The Rose Petal Beach (13 page)

Beep-beep-beep-beep!

My phone in my pocket makes me jump. My eyes go to the clock on the mantelpiece. Two-fifty. My ten-minute warning, a reminder that I need to be on the way to pick up the girls from school in no more than ten minutes.

Scott has his hands in his hair, staring down at the carpet. I need this to be over. I need to rewind time and for him to have not told me, or further, for him not to have done it. I remember that first time we did it. He always called it making love. He always made it seem special, like he’d never do that with anyone else. He always said he didn’t want anyone else. Liar.

LIAR!

My legs felt like jelly when he first told me, my body seemed carved from stone, too, but now I am standing, I discover my body can support itself, my limbs can move.

‘I have to go and get the girls,’ I say. I have to put this all in a box because I cannot handle this right now. If I think it through any longer, if I talk any longer about this, I will not be able to do anything else. I will not be able to keep on walking and thinking, and the girls don’t need that. They don’t deserve to have me falling apart because I was stupid enough to marry their father, and befriend his mistress.

‘I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,’ Scott says as I am about to leave the room. ‘I really didn’t mean for you to find out.’

I’m sure you didn’t,
I think to myself.

He didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t beg forgiveness for sleeping with someone else. In Scott’s mind, our biggest problem was me finding out he’d been cheating.

That was the thought that haunted me as I hurried to school.

My husband was sorry to be caught, not for doing what he did in the first place.

‘Where do the clouds sleep, Mama?’ Anansy asks.

We’re at the beach, eating fish and chips for dinner. I am a bad mother, yes, for doing this to them, but the thought of going back to the house with
him
is unacceptable at the moment. It’s slightly chilly, especially with the wind down here on the front, and night will start to ink itself onto the sky soon, but a few more minutes here, and then home and straight upstairs for homework and then bed will help me.

I look up at the clouds above us and those suspended over the sea.

‘I don’t know,’ I say to her. ‘Do you know, Cora?’

‘No, I don’t know either,’ she says.

‘Maybe Dad will know,’ Anansy says.

‘Maybe,’ I reply. ‘Maybe.’

I relieve them of their greasy chip papers and scrunch them up, place them on top of my untouched chips. ‘Let’s go, homework, bath, bed.’

‘Is Dad going to read us a story?’ Anansy asks as they gather up their book bags and normal bags. My hands are cold, almost numb. The girls are cold to the touch, but not cold. They never seem to feel the cold, it’s always a battle to get them to wear coats or do them up because they are always so warm.

‘Maybe,’ I say, as non-committal with the word as I can make it. Maybe he’ll read you a story, then come back to finish torturing me with the story of his affair.

He didn’t know where clouds sleep, apparently. They asked him and he didn’t know. He also didn’t read them a story because that would mean leaving the safety of the loft room where he has been hiding all this time.

I’m curled up in the dark, waiting for something.

I’m not sure exactly what, but I am waiting, my breathing pausing and waiting with me until I have no choice but to breathe out.

I can’t quite bring myself to think about it. It is too big, too scary, too unreal. Maybe that’s what I am waiting for. Maybe I am waiting for the reality to hit so my mind will accept that Scott cheated and Mirabelle lied. It doesn’t seem possible.

The bedroom door opens and he slides in through the gap, trying to keep the room dark and not wake me. Usually, lately, he hasn’t been that bothered about waking me when he comes to bed after me. He didn’t want me to go running with Mirabelle. He’d sulked and complained about it when I told him he had to get the girls ready one morning a week until I said, ‘What’s wrong with you looking after
your
children for two hours one morning a week?’ and since the only answer was ‘nothing’ he’d let the matter drop. Instead, it felt as if he had been trying to sabotage my running but didn’t quite have the courage to go all the way: he didn’t mind waking me up so I’d be tired and might cry off the run, but he stopped short at doing something overt like arranging an early meeting. Of course, now I know what that’s been all about. He wanted to keep us apart, scared that his secret would leak out.

Scott’s clothes rustle loudly in the quiet as he removes them and
leaves them in a pile on the floor on his side of the bed. I can tell from here, without even looking, the order of the pile: shirt, trousers, T-shirt, underpants, socks. It is virtually the same every night – sometimes with a suit jacket, sometimes with a jumper, but usually as it is now. He takes off his clothes in the same order every night, then drops them on the floor for me to put in the laundry hamper. It’s not an overt act, of course, it’s simply a habit: he leaves them there because I will clear them away. It didn’t used to be like this. I don’t know when it changed, when he became too important to put his clothes in the hamper and when I became so unimportant I let him get away with it.

His body is warm in the bed. A familiar, solid presence I’ve come to expect over the years. Well of course I have, he’s my husband. He’s the man I’ve pledged to spend the rest of my life with. Where else would his lean, muscular body be at night except in bed with me? Where else? Up the road and round the corner, in the big house with the drive and gorgeous owner. Scott moves across the bed, edging closer and closer until his body is near mine, and then it is touching me, and then he is beside me, his body curled around mine, making the other part of the 99 quote we always used to be.

‘Remember the nights you used to come home after working in the bar and would curl up behind me, and I’d wake up for a second and then fall asleep again because now I could sleep properly because you were home?’
I want to say to him.
‘Remember how we were the perfect 99, then?’
And I want to say,
‘Were you fucking someone else then, too? Did you lie about working late nights so you could orgasm inside someone else’s body?
’ And I want to say, ‘
Can you finish cutting out my heart with a spoon and feed it to your dog because this job you’ve left unfinished is so incredibly painful? I’d rather you did it and it killed me so I don’t have to feel this.’
And I want to say so many other disjointed, unpleasant, hurtful, painful, desperate things that I’m glad I can’t speak.

‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ he murmurs. We used to whisper when the girls were babies and slept in our room. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t think about what I was doing. It was a stupid, stupid mistake
because I was so weak and lonely. I can’t think or function properly if we’re not getting on, if we’re not working together as a team. It was such a huge mistake … I’m so sorry.’

I want him; ache for him. In my chest, between my legs, at the back of my mouth I long for him. I need him to be a part of me so that he can be mine again and that will somehow undo him being with her. His body can belong to me again, as he pledged it to me on the day we got married, like it has been all these years. I reach for him, my hand knowing exactly where to touch to let him know what I want: him. I bet she doesn’t know. I bet she goes for the obvious place to initiate sex, but if I touch Scott there, he knows what it means.

In response to my fingers on his skin, to our physical shorthand, he moves from behind me, and as I roll onto my back, he climbs on top of me. He briefly kisses me, our lips meeting in an exchange of understanding, of acceptance of what is about to happen.

Scott, erect and firm, pushes into me and the ache doesn’t recede into nothingness like I thought it would once we were together. It explodes, becoming more urgent, more agonising. I arch my back, pull him closer to me, digging my hands into the flesh of his back as I try to claw him back. I want all of him. It’s what I had, it’s what I want back.

I want him back.

I draw him nearer still, the memory of the first time we did this, the intensity, the closeness, the desperation to not allow anything to come between us flashes through my mind as he starts to move harder.

He did this with her.

The thought slams into my head, my chest, my heart at the same time. And then it ploughs into my hands, which rip themselves away from clinging onto him and are suddenly on his chest, pushing at him, while my body twists away, rejecting him, distancing him.

‘Stop,’ I almost scream. ‘Stop. Stop. Get off me.’

Without question, in an instant, he is rolling away and off me.

The tears are huge and constant as I grab the duvet, tug it up over me, hiding my body from him. I don’t want him to see me, not even the outline of me. I don’t want him to think of me naked when I know he’ll be comparing that image to her. And I’ll be found wanting, of course. Because I’m not good enough for him any more. Maybe at one time he looked at me and couldn’t imagine being with anyone else, maybe at one time he thought that my body and who I am were what he wanted, but now I know different. In this moment, I realise I am not enough. He looks at porn and he had an affair. I am not enough for him.

If I was, he wouldn’t have done what he did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers.

Scott reaches out to comfort me as I sob, but I shrink away from him. I don’t want him now. I don’t want him to touch me at all. I have heard half a story, have had half an explanation and I can’t let him touch me again until I hear it all. Until he talks and talks at me and I understand. Until I know
why
. And
when
. And
how
.
How
could he do this to me.

‘I need to have a shower,’ I say between sobbing breaths. I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe I tried to reclaim my husband from someone else. I can’t believe I had sex with the person who has hurt me more than anyone has in my life. I need to cleanse myself of that. ‘I need a shower. Please look away.’

‘Why?’ he asks, confused.

‘I don’t want you to see me naked.’

‘I’ve been seeing you naked for sixteen years,’ he replies.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ The sobs are subsiding, calmness is starting to enter my body. ‘Just look away, Scott. Please.’

He starts to protest, I can tell in the way he takes a breath, then he obviously changes his mind. When I see he is staring at the wall of wardrobes opposite, I slip out of bed and grab my dressing gown off the metal hook on the back of the door. The
towelling material feels scratchy, like needles against my over-sensitised skin.

My hand is on the door handle when he speaks again.

‘Are you going to make me leave?’ he asks, his voice small and fragile and frightened. I haven’t heard him sound like that since the night of the miscarriage when he asked the doctor if there was any hope of the baby being saved. Scott hasn’t shown that type of fear,
real fear
, since then. He might have felt it, but not shown it.

‘How can I make you leave, Scott?’ I say through the broken glass in my mouth. ‘You’ve already gone.’

Eighteen months ago

‘I’ve invited Mirabelle over for dinner tomorrow night as well as Beatrix,’ I said to Scott as he sat reading reports in bed.

‘What?’ he replied, lowering the piece of paper in his hand, slipping off his reading glasses. ‘You
what
?’

‘You know Beatrix is coming over? Well, Mirabelle’s at a loose end so I said she should come, too.’

‘No,’ Scott said. ‘That’s not happening. Isn’t it enough for you two that I have to work with her all day, do I really have to eat with her after hours, too?’

‘No, you don’t, actually. You can sit up here and I’ll bring your meal up to you if you feel that strongly about it.’

‘You know what I mean, TB. It’s enough that she comes over and sees you and plays with the girls. Why does she have to keep invading our family time, too?’

‘“Keep”? This is the first time I’ve invited her.’

‘I don’t want her in this house when I’m here,’ he said firmly. He used that tone with his not very competent juniors at work, with difficult clients, with tradespeople who hadn’t delivered the things we’d ordered and were trying to wriggle out of it. He had clearly forgotten that I was his wife. I didn’t need that tone – about anything.

‘Well I do, and in case you’d forgotten, it’s my house too. And in
case you’d forgotten something else – you’re not
actually
the boss of me, as the young people say.’ I mimicked him: ‘“I don’t want her in this house when I’m here.” Who do you think you’re talking to?’

‘You’re not being very fair on me, you know,’ he said sadly. ‘I come home from work to get away from the office, not to have to put on the face that I use there. This is my refuge from all the shit I have to put up with every day. I’m gutted you can’t see that I need a break from my work and that having her here puts me under pressure. You did this job once, I’d have thought you’d remember what that was like.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him, feeling ashamed. ‘I didn’t think. You’re right, of course. I’ll get out of it somehow.’

‘Thanks, gorgeous, I really appreciate it.’

Sorry lovely, is it ok if you don’t come to
dinner tomorrow night?
Bea has some private stuff she
wants to chat about. Will reschedule. X

No problem, gorgeous. Hope she’s OK. Lots of love M x

PS Remember that programme No Problem?
Loved that show! M x

Scott creeps down the stairs to find me because I haven’t returned to bed. I wanted to be down here rather than the spare room because I feel safer in here, in the kitchen. Wearing only my dressing gown, I am cuddled up on the sofa watching a gambling show on the television.

‘Come back to bed,’ he tells me, standing beside me as I stare across the room at the wall-hung TV.