meant to record the incidents I kept feeling, my heart fluctuating, squirrelling, trying to break free.
I had been given the all-clear that time too, and no longer felt I could mention the things my heart did, all of its dives, its inversions, its battle for release. I gripped the railing of the stairs, feeling wrongness squirm and flip somewhere unseen. By the time I was standing in front of Jake, I was sweating, breathing quickly: I hardly needed to say a thing.
6
Jake got me a glass of water, running the tap until it was cold, testing the temperature with his hand, so that the glass he gave me was slippery with wetness, its contents fresh and cool as though they were from a spring. I gulped the whole thing, gasping between swallows.
He kept his eyes on me: usually by this point he’d be moaning about the train, about the other commuters – so packed, so bloody rude – speaking with his mouth full, gesturing with his fork. But now he was placing the food into his mouth slowly, deliberately, watching me.
How was your day? he said instead, putting as much normality into the question as possible. Sometimes I thought this was the worst thing about being married: the way you get to know exactly what every tone means, every gesture, every single movement. Sometimes, even before this happened, I would long for a misunderstanding, to have no idea what he meant.
I put the glass down, pulled the sleeves of my cardigan over my hands. I let the silence be for a few seconds, feeling the innocence in it, the reality of our life, the thousands of days without this knowledge.
Jake, I spoke to – for a second I thought that I was going to forget his name, that this is what would save us, after all. Forgetfulness, some boring name given to someone decades ago lost, slipping by, letting Jake get away with it.
David Holmes – there it was, words caught on a hook. He told me – about you and Vanessa.
I swallowed, looked up. Jake held his fork in mid-air. I had expected immediate remorse, his face crumpling with it – this would be new, in fact. I had never seen that before. But instead he looked angry, that old dog, the irritation creeping up his features. He shook his head.
Fucking wanker. He dropped his fork so that it fell on the plate, such a small, domestic noise. Nothing that the neighbours would notice. He scraped back his chair abruptly – they might have noticed that, the walls were thin – then walked around the kitchen leaning his neck back, cradling it in his own hands.
He seemed to have forgotten that I was there, feeling tiny now, at the table, my legs crossed, the panic subsided and replaced by the water I had drunk, its waves breaking inside me.
He carried on walking up and down, as though deciding something. He came towards me, his face different, younger somehow, new emotions, new skin, his knees down on the ground, his hands reaching up for mine.
Lucy. Lucy, please – it was – it’s no t —
He was trying not to speak in clichés, I could tell. Trying not to say all the things we’d both seen, a thousand times. All of those stupid, broken, fictional couples on television, not even able to find their own original language. And here we were.
Vanessa? I couldn’t help it. Her name filled my mouth, sat on my tongue. Vanessa? That sound at the end, sibilance giving way to an open mouth, a gape.
She’s so – you promised me. These words through my teeth, as though opening my mouth again would be a mistake.
I’m going to end it. Jake mumbled this into my hands, which I knew must smell of the moisturizer I rubbed on Paddy’s eczema before bed, a bitter, chemical-rich tang.
I’m going to— He was crying now, and this was the thing that finally disgusted me, that made me jump from the chair.
I had seen my father cry once. They used to rip each other to scraps, my parents. Domestic violence, a therapist once called it. But we never talked about it like that. Even an hour later, Dad could be humming again, frying bacon for dinner, a roll-up at the side of his mouth. But that time, he was at the kitchen table with his hands over his face. And he was sobbing, loudly, nothing like a little boy or a woman. Like a man.
Sleep on the fucking sofa, I snarled at Jake, a rose bush, a tarantula, a creature endlessly thorned and sharp-toothed, something that could spring at any moment. The fucking sofa, kids in bed, husband crying on the kitchen floor – cliché after cliché – how did it happen? At that moment it was infinitely mysterious, the way we had ended up like everyone else. The mystery felt almost like God had as a child, in church – something barely present, endlessly unknown, never to be brought fully into the light.
~
When I was a child, there was a book – out of print now, expensive – about a unicorn who went into the sea and became a narwhal. The book had beautiful illustrations, dark blue seas, peach-pale evening skies. But the picture I remembered best was of the harpies: dark shadows, birds with women’s faces, who came down to torture the unicorn, to make him suffer.
I asked my mother what a harpy was; she told me that they punish men, for the things they do.
~
7
The day afterwards, we stuck to the usual, and I was grateful for it, at first. Jake brought me a cup of tea, and I sipped it in bed, watching him interact with the children, watching his normality, his smiles. Paddy was talking to him intently about some rare species of shark – a goblin shark – and they spent time looking up images of the monstrous thing online, both of them in their pyjamas. Ted was under the covers with me, still half submerged in sleep, his eyes only just visible over the duvet.
They had a friend’s birthday party that day, and we went together, sipped thin cups of coffee in the soft-play centre, chatted to the other parents about swimming clubs and the new teacher. Jake only spoke to other dads: I noticed that I felt an obscure gratitude for this, as though it was a gift to me, a bird with a mouse in its mouth. I felt a curiously strong urge to tell one of the other mums, to drag someone into the bathrooms with plywood dividers, like we were teenagers. I could have chosen Mary: she and her husband had sex on Saturday mornings, I knew that already. She let it slip during an otherwise typical comparative conversation about screen time, during which I felt I was minimizing my stats, and she was maximizing hers. We only let them on Saturday mornings, she’d said. So we can have some time.
Despite this confession, her revelations went no further. Nobody’s ever did. I had tried being candid before, at book groups and PTA socials, and it never ended well. Once, drunk on prosecco and inadequately fed on sushi, I’d asked what contraception people used. The silence was acute.
We should be so lucky, someone joked, and laughed. Everyone laughed. End of conversation.
I wondered if they all secretly had coils, jagged, effective pieces of metal in their wombs. I kept considering one but couldn’t face it, couldn’t bear the thought of someone pushing their hand right inside me. After one difficult natural birth and one caesarean, I felt that my body had closed over for gynaecological intervention, forever. I’d recently psyched myself up for weeks to get a smear test only to have it cancelled as the nurse stared into me. You’re still bleeding, she’d said, and it had sounded like an admonishment.
After the party, we
