‘So what do I rate – a five, an eight?’ I asked him, standing nude in the doorway.
‘That’s private,’ he said, shutting the book and recapping his pen. ‘Just like everything in this book.’
The tone was pleasant – but coolly firm. I took the hint and never asked him about his notebook again … even though, over the coming months, I’d often see him writing away in it. Someone once said anyone who kept a journal was a bit like a dog going back to sniff his own vomit. But to me, anyone who chronicled their day-today life – and, simultaneously, their deeply personal reactions to those closest to them – ultimately wanted it to be read. Which is why – I surmised – Tony had casually left his Moleskin notebook on top of his desk. Because though he knew I respected his privacy, to the point of never coming into his study, I couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t also playing a subtle passive-aggressive game with me, silently saying: There it is … go on, open it if you dare.
Then again, he might have just left it there by accident … which meant that all my psychobabbly thoughts about his alleged tactical behaviour were further examples of my heightened fragility.
I was feeling pretty damn fragile right now. So fragile that – as tempted as I was to open the notebook and learn whatever horrible truth was contained inside (‘We are a terrible match’, ‘Why is she so bloody literal about everything?’, ‘I have constructed a prison of my own making’. I really was having inventive flights of paranoid fancy) – I knew that I would be venturing into territories best sidestepped. Anyway, who in their right mind really wants to know the private thoughts of their spouse?
So I pulled my hand away from the notebook, and also resisted the temptation to read a few manuscript pages and see whether Tony was playing Graham Greene or Jeffrey Archer. Instead, I simply unfolded the sofa bed, opened the wicker box where Tony kept the duvet and pillows, made the bed, pulled down the shade on the dormer window, turned the phone on to Voice Mail, took off my jeans, and got under the covers. Even though there was an excessive amount of hammering and sanding on the lower floors, I was asleep within minutes – a fast, blacked-out tumble into oblivion.
Then I heard a familiar voice.
‘What are you doing here?’
It took a moment or two to work out where I was. Or to adjust to the fact that it was now night, and the room had just been illuminated by the big floor lamp that stood to the right of the desk, and that my husband was standing in the doorway, looking at me with concern.
‘Tony?’ I asked, my voice thick with sleep.
‘The hospital has been trying to reach you …’
Now I was completely awake.
‘They what?’
‘Jack had a minor setback this afternoon. The jaundice returned.’
Now I was on my feet, grabbing for my clothes.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, pulling on my jeans. Tony put a steadying hand on my arm.
‘I’ve been there already. It’s okay now. They were worried at first that it might be a serious relapse. But the blood tests showed only a very minor overload of bilirubin, so there’s nothing to worry about. However, they did move him back to Paediatric ICU …’
I shrugged off Tony’s hand.
‘Tell me in the car.’
‘We’re not going …’
‘Don’t tell me we’re not going. He’s my …’
‘We’re not going,’ Tony said, holding my arm with more vehemence.
‘If you’re not going, I’m …’
‘Will you listen?’ he said, his voice suddenly raised. ‘It’s nearly midnight.’
‘What?’ I said, sounding genuinely shocked.
‘It’s seven minutes to twelve.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘You’ve been asleep all day.’
‘That can’t have happened.’
‘Well, the hospital has been trying to ring you at home since three this afternoon.’
Oh, no …
‘And I must have left you ten messages on your mobile …’
‘Why didn’t you try the builders?’
‘Because I didn’t have their bloody mobile number, that’s why.’
‘I was taking a nap after seeing Jack this morning.’
‘A twelve-hour nap?’
‘I’m sorry …’
I gently shook off his grip and finished getting dressed.
‘I’m still going over there,’ I said.
He blocked my path towards the door. ‘That’s not a good idea right now. Especially after …’
‘After what?’ I demanded. But I already sensed the answer to that question.
‘Especially after the difficulties you had this morning.’
That bitch, Nurse McGuire. She shopped me.
‘It was just a feeding problem, that’s all.’
‘So I gather – but one of the nurses on duty said you nearly yanked Jack off your breast.’
‘It was a momentary thing. He hurt me.’
‘Well I’m sure he didn’t mean to.’
‘I’m not saying that. Anyway, it wasn’t as if I threw him across the room. I just had a bit of a shock.’
‘Must have been quite a shock if the nurse reported it to her superior.’
I sat down on the bed. I put my head in my hands. I really did feel like grabbing my passport, running to the airport and catching the first plane Stateside.
You can’t do this … you’re a maternal disaster area …
Then another calm and lucid voice entered my head, repeating, over and over again, a soothing mantra: You don’t care … You don’t care … You really don’t care.
Why should a catastrophe of a mother like me care about her child? Anyway, even if I did care, they (the doctors, the nurses, my husband) all knew the truth about me. They had the evidence. And they saw just how …
How what?
How … I wasn’t understanding any of this.
How … one moment, I was wracked with grief and guilt for what had befallen Jack … the next, I couldn’t give a damn.
Because I’m unfit. That’s right, U-N-F-I-T. Like that old country-and-western song about D-I-V-O-R …
‘Sally?’
I looked up and saw Tony staring at me in that quizzical, peeved way of his.
‘You really should go to bed,’ he said.
‘I’ve just slept twelve hours.’
‘Well, that was your decision.’
‘No – that was my body’s decision. Because my body’s noticed something which you definitely haven’t noticed … the fact that I am completely run down after a little physical exertion called “having a baby”. Which, I know, in your book, is just about up there with stubbing your toe …’
Tony gave me a thin smile and started stripping the sofa bed.
‘Think I’ll go to work now,’ he said. ‘No need to wait up for me.’
‘I’m not going back to sleep.’
‘That’s your call. Now if you’ll excuse me …’
‘You don’t care what’s going on, do you?’
‘Excuse me, but who ran to the hospital this evening when our son’s mother turned off all the phones and put herself out-of-touch with the world?’
His comment caught me like a slap across the face – especially as he said it in an ultra-detached voice.
‘That is so unfair,’ I said, my voice a near-whisper. Tony just smiled.
‘Of course you’d think that,’ he said. ‘Because the truth is usually most unfair.’
Then he sat down in his desk chair, swivelled it away from me, and said, ‘Now if you’ll excuse me …’
‘Fuck you.’
But he ignored that comment, and instead said, ‘If you do feel like making me a cup of tea, that would be most welcome.’
I responded to this comment by storming out of his office, slamming the door behind me.
Marching downstairs, my initial reaction was to fly out the door, jump into a taxi, tell the driver to floor it to the Mattingly,
march straight into Paediatric ICU, demand to see Jack immediately, and also demand that they find that Irish stool pigeon, so I could confront that Ms Holier-Than-Thou with the lies she’d peddled about me. And then …
I would be bound and gagged and dispatched to the nearest rubber room.
I started to pace the floor. And when I say pace, I mean pace. As in a manic back-forth motion: here-there, here-there, here-there. Only when the thought struck me – look at you, treading up and down the room like a laboratory animal on amphetamines – did I force myself to sit down. At which point I had a bad attack of the chills. An arctic wind had blown down Sefton Street and had somehow penetrated the very fabric of my house, leaving me convinced that the floorboards were rotting, rising damp was prevalent, and this entire shit heap investment, this mean little example of domestic Victoriana, was going to be blown off its dirt foundations, leaving us destitute and in the street.
But then, the climate changed. The mercury soared eighty degrees. I’d left mid-January in the Canadian Rockies and was now somewhere in the tropics. Aruba, baby. Forget the frostbite. We’re having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave. Like one-hundred-and-ten in the shade, with ninety-six per cent humidity. Suddenly, I was sweating. So drenched in perspiration that I had to strip off all my clothes.
Which is exactly what I did – not noticing that our front curtains were open and someone was getting out of a black cab parked right outside, and the driver was gawking at me, wide-eyed, and I felt like turning full-frontal towards him, and showing off my Caesarean scar. Instead, some intrinsic modesty took over and I made a dash upstairs for the bathroom, and turned on the cold tap full-blast, and jumped under the downpour (thank God, I’d insisted on an American power-shower), and then …
What are you doing?
I turned off the water. I leaned my head against the tiled wall. I felt another stab of panic – because I was so completely adrift and out-of-control. What was scaring me most was the realization that there seemed to be no logical progression to these strange, manic interludes. I had become an emotional pinball, bouncing wildly off every object in my path. In the midst of these mood swings, there would be moments of extreme, painful clarity – like the one I was negotiating right now, where I felt like beating my skull against the wall and repeating over and over again, What are you doing?
To which I could only answer: I really don’t know. Because I don’t even know how things operate within me anymore.
Oh, listen to yourself. Little Miss Self-Pity. A mild postnatal dip in your equilibrium – something any sensible, balanced person could handle – and you cleave in two. Tony’s right to treat you as some sort of silly recalcitrant. Because you’re making an idiot of yourself Worse yet, you keep going down this manic road, and questions will start being raised about your sanity. So get a grip, eh? And while you’re at it, go make your husband a cup of tea.
I followed the advice of this hyper-censorious internal counsellor – and stepped out of the shower, determined to put everything right. As I dressed and dried my hair, I told myself that, from this moment on, calm lucidity would prevail. I would go to the hospital tomorrow morning and apologize for not showing up today. I would seek out Nurse McGuire, and let her know that I perfectly understood her concerns about my mental well-being yesterday, but would then demonstrate that I was in control by breast-feeding Jack with uncomplaining aplomb. And on the domestic front, I’d soothe all of Tony’s concerns by going Stepford-ish for a while, and playacting the perfect wife.
So, not only did I make my husband a cup of tea, but I also arranged a large plateful of his favourite biscuits and found a bottle of Laphroaig (his malt whisky of preference). Then I negotiated the stairs, nearly losing my balance (courtesy of far too many items on the tray) on at least two occasions. When I reached his office door, it was closed. I used my foot to knock.
‘Tony’ I said.
He didn’t answer – even though I could hear low-volume music coming from within.
‘Tony, please – I’ve got your cup of tea …’
The door opened. He looked at the laden tray.
‘What’s this?’
‘Sustenance for your literary endeavours. And an apology.’
‘Right,’ he said with a nod. Then, relieving me of the tray, he said, ‘Think I’d better get back to the desk.’
‘Going well?’
‘I suppose so. Don’t wait up.’ And he closed the door.
Don’t wait up.
Typical. So bloody typical. Pissing on my parade, per usual. And while I’m trying to be so good.
Stop it. Stop it. He’s working, after all. And you did have that little ‘set-to’ (to be bloody English about it) just before, which you can’t expect him to get over in ten minutes … even if he did make that shitty comment about …
Enough. Tony’s right. You really should just go to bed. The only problem is: having just been asleep for the past twelve hours …
All right, all right. Stay busy. Do something to make the hours pass.
That’s how I ended up unpacking just about every box and crate still strewn around the house. The entire process took around six hours and I had to work around what remained of the builders’ mess. By the time I was finished, dawn light was just making a tentative appearance – and I had the weary, but satisfied buzz that comes from finishing a major domestic chore that had been naggingly unfinished for months. Walking around the house – now nearing a state of actual liveability – I felt a curious sanguinity. There was finally a sense of space and proportion and (most of all) order.
Order was something I truly craved right now.
I ran a bath. I sat soaking in the tub for nearly an hour. I told myself: You see … a little displacement activity, and the gods of balance and equilibrium land comfortably on your shoulders. Everything’s going to be fine now.
So fine that, after I got dressed, I felt fully energized – even though I hadn’t been to bed all night. I peeped in on Tony in his office. He was crashed out on his sofa … but I did notice a stack of new pages on the ever-growing manuscript pile. So I tiptoed over to his desk, made certain his radio alarm was set for nine am, then scribbled a fast note:
Off to the hospital to see our boy. Hope you like the clean-up job on the house. Dinner tonight on me at the restaurant of your choice? I await your reply.
Love you …
I signed my name, hoping that he’d respond favourably to the idea of the sort of pleasant nights out we used to have in Cairo. With Jack due home within days, this would be our last chance to roll out of the house unencumbered.
I went downstairs. I checked my watch. Just after seven am. I opened the front door and noticed that someone on the far side of the road was in the middle of building work, with an empty skip out front for assorted debris. I glanced back at the stack of empty cardboard boxes and now-broken-down packing crates, and thought: this would save a trip to the dump. I also remembered how everyone on the street emptied their attics into our skip during the first stage of our renovations. So I decided that there would be few objections if a few items from my house ended up intermingling with my neighbour’s debris.
However, as I was in the process of dumping the second lot of boxes into this large bin, a house door opened and a man in his mid-forties came out. He was dressed in a dark grey suit.
‘You know, that is our skip,’ he said, his voice full of tempered indignation. Immediately I became apologetic.
‘Sorry, I just thought that, as it was kind of empty …’
‘You really should ask permission before tossing things into other people’s skips.’
‘But I just thought …’
‘Now I’d appreciate it if you’d remove all your rubbish—’
However, he was interrupted by a voice which said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, will you listen to yourself.’
The gent looked a little startled. Then he became immediately sheepish, as he found himself staring at a woman in her late fortie
s – blonde, big boned, with a heavily lined face (blondes always start to fracture after the rubicon of forty is crossed), but still striking. Equally eye-catching was the very large Labrador she had by her side. She had been walking by us when she heard our exchange. I recognized her immediately: she was the woman who had spoken to me approvingly in the newsagents after I forced Mr Noor to be polite to me. And I could tell from the reaction of the Suit that he was distinctly uneasy in her presence. He avoided her accusatory gaze and said, ‘I was simply making a point.’
‘And what point was that?’
‘I really do think this is between myself and—’
‘When I was having my new kitchen put in last year, and there was a skip out front, who filled it up one night with half the contents of his loft?’
The Suit now looked appalled – because he had been publicly embarrassed. From my few short months in England I knew that embarrassment was considered the most fearsome of personal calamities – and to be avoided at all costs. But whereas in America, the guy would have countered by saying something politic like, ‘Mind your own effing business,’ here he suddenly went all pale and diminished, and could only mutter, ‘Like I said: I was just trying to make a point.’
To which my Good Samaritan with the Labrador gave him a cold, knowing smile, and said, ‘Of course you were.’ Then she turned back to me and asked, ‘Need a hand with the rest of the boxes?’
‘I’ll be fine. But I …’
‘Nice to see you again, Sally’ she said, proffering her hand. ‘It is Sally, right?’
I nodded. ‘Julia?’
‘Well done.’
The gent cleared his throat, as if to announce his departure. Then he turned tail and hurried back into his house.
‘Twit,’ Julia said under her breath after he was gone. ‘No wonder his wife walked out last month.’
‘I didn’t know …’
She shrugged. ‘Just another domestic drama – like we’ve all had. And, by the way, I heard you’re a new mother. Wonderful news. I would have dropped over with a little something, but I’ve been away most of the last two months in Italy with my son Charlie.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Fourteen. And what did you have – a boy or a child?’
A Special Relationship Page 17
