I take the stir-fry off the heat.
‘Well, your make-up’s smudged.’
‘Are you criticising me again?’ you ask with a smile. An over-egged smile that doesn’t quite work. Carly, sometimes your smile frightens me.
I serve the food into large china bowls and we sit opposite each other at the table, a lighted candle and the cruet between us. Without tasting my endeavours you take the salt and pepper and lash it across your food. I want to reprimand you. But I cannot. You are like an awkward teenager and I need to address one issue at a time. And tonight I have a more important mission. I take a forkful of food.
‘Carly, why did you slap Matt on the way back from Snakes and Ladders?’
‘He deserved it,’ you say violently. A pause. ‘Are you going to call the police?’
‘Of course not.’
I lean across the table and put my hand on your arm. ‘I just want to talk about it.’
‘I’m not one of your patients, Rob. Leave me alone.’
I remove my arm. We sit and eat in silence for a while. I can’t resist saying more.
‘Are you still cross with me about Jenni?’ I ask softly.
‘It shocked me that you want to fuck her.’ You emphasise the word fuck almost jubilantly; its guttural ending spitting out of your mouth.
‘Fuck her? When did I say that?’
‘That’s what you meant, isn’t it?’
‘You twisted my words. You pushed me.’ I pause. ‘Please, Carly, stop this. I love you.’
Rob is in bed before me; he always is. I slide in next to him and he moves towards me across our silken sheets.
My luck is in.
I know he wants sex.
Last night he was too tired, and as soon as I got into bed he told me, by rolling over into his sleeping position: on his side, elbow out. The position he always uses when he isn’t interested. But not so tonight.
He is hot.
I can smell it.
He moves towards me, erect. He pushes my hands behind my back with one hand, puts a pillow under my rear with his other and goes down on me. I love this. Every flick of his tongue is exquisite. Perfect. Delicious. Whipping me into a frenzy of lust so perfect that as soon as he enters me I am ready to climax. But I hold off because I want more – I want this to last forever. Wrapping my legs around him, I push him further into me, pressing my feet against his bum. Thrashing. Gyrating. Moaning uncontrollably. I reach for his balls and squeeze them, climaxing hard. This is beautiful. This is what I need.
Rob is a gentleman. A real gentleman. My joy is his aphrodisiac. Now I have finished he lets himself go; jerking, grunting in my ear and juddering. We fall apart exhausted, exhilarated. I am still so charged it will be a while before I sleep. He closes his eyes and I can sense the moment he slips into dreams. I wait until I am sure he is sleeping, then I get out of bed and head for the bathroom. I sit on the toilet in our compact en-suite, but my nervous system is still so charged that I cannot urinate. Instead, I play with my clitoris. Legs apart on the lavatory is a good position. I climax again.
This time I am thinking of Craig.
I am living within my own personal nightmare, the sort we all have to wade through at some point in our lives. Nothing seems real. Nothing tangible. One day I will wake up to find that this is not really happening – that my sixty-six-year-old mother will carry on mothering me forever.
Craig has tried to comfort me. He held me in bed while I cried. He listened to me when I vented my anger – listened with his ears and with his eyes.
Rob came round to see me a few afternoons ago, when I was still at home on my own with the children. He fitted me in in the middle of his home visits. I made him a cup of tea and he stayed for an hour, making me feel guilty for taking up his time. When he left, he pressed his card with his mobile number on it into my hand in case I needed any advice – day or night. He told me the dire statistics for my mother’s stage of ovarian cancer and lectured me on pain relief. I asked how Carly was because I hadn’t seen her since our dinner party. He didn’t reply as he was too busy fussing over my mother.
Carly. I think of her blue eyes, the deep blue of the sea. I didn’t manage to pop and see her before I left, but I know from Craig that she is helping me, by helping him with the children while I stay with my father in Chessingfold, over an hour away. My mother is incarcerated in St Richard’s Hospital, laid low by her chemo, so I’m chauffeuring him between their bungalow and the ward. And Craig, my rock, my brick, is looking after the kids on his break between shifts. Even though I miss him and the children dreadfully, I don’t want the little ones here at the moment. They must not see my mother like this.
My parents’ bungalow is packed with family treasures and memories; photographs, ornaments, tarnished silver cutlery. A conch shell I found on the beach when I was three. When I hold it to my ear I can still hear the sea. I spend too much time looking into the past, not knowing who worries me more; Mum or Dad. They met at school when they were fourteen. A lifetime together. I don’t suppose they can remember a life apart. Dad hardly leaves my mother’s side. He sits with her while she has her chemo, watching its poison drip into her body. He sits with her as she sleeps.
Two days after Jenni has left to be with her mother, the object of my now regular late night masturbation is standing on my doorstep. In my fantasy, he is a cross between Jude Law and David Beckham. In reality, he is a slightly overweight thirty-eight-year-old man with a dimple, wearing jeans with holes in and a Canadian-style woodcutter shirt. Rob has been called out to an emergency; a suspected severe stroke in one of his elderly patients. Craig steps into the dull light of my hallway and towers above me. He is a big man. Much bigger than Rob.
‘Thanks for having the children,’ he says.
‘My pleasure. Did my usual. Another trip to Snakes and Ladders.’ I smile at him. ‘How’s Jenni getting on? I haven’t had a chance to ring her.’
‘No news is good news. Her mother’s holding on at the moment.’
I put my hand on his arm. ‘It must be awful for her.’
He follows me into the sitting room, which is superficially tidy, the usual litter of plastic toys thrown into the cupboard at high speed.
‘They’re all asleep,’ I continue. ‘Exhausted. You can leave them here tonight if you like. I’ll run
