terrified of getting in touch with his emotions, but I don’t want that. Happiness isn’t fear. Fear leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side … I know because Ben and his mate Iggy watch Star Wars constantly – the DVD Special Edition, the Director’s Cut Four Disc DVD, the Special Director’s Cut Ten Disc Super Edition. Cue Darth Vader heavy breathing. But I’m not ready for the dark side. I can still feel the force, even if Ben can’t. And I’ve always been afraid of the dark …
I suppose I should acknowledge that Ben thinks he’s just fine. ‘Men don’t talk,’ he says, like that’s reason enough for us not to sort things out, not to be happy.
I throw my phone into my bag in despair. My head is hot but the rain cools the air around me as I feel my face crack and crumble like an earthquake in a desert, my make-up disintegrating as I start to cry.
I startle myself with a short sharp laugh of surprise.
Then I cry again.
The prospect of leaving Ben makes me shake. I cannot contemplate being without him, of how scared I am of being alone no matter how cowardly it makes me feel … I desperately grab in my bag for my phone again, as if I am suddenly on a ten-second deadline and if I don’t speak to him before the timer runs out our relationship will explode. I find it and claw it open, and hit his number.
I just need to hear his voice. I need us to say important things that cement our feelings for each other somehow, so that I can get through the day. Ben and I don’t discuss marriage or kids, because I don’t want to put too much pressure on him. But, then, I am thirty-one now and I want those things, and maybe he does too. Lots of other people do, so why not us, and why am I so scared to say it? I don’t have to goad him into loving me and then, and only when he tells me he is ready, will we be allowed to admit that we want babies. I am not going to be scared to say that I want to have children anymore! Maybe if I just say it then he will too …
It rings five times before he answers and I immediately say, ‘Ben, it’s me.’
‘I’m working …’
‘I want to have children.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I want you to know that I want to have children.’
‘Right …’
‘And?’
‘And what? I’m working …’
‘I am telling you that I want to have children.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose you do …’
‘Well what do you think?’
‘About what?’
‘About having children?’
‘I think I want to have them too …’
He sounds like he is searching desperately for the right answer on some quiz show, like Blockbusters: ‘I’ll have whatever will make her stop talking please, Bob?’
‘Soon?’ I ask. ‘Do you want to have them soon?’
‘I … I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘Well … what do you think about?’
‘What? I’m working.’
‘Yes, but I’m thirty-one.’
‘Right …’
‘I think about things … about marriage … and stuff …’
‘Right …’
‘What do you think about those things?’
‘I … I don’t know … Scarlet, I’m working …’
‘Oh, okay, do you want to talk about it later?’
‘I … I don’t know … maybe … another time …’
I want to cry. Again. I realise we haven’t even had a conversation. Ben has just deflected me. I kick my words at him like weak volleys to his chest. He doesn’t even have to move off his spot. He doesn’t even have to stretch. He just stands there and bats me away with ‘maybes’ and ‘I don’t knows’ and I don’t even challenge him for anything more. A stronger woman would punch that ball back out of his hands, make him stand three feet from the penalty spot, then fire it at his testes. But I am not that woman … I thought that I was, but then I met Ben. If one person shuts down eventually the other one does too. I kick like a girl now.
‘Okay, I’ll see you later then,’ he says, finishing the conversation off.
‘You can’t wait to get off the phone, can you?’
‘No, it’s not that, but I’m working.’
I can hear his mates in the store laughing in the background. I can hear that they are watching Dude, Where’s My Car? again.
‘But … but what about … I just … Okay, fine. I’ll see you later.’
The phone line goes dead.
I don’t know who is more scared, me or Ben? It’s like Halloween round at our flat. But it’s the prospect of staying with him as our relationship rots beneath us that scares me the most.
And what if there is nobody else out there for me? Helen always tells me not to be ridiculous when I say that, but I worry that Ben and I just don’t try anymore, and what will make that any easier with somebody else? Maybe I am just creating problems, but I have a head full of questions. Maybe he’s having an affair? Maybe he doesn’t like sex? Or intimacy? Or anything that means you have to be close to another person? This is the man I want to marry, a man who won’t even give me a hug unless I ask for it and sometimes not even then. Will we even kiss at the altar?
Of course, the thought that constantly lingers is: Why did you leave your wife if you don’t love me? Did you start loving me and then stop? Are you seeing her again? I know they didn’t do ‘public displays of affection’, or ‘pda’s’ as Ben once described them. I thought expressions like that were the reserve of eight-year-old girls. At the time I wasn’t even talking about a passionate kiss, I was asking him for a peck on the lips on a half-full Virgin train. But Ben won’t do public displays of affection, not on a train, not now. The obvious question is of course, why?
But Ben won’t ask the ‘why’ questions either. He says ‘this is who I am’, even if he knows it won’t make him happy. As long as he can’t get upset, then he need never ask ‘Why?’
I don’t want that life. I want a deliberate passionate honest time.
It’s my mother’s fault for calling me Scarlet.
You can’t give a child that name and not expect her to live …
There is a loud cough – somebody is lurking awkwardly at the end of the corridor and has probably heard my entire conversation with Ben, and has certainly seen me standing here crying like some pathetic soap-opera wife.
