you enter your forties, it feels like the bad news overtakes the good. More cheating spouses and tests on breast lumps, and a lot fewer mini-breaks to Paris. I’d seen enough marriages crumble to know the risks.
I suppose I’d always thought, maybe a bit smugly, that Simon and I were solid. Solid as a big, immovable, maybe not particularly inspiring, rock. More Scafell Pike than Kilimanjaro, but still solid.
‘Mum,’ shouted Ollie, having walked into the room without me so much as noticing his size ten feet stomping through the hallway, ‘stop!’
‘Stop what?’ I said, wiping my hands on the tea towel. My face was wet. I hadn’t even noticed I’d been crying. I wiped that with the tea towel too.
‘Stop spreading mayo on that chocolate log, because it’s going to taste like puke – are you going senile or what? And are you…crying?’
I glanced down. It looked a bit like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where everybody was trying to sculpt a big hill out of mashed potato. Except ruder – because a chocolate log covered in a white creamy substance does look kind of gross.
I scraped it all into the bin and took a deep breath. The tears were still flowing. Even if my brain wasn’t quite processing what was going on, my emotions had kicked in against my will. I swiped my fingers across my face to wipe the tears away, smearing my cheeks with chocolate mayo cake.
Should I tell the kids or not? Was there any point, if it wasn’t real? Perhaps I needed to read that e-mail again. He had said it wasn’t to do with me. That he just had some issues to work through. Maybe he’d go on a retreat to Tibet and fix himself, and all this emotion would have been for nothing.
Maybe I should wait and see what happened. What he had to say for himself. The Simon I knew, the Simon I’d loved for so long, wouldn’t do this. Maybe it was just a rough patch. Maybe he’d come round tomorrow, see me in my finest negligee and realise the error of his ways. He’d come crying into my arms, and bury his head in my heaving bosom…except I don’t own a negligee. Or anything more sexy than a T-shirt from the local garage that says ‘Honk here for service’ across the boobs.
When you’ve been married for seventeen years, have two teenaged children and are almost forty, you’re more likely to be shopping at Mother Malone’s Big Knicker Emporium than Ann Summers. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I should have been greeting Simon at the door every night dressed in garter belts and stockings, bearing a G&T with a blow-job chaser.
‘Come and sit down, Mum, I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ Ollie was saying, carefully taking the knife from my hands and putting it on top of the fridge. He gently placed his arm round my shoulders and guided me over to the sofa. He’s already much taller than my five foot five, and it’s disconcerting to have to look up at your own baby.
I realised then how seriously he was taking my newfound pallor and altered mental state – he’d actually taken his iPod earphones out, and they were dangling like silver tendrils down the front of his I Heart Tolkien T-shirt.
‘What’s up, Mum? You look terrible. Has there been an accident? Is it Lucy? Have you finally accepted you should have let that priest do the exorcism when you were up the duff?’
His lame attempt at humour both warmed my heart and made me feel even worse. I felt more tears welling up in my eyes, running down my face in big, fat, chocolaty drops, pooling under my chin and making my neck soggy.
I stared into space while the deluge continued, barely able to breathe between sobs, lovely Ollie patting my hand and looking slightly more hysterical with every passing moment.
He jumped up as he heard the front door slam – I don’t think he’d have cared if it was a gas salesman, or a hooded figure carrying a scythe. It was the cavalry as far as he was concerned.
My own heart did an equally big jig – was it him? Was it Simon, coming home to tell me it had all been a mistake? Telling me he was sorry? Telling me to forget all about it? I felt so impossibly weak, so impossibly broken by his proposed absence, that the thought of him walking back through that door was like being zapped by a defibrillator.
‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ Lucy shrilled at us as she stormed into the living room. Not Simon after all. Someone much scarier.
Lucy is five foot eight, most of it legs, and does a very good storm. Hands on hips, she stared down at her weeping mother, fidgeting brother, and the tea towel smeared with the remains of mayo-on-sponge. She narrowed her eyes and threw her head back. Her hair didn’t budge – probably because it was dyed midnight blue-black, straightened, and glued to her head with industrial-strength hairspray.
‘Tash, Soph!’ she yelled. ‘Bugger off, will you? Mommy dearest is having some kind of spaz attack and I need to deal with the dramatics…’
I heard a very impolite sniggering from the hallway, and a slight creak of the door as the Devil’s Daughters sneaked a peek at the crazy woman.
They might listen to a lot of songs about the unbearable agonies of stubbing your toe on a guitar amp, but they had no empathy with a real-life human being at all. They’d be more upset at missing an episode of The Vampire Diaries than seeing me in tears, and I’d known them since they were four. They departed in a fit of giggles.
Lucy looked down at me, not knowing quite how to behave for a change. Her usual loving approach – verbal abuse combined with facial representations of complete contempt – normally served her well, but she was clearly a bit unsettled by all the tears.
‘Okay, Mother, what’s the big deal? I know this is probably just some stupid retarded midlife crisis, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt – have you got cancer?’
Momentarily thrown by a worldview where having cancer was preferable to a midlife crisis, I managed to stop my sniffling and stem the torrential waterworks. Attagirl, Lucy.
‘No, I haven’t got cancer,’ I said, feeling poor Ollie deflate slightly beside me with relief – he’d obviously feared something similar. But, unlike my darling daughter, he’d actually given a shit.
‘It’s your dad…’
‘Has he got cancer?’ interrupted Lucy, kicking her Converse-clad feet impatiently against the coffee table. She was dressed in leggings with black and purple hoops, and could have passed for the Wicked Witch of the West.
‘And if he has got cancer, is it in some disgusting place like his testicles? Because I’m telling you now there is no way I am going to sit around listening to people discuss my dad’s balls—’
‘No, no, your dad’s balls are fine…well, I suppose they are, I haven’t seen them up close recently…’
‘Oh, gross, Mum!’ cried Ollie, making gagging gestures with his fingers in his throat and pretending to vomit. Lucy looked similarly disgusted at the mere mention of me in close proximity to her father’s genitals. Clearly she preferred the theory that she had been hand-delivered by Satan’s stork.
‘Oh, just shut up, both of you!’ I said. ‘Your dad, and his testicles, are okay – but he’s leaving us. No, that’s not right. Not us – me. He’s leaving me. For a while. Just for a bit, while he gets his head together. I’m probably being dramatic for no reason. But…well, I only just found out. He told me today. Kind of. He e-mailed me today, actually—’
‘Hang
