The Child Inside

by Suzanne Bugler

  I try, but the truth is that I am still just as uptight as ever I was.

  And now I picture Simon as I have come to know him; I picture him standing in front of that huge window in his flat, coffee cup or wine glass in hand, staring down at the vastness of the city below him. I picture the paleness of his skin with its smattering here and there of fine, blond hair; of the way the sinews in his arms stand out against his thinness. And of his laugh, which hides such a mass of insecurity, and of the easy, polished way that he talks. I think of these things and I love them because they remind me of another world, another time. But what do I really know of him apart from vague, broken memories? And what does he know of me? What could he ever know? We connect on such a loose, transient fantasy; that is all. But then I think of him hiding away those pictures of his sister, hiding them away from his mother – and from his wife, too, for all that I know. I think of the coldness there must have been in his life since Vanessa died.

  And I think of the creeping, elusive coldness in mine.

  Surely there is some necessary purpose in this? Call it fate, or whatever you will, but think back – think back to those months after Vanessa died, when I’d take the bus after college to Oakley and walk about the green and stare up at her house, willing, willing something to happen, for there to be some sign, some reason for me to have known her and loved her as I did . . . Surely, now, surely, this is it?

  Trance-like, I set about preparing Jono’s breakfast things as I do every morning: his toast, his cereal, his milk. I put it all out on the table, and then I walk back out of the kitchen to call up the stairs, ‘Jono! Jono! Are you ready?’

  And I wait for him. I hover in the kitchen in my bathrobe and I wait. And while I wait, a question strikes me suddenly, out of the blue: what difference would it make to Jono if I wasn’t here, waiting on him like this, day in, day out? And the answer is this: not much, probably. Not to Jono. The difference would all be to me.

  ‘What have you done with my PE shorts?’ he demands when at last he stomps his way into the kitchen.

  ‘Jono, I haven’t done anything with your PE shorts.’

  ‘Then why aren’t they in my bag?’

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t put them in your bag,’ I say.

  ‘I did,’ he wails, and he picks up a piece of toast and throws it down again. ‘They were in there yesterday.’

  ‘Perhaps you left them at school,’ I suggest.

  And he replies, in a voice that tells me how stupid he thinks that I am, ‘How can I have left them at school when I didn’t even have PE yesterday? Dub.’ And he takes a gulp of his drink and slams the cup back down, so that milk slops over the side and onto the table.

  I feel my heartbeat, picking up its pace.

  I glance at the clock.

  ‘Jono, you have less than five minutes before you have to leave. Please eat your breakfast. And if you can’t find your shorts, you’ll just have to take another pair for today.’

  ‘How can I take another pair? I don’t have another pair!’

  A pair of your home shorts,’ I say, as steadily as I can.

  He stares at me, his face stricken with panic and disbelief. ‘I can’t do that!’ he howls. ‘Everyone will laugh at me!’

  I watch my son, as he hurries up the road, shoulders bent under the weight of his bag and the heavier weight of his woes. I see him struggle with his sports bag, and my heart aches for him, and for myself. I would go with him to the coach stop and help him with his bags, but of course that would not do. The net with which I would catch him is the net with which I trap us both, after all. And so I just stand there in the doorway, watching until he disappears from view.

  And then I go back inside, take my phone from my bag, turn it on and wait.

  To make less of a deal of the waiting, to have something to do, I go and have my shower. I time things: ten minutes in the shower; ten minutes to moisturize my face and my body, and to get dressed; ten minutes to dry my hair. Half an hour later I am still waiting. I make another coffee, and some toast, which I am unable to eat. By now, Simon will be in London. He will soon be pulling in to Paddington and crossing down to the Underground. He has had plenty of time to call me.

  I walk about the house with my phone in my hand. Every time I pass the mirror in the hall I stop and look at myself and force myself to smile, to try and ease the stress and the tension from my face. And I speak to myself; I say, Hi, Rachel here. Or, Hi, how are you? I practise. I modulate my voice, lest my true feelings should come ripping through.

  I need to be calm, at ease. I need to be nice.

  He will be at the office now. I will not wait any longer.

  I call his mobile. He answers after three rings and says, ‘Rachel, hi,’ as if everything is okay.

  ‘I was waiting for you to call me,’ I say as pleasantly as I can.

  ‘I’ve just got in,’ he says, as if that’s an excuse. ‘Now what can I do for you?’

  I picture him, still warm from his wife and the comforts of his effortless weekend life, and jealousy needles its way over my skin.

  ‘I need to see you.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Now let’s see . . .’ He pauses to check his diary, to find some little space in which to fit me in.

  ‘Today,’ I state.

  ‘Is everything all right, Rachel?’ he asks at last.

  And I say, ‘No. I need to see you.’

  ‘I’ve got a meeting at eleven-thirty, but it should be fairly quick. I can meet you at the flat at one.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, and when I hang up the phone I look at myself in the mirror again. My face is taut and drawn, and again I force myself to smile. I wonder how I compare to her, his wife.

  First, we have sex. That is, after all, why we are here.

  But Simon doesn’t have long. He was nearly fifteen minutes late, and he has to be back for another meeting at two. He rolled himself gracefully away from me and went straight into the shower. And now I sit on his bed and watch him as he gets dressed to go back to work.

  ‘Did you have a busy weekend?’ I ask, but what I really want to know is why he didn’t call me.

  ‘Fairly,’ he says. ‘Charlotte’s got a new pony, and she wanted me to take her out on it. And friends of ours came down on Saturday and stayed over.’

  Friends of ours.

  Instantly I picture them, these friends who come down from London. I picture them with their loud voices and their kids of the same age; I see them all piling out of the car in their weekend clothes, so glad to have escaped out of town. I see how they kick off their shoes and curl up on the sofa; I hear their voices: My God you’re so lucky to have all this. Don’t know how I’ll bear to go back. If only we weren’t so tied to the schools . . . I see them rounding up the kids and the dogs for an amble across the fields after lunch, and what an enviable sight they would make together, these two families. But mostly I see them in the evening, gathered around the table over dinner once the kids are in bed. The candles are lit now; oh yes, there will be candles everywhere, warming the glow on their faces. And how they all talk now, the four of them, their voices growing ever louder on Simon’s good red wine; how they talk and how they laugh about the old days: so many old days, so much to share. For they will have known Simon and Isobel forever, these friends who came down for the weekend.

  I watch Simon’s profile as he stands in front of the mirror to put on his tie. I watch the thinness and the deftness of his fingers as they thread the thin end of the tie through the loop and pull it straight; fingers that have been on me, exploring me. It is a thick, silk tie that matches exactly the line of violet threading down the stripe of his shirt. He’d have bought them together, to match. Probably he didn’t even have to go to the shop. Probably they arrived together, this shirt and this tie, in a carefully wrapped package along with several other coordinated shirts and ties, from some shop in Jermyn Street, where he has an account and where some assistant periodically pairs up a selection and sends them
off to him. He would have these invisible people doing things for him like that, just as he has his housekeeper emptying his bins and seeing to his laundry; his housekeeper, whom he has never even met.

  How remote it all is, his life. How untouchable.

  Inside my heart there is a dull, persistent ache.

  ‘Quite a houseful then,’ I say, and I hear the sarcasm in my voice even if he doesn’t.

  But I think that maybe he does hear it, because he doesn’t respond. He gives the knot of his tie one last little push, then checks his watch. ‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘I have to get back soon.’

  ‘We don’t even have time to talk.’ Suddenly my eyes are filling with tears. They come in a rush, spilling over fast, and I gather up a handful of his expensively covered duvet and wipe them away.

  Simon sits down on the edge of the bed and looks at me. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks and he reaches out a hand to find mine, buried in a clutch of his duvet. I am so aware of the neatness of him, the perfection of him, dressed and clean in his suit and his shirt and his tie, and of the rumpled mess of me.

  ‘My sister knows about us,’ I say.

  His hand, although it stays holding mine, stiffens a little; I feel his fingers straighten against mine.

  ‘Does this matter?’ he asks carefully.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I use my other hand to wipe my face. I am still crying. I feel my cheeks and my eyes puffing up.

  Simon looks away from me. He stares down at the duvet, a frown upon his face. Eventually he says, ‘I do not want to come between you and your family, Rachel. You know I wouldn’t want to do that.’

  But I think that what he is really saying is, And don’t you come between mine.

  He looks back at me with gentle, concerned eyes, but his body is tense. He is aware of the watch on his wrist, silently marking time. He is aware of his need for an exit. I feel it in him; that metaphorical glance over the shoulder, the plan to run.

  ‘Of course,’ I manage to say, and I try to stop myself crying. I try to regain a little poise.

  ‘Will she tell your husband?’ he asks now, getting straight to the point.

  ‘I don’t know.’ My hand, clutching his, is hot. I feel his fingers try to ease away from my mine, but I do not let them go.

  He sighs. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asks.

  ‘What do you mean, What do I want to do?’ I wail. ‘I don’t want to do anything! Why? What do you want to do?’

  He flinches at the rise in my voice.

  ‘Rachel, don’t let’s argue,’ he says. ‘Please. Don’t let’s spoil things.’

  ‘Don’t spoil things?’

  Again I think of him enjoying his lovely weekend with his lovely wife and his lovely children and his friends down from London . . . I think of how he didn’t call me, and it wasn’t because he was too busy. Of course he wasn’t too busy. He chose not to call me. I am compartmentalized. We haven’t talked about love, or any kind of future. All that we have talked about is the past, and the transient, fantasy world that we have created from it.

  But what would I do without this escape?

  I see him looking at me now with his blue eyes so unreadable, and I am gripped with fear.

  ‘I don’t want to upset you,’ he says in his beautiful and tender voice. ‘I don’t want to make things awkward for you . . . with your husband.’

  ‘I thought this was what you wanted,’ I whisper.

  He closes his eyes. ‘It is, Rachel,’ he says. ‘It is.’

  He left me in his flat. He didn’t want to, I could tell. But he had to get back to work and there was I, still sitting in his bed, still naked.

  I watched him, torn between leaving me and not leaving me, but in the end he had no choice.

  ‘I think you can trust me to set the alarm,’ I said, but I wondered. Was it that he didn’t want to leave me, or that he didn’t want to leave me in his flat?

  He leant across the bed to kiss me on the cheek. How polite. How very formal.

  ‘I’m sorry I have to go,’ he said, as he has said to me many times. ‘I’ll call you.’

  And, too eager, I asked, ‘When?’

  ‘Soon,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk more soon.’

  And it will hang between us now, this need to talk.

  I have never been alone in his flat before. The silence when he is gone is strange and unfamiliar. I have the overwhelming feeling that I don’t belong here, but it is a feeling that mixes inside me with longing and envy.

  I take a quick shower and dry myself on one of his thick, soft towels. I straighten the bed, and dress. And then I walk about the flat; I look in the cupboards and the drawers. I see his socks, all neatly rolled, his pants laid folded and ironed. I see that blue cardigan still hanging in the wardrobe, and I find an umbrella that I somehow missed before, tucked in at the side of the shelf above the hanging rail, near the back. It’s a woman’s umbrella, striped purple and black. I check the items in the bathroom cabinet and I scrutinize them for signs of further use, though there are none.

  The housekeeper has left Saturday’s post on a pile on the kitchen counter, next to the newly stocked fruit bowl. Of course Simon hasn’t had a chance to open his mail yet, so I can only read the envelopes and guess at their contents; they appear all to be business letters, officially labelled. And now I trail my eyes along the shelves stacked with legal books and files; I know already there is nothing here of interest to me, but I look again, anyway. And inevitably I pick up that photo cube. I see the laughing faces of his beautiful children; I see the confident, knowing look in the eyes of his wife. I see how strands of her dead-straight hair flutter across her forehead. I see how she smiles at the camera as she hugs her small daughter close to her, cheek to cheek, in a squeeze. Look at me, she is saying. Look at me and see how you will love me.

  I put the photos down and move over to the window. I wish that this view was mine to stare at forever. I wish that I lived here, high above the world. I wish that I could come and go, without complication, without depth. And I wish that it was me in that photo, clutching my daughter. Then see me too, I might cry. See me too.

  My sister knows about us, I said, but I didn’t need to tell him at all. I told him because I wanted him to care. I wanted him to cling to me and say, What will we do? I wanted to chug us forward, into another phase. Stupidly, I was testing.

  But there is no other phase. This is it. The world that we have conjured together is thinner than a breeze. So easily it could be gone, and then I will have nothing.

  I leave him a note. It’ll be fine, I say, scrawled on the back of an unopened envelope on top of his pile of mail. I’m sure my sister won’t tell. I’m sorry, I was just upset.

  And I sign my message: love Rachel.

  EIGHTEEN

  The next day, when I have seen Jono off to school, and cleared up the kitchen and put on the dishwasher, and shoved a load into the washing machine, I phone Janice. It is coming up to a quarter to nine and I am still in my bathrobe. She, however, has been at work since eight. Somehow this difference between us makes my lie seem more real; I am the meek one, as always, buckling under.

  ‘You need not worry,’ I say stiltedly when she answers her phone. ‘I won’t be seeing him again.’

  I hear her sigh of relief. And then there is a long silence while I imagine she considers the likelihood of my words.

  To convince her further I say, ‘And it really wasn’t anything anyway.’

  My heart beats into the silence. I am ready to take back my words, to scream into the phone, Oh, but it is something. It’s everything. And who are you to sit in judgement on me, my dear hypocritical sister?

  And in my head I see her, when I was nine and she was ten; I see her marching home from school three steps ahead of me with her long hair pulled back in a ponytail and flicking horse-like from side to side behind her. I see the upturned tilt of her head, I see the stomp of her feet. And there is me, running along behind her, grizzling, Please, please don’t
tell them, because I had been told off in front of everyone by the headmistress for talking in assembly, and she had been there two rows behind me to see it and now she was threatening to tell our parents.

  Please don’t tell, I wailed, and the fear that she would had me grovelling to her for days.

  You should be ashamed, she scolded, hands on hips, watching me squirm. I was ashamed. And they will be ashamed of you, too.

  She who used to steal the pick-and-mix in Woolworths, and get away with it.

  I think of this and I am nine years old again, with the old resentment knotting itself up inside me.

  At last Janice speaks. ‘You don’t realize how lucky you are to have Andrew,’ she tells me now in her schoolteacher’s voice. ‘And Jono.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thank you. Well, goodbye then.’

  And I hang up, because I do not need to hear how lucky I am. I have heard it too often and it simply doesn’t wash any more. They are words to keep me down, that is all.

  Still, she believed me. But then why would she not?

  The nail on the little finger of my left hand is chipped and jagged. I pick at it. I pick and I pick until it is split right across, split too low, so that the pink and tender skin below the nailbed is unwillingly exposed. I probe the soreness and it sings as though electric, raw and sensual, disproportionate to the size of the wound. Like gum pain, I cannot leave it alone. I pick, I feel it throb. And I sit there at my kitchen table wrapped in the cloying heaviness of my bathrobe, like just one of so very many housewives, marking down the years.

  And I think of Janice, busy with her life, doing whatever it is that she wants to do, because, after all, she is Janice. Her sense of entitlement marches full steam ahead of her, waving its flag in your face.

  I have no such flag. I am a wife, a mother. And that is it: the beginning, the middle, the end.