by Megan Hunter
27
The text came in the middle of a routine evening, bath time in progress, Jake sitting beside, his eyes pink and cushioned with bags of fatigue. I noticed the absence where I would usually feel sympathy for him, a desire to touch his face gently, to kiss his eyes. In its place was nothing at first, and then the creeping pale of observation. I saw Jake, in incredible detail, every hair on his head, every pore on his skin. My vision was as clear as the camera on a nature programme; I could zoom as close as I wanted, without moving at all.
I was peeling a pair of Ted’s underpants from the crotch of his joggers when the bleep came, the hopeful sound that so often – in reality – heralded a message from a group I was no longer in touch with, people who had forgotten to remove me from their list. Or: school requests; pleas for homemade cakes, for volunteers, women with time on their hands.
But this was different: unfamiliar numbers, a swirl of colour where a profile picture would have been. A painting.
This is David Holmes. I would like it if we could speak. Could you meet me?
My first reaction was to tell Jake: this is what marriage does to you, makes you borderless, even in circumstances like ours, when we were barely speaking, let alone touching. We communicated only along the most basic lines: essential facts relating to the bodily health and safety of our children, to food or collection times or illnesses. Nothing else.
But I still turned to him, my phone in hand. As I moved, Paddy moved too, pouring a cup of old, freezing water that had been sitting by the side of the bath over his brother’s shoulder. Ted let out a long scream, then began to sob. The boys had been arguing more than usual lately, had entered a phase where almost any daily fact – the colour of a cup, the order of bodies through a door – brought a sudden eruption of animosity.
Any idea of telling Jake was lost in Paddy and Ted’s anger, in their small bodies bundled in towels warmed on a radiator, their careful sounding out of age-appropriate, nurturing reading material. There was no longer hour in our days, and none so full, our children climbing on us, closer and closer, as though trying to climb inside, to broach the divisions between our bodies.
Ted could only read a few words at a time, and soon got too tired to read at all, letting his head fall back against the pillow, his eyes closing briefly, opening again.
You read, Mummy.
For the first few sentences, Biff and Chip’s latest adventure kept my mind in its words, in the glowing key, the sea monster that Ted traced lazily with the tips of his fingers. But before long I found that I could both read and think, that my eyes and mouth could easily work independently, leaving my mind free to return to the message on my phone.
What possible reason could David Holmes have for wanting to meet me? I tried to remember what he looked like, but could only think of disparate details: a brown beard, flecked with white. Narrow, pale eyes – or perhaps he had only been squinting in the light. He was an academic too, Jake had told me, the same field as him and Vanessa, a full professor at a more prestigious university than theirs. It was coming back to me now: his air of self-satisfaction at our Christmas party, at some departmental drinks thing, the sense that anything he experienced in these places could only be a passing amusement, a triviality moving across the depths of his life.
Ted yawned, and I let myself lean over and kiss his cheek, smell the musty goodness that collected under his hair, behind his ears.
Goodnight, my sweet one. Another kiss on his forehead: that was enough, I told myself. I kissed my children too much, I feared. I needed to limit it, to let them be.
As I left the room, I lifted my phone from my back pocket. I would delete the message before there was any risk of Jake seeing it and getting angry. It would be gone, not-happening just as quickly as the email I sent had happened; momentous decisions, whole lives altered by a tap, something barely more than a twitch.
I went straight to the kitchen, bathed myself in the cool beam of the fridge light. Upstairs, I could hear Jake reading to Paddy in our bedroom, his voice a single, steady noise. I reached in for a bowl covered by a plate, something else wrapped in clingfilm. Lately, I’d been having an extra supper, leftovers, scraps eaten standing up, without cutlery, taste after taste pushed into my mouth.
This was a new kind of hunger, the kind that made me hold a wedge of cheese in my hands and chew its sides, like an apple. I went through every bowl of leftovers in the fridge, spooning whole cresting waves of tuna mayonnaise straight down my throat. Just as my mind had quickened, so had my mouth, it seemed, my neck, my entire digestive system. I was always empty, these days, a completely open space, waiting to be filled.
~
As a child, I once made the mistake of telling someone. Wings, I mentioned. A woman.
Ah, the other person said, their voice only lightly mocking. A guardian angel!
On the news one day: a skeleton with wings. Proof, people said. Of angels, or something else. But it turned out to be butchery, rather than miracle. Chickens, fingers working in a dark shed, making the dead into something else, trying to make them rise.
~
28
It was Paddy’s birthday in a few weeks, towering up against me, despite everything, a distant monument, its details hidden from view. A big party would be difficult to afford, but seemed unavoidable; how else would we keep him happy, prevent him from being an outcast? I’d sent the invitations before the end of term, hoping the Easter holidays would mean that most of them couldn’t come. It had become normal to invite the whole class, at least thirty children, to hire a hall, an entertainer. Enjoyment did not seem to be the purpose of these events; children were often skittish and anxious, parents exhausted at best, traumatized at worst, handing out recycled-paper treat bags with shaking hands.
I spent a lot of time online in a cafe by the river, pretending to be working and instead shopping for pirate-themed party items. Cups and straws and pencils and pots of bubbles and tablecloths and balloons and miniature water guns and candles and tiny yo-yos, each with a different pirate image stickered on the outside. I roamed over the Internet, selecting and eliminating options faster, more efficiently than I ever had been able to do before: I could feel the energy building up behind my eyes, a sugary power, a vertical ascent.
Sometimes, I could think of nothing else. At night, I began to see parrots in my dreams, huge ships with dragon prows, a soft rain of chocolate gold coins. During the day, I was getting very little work done; clients were beginning to send terse emails, scrapings of politeness meant as weapons, certain phrases chosen to wound.
We are disappointed that . . . We would expect . . . We hoped . . .
Always we, even from clients who had previously used I. The wounding was easier, I surmised, if done from a point of togetherness. I could feel work slipping from my fingers, but felt unable to stop it: my mind was too fast for it now, it seemed. It could only skim above each task, picking up the briefest of facts.
Despite this, life continued, a new version of normal, a mode of being we adjusted to quickly: I still picked the boys up from school every day, even though Jake was at home, filling the lounge with coffee cups and the wrappers from cereal bars, headphones on, typing, his laptop resting on his knees. Working, I supposed.
I still cooked all the meals, loaded and unloaded the washing machine, the dishwasher, texted the parents of the boys’ friends, arranged their after-school clubs, their haircuts and playdates and new shoes and eye tests. Some things fell by the wayside: the house was often untidy, neglected. Looking at me with scorn. But I went out to work: I came back to more work. I was being good.
And in this state of mind there was a new clarity too, as though my mind had been refreshed, its speed becoming something sharper, my perceptions cleansed of the unnecessary. For years, when Jake had taken the children out at the weekends – to the park, maybe, or swimming – I had been convinced that one of them would die. This would be my reward for asking for time alone, for preferring it, however b
riefly, to the company of my family. Selfish mothers don’t deserve their children. Somewhere, somehow, I had heard this, or felt it, ingested it in cereal perhaps, taking the message like fortification, like the dawn: something completely natural, entirely inevitable.
Then one day, as easily as it appeared, the message was gone. As the boys left the house, on their little bikes, I did not imagine the moment they would fall from them, their skulls cracking open on the pavement. I did not picture the time when Jake would look away from Ted in the swimming pool, just for a second, the lifeguard distracted, the dark shape of a small body disappearing under the water.
I could see it clearly, at last: the children would, almost certainly, be fine. And if they weren’t, it wouldn’t be my fault. This must, I realized, be what normal mothers feel. All the ones who are very happy, with their tasteful clothes and missionary-position weekly sex. Their stylish furnishings, the ease with which they let their souls go, let them pass, wordlessly, on to the next generation. All those mothers who no longer wanted anything for themselves, but sobbed at their daughter’s clarinet concert and their son’s graduation, their tears truly pride and not some concealed mourning (as mine would have been) for their lost selves, the energy that now belonged elsewhere.
I had even stopped checking Jake’s phone. Ever since I sent the email, I had been sliding it from under his pillow as he slept, entering my birthday, looking for her name, for any new photos. But there was never anything I hadn’t seen before: I learned to see the phone and ignore it, to let the screen keep its own sleep, its glinting blandness.
~
The harpy has never had children, it seems. Has never bought or rented a house, chosen cushion covers or selected a carpet from a choice of thousands.
She can sleep on the wing, her own body her refuge, her nails curled, ready to strike.
~
29
One afternoon, I got back earlier than usual: I had decided to put something in the oven before I collected the boys in the car, took them to their weekly swimming lesson. Lately, I’d only been making the simplest of meals again: piles of pasta, oven pizzas, oven chips, soups from tins. But today I had a leg of lamb, something I could cook slowly and serve with potatoes, with steamed vegetables. I was the one making amends now. Giving Jake something to be grateful for.
When I arrived, he was not on the sofa, the place he seemed to live nowadays, lying with his legs up in the evenings, watching television, programmes about space, about aliens, humans with very slightly altered faces. He had taken the house over: it was loyal to him now, I sensed, rather than to me. It smelled like him, even when he wasn’t there. But today, when I went into the lounge, the sofa was plain and silent, looking oddly defeated without him, its cushions still dented by the place he’d sat for so long.
I wandered through to the kitchen, expecting to see him there, hovering by the kettle as he so often did, like the housemates I’d lived with at university, one reclusive boy who I only ever saw at the kettle, making coffee or noodles, running his hands through his oily hair. But Jake was not there either. I walked up the stairs, picking up items belonging to Paddy and Ted as I went, two jumpers, a sock, pieces of an abandoned puzzle.
Jake? I called up the stairs.
He was in the bathroom, with a tin of white paint and wide brush, covering over a scribble Ted had done with a crayon years ago.
Hi. He turned around briefly, then back to the wall. Unusually, he was wearing jeans, old ones he only ever wore around the house, loose around his bottom, pulled in with a belt at his waist. A threadbare T-shirt: a band he used to like fifteen years ago.
Thought I’d better keep busy, he said, still looking at the wall, dabbing an already-pristine corner with the brush. He breathed out slowly. Still weeks until the hearing.
He emphasized the last two words, slanting his voice into a mocking tone. He’d already told me that he’d say his finger slipped, sent the email by mistake. He wouldn’t bring me into it. If – when – he went back to work, he promised me, there would be no more Vanessa. He’d resign from the working groups and committees they’d shared, avoid her in the corridor.
Listen, Jake – I was twisting my hands, looking for words I hadn’t already said to him. Not sorry, which seemed to have been said so many times – by both of us – that it had lost any meaning, was now a kind of joke, provoking derisive laughter every time.
Thank you – I went with this – I don’t know if I’ve said that. Thank you, for keeping me – for owning up to it.
Owning up?
I had managed to say the wrong thing, after all.
I didn’t mean – I just wanted to say. Thanks.
Owning up, Jake said again, moving his head from side to side, as though he was weighing this phrase, judging its merits.
That’s not quite right, is it, Luce?
He put the brush down, went to the sink to wash his hands. There were small flecks of white paint on his jeans, on his forearms, on his face. He walked towards me, and without thinking, I reached up a hand to wipe some paint from his cheek.
Very fast, he stopped my hand in mid-movement, held it in the air. Without meeting my eyes, he kissed me, harder and harder, his tongue in my mouth, the kind of kisses that are not asking for a response. He began to push me backwards, gently, and then with more force, his arm around my back, my legs moving with his.
Where usually there would be an opening, slow or fast, gentle or sharp, there was nothing. I felt nothing, could hardly sense his hands as they pushed my top up, grabbed one breast roughly. Jake had never touched me like this before: as though I was just a body.
I lay down on the landing carpet as he fumbled with his belt above me. He kissed me again, slightly more tenderly, looked in my eyes for the first time, as though checking. I nodded. Surely, I thought, this was the least I could do.
As Jake moved above me, I saw a poster on the wall, an old one, from his flat at university. I remembered the first time we ever had sex, something awkward about it, before the passion had built up. There was a full moon that night; I thought of the way we’d taken our clothes off and let the pale light shine on our bodies, the way we’d felt new: to each other, to the world.
30
I was going to collect the boys from school, take them to their swimming lesson, like this, with soreness between my thighs. I would stand by the gates and talk about the new playground equipment, question if they could smell it on me: I wondered how many people had collected their children from school with sex on their hands, drying in their underwear. Rearranging their clothes under their jackets.
Paddy and Ted came out exhausted, hungry. I had forgotten to bring snacks; we had to go to the shop, where a tied-up dog barked loudly, scaring Ted. I knelt down on the hard pavement, took my son’s uniformed body in my arms. He smelled of school, diluted urine accented with cooked meat and something like cabbage. He didn’t stop crying until the dog was led away, still barking, by its owner. Feeling Ted’s small arms on my waist, I thought of Jake, of his fingers pressed blankly inside me, as though he’d forgotten how I liked to be touched. When Ted buried his damp face in my neck, I wondered if he could sense what happened there, could smell the maleness, his own daddy.
It’s only a dog! Don’t be such a baby-waby, Teddy bear, Paddy yelled, his face creased by spite, flecks of wetness landing on his coat.
Ted bawled even louder at this, threw back his head to the clouds, opened his mouth wide. Passers-by glanced down at us, at the noise.
Shut – be quiet, Paddy. For God’s sake, he’s really upset. I found an old tissue in my pocket, padded it across Ted’s cheeks, tried to absorb the tears before they fell. I could have left the boys in the car, but I knew the looks I’d get for that.
On the drive to the swimming pool – the traffic bad, rain beginning to spatter on the windscreen – Paddy kicked the back of my seat with the hard tips of his school shoes. They were sturdy boots, a good-quality pair we’d chosen together one Satur
day, Paddy stomping proudly across the shop floor.
Now, the kicks kept coming, a steady beat, starting up again after every time I told him to stop, my voice filled with more anger each time, becoming strained then broken, torn-sounding.
You’re horrible, Mum, he shouted eventually, meeting my anger with his own, landing an extra-hard kick at the base of my spine. I cried out, pain moving down my back. Deep inside me, the ache of Jake’s presence pulsed on, a reprimand. Paddy was right, I sensed. He knew what I was.
They were both quiet for a few minutes, hushed into dulled daydreams by the world rising and falling at the windows, the steady lull of the engine under their bodies. It was when the snacks ran out that the fighting began, dark scratches of noise across silence, yells that I countered with my own.
He called me a stinking bum, Mummy!
No I didn’t! He’s a liar.
Stop it! Both of you. Stop shouting!
Someone did stink, in fact. Someone – probably Ted – hadn’t wiped themselves properly, and the smell of crusted, hours-old child shit floated around the car, getting in our noses, our hair, under our nails.
There was more yelling, then the desperate striking of arms too small to reach across the width of the car. In my mirror, I saw Paddy trying to squirm free of his seat belt, ducking under its restraints, reaching out an arm to meet his brother’s, which were already flapping wildly in an attempt at defence.