Otherhood

by William Sutcliffe

  She wanted to leave a note, explaining that there was nothing sinister in her sudden departure and thanking him for his hospitality (if that was a word you could use for what was on offer from someone like Matt). Another search around the house ensued, but she could find no pen or paper. Perhaps she’d have to send him a text message. Then she remembered her own handbag. Tearing a page from the back of her diary, she wrote:

  Thank you for having me. Couldn’t sleep, and decided to leave a bit early. Missing Dad terribly. So nice to spend time with you again. I only want you to be happy.

  love

  Mum

  xxxx

  It looked so kitsch and empty, that final sentiment, but she couldn’t think of what else to say. The truth was, she wanted much more than that. She wanted him to be good and honest and decent, and loving to someone worthwhile who’d love him back. But ‘I only want you to be good and honest and decent, and loving to someone worthwhile who’ll love you back’ would not have struck the right note, and wouldn’t have fitted on to a page of her diary.

  At least, perhaps, in the course of the week she had communicated this to him without having to say it. Not that she could possibly make a difference. She had to remind herself that she hadn’t come to change him. She had just come to satisfy her curiosity, which she had achieved. It had been a successful week.

  She switched the light off and slipped down the stairs. He would do his own thing in his own time. She had done her best with him. At heart, he was not a bad man. She was not a bad mother.

  Gillian and Daniel

  pragmantic

  Gillian stared at Daniel across his living room, which felt embraced by the dense quiet of the sleeping city around them. It was now after one in the morning and Edinburgh, in a way that never happened in London, had gone silent. Gillian couldn’t remember when she had last been up this late, but she didn’t feel tired. Honesty had the same effect on her as caffeine.

  Daniel’s history of his love for Erin had not surprised her. She wasn’t sure how, but she somehow already knew almost everything he’d told her. She felt she’d understood the depth of Daniel’s love for Erin even before he had, even while they were only friends. And yet, to hear Daniel unburdening himself came as an exquisite relief to Gillian.

  She knew that by talking about his unhappiness he was not automatically curing himself of anything, but, equally, she felt certain that his previous denial of it had doomed him to indefinite misery. A corner, she sensed, had been turned. There was no guarantee that the next thing would be better, or easier, or happier, but at least there would be a next thing, and by beginning to acknowledge his problem and accept it, Daniel was allowing his life to acquire a forwards momentum.

  Gillian left the room without a word, returning a while later with two cups of tea. He smiled sadly at her as she sat down, and they drank for a while in easy silence.

  As the mug began to cool between her palms, Gillian told Daniel that she, too, had something important to say. She’d never thought she would tell Daniel this particular story, but now the events of one distant summer’s day suddenly felt relevant, even pressing.

  Gillian’s story was almost twenty-five years old. She began by asking Daniel if he remembered a camping holiday they had taken in Gloucestershire when he was eight. A group of Pinner families had all gone together, and taken over a campsite that had turned out, when they got there, to be a very sketchily set up sideline for a farmer who had done nothing more than rig up a crude shower in an outhouse.

  His advertising campaign had been as half-hearted as every other aspect of the enterprise, and even though it was high summer, the group had ended up sharing their field with no one other than a few sheep. On the first day there had been a few moans to Ian, Daniel’s father, who had made the booking, but once they settled in, the place proved to be perfect. The children could shout as much as they liked, roll around naked in the mud whenever they felt like it, and generally run wild without anyone worrying that there was anybody around who might be annoyed, disturbed or offended.

  Daniel’s strongest memory was of a pair of peacocks who acted like they owned the place and were always strutting around near the farmhouse. For a whole week, the peacocks were the only creatures who seemed to attempt to tell the children off for anything, shrieking with outrage when they got too close.

  As Gillian started talking about this farm, a powerful memory of a fallen tree also came back to him. It was a huge oak, long dead, that lay like a felled giant in the middle of the field. This tree had been the centrepiece of their week, alternately a pirate ship, a jungle canopy, a castle, a transport network and a battleground. It was too high to be safe, but too irresistible to go unclimbed, and the parents soon gave up their attempts to keep the children off it. The only injury had been when Paul fell into a bed of nettles that infested one end. Daniel remembered clearly that Matt had pushed Paul off, but Gillian recalled it as an accident. Perhaps only Daniel saw the incident – and had never told anyone the truth.

  ‘Why did we never go back?’ Daniel asked. It had, after all, been a near-perfect week. ‘In fact, why was there never another group holiday?’ After that one magical week, it had never happened again.

  ‘Because it was far from perfect,’ Gillian replied. ‘That’s why I’m bringing it up.’

  There had been one disastrous day, which had begun with Larry getting a mild electric shock in the shower. He had gone to speak to the farmer about it, but the farmhouse was empty. No one had seen him or his wife since the day they had arrived. Larry had another look at the shower, and decided all that was required to make it safe was some insulating tape. Since this was the only place everyone could wash, he decided to do it himself. Ian knew the area, and had a vague memory of having seen a hardware store somewhere in one of the local towns. He couldn’t describe it, but he thought if he went he’d be able to find it. This, at least, was the story Larry and Ian had spun to the rest of the group.

  The two men went off in Larry’s car, with an arrangement that they would meet up with everyone else at the cheese-rolling contest they were all due to visit that afternoon.

  ‘The cheese-rolling! I remember the cheese-rolling!’ said Daniel, sitting up sharply.

  ‘We never saw any cheese-rolling.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I couldn’t be more positive.’

  ‘I remember the idea of it.’

  ‘It must be that.’

  The morning had been hot and muggy, dedicated to a seemingly endless game of French cricket, and to a picnic lunch made by Carol involving an avocado salad that Matt, for some reason, had smeared into Paul’s hair.

  It began to rain just as they were finishing lunch, and the other families decided to hunker down at the campsite. Only Gillian and Helen opted to persevere with the cheese-rolling outing, in order to make the rendezvous with their husbands. By the time they got near, they were caught up in a downpour of folklore-obliterating proportions. Even if they had reached their destination, they wouldn’t have wanted to get out of the car, besides which, the cheese-rollers, whoever they were, and whatever it was they were hoping to do, would almost certainly have gone home and taken their cheese with them. Larry and Ian would understand what had happened, and they’d all find each other later at the campsite.

  Despite protests from the children, they decided to head for a local museum, which was the only dry activity the two women could think of. The promise of a complete skeleton and some antique surgical tools, as described in a guidebook, with the added bribe of a cream tea, put a stop to the whining from the back of the car.

  It was as they were pulling into the museum car park that Gillian saw Larry’s car approach. What she saw next imprinted itself on her brain not as a moving image but as a single still glimpse that even now was as clear to her as the moment it happened.

  It was, of itself, an ordinary sight. Just a car containing two men and two women. Larry was in the front, with a woman who looked around
ten years younger than him in the passenger seat. Ian was in the back, alongside a woman of the same age. All four were laughing, too absorbed in their joke and in each other to look out of the window at the gawping figures of Gillian and Helen on the pavement.

  The children, already dashing ahead into the museum, saw nothing; the men in the car saw nothing; but in that moment, all their lives changed. There was no possible innocent explanation for what they had seen. Had the two women been in the back, there was a possibility they could have been hitch-hikers, but the arrangement of the bodies in the car spoke of coupling-up, of intimacy, of sex.

  Straight away, the story of the unsafe shower seemed strange, and the joint mission to a hardware store sounded like a a pretext. The men had not just lied, they had planned their lies. They had arranged a day off from domesticity, from childcare and from marriage. The more Gillian thought about it, the more this plotting, this utter lack of spontaneity in their arrangements, struck her as the greatest evil of all. Whatever her husband had done with this woman, whether he had slept with her or not, the fact of having schemed the day out in advance, with rehearsed deception, was unforgivable. After all, for every rehearsed lie there are a thousand casual ones while you wait for your moment, feigning devotion, planning your escape.

  The men didn’t arrive back at the campsite until late. They smelt of beer, of pubs, and ever so faintly of the kind of air freshener used in cheap hotels. There was too much bounce in their walk. They radiated ill-suppressed glee. Between them, there was a palpable secret hanging in the air.

  They jauntily related a long story involving a breakdown and a garage who had sworn to repair the car while they waited but then took much longer than promised, but as it dawned on them that their wives’ anger was not just because they had stayed away too long, and as their story began to be tested for precise geographical details and timings, the alibi unravelled. When they were told that they had been spotted, they lied their way in opposing directions, tangling themselves in knots of mutual contradiction.

  The two men were put in charge of getting the children into bed, while Gillian and Helen sat and thought. Neither had anything to say to the other. When Larry and Ian emerged from the tents, the women demanded the truth. Strangely, though Gillian remembered so many details from that day, what exactly her husband had done, or claimed to have done, was now slightly hazy in her memory. The essence of it was that Larry had a mistress, or an ex-girlfriend, who had recently moved to the area. She had come down for the day to see Larry. Larry had told Ian that she was coming, and asked Ian if he thought it would be fun if she brought a friend. Ian had agreed. Part of the afternoon had been spent at a hotel. Ian had tried to protest that only a few precise things had happened in the hotel room, while other key things hadn’t happened or even been desired, but these details Gillian did not want to know. He had told her enough.

  A few days after returning from the camping holiday, Gillian told Daniel that she was going to her mother’s for a week. Daniel remembered this, though not that the timing had been so close to the camping holiday. He had never doubted this was where she had gone, and the only thing that struck him at the time as weird was that she took the car. It was strange enough to be looked after by his father, but to be carless at the same time felt like a double deprivation. He remembered his father being tense and tetchy, an unnerving mix of over-keen and neglectful in his attention to Daniel and Rose’s needs. The week had been odd, but his mother not being there was explanation enough for any unusual atmosphere or behaviour. It had never occurred to him to wonder why she had gone; less still, where.

  The truth was, she had simply got in the car and driven. She did not want warmth or comfort; she didn’t want anything that might seem like a holiday and distract her from the thinking she had to do, so she drove north. Without making any kind of plan, without even having in mind any particular destination or purpose, she headed for the M1 and drove. She stopped to pee, she stopped to eat, but she kept these pauses to a minimum, the harsh lighting and screamy acoustic of motorway service stations jarring on her mental state. The radio stayed off, and her eyes barely strayed from the road. One part of her brain drove, the other part thought. Neither, it felt to her, were using language or logic. Her thoughts were not coherent or purposeful; she was not yet even trying to work out what she would do, she was simply setting a mental peristalsis to work on the events of the previous week. Until she had broken down her husband’s betrayal and digested it, no decisions could be taken.

  Though she was driving, in a way that seemed to her perfectly safe – overtaking when she had to, checking her mirror, indicating, changing lanes – her mind felt more asleep than awake. She was not really inhabiting her body or her thoughts. She simply did not feel as if she was there, in the car. She was not anywhere.

  As darkness fell, Gillian’s sense of unreality deepened. The motorway now seemed less like a road containing other cars driven by other people, more like an abstract corridor of lights down which she was effortlessly passing. Occasionally she would jolt to her senses and remember what she was doing, but most of the time she felt neither time nor distance impinge on her. She almost forgot that she was going anywhere. She passed Manchester, passed Glasgow, went beyond the end of the last motorway, and still she kept driving.

  She didn’t look at her watch until she felt her eyes drooping. It was almost midnight. A sign told her she was approaching Ullapool. At the next B+B hoarding she turned off the road and rang the bell. Gillian knew you were not supposed to arrive at places like this unannounced, late at night, and she tried to think of a plausible story, but her brain was not capable of it.

  A landlady wearing a dressing-gown answered the door, angrily at first, but she saw something in Gillian’s face, something Gillian didn’t even know was there, that changed her manner. Kindly, solicitously even, she showed Gillian to a room and told her that she could have breakfast as late as she liked. Gillian didn’t even ask her the price. She just thanked her, stripped off, and within seconds was fast asleep.

  The following day, Gillian walked to the centre of town, which was empty and appealingly desolate. She found a pub with a view of the harbour and lingered over a bowl of soup and a coffee, staring out at the bobbing, rusting ships. It was mid-afternoon, and no one had bothered her, when a huge ferry hooted its arrival. For ten minutes the town was suddenly abuzz with lorries, motorbikes, cars, caravans and pedestrians, then it went quiet again, as if the momentary bustle of activity had been a fleeting hallucination.

  She paid at the bar and asked about the ferry. It would be leaving that evening, heading out to Stornoway, on the Western Isles: what they used to call the Outer Hebrides. Gillian wanted to keep going, further out, further away, but did not yet want to get back in the car. This was perfect. When the ferry left, she was on it.

  Gillian was on deck to see the sunset: stripes of orange and pink bashfully hovering between the sea and the sky, as if embarrassed to be so beautiful and so richly coloured. The islands rose out of the sea ahead, a mass of pure, calm bulk. Gillian closed her eyes and let the cold, salty tang fill her lungs. It was hard to be angry here. If ever there was a place to put aside the now, this was it. She could leave Ian; she could kick him out. She could let her life as she knew it be destroyed. Or she could stay with him, weakened and humiliated, waiting for the next infidelity.

  There was a map somewhere in the back of the car, but Gillian still didn’t look at it. She drove off the ferry and kept going, putting more distance between herself and home. If she went far enough, she felt she would find her answer. Another anonymous B+B housed her for the night, but this time she was up and back in the car even before breakfast, leaving cash for the room under a pink ashtray on her bedside table.

  Only weeks later did she look at a map and find out where she had been. Her journey further out through the islands had, though she didn’t realise it at the time, been leading her closer to home. As she drove further from Stornoway, hopping
from island to island on causeways and two small ferries, the archipelago was in fact taking her back southwards, from Lewis to Harris, North Uist to Benbecula to South Uist, and finally over a short strip of water to Barra, then Vatersay. Here the road ended. She could go no further.

  She stopped the car and got out, a blast of cold wind slapping her across the face. The road ended on a high ridge. Ahead of her stretched a featureless slope of rocky grass, dotted with sheep. Down below, on either side of the road, were two beaches of pure white sand. One beach, on the right, was pummelled by vicious breakers. The other, down a short slope to her left, was a calm bay filled with the kind of clear turquoise water you would expect to find on a tropical island. In the water, looking at her with quizzical poise, was a seal.

  She had passed no cars for the last hour. She had not seen a single person on the entire island. Gillian allowed the wind to buffet her a little longer, then quickly stripped off all her clothes and ran down to the calmer of the two beaches.

  The water clamped itself down on her ankles like a threat, a punishment, but she didn’t falter. As soon as the water was up to her knees, she threw herself in, over her head. The shock of the cold made her want to scream, but when she resurfaced and opened her mouth no sound came out. Her lungs were in a vice, incapacitated, unable to push out enough air to make any noise. She felt as if her body might solidify, give up on her, literally petrify in the water, but she was in now. She kicked as hard as she could, and set off with the fastest front crawl she could manage. When her breath began to shorten, she switched to breast-stroke. Soon she was at the spot where she had seen the seal. The cold was no longer so painful. In fact, her skin was now giving off a shrill buzz that felt a little like warmth.

  She stopped and turned, treading water and looking back at the shore. She had left the car doors open. She looked down, into the water, which was such a limpid, crystalline blue that she could see her toenails as clearly as if she was standing in air. Lifting her head again, something small and brown floated past in the water. It was a neat, dry sheep turd. She laughed. She had almost forgotten what if felt like to hear this sound coming out of her throat.