Precocious Read online

  I hug Laura tight, but when I leave here I call you, and immediately delete the call history, covering my tracks, just as I cover myself with perfume to mask your smell when I go back to my husband.

  eight

  You’ve announced you can spare a ‘whole day’ for me. You’re uncharacteristically excited when you tell me this and we spend ten minutes on the phone, like teenagers arranging a first date.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I ask.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘We could go to the seaside. Blackpool!’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  ‘Okay, your turn.’

  ‘I was thinking a stately home … a picnic.’

  ‘Snore!’

  ‘A museum? Art gallery?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You used to like that kind of thing.’

  ‘Well, I was trying to impress you then. Besides, I want fresh air.’

  ‘Okay, you win. Blackpool. I’ll pick you up at nine. The usual place.’

  I don’t know what made me suggest it; I find British seaside towns, especially Blackpool, kind of sad. It’s not the same place that was captured in muted colours on our childhood photographs: boy posing next to his sandcastle; me in a flowery hat, licking an ice-cream; Mum’s bikini seeming to be evidence that summers really were hotter then. The Tower imperious in the background against an improbably blue sky.

  Everything looks tawdry now. Even though, being half term, it’s busy with families, who mill through the arcades and bustle on and off trams just the way we used to, the sour, hung-over taste of stag and hen parties, of bloody fights and half-eaten kebabs, lingers in the air.

  ‘Look at the donkeys,’ I frown, ‘they don’t look happy.’ We’re walking along the front, the famous Golden Mile, hand in hand, anonymous in the crowd. Slow pressure of your thumb across my knuckles.

  You laugh, ‘I shouldn’t think they are, endless tourists dumping their fat kids on their backs and forcing them to trot up and down all day.’ Peering at me, ‘I do hope you didn’t think you were going to get me on a donkey?’

  ‘You, the animal lover? Hardly,’ I squeeze your hand, ‘but I do think we should get fish and chips.’

  ‘Nah, not fish and chips – mussels. Cockles and mussels. Come on,’ and, whistling the song, you pull me to a nearby van where a man in a blue-and-white-striped hat cheerfully takes your money in exchange for two polystyrene cups of unidentifiable seafood bobbing in nostril-stinging vinegar.

  Miraculously we find a bench and, looking out over the choppy grey sea, I feel the happiest I’ve ever been.

  ‘I’ve told you my stories,’ I say when we’re walking again. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing these past fifteen years?’

  You take my hand to your lips and kiss it.

  ‘Nothing as important as what I’m doing now.’

  It’s not an answer, really, I know this, but I like it and I accept the silence you obviously want to offer, because it gives me the opportunity to really look at you. You’ve put on weight, of course, in fifteen years, but you still have the shape of a swimmer: broad shoulders, narrow waist. Your clothes hang on you in a way I’ve never seen on another man, clinging to your shoulders and chest, loose around your flat stomach, which I glimpsed when you stretched after getting up from the bench. A neat line of hair snaking to your waistband. You still have a body that I ache to touch, giving me a physical, smarting sensation made all the more acute by the fact that you permit it so infrequently. You’re not a ‘touchy-feely’ person, you told me this all those years ago, so when you do bestow contact, affection, I’m pathetically grateful to receive it.

  Everyone has one feature, I think, that makes them attractive in a way unique to them. Yours is your eyes: the colour of dull steel, of stone, of the undulating Irish sea. One minute impenetrable, the next, flickering with mischief, glinting. I want to make it my life’s work to put light in those eyes. To make them burn.

  The wind has blown sand into our hair and our skin is covered in a film of salty spray. You suggest a shower, but we’ll have to go back to yours for that, of course (said with a wink). In the car I trot out my feeble married-woman lines (‘I can’t, I shouldn’t’) and this time you’re the one doing the persuading, in your calm, logical way. ‘You’ve done it already. What difference does one more time make?’

  But your driving isn’t calm, it’s fast and erratic, and when we reach your house, as soon as the door closes we fall into each other.

  There are things to do, at home. There is cooking, and paying bills, and touching up the paintwork on the skirting boards, and there is always, always cleaning to do.

  When we argue, I clean. When I feel guilty, I clean. At least I can be a good wife in this one way, if in no other, is what I tell myself. But then I catch myself wiping a work surface and shying away from the very back, or hoovering around the sofa but not under it, or brushing crumbs into the air, and I realise, I am like my mother after all. All show, and no real effort.

  So I scrub and scrub until my hands are raw, deliberately using bleach although I am allergic to it. No gloves. My hands swell and turn red, angry. I look at them: scarlet woman. My eyes stream. The bathroom gleams.

  There are no things to do, with you, except philosophise, posture (we make each other and ourselves laugh with our grand ideas – our plans for world domination – the sweeping pictures we paint with words), look at art, talk about books. We drink wine, we drink coffee. We lie silently listening to music: Dylan, and Janis Joplin, and Tchaikovsky. We watch Manhattan, and Annie Hall, smoking and crying and laughing.

  You ask me to move in with you, but you ‘won’t be the reason’ why I leave my marriage. I tell you you’re not, it’s on the rocks anyway. But I’m unsure, in my heart, how true this is. I think you’ve watered the seeds of decay that were already there, that exist in the soil of any long-term relationship – the petty disagreements, the small daily grievances and irritations – most people leave them covered and get on with managing the surface; you’ve just turned everything over and brought them to light.

  I wonder aloud if this craziness that is you and me can be sustained.

  (Mari’s words in my ears: ‘Same shit, different pair of shoes under the bed.’)

  ‘Who cares?’ you shrug. ‘Why not try?’

  The answer to ‘why not’, of course, is Dave. His pleading eyes. Even when we argue, when I deliberately provoke him in my vain efforts to get him to do or say something that will justify the way I’m treating him, his eyes are always saying ‘please’. I stop being able to look at them.

  The trouble is that love comes as a deceiver, a flatterer, a cheat. It makes you believe you are the only two people in the world who have ever felt it. Felt this. Okay, other people have been in love, you might say, but no one has felt this. No one feels like we do.

  The trouble is, everyone is saying that. You may have said it yourself several times, but by the next time you’ve forgotten.

  Love is a great eliminator of memory.

  I love you.

  That’s all.

  Guilt infects my sleep. In my dreams, Dave is flicking through photographs and he finds one of you. I move to cover it, but I can’t reach.

  In the photograph, your back is to the camera and your head is turned over your shoulder, as though someone has just called your name. There is a surprised look on your face. Dave’s fingers rest on this miniature version of you, his hand bigger than the whole of you. He touches your shoulder as though trying to unpeel you from the picture, turn you around, see you front-on.

  My heart pounds, full of excuses and lies, but nothing comes out of my mouth, and I feel as though I’m drowning, and then I wake up with a sudden feeling of having been winded.

  The realisation of what I’ve done is heavy in the pit of my stomach. And small and dark, the realisation that it can’t be undone.

  The times before you arrived again are a distant country, filled with i
nnocence.

  There was such an overwhelming sense of relief when you reappeared that I never stopped to think what the effects on my normality would be. It was as though for years I’d been holding my breath without realising it, and finally I was allowed to exhale.

  In the intoxication of release I saw only magic, nothing sinister, nothing that could do any harm.

  When you convince yourself that something is ‘meant to be’, when something feels so good that it can’t possibly not be ‘right’, it absolves you of some of the guilt. In some strange way you also imagine that it could not possibly hurt the other person. The Other Person, The Husband, suddenly relegated to Third Party status. It – The Thing, The Feeling – is ethereal, other-worldly: surely it can’t touch your husband, and all the base matter of your earthly life.

  But it’s foolish now to continue to believe that you don’t affect my everyday existence. When an ordinary evening on the sofa descends into tears; when Dave’s concerned, if slightly irritated ‘What’s wrong with you?’ elicits only an animal cry that he can’t understand the meaning of, or doesn’t want to.

  I try to tell myself that he hasn’t noticed anything, but he’s started getting up earlier. They say getting up excessively early or staying up late means you’re avoiding your bed and what it represents, and ours has been the scene of, apart from the obvious, some of our most important conversations, our closest cuddles.

  I, on the other hand, although struggling with sleep, lie in; avoiding reality, I suppose.

  Some days I’m jaunty, springing around the house unable to stop myself from whistling Dolly Parton’s ‘Here You Come Again’, a foolish grin on my face. Other days I’m morose, I either rattle about, a bear in a too-small cage, or sit on the sofa for interminable minutes, staring at the wall.

  Dave mostly ignores the bad moods and tries to take advantage of me when I’m cheerful. Sometimes, I let him. I lie under him while he makes love to me in that way you never do: with tenderness, with hand-holding and hair-stroking. He makes love to me so considerately it makes me want to cry. And when he rolls away, sometimes I do cry, snuffling secretly into the pillow, because I’ve realised that the pendulum has swung and I feel as though I’m being unfaithful … to you.

  He asks me why I don’t read in the bath anymore. How could I read? I’m in a trance, letting the water wash over me, sink into me, make grooves in my skin. Watching myself change. My hands, my feet wrinkle. Like ageing.

  I visualise scenarios, each one unbearable. Leaving Dave seems impossible, him finding out about you even worse. But letting you go now is unthinkable.

  I hear him down in the kitchen, running water, rattling pill bottles. Does he have a headache? Every morning?

  Do I only feel guilty because your mark is on me? Under my hair, under my clothes, on the soft part of my shoulder, just above the collarbone, waiting to be discovered or to disappear, whichever comes first. Loitering on me, heavy with risk. A purplish mark with no other explanation. Look closely, see teeth marks.

  I look at it obsessively every time I pass the mirror. Am I checking that it is fading, or hoping that it isn’t?

  Because it is proof of you: proof that you were here, that for a few seconds you abandoned your control.

  Unable to sleep, I try a trick Dave once told me. Deep breaths, in, out. Count backwards from 300 in threes. Used as a memory test, but also a good relaxation aid apparently, although I’m sure it works better for people like him who are maths minded. ‘The word woman and the numbers man’, he used to call us when we first got together. 300. 297. 294.

  Grunt. Creak. He rolls over.

  291.

  Behind my squeezed shut eyes, reversing trios of sheep stumble over fences.

  Concentrate. If you make a mistake you have to go back to the beginning.

  288, 285, 282.

  Slow down; the aim is not to get back to zero. I should be asleep before then.

  Count the days, weeks, months, since we – what? Restarted? Is that the word for what we’ve done? What do I use as zero? The first time we slept together? Or that first supermarket collision, that dinner, that kiss?

  243. 240.

  Count back to countless instances of wishing for you. Do they count? Delirious with half-sleep, words and numbers whir in my head.

  Dave’s soft snoring. The shape of him under the sheet.

  Who am I kidding, I don’t have to strain to think of it – I know the dates, I know the days, weeks, months. I know the years. I know your number. Your phone number, postcode, birthday and car reg (then, and now). They’re imprinted on me, my brain the tattooed wrist of a prisoner. Marked for life.

  Hurtling towards zero, no sign of sleep. 37, 33, 30. Thirty, my age, that pivotal age imbued with meaning. A conversation with you, lying in a bed not like this one, playing our own game with numbers.

  ‘Remember when you said I was fourteen going on twenty-five? Does that mean I’m now thirty going on … forty-one?’

  You laughed at the barely perceptible pause. ‘Maths never was your best subject.’

  ‘Cheek. Well?’

  ‘I don’t think so … I think you’ve caught yourself up.’

  ‘Seriously … have I turned out how you thought I would?’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ (whenever you start a sentence like this, I always get the unnerving feeling that everything you’ve said before was a lie), ‘I never really thought about you growing up.’

  Thirty. My brother Alex passed that milestone, two years ago. He’s grown old disgracefully, as the saying goes. He doesn’t know how to be in his thirties; it feels wrong to him, he says, like wearing someone else’s clothes.

  Once, when he was drunk, Alex slurred to me that he’d always secretly assumed that he would die at the age of twenty-nine, if not before. I didn’t want to tell him that in a dark place in my mind I’d thought the same thing. He didn’t seem the type to ever grow up. He told me that when he woke up, aged thirty, he felt some small relief but mostly disappointment. He felt lost.

  30, 27. I think about you at twenty-seven and me at fourteen.

  24. Wait. Go back. Ticking off fingers under the covers. Days since that afternoon in your bed. Days since I … stop. Count weeks. I sit up. There’ll be no sleeping now.

  Late. It’s not a word Dave was ever fond of.

  I’m going to be late.

  It’s too late.

  I’m late.

  I’m not keen on it in its present context either.

  I’m late.

  Late, the word welling in my head, in my mouth; its connotations with death, with history, unavoidable. The late Fiona Worthing, I think.

  I don’t know what makes me tell him, and I instantly regret it, but it just feels too big a word, a concept, to contain.

  ‘Dave,’ I shrug him awake, ‘Dave. I’ve just realised … I’m late.’

  ‘Late?’ he repeats. ‘You mean …?’

  When we’ve talked about children, we’ve always brushed them away under another holiday we must take, or something we decided we desperately needed for the kitchen. The shining hopefulness that the word ‘late’ puts into his eyes fills me with surprise. And it finds no reflection in mine.

  While my heart is sinking, while my insides are all churned up, he is smiling. The ghost of a child that to me is just cells, cells and blood, a problem to be dealt with; for him it has eyes, and a name. Oh God. He is visualising it, feeling it, he already has the child in his arms, on his knee, in the garden kicking a ball. Jesus. I feel like I can’t breathe.

  This is how the distance between us is illuminated, but still only I can see it.

  ‘You should do a test.’

  I’m making tea in the morning and the kettle is loud, so I pretend not to have heard him. I pull my dressing gown tighter around my stomach.

  ‘I said, you should take a test,’ he repeats, coming up behind me and squeezing my hand even as it clenches around the edge of the worktop.

  ‘Mmm.�
�� I make as non-committal a sound as I can muster. ‘Well, you know, I’m not that late.’

  It becomes one of those conversations that you think is finished but then starts again, later, exactly where it was left, with no preamble or warning. Ruining a perfectly good Saturday.

  ‘Five days is a long time for you, though, isn’t it?’ he says, suddenly, while we’re in the garden reading the newspapers. I raise the arts pages so he won’t see my frown. For me? I think to myself. Since when does he know what’s normal and not normal for me and my menstrual cycle? I suddenly resent that this man knows anything about me, let alone such personal information. It’s as though he’s not my husband, it’s like he’s someone I’ve just met.

  Eventually, when he brings it up again while I’m parking the car at the supermarket, I snap.

  ‘I’ll buy the bloody test, okay? I’ll do it in the morning.’ I look at his face and feel sorry, so I say more gently, ‘It’s better to do them in the morning, that’s what they say. We want to be sure, don’t we?’

  What’s weird is that he doesn’t question any of it. He doesn’t bother to count the days, for example, whereas I do this obsessively. I can see my cycle as a bold, bright diagram emblazoned across my brain and there, right in the middle, you, me, bed. It wasn’t him, on that day. It was you. You, me, tangled bodies, wet hair, bed.

  It doesn’t seem to occur to Dave to even wonder aloud about the fact that he and I are always careful. Oh yes, I use condoms with my husband. Not with you, but with my husband, always.

  I’m annoyed at him for not hurling these things at me. And I’m annoyed at him for wanting this baby real.

  That night, I dream. Underwater.

  Swim towards you with bloodied hands, wipe them on your face. You did this.

  In the morning, I wake to pain, and warmth, like comfort.

  Red.

  I find myself weeping with relief that Dave still can’t read; mistaking it for grief, he holds me. Sitting in our bed, in my blood, I sob harder. I can’t have this kindness.