Something I'm Not (16 page)

Clearly some choices have minimal repercussions. Yesterday, I'd tried on a dress in a bare-bricked boutique on Mercer. The fabric was pink and delicate, with just the right amount of subtle support around the bodice. At today's laughable exchange rate, it was a steal. But still my inner anorexic had balked at sartorial nourishment.

‘—and there was something about the cut', I'd said to Matt earlier today, during my severely edited description of my trip to New York, ‘which made it far too baggy around the hips.'

‘Well, you don't want that,' he'd said, reasonably.

‘—and they said they could take it in, and add a few darts here,' I'd said, gesturing to under the bustline, as if Matt even knew what a dart was, ‘but I couldn't see the point.'

‘Plus,' I'd added, when my last comment had elicited no response, ‘the material was really light and floaty, and I know it's been hot here, but it is nearly autumn—'

‘Sounds like you did the right thing in not getting it, then,' had been Matt's succinct reply.

There had been a woman in the Club lounge at JFK, reading a book,
How To Bond With Your Child
. In the next chair, her little girl, the mother in miniature right down to the pout, was refusing her Asian nanny's attentions. All three were seeking consolation. And each one, I sensed, was destined for disappointment.

Now, dusk slips through the grass-weave blinds, bathing the walls in fractured light.

‘So, do you think I did the right thing, not getting that dress?' I ask, as we brush our teeth.

‘What dress?' says Matt, spitting out toothpaste and blood, a colour combination which somehow works for the picture on the tube, but which looks revolting spat into the basin.

‘The one in New York I told you about. The one I tried on.'

‘The floaty one?'

Very good
, I think. ‘The floaty one.'

‘I thought you didn't like it?'

‘I didn't say I didn't like it. I said it was too baggy around the hips.' I yank out a long skein of dental floss before remembering that I've already flossed. I try to throw it away in the bin, but it wraps itself around my wrist.

I have to wait while Matt rinses and gargles (
who gargles
?) with mouthwash, a ritual in his night-time schedule as sacred as prayer. His cheeks fatten and wobble with the liquid inside them.
Matt at his most Neanderthal
, I think. ‘I said, I didn't say I didn't like it.'

He spits, and then turns on the tap to full force, sluices water around his mouth, before spitting again. Then he holds my gaze in the mirror. His voice is overly even. ‘I didn't say that you'd said you didn't like it. It was simply the impression I got after all your negative comments on the dress.' He wipes his mouth dry before hurling the towel into the bath.

‘So, you think it wouldn't look good on me?'

‘How the hell should I know? I didn't see it.'

‘Because if that's what you're thinking—'

‘I'm not thinking anything. Why on earth didn't you buy it?' In the mugginess of the bathroom, his tanned brow is speckled with sweat.

‘Why do you think?'

Matt frowns, and mutters something I don't catch. ‘Look, if this is about you fishing for reassurance that you're worth spending money on, you're out of luck. I'm not in the mood.'

‘I'm not fishing—'

‘Good, because I can't quite see what buying expensive dresses—'

‘It wasn't expensive.'

Matt exhales. ‘So, let's get this straight. You find a great dress, which is cheap—'

‘It wasn't cheap.'

‘Which isn't cheap, but we could have afforded it, right?'

I nod.

‘And which is just your colour. And yet you don't buy it. And you talk it down to me, and I agree – even though I couldn't see then, and I still can't see, what the hell it's got to do with me – that you did the right thing, not buying it. And now I discover that actually, deep down, you really wanted the dress.'

I put my hands to my face. ‘I don't know if I really wanted the dress, I just want to know whether you think I've done the right thing in not getting the dress.'

Matt coughs a laugh. ‘Right now? If not buying the dress has ruined my evening, then, OK, I think you made the wrong decision in not getting the dress. OK?' He strides out of the bathroom, and turns on the television. A football commentator sounds like he's having an orgasm.

I stare at myself in the mirror. Matt's right: it's been one hell of a twenty-four hours. The bags under my eyes are a pair of wrecking balls. In moving to the window to roll up the blind – the better to see these new facial deformities – I trip over the Perspex set of scales. I yelp with pain, and kick them back, which hurts my naked foot even more.

‘Now what?' Matt yells over the climax. ‘Look, if this is still about the dress, go to fucking Harvey Nichols, or wherever, and buy the fucking dress tomorrow.'

What do you mean: Is this about the dress?
I want to ask him. What else could I possibly be upset about? I stand in the doorway, rubbing my stinging foot. ‘I can't buy it anywhere else,' I say, tersely, and with exaggerated enunciation, as if to a difficult child. ‘It was a one- off piece, from a one-off boutique. New York was my only chance.'

Matt turns off the TV by remote control. ‘Oh, what, and I'm supposed to know that? That deep down you really wanted to buy that dress, despite giving me a very good impression of not wanting it?' He snorts again. ‘Well, I took my cue from you. And you know what? You're just furious with me because you're furious with yourself for making a decision, and getting it wrong. And you've no one else to blame.' He points the remote at the TV. ‘Any other decisions you've made in your life you want to blame me for?'

And then he switches on the TV once more. The football crowd sounds like it's cheering, just for him.

Chapter Twenty-two

M
ATT ONCE SAVED
my life. For our first Christmas together we holidayed in Cape Town, where the current is fickle, not to say treacherous. We borrowed the family apartment, and sunbathed by day. By night we sipped white wine on the balcony and watched sunsets. In between we giggled over the boys performing one-armed press-ups on the beach, and licked each other's salty skin.

Matt swam like Dad, confident, absorbed. I stayed on the beach, tacked to the towel by a paste of suncream and sand. I would watch him until my eyes ached with the dazzle of sun on water. Deep down, I despised my own timidity.

So, one morning, I waded out behind him and pushed off as he did, mimicking his strong strokes. He was apparently reliving a bunker shot from a game with his father the day before, when he heard close behind him my panting and anxious giggles. Turning, he saw me, my hands little moles' paws floundering in a doggy paddle, thrilled at how far I could swim.

The tide at that hour was shifting. No sooner had we set off to swim back to the beach when I was knocked by the rising swell and dragged under. Panic seized my limbs. My legs flailed in the waxy expanse of icy water. I shouted to Matt, but the wind stole my words. A merciless weight pressed in on my chest. I lacked the strength to scream louder. I couldn't breathe. I needed to raise the alarm, but in heaving one arm out of the water I was sucked beneath the fold of another indifferent wave. Acrid salt water spurted up my nose. I barked several coughs, and my lungs burned. I gasped for air. And all the time Matt was swimming further and further away with every stroke.

What made him turn? When he did, his eyes registered the void where he thought I was. He scanned the sea and trod water, turning full circle in his search. I willed him to see me, but to my horror he now peered back towards the beach, assuming I was ahead of him.
I swim like a stone, remember? Look this way
. Then he turned one final time and glimpsed me as my weary limbs expired and I sank.

When he reached me, he told me to climb on his back. I thrashed out and grabbed his neck. But he soon realised that the current was too strong for him to swim for the two of us. Shocked by his twisting torso and urgent cries to let go, I released my grip and drifted beyond his reach. Suddenly, a wall of cold water smacked me in the face. I gagged and dipped out of sight. The gap between us widened. We were now both gasping, and it hurt our necks to keep heads above water.

Casting around for someone to shout to, Matt saw in the distance, in a parallel line further along in the sea, several bathers. They stood on what was obviously a sandbank, the water barely up to their stomachs. They had a Frisbee and were playing catch, blissfully ignorant of the drama behind them.

‘Not the beach,' Matt yelled. ‘Aim for those people.' By drifting east with the tide, we could conserve energy. Then he turned on his back and swam, kicking fiercely with his legs as he gripped my exhausted arms, and tugged me to safety.

From the sandbank we walked back to shore as though drugged. Our aching thighs were weak and shaky, our calves stinging. We collapsed on the beach, lying there for several hours, wrapped in towels, holding each other tightly.

Chapter Twenty-three

T
HE DAY AFTER
Louisa's outburst and my row with Matt, I ring the vicar-cage doorbell. In one hand I hold a carrier bag containing a perfumed candle. I've seen them in the lifestyle pages of magazines, and have always wanted one. This morning seemed the perfect time to treat myself.

After a few minutes measuring out the doorstep in pigeon-steps, I walk round the block and push open the garden gate. There I find Dylan in discussions with his gardener – last-minute adjustments for the Harvest Festival fête. I loiter next to the wisteria, inhaling the smell of late-cut grass. When Dylan, who relishes using the Latin names for plants, becomes aware that I'm not a parishioner requiring edification, but a friend prone to mocking his pretensions, he ends the conversation with the hired help and holds out his arms.

‘Hey, what a lovely surprise. Are you playing hookie?'

‘Not quite,' I say, adding that I've been made redundant. And now, as Dylan holds me, the tears well up which had remained loyally invisible during the morning meeting while the bailiffs took furniture, and while the policeman explained why Interpol is searching for Rex, who has gone AWOL in Spain with all the firm's money.

‘Christ!' Dylan kisses my wet cheek. ‘What about the famous guy you interviewed on Monday?'

‘The bailiffs have taken all the laptops, all the computers. Apparently Rex has been downloading files remotely. There's nothing left. And we all thought he was a benign old buffer obsessed with reducing his golf handicap.'

‘Christ!' says Dylan, again.

Help me
, I long to say to him,
like you did once before, by finding me Matt
.

‘What does Matt say?' asks Dylan as we enter his kitchen.

‘We had a row.'

‘About this?'

I shake my head.
About a dress
, I want to say. As if somehow this would make it completely true. I sit down, as Dylan sets about trying to remember how to make tea.

‘Hey, you could try being me for a while, and meet the Bishop.'

‘Metamorphosis – well, there's a thought.'

‘Call it transubstantiation,' Dylan says, making a mess of pulling apart a milk carton.

‘So the church really does have an answer for everything?'

‘We hate to boast.'

‘Well, then, I'll have to try one of those Alpha courses at Holy Trinity—'

‘For God's sake, don't do that,' shouts Dylan, flinging cups and saucers noisily on to the table. ‘That's not the way at all,' he adds, ripping open a packet of biscuits.

‘I was only joking.'

‘All right. But really, that's not religion. That's for people wanting easy answers.'

‘And what's wrong with that?' I want to know, tugging at my parting.

Dylan spoons fragrant compost into a teapot. ‘Nothing, if you're prepared to tolerate the unknown, and endure the fact that not everything has an answer.'

I pull out a hair. ‘But there must be meaning. There must be an answer.' I'm almost crying.

‘Darling, don't start again. Here, have my – oh no, I haven't got one – here, have a tea towel instead.'

‘I thought “God is love” was the answer,' I sniff.

‘It is. But not always. There's earthquakes, terrorism, cancer. You can't just airbrush out the bits you don't like. It's all or nothing. Faith is about commitment. It demands full participation. At least, that's what I've been reminding myself lately.'

‘A bit like parenting.'

‘Yes,' snaps Dylan, as he pours.

‘Which makes parenting such a terrifying prospect.' I reach for a custard cream, and nibble its manufactured border. Once the edge is in line with the filling, I dunk it in my tea and suck on its sugary insides.

‘I thought the same when I saw Louisa. You know the little fella's not well?'

‘No, I didn't,' I say. ‘But I'm not surprised. Two months premature.'

Dylan slides to the edge of his chair, stretching out his legs until his body is in a straight line. ‘Prue's asked me to perform a naming ceremony tomorrow. Just in case.'

‘Ah. She left a message on my mobile this morning, but I haven't got round to returning it. Poor things.' We sit in silence, our hands cupped round our drinks. ‘Do you know the worst thing? Everyone'll think I've given up work to get pregnant.' Dylan sniggers. I tell him it's not funny, and he pretends to have been admonished. ‘Because, after a time, it'll be obvious I'm not, and then people will start to pity me. They'll think Matt and I are blowing our savings on IVF. Or that one of us is defective. I don't think I can bear it.'

‘Bear what?'