I held her gaze levelly and forced myself not to look away. I would make her hear me, even if she didn’t want to, even if she hated me for not ignoring the signs, for forcing us apart when she was trying so hard to bring us together.
Her brows drew together, and caution made her eyes almost deceptively calm, like she’d drawn a blind down to keep the fight within a secret.
“Is this because of what I told you, about the affair?”
“That’s part of it.”
“But...” she took a step towards me, putting her hands on my arms soothingly. “That was ages ago, and we made it up. It was just a mistake. You’re thirty-two; don’t you think you’ve had time to work out who you are? You’re my husband, and you’re not gay. You just made a mistake.”
“I don’t think it was a mistake,” I said, hating the apologetic tone that I was apparently incapable of dropping. “I think maybe it was me trying to work out what the hell was going on with me. And maybe he didn’t mean anything, but...I think I’ve found someone who does.”
Her face, contorted somewhere between concern and impatience, froze, and I could almost see hairline cracks forming in her composure.
“Who?”
I shook my head, “I don’t want to get into that, I just wanted to get this out in the open, so I wouldn’t have to lie to you.”
Her eyes searched my face, and she drew away from me. “It’s that friend of yours, isn’t it?”
I said nothing.
“For God’s sake!” she cried, “how could you let him do this? How can you not see that he’s messing with your head? I should have seen it before, the way you kept just running into him, going off...he’s a predator, Connor. He’s only got you thinking this way because you’re weak.”
“Nate hasn’t got me thinking anything,” I told her, hating the accusations she was making, “he’s just a friend, who...who I think I like, more than just a friend.”
“So you’re ditching your wife, our marriage, to go and live with a man you don’t know?” she challenged.
“I’m not going to live with him. I’ll get somewhere else,” I said, “but I think by leaving, I’m giving me and him a chance to get somewhere. And I’m giving you a chance too.”
“A chance to be dumped by you? Stuck here all on my own?” She hissed, “when all my friends warned me that it would happen again, that you’d go off with some other bloke? I’d rather you’d have died! I wish you had, ‘stead of turning into a shameless, cold, bastard who I don’t even know anymore.”
I couldn’t say anything to that. What can you say when your wife wishes you dead, and you can’t take offence, because you’ve been wishing the exact same thing?
I left the kitchen and went upstairs to pack up my clothes and things. Emma followed me, and watched as I put my few belongings into a bag. She stayed silent, hard faced and wet eyed, while I zipped the bag up and dumped it on the landing.
In the study, I turned on the computer and looked up a list of flats in the area, then printed it, plus the number for the job centre, and folded them into my pocket.
A message bing-bonged at the corner of the screen. Coop. Why had he chosen now to talk to me? Even stranger, why was I reassured by his appearance on my screen?
What’s up?
I looked at it for a whole minute before deciding to reply. I’m leaving my wife.
When?
Right now.
It was almost funny, almost. Writing it made me certain, and gave me the strength I needed to go.
I picked up my bag and carried it downstairs to the front door. Emma stayed at the top of the stairs, one hand on the banister for support.
“Bye then,” I said, as the ringing silence became too awful to bear.
“You’ll be back,” she said quietly as I opened the door, took my bag out, then closed it behind me.
Somehow, I didn’t think I would.
I’d never thought that leaving my wife would be so easy, and it was only afterwards, as I walked through the darkening streets, that I realised what I’d done.
My whole life was in that house, and I had just left it behind, left Emma behind. Since leaving hospital I’d been a grudging half of a team of two, and now I was truly alone.
The feeling of vulnerability didn’t leave me, even though I’d agreed to meet Nate at the end of the street, and found him waiting for me. We walked together to his flat, where he’d already cleared the sofa, propping old tapestry cushions on one end and putting a sheet on it.
“First thing tomorrow we’ll get you down to the welfare office, find you a place to live, and get you signed on. Then it’s job hunting, all day, ‘till you don’t want to look at another computer ever again.”
I sat down on the sofa, and Nate put the TV on for me, then went to get some dinner together in the tiny kitchen. He was a good judge of people, that much was clear from the way he didn’t try to talk to me. I think he knew I was still in shock, that I wasn’t ready to go to sleep somewhere that wasn’t my married home, to admit to myself that a chunk of my life (albeit one I didn’t remember) was now over.
Instead, Nate clattered pots and pans about, and soon the smell of onions frying and chicken stock bubbling filled the tiny flat. He flipped on the radio in the kitchen and sang along to several pop songs, as if he’d forgotten I was in the living room, staring at the TV. I let myself relax into the sofa, and listened to Nate bash out Oasis hits.
Nate came out of the kitchen with two plates of apricot chicken and rice, passed one to me, and sat down on the sofa with a bump.
“What’re we watching?”
It was the news, and I wasn’t particularly interested in watching the same news stories come around for a third time, so Nate switched it over to a cooking programme, which he then proceeded to talk over.
“Feeling alright?” he asked.
I stabbed chunks of soft, cumin spiced apricot onto my fork and tried to work out how exactly I was feeling. Relieved? Lost? Guilty?
I shrugged.
Nate chewed meditatively for a while, then swallowed and said. “She’ll be alright you know. A grown woman and all that. She’ll soon find someone else, move on.”
“Probably a good thing we don’t have children,” I said, finding my voice had dried up inside my throat, a dried pea rattling in a cheese grater.
“Yeah, there’s that.” Nate chased a lump of chicken around his plate with his fork.
“I just wish...” I tried to nail down exactly what it was that was niggling at me, “it should have been different, happier. I mean, I survived that accident, I came home to my wife almost unharmed...and we weren’t happy.” I looked down at my plate, “And worse, whoever I was, before, he might have stayed in that house, in that marriage forever...and I don’t think he was happy either.”
“At least now you have a chance to be,” Nate said, setting aside his plate and letting out a deep breath, “but you know, most people aren’t.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m serious.” Nate turned his body towards mine, our knees touched on the small sofa, and his grave expression softened around the eyes. “The most your average person can hope for is contentment. General alrightness. No red bills in the post, no blazing rows or awkward silences in bed, and a full, healthy life.”
“Isn’t that happiness?”
“It would be, if you didn’t have things lurking underneath,” Nate said, “the struggle that got you there, the broken things you’ve had to mend, which won’t be right again, but which are still good, still OK,” he shrugged, “contentment is happiness without the perfection, without the naiveté.”
He was so serious that I couldn’t help but smile. “Where do you get this stuff?”
His face cracked a sideways smile. “I read twice as many books as I should, and I think too much.”
Nate cleared the dishes into the kitchen, and I washed them up, even though he said we could leave them. He had a half bottle of white wine leftover from cooking dinn
er, and we drank it in front of the tail end of a black and white film about the Second World War.
For about an hour after it got too late to keep my eyes open anymore, we stayed up and watched the film, both of us pretending that I would be bedding down on the sofa. Maybe Nate believed it, maybe I did, still, by the time the film ended and Nate turned the television off, both of us knew I wouldn’t be sleeping anywhere but with him.
Nate went to his side of the room to get undressed, and I took my clothes off and folded them, putting them over the edge of the sofa. Then he climbed into one side of the bed, pulling its camouflage print duvet over him. I got in on the other side, and clicked the lamp off.
The flat wasn’t truly dark, but the air was a cushiony grey, soft like the over washed sheets that smelt like cooking, cigarettes and a bed already slept in. Nate moved across the bed, and I shuffled back until we were lying together. His forehead fit between my shoulder blades, and the hairs on his arm tickled my waist.
I slept probably the best I had since waking up in hospital.
Chapter Eleven
Setting up a life from scratch was a daunting prospect, and as I sat on Nate’s sofa, eating Marmite slathered toast and writing a to-do list on a receipt from the library, I was almost paralysed with worry.
Nate thumped a mug of tea down on a coaster he’d put on the carpet next to my seat.
“Don’t worry about it, we’ll get it all sorted.”
His brown hair was even more spiky and dishevelled than usual, and he looked lighter, some of the little lines around his eyes were smoothed out, and his face, with a smudge of stubble on it, looked strangely younger. He looked dizzily youthful.
After waking up with him, I felt the same way. Young. Free.
I had a lot ahead of me that day, signing on for one, and then I’d have to find a flat, get some basics for myself like pots and sheets and the hundreds of other things that I hadn’t known I needed until I didn’t have them.
“You know,” Nate said, nursing his cup of tea between his hands, “you don’t have to move out of here right away, you could take a few weeks...”
I thought about going to sleep every night in his soft, comforting bed, eating home cooked food in the glow of the tiny TV, and having Nate all to myself. Already, after only one night, I could imagine life with him, and the thought of having to leave Nate’s flat and strike out alone made me surprisingly sad.
“That’s a nice offer, but, I think I need to try things on my own for a while.”
He gave a shrug, “Offer’s still open anytime.”
“Thanks.”
He turned the mug between his hands, looking down into the dregs of his tea rather than at me. “It was nice, having you here last night.”
There was a lump in my throat as I looked at him, “I know. Best night I can remember.”
Nate’s eyes held mine, their warm brown the exact shade of beer foaming into a glass. I was close enough to smell his minty toothpaste.
“Come on,” he said, “best be getting down the job centre.”
For all that I’d walked past it every day on my way to work, I hadn’t actually paid much attention to the Job Centre. It took up a shop front between a Dreams bed showroom and Pizza To-Go-Oh!, with a bright green sign over tinted windows made doubly opaque by a layer of rain splashed dirt.
Nate showed me up to the narrow automatic doors, where a man in a blue uniform shirt was smoking a cigarette.
“Here we are then, I’ll be waiting back at the flat,” he told me.
Inside, I gave over my details to a woman on the front desk, who directed me upstairs to a room with primary coloured sofas and drab notice boards of photocopied memos, where I waited for fifteen minutes, and then had to sit with an advisor and answer all kinds of questions about my job, my living situation and my past occupations, which were hard to answer given that I couldn’t remember anything about the last thirty-odd years. The office was open plan, and I got more and more embarrassed as the little interview went on, because I realised how thick I must sound.
Eventually the advisor, a small birdlike woman called Carol with a fine moustache who was wearing a natty lilac cardigan and orthopaedic leather clogs, made me an appointment in a half hour, and sent me off to prepare. I filled out a phonebook sized stack of forms at a tiny table beside a vending machine. Like the rest of the building, it smelt like recycled air, sweat, and rubber underlay. Three other people were filling out similar forms, and we exchanged glances of disbelief at the sheet amount of questions. Some of the sections didn’t even make sense, and asked questions that had already been answered. Do you have a mortgage? No. Who is responsible for paying your mortgage? N/A. Is your mortgage nearing its end? N/A. And so on and so on for five more pages.
It was a further hour before I breathed fresh air again, but I had an appointment time on a scrap of paper in my pocket, and I knew that if I had no luck job hunting in the next three days, I’d soon be getting my job seekers money. It took a small amount of stress out of the next few hours at the library, using my free internet time to look over the careers websites and take down phone numbers.
Still, by the time I made my way back to Nate’s some five hours after I’d seen him last, I was exhausted. I had made enquires and sent out eighteen emails and made ten phone calls via my mobile. Now there was nothing left to do but await a reply, and I knew that at the very least, I wouldn’t have any money until the end of the month, when I either got my first pay packet, or my first lot of JSA money.
Nate was in the middle of pegging out his washing in the tiny concrete covered space next to the flat when I arrived. Three collapsible lines were rooted there, like dead trees, and there were feathers blowing around one corner of the yard, where a pigeon had been mauled beside the kebab shop bins.
“Alright?” Nate called, shaking out a t-shirt and hanging it out.
“Yeah, got an appointment, beginning of next week.”
“Cool.”
Nate hung out the last thing in his plastic basket and together we went to the back stairs and up to the flat. I made him a cup of tea, and we sat down so I could fill him in on what the Job Centre advisor had told me.
“Sounds good, least you’ve got a plan, some applications out. Who knows? Maybe you won’t even have to sign on.”
“I hope so,” I said, not much liking the idea of going back to the job centre, fortnight after fortnight, having failed to find any kind of job. Even though my advisor had not been hopeful, given that my memory loss had already lost me one job, and would probably prove an obstacle to finding another.
“Still,” Nate said, “it’ll be a while before you’ve got any cash coming in then?”
I nodded. “My last bit of pay from the leisure centre’ll go into mine and Emma’s account, and I think she should have it.”
Nate didn’t say it was the right thing to do, and I liked him for that. Instead he said, “Well, you can always doss here ‘till your money comes in, and we can sort out your stuff from hers, and see if you’ve got anything that’ll keep you going in the meantime.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged, “Anything you can sell, jewellery, DVDs, clothes...I paid for my interview suit and all my kitchen things by pawning the necklace I had on when I was taken into hospital.”
I raised an eyebrow, “You don’t strike me as the necklace type.”
“That’s why I sold it,” his face drew into a frown, “kind of wish I hadn’t now though.”
“Why?”
“Well, it wasn’t the kind of thing I’d have bought myself. Someone must have given it to me, and now I don’t have it.”
“But you don’t even remember who bought it for you.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Just someone who cared, you know? That would be enough. Knowing someone cared.”
I was embarrassed by the strength of the emotion on his face, unused to seeing Nate dwell on his past.
“What did it look like?” I as
ked.
“Just a chain, made up of those feathery things – fleur du something. Anyway, it was solid sterling silver, the bloke I pawned it to said it was probably at least three hundred quid when it was new. I got one-twenty-five for it.” He sighed, “someone spent a lot of money, buying that for me, and I handed it over so I could get some ASDA saucepans.”
“If they cared enough to buy it for you, they probably wouldn’t mind you using it to stay afloat,” I said.
Nate still looked thoughtful, but he smiled a little.
For dinner there was frittata with fried potatoes and peppers in it, and Nate poured us both glasses of whisky afterwards. We watched a half hour of a BBC drama about the Russian revolution, and then went to bed.
I think I was the first one to take my pants off, and then Nate followed suit. Completely naked, in the bed, I rolled over and put my arm around him, placing a clumsy kiss on his cheek.
“Is this OK?” I asked.
Nate nodded, his eyes and hair almost black in the dark. “But you don’t have to.”
“I just, want to, that’s all,” I realised what he must be thinking, “this isn’t because you’re letting me stay here...I’ve just been thinking about what we did, pretty much nonstop since then.”
Nate relaxed and turned towards me, kissing me properly. For a while we just traded kisses, comfortable and warm in the bed, listening to the drunks on the street outside making their way home from the pub. Then Nate kissed lower, across my chest, his lips brushing a chain of light touches across my abdomen. I couldn’t keep my breathing steady, couldn’t match what was happening up against anything I could remember experiencing.
When Nate slid his mouth over me, I let out a gasp and couldn’t catch my breath again. It felt amazing, and Nate’s strong hands holding my hips down were comforting and exciting all at once. For the longest time I was blind and deaf, only able to lie and feel him touching me, sucking me, breaking off to breath heavily and kiss my stomach and hips.
After The Fall Page 11
