said that twice: he thought I should know. The way he said it – even with the splits in his voice, the way it was balancing, like an adolescent boy, between high and deep – it seemed significant. Well thought out, as though he knew that knowledge was important in a marriage, that it was correct. He was careful to use surnames, for everyone. To make it official. He had a serious, professor’s voice, maybe that was it. I have always had a weakness for listening to academic men, for believing what they say. I trained in the art of this at one point.
And so when I heard him say those words, the first thing I did was nod, very quickly, and put the chicken down.
4
I imagined how a woman in a film would react, on receiving this news. She would shake: I held out my hand, to see if it was shaking. But my hands have always had a slight tremor. I watched my fingers, their individual movements, separate creatures twitching in the kitchen lights.
The TV continued in the next room, pulsing on regardless. When I was a child I was disappointed to realize that television would not keep me safe: I had thought of it as an intelligent presence, able to sense danger. But then I saw a police reconstruction of a murder, and the woman was dead on her sofa, the TV talking over her head.
Please can I have a drink, Mummy! We had taught the children to say please, but had not taught them to come into the kitchen and pour water from a plastic jug set at a low height. We had not done this, and yet we blamed them, rolled our eyes at each other whenever they called out to us, their servants. When I was alone it was easier to be a servant, to lose myself in this particular pattern of movement, from cupboard to sink, sink to hallway to their thirsty faces. People complain that women lose themselves to motherhood, but aren’t so many of the things we do an attempt to lose ourselves? I never minded the practical aspects much: the fetching and carrying, the work of the hands.
I started the dinner. I could only make a few dishes, simple things mostly. I had a whole shelf of recipe books, like most people do, and I cooked from them, occasionally, in a new-year burst of good intentions, or a sudden inclination following a dream. But these recipes never stuck, however simple. This is what stuck: a chicken breast, sliced into sections, each part lowered into a bowl of seasoned flour. Even seasoning the flour felt fancy, the faith that salt and pepper would somehow cling to the white powder and make some difference to the taste of the chicken. Cooking always seemed mysterious to me, the art of the unseen.
As I sliced the chicken, I noticed that it had changed, the fibres of the meat altered, more granular, the skinless surface almost opalescent. I am a woman whose husband is having an affair, I said to myself in my head, as though these words would make some difference to reality. Then I said them out loud, wanting to taste the phrase under my tongue, to pass its particular rhythms through my lips. I said her name.
Vanessa. The first times I saw her: laughing at our Christmas party. A soft handshake at a work do, then later: straight backed, clapping. A neat suit jacket, her hair tucked behind her ears. Where did she buy those jackets? I imagined that she had a personal shopper, someone who presented her with racks of almost identical jackets, described their subtle differences of tailoring. Vanessa Holmes. A raised eyebrow, plucked to a wisp, the tail of a tiny animal.
I noticed that I felt sick; I noticed this as you would notice that a book has fallen from a shelf: impartially, at a distance. When I was offered pethidine in labour with Paddy, they said it wouldn’t take away the pain, but it would make me care about it less. You’ll see it there, said the midwife, but it won’t matter to you. It appealed to me, this separate pain, but there was no time to take the drugs, as suddenly Paddy was coming, and the choice was gone.
After the chicken was cut I squeezed an entire lemon over the top, like my mother taught me to do. My mother didn’t like cooking, but she knew certain things. She knew about clamping your fist down on the thick yellow skin, digging your nails in, squeezing tight. As I did it I noticed – apart again, from a small space away – how it made me feel, as though a cool wind was blowing through my chest. I squeezed harder, the juice falling into the sizzling pan, my teeth coming together, my jaw clenched. I kept doing it, feeling my face contorting into an ugly shape. When I had finished – when there was not one drop of lemon juice left in that fruit – I turned around to throw the skin away. Ted was there in the doorway watching me, his mouth hanging half open.
~
There is a trail of anger flowing through my bloodline, from my great-grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me. Perhaps it goes even further back too, to my great-great-grandmother, who had twelve children, three of whom died.
One of them, so the story goes, was left out in a pram until his face blistered over in the sun. This is a story I have known since childhood, but when I told it to my mother, she said that I had made it up. I am left with the mystery of this woman of many children; was she too busy to notice the baby in the pram? Did she forget?
~
5
It was the worst-case scenario: he was back past eight o’clock, the boys asleep, me wide awake, curled in Ted’s bed, my arms around him for comfort. It is wrong to look to your children for comfort, I knew that. And yet I had so many moments like this: after a bad afternoon, a bad year, his body against mine, his sleep the most soothing rhythm I could imagine. I had sung Ted to sleep that night; he’d asked for it, even after Paddy clamped his hands over his ears and howled Shut up! Both boys, in fact, had lain down quietly in the end, and I had sung until my throat was sore and the phone message seemed abstract, only very distantly dangerous, like a firework alight in the sky.
I heard the scrape and accordion-like breath of the door, so familiar, Jake’s steps, his bag going down on the chair beside the table. I didn’t move. Jake called out, softly, from the bottom of the stairs. He might have thought I was still wrestling with the consciousnesses of our children, pushing them into the softness of sleep. Too often, he had come up just at the point when Ted’s eyelids were drooping, and I’d had to start the whole process again. So he only called once. I heard him go into the kitchen, shut the door, put his dinner in the microwave.
I think my parents were liberal with television too, because all I saw when I imagined dramatic scenarios in my life were those in TV shows: certain episodes I’d seen over and over, that seemed to have greater texture than my own existence. I could not think of a way to confront Jake that did not feel scripted, stilted, too cheesy or on the nose. I could fling myself at him, pummel his chest with my fists, demand that he tell me everything. I could, carefully and without crying, cut every single one of his work shirts into shreds. I could—
Ted stirred, his arm surprisingly heavy and strong in his sleep, falling backwards like part of a sail turned by the wind. He moaned something indecipherable, made an attempt to stretch out on the whole bed. I was going to have to leave. I thought of creeping upstairs, to our room, pretending to be asleep, but the thought was too lonely, too cold somehow, as though I could already feel the emptiness of the sheets, the particular creak the bed would make when Jake eventually came up, found me with my eyes closed.
As I started down the stairs, I briefly considered acting as if I didn’t know, but the precariousness of this was obvious – she would tell him. And at the thought of her – the name had become unbearable, suddenly – something changed. Something became untethered inside me, as I had often feared it would, one organ seeming to break free from the rest, left to float, uprooted, around my body.
For as long as I could remember, I’d had a terror of my own heart. As a ten-year-old, I insisted that it was missing beats, ended up with my flat chest covered in circular plastic suckers at the doctors. My heart, it was proclaimed, was healthy. At sixteen,
