Otherhood

by William Sutcliffe

  ‘I’m having a bit of trouble with your metaphor, to be honest.’

  ‘That’s quite normal.’

  ‘There’s an egg, and it breaks, then it comes back again, and, I . . . I’m a bit lost. The egg thing isn’t working for me.’

  ‘That’s very honest of you to say so. I respect you for that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Before you can know that the egg is broken, you have to know the egg. And you cannot know the egg in one step. It takes time, and a lot of thought, and a lot of emotional spadework.’

  ‘Can we move on from the egg? I thought the weather was nice today. Windy, though. Edinburgh’s often windy, isn’t it?’

  ‘I see a lot of pain,’ said Alison.

  ‘You use interesting tenses. It makes a nice change to talk to someone who speaks in so many tenses.’

  ‘I see a lot of defences and a lot of pain.’

  ‘I eat pizza. I drink wine.’

  ‘Defensiveness is normal. Aggression is to men what love is to women.’

  ‘Did you talk to your husband like this? I’m just wondering.’

  ‘If only. I only discovered the vocabulary of my self-worth after he left me.’

  ‘So he left you? It sounded like you were building up to saying you left him.’

  ‘We left each other.’

  ‘And how’s his egg? Did you break it?’

  ‘Are you being facetious?’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘Can you hear me trampling on your beliefs?’ said Alison.

  ‘Kind of. Logic, for example.’

  ‘Where did you get this hostility? You are a very broken man. You are so damaged.’

  ‘Let’s skip dessert, shall we?’ said Daniel. ‘I’ll ask for the bill.’

  ‘Why do you hate women?’

  ‘I hate hundreds of men, but very few women, though one does spring to mind at the moment.’

  ‘Your ex.’

  ‘That’s not who I meant.’

  ‘Not who you think you meant, but we all say far more than we mean.’

  ‘I thought it was windier in the afternoon than the morning. Didn’t you?’

  ‘You hate her and you love her. For men, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s why marriage is a doomed institution. It contains two lovers and one hater.’

  ‘You don’t hate your husband, then?’

  ‘I do now. Of course. But not then. That was the whole problem. I wasn’t yet empowered enough. Men know how to hate. Women have to learn.’

  ‘Well, good luck with that. I get the feeling I may even have helped. I’m going to go and settle this bill at the bar. And it was very nice to meet you.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me. Why are men addicted to lying?’

  ‘Er . . . OK, it wasn’t that nice to meet you. Is that better?’

  ‘At least it’s honest. It’s a glimpse of the real you.’

  ‘Bye, then.’

  ‘That’s right, run away. Run away from your issues.’

  ‘OK. Will do.’

  Rarely had fresh air felt so fresh, nor had the sensation of walking away from another human given him such simple joy. As Daniel strode home, crossing the Meadows with a fast stride, almost running, for the pleasure of feeling blood pulse through his body, an awful thought struck him. Despite the intensity of his dislike for Alison, despite the scorn he felt for her sanctimonious, accusatory self-pity, it dawned on him that perhaps, in her, he saw a glimmer of himself. He was dealing with it in a different way, but, just like her, he was allowing his life to be dominated by resentment towards an ex-lover.

  He glanced up at Salisbury Crags, the wide, high escarpment that loomed over the city, and it seemed to grin down at him like a vast set of decayed teeth. He shivered and hastened his step, almost bumping into a gaggle of students heading the other way, dressed either for clubbing or prostitution or a medical study of hypothermia. He avoided a collision at the last moment by standing still, and the group parted fractionally and re-formed on the other side of him, as if he was an inconveniently located tree. He stood there for a moment, listening to their receding chatter, breathing in the squall of perfume they had left in their wake. Only when their sound and scent had tailed away to nothing did he continue on his way, out of the city, away from the students and nightclubs and restaurants, away from Alison, towards home, where his mother would be waiting for him, expectantly.

  As if the evening hadn’t been bad enough already. Now he’d have to go through it all with his mother. Gillian was not a woman you could brush off with a sketchy summary. She’d want to know it all: who said what, and when, and in which tone of voice. Given half an opportunity, she’d probably want to discuss Alison’s table manners.

  How would he describe Alison? Was it worth saying how much he had loathed her? As he tried to think of a way to encapsulate the essence of the evening into an informational nugget that would get him off the hook with his mother, and quickly into bed, he began to worry again that the intensity of his dislike for Alison had been caused not by the differences between them, but by their similarity. He hated to admit it, but he couldn’t deny that he had seen in her a reflection of his own bitterness.

  Could he really be as obsessed with Erin as Alison was with her ex-husband? Was he, perhaps, just as consumed with anger, just as wracked by betrayal and disappointment. Were they both, above all, prisoners of their wounded self-esteem?

  Alison’s egg metaphor was preposterous and meaningless, but as Daniel crossed the cobbles of Warrender Park Road and turned into his own street, he found himself picturing an egg plummeting through the night sky and smashing at his feet, a perfect miniature of violent metamorphosis.

  Yes, he thought, Erin had smashed his egg. He couldn’t put his finger on precisely what this egg was supposed to signify, but the act of smashing it was exactly what she had done. The bitch had taken his egg and chucked it on the ground, and it was the only egg he liked. He didn’t want another damn egg. That was the only egg for him and now it was shattered and useless, and it was all her fault.

  Maybe the only real difference between Alison and Daniel was that Alison had tried, with the dubious assistance of whatever self-help manuals she had stumbled across, to think her way free of her problems, while Daniel simply chose to cohabit with them. Alison, in her own way, was at least moving on from her divorce, while Daniel let himself stagnate and fester in a marinade of old rage.

  She was, by a clear margin, the most annoying woman he had ever dated. But was she, perhaps, braver and smarter than him?

  but I remember less often

  It wasn’t late when Daniel got home. He found his mother gazing listlessly at the TV, watching a garden makeover show on which a man in a yellow sweatshirt was having a tantrum about decking. She switched it off as he walked in.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Hard to describe.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Not really. There was a fundamental problem.’

  ‘What?’

  Daniel slumped heavily into a chair opposite his mother. ‘I detested her,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Daniel,’ sighed Gillian, her disappointment mitigated only by the fact that she had known this would happen. When he was young, he had been such a warm, loving and sociable boy. Aged three, when Helen and Carol’s boys had still been clingy and shy, Daniel had been in the habit of grabbing visitors by the hand, regardless of whether he had even met them before, and dragging them off to private corners of the house to read him stories or play with his toys. He had, initially at least, instinctively and unreservedly loved people. He’d always just assumed that people liked him, and would enjoy his company, and as a result they usually did. Then, at the point in his adolescence where you’d expect it to happen, he changed his mind.

  The hating-people phase, which Gillian had thought would last a few years at most, had somehow never quite ended. Daniel was no longer angry o
r sulky, but one last shred of teenage anti-sociability had remained stubbornly in place. His social life appeared normal, but Gillian could sense that he didn’t depend on it. Friends, for him, were optional. As for strangers, his default responses seemed to range from suspicion and hostility to (if he was feeling generous) recalcitrance and indifference.

  From the first moment of Daniel’s life, Gillian had always enjoyed his company. Even before he could talk, he’d known how to make her laugh. He was fun and he was funny, he was clever and warm, but he chose to hide these qualities from the world as if he were ashamed of them, and she’d never been able to understand why. For almost twenty years, she had worried silently about this aspect of Daniel’s nature.

  In many ways, she felt she shared her son’s flaws, and she understood his tendency towards pessimism and misanthropy. The fundamental difference between them was that he laid out on public display the very character traits she tried hardest to repress, conquer or hide. This was what never ceased puzzling her about her son. They were so alike, yet so unalike – cut from the same pattern, yet somehow inside-out versions of one another – in a way that sometimes made her feel as if their oppositeness was an expression of their similarity.

  ‘Why are you oh, Danieling me?’ he said.

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I know what you’re like. When you’re in this mood.’

  ‘What mood?’

  ‘You choose to hate people. To hate everyone.’

  ‘I don’t hate everyone. There are lots of people I like.’

  ‘New people. You get in moods where you’re just not going to be open to new people, and I saw it on your face as you walked out, and it’s just . . . such a waste.’

  ‘A waste of what?’

  ‘You’re too old for it, Daniel. It’s childish.’

  ‘Listen, I didn’t hate her because I’d decided to hate her in advance. I actually quite fancied her until she opened her mouth.’

  ‘You can be so critical.’

  ‘How is that bad?’

  ‘How is it good?’ snapped Gillian.

  ‘You think it’s better not to care? To just be indifferent to everyone without thinking about who you like and who you don’t?’

  ‘You just ought to give people more of a chance.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it would help you. It would make your life easier.’

  ‘Rubbish. My life’s a lot easier having decided I hate this woman straight away, instead of dating her for a month, then figuring it out.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘It isn’t, because in that month you could have found out new things about her that you might have liked and that might have made the relationship worth pursuing. You can’t just write people off.’ As the words slipped out of her mouth, she suddenly heard the sound of this very phrase coming from her mother’s lips. She could picture the moment. She could see her mother in a lilac twin-set, her stiff back set at an irate angle, telling her off in the same words for the same offence, in the front room of the poky East End house where Gillian had battled unsuccessfully to introduce her parents to the then-novel notion of the teenager.

  ‘Some people I like, some people I don’t,’ said Daniel. ‘The quicker I know which camp they’re in, the easier things are for everyone.’

  ‘And when did you last meet a new person you liked?’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘You just said it is that simple. When? It’s not recently, is it?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘When? I want to know.’

  Daniel rubbed a hand against his forehead, running an index finger along the groove above his eyebrows.

  ‘I can’t think. Not recently,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Gillian, her voice resonating with a hint of triumph, a hint of doom. She felt they were now, at last, zeroing in on the conversation she had travelled four hundred miles to have.

  Daniel looked at her, scrutinising her face, as if demanding an elaboration but unwilling to ask for one. Gillian could see in him a reluctance to pursue the subject mingled with a curiosity about where her hints were leading. She forced herself to wait for his response, not wanting to dive in with another accusation that might cause him to lose patience with her and walk away.

  ‘Exactly what?’ he said, eventually, fiddling with the cuff of his shirt, refusing to catch her eye.

  ‘You’re depressed,’ she said. ‘You’re hiding from the world, most of all from the people who love you, and you don’t seem to go anywhere or do anything or enjoy anything, and you’re just disappearing into yourself, into your own unhappiness, and it’s breaking my heart. You’re depressed.’

  ‘I’m not depressed,’ he barked.

  ‘And the longer you deny it, and pretend it isn’t happening, the worse it’s going to get.’

  ‘This whole conversation’s stupid.’

  ‘Why did you come here, Daniel? Why did you come all this way, where there’s no one who knows you or cares for you or loves you?’

  Daniel picked up the remote and switched on the TV. The man in the yellow sweatshirt was now standing up to his waist in a garden pond, gesticulating enthusiastically with a fistful of algae. Gillian leapt from the sofa, stamped over to the set and flicked it off at the plug. ‘I asked you a question,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve had a terrible evening,’ said Daniel. ‘This really isn’t the time.’

  ‘It’s exactly the time. I’m asking because I care about you and I want to understand what’s going on.’

  ‘Please leave me alone.’

  ‘No,’ said Gillian. ‘You’re my child, and I will not just leave you alone.’

  Daniel looked down at the remote control in his hands. With his little finger, he began clearing away the dust that had collected between the buttons. He could quite easily stand up and leave the room. He was under no obligation to pursue this discussion. He was an adult, and he was free to do as he wished, but he sensed a uniqueness to this moment.

  He felt it had taken several days to reach this point between him and his mother. If he didn’t respond to the lifeline she had just this once managed to throw to a point within his reach, then he might simply be swept away, alone, for good.

  It was a long time before Daniel spoke. When he did, he told her from start to finish, in a way he had never told anyone, the whole story of his friendship and love affair with Erin, right up to his discovery of her infidelity. As he spoke, he realised that his life, from the moment he met Erin, had been dominated by one simple idea. Since that encounter, now fifteen years in the past, no one else had ever matched up. It had taken them years to become lovers but immediately and irreversibly, in some way, she had become his yardstick.

  Throughout the last decade and a half, Daniel’s entire adult life, all other women had been measured in Erins. Or rather, in fractions of an Erin. And as this occurred to him, he realised he was definitively stuck, utterly lost, for ever. Because even if he did meet the perfect woman – more beautiful than Erin, funnier, kinder, cleverer – he’d still be measuring her in Erins. She had become his calibration, and that would never change. She was engraved into him.

  As things stood now, the only meaningful relationship in his life was with Erin’s absence, and he could not imagine that ever changing. But he could never go back to her. She had humiliated and betrayed him. She had smashed his egg.

  Daniel confessed to his mother that he had, as she thought, simply run away from his life. But he didn’t regret it; he didn’t see an alternative. Physical distance was the only thing that helped him forget.

  ‘But it hasn’t helped you forget,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but I remember less often.’

  Carol and Matt

  a little pride

  On Saturday morning, Carol suggested that she and Matt take a walk in Hyde Park. Matt didn’t like walking, an
d he wasn’t keen on parks, either, but he felt it would be churlish to refuse.

  It was one of those London days when you’re too hot if you wrap up and too cold if you don’t; when it’s not exactly raining, but it isn’t what you could call dry; when there’s simply nothing to be gained by being outside. It was the kind of day when all you want to see of the weather is what you can make out from your local pub’s football coverage.

  The park was swarming with children, dogs, pigeons, kite-flyers and roller-bladers: every variety of life that Matt most despised, a significant proportion of them at any given time engaged in the act of public defecation. Carol, however, seemed thrilled by the place.

  ‘I should come here more often,’ she kept saying. ‘It’s not as if I’m so far away, is it?’

  Matt didn’t want to encourage this line of thinking, and protested to her that central London was a dirty and dangerous place that a woman of her age ought to avoid.

  Carol told Matt the latest news from home and from his father, but he didn’t appear interested and failed to ask any further questions. After raising a couple more topics that also fell flat, Carol decided to let Matt take over the conversational running.

  She was disappointed, if unsurprised, to discover that this resulted in silence. As the longueur between them grew, she found herself welling up with anger at his selfishness. She didn’t want her annoyance to show, so she didn’t let herself stare at him, but a few glances in his direction showed him seemingly unperturbed by the ever-deepening chasm in their attempt at a chat, unaware that his mother was taking an experimental measurement of his self-absorption and rudeness. Then, suddenly, he put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.

  Carol’s irritation, at a stroke, was transformed into thrilled gratitude. ‘Well . . . it’s been a pleasure,’ she said, colour rising to her cheeks as she almost went on to suggest that they do the same again soon. But she stopped herself. She’d ruin the moment if she pushed her luck. And, on reflection, she wasn’t sure she even wanted to. Her week had been interesting, but she’d need a good long while to recover from it.

  ‘I’ve . . . er . . . I’m still in touch with that girl. Julia,’ said Matt.