Another Mother's Life

by Rowan Coleman

  She didn’t say a single word as she listened to Cathy chatter on the way to the supermarket; she couldn’t say anything. The feeling of jealousy and rage and longing that was churning in her kept her mouth firmly shut. She was afraid, not of what she might say, but of how her voice would sound when she said something. All she knew was that this was wrong, it was all wrong. Cathy wasn’t meant to have someone like him. Marc wasn’t meant to be with a girl like Cathy.

  They must have been seeing each other since the day that Alison had agreed to go round to Aran Archer’s, Alison thought. Cathy must have met Marc in the park that afternoon when she had been waiting for Alison. If Alison had shown up that afternoon, there would have been no way that Marc would have looked at Catherine, no way. She would be the one holding hands with him in the sunshine now, and Catherine would be walking on her own. And Cathy would have been happy with that, because she would have understood that that was the right thing, that that was the way things were.

  It must have been about four when Cathy looked at her watch and scrambled to her feet.

  “I’ve got to go. Mum’ll be back in half an hour. Are you walking back, Ali?” Cathy stood, waiting for her friend. Alison guessed she couldn’t wait to hear what she thought of him.

  “Um … no, I can’t. I said I’d drop by Aran’s on the way back. I’ll see you later though, okay?” Cathy nodded and smiled. She looked so happy, as if she felt special for the first time in her life.

  “See you at ten,” Cathy said. Alison watched as Marc got up and put his heavy arms over Cathy’s fragile shoulders and whispered something in her ear that brought the blood to her cheeks. And then he kissed her, a long, slow, tender kiss.

  Alison did not know who she hated the most just then, her friend for stealing away her lover, Marc for not seeing he had met the wrong girl, or herself for what she knew she was about to do.

  After Cathy had gone, Marc turned back to Alison and looked at her lying in the sun. He waved a hand halfheartedly.

  “See you, then,” he said, as if he was going to leave. But he didn’t leave.

  “Stay and talk to me a bit longer,” Alison said, dropping her shoulder back so that her chest pushed forward. She patted a patch of grass next to her.

  “Thanks, but I should get some sleep before my shift starts,” Marc said, looking at her legs. “You don’t want to be too tired working on a railway line, I saw this lad get cut in half in Manchester.”

  “She was meeting me, you know,” Alison said. “The afternoon you two met here.”

  “Really?” Marc looked over his shoulder at the tunnel under the railway line that led back to his lodgings. “So?”

  “Well, who do you think you’d have asked out if I’d turned up that afternoon? Who do you think you would have fancied if you’d met me first?”

  Marc looked back at her, his hands on his hips, and he laughed. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m interested, that’s all,” Alison told him, tipping her head to one side so her hair brushed her bare arm.

  “Well, I’ve never been with anyone like Catherine before,” Marc said. “So if I’d met you both at the same time I’d have probably made a move on you. But then I would have missed knowing her. She’s a lovely person.”

  “Lovely?” Alison laughed.

  “Well.” Marc put his hands in his pockets and looked awkward as he shrugged. “She is.”

  Alison had never been able to believe the words that had come out of her mouth next. After all, her sexual experience was only slighter greater than Catherine’s for all the flirtatious front she put on.

  “You can make a move on me now if you like,” she offered, her voice sounding shrill and girlish.

  Marc stood still and laughed. “I thought you were her best friend. She talks about you all the time.”

  “I am,” Alison said. “But anyone can see you’re not right for her. You two don’t fit together. You’ll just end up hurting her, she deserves better.”

  “And you don’t.” Marc sounded skeptical. But he still hadn’t walked away.

  “I can handle you,” Alison said. “And anyway, I know that if you’d met me first you’d be with me now. I know it.”

  Marc shook his head. “You’re very confident,” he said, pausing, taking her in, an untranslatable expression crossing his handsome face.

  For what seemed like an age neither one of them said anything or moved a muscle, and then suddenly Marc walked decisively over to her and held out a hand.

  “Come on, then,” he said. “Come back with me.”

  “What? Now?” Alison said, scrambling to her feet.

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Marc asked her. “To be with me?”

  “Yes, yes it is,” Alison said.

  “If that’s what you want, then you have to come now,” Marc challenged her, and she wasn’t sure if he wanted her to take up the challenge or if he was just trying to frighten her away. “It’s now or never, so tell me are you as confident as you think you are?”

  Alison remembered feeling as if her heart would pound its way through her rib cage, everything was happening a million miles faster than she had expected, but if this was how it had to be, then she was ready, because he belonged to her and she had to prove that to him. She lifted her chin.

  “Let’s go, then,” she said, with a thousand times more bravado than she felt.

  Afterward she lay in the tangle of sheets on his single bed and stared at the ceiling.

  “Have you done that with her?” she asked him.

  His eyes were shut, his face perfectly still. “I’ve never done anything like that with her,” he said eventually.

  Alison found it hard to read the tone of his voice, it was so … closed. This moment was not at all like she had expected it to be. She’d expected his arms to be around her, for him to be holding her, kissing her, but he hadn’t touched her since he’d pulled out of her. Quite a feat in a single bed. Alison fought the urge to cry, telling herself that this was just the beginning. She still had a way to go but she’d get him in the end. She’d make him understand.

  Making herself smile, she sat up and leaned over him so that her breasts brushed his chest. He opened his eyes.

  “That was my first time,” she told him, careful to erase any trace of vulnerability from her voice.

  “I know,” he said, watching her face. “I’m sorry if I was a bit … rough.”

  “I liked it,” Alison said steadily. “It was passionate.”

  “You are very sexy,” Marc told her, his voice still unyielding. “You’ve got an amazing body.”

  “Do you feel bad?” Alison asked him. “About Cathy?”

  “I am a bad person,” he said. “I told her that the day I met her. I thought I could be better than I am if I was with her, but I can’t. This is the way I am.”

  “You’re not a bad person, you just don’t fit with her, that’s all,” Alison said, leaning over him. “If you are with the right person, then you don’t even have to change.”

  Marc didn’t move a muscle.

  “I don’t think anyone can change me,” he said eventually, and Alison got the feeling that he’d only spoken half a sentence out loud.

  “When you finish with her be kind, okay?” Alison said, sitting up and putting on her bra. A tiny tender and bruised part of her was still wishing for the hearts and romance and flowers that she’d always dreamt would accompany this event, but she knew she had sacrificed any chance of that when she’d agreed to go back to his place with him. Alison told herself all of that would come when she really had him. “Don’t break her heart. Don’t tell her about us. We’ll stay a secret for now, until she’s over you.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to break up with Catherine?” Marc asked her.

  Alison looked at him, feeling suddenly out of her depth. “Well, you have to now, don’t you?” she asked him. “We’ve had sex.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” Marc said, turning h
is face to the window.

  Alison felt she should have some right over him now, some extra hold now that she had surrendered to him what Catherine had not. But she had no idea how to play this person, he was nothing like the boys she knew at school, the boys that she could manipulate so easily. Then she realized it was he who had a hold over her. He had her in the palm of his hand.

  “Are we going to do this again?” she asked him bluntly, because he seemed to like that about her. Marc turned his face back to her and looked at her, his dark eyes in shadow; one hand reached out and touched her cheek.

  “I wish I’d met you first because, you’re right. I wouldn’t have looked at Catherine, I wouldn’t have noticed her at all. I’d have gone straight for you. You’re very beautiful, you’re …” His fingers traced a line down her neck to her shoulder. “You’re hard not to touch.”

  “So?” Alison pressed him, with a little smile. “Are we?”

  “Yes,” he said simply. “I think we are.”

  Every time they met after that, each secret hour of afternoon they spent with each other they grew closer and closer, easier and easier together. Alison knew that Marc still saw Cathy whenever she could get away, that they still went walking in the park, or lay in the grass talking about his past, because Cathy would tell her at night, her eyes shining. And somehow Alison could still manage to be happy for her friend because she knew the love that Marc felt for Cathy was entirely different from what he felt for her. He wanted the very bones of her, he wanted to consume her body from the inside out. He couldn’t get enough of her body, and every single time they saw each other they went straight to bed.

  One evening just as the sun was low in the sky, bathing the room in gold as they lay in his bed, Alison felt that something was different, something had changed between them. And then she realized: he had his arms around her, her head was resting on his chest; the unfamiliar sound she was hearing was the beating of his heart, slow and steady.

  It was then she got a sense, the very first inkling that eventually, one day he would love her back.

  Now, in the living room of their brand-new house a lifetime later, Alison felt Marc shift his weight on top of her and she wondered where that desire, that unswerving love for him had gone. He kissed her neck just as passionately as he had always done, his fingers as expert as they had always been, knowing how to please her. But although her body responded to him, her heart was still and silent.

  What had happened to her love for Marc, which had defined her life for so long? Alison couldn’t tell if it would ever come back, she only knew that at that moment she felt nothing.

  Not for the first time since she’d found out Marc was bringing her back to Farmington, Alison found herself wondering what had happened to Cathy Parkin.

  What she could not have known was that her husband, still wide awake despite his closed eyes and perfectly composed features, was wondering exactly the same thing.

  Eight

  This is ridiculous,” Catherine said as Kirsty, one palm firmly securing her forehead, plucked her eyebrows.

  “Only you would say that,” Kirsty said through gritted teeth as she jerked another hair out of Catherine’s tender skin. “Only you would think that having eyebrows that frame your eyes instead of hanging over them is not a good plan.”

  “I don’t think anything about eyebrows, eyebrows are not important to me,” Catherine said, beginning to regret agreeing to go out with Kirsty at all.

  Kirsty paused for a minute, the tweezers hovering menacingly in front of Catherine’s face.

  “Tell me you shave your legs,” she pleaded.

  Catherine looked at her sensible shoes and said nothing.

  “Good God, Catherine! What’s wrong with you?” Kirsty exclaimed.

  “What’s right with me, you mean,” Catherine retorted. “I don’t feel the need to denude myself in order to be attractive to men, and besides, what’s the point of shaving my legs? No one ever sees them.”

  Kirsty attacked Catherine’s brow with renewed vigor.

  “The point of shaving your legs is the same as always wearing sexy underwear even when you’re not on a date. It makes you feel both beautiful and womanly, and then your sexiness exudes from with in.” Kirsty yanked hard on a particularly stubborn hair, making Catherine yelp. “No wonder you are so …” Kirsty struggled to find a suitable adjective and failed. “Look, imagine that you suddenly meet the man of your dreams tonight. There you are in the pub, I’m in the arms of my personal trainer …”

  “Does your personal trainer have a name?” Catherine asked, hoping in vain to deflect Kirsty’s line of questioning. Ever since she’d let herself think about Marc again, it had been hard to stop, and for at least three nights this week he had populated her dreams, dreams in which she was seventeen again, before he’d met Alison, before everything went wrong. She was seventeen and living those few brief weeks when for the first time in her life she had been completely happy. Why she had let him back into her head now, Catherine couldn’t comprehend. She was crazy to have listened to Jimmy and his rock psychology, telling her she’d forgotten how to be in love.

  The truth was after Marc had gone, after Alison had left the way she did, it had taken Catherine a long time to feel whole again because she’d felt as if her guts had been ripped out. But Alison’s abandoning her was a turning point too. It was the beginning of her own life, the life where her head ruled her heart and every other part of her. It was the time when she first got to know Jimmy, when the two of them became friends and then finally more, and he gave her the strength she needed to be able to leave home. It was around that time that Jimmy Ashley had told her he loved her and swore that one day she’d love him back. It was a prediction that she had never been able to fulfill to his satisfaction.

  “Of course my trainer has a name,” Kirsty replied indignantly, pulling Catherine back into the conversation.

  “What is it, then?”

  “Sam,” Kirsty said firmly. “Or Steve. It’s an S name and anyway don’t try and get me off the subject, you know it takes me a long time to remember names. I was calling you Clara for the first six months we knew each other, and it doesn’t mean I love him any less. Anyway, there I am in his arms—kissing him passionately—and up comes this man. He’s tall, dark, handsome and he wants you, sexually. He sweeps you off your feet and into his arms. He takes you to his bed …”

  “What, in the pub?” Catherine asked.

  “Don’t be an idiot—unless he’s a barman. Anyway, he takes you home and then to bed, and as he goes to run his manly hands along your long, lithe limbs, he recoils in horror because he’s got carpet burns on his palms.”

  “If he was the man of my dreams he wouldn’t mind,” Catherine said stubbornly, remembering with sudden shocking clarity the pressure of Marc’s palms on her thighs. For once she welcomed the distracting pain of Kirsty’s attack on her eyebrows.

  “If he’s any man at all, barring a German one, then trust me, he’ll mind,” Kirsty said. “There are some people that work on the Murphy’s Law ethos that if you don’t shave your legs and wear your worst pants you are much more likely to hook up. I do not think that way. I think that you have to treat hooking up as if you were in the army in the Special Air Services. Like their motto says, ‘Always be prepared.’ ”

  “Isn’t that the Boy Scouts?” Catherine asked. “Isn’t the SAS ‘Who dare wins’?”

  “Even better,” Kirsty said, making Catherine’s eyes water as she removed three or four hairs at once. “And that should be your motto, love. It’s much better than your current one.”

  “Okay.” Catherine relented to the inevitable with a sigh. “What’s my current one?”

  “She who doesn’t dare sits about on her arse all day turning herself into a decrepit old woman before the age of thirty-three who is afraid to be happy.”

  “That’s it,” Catherine said, folding miserably on the bed, drawing her knees up under chin.

  “That’
s what?” Kirsty asked with some concern, tweezers poised.

  “I’m just going to have sex with the first man I meet tonight, whether I like him or not, and then maybe everybody will stop going on at me. Maybe you’ll stop telling me I need to have sex to be happy, maybe Jimmy will stop telling me I’m some head case who’s trapped in the past just so he can pretend it wasn’t his fault our marriage is over and maybe—” Catherine stopped herself. She had been about to say maybe the images of her and Marc that had been crowding her memory would leave her alone. But she’d never told Kirsty about Marc, Alison, and everything that had happened. And she wasn’t ready to now.

  Contrite, Kirsty sat on the bed next to her and patted her shoulder.

  “Don’t have sex with the first man you meet tonight,” she said gently. “He might be an old man or a fat man, and besides, that’s not why I’m taking you out.”

  “No, I know why you’re taking me out, so I can be the goose-berry when you finally catch Sam.”

  “Or Steve,” Kirsty added. “And that’s not why either. Well, it is, but it’s not the only reason.” Kirsty lay on the bed so that she was facing Catherine, looking into her eyes. “You don’t see yourself, Catherine, you don’t see how stunning you are, with your incredible legs and all that hair and those eyes and those cheekbones. And I just thought if I got you dolled up a bit and we went to the pub, you’d see the way men would look at you. The way they’d turn their heads to look at you when you walk past. And no, you don’t need to have sex to be happy and you’re not some head case who’s trapped in the past, whatever the past is. But you are my friend now. And as well as being a mum and an entirely arbitrary wife, you are also a beautiful woman. So don’t have sex with any of the men you meet tonight, just come out and stand in a room with your eyebrows plucked, some lipstick on, and smooth legs and see what effect you have. Because when you do I bet you’ll feel great, I bet you’ll feel free.”

  “I’d like to feel free,” Catherine said thoughtfully. “And actually the thought of having sex with the first or any man I meet makes me want to be sick, so I don’t mind leaving that part out after all.”