Too Close For Comfort (33 page)

‘The way she’s spoken to me the last few weeks . . .’ I said. I traced a sharp peak with my hand. ‘Her moods are like that.’

‘It’s a nightmare,’ said Jim, his body subtly meeting mine. ‘She said if I talked to Ged she’d never speak to me again, and the way she said it, was like she meant
it.’ His hands dropped heavily to his knees, a gesture of helplessness. ‘Since Sarah died . . . I know she’s getting worse, Mia. I hoped you being here would sort her out. To be
honest, I was just grateful it wasn’t her who died.’ It was his voice which broke now. ‘I’m no good at this stuff. You know that better than anyone.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen you for twenty years.’

‘Exactly. I’m a fucking hopeless case.’

Now we looked at each other properly, eyes locking in the sodium glow of the kitchen window. His child – the baby I’d known I couldn’t have, and yet mourned so deeply when it
had made its own decision to leave my body. My father – violent and terrifying – attacking him so viciously the morning of my planned abortion that all of our lives had been indelibly
changed. It wasn’t just Jim I hadn’t spoken to for twenty years. We’d made a tentative recovery, my dad and me, now he was sober and contrite. And here was Jim, in front of me.
There was only one piece I didn’t know could ever be made better – no wonder Kimberley’s sly aside had reduced me to a sobbing mess. It was about so much more than today. I felt
those tears threaten again, took a couple of minutes before I trusted myself to speak.

‘My dad should never have done that. It was right that he went to prison.’

‘I know,’ said Jim, putting his arm around me now and pulling me close. I let him. I couldn’t not – in that moment it felt as if we were outside of time and space.
‘But it wasn’t your fault. And I was an immature little prick. I should have called you. You lost the baby. Our baby.’ His face was near to mine, his eyes burning with feeling.
‘It wasn’t like I didn’t think about it. Think about you. When I had kids too.’

The shame I’d felt in the aftermath had come from so many different places. It had locked parts of me up, thrown away the key.

‘Thank you for saying that,’ I said. A sense of relief – unexpected and overwhelming – seeped through my whole being. I let my head rest against his chest, his heartbeat
softly pumping against my cheek. Exhaustion followed the relief – I closed my eyes, unable to move. After a few seconds his body shifted, his lips suddenly on mine, smoky and alcoholic. I
remembered that taste too well. It was intoxicating, and I was already intoxicated. I lost myself in it, our bodies pressed tight together, his fingers tangled up in my hair. Then I came to my
senses, twisting my face away.

‘Jim, no. We’ve got to stop. We shouldn’t have done that.’

‘What?’ said Jim. ‘I thought that’s what you wanted?’

Our bodies were still dangerously close. His arm was tight around my waist, scooping my flesh towards him.

‘You’re married!’

‘Yeah, and you’re engaged,’ countered Jim, scowling down at me.

‘Exactly.’ The thought of Patrick – steadfast, loyal Patrick – was fast sobering me up. ‘That’s why.’

‘Really? You don’t feel like it’s been building up between us ever since you turned up here?’

We stared at each other, our faces only inches apart. In one sense it was true, and in another it was an absolute falsehood. That younger, more vulnerable part of me had splintered off without
me knowing, it provided what she craved. Not the kiss, but the validation of it.

‘Not so we should’ve done anything about it. You just introduced me to your wife!’

‘Chill out, Mia, seriously. Fine. I misread your fucking confusing signals. Forget it.’

He ripped his fags out of his breast pocket with his left hand, scrabbling around for a light, then caught the cigarette between his full lips, his scowling profile lit up by the savage flame of
his lighter. We still hadn’t pulled apart – I knew it was imperative, and yet it seemed hypocritical to treat him like a predator when I’d co-authored this sorry mess.

A familiar voice called out. ‘Mia?’

‘She’ll definitely be lurking around here somewhere!’

And then they were there, right in front of us. Patrick, his face crumpling in on itself with hurt, and Kimberley, lit from within by her ugly sense of triumph.

Oh my God. Oh my God. First off, we took it too far, no question. When you’re leaning over a kiddie toilet, hoovering up lines, you’ve gone over
the edge. Lys looked at me like, is this bad? and then we took a bit more for the road. We were like gangsta rappers – Fuck The PTA. We kept chanting it and pissing ourselves
laughing.

Something happens here – the way it all looks so pretty, and it’s so ugly underneath. It makes everything twist out of shape. Last night Max begged me to read
him
The Gruffalo
for like, the millionth time, and I told him he didn’t need to beg, it’s my favourite story. All those scary animals coming out of the dark,
dark wood. It’s always dark here, even when the sun’s shining its heart out and it’s getting darker all the time. Thank God for Lysette.

I nearly told her tonight, when we were giggling and scraping the little white flecks off the top. I can see the pain in his eyes, the wanting – I saw it tonight. That
was when it hit me: it’s not that I’m not hurting anyone, it’s just that I’m choosing who to hurt. It was starting to eat away at me, wanting to be said, but then we skipped
back out there, all of them with their stupid answer sheets and their special trivia faces, and I got distracted. I saw them, the two of them, their heads pushed together like no one else could
know the answer. Like they were a double act. I felt this stabbing, deep inside, that sense of how much I love him. I’m addicted to him, I always have been. And then all I wanted was to win.
I wanted her to know I wasn’t just a stupid little waitress who got lucky.

There was too much flying around, silent agendas filling the space while it looked like all anyone cared about was how many African countries began with S. Kimberley saw, she
saw the way he looked at me, and then she couldn’t keep her eyes off me. I shouldn’t have been so stupid as to use my phone, but I had the devil in me by then.

She punished both of us that night. You could say I deserved it, but there’s no way he did. I’m not having it. I’ve got the devil in me all over again, but
it’s for different reasons now. She thinks she’s in control, that she’s pulling the strings. She’s got a shock coming. With everything that’s happened, everything
I’ve seen, I can cut them any time I like and she’ll be the one taking the fall. Her and all her fancy mates. They’ve got more to lose than any of us.

‘I don’t want to play your game.’

Max wasn’t the only one. Every time I thought about last night – and it was hard not to with a snare drum pounding out a relentless beat inside my aching temples – I felt
disgusted with myself. How had I got into that situation with Jim? It was so hard to switch my phone off and come into this session, try not to think about whether Patrick would have finally
responded to me.

‘Do you want to play a different game?’ I asked him, my voice bright and tinny.

I forced myself to focus: I needed to show up for him like I’d promised. A client of any size silently senses when you’re only half there. It was Max who’d pulled out Hungry
Hippos, laid it between us on the scratchy brown carpet of the reading corner, but now his face was mangled by a scowl.

‘I hate Hungry Hippos.’

‘Do you? So why do you think you got it out of the cupboard if actually you hate it?’

Max thought about it. His voice was a snarl when it came. ‘I thought
you
liked
Hungry Hippos
.’

‘Did you? I just asked if you wanted to play a game, and you went and got it.’

Was he trying to please me, then resenting me for making him do something he didn’t want to do? If he was, he wasn’t the only one. Every tiny event somehow managed to echo Patrick,
sending another shockwave of guilt and regret through my battered system. ‘What are you doing here?’ I’d stuttered, which was absolutely the wrong thing to say: what was
I
doing drunk and entwined with the ex-boyfriend I’d totally whitewashed out of my account of the last few weeks? I could see from his expression as his eyes burnt
into Jim that I wasn’t the only one who’d done some furtive Facebook stalking. Our lips may not have been locked, but the tension between us was as subtle as a blaring car alarm on a
suburban street. The hurt in Patrick’s face made any explanation turn to dry ash in my mouth.

‘You said you weren’t mad, you were disappointed. Well, I didn’t want to be a disappointment.’

The way he said it left no doubt as to who was the disappointment now. I sprang up, but I was left clutching a handful of his suit jacket. He was already pushing his way out: I chased him to the
car, but all I got was a few angry words, the suggestion I stay with a friend if I ever bothered to come home, and finally a mouthful of exhaust fumes. I’d sent him a Bible’s worth of
texts, left countless messages, but he was point blank refusing to respond. Could something so stupid, so meaningless, really have ruined things between us? I had to believe this state of affairs
was temporary.

‘Games are stupid,’ said Max, repetitively flicking the blue hippo’s plastic jaw. The crashing sound sent a bolt of pain through my head on every flick. ‘They’re
for babies.’

‘Not always. Even grown-ups play games sometimes.’

‘Only stupid grown-ups.’

His anger was simmering and spitting. I was actually quite heartened to see it: he had every right to be angry, and sending its flames out into the universe was infinitely better than letting
them burn away inside himself. The children who fatally struggle are the ones who make sense of the senseless by blaming themselves. They get scarred deep within where no one can see, whilst the
adults around them marvel at how well they’re ‘coping’.

‘Do you think that grown-ups are stupid sometimes?’ I asked.

I could answer that question for him very easily, I thought, as I subtly reached for the bottle of water I’d been forced to bring into session with me.

‘My mummy isn’t stupid,’ he said, defensive.

‘I know she isn’t. What words would you choose for your mummy if you could have any ones you liked?’

He plunged small hands into the plastic balls that had pooled between the hippos, letting them trickle through his fingers, then scrunched them up into tight fists. The energy felt taut, as if
he was summoning up all his inner strength to do her justice. I tried to silently send him support, my focus pin tight.

‘She is very, very pretty. Not now, now she’s buried in the ground – in the ground the maggots and worms eat you, that’s what William said – but she is also in
heaven, and there she is as pretty as when she’s going out and she says goodnight and she gives me a Marilyn kiss.’

‘What’s a Marilyn kiss?’ I asked.

He touched his cheek reverentially, grimy nails making black crescent moons against his pale skin.

‘When you kiss with red lipstick on and it leaves your lips behind. If I woke up and she wasn’t there, it meant she was still giving me a kiss.’

I saw her then, conjured up by his words, as clearly as if he’d caught her in a camera flash. She leant down deep over his small bed, perfume rising from her pores, white wine on her
breath, chestnut hair a heavy curtain that fell against exposed flesh. Her kiss was extravagant, rendered more so by the smacking sound she gave it. No wonder Max was so reverential.

‘Come on, Mia, you’re losing!’ he yelled. He thwacked the blue hippo’s lever again and again, gobbling up plastic balls. There was nothing for it: I hit the green
hippo’s lever, snaffling a few balls of my own. It felt like my brain was shaking inside my cranium – I forced myself not to think about the shameful reasons why. Max was manic now,
only sated once his hippo had gorged himself. He sat back on his haunches. ‘You are very, very shit at Hungry Hippos,’ he said, eyeing my reaction. ‘You are fuck at it.’

‘You definitely won,’ I agreed, tracking the trepidation that was rising in his face. ‘I bet you’re not allowed to swear like that at home. Or at school.’ We eyed
each other. ‘But I’m not angry if you use those words in here with me. We just have to agree they stay inside our session.’

‘OK,’ he said solemnly.

‘As long as you don’t hurt yourself, hurt anyone else or take something away with you when you leave, you can use our sessions however you like.’

Max took that in. ‘Fuck,’ he pronounced, clear and confident. ‘Poo,’ he added, voice rising an octave. ‘Wee. Fart.’

His face had lit up now.

‘How does it make you feel when you say those words?’ I asked him. I could see him struggle to find an answer and I jumped to my feet. ‘Poo!’ I shouted, jumping in the
air, all instinct. Max followed suit, springing up.

‘Wee!’ he shouted. His swearing dictionary had reassuring limitations. ‘Shit! Fart!’

He was grinning now, anger moving through his body and out into the ether. We jumped and shouted until we collapsed back down into a heap on the green beanbag, me trying not to think too hard
about the dubious brown stains that peppered it. He brought his body close to mine, almost touching, the beans shifting and sliding beneath our weight.

‘Was that fun?’ I asked him, looking down into his owlish face. He nodded, glasses wobbling on his nose. ‘I could talk to your daddy, and tell him we swore in a way that
wasn’t naughty. Sometimes when we’re angry or sad it can be good to find a way to turn it into a noise or a movement. Perhaps you and Daddy can come up with some different ways to do
that together?’

Max looked up at me, his face a picture of heartbreak. My own heart seized for a second, both for him and also not. I couldn’t allow Patrick’s stricken face to seep into my
consciousness as I looked into his.

‘I want my mummy to do that with me . . .’