Too Close

by Natalie Daniels

  But I do have an admirer. Mental Sita is in the garden too. She has a visitor, her mother, I think – an oval-shaped woman in a sparkling sari who appears to be neither cold nor self-conscious about the copious rolling folds around her midriff. This must be where Mental Sita gets her sense of abandon from. She herself is frolicking about the lawn collecting blades of grass, leaping from one patch to the other, confused and marvelling all at once for it seems that she cannot work out how the grass is greener on her left than her right. Look up at the light, lunatic!

  The Squeak directs me towards another bench as Mental Sita’s mother got there before us. She’s gorging on a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk, unconcerned with the prancing goat before her.

  How nice for Mental Sita to have a visitor. I haven’t had anyone since the Weasel and that seems a very long time ago now. I cannot stop thinking about my old dad and how he is coping without my mum. Not well, I know that. He can’t even get himself together to come and see me; it would have been nice for the Weasel to have brought him along.

  My mother is dead. My mother died over two months ago, they tell me. I will never see her again. Never. That is not a concept I can grasp. Dr Robinson says I have locked the information away. She’s right. It feels like somebody told me in a dream; as if another Connie knew it, another Connie in another dimension. I feel divided up: this Connie, me, is occupying only a small part of myself. If I were a house I would be in the hallway surrounded by doors that are all shut. I have curled up in a ball on the floor.

  I want a visitor. I’m so lonely I’m forced to have a conversation with the Squeak. She’s head down in her word search now and has chosen ‘Modes of Transport’, for crying out loud.

  ‘Do you know if my father’s going to come and see me?’ I ask her.

  She runs her short triangular finger up and down the letter columns and shrugs. ‘I’m not psychic.’

  I miss my mum.

  ‘Have you ever seen someone overdose?’

  ‘Yup,’ she says, carefully circling the word dumptruck.

  ‘Is it a painful death?’ I ask her. I’m really hoping not, I’m hoping she just went to sleep.

  ‘It’s agony,’ she says. She’s on a roll: caravan. ‘You puke up your guts.’

  I try not to think about it. I shut that door and open my old Dell.

  *

  I puked up my guts, Dr R; I did it there on the Twister mat after listening to them fucking. It was a visceral thing, a great purging from my centre. It’s a blur now, what happened straight afterwards, but somehow I must have mopped it up and I remember watching the rest of Toy Story 3 with Annie in my arms, resting my chin on her wimple, feeling like I’d been punched hard in the face, my eyes stinging. At some stage Josh came back from footy and he seemed different to me, like he had grown since he left the house: his voice was deeper, his hair darker; he had become a man in those few hours. ‘You all right, Mum?’ he asked. ‘Fine,’ I said, smiling, and that seemed to suffice. I watched a version of myself making him some beans on toast. He thanked me, ate it, got out his phone and went up to his room. I took Annie upstairs too. She chatted away, making the most of my vagueness, asking me if she could borrow £100 to set up an ice-pop business. With difficulty – for she was practising being chewed to death in a garbage-crushing machine and was acrobatically rolling about on the top bunk – I got her into bed and tucked her in to her unchanged world, and then I sat on my bed, where nothing was familiar at all.

  Even my hands seemed to belong to a stranger. They were the hands of the old me, of a few hours ago, an innocent. She was there, on my hands, on the fourth finger of my right hand, to be precise – my beautiful petal ring. She had given me that. I spun it around on my finger and removed it, put it on the bedside table and stared at it. I loved that ring. She was there too on the bedside table: three of those books were hers; I slowly reached out my hand and struck them hard and they fell to the floor. She was there on the floor too where the bookmark fell out, a David Hockney postcard she had given me. I picked it up. Darling C, it said on the back, I am eternally grateful for your love and friendship. Love, as ever, Ness. I looked away. She was there on the dressing table: my make-up bag a birthday present. And there she was hanging on the door: my kimono – a gift from Karl. She was the only person, including me, to have worn it. My eyes stung again, I was still reeling from the punch. Even the ceiling wasn’t safe from her – the lampshade was made by her sister-in-law; I’d bought it at a private view that we’d been to. Ness had permeated everywhere, everything, even my husband.

  Here’s the thing I can see clearly now when I look back at my idiot self sitting in that bed: of all the conflicting emotions rampaging around me, the root of it was simple. I felt left out. The two people dearest to me had excluded me from their club. I was surplus to requirements. I simply wasn’t wanted. Or needed. I had valued my own worth as being far greater than they had. What a fool! On how many occasions had they wished I hadn’t been around so they could relish each other’s company, sharing grimaces behind my back? The sheer ridiculousness of my presence embarrasses me even now.

  I sat there on my bed waiting for hours, head hurting, thoughts that cut like shards of glass while the kids slept peacefully in their rooms. Nothing was as it seemed any more. I kept tripping up at every remembered happiness; how could I not have seen what was right before my eyes? All those people I’d sneered at when they’d said to me, I’d never let my partner go to the cinema/theatre with another woman. How superior I’d felt at such small-mindedness, such possessiveness, such lack of trust. Turned out they were right, and how the disappointment stung.

  I couldn’t compute. It was all so messy. I hated mess. I had thought that my arrangement with Karl was specifically so as not to have mess in our lives. He could have chosen anyone at all, so why her when it was so clearly a destructive move? Or had this been part of his plan all along? How had I been so easily manipulated?

  I heard him letting himself in at last, closing the door, locking it behind him – the guardian, the protector of the house returned. I listened to his footsteps climbing the stairs and I thought I was going to panic, be unable to hold it together. I quickly grabbed one of the books and pretended to read, the bookmark now on my lap, her words of love scrawled across me. He was on the landing outside the bedroom. I wondered how on earth I was going to be able to look at him.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, hanging his jacket over the kimono. ‘Good evening?’ he asked with a yawn.

  ‘Yup,’ I said, my voice surprising me with its calmness. It turned out that I could bear to look at him; it was he who couldn’t bear to look at me. In fact I became mesmerized by him. How often in life do we get to knowingly observe a con, to witness the enacting of pretence, the lie so blazingly authentic? Momentarily I felt lofty, from up here on my high horse trotting along the path of righteousness.

  He yawned again. Yes, he always yawned when he lied, I’d noticed that when he was on the phone to his family. I just hadn’t noticed it in relation to me before. He was putting on a great display of tiredness as he got undressed. He was nearly naked now, fresh from her touches and clutches; I searched his coelacanth skin for mating marks. He would not be getting in this bed, that was for sure.

  ‘How was work?’ I asked, again surprised by my own voice. I sounded casual. I put down my book for the showdown. If he hadn’t been so pickled in his own deviancy he might have noticed that it was upside down and my hands were trembling.

  ‘We met in a pub actually.’

  ‘Oh, which one?’

  ‘Coach and Horses.’ He was quick.

  I let him see me clocking my phone. ‘That’s late, was there a lock-in?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. He was taking off his socks now, sitting on the bed, his back to me.

  ‘You didn’t pop in anywhere on the way back home then?’

  ‘No,’ he said, pairing the socks, rolling them up, leaning over to put them in the drawer in a suspicious display of tidiness.
>
  ‘Not even Ness’s?’

  He paused. Squirm, you fuck-face.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, suddenly remembering; the rat didn’t know he was cornered. ‘She needed a hand getting the boiler working … the ignition had gone …’ Blah blah blah bullshit (macho bullshit; it was me who worked boilers).

  ‘And then you slipped and accidentally your cock fell in her mouth?’

  He turned with a twitch. ‘What?’

  ‘Your phone rang me, you fucking prick.’

  We were eye to eye now. He’d been caught out and he knew it. I shook my head slowly and watched it all fall away: my hauteur, his pretence, my respect, his dignity, my control, our deal, our striving for truth and honesty, our intimacy, our family. I felt it all tumbling away from me. I welled up, my voice cracked. ‘How could you?’

  For a second or two he fumbled about looking for words that weren’t there and then, oh, how quickly he turned things around. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind,’ he said breezily. ‘This was the agreement, wasn’t it? Why should you mind? I don’t ask you what you get up to … you’re fucking that Hapgood guy …’

  Why should I mind?

  ‘I thought we weren’t going to talk about it,’ he said. ‘What happens outside the home stays outside the home.’

  ‘But it’s not outside the home, is it?’ I shouted. ‘She’s my best fucking friend!’

  ‘I knew it! I knew it!’ he sounded strangely jubilant. ‘Face it, Connie. You were never going to hack it, whoever I chose.’

  ‘I was. I was! Just not her!’

  ‘Sssshhh …!’ he whispered sharply, patronizingly, glancing at the door, as if I was being hysterical, as if my behaviour was unhinged. ‘Keep your voice down!’

  ‘Oh now you care about the fucking children …’ I was crying now, I couldn’t help myself. Tears of outrage streamed down my face.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re so upset,’ he said, faux bafflement on his face, hands raised in innocence.

  ‘She’s my friend,’ was all I could muster. My God, he was going to deny me my own feelings, my rightful pain. I couldn’t keep it together at all; I was twisted and wretched, sobbing and snotting.

  Then, cautiously, like he was approaching a rabid dog, he came towards me and sat down on the bed next to me, reaching out a hand to comfort me, or to smother me, for it felt as if he was pressing a pillow over my face.

  *

  I gasp for air. Mental Sita is standing beside me. She has a crush on me. Recently she’s been leaving love tokens about the place, sanitary wear scrawled with messages pushed under my door. You have nice bits of hair. You have nice nose. You have nice bra strap – sophisticated literary erotica. Still, it’s good to know I haven’t lost the old magic.

  ‘You lovely,’ she says as she sits down beside me, handing me a bunch of grass. I can’t breathe, my heart is beating too fast. I’m having a panic attack; I need my pills. I take some deep breaths and press my nose to the grass. There’s nothing like a scent to bring you back to the present, or to waft you back to the past for that matter. Mental Sita’s mother hovers and wobbles at her side and they both seem to be expecting a reaction from me, I don’t know what: a proclamation of undying love? A bended knee?

  I get my breath back and wonder about eating the grass, chewing it up and spitting it out, but I haven’t got the energy for pranks like that any more. The Squeak wouldn’t even notice – she’s just found long haul vehicle and, full of the glory of her achievements, rises to her feet. ‘It’s time for your scan, Connie,’ she says, shark smile intact for Mental Sita’s mum. ‘Connie’s got to go in now, Sita,’ she says to Mental Sita in a strange sweet voice, as if she’s talking to the baby Jesus, not a serial nutjob who killed ten cats with her bare hands. They both nod in response. I wish I had my mother to nod with. Then the three of us watch as Mental Sita leaps off the bench and runs towards the trees for a gambol in the leaves. I wonder whether her mother knows what a voracious onanist her daughter is.

  Not long after, all of us, my new motley crew and I, head back inside.

  Chapter 15

  Do you feel like a god, Dr R? Healing the sick, easing the pain, dispensing your medicines with a scrawl of your pen? Or do you just feel like a glorified drug dealer (with a shitter car)?

  They both promised it was over. Ness sent me pleading texts which I ignored. It’ll never happen again. Please forgive me. I can’t bear it. I didn’t respond. I wanted her to suffer. Actually, I tell a lie, I sent her one text: Fuck off, cunt. I was so angry. In some ways I found the Weasel easier to understand than her. I felt partly culpable for his behaviour. It had been a joint decision (or had it?) to go off the beaten track in our marriage; I was responsible in some way for his needing to feel attractive and due to the fact that he was fundamentally lazy, he had barely looked further than his own front door. But Ness? No, she’d known how things were, she’d milked my weaknesses; she’d manipulated events to her own advantage.

  There were dark hours where I was eaten up with angst, sifting through memories, catching the lies, like the time she told me she was at the theatre and that same night Karl told me he was playing football and I had thought it odd that he’d left his kit behind. A drumming panic would take hold. But what could I actually do about it? What choices did I have? She and I were too far immersed in each other’s lives, not just school and the community but our families. By cutting her off I would be creating a trauma for everyone – we’d have to move house, upheave our family, all because I couldn’t hack something that I had brought about. Besides, there was no possibility of not seeing her so I had to find a way of dealing with it: I even flirted with the idea of polyamory. Could the three of us share love? To be honest, Dr R, I was slightly hurt that neither of them had presented that as an opportunity before starting their own club without me. I’d have thought it might have flitted through the mind of Karl and his cock. Was I just jealous of the fact she had chosen Karl over me?

  I tried to find positives in the situation – to enjoy the fact that my husband was attractive enough for the beautiful Ness to have desired him. I was looking for ways to exist without the pain, you see, trying to trick my feelings. But I was much more conventional than I had hoped I’d be. I had two choices: either I grinned and bore it or I made life very difficult for everyone. Karl and my reckless stupid adult decisions must not affect the kids. I had to accept it. The warfare continued but after a couple of weeks I let Karl back into the bedroom.

  I changed quite rapidly. My joy had upped and gone and I couldn’t find it. I was cynical and suspicious with everyone – including myself. How could I have been so wrong about these people closest to me? If they were not who I thought they were then therefore neither was I.

  In private, I spent hours looking out of the window, finding relief in alcohol or sleep, the children’s needs and demands drifting over me. I had absolutely no interest in writing my book any more. I’d lost all perspective; it seemed ridiculous to be fabricating stories when my own world was replete with such hideous dramatics – I’d found myself living in a bona fide cliché: husband and best friend. Zero out of ten for originality. Home now felt hazardous, a minefield to be negotiated. I could see her house from the back window; every time I went upstairs my eyes glanced over at the goings-on there.

  In public, I was developing a peculiar jolting laugh that had nothing to do with what I was saying or feeling. And what I was saying had nothing to do with what I was feeling. I was ghostly, wearing this strange brave face: at the school gates, in Sainsbury’s, on football sidelines, on the street. But any small rudeness was enough to let them see. I was floored by a stranger’s car horn, an unfriendly look, a passing comment or a mistimed jostle on the pavement; the tears would spring to my eyes. I had never felt this fragile; my edges were bone china-thin.

  Usually I would have had my mother to run to, to shelter me, to put my pain in perspective with her wonderful words and unflinching love: this is just a chapter in
the novel of your life, darling, adding depth and intrigue, challenges to be overcome, etc. But confiding in my mother was out of the question now, the Alzheimer’s made her a liability in front of the children. I missed her so much, Dr R, my mother from before. The sad thing is, when you are most vulnerable, most in need of friendship and contact, you are in the weakest place to ask for it. I couldn’t confide in anyone. It was too close to home; there was too much at stake. The possibility that the children might overhear a careless comment, a fragment of gossip that could crush their world, was too much to entertain. My silence was vital.

  Then Grace, my oldest friend, rang me, expressing concern at a photo I’d been tagged in on Facebook: I was scrawny and had dark bags under my eyes. She lived in Norfolk and had nothing to do with this tiny world so I walked along the river talking to her on the phone, breathing in the fresh, home-free air, and dared to explain what was happening. But I retracted like a spider when I sensed her reaction to my ‘arrangement’ with Karl. I could hear it in her voice: well, if you will play with fire you’re bound to get burnt. I shut up and came off the phone feeling more isolated than ever. She was right: I had only myself to blame. I was responsible for this mess. I didn’t deserve the self-indulgence of victimhood. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. Night after night I’d wake with a thumping heart in those eternal pre-dawn hours, feeling myself slipping into the dark abyss, clinging on to the sides until the sun hauled itself up and the day offered the small respite of routine. Josh asked me what was wrong: Are you going to divorce? When I said I don’t know he slammed the door. Everything will be all right, I’d said to the door. My other work was suffering; I missed a deadline and lost a job. And worst of all, the Lofepramine was having no effect whatsoever – it couldn’t deal with a real crisis, just an imagined one.