by Abigail Dean
He looked bemused. He looked, I decided, disappointed.
‘So,’ I said, ‘when will the baby come?’
‘In two more months.’
‘Jesus. You should be at home, preparing. All you’ll get here is wine and debate.’
In the middle of the table, he reached for my hands and entwined them with his own. I looked at his wrinkled palms and the mounds of veins and the hair between his knuckles, and I thought of the many, varied times when I had taken one of these hands in mine. On aeroplanes and after dinners, in my college room the day after we met, walking into a restaurant or into a party, and in the taxis which we sometimes shared on our way home. I held his hand when it was too hot to embrace at night, and to guide him to the right place – just there – between my legs. When we were outside in wintertime, he enveloped my fist in his palm to keep it warm. His child would have improbably minute hands, barely big enough to clutch a finger.
‘Why are you so sad, JP?’ I said. ‘Why are you so sad, when you got everything you ever wanted?’
We finished our drinks, and he walked me across the two streets to the Romilly Townhouse. There was nothing left to say, and we both produced our work phones, and began to scroll through the messages we had missed. Devlin had been in touch: our client was comfortable with the commercial terms for the purchase of ChromoClick, and it would be bought within the fortnight. Full steam ahead! said Devlin. We had been drinking for some time, and I didn’t trust that I could respond with the alacrity her message required.
At the entrance to the hotel, JP opened his arms. ‘It was great to see you,’ he said, and at the same time I said, ‘Congratulations again.’
Like this, with his arms around me and my lips against his jaw and the wine nudging me towards my worst ideas, I said, ‘You should know that I still think about us when I masturbate.’
He took my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, and I smiled stupidly. He was three-headed, and each head was shaking. Cerberus in disapproval.
‘I’ll always be heartbroken about what happened to you,’ JP said. ‘But don’t do this, Lex. Don’t do it.’
The second time I met JP’s mother, it was Christmastime, and the week before he left me.
Christmas had invaded JP’s childhood home. His mother had a real Christmas tree, which looked like it belonged in a bigger house; you got a faceful of pine on the way to the kitchen. It was laden with stringy tinsel and glittering baubles. There was a singing, sensor-operated Father Christmas in the kitchen, which startled me each time I walked past. She had purchased a stuffed elf, the kind that parents relocate while their children are asleep. ‘It’s an Elf on the Shelf,’ she said. ‘But he’s been all over. In the oven. In the washing machine. On the TV.’
I thought of her at bedtime, carrying the elf through the rooms of the house.
‘Who knows,’ she said, ‘where he’ll be tonight.’
‘Who knows,’ JP said. He had bought the Financial Times at a service station on the way, and he was working through it, word by word.
‘You never could get him to believe in Christmas,’ JP’s mother said to me. ‘And I did try. He was five years old – four or five – when he started questioning the logic, you see. “But he can’t reach all of the houses in the world.” I tried some stories, but they didn’t convince him. And a year later I was receiving a list of demands for his stocking.’
‘You should have been more convincing, then,’ JP said.
‘Tell me about your Christmases, Lex,’ JP’s mother said.
That night, in a small, floral guest bed, JP pinned his knees to my shoulders and choked me. For five seconds – ten seconds – more. His mother still pottering in the kitchen below us, preparing tomorrow’s food. Relocating her fucking elf. Through the darkness, there was something different in JP’s face, something passive and devoid of pleasure, and I signalled for him to stop.
‘But you like it.’
‘Yes. But not like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like you’re angry.’
That was Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, before JP was awake, I went for a long, cold run through the town, waiting for the moment when the exhaustion of it erased everything else. Most of the houses were dark, but there were lights on in a few bedrooms. Fairy lights tracing the windows and doors.
We opened our presents with mugs of tea, JP’s mother in her dressing gown. She gave me a Christmas jumper and a book on meditation. ‘It’s changed my life,’ she said.
‘Like colouring books for adults?’ JP said. ‘Like Zumba?’
They argued over dinner, too. We pulled crackers and wore the thin, obligatory hats. I ate quietly, watching my food and monitoring the contents of the side plates. Condensation thickened across the windows, sealing us in. JP was talking of our family – the family we would have together.
‘You see it in the people who’ve lived in London their whole lives,’ he said. ‘People whom Lex and I know. It’s this – this confidence, I suppose. You grow up surrounded by culture, by sport, by commerce. None of it comes as a surprise. It’s the only place we’d want to have children, I think.’
‘Right in the centre? Where you live now?’
‘Right in the centre.’
‘I don’t know why you’d do that. It’s inconceivable. Just the two of you, without any family around. With the fumes, and all of those people.’
‘As opposed to here? In a shithole?’
‘JP,’ I said.
‘I would advise against having children,’ JP’s mother said. ‘If this is the kind of thanks that you get.’
‘Actually,’ I said. ‘That’s already decided.’
JP stopped drinking. We looked at one another. He stood up so quickly that his chair teetered, and fell to the floor. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, still watching me. His mother giggled.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said. ‘He always knew how to throw a strop.’
‘Thank you again,’ I said. ‘It was a great dinner.’
She smiled. ‘It’s a thing worth learning,’ she said. She was playing with the keyring from her cracker, dangling it from a finger. I was sure that she would keep it.
‘I should check on him,’ I said.
I opened the sliding doors to join him in the garden. A little island of concrete, encircled by wet grass. We stood together on the paving stones, neither of us dressed for the weather. I removed my cracker hat. The sky was a murky white, like day-old snow. In an hour it would be dark. I had the sense of Sunday evening, or the journey back from the airport after a holiday. The feeling of things coming to an end.
‘Why would you say that?’ he said. ‘Where did that come from, Lex?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She just – you were being cruel to her.’
‘She says stupid things. What do you expect?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You humiliated me. Do you understand that? Here – you’re supposed to be on my side.’
‘I’m always on your side.’
‘But you weren’t then, were you? There always has to be – your objectivity. And – speaking as somebody who has to be objective a great deal of the time – it isn’t always appreciated. I need you on my team.’
‘You sound like a child,’ I said. ‘Teams?’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, ‘what it was like. Growing up in this house. It was miserable, Lex.’
‘Was it?’ I said. ‘Was it really so fucking bad?’
He flinched. They’re just words, JP, I thought, and then, knowing that I could think something like that: Well. I suppose this is it.
‘What did you mean,’ he said, ‘about children? About that being decided?’
‘You want the truth?’ I said. ‘There’s something you should know. About our future family.’
That wasn’t the end of it, of course. There was the journey back to London on Boxing Day, suspended in traffic with a Christmas playlist, which JP cut midway
through. There were the messages exchanged at work, spiteful and sad, while we sat at our desks with still faces. There was the fact that we were still fucking, hating each other a little more every time. There was the last time, when the hating outweighed the pleasure. There was the conversation when JP said – and I quote – ‘You should have told me that you were—’
‘Go on. Say it.’
‘That you were— Fine. Broken.’
For the first time in many years, I considered seeing Dr K. She had celebrated the beginning of it: let her commiserate the end. I had recognized the relief in her expression, that evening in her office garden. That I might have found somebody who would offer normality, ambition, forgetting. She had expected that JP might drag me with him, and I had hoped for the same. But my past wasn’t something which could be left behind us on a footpath, or in a cluttered house in a distant city. The facts of it lived inside me, and if he was going to take me with him, he would need to bear them, too.
Instead, Evie came to stay. She took a train from Gatwick and arrived before sunrise. I found her huddled by my door in a thin jacket, her hands tucked underneath it for the warmth of her body. ‘Surprise,’ she said, although she had called from the airport, to check that I was awake. ‘You didn’t need to,’ I said, and it was true: I was dry-eyed and showered, and dressed for work. ‘I know,’ she said.
She cooked dinners; she sourced terrible television; she wore my sweaters, until everything smelt of her. After the first time, we didn’t talk about JP. ‘Listen,’ she said, once I had explained it. ‘Fuck him.’ At the weekend, we dressed beautifully and visited a bar, and danced recklessly on an empty dance floor, ignoring the people watching. We walked home together, across the river in a thin, fine drizzle, both of us stopping to vomit into the Thames. We slept until Saturday afternoon, our limbs entwined. Beneath the pain, I felt better. Devlin’s reputation had drifted across the Atlantic, and I had already scheduled a call. I cancelled JP’s flight to New York, and upgraded my own. Another escape.
In Soho, I awoke suddenly in the night, as if the recollection of our parting had startled me. It wasn’t so bad. I had been telling the truth. For the most part, anyway. And there were far more embarrassing things that I could have said. About loneliness, for example. In the face of his gibbering – all of the fucking melancholy – I had been so composed. It had never been likely to last.
I reached for the light switch and wandered through to the bathroom. I had been too tired to shower when I got in, and now I felt dirty and nauseous. I had thought in the evening that there had been longing in JP’s face, but, sober and alone in the night, I concluded that it had probably been pity. I turned the shower as hot as I could stand it and stepped inside. My hair collapsed across my face, and my skin became a hot, porcine pink where the water hit it. I cleaned my body, the folds of it, the old scars, as carefully as if it was somebody else’s, and afterwards I held the skin above my womb, trying to imagine it taut with a child. Sometimes I dreamt about it, in vivid, mundane dreams, but when I was awake it was no good. Even the imagining was impossible.
There were two events which marked the end of my time at Five Fields. The first was Father’s disappearance. The second was the opening of the computer shop in Hollowfield, although I didn’t realize its significance at the time. That came many years later, and only with Dr K’s assistance.
Father went missing on my final day at Five Fields. I had just left English, which was one of the few classes I shared with Cara. Homework had been handed back – it was our first essay on The Bridge to Terabithia – and she was bad-tempered and cold. I had received an A, and she had been awarded a B+. ‘How is it,’ she said, ‘that I’m the one who has to bring you books to read, and you still find a way to beat me?’ I had nothing to say to that. We walked in silence, heading for the final class of the day. Everybody in our year ended Thursday afternoon with mathematics, and there was a crush of students waiting in the maths corridor. Cara was in the set below me, and I was relieved; tonight, Evie would congratulate me on the A, and by break time on Friday, Cara would be appeased by the proximity of the weekend.
At first, the woman in the corridor was a glimpse of white between the blue jumpers. She was walking in our direction, a head taller than the students around her. As we approached her, Cara stopped and seized my arm.
She wore a white gown to the floor with yellowed patches at the neck and armpits, and a rumpled quality which gave the impression that she hadn’t changed for many days. Her hair hung flat against her back and then dangled down to the knees. She was anxious in the hallway, turning this way and that, and flinching when a pupil came too close to her. Where she passed, the hubbub softened to a hum. It was the pitch of stage whispers, and feigned horror. She was gaunt other than for her jowls, and the hangs of her belly and breasts.
‘Oh my God,’ Cara said. ‘Is she OK?’
I realized with a slow, hot humiliation that the woman in the corridor was Mother.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I know her.’
Cara turned to me, incredulous.
‘It’s my mother,’ I said. ‘Something must have happened.’
I considered my hard-won invisibility. Its cloak was beginning to slip, and in moments it would be on the floor.
‘I should find out,’ I said. ‘But break time tomorrow?’
Cara was backing away from me against the corridor wall. She took timid little steps in her school shoes, as though I might not notice her departure. Already, I knew, she was thinking about who might be her new best friend.
‘I’m sorry, Lex,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry.’
Alone, I approached. Mother was trembling. ‘Is it Evie?’ I asked, and Mother shook her head. I hadn’t seen her outside the house for so long that I had forgotten her twitchiness. Without Father at her side, she moved like a cornered sheep, twisting for an escape. She placed a hand on my wrist and I saw her fingernails as the other children would see them. Not resting harmlessly on her duvet when we said goodnight, but overgrown and jaundiced, with shadows of dirt trapped beneath them.
‘Can we go somewhere else?’ she said. ‘The office was incompetent – I didn’t know where to find you.’
‘Of course.’
She fed her arm through my elbow, and the sea of children parted to let us pass. Cara would do well from this, I thought: she could testify to my secrecy, my strange habits. Her statements would be in high demand. Just before the door to the playground closed, I heard the eruption behind us.
Cara contacted me once, when I was living in London with JP. She had found me on LinkedIn, and hoped that we might connect. She didn’t mention Five Fields, and she didn’t refer to the events at Moor Woods Road. She was a solicitor too, she said. I hadn’t heard of the firm, and I didn’t respond to Cara, but not out of any sense of resentment. We had never had very much in common, other than being a little cleverer than our peers; since then I had met many clever people, and knew that it was an insufficient basis on which to build a friendship. If I had been kinder, I might have let her know that I didn’t begrudge her that day in the corridor. People have done far worse things to survive being a teenager.
Mother and I stood in the playground in near-darkness. The moorlands were already black against the sky. I could see flickers of lessons through the classroom windows. Across the road, older boys ran on the football pitches, orange beneath the floodlights.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘It’s Father,’ Mother said. ‘He hasn’t come home.’
He had driven to one of Jolly’s sermons that morning, before sunrise. He had kissed Mother through her half-sleep, and touched her stomach, like a charm. He would be home for lunch. I tried not to think about the stretch of Mother’s days, now that we were at school, and she had nothing to soothe. She had spent the morning preparing for Father’s return, her fingers laced with pastry and meat. She had left the pie to cool and fallen asleep on the sofa, amongst her blankets. She woke
in the mid-afternoon with the shock of the empty house.
‘Where is he?’ she said.
She had passed by the Lifehouse. The windows were dark.
‘Let’s get the others,’ I said. ‘Let’s get everyone home.’
The school office was decorated for Christmas. Pink tinsel hung around the secretary’s desk, and a plastic tree had been unfolded outside the headmaster’s door. I asked where I could find Ethan, and the secretary informed me that he had been marked absent that morning, and every other morning that week. ‘Aren’t you his sister?’ she asked.
‘I think that there’s been a mix-up,’ I said. ‘He was here this morning. I mean – we walked here. Together.’
‘Well, that’s not what the register says.’
The secretary had a heater beneath her desk, and she rested her bare feet between its gratings. She stared at me, as if she was waiting for me to leave. Through the doors, I could see Mother, huddled against the wind at the edge of the playground. An uncollected child at home time.
‘Thanks, anyway,’ I said.
By the time we returned home, Ethan was waiting for us, impatient and confused. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’ he said to Mother. He listened to the story of Father’s disappearance with ever-widening eyes, and as soon as Mother was finished, he sat at the kitchen table and commandeered the phone. There was nobody at the church in Blackpool. Jolly’s phone rang out. Mother stood over him, trembling, with her fingers at her throat. Delilah called to her from the couch, asking for a hug, and as soon as she was in the other room, Ethan started ringing hospitals.
Without Father, it was a strange, quiet evening. I divided the pie into six precise slices, and we ate in the living room, gathered at Mother’s feet. Evie curled in my lap, feline with contentment. We prayed into the night, with full bellies and bowed heads. I could feel the jitters of a smile on my face. I didn’t know what to pray for. I had the kind of ideas that I knew landed you in hell. Father’s van was upturned on the moors, with a Father-shaped hole in the windscreen. Father was hanging from the bracken. We would eat well for the rest of time.
