by Lisa Jewell
He paused, questioning the quiet euphoria that suffused his body as he thought of escape. Did that mean he was unhappy? Could he be unhappy? He had it all. He had Jem, he had two beautiful children, a house, a career.
He looked at himself in the mirror that was bolted above the paint-splattered sink in the corner of his studio. He looked OK. Considering he was forty-two. Considering he barely saw the sun these days. Considering he hadn’t had a holiday in two years. Considering he smoked thirty cigarettes a day. Considering he hadn’t had sex for nearly seven months. He looked OK.
What had he thought forty-two would be like? How had he pictured it? He’d assumed there would be a wife, that there would be children. And he’d assumed that both the wife and the children would be beautiful, of course he had; who dreams of an ugly family? He might not have predicted, though, that he would still be painting. His career had always been precarious, a little like his balcony; a funny, rickety old thing, not to be trusted. The fact that he would be making a living from oil and canvas would have been surprising to him. Less surprising would have been the extent of that living: enough for mortgage repayments, for nursery fees, for car repairs and Ocado deliveries, enough for birthday dinners in smart restaurants, enough for Diesel jeans and Monsoon baby clothes and proper cigarettes and a cab home after a night out.
But still, not enough.
Eleven years ago Ralph’s star had risen. Eleven years ago all his dreams had come true one icy March night, in an art gallery in Notting Hill. Ralph had declared his undying love to his soulmate and been acclaimed a star. Eleven years ago Ralph had felt it – something that most people never get to feel – the sharp punch of success. The girl of his dreams! His! The respect of his peers! Goal!
Now he was just a man with a family who painted pictures for middle-class people who couldn’t afford real art.
He heard the stillness of the house again; it came to him ominously, like the barely audible rumble of a far-away train. He looked around his studio, at the half-finished canvases, the uninspiring still lifes of poppies and daisies and hands and faces, the same safe ground, trodden over again and again because it paid the mortgage.
He sighed and decided to go to the gym.
The gym.
This was not a place that Ralph ever imagined he would have cause to haunt.
But he was here today, not for calorie-burning or muscletoning, just for the background noise. He wanted to move among other human beings, in a coolly detached way, wanted to smell their smells and overhear their mobile phone conversations and watch their bodies moving in time to some unheard music. He wanted to be part of something, even if it was just mid-morning at a slightly grubby gym in south London.
He picked a treadmill that was comfortably apart from other exercisers and hung his towel over the handle. He typed in the settings, stumbling for a moment as he always did over the number 42 when asked to input his age – really, it seemed so unnaturally old – and then he started to walk. He’d forgotten his earphones so had to make do with watching the screens overhead silently. Screen one showed an R&B video; three sphinx-like women in red hotpants and bandeau tops, gyrating, pursing full lips, passing hands across taut bellies. Ralph watched for a while, wondering why every time he came here a woman under the age of thirty wearing hardly any clothes was gyrating unsmilingly on that screen. Every single time. Ralph thought of Scarlett, imagined her here beside him watching that screen, her pale jaw hanging slightly open as it always did when she watched TV. What would her small, sponge-like brain make of these women, impossibly engineered, humourless, characterless, thrusting, shining statues, imploring the world to buy some man’s music with every flick of their hips? And if Scarlett was to watch her, and women like her, all day long, what would she learn of womanhood, what would she think of musicianship, what would it say to her about fame?
Ralph shook his head sadly and glanced at the next screen. A real-life action show: paramedics prising a middle-aged man out of a concertinaed car. His head was held in place with a plastic neck brace, his nose and mouth covered with an oxygen mask. His eyes flicked from side to side as he allowed a man in a fluorescent jacket gently to pull him away from beneath his bent steering wheel. A few moments before, he had been a bloke driving somewhere, who knew where; to buy cigarettes, to work, to pick up a new bit for his power drill? Now he was trussed up inside a written-off car, about to spend the day, at the very least, in hospital, all the while being filmed by a man with a camera, to be broadcast on national television. How much more surprising and unsettling a turn could a normal day take? Ralph knew that the man was alive and well because they kept cutting to clips of him in a studio, reliving his nightmare to an off-screen interviewer, but still, thought Ralph, an ordinary life, touched for ever, never to be the same again.
In contrast, screen three showed a series of slightly overweight models parading up and down a tacky TV studio in ‘outsize’ clothes. Ralph wasn’t sure where he stood on the subject of overweight models. Or overweight women in general, really. Try as he might to be piously PC about the whole thing, he couldn’t quite get beyond thinking that women that shape generally looked better in basques and camiknickers than they did in tailored trousers and natty waistcoats. But he did know that the pompous little man officiously directing the big women up and down the studio floor as if his job was on a par with oncology would probably have benefited from an unforeseen car crash and a little new perspective on his existence.
On the fourth screen there was a news report from somewhere in middle America, square-faced men and women with placards, lambasting pissed-off looking people in cars for not adhering to some scripture or other that governed their lives. Their faces were hard with blind belief, their mouths were oblongs of disregard for other people’s values. The people in the cars batted them away as if they were wasps bothering their lunch. How could the people with the placards possibly believe that these actions would lead to any more believers? How could they not know that all they were bringing about with their shouting and their bombasting and their ugly talk of Christ and saved souls was repulsion?
Ralph looked around him at the sparsely occupied gymnasium. Were there believers in here, he wondered. Were any of these normal-looking men and women likely to pick up a placard on a Saturday morning and yell at people for not seeing the world the same way they did? He glanced again at the screens overhead, at the thrusting women in red, the broken man in the broken car, the larger ladies in the frumpy clothes and then once more at the angry Americans with their placards, and for a second it hit him, somewhere round the side of his head, a shocking thought: What if they were right?
What if those Americans were right?
What if there was a God? What if his son had saved all our souls? What if religion were true? Would it make sense of all the nonsense in the world? All the flukes, all the coincidences, all the miscarriages and car crashes and people worrying about being fat? Where, he wondered, did all that belief come from? It had to come from somewhere? It had to have some substance, surely?
Ralph left the thought suspended outside his consciousness like a spoonful of something he wasn’t sure he could put in his mouth. And then he shut the door on it.
God was for freaks.
Christ was for idiots.
He turned his attention to his heart rate and brought it, as quickly as possible, up to 160.
Chapter 3
Jem scooped her baby boy into her arms and felt relief suffuse her body. ‘How was he?’ she asked, secretly wanting her sister to say, ‘Oh, you know, devastated to be apart from you.’
‘He’s been great, haven’t you, little man?’ said Lulu, running her hand across his cheek and smiling at him fondly.
‘How much milk did he have?’
‘He had about three ounces just after you left, and then another three just now. He’s slept most of the time.’
‘Typical,’ smiled Jem, sliding the bridge of her nose across Blake’s cheek and inhaling the
scent of him as though he were a flower.
‘How’d it go?’ asked Lulu.
‘Oh, great, fine, it was just a preliminary meeting, nothing scary.’ She carried Blake to the sofa in Lulu’s kitchen, laid him across the cushion and unstrapped her high heels, kicking them off triumphantly. ‘Those,’ she said, pointing at them where they lay on the floor, ‘were a mistake.’
‘Yeah, you should have worked your way back up the heel scale a bit more slowly. Converse to skyscrapers in one swoop, not good for the calf muscles.’
Jem stretched her aching legs out in front of her and examined her feet. What would he think now, she wondered. What would Joel think if he could see her here, flopped ungainly, feet in damp tights, a squelchy baby at her side? She could feel curls escaping from the pins she’d trapped them with three hours earlier. Her left breast was leaking warm milk. She was halfway between the two states, halfway between ragged mother and desirable woman, a changeling. She unbuttoned the Vivienne Westwood Red Label jacket that she’d won in a fevered eBay auction three weeks ago and peeled it off, shedding her layers. Then she picked up her baby and held him over her shoulder and let his warmth and stillness soothe her back into being.
‘The funniest thing happened,’ she said to Lulu.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes, it was like something out of a novel. There’s this man –’
Her sister’s face registered her surprise.
‘No, nothing like that, just this man, a dad, I see him around, he’s cute, but it’s nothing … it’s not significant. Just, you know, something to do.’
Her sister smiled knowingly. Silly crushes on men they weren’t married to was something of an ongoing joke between them, a way of maintaining some sense of girlishness.
‘Anyway, he’s always with his little girl, I think he’s a house-husband, never seen the mum, we smile and stuff and he’s cute and then today he was there, on the tube, without his little girl and it was a bit …’
‘Oooh,’ smiled Lulu.
‘Well, yes, a bit oooh, and we were, I think you could say, studiously ignoring each other and then he got off at my stop, at Warren Street, and I thought, oh my God, this is it, one of those moments, like something from inside your head has escaped, gone feral, you know, doing its own thing.’
‘And so, what happened?’ urged Lulu.
Jem shrugged, and moved Blake on to her other shoulder. ‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing happened. Of course. He went off to the Northern Line, I went to the exit. I watched his back disappear from view. I breathed a sigh of relief …’
‘Because you don’t really want anything to happen?’
‘Exactly,’ said Jem. ‘I don’t really want anything to happen. It’s just sometimes you get the feeling that something was supposed to have happened, you know, that a door was left open deliberately for you and you have to wonder why.’
‘The “sliding doors” thing.’
‘Yup,’ said Jem, sitting Blake up on her lap and smiling at his little floppy head. ‘Timing is everything. And maybe, you know, if me and Ralph had been going through a bad patch or something then –’
‘You’d be in a wine bar with Mystery Dad right now, banging on about how your husband doesn’t understand you.’
Jem smiled at her sister. ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘Oh, look at him, he’s knackered.’ She appraised her baby son. ‘I’d better get him home.’
‘No time for a cup of tea?’
‘No, honestly, I’m knackered and so’s this one and if I time it right, I might just get a lie-down when we get home.’
Her sister gave her Blake’s coat and sat down next to her, helping her to thread his floppy arms through the sleeves. ‘So everything is all right, is it, with you and Ralph?’ She sounded concerned, as if it was a question she’d wanted to ask for a while.
‘Yes,’ answered Jem, slightly too abruptly. ‘Well, as all right as things can be when there’s a baby in the house. And we did have a bit of a row yesterday –’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes, about me going back to work, about the fact that he was “too busy” to look after Blake for a few hours today. You know, it’s just ridiculous, he’s there all day, in that house, nowhere to go, nothing planned, this is his son, his baby, yet I’ve had to bring him all the way over here so just so I can go into town for a few hours.’
‘Yes,’ said Lulu, circumspectly, ‘I did wonder about that. What was his excuse?’
‘Oh, you know, deadlines, always deadlines, deadlines that miraculously disappear when there are things going on that he actually wants to do. He just couldn’t hack it, that’s the bottom line, just couldn’t hack the thought of being stuck with his baby for half the day, all on his own. Plus, of course, he thinks my job is some kind of joke. He’s never taken it seriously. Maybe if I was a lawyer, or maybe even an artist, like him, maybe then he’d be more supportive of me trying to find my way outside the home. But as it is …’ She paused, and then she sighed. There was no point, she reminded herself, no point whatsoever getting herself worked up about all this stuff. It was just the way things were, not only for her but for nearly every woman she knew. At some point in the last few years Ralph had turned his back, stuck his metaphorical hands in his metaphorical pockets and allowed her to become a housewife. And somewhere deep down inside she hated him for it.
She sighed again. ‘Anyway, it’s fine, it’s sorted, for now. And yes, generally things are OK. We just need to get through the next nine months, just need to get to Blake’s birthday, and if we get there intact, we’ll be fine.’
She glanced down at Blake, bulky and squashy now in his winter coat, and smiled at him. ‘We’ll be fine, won’t we, little man?’ she asked him in a softer voice. ‘We always are.’
Chapter 4
Ralph watched Jem return. Her hair was looser, but she was still resplendent in her tight jacket and high heels. He watched her negotiate the pushchair up the footpath, he could see the rotund form of his son slumbering in his fat winter coat, his outstretched legs cocooned in a thick soft blanket the colour of sky. Jem looked great, he thought, trim and tiny and back to her pre-pregnancy weight already. She was, he thought to himself, a very yummy mummy. He smiled at the thought. And then he thought that he wanted her. He wanted this Jem, his Jem. He wanted her out of that jacket, naked, except perhaps for the extraordinary heels. He wanted to breathe in her breath, taste her mouth, be a part of her again, not this useless adjunct, this separate floating particle. He wanted to drift back to port, slot himself in, anchor down. He wanted to be wanted and he wanted it now.
He smiled at her from halfway down the stairs. ‘Welcome home,’ he whispered, ‘how’d it go?’
‘Good,’ Jem whispered back, wheeling the pushchair into the alcove underneath the stairs.
‘And how’d it go with the baby at Lulu’s?’
Jem smiled. ‘Really well. I don’t think he missed me in the slightest.’
‘See,’ he said, descending the stairs, ‘I told you it would be fine.’
‘Hm,’ said Jem.
Hm.
Ralph, with an agenda that didn’t involve tedious bickering about whose turn it was to plonk themselves down triumphantly at the top of the moral high ground and stick their flag in it, decided to let it pass.
‘I watched you coming back just now,’ he said, ‘from the window.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Jem unlooped Blake’s nappy bag from the back of the pushchair and pulled out two empty milk bottles.
‘You look amazing,’ he said, somewhat breathlessly, as if Jem were some hot stranger in a bar, not the woman he’d lived with for eleven years, not the woman he’d watched give birth to his two babies.
Jem glanced at him, half suspicious, half pleased.
‘No, really, I looked at you and I thought, if I were to walk past that woman in the street, I’d want to …’
Jem frowned at him.
There it was, the knee-jerk rebuke. Ralph thought
about giving up – it would be easier. But then he glanced down at Jem’s feet, so small, so feminine, in those heels. He thought about the dull ache in his chest, the empty space in his soul where they had once resided. He saw his son, still slumbering; he saw an opportunity slipping through his fingers. ‘Reckon we could squeeze in a quickie?’ he said, a hint of apology tingeing the edges of his words.
Jem looked at him in horror. ‘What,’ she said, ‘now?’
‘Well, yes, why not? Blake’s sleeping, the house is empty …’
‘I thought you were busy?’
‘No. I mean a real quickie. You know, three minutes, tops.’
Jem blanched. ‘Jeez,’ she muttered. ‘I mean, no.’
‘Right,’ said Ralph. ‘I see.’
‘No, it’s not that, it’s not … it’s just I have to express some milk, look, I’m leaking.’ She pulled her tartan jacket out of the way to show Ralph the damp patch on her blouse. ‘And then I was going to have a lie-down. I only got five hours’ sleep last night.’
Ralph nodded. He couldn’t argue with that. How could he argue with that? How could he argue with breast milk? How could he say that she shouldn’t be tired when it was she who had woken three times in the night to feed their hungry baby? How could he even begin to make a case for his own needs and wants? He couldn’t. Which was not to say that there wasn’t a case to be made. There was a very strong case to be made indeed.
Jem and Ralph had not had sex for nearly seven months.
If there were such a thing as a court of sex law, Ralph’s case would be open and shut. He was being starved of sex at the very same time as being expected to remain faithful. It was a little like being cut with a knife and told not to bleed.
