got me a glass of water, running the tap until it was cold, testing the temperature with his hand, so that the glass he gave me was slippery with wetness, its contents fresh and cool as though they were from a spring. I gulped the whole thing, gasping between swallows.
He kept his eyes on me: usually by this point he’d be moaning about the train, about the other commuters – so packed, so bloody rude – speaking with his mouth full, gesturing with his fork. But now he was placing the food into his mouth slowly, deliberately, watching me.
How was your day? he said instead, putting as much normality into the question as possible. Sometimes I thought this was the worst thing about being married: the way you get to know exactly what every tone means, every gesture, every single movement. Sometimes, even before this happened, I would long for a misunderstanding, to have no idea what he meant.
I put the glass down, pulled the sleeves of my cardigan over my hands. I let the silence be for a few seconds, feeling the innocence in it, the reality of our life, the thousands of days without this knowledge.
Jake, I spoke to – for a second I thought that I was going to forget his name, that this is what would save us, after all. Forgetfulness, some boring name given to someone decades ago lost, slipping by, letting Jake get away with it.
David Holmes – there it was, words caught on a hook. He told me – about you and Vanessa.
I swallowed, looked up. Jake held his fork in mid-air. I had expected immediate remorse, his face crumpling with it – this would be new, in fact. I had never seen that before. But instead he looked angry, that old dog, the irritation creeping up his features. He shook his head.
Fucking wanker. He dropped his fork so that it fell on the plate, such a small, domestic noise. Nothing that the neighbours would notice. He scraped back his chair abruptly – they might have noticed that, the walls were thin – then walked around the kitchen leaning his neck back, cradling it in his own hands.
He seemed to have forgotten that I was there, feeling tiny now, at the table, my legs crossed, the panic subsided and replaced by the water I had drunk, its waves breaking inside me.
He carried on walking up and down, as though deciding something. He came towards me, his face different, younger somehow, new emotions, new skin, his knees down on the ground, his hands reaching up for mine.
Lucy. Lucy, please – it was – it’s not—
He was trying not to speak in clichés, I could tell. Trying not to say all the things we’d both seen, a thousand times. All of those stupid, broken, fictional couples on television, not even able to find their own original language. And here we were.
Vanessa? I couldn’t help it. Her name filled my mouth, sat on my tongue. Vanessa? That sound at the end, sibilance giving way to an open mouth, a gape.
She’s so – you promised me. These words through my teeth, as though opening my mouth again would be a mistake.
I’m going to end it. Jake mumbled this into my hands, which I knew must smell of the moisturizer I rubbed on Paddy’s eczema before bed, a bitter, chemical-rich tang.
I’m going to— He was crying now, and this was the thing that finally disgusted me, that made me jump from the chair.
I had seen my father cry once. They used to rip each other to scraps, my parents. Domestic violence, a therapist once called it. But we never talked about it like that. Even an hour later, Dad could be humming again, frying bacon for dinner, a roll-up at the side of his mouth. But that time, he was at the kitchen table with his hands over his face. And he was sobbing, loudly, nothing like a little boy or a woman. Like a man.
Sleep on the fucking sofa, I snarled at Jake, a rose bush, a tarantula, a creature endlessly thorned and sharp-toothed, something that could spring at any moment. The fucking sofa, kids in bed, husband crying on the kitchen floor – cliché after cliché – how did it happen? At that moment it was infinitely mysterious, the way we had ended up like everyone else. The mystery felt almost like God had as a child, in church – something barely present, endlessly unknown, never to be brought fully into the light.
~
When I was a child, there was a book – out of print now, expensive – about a unicorn who went into the sea and became a narwhal. The book had beautiful illustrations, dark blue seas, peach-pale evening skies. But the picture I remembered best was of the harpies: dark shadows, birds with women’s faces, who came down to torture the unicorn, to make him suffer.
I asked my mother what a harpy was; she told me that they punish men, for the things they do.
~
7
The day afterwards, we stuck to the usual, and I was grateful for it, at first. Jake brought me a cup of tea, and I sipped it in b
ed, watching him interact with the children, watching his normality, his smiles. Paddy was talking to him intently about some rare species of shark – a goblin shark – and they spent time looking up images of the monstrous thing online, both of them in their pyjamas. Ted was under the covers with me, still half submerged in sleep, his eyes only just visible over the duvet.
They had a friend’s birthday party that day, and we went together, sipped thin cups of coffee in the soft-play centre, chatted to the other parents about swimming clubs and the new teacher. Jake only spoke to other dads: I noticed that I felt an obscure gratitude for this, as though it was a gift to me, a bird with a mouse in its mouth. I felt a curiously strong urge to tell one of the other mums, to drag someone into the bathrooms with plywood dividers, like we were teenagers. I could have chosen Mary: she and her husband had sex on Saturday mornings, I knew that already. She let it slip during an otherwise typical comparative conversation about screen time, during which I felt I was minimizing my stats, and she was maximizing hers. We only let them on Saturday mornings, she’d said. So we can have some time.
Despite this confession, her revelations went no further. Nobody’s ever did. I had tried being candid before, at book groups and PTA socials, and it never ended well. Once, drunk on prosecco and inadequately fed on sushi, I’d asked what contraception people used. The silence was acute.
We should be so lucky, someone joked, and laughed. Everyone laughed. End of conversation.
I wondered if they all secretly had coils, jagged, effective pieces of metal in their wombs. I kept considering one but couldn’t face it, couldn’t bear the thought of someone pushing their hand right inside me. After one difficult natural birth and one caesarean, I felt that my body had closed over for gynaecological intervention, forever. I’d recently psyched myself up for weeks to get a smear test only to have it cancelled as the nurse stared into me. You’re still bleeding, she’d said, and it had sounded like an admonishment.
After the party, we all piled into the car in the industrial centre car park, a light drizzle falling outside. The boys were moaning in the back, comparing party bag spoils, wailing about any differences between them. Jake suggested – without looking at me – that we go to the supermarket, and I agreed, my voice almost lost in concrete. In the car, I closed my eyes so I could feel just how fast we were going, how much I was letting myself be carried on.
~
I knew I was meant to pity the unicorn, to feel his pain in my own skin.
Poor creature, my mother always said, turning the page.
But it was the bird-women I felt for. I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like: my wings filling with air, the whole world flattening beneath me.
~
8
The feelings didn’t start all at once. They came slowly, gradually. We went to the supermarket, and I planned meals in my head, dishes that I would cook and serve to all of them, that Jake would insert into his mouth. Jake would sit there and chew my food and swallow it: I assessed this information for cracks, for gaps that I might slip through. It seemed very important that I could tolerate this exact thought: the meat tenderized by me, stirred by me, being chewed by him, digested by him, becoming part of his body.
I thought that I could tolerate it, but I noticed another feeling beginning in my belly button, or perhaps lower, in my C-section scar. The feeling spread over my abdomen, like a menstrual cramp, an early contraction. It tightened me up. When Jake came back towards me, pushing the trolley, I noticed that he was smiling, telling some joke to Ted, leaning close to the trolley, where Ted’s bottom spilled around the child seat, his plump hands paling as they gripped tightly onto the handle.
The boys were hungry, having left most of the food at the party, and as we shopped they began to throw themselves around as though their muscles were failing, becoming loose beings, grabbing things from the shelves. Jake and I presented ourselves for duty, emergency workers at the same crisis, speaking sharply to our children, replacing chocolate bars in their places. Our lack of eye contact, of touch, counted for very little. As we had been for years, we were teammates now, classmates. We were learning – or unlearning – the same things.
I was startled by how much the new reality was like the old reality: how we could still buddy up and parcel out the duties so smoothly. Jake cooked that night, making burgers with Paddy, letting him flatten them with his fists. And we did bath time, as usual, Jake sitting beside the boys, containing their wildness in the water as I scurried around finding pyjamas, tidying bedrooms, setting out reading books. I wondered if we could continue like this forever, spend a lifetime never quite looking each other in the face.
~
Sometimes I question whether anyone can know what it’s like before it happens. Marriage and motherhood are like death in this way, and others too: no one comes back unchanged.
Even now, it is hard to look at that woman (myself), at those boys (my sons), with anything like a clear lens. My sight is still coloured, infused by the blood we shared, by their journeys through my lightless body.
~
9
After dinner, while the boys played on the floor, Jake came and sat next to me. To this day, I think he was going to suggest that we watch a TV series or a film when the kids were in bed, as we had done almost every night since I was pregnant with Ted. I have often wondered what would have happened if we had done that. I can see that imaginary possibility – which surely exists in some other dimension – almost as clearly as I can see the actual events that have taken place.
I would have put my feet in Jake’s lap: a true act of forgiveness. He would have allowed me to have the remote – the first of so many small allowances, over so many months – and we would have turned our faces to the fire of the screen, let it absolve us, a living presence, an endless alternative. One evening – not that evening, but on some night not too far away – he would have put his hands on my feet, the first touch, and we could have started again.
But as soon as the boys were asleep, I put myself to bed. I carried out my skincare routine, the adult version of childhood prayers, rubbing my face in precise circles, my own touch gentle on my cheeks. Before I turned off the light, I rubbed cream over my hands, an expensive product with all-organic ingredients blended to create the illusion of calm, the impression of the desire to sleep. This could be a normal night, I told myself. I have done the usual things. I am sticking to a routine.
I was not even close to sleep when I heard his footsteps; I was looping around a curve in my mind, falling down the slopes of a particular feeling. I tried to stay there, to feign sleep, make my breath as regular and slow as I could. But he sat on the edge of the bed, tilting the mattress sideways with his body.
It seemed to be up to me to put the bedside light on, but I didn’t do it. At that moment, any movement felt like a capitulation, an agreement that he could be there.
What do you want?
This came out as more of a whisper than I intended, the lack of light lowering my voice naturally, making it seem more like a question than an accusation, a soft noise between us.
His shape changed in the darkness, a collection of rocks moving with geological slowness. He had his hand on his forehead, I thought, from what I could see from the edge of my vision. The image was fuzzy: he could easily have had his hand anywhere else.
Just as I was dragging my arm out from under the pillow, turning my weight on my side, his shape changed, came much closer, his hand stretching for the cord of the light. I moved my own hand forward as he did it, set on stopping him. One of my nails caught the underside of his forearm: there must have been a tiny jagged edge, no bigger than the end of a pin.
Shit! What was—? Put the light on.
I fumbled for it, the small click, light over us at last, Jake’s head bent, examining his arm, eyes narrowed.
I moved forward instinctively, as I would move to the children when they had hurt themselves, to reassure, apply the soothing balm of
motherliness. The scratch was superficial, pale pink, but there nonetheless. I moved to touch it, and Jake’s whole body startled, as though he was being woken from a brief, deep sleep.
His voice was wounded, little-boy tender.
What did you do that for?
It was an accident, Jake. I couldn’t see.
It was becoming difficult to speak again, I noticed. There was something in my throat preventing it, rising up like an Adam’s apple, blocking the way. I wanted something from him, but if he said it, I thought I might actually vomit, right there on the bed. The blockage would come out, I imagined. The talk-stopper. I would not be able to stop screaming.
I came to talk to you, Jake was saying now. He was saying something else.
I’m sorry, Luce. I don’t know how else to say it. I shouldn’t have done it. It was just sex, I swear. So stupid.
I realized my hands were creeping up, past my neck, towards the sides of my head. I felt the softness of my hair, pushed it to one side. I put the flats of my fingers against my ears. Shook myself from side to side, felt the heaviness of my skull, this weight that I carried around, day after day.
No, no no, no, I seemed to be saying. I was the child now, my body curled and soft in my nightdress, my feet soles up, moist under the warmth of the covers. I clenched my teeth. A tantrum.
Please shut up. Get out. Single syllables were all that could get through, mangled, barely complete.
I just want to help you, he was saying, somewhere in the room. He was off the bed now. I could feel him, tall and oppressive, by the bookshelves or the dressing table. A shifting space, a ghost.
Help me? Help me?
The sensation – gathering needles, an eviscerating sting – was almost overwhelming. But I was still within it: it had not taken me over. Not yet. I heard him exhale, walk towards the door. I thought of a surfer on the biggest wave in the world, staying upright against a mountain of water. That is how I could be, surely. Not getting carried away.