‘I see,’ Joe said. ‘That’s sad.’
‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I suppose it must be.’
‘Hmm,’ Joe said, sipping at his drink. ‘I wonder what she’s going to say tomorrow.’
‘Are you worried?’ I asked. ‘I mean, of course you’re worried. But you’re confident it will all work out, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joe said. ‘I feel like . . . I guess . . . Look, I don’t know. I think all I want is for her to be happy, if that makes any sense.’
‘Gosh!’ I said. ‘That’s a generous thing to say. Especially under the circumstances.’
‘It’s just that she’s not, really,’ Joe explained. ‘And it’s been quite hard work living with that – living with the fact that I’m never enough for her, that nothing’s ever enough, you know?’
‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘I know that feeling.’
‘So I suppose I’d like her to be happy. One way or another. Either with me, or . . .’ His voice broke a bit as he said that, and his eyes glistened in the moonlight. ‘It’s just Ben, isn’t it? He’s the one we need to worry about.’
‘It sounds like you love them both a lot,’ I said. ‘Ben and Amy.’
‘Oh, I do,’ Joe said without hesitation. ‘I love them both to bits. As far as Amy’s concerned, I couldn’t tell you why, but I do.’
‘Well, that’s got to help,’ I reassured him. ‘That’s a good thing.’
‘D’you think?’ he said. ‘We’ll see.’
I sipped my wine and then turned to watch a bat that had caught my eye as it swooped at the insects gathered around the street lamp.
‘And you?’ Joe asked. ‘Do you still love yours? And, um, don’t feel you have to answer that one. I’m probably being insensitive.’
‘It’s fine,’ I reassured him. ‘I’m drunk. You can ask me anything.’
‘So?’ Joe asked. ‘Do you?’
I shrugged sadly, exaggeratedly. ‘The question isn’t so much do I still love him,’ I said. ‘It’s . . .’
‘Whether you ever loved him at all,’ Joe said, hesitantly finishing the phrase that I was unable to.
‘That’s the one,’ I said, my voice wobbling as a tear welled up in the corner of my eye.
‘I think I’m gonna leave you to your thoughts,’ Joe said, looking embarrassed. He stood and leaned across the table to squeeze my shoulder gently.
‘It’s fine,’ I told him. ‘You’ve got your own stuff to deal with, haven’t you?’
Once he’d gone, I downed the rest of the bottle of wine. It was only then that I let myself cry – at first a self-conscious whimper that seemed almost forced, but which soon morphed into an unstoppable flood of self-pitying tears.
Because I’d wasted my life, hadn’t I? I could see that now. I’d spent my childhood and adolescence worrying about my father and as a result I’d found myself unable to have any kind of healthy relationship with a man. I’d accepted the first person to pursue me with any determination, and now here I was, as drunk as my father, miserable and alone.
The butterfly of excitement had vanished, the glimmer of alternative futures had faded, and now all I seemed to be left with was a series of bleak grey roads to choose from or, worse, to submit to, based on someone else’s choices: a continuing life with Ant, who, in the light of his infidelity and with the help of lashings of rosé, I was momentarily able to admit I hated. Or a life alone as a single mother with no money, nowhere to live, no friends and no family . . .
I thought of Kerry then, and felt guilty. I was overdramatising, because the ‘no family’ bit simply wasn’t true. Kerry. Suddenly, I desperately wanted to speak to my sister.
I wobblingly circled the swimming pool and did my best to enter the house silently for my phone. But I was drunk and it was dark, and someone had left a chair bang in the middle of the kitchen. I tumbled over it painfully and all but wrestled it to the floor.
Once upright again, I found my phone charging beside the sink and then weaved my way back across the courtyard and on down the track to the trees, where I sank to the ground, my back against a trunk. As I dialled Kerry’s number, I tried to work out what time it was in Rome. There was a one-hour difference when I phoned her from England, and we had a one-hour difference with England from here too, but I couldn’t for the life of me decide if that meant it was the same time in both places, or if it meant she was two hours in front, instead.
Whatever the time in Rome, she didn’t pick up. I decided not to leave a message as to do so would achieve nothing other than worrying her.
I sat and stared out at the moonlit plain and the mountains and noticed again how beautiful it all was. A bird squawked somewhere in the distance, and there was an almost imperceptible thud of music coming from behind me.
I knew exactly what Kerry would say anyway, I realised. I could hear her voice so clearly it was as if she was right here beside me. How nice that would be, I thought, to have her here, looking at this view, her shoulder touching mine.
‘Leave him,’ she’d say. ‘The guy’s an arsehole.’
‘But what will I do?’ I’d ask. ‘How will I live?’
‘You can work,’ she’d say. ‘The girls go back to school in September, so you can work. You can go back to nursing again. You were happier back then anyway, weren’t you?’
And it was true; my virtual sister was absolutely right. I had been happier back then.
I thought about my nights out with the girls in Canterbury and I remembered going to the pictures with Sheena. I thought of the friends I’d lost over the years, and I wondered why I’d let that happen, how it was possible I’d got to the stage where I didn’t have a single person I could call.
The rhythm of the music changed and got a little louder and I realised it was coming from the house just behind me. It sounded like a very young person’s kind of music – the rapid thwak thwak thwak of techno. I sniffed and wiped my eyes on my sleeve and then stood and, steadying myself by hanging on to the tree, I turned to look back at the house.
Like our own, it only had small windows, but beyond them I could see the tall guy’s back silhouetted against the orange light of the interior as he bopped energetically from side to side.
I moved closer so that I could get a better view of their mini-party. The tall guy danced out of sight and the short one appeared instead, grooving in a more restrained manner, a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
The tall guy shouted something and the man in the window laughed and then grinned as he span around on one foot, and that simple sight, of two friends dancing and laughing, struck me as so beautiful, and so simple, and so . . . what’s the word? quintessential, perhaps . . . that I started to cry all over again. When was the last time I had danced? When was the last time I’d partied and been happy with friends? When was the last time I’d been truly happy at all?
In that moment this simple scene summed up, to my miserable drunken self, everything that was missing from my life.
In the morning, Sarah woke me up. It was too early and I had a hangover – in fact, I think I was probably still drunk. The ground seemed unsteady beneath my feet as I wobbled my way to the bathroom.
On returning, I snuggled with Sarah in my bed. I was hoping that she’d go back to sleep, but she was fidgety and chatty, and I knew from experience that it wasn’t going to happen.
When I got back up for the second time, I found Joe in front of the stove, making coffee.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘Is it?’ he replied.
I pulled a face behind his back and took Sarah outside. Lucy and Ben were seated at the table eating bowls of cereal, so I served one for Sarah and returned indoors to speak to Joe.
‘Thanks for fixing them up with breakfast,’ I said. He grunted by way of reply, so I moved to his side and rested one hand on his back. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ he said, without looking up.
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘I got a text,’ he explained. ‘She’s not coming home today either. She now says she’ll be in touch tomorrow.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Gosh.’
‘I tried to phone her, but of course her phone’s switched off.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘That must be upsetting.’
‘Yeah, I’m a tiny bit pissed off,’ Joe said. ‘Did you get any news from Anthony?’
‘I haven’t looked. But I assume he’s back home by now.’
‘I’d be grateful if you could check,’ Joe said.
I frowned at this for a moment, until I understood what he was implying. ‘Oh,’ I said. Then, ‘Oh, I see. Yes, maybe I’ll go and see if I have any messages.’
‘Thanks,’ Joe said. ‘That would be good. Because my mind’s going crazy here.’
I gulped down a few glasses of tap water. We were out of the bottled stuff, but it didn’t seem to have done me any harm to drink it previously, so I assumed I’d probably survive.
Back beneath the group of trees, I sat on the ground and switched my phone on. I waited for a minute, but no messages appeared.
I thought about calling Ant, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I started to send a text message asking if he’d got home all right, but, again, couldn’t bring myself to give the impression I cared.
I tried to think of some neutral question I could ask about home. In the old days I might have reminded him to feed Dandy. I thought about asking what the weather was like, but that struck me as overly casual, considering the circumstances.
Finally, I had an idea. ‘If you’re home, can you look on Google for a taxi company in Orce?’ I texted. ‘Amy’s not come back and we’re stranded.’
I lowered my head to my hands as I waited for his reply. I was starting to feel quite awful.
A few minutes later my phone buzzed, but the message contained nothing more than a name and a number: Ramon Batista Alcazar: +34 67657 2042.
This was useful, but it wasn’t going to help Joe.
‘Is everything OK with the house?’ I asked, hoping that this implied I cared about the house more than I did about my philandering absent partner.
‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ he replied. Then, ‘Talk soon.’
‘Everything’s fine!’ I muttered, as I stood. The cheek of it!
‘He’s home,’ I told Joe when I got back.
‘Well, that’s something at least,’ he said. He was sitting in the shallow end of the pool, where the jet squirted out. If you sat in that exact spot it massaged your back rather nicely.
‘I got a taxi number from him too,’ I said. ‘I thought that might come in useful.’
‘Here?’ Joe said, climbing from the pool. ‘Can I have it?’
‘In Orce,’ I said. ‘And yes, of course.’
He noted the number in his own phone, and then I returned to my bed to lie down.
At one, Lucy woke me to ask if I wanted lunch. She was excited because we were eating in the jacuzzi. I thought she’d probably got that wrong somehow, but when I got outside, I saw that Joe had set up a little plastic table in the middle and even positioned a parasol to provide shade. It was there, the water up to our waists, that we ate our hummus sandwiches.
Over lunch, he explained the plan: he was going to get the taxi to nearby Huéscar, where the taxi driver had said he could hire a car. On the way home he’d pick up supplies.
‘We can probably get by until tomorrow, if you prefer to wait,’ I told him.
‘Actually, we can’t,’ he said. ‘Why do you think we’re eating chickpea sandwiches?’
Eight
Amy
I don’t imagine for one instant that anyone wants to hear my point of view. I know how society judges women. It judges us all the time for everything, after all.
We’re judged because our dresses are too long or too short, because our heels are too low or too high. We’re labelled frigid, or weak, or sluts, whether we’re following the ‘rules’ or not and whether the rules in question say we should be wearing a mini-skirt or a crinoline, or a burkini.
But the ones who cheat on their husbands? Well, everyone knows we’re the worst of all.
Joe could sleep with another man’s wife and his friends would say, ‘Did you? You dirty so-and-so! Good on ya, mate.’ But me? Well, you can answer that one for yourself. Because I’m pretty certain I know what you’ve decided.
But would it really be too much to ask that you take a second to know me first? The universe is big and messy – it’s both beautiful and ugly. And part of its beauty is the very fact of our capacity to see that ugliness, and care.
So this is me. This is Amy. The temptress, the whore, the bitch. And these are the keystone events that made me.
I was born in Toronto, the daughter of a woman and a man who disliked each other pretty intensely. Why were they together in the first place? I guess we’ll never know.
When I was twelve, my sister killed herself. She sat down in a bath full of warm, scented water and slit her wrists – she didn’t make a sound. Downstairs, watching Friends, we were completely unaware. Friends! It sounds like the punchline to a joke. Only it isn’t.
She didn’t leave a suicide note, so officially no one knew why. Except we all knew. We all knew, without actually knowing, that it was my father’s fault. And if there had been any proof, then we could have told the cops and prayed for him to go to prison for a very long time. Only we didn’t have proof. My sister’s death was the only hard fact, and without a suicide note it proved nothing at all. It didn’t even really point a finger.
After the funeral, Mum told me she was going to leave him. We would move back to England together, she told me, whispering the words excitedly into my ear. I was so relieved that I wept. I didn’t even want to be in a room with my father by then. I was terrified that, with my sister gone, I’d be next.
But instead of saving me, instead of protecting me, Mum slipped off the edge of reason. She’d been at the end of her tether for years, but when Jemma died Mum lost her grip entirely. And once she let go, she just fell and fell and fell.
Until she was well enough to return to England, I was left alone with him. And that process took almost two years.
To defend myself, I hid a kitchen knife under my pillow, and the only time he ever came into my room, about three months after Jem’s death, I showed it to him. He never came near me again.
One evening, I got home from school to find him drunk and crying. The bastard was actually crying . . . I stood in the doorway staring at him coldly, and when he looked up and saw me, all he said was, ‘I miss her.’
‘I’ll bet you do,’ I said icily.
‘It should have been you,’ he said, through tears. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘Fair . . .’ I repeated. ‘No, you’re right, it isn’t.’
‘She was the clever one,’ he told me. ‘She was the pretty one, and she loved me. You don’t love me. You don’t even like me.’
‘She didn’t love you either,’ I told him bitterly. ‘She was your victim, Dad, that’s all.’
‘You think you know it all,’ Dad said. ‘But you don’t understand anything.’
And in a way he was right about that. Because I did know it all. And I didn’t understand any of it.
Does any of that excuse any of this? Clearly it doesn’t, and that’s not my purpose in telling you. But it maybe throws a little light of relativity, let’s say, on the subject. Because some crimes are manifestly worse than others.
Anyway, I’m still that woman. I’m the woman who stole another’s husband. And I don’t suppose the fact that there are worse crimes, or the fact that I was unhappy, or even the fact that she was unhappy – I don’t claim any of that changes anything.
But the idea had been to take Ant to the airport, spend an evening getting my head together, and then drive back to patch things up with my husband. I swear to you that was the plan.
What had happened had been a stupid drunken mistake,
I told myself. It was something that should never have happened, and something that could never happen again.
The problem was that it hadn’t been quite the spur-of-the-moment incident it appeared – more the culmination of months of longing.
I’d first met Anthony in February, at Red Nose Day at Ben’s school. I remember the moment vividly, spotting him across the room, catching his eye; I remember the way he smiled at me.
He looked a bit like that Spanish footballer, Xabi Alonso, and I’d had a crush on Alonso for years. Both he and Ant were the kind of men I’d fantasised over ever since I was a teenager: smart, athletic, well-dressed men with a hint of meanness lurking behind the eyes.
I’d known it was dangerous in that very first instant, which was why I’d turned away and forced myself to tune into the conversation around me instead. It had been a sterile debate about whether we might be better raising money for the school rather than Comic Relief and it seemed pretty obvious to me that it was entirely possible to do both. I couldn’t help but notice that those who systematically argued that money collected to help people ‘over there’ should be spent on people ‘over here’ instead were invariably the same people who gave absolutely nothing to either. It was always just an excuse to not help anyone at all.
The next time I spotted him, he was standing right next to Joe, and without even realising I was doing so, I compared them: Anthony’s tall, muscular frame, his slick suit and crisp white shirt, against Joe’s friendly stockiness, the rounded amiability of his face; his desert boots and faded jeans. I sighed, I think, at the realisation that I wished my husband looked more like Ant.
Now, I’m sure that everyone has these kinds of thoughts; at least, anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship does. The main thing is simply not to act on them.
So I avoided being in the same space as Ant for the rest of the event, and did my best not to think of him again.
But that night, bang in the middle of having sex with my husband, the image of a man, half Ant, half Alonso, popped into my mind’s eye. I tried, for a few thrusts, to push it away, but then I caved in. A friend of mine always said that ‘it doesn’t matter where you get your appetite, as long as you eat at home’, and that had to be true, didn’t it? Joe certainly looked pretty thrilled when I came.
From Something Old Page 20
