Precocious (12 page)

I hear him down in the kitchen, running water, rattling pill bottles. Does he have a headache? Every morning?

Do I only feel guilty because your mark is on me? Under my hair, under my clothes, on the soft part of my shoulder, just above the collarbone, waiting to be discovered or to disappear, whichever comes first. Loitering on me, heavy with risk. A purplish mark with no other explanation. Look closely, see teeth marks.

I look at it obsessively every time I pass the mirror. Am I checking that it is fading, or hoping that it isn’t?

Because it is proof of you: proof that you were here, that for a few seconds you abandoned your control.

Unable to sleep, I try a trick Dave once told me. Deep breaths, in, out. Count backwards from 300 in threes. Used as a memory test, but also a good relaxation aid apparently, although I’m sure it works better for people like him who are maths minded. ‘The word woman and the numbers man’, he used to call us when we first got together. 300. 297. 294.

Grunt. Creak. He rolls over.

291.

Behind my squeezed shut eyes, reversing trios of sheep stumble over fences.

Concentrate. If you make a mistake you have to go back to the beginning.

288, 285, 282.

Slow down; the aim is not to get back to zero. I should be asleep before then.

Count the days, weeks, months, since we – what? Restarted? Is that the word for what we’ve done? What do I use as zero? The first time we slept together? Or that first supermarket collision, that dinner, that kiss?

243. 240.

Count back to countless instances of wishing for you. Do they count? Delirious with half-sleep, words and numbers whir in my head.

Dave’s soft snoring. The shape of him under the sheet.

Who am I kidding, I don’t have to strain to think of it – I know the dates, I know the days, weeks, months. I know the years. I know your number. Your phone number, postcode, birthday and car reg (then, and now). They’re imprinted on me, my brain the tattooed wrist of a prisoner. Marked for life.

Hurtling towards zero, no sign of sleep. 37, 33, 30. Thirty, my age, that pivotal age imbued with meaning. A conversation with you, lying in a bed not like this one, playing our own game with numbers.

‘Remember when you said I was fourteen going on twenty-five? Does that mean I’m now thirty going on … forty-one?’

You laughed at the barely perceptible pause. ‘Maths never was your best subject.’

‘Cheek. Well?’

‘I don’t think so … I think you’ve caught yourself up.’

‘Seriously … have I turned out how you thought I would?’

‘To tell you the truth,’ (whenever you start a sentence like this, I always get the unnerving feeling that everything you’ve said before was a lie), ‘I never really thought about you growing up.’

Thirty. My brother Alex passed that milestone, two years ago. He’s grown old disgracefully, as the saying goes. He doesn’t know how to be in his thirties; it feels wrong to him, he says, like wearing someone else’s clothes.

Once, when he was drunk, Alex slurred to me that he’d always secretly assumed that he would die at the age of twenty-nine, if not before. I didn’t want to tell him that in a dark place in my mind I’d thought the same thing. He didn’t seem the type to ever grow up. He told me that when he woke up, aged thirty, he felt some small relief but mostly disappointment. He felt lost.

30, 27. I think about you at twenty-seven and me at fourteen.

24. Wait. Go back. Ticking off fingers under the covers. Days since that afternoon in your bed. Days since I … stop. Count weeks. I sit up. There’ll be no sleeping now.

Late. It’s not a word Dave was ever fond of.

I’m going to be late
.

It’s too late
.

I’m late
.

I’m not keen on it in its present context either.

I’m late.

Late, the word welling in my head, in my mouth; its connotations with death, with history, unavoidable.
The late Fiona Worthing
, I think.

I don’t know what makes me tell him, and I instantly regret it, but it just feels too big a word, a concept, to contain.

‘Dave,’ I shrug him awake, ‘Dave. I’ve just realised … I’m late.’

‘Late?’ he repeats. ‘You mean …?’

When we’ve talked about children, we’ve always brushed them away under another holiday we must take, or something we decided we desperately needed for the kitchen. The shining hopefulness that the word ‘late’ puts into his eyes fills me with surprise. And it finds no reflection in mine.

While my heart is sinking, while my insides are all churned up, he is smiling. The ghost of a child that to me is just cells, cells and blood, a problem to be dealt with; for him it has eyes, and a name. Oh God. He is visualising it, feeling it, he already has the child in his arms, on his knee, in the garden kicking a ball. Jesus. I feel like I can’t breathe.

This is how the distance between us is illuminated, but still only I can see it.

‘You should do a test.’

I’m making tea in the morning and the kettle is loud, so I pretend not to have heard him. I pull my dressing gown tighter around my stomach.

‘I said, you should take a test,’ he repeats, coming up behind me and squeezing my hand even as it clenches around the edge of the worktop.

‘Mmm.’ I make as non-committal a sound as I can muster. ‘Well, you know, I’m not
that
late.’

It becomes one of those conversations that you think is finished but then starts again, later, exactly where it was left, with no preamble or warning. Ruining a perfectly good Saturday.

‘Five days is a long time for you, though, isn’t it?’ he says, suddenly, while we’re in the garden reading the newspapers. I raise the arts pages so he won’t see my frown.
For me?
I think to myself. Since when does he know what’s normal and not normal for me and my menstrual cycle? I suddenly resent that this man knows anything about me, let alone such personal information. It’s as though he’s not my husband, it’s like he’s someone I’ve just met.

Eventually, when he brings it up again while I’m parking the car at the supermarket, I snap.

‘I’ll buy the bloody test, okay? I’ll do it in the morning.’ I look at his face and feel sorry, so I say more gently, ‘It’s better to do them in the morning, that’s what they say. We want to be sure, don’t we?’

What’s weird is that he doesn’t question any of it. He doesn’t bother to count the days, for example, whereas I do this obsessively. I can see my cycle as a bold, bright diagram emblazoned across my brain and there, right in the middle, you, me, bed. It wasn’t him, on that day. It was you. You, me, tangled bodies, wet hair, bed.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Dave to even wonder aloud about the fact that he and I are always careful. Oh yes, I use condoms with my husband. Not with you, but with my husband, always.

I’m annoyed at him for not hurling these things at me. And I’m annoyed at him for wanting this baby real.

That night, I dream. Underwater.

Swim towards you with bloodied hands, wipe them on your face.
You did this
.

In the morning, I wake to pain, and warmth, like comfort.

Red.

I find myself weeping with relief that Dave still can’t read; mistaking it for grief, he holds me. Sitting in our bed, in my blood, I sob harder. I can’t have this kindness.

‘There’ll be other times,’ he whispers, ‘other months. We have all the time in the world.’

With a deep breath, I push him away.

The next few days make it obvious I need to leave. The ‘non-baby’, as Dave has taken to calling it bitterly, has become a block between us, a boulder we can’t get around.

‘You knew what you were signing up for,’ I tell him. ‘I was clear from the start.’

‘Yes, but I never knew why. Maybe it would help me understand if I knew why.’

‘But you didn’t care! You didn’t ask then, and it’s too late to ask now. You’ve married me now – it’s not fair to ask me to change. Sold as seen.’

I haven’t had to tell him about you. I’m glad, for selfish reasons, that I don’t have to say: ‘I’ve been having an affair.’ I don’t want to admit to myself that that’s what it is. That that’s all it is.

We talked about it once, about how we would feel if one or the other of us were unfaithful. It’s only a suitable subject of conversation for a couple in the very early stages, when it seems the most remote possibility. It’s an ‘in the pub’ conversation, along with ‘what would be the first thing you’d buy if you won the lottery?’ and ‘which of my friends do you find most attractive?’ – another one that can only be had very early in relationships, and even then it’s risky.

It was the classic debate: which is the worse infidelity, a one-off dalliance or an ongoing affair? A drunken, ‘it meant nothing’ fumble or falling in love? We’d disagreed, but amiably, because either seemed so unlikely to happen to us. To other people, but not to us, lacing our fingers together across the table in the pub, by the fire.

Dave: ‘It would be worse if you’d fallen in love.’

Me: ‘Nah, the one-nighter is worse.’

‘How’d you figure that?’

‘Because that would mean you’d risked everything we have for something that didn’t even mean anything.’

‘Yeah, but it’s just physical. It’s the heart stuff that really hurts.’

When I do try to tell him how I feel, that too is selfish. An honest voice inside me lists my reasons:

I want him to understand. To
pity
me.

I want someone else to feel the great gaping loss that I feel, of loving and not being sure of being loved in return.

I want
him
to leave
me
, want
him
to break us up.

He’s not going to let me get away with that. He won’t let me get the words out.

‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘Why do you always interrupt me?’

‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘Maybe you don’t.’

‘I do.’

‘I don’t—’

‘You don’t love me anymore.’

‘You’re putting words in my mouth.’

‘I can say you don’t love me but I can’t hear you say you don’t love me.’

‘That doesn’t make—’

‘Sense? I know. So?’

‘But I do. I do—’

‘Don’t. Don’t say that either.’

And that is all the talking.

I’ve told him I’m going and that it’s ‘for the best’, but I’m not sure. His confused face says it’s not best for him. I divide my belongings into two sets of boxes: one for Mari’s, which is to be my ‘decoy home’, the place Dave thinks I’m going, the address my post will be redirected to, the home Dave will call if he needs me; and one for your house. I want to bring as few things as possible to yours because it is complete as it is. I don’t want to crowd you, at least not with things that hold traces of the life I had before.

All my things are touched in some way by Dave. I can almost see his prints on them. But your prints are on me, and everything has changed, and no shower or bath can make me clean, now.

There is a photo of the two of us at Aphrodite’s Rock in Cyprus. Dave is squinting in the sun, and we are clinging to each other as though afraid that the same foam that gave birth to the goddess of love might jealously snatch one of us away. When I look at photos of the two of us, from holidays when it was just us, I often try to remember who took them. Who Dave waved the camera at with ‘please?’ in his smile. Were they English? German? Greek? What did they look like? Why didn’t we ask their name? Someone we didn’t know pointed the shutter at us, snapped us, shot us. Some stranger created an image of us.

We exist – together – only in someone else’s line of sight.

I spend almost an hour cuddling Bella, while Dave waits upstairs.

I hadn’t really thought about the fact that leaving Dave means leaving Bella. Taking her with me is not an option – I know how
you
feel, or rather don’t feel, about animals – and besides, Dave thinks I’ll be living in Mari’s little one-bedroom flat.

When we adopted Bella, she looked more like a lamb than a puppy. Her fur, which would later grow long and golden, lay in white curls tight against her tubby body.

Taking her home was the only time Dave ever criticised my driving.

He sat in the back seat with her box beside him, one hand resting protectively on top of it, while she scrabbled around inside.

Mostly he spoke to her, in soothing tones: ‘It’s alright, baby’, ‘Soon be home’.

Dave has made his face vacant, that’s the only way I can describe it. He doesn’t really drink, never smoked, but he takes pills, sometimes. I downplay it, don’t think about it, because he downplays it.

The first time I saw him do it, we were getting on a flight. We drove to Nice (hours upon hours of French motorway, wind skimming our hair through the sunroof, listening to Dave’s Genesis and Pink Floyd CDs on rotation) so it must have been Cyprus, I think that was the first time we flew together. To calm his nerves, he said. I was a little spooked but he was blasé about it. ‘It’s not always tranquillisers,’ he said, ‘not often even, mostly painkillers,’ as though this was okay.

Dave put his back out at work. He was a get-stuck-in kind of manager, so even though he didn’t need to lug boxes in the storeroom, that’s exactly what he would do on delivery day, sleeves rolled up and beads of perspiration decorating his face and neck.

Following this injury, when it became obvious neither rest nor physio was really working, he was prescribed strong painkillers. He’d just kept taking them, he said.

They made him numb, and he liked it. As our marriage progressed, it became one of those facts: he had his pills; I was numb anyway.

I remember thinking, and I think it now, how typical it was of Dave. Even his worst habit, the closest thing he had to an addiction, was legal and on prescription. Or at least, it used to be; I don’t know where he gets the stuff from these days. I can’t question him because he just gives me that pointed look that says considering the chemicals Mari and I ingested in our teens, I should keep quiet. Its purpose only to make him even more placid than he is by nature. I suddenly feel angry, and cruel, and pity him, and then I feel more angry at myself for feeling all of those things. It’s time to leave.