by Mason, Carol
I can’t face work again. So I ring in sick, rattling off some rubbish about a bug. Wendy phones. I had almost forgotten about her. So this is where I have to start telling people. I stare at her number on my call display. I don’t pick up. I just can’t do it.
At some point I throw up. My dad keeps feeding me tea. Then he messes around in the kitchen and somehow produces mincemeat and Yorkshire puddings. We eat by the small bay window that overlooks the grassy lawn that’s bordered on all sides by two sets of old-person’s semi-detached bungalows. ‘What happened to her place?’ I nod to the house across from us, with newspaper up at the window.
‘Dolly Oliver? She snuffed it love. Stroke. About a month ago.’
I look at my dad’s fingers curled around his tea mug and feel a horrible shortening of opportunity. ‘Is it strange, Dad, to see people you’ve known all your life die? People who were young with you, had kids when you had kids…’
He leaves his carrots. ‘Not really love. We all have to do it. So long as we’ve lived a good life and we’ve treated those we love well, there’s no need to be frightened to leave this world.’ He searches my face.
Who will I grow old with now?
More to the point, who will Rob?
‘What you doing the Ray for again?’ When I cry, I tend to put my sunglasses on and he says I am “doing the Ray Charles.” He squeezes my hand. ‘She never knew you cared.’
‘Who didn’t?’
‘Dolly Oliver,’ he playfully slaps me.
~ * * * ~
I somehow make it through a week. A week of my mam’s tantrums and my dad’s tears, her dirty laundry showing up in strange places, the fire on full blast, the telly blaring, my dad’s lectures about not switching the lights on and off as it wastes electric, or his tapping on the loo door every time I just get into a bath, telling me he's bursting for the toilet… my dad screaming like a banshee in the middle of the night. I’d forgotten about his nightmares. He’s had them from as far back as I can remember. They consist of him squealing in progressively higher notes until he reaches a blood-curdling squeal crescendo, at which point my mother usually sends her elbow right through his ribcage to come out the other side, and he wakes up. He never remembers anything after, and he’s never seemed to take any harm from them. And then there are the routine non-events of the old person’s square…
Of course, amidst all this I ring Rob several times and listen to his voice on our answer machine. It strikes me that I’ve done the same telephone stalking business quite recently, only with some other prey. If he answers, I hang up. The other day he said, Hello? Hello?’ And then, ‘Jill is that you?’
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Don’t bother me again,’ he said.
Since then he’s stopped answering.
I drive over to our house. I sit parked down our street, staring at the front door, waiting for him to come out. Then I follow him. To work. To the grocery store. To the dog park. I reckon that if somebody saw me and tried to have me arrested for it, Rob would probably happily watch while they threw me in jail.
And then I pluck up the courage to ring Wendy. And in the dim of her Tiffany-lit sitting room, nursing a glass of wine that I can’t drink, I tell her what I did. She listens for hours, slowly polishing off an entire bottle of wine with a certain mechanical lift to her arm. I have to be a little careful what I say though. I mean, I can hardly tell her, Oh Wendy, Leigh was having such a great time shagging your husband that it made the idea of having my own affair irresistible.
But as for what happened in his room—how awful it was—I don’t tell her that. I just say it only happened once and I felt too guilty to do it again. Another lie. But one I actually like the sound of, for a change.
Of all the people, I would have most dreaded Wendy’s reaction. Yet she listens with an almost therapist-like understanding, completely without judgement, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought she’d be capable of, being the wife of a cheat. But she says one thing that stings to my soul. ‘What surprises me Jill is that I would have thought nothing and no man would have ever tempted you to go astray. I wouldn’t have thought it would even be a last resort to you.’
‘But what are you supposed to do in the circumstances I was under Wendy? When your husband won’t touch you and you can’t even talk about it?’
She seems to think hard. ‘When you know the reason for it? When you know he’s just learned some sad news about himself, and you know that fertility is a very tender subject for a man… I don’t know. I suppose you give him time.’
Time.
Yes. Why didn’t I?
Next, I receive the letter. I recognize the envelope. I’ve filled them many times. They’ve fired me. Too many unexplained absences. Unreliability. Refusal to provide doctor's confirmation of blah blah blah… The paper falls from my hand.
My lovely job at the football club! All my lovely pals I go for lunch with. They all ring me. They hate Swine-burn as they now call him. Think he had it in for me all along. But they can’t understand why I didn’t just go on the sick. Heather tells me a friend of hers did that when her husband had an affair.
So they think Rob cheated. And, dreadful as it is, I don’t feel like disillusioning them. I’m flattered they care. I want them to go away.
My dad gives me a handout from his pension. ‘Don’t worry,’ he tells me. ‘Tony Blair needn’t know we’re splitting it three ways.’
Don’t worry, but I do. I mustn’t be hiding it well because in the dead of night I wake up conscious of a presence in the room. I think I smell her talcum powder first. ‘Mam,’ I whisper. She hovers above me then she bends her face to mine. ‘Jill, my precious daughter.’ Her warm hand lightly touches the side of my face. ‘No matter what happens in this life, I want you to remember one thing. Remember that I love you. And nobody will ever love you like your mother.’ Then she kisses me, a wet smack of proud ownership on my lips. And then she disappears as softly as she came, into the still of the bungalow with the fridge softly burring in the background.
How fast is a person supposed to recover? Well, I’m not. Wendy tells me I absolutely have to get back up to the doctor’s because my face is so gaunt. ‘You’re remarkably together,’ I tell her, proud of her.
‘I’m surviving. I look like this when I’m out doing things. But when I’m on my own with just all my thoughts, it’s a different story. I’m a lot like you.’
The doctor gives me more than the standard ten minutes, which feels flattering, or worrying, depending on how you look at it. Probably because when she asked what the matter was I burst into tears. She drags the skin under my eyes down, runs a batch of blood tests. I didn’t for a minute think I was depressed, but when she suggests prescribing me uppers, this of course sends me into a downer. I tell her I’m not ready to take pills for depression. I tell her, actually, I’m fine now. I straighten myself up, walk out of there, and have a fit of tears outside.
On the weekend I go to Seaburn beach. I know he won’t be there, this being September. In fact, the whole place is a ghost town on this pallid, grey day. The fairground shut down. Coffee shops closed. Only Morrison’s supermarket ticking away at life. I walk along the deserted promenade, arrive at the bench where we sat when I said that terrible, ‘I’ve never had an affair before…’ Staring at a melancholy beach, everything comes back. I relive it, large as life, like I somehow need to, to forgive myself.
It wasn’t all bad, was it? It just should have just stayed as a flirtation. Nobody can punish you for them. It could have been the summer I almost had an affair. There’s a touch of glamour in that. I would have had a whole corridor for my imagination to wander down in my lonely old age, with Rob in the rocking chair beside me.
Speaking of, later in the week I do something brave. I drive home and knock on my own front door, which is a whole other level of weirdness let me tell you. I barely recognize his face under three weeks worth of beard, and hair that needs a good cut. His dark blue eyes stare
out at me like a man in hiding. Then his gaze drops quickly over me. He leaves the door open as he walks back into the house. I go in. The house feels so empty. It's missing me.
Walking into the kitchen feels foreign, like I’ve been away on holiday and have to reacquaint myself with my life again. Rob opens a can of soup. I’m amazed how thin he is. The counters are a mess of opened cans, empty bread packets, empty milk and juice cartons, food stuck to the stovetop—his shoes all over the place. ‘I want to come home,’ I tell him.
He tips the white soup into a saucepan. ‘Not an option.’ He turns the heat up and watches the soup spatter. Something about his disappearing bum in his faded jeans makes me put a hand over my mouth to stop an anguished sound coming out. ‘You’d better stir that or it’ll stick,’ I tell him, trying some form of cajolery. Like soup pans of the past, I can see this one already with the burnt business on the bottom, waiting for me. And I’d clean it cursing him, resenting the very institution of him, as though this pan was the end of my world.
Why do we let things like that bother us? I’d give the world to have Rob and his gluey pans back, Rob and his shoes on the duvet.
He pours his soup into a bowl, takes a dirty spoon out of the dishwasher, doesn’t bother washing it, comes and sits at the table. ‘I’ll go if you want me to,’ I say.
He bites into half a stale French stick. ‘Please yourself.’ The soup burns his mouth. He stands up and takes a can of pop from the fridge. For a moment I wonder if I’ll ever kiss Rob again. But I think I knew the answer the second I saw the state of him at the door. I will never kiss Rob again. Even if he could forgive me, he would never forget how I made him feel.
I watch him skim off the crinkled skin on his soup. I’m not here as far as he’s concerned. His body is healing itself and that means voiding me out.
‘How’s your mam?’ he finally asks. Dinner table chatter of the past. Gets my hopes up.
‘Not good. But I suppose not really all that much worse either.’
‘So what are you going to do then? About your job?’
He asks it as though he cares, but as though it impacts only me, me not us. It fells me. ‘I can’t think about that now,’ I say.
He studies me unsympathetically for a moment or two then scrapes his bowl. ‘Well what are you going to do about the bungalow? I mean, I can’t see you wanting to live there for too much longer. Are you going to look for a flat or what?’
I stare gauntly at him, disbelieving his cruelty, but he refuses to look at me. My eyes fill.
‘Well?’ he asks, finally looking at me again. I want his eyes and his heart to melt for me. Aren’t I the person he used to least like to see suffer in the whole world? But he looks at me coldly. ‘No good crying over spilt milk,’ he says, and he scrapes his chair back and goes to the sink with his bowl and runs the tap. I sit there and drop tears into my lap.
‘I hate you,’ I say, unconvincingly.
‘Yeah, well, I’ll live.’ He starts washing dishes. He’s even got the gall to hum a tune.
That’s it. This is so belittling. I get up, too choked to even say goodbye. But I register something as I walk down our passage to the front door. He has stopped washing dishes. He’s listening to the sound of me leaving.
Chapter Nineteen
Wendy and I go for a day out to Durham. It’s the first change of scenery I’ve had in the month since Rob threw me out, and I’ve been living ‘on death row at the bungalow’ as my dad puts it. Again I note Wendy’s conspicuously un-made-up face. But other than that, she’s turned-out like her old self, even tries the same smile. We attempt pie and mash in a falling-down corner of a seventeenth century alehouse just up from the cobbled marketplace by St Nicholas’s Church. We drink a draught lager and my misery gets to go first. I fret and she consoles, both of us doing a good job of it. Never once does she pressure me for what I’m going to do, or ask questions she knows I don’t have answers to. ‘I wish I’d confided in you instead of Leigh,’ I tell her. ‘It’s just you only ever had eyes for Neil...’
She studies me wisely. ‘You’re wrong. I think both you and Leigh wanted to think that about me but it’s not true. There have been, over the years, one or two who’ve caught my eye. With one of them, yes, I suppose something could have happened if I’d wanted it to. But I never thought a fling with somebody who didn’t really know me could be better than all the years invested in my body by somebody who did.’
Yet we do, don’t we?
Why do we?
‘Neil and I were very inexperienced with the opposite sex. I’d only ever had one other lover before him and Neil had two. We met so young. But that was never a problem for me.’
‘Men are different.’
‘Are they though? I think we like to believe they are, to somehow make them easier to excuse or blame. But look at you and Leigh. You both were married.’ Then she adds, ‘I’m sorry,’ when she sees my face. ‘I didn’t mean it in any recriminating way. I’m just saying I don’t blame Neil because he’s a man. I blame him because he’s Neil.’
I tell her I need fresh air. We walk outside, join the gathering crowd in the market square and listen to a curly-haired student playing Clair de Lune on a violin. A homeless person is sat on the wall. He’s swaddled from head to toe in a commercial fishing net, and there’s an orange kitten crawling all over it, having a field day. We watch its antics for a while then leave. We take the narrow high street that’s closed to traffic and join the slow, quiet milling of people walking down the cobbled bank, gathering at shop windows. When we come to Elvet Bridge, we pause to gaze at its unbeatable view of the three majestic towers of Durham Cathedral set high on the green banks of the river Wear. The day is picture-postcard perfect. But it’s missing a feeling that neither of us can bring to it. It’s even missing Leigh, and the high old times. I experience a wish-I-were-here-with-Rob craving but push it away. I reckon we have enough missing going on already.
‘He’s living with her you know,’ she says, eventually, flatly, staring down river at the rowing boats that roll into the distance. ‘He’s renting one of those new lofts down the Quayside.’
I am almost too floored, and disappointed, to speak. ‘Living with her!’
She plucks ears of grass that jut through the stone wall. ‘Neil needs somebody to pander to him. He needs to come home to his comforting pile of ironed underwear.’
‘Well he’s picked the wrong girl there, hasn’t he.’
‘Who knows? She was tired of being the one who wore the pants all the time. Maybe now she’ll be content to wash and iron them.’ She looks at me and smirks and her eyes have colour depths like two dark marbles held up to the sun. ‘Isn’t that what Dennis Thatcher said to a reporter about his relationship with Margaret? That he wore the pants, and he washed and ironed them too. That’s about the only thing I remember about a sizeable era in British politics. Isn’t that sad?’
Her face quickly takes on that distant, dismantled look again. ‘He wants to come home. Came round last night. His words were, “To give it another try.”’
I scrutinize her hair that’s been forced into a cute little ponytail that sticks up like a palm tree in the centre of her crown. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said what do you mean another try? We were never giving it a try in the first place. We’ve been married for eighteen years. We have two sons.’ She looks at me with a harrowed face. ‘He said he can’t bear her, and now he’s living with her, it didn’t make sense. Apparently she wants them to buy a house and have Molly live with them.’ She goes to bite her nails but stops herself. ‘What’s really strange about this is that Neil isn’t a person to just get bobbed along with the tide.’
‘Maybe he just can’t be bothered dealing with her right now. I mean his life has changed radically as well, hasn’t it? Maybe he’s just catching his breath.’
‘Poor him.’ That was a rare feat of sarcasm. ‘He’ll not want Molly. I know how much he didn’t want to have a third child, to s
tart from square one again. Sometimes I think he resented being a father because it took him away from the two things he loved most: his job and himself.’
‘I’d never have thought, Wend. I assumed he was pleased about the baby when you fell pregnant.’
‘I was hardly going to tell you. It doesn’t exactly make him look very good does it? And it’s disrespectful to the memory of my daughter, making it known that her own father didn’t really want her in the first place.’ She straightens up from leaning on the wall. ‘Come on, let’s walk now.’
We take a stony cut down to the riverbank. Fishermen are casting lines into water that looks like a sheet of green opaque glass. On it quivers the reflection of the cathedral. She stops and gazes out across to the other side, to a neat line of moored rowing boats. ‘It’s not the first time he’s cheated you know.’
‘What?’ Peel me off the floor. Her eyes scan my reaction. She almost smiles. She starts walking again leaving me lagging there, mouth ajar. ‘I can’t believe this!’ I pad after her. ‘Wendy! I had no idea! How d’you… How do you know?’
‘You know,’ she says. ‘I mean I never had any concrete evidence if that’s what you mean.’ She pushes up an overhanging bramble and we duck under it, minding our eyes. ‘The thing with Neil is he’s very good. Maybe spending your career around dishonest people you learn the ropes. You’ll never catch him in a lie. None of Neil’s behaviour is typical of the cheat. He never gets too nice all of a sudden. Never has strange hairs on his clothing or lipstick on his boxers. He has never gone off sex—quite the opposite. He doesn’t make excuses to pop out and be gone for hours. He’s not forgetful and I don’t have to tell him everything three times.’
