by Tor Udall
Hunching under the new sun, the robbed husband wears his solitude like a coat. How wonderful it would be if Audrey was looking down on them, but she has abandoned them both. How can a woman leave two men so gifted and disabled? Harry desperately wants to explain that none of it was Jonah’s fault; but he just stands there, seeping pity, until the sky relents and joins in, soaking them both.
Outside the window, the Tuesday morning is sleepy with rain. Chloe sits naked on the toilet, the yellow book in her hand. There are only two hours before Jonah needs to leave for school. A crumpled blue dress lies on the bathroom floor like a puddle.
Chloe feels wretched. Having skipped dinner, she keeps thinking she’ll get up and make some toast, but the only thing that will cure her nausea is sleep. She’s promised that after tonight she won’t look at the diary again, but she can’t find a good place to stop. She’s trawled through Audrey’s complaints about work, pages of purple prose on the ecstasies of Kew Gardens. It is clearly written by a woman who enjoys language. Notes about favourite books, Saturday jaunts – a miscarriage.
I woke up and didn’t remember. I stroked my belly, then realised that this is just the space where you once were.
The next page holds a scattering of biscuit crumbs.
Think of all the times I would have kissed your head, or your feet. WHAT HEAVEN IS WORTH GIVING UP THESE THINGS?
Under a doodle of an inky maze, the handwriting becomes scratchy.
Watching some mutant, slug-like insect. Why does it get to live?
14 May
Today I passed a pregnant woman on the street – the radiance of her rounded belly. Then I stopped outside The Shoe Station (masochist). I looked at the tiny sandals, then went home, undressed and stared in the mirror. Why doesn’t anything grow in here?
Chloe peers out of the window. Between the house and the fence, a gravelled path stores the building’s bins. Propping herself up against the wall, she continues reading, her bare toes scrunched against the lino.
19 May
The grainy image of that ten-week scan . . . the many minutes of the professionals staring at the screen. A doctor came in and said, ‘Has anyone told her?’ The sound I made – as if something inside had ripped. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the monitor. My womb had become a reluctant grave.
Friends moan about the sacrifices they make for their kids, then look at me with pity. I offer them another cup of tea – while wondering what would happen if I told them that I want to dig up the foetus. I want to devour all the membranes, the tiny vertebrae, the once-flickering brain, until she becomes part of me again. Is that why some beasts eat their children?
All these things I don’t speak out loud. I’m still a Grade A student, but it doesn’t matter how many languages I speak. It only gave me a sense I could control things . . .
It feels like the ghost of a wife is sitting on the toilet. Two naked women in different times circle the same bathroom.
4 June
I was twenty-seven when J rescued me from my library tower. He smelt of wood fires and salt – kindling all the desires I had stifled. Back then I didn’t know how to be intimate, not even with myself.
London became a windswept shore – and I, the net. He reeled me in; then he showed me how to spread my wings, my legs.
There are pages of collage: a cinema ticket, a postcard from an art gallery and an advert for a herbal supplement that claims to fix hormonal imbalances. Then a passport photo of Jonah, younger, untamed, his body taking up the entire booth. He had to hunch himself into the frame.
13 June
I first saw you perform in a smoky cellar. Hands like a sailor, but boy, could you play. You stood as if you only wanted the mic to hear, and everyone leant in to be part of that secret. I was mesmerised – by the emotion snagging in your throat, the awkward poetry of your body. Then the music shifted, and your voice, generous and unaffected, invited us all to join in. Guitar pounding, the audience bounced, girls shrieking your name.
But you were never at ease with the self-promotion. You were happiest sitting in the sunshine on a brick wall, highlighting Chatwin’s Songlines or a novel by George Orwell. You heard words differently – scribbling music in the margins. Like a scruffy magpie, you collected things that glittered.
As time went on, I worried about your fans – their tight jeans, their impossibly straight hair – but then you gave me a demo cassette, Between Your Smile.
You had turned me into music.
Where is he, anyway? Perhaps Chloe should record him as a missing person, but it’s most likely that he went to the pub and is now pushing a woman up against the wallpaper, kissing her neck. Or maybe that happened hours ago. Chloe’s throat feels claggy. She really should get some water.
17 June
Early on, we talked about children – my ambition to do things differently from Mum. I couldn’t stand being in that car with her bloody perfume. When my dad yelled at me for throwing up over the leather, I promised myself that when I had kids, I wouldn’t care about appearances, or grades, but making things out of egg boxes.
12 July
PGCE done, you’ve had four or five interviews. Once, you only wore suits to funerals. With your extra weight, you’re no longer able to get away with the slouch of younger musicians; you try to remain the rebel – with your seventies lapels, your retro hair – but somehow I have tamed you.
You were the only one who understood my jokes, and where to touch me – but now all you do is chastise me for smoking. But darling, it knuckles everything down – the grief, the boredom – even you, the way you look so disappointed all the time.
Last night, at Kate’s, you told the story about that stray dog you found on Bantham Beach. I’ve heard it so many times – the anecdotes you bring out to amuse or impress – and we’re both so talented at pretending everything’s peachy. We still see friends, or share the crossword – after all, we have no gravestones to visit. I find myself mourning: the potential not just of our kids, but of the mum I know I could be. And what about you? You sacrificed your career to become a father. But without children or music, you are shapeless.
I can’t remember exactly when you stopped playing. You had assignments to write, a wife to cheer up . . .
It’s your muse I blame. She’s no longer beautiful. Sassy. I’ve no idea why you keep framing her up on the walls. She doesn’t live here any more.
4 August
Sex has become perfunctory. A means to an end. Sperm, eggs and timing and us trying so bloody hard to be who we once were – but we’re like ghosts of the people we married. For most of the month our bed is frigid. A yard of mattress between your legs and mine – I could tell you the exact temperature of its coldness. My body is beached, voluminous, unattractive.
7 August
What kind of woman is unable to bear children? Even my mother was able. And still you try so hard to be romantic. The other day you surprised me with scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for breakfast, but when you stroked my hip I couldn’t bear it.
Skipping forward, Chloe reads about Jonah starting at the Paddington comp then finds a place where the paper is crumpled. Some of the words have leaked into inky puddles, as if Audrey’s hair has dripped.
12 September
In the bath, sunlight spills through the window. This could be the perfect journey. I could hold my breath underwater. Wait for my lungs to stop.
I’m sculling towards my children. They are in the corner of my eye, waiting – but then I sit up, spluttering. My lungs have a willpower stronger than my own. They insist on breathing . . .
Lying inside the empty bath, Chloe imagines Audrey cradled by the cold enamel. Is this what suicide feels like? Don’t. Flicking back through the pages, Chloe retraces the entries she has missed.
THE POND, August
Just you, me and the view – the grey sky, the lilies – but between you and I there was an uncoverable distance. You coughed into your sleeve and it irritated me. I don’t kn
ow the exact day it happened, when we lost our shine, but now we’re like a faded version of ourselves, a tape recording weakened by time.
I tried to imagine what we would look like ten years from now, but I could only picture the damage of two people. I knew you were doing everything you could. You folded your arms, squinted at the pond. You tried to hide it, but your eyes were damp.
This is my husband, I kept telling myself. This is the man I love. But you kept fidgeting, making inane comments about the lilies, and I wanted you to be still. When your mind paused, I could almost remember your beauty.
You said it was going to be OK, but that was a lie, just childish faith. You talked about holidays, and I wondered what supports a love that endures – then I thought about the unfamiliar borders where love stops and something else begins.
I started crying because I realised I was sorting out the business of leaving a man. Perhaps you could meet someone else, become a dad.
Chloe pushes the diary away. She doesn’t want Jonah to read this, but then wonders if it is herself she is protecting. She looks around the tiny bathroom and feels dirty.
It is eight in the morning and Jonah is either lying in another woman’s bed or on the tube, travelling to school in yesterday’s clothes. As Chloe gets out of the bath, her vision skips, the white patterns on the floor swirling. It’s impossible to rub away her headache. She distractedly tears off a piece of toilet paper and begins to fold the tissue. Origami has shown her that nothing is set in stone. A bird can be refolded into a boat, a fish, a kimono, or any other extravagant vision. At other times it aches to return to its original folds. The paper begins to fray. It tires, rebels.
Stories, too, can be unfolded into different shapes. It depends on who is doing the telling. The truth is versatile; Chloe can pleat it and pleat it again. She transforms the tissue into a bird then a box – how much does paper bend?
A Day in September
Audrey’s bench has been missing for three weeks and no one in Kew has been able to help. Jonah has tried to focus – organising a meeting with a troubled pupil, rehearsing the Year 10 concert – but he can’t shake off the feeling that he is being punished. His dad disagreed, suggesting that this was a sign for him to move on; but to Jonah the missing bench is a mystery to be solved. There’s nothing more haunting than a question mark.
Two days ago, on the first anniversary of Audrey’s death, Jonah sat cross-legged on the lake’s benchless deck. His aching back became a self-flagellation, but other than that, he felt surprisingly numb. He had scheduled in the devastation. It was easier than those times of ambush. Once, he had seen a woman walking down George Street, wearing a poppy-print skirt – one of Audrey’s donated to Oxfam.
Chloe is sitting in his stained white armchair, sketching in a notebook. She looks like a scrawny stray cat that has wandered into his living room. The late-May evening lights up her pale elbows, her baggy T-shirt. She is wearing Union Jack boxer shorts and snakeskin boots from the second-hand market; she has revelled in tottering around in them all afternoon. She has left a trail: a spill of coffee, a magazine by the toilet, pencils and pastels strewn across the floor. Audrey would have shuddered at the mess, raised an eyebrow at Chloe’s leg slung over the arm of the chair. But her long, naked limb makes Jonah think of the strength in her thigh muscles, her joyous nocturnal yells. He craves it. He chastises himself.
The fish is ready. Over supper, Jonah remembers a night chatting with Audrey. Massaging the evening with whisky, they rewound their day, the candlelight warming their upturned faces. Over the wax-crusted table, the conversation waned. There was the cough of dawn, the crunch of morning. Her cigarette smoke lingered in the air.
‘Joe? Did you hear what I said?’
‘What?’
Chloe’s eyes are hurt. ‘I was talking about the Kew Gardens commission.’
‘Sorry.’
She is too close for him to see, his focus far away on a memory. Perhaps if she steps back a few feet?
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have stopped seeing your therapist.’ She tugs on a tuft of hair. ‘Since the bench has gone missing, you’ve been getting worse.’
‘Worse?’
‘Distant. Not sleeping.’
Jonah shovels peas down his throat then puts down his fork. ‘Did you move it?’
‘What? No!’
‘It can’t have vanished into thin air.’
She looks at him steadily. ‘You’ll find it.’
As she tidies away the clattering dishes, Jonah has an itch to quarrel. He remembers that, with Audrey, sometimes fighting was more intimate than sex; it can be the best way to know a person. They would squabble over undone chores, opposing views about a mutual friend, her over-criticising her parents, but now he would give anything to have one more chance to argue. His fight wanes. Don’t even consider it; Chloe needs a better man than him, a man who is, at least, present.
A bench was supposed to make his marriage indelible. But so much is being rubbed away, erased, and now he has to make a decision; he never expected this relationship to become serious. They both reach across to clear up the same breadcrumbs; but he withdraws and tidies Chloe’s sketchbook. Inside is a drawing of Audrey copied from a photo above the fireplace. The cross-hatched lines feel blasé, intrusive.
‘What the hell’s this?’ he splutters.
Chloe’s lips part as if rehearsing an answer. Instead of shaking it out of her, he strides over to the piano. He insults her by practising scales; a private meditation. He focuses on keeping an even pace. As she hovers nearby, he persists: B flat minor pentatonic. Then she’s behind him, trying to reel him home with a kiss. Her lips land somewhere between his ear and cheek.
His voice has a careful sheen. ‘I’m sorry, Chlo. But if you’re looking for somewhere to put down roots, this isn’t it.’
‘Lucky I’m not a flower . . .’
‘Great.’
A nod to check they understand each other. He smiles a smile that’s trying too hard to please, then turns back to the piano. As he plays arpeggios, he congratulates himself for being honest, then wonders if there’s another truth, so frail that speaking it would be prodigious.
‘I’m having a bath.’
He stares down at the scuffed pedals. ‘I’m sorry, Chlo. I wish I could be who you want.’
She shifts position, hip cocked like a gun. Her snakeskin boots seem pitiful.
‘Who’s that, then?’
Her face is resolute, blunt. Jonah reaches out, hoping to escape the mess of words, but all she returns is a frigid child-like hug.
While the bath is running, Chloe slips down the hall to the study and levers Audrey’s diary from the box-file on the shelf. Stashing it under a dressing gown, she makes her way back to the bathroom, where she sits on the floor, clutching the towelling bundle. Three weeks ago she’d returned the diary and spent the rest of the day temping in an office in Old Street. As she photocopied and stapled, she debated whether to let Jonah discover the book in his own time, if ever. But when she called to check he hadn’t been run over, he informed her that the bench had gone missing. It was as if Audrey was asking to remain hidden.
Chloe thinks of Jonah’s patronising, apologetic smile and considers whether she is gathering ammunition. At any moment, she could walk out, throw this book across the floor.
Your wife was not who you think. Can’t you see who is standing here instead?
A liar.
Perhaps she should storm out, go back to Claude. She’s always been able to fold herself into someone new, to fly away . . . but she remains motionless. She chews on the inside of her mouth, feeling the satisfying mark made by her teeth, the sweet pain she can manage. The room is steaming up, the mirror clouding over. She becomes mesmerised by the ghosts lingering in the mist, the whitewashed walls, the mock-1950s radio the only bright-red excess. This is what Audrey listened to as she touched these towels and taps. She studied her reflection, as Chloe does now, stretching the skin across her ch
eeks, pinching her neck.
Last week, Chloe went to the market and bought Audrey’s favourite book: Bonjour Tristesse. Despite Chloe’s hankering to dislike her rival, she knows Audrey better having read the novel she loved. She can recognise the other woman’s obsessions and doubts. As she read about an existential daughter, a promiscuous father, she wondered what it would have been like if they had met; perhaps they could have been friends. Then the penultimate chapter described a woman killing herself in a car crash.
Chloe sits on the toilet and opens the diary. She tells herself that she needs to understand what she’s giving Jonah, but she feels like a child who says she hasn’t eaten any cake while it sits like a rock in her stomach.
13 September 2003
At the pedestrian crossing, I thought the lights had turned green. I stepped out, sure the car would brake – but everything seemed involuntary.
The wind hauled me back, but it wasn’t the wind. It was a stranger. I’m not sure if he held my wrist or elbow. As the car whizzed past he let go.
‘Today is not your day to die,’ he joked.
I looked away, embarrassed. Pedestrian lights. Flashing. Once I’d crossed the road with the others, he had gone.
I don’t know how to describe him. A stranger stood before me, and yet – it was the most intimate moment I can think of. It wasn’t his appearance that was the beauty. His eyes knew me. Imagine that.
Harry thought it was a funny day – something in the weather. Kew Gardens was filling up with visitors, squinting in the mid-September sunshine. The afternoon glimmered with possibility.
When Audrey walked out on to the busy street, his arm reached out instinctively. He didn’t expect to have an impact; the words came out of his mouth without thinking. He didn’t stick around to see if she had heard him.
