by Voss, Louise
‘You won’t be happy with her,’ I ventured, still crying, and he rounded on me. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to me.
‘How dare you say that! After what you’ve just told me? Who are you to tell me what makes me happy—and who am I to know?’ His face crumpled. ‘I thought I’d found the person to make me happy. What a total, gullible idiot I am. All you are is a liar and a cheat, and I wish you didn’t exist. No, I don’t, because of Max. I just wish I’d never met you.’
He was right; I should never have said that about Marilyn. But it hurt, so much, to hear him say he wished he’d never met me.
‘It all makes sense now,’ he said softly, ripping up one of the willow leaves in his fingers. ‘You were so loving, and brilliant with Max, and I think we had real passion for each other—but whenever I tried to talk about the future, you just switched off, or changed the subject…t first I thought you were just cautious, afraid of being hurt; but then I did start to think that this relationship was more one-sided than I’d originally believed. I started to think that you didn’t love me.’
But I do, I wanted to say. I wanted to scare the ducks off the river by shouting it out; I wanted to rattle the windows of Max’s classroom with it. I wanted Max to know that his dad had changed my life, made me happy, made me love myself, helped me look to the future again. But it was too late, and Adam wouldn’t have believed me any more. I couldn’t blame him.
Instead I looked away, to a row of tall but unidentifiable trees wavering on the horizon. It was depressing how nobody except the older generation seemed to be able to readily identify trees or birds anymore, other than the most obvious ones, I thought. Max and Crystal knew who Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears were, but wouldn’t have had a clue about the difference between an oak and a sycamore, or between a wren and a sparrow…/span> Lil could have recognised a mistlethrush in an elm tree at a hundred paces.
It was easier to think about Lil and trees, than to think about Adam holding Marilyn instead of me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, wiping the tears off my face with the palms of my hands. ‘I didn’t mean it. I really hope you are happy with Marilyn…
‘Thank you. I think we will be. She’s changed, anyway. She’s stopped drinking, she’s doing an Open University degree. She said that she was coming back, even before I rang her mum when we thought Max was ill. She really wants to make a go of it with me. For Max. She can’t do enough for him. And he’s so happy to have her back…
‘Of course,’ I said, equally politely, feeling steel shutters clanging down all around me, sealing me into a prison of my own making. ‘I will still be able to see Max though, won’t I?’ My throat seized up with fear that Adam wouldn’t let me.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Please.’
He hesitated. ‘Well, I suppose so, for Max’s sake. After what Marilyn did, it would be pretty harsh for you to suddenly disappear out of his life too. But it may have to be when I’m not around.’
I felt suddenly desperate to hug Adam, to hold on to him. I was already missing the contours of his solid, reassuring body. I’d loved that body so much—he was right when he said that we fitted together well.
‘I’d like to say goodbye to him before I leave, if that’s OK.’
‘Before you go back to your husband, you mean?’
I bit my lip. ‘I’m only going back to tell him it’s over between us.’
I meant it, too. I couldn’t continue with Ken in the knowledge that I’d felt so much for another man.
‘You can pick Max up from school today if you want.’ Adam extracted a hard lump of tissue from the front pocket of his jeans, and managed to un-crumple it enough to blow his nose into. He looked old and miserable, the red rims around his eyes making them seem even bluer than ever. Then he put his arms around me - but politely, like a formality.
I nodded into his shoulder. ‘Thanks,’ I said, wondering how I’d be able to cope knowing that it might be the last time I’d ever see Max burst out of the classroom door, laden down with artwork, lunchbox, swimming stuff, book bag; yet still dancing across the big yellow snake painted onto the tarmac of the playground, hopscotching across its’ numbered segments towards me, with his stuff flapping about him, his very existence a miracle.
I’d always visualized collecting Holly from school like that, waiting for her in a huddle with the other parents in the playground. It had been such a joy to have Max running into my arms, walking him home to play, sometimes with a friend, giving him juice and biscuits and then cooking supper for him, sweet-talking him out of waffles and into broccoli. The small rituals of premeal pees and hand-washes, rations of children’s TV and liberal applications of glitter glue. I’d felt just like a real parent.
I was going to miss it all so much. And I was going to miss the man with his arms still around me, the scratch of his beard rubbing against the crown of my head as we stood still, the canal flowing faster past us than we would ever be able to flow. I closed my eyes and thought of Ken. Maybe I should at least try and make things work with him now: to get re-accustomed to brown eyes instead of blue, tennis instead of Tweenies, the lonely nights in instead of the cheerful chaos of the supper-bath-bed routine. I was so afraid of being on my own. Perhaps, I thought, I could bend the truth a little, just to save his feelings? Perhaps I could make out that Adam and I were just friends, and I’d only rented the flat to be close to Max? But the thought of telling yet more lies felt like the scratchy fibres of a rope noose tightening around my neck. I had to start telling the truth, no matter what the cost.
Adam dropped his arms back to his sides, and moved away from me, looking at his watch.
‘We’d better go. I’ll ring Marilyn and tell her not to pick up Max today; that you’ll bring him home. And then you’re leaving, right?’
It sounded like an order. I’d lost him, and Max.
Chapter 35
Normally, when I picked Max up from school, I stood in a cluster with the waiting mums, many of them with smaller children straining to escape from pushchair harnesses or snoozing in papooses against their still-distended bellies. It had been the first time since Holly died that I hadn’t resented other mothers in general; but since I’d almost, by proxy, become one of them, I had learned to pity them instead. Not so much by their complaints of sleepless nights and non-existent sex lives, but by the tangible marks of their suffering: the violet shadows under eyes they’d had no time to make up; the misshapen but comfortable clothes; the tangled hair; the defeated expressions when their toddlers took not a blind bit of notice of what they said. We’d chatted in a desultory fashion, about the weather, nits, colds, E numbers, cake sales. I loved every minute of it.
On that last day, however, I stood apart from them. It would have been nice to continue the charade one final time, but I was too afraid of breaking down. Unfairly, I imagined their censure: ‘Look at Max’s dad’s girlfriend - Max isn’t even hers, and she can’t take the pace…he should try having three!’ Although of course they must have realized that Marilyn was back on the scene, so perhaps they pitied me instead. They were probably thinking, well, my ass might be halfway down the backs of my legs, but at least I’ve got a husband and a child of my own.
I put on my shades, even though the sun was behind a thick bank of grey-blue cloud, and fixed my eyes on the room Max would come out of at three o’clock. There was a blu-tacked sign on the classroom’s outside door announcing that the letter of the week was C, and that they would be talking about Carpets, Corn and Ceilings. Not in the same sentence, I hoped for Max’s sake.
He was the sixth one through the door. As I mentally named the classmates in front of him, I wondered how they would all turn out, and felt sad that I might never see them again. Dominic was out first - face of an angel, blond cherubic curls and cupid’s bow lips—but a mouth like a sewer and far too handy with his fists. Then came Natalie, who was a sweetheart. She’d been round to play with Max a few times, and he bashfully r
eferred to her as his girlfriend, and surreptitiously stroked her brown pigtails when he thought nobody was looking. Although she’d been the one who’d told him that boys put their willies into girls’ dinkies to make babies, so perhaps she wasn’t as innocent as she seemed either. She was followed, in a huddle, by Katy, Gracie, and Amy, the ‘y’ girls. They were far too cool to hang around with the likes of Max.
Then Max appeared, laden down like a packhorse like all the other children, but distracted and too upset to even hopscotch down the painted snake. ‘Anna!’ he cried, hurling himself at me and breaking into tears. ‘Look!’ He yanked down his lower lip and showed me his bottom front tooth, which that morning had merely been wobbly, but was now hanging on by the thinnest of threads.
‘Miss Taylor wanted to pull it out, but I didn’t want her to,’ he wailed. I wrapped my arms around his thin body, almost glad of his tears so I had an excuse to hold him. There was a splodge of blue paint in his hair, yogurt on his tie, and his fingernails were black. I contemplated kidnapping him; running away somewhere with him and starting a new life. Just me and Max.
‘It just needs a little tiny twist, Max, and it’ll be out,’ I whispered. ‘Want me to do it for you?’
‘No,’ he said, wriggling away from my grasp. ‘Mummy can, when we get home.’
I released him. I knew I’d have to let him go some time. I prayed that nobody would speak to us on our way down the alley out of the school’s side entrance, walking at a snail’s pace behind a woman holding a staggering baby’s hand. I couldn’t even talk to Max, to ask him about his day as I usually did.
‘Anna, is it Friday?’
‘No, sweetie,’ I just about managed. ‘It’s Wednesday.’
‘Could we have Bun Day on Wednesday, just this once?’ he said hopefully, but without real conviction. We came out of the alley, and he hopped up on the low wall alongside the old people’s home, skipping along it with his arms outstretched like a tightrope walker. He seemed to have forgotten about his tooth again.
‘OK then. Just this once,’ I said, and he whooped with delight. ‘I want a gingerbread man!’
‘But what about your tooth, Max? You can’t bite into a gingerbread man!’
He was crestfallen. Then he stopped and faced me. Standing on the wall, he was almost at eye-level with me, and his serious expression was so like his father’s had been when Adam had faced me on the towpath less than an hour earlier, I caught my breath.
‘You can, then, Anna.’
‘I can what?’
‘Pull out my tooth. Go on. I won’t even cry—not if I can have a gingerbread man, and the tooth fairy comes.’ He thrust his open mouth at me, pushing the tooth forwards with his tongue.
I thought of a conversation I’d overheard at one of Ken’s work dinners a few months back. I’d been down the other end of the table, stuck with another executive wife and some radio plugger, not listening to what they’d been saying, but trying to tune into the conversation in which Ken and an attractive red-haired woman had been engrossed.
‘You just pinch it between your thumb and forefinger in a tissue, and twist it out,’ the woman had explained earnestly, and I had been desperate to know what she was talking about. Eventually I’d decided that she must, for some reason, have been explaining to him how to pull out a child’s milk tooth, and it had moved me. I knew it to be one of those nuggets of information I’d store up, and hope that I could use one day. Even though afterwards Ken had told me that what they’d actually been discussing was the way to stop lily pollen from staining everything– you pulled out the stamen - I still believed that I now knew the correct method of extracting a wobbly tooth.
Max’s tooth dangled in front of me. Taking a deep breath to try and dispel my queasiness, I reached into his mouth, grasped the tiny white square, and yanked. It felt like the most intimate thing I had ever done for anybody else. I felt a split-second’s resistance, and Max’s face turned pale. I held the tooth up, and blood began to flood into the space in his gum.
‘There it is! Your first ever tooth to come out—what a big brave boy!’
‘Anna, I’m BLEEDING!’ he moaned, clutching his mouth.
‘Spit it out, darling. Have a sip of water and spit that out too.’ Helping him off the low wall and handing him his water bottle, I instantly regretted my impromptu extraction. I didn’t even have a tissue, for heaven’s sake. I should at least have waited until we’d got home—although then Marilyn would have taken over. At least this way the moment had been mine. I would, forever, be the person who pulled out Max’s first tooth.
One of the passing mothers—Natalie’s - stopped. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, more to me than to Max.
‘You wouldn’t have any tissues, would you? I’ve just pulled out his tooth, and it’s bleeding more than I thought it would,’ I said. Max had taken the tooth from me and was showing Natalie, who was duly awestruck.
‘Is that his first one to come out?’ asked Natalie’s mother, handing me a small pack of Kleenex. I couldn’t remember her name, and there didn’t seem much point in asking.
‘Yup,’ I said, beaming with as much pride as if the tooth fairy had left a pound under mypillow.
‘Ooh,’ she replied, ‘Isn’t that great? Natalie can’t wait to lose her teeth!’
I handed Max a tissue, and he dabbed at his gum, although it had already stopped bleeding. ‘Come on then, Maxie, let’s go and get a bun,’ I said. ‘Want me to look after your tooth till you get home?’
He passed it across to me like a jeweller handling a valuable diamond, and I wrapped the bloody stump of it in another tissue. ‘Thanks for the tissues,’ I said to Natalie’s mum, and she smiled cheerily.
‘No problem. Well done, Max,’ she said. ‘See you both tomorrow.’
Well, you won’t see me, I thought, plunged back into depression again as I watched her walk out of my life, with Natalie holding the handle of the buggy containing her baby brother. She had turned back into the enemy instead of a peer.
Max hammered with his fists on the front door of his house, calling through the low letterbox. ‘Mummy, Mu-ummy! Guess what?’ His voice was muffled because he’d stuck a soggy half of gingerbread man into his mouth to free up his hands.
But it was Adam who opened the door, and my heart still jumped when I saw him, familiar in his checked shirt and jeans, familiar in his crinkled eyes and the wide smile which was only there for Max’s benefit—it dropped from his mouth when he looked at me.
‘Where’s Mummy?’ Max pushed past him. ‘Anna, I need my You Know What, to show Mummy.’
‘She’s not here at the moment, sweetheart, she’s just gone to Tesco’s,’ said Adam.
His face fell, and he laid the mutilated trunk of the gingerbread man on the hall table, all interest in it lost.
‘Show Daddy instead,’ I said, passing the precious tissue over to him.
Max unwrapped it slowly, his big blue eyes anxiously scanning his father’s face, waiting for the appropriate reaction as each layer was drawn apart until the tiny tooth lay there.
‘Max! That’s never your…’ began Adam, switching his gaze from the grisly tooth to the gap in his son’s smile.
‘Anna pulled it out for me so I could eat my gingerbread man,’ Max beamed, and Adam hugged him. ‘Oh, Max, that’s so exciting! We’ll have to put it under your pillow for the tooth fairy, won’t we?’
‘It was only hanging on by a thread, and he did ask me to,’ I said, not wanting Adam to think I’d pinned Max down against his will, like some kind of re-enactment of the dentistry scene in Marathon Man.
‘If it’s OK with you, I’ll just nip upstairs. I’ve got a few bits and pieces to collect before I go,’ I added.
‘Why, where are you going, Anna?’ Max plucked at my arm, a slight tone of panic in his voice. He knew, I thought.
I crouched down to him. ‘Max. Now that your mummy’s back, there’s…well, there’s not really enough room for me to be here too.’
&nb
sp; ‘You could share my bedroom,’ he said, clinging to me. I hugged him back.
‘Thank you, darling, but that might not work out. You see, I’m moving out of my little flat, and back to -’ I nearly said ‘my old house,’ ‘back to where I used to live. But I’ll still be in touch, lots, I promise. I’ll write, and email, and talk to you on the telephone, and if Mummy and Daddy don’t mind, maybe we could go out together for the day sometimes? The zoo, or the park—or perhaps even a sleepover, when you’re on school holidays?’
I wouldn’t have to worry about what Ken thought about this—he’d probably be long gone by then.
‘You’re leaving?’ His face was desolate. ‘Anna, please don’t go!’
Adam turned away. I held Max to me, committing to memory the feel of his thin body against mine, in the same way I’d done with his father. I could not think of anything to say. After a few moments, I prised him gently away from me.
‘Want to help me get my things?’
‘No,’ he said, and ran away from me, up the stairs to his bedroom.
‘This is horrible,’ I muttered to Adam, but he’d walked away too, into the kitchen. Max’s door slammed, and I felt utterly alone.
Going into Adam’s bedroom was horrible, too. I’d spent so many nights there, was so familiar with its contents: the crooked Japanese print on the opposite wall which no-one ever straightened; the woodworm-pitted antique pine wardrobe. The powder blue walls which we’d painted ourselves. And now Marilyn’s nightdress was thrown casually on my pillow, and her unzipped suitcase oozed tights and tshirts across the floor. I felt angry, that Adam hadn’t sheltered me from those sights—it was one thing to hear that they were back together, but I didn’t want to see the evidence. As if he’d read my mind, he appeared in the doorway.
‘Sorry, Anna,’ he said. ‘It’s not like it looks—I’ve been sleeping on the sofa bed downstairs. I told her that I wouldn’t share a bed with her while I was still involved with you. It wouldn’t have been fair on either of you.’
