THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 2013
MORNING
I can’t sleep in this heat. Invisible bugs crawl over my skin, I have a rash on my chest, I can’t get comfortable. And Scott seems to radiate warmth; lying next to him is like lying next to a fire. I can’t get far enough away from him and find myself clinging to the edge of the bed, sheets thrown back. It’s intolerable. I thought about going to lie down on the futon in the spare room, but he hates to wake and find me gone, it always leads to a row about something. Alternative uses for the spare room, usually, or who I was thinking about while I was lying there alone. Sometimes I want to scream at him, Just let me go. Let me go. Let me breathe. So I can’t sleep, and I’m angry. I feel as though we’re having a fight already, even though the fight’s only in my imagination.
And in my head, thoughts go round and round and round.
I feel like I’m suffocating.
When did this house become so bloody small? When did my life become so boring? Is this really what I wanted? I can’t remember. All I know is that a few months ago I was feeling better, and now I can’t think and I can’t sleep and I can’t draw and the urge to run is becoming overwhelming. At night when I lie awake I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away. I can’t get comfortable, because every way I turn I run into dead ends: the closed gallery, the houses on this road, the stifling attentions of the tedious Pilates women, the track at the end of the garden with its trains, always taking someone else to somewhere else, reminding me over and over and over, a dozen times a day, that I’m staying put.
I feel as though I’m going mad.
And yet just a few months ago, I was feeling better, I was getting better. I was fine. I was sleeping. I didn’t live in fear of the nightmares. I could breathe. Yes, I still wanted to run away. Sometimes. But not every day.
Talking to Kamal helped me, there’s no denying that. I liked it. I liked him. He made me happier. And now all that feels so unfinished—I never got to the crux of it. That’s my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because I didn’t like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better. I’m embarrassed now, ashamed. My face goes hot at the thought of it. I don’t want that to be his final impression of me. I want him to see me again, to see me better. And I do feel that if I went to him, he would help. He’s like that.
I need to get to the end of the story. I need to tell someone, just once. Say the words out loud. If it doesn’t come out of me, it’ll eat me up. The hole inside me, the one they left, it’ll just get bigger and bigger until it consumes me.
I’m going to have to swallow my pride and my shame and go to him. He’s going to have to listen. I’ll make him.
EVENING
Scott thinks I’m at the cinema with Tara. I’ve been outside Kamal’s flat for fifteen minutes, psyching myself up to knock on the door. I’m so afraid of the way he’s going to look at me, after last time. I have to show him that I’m sorry, so I’ve dressed the part: plain and simple, jeans and T-shirt, hardly any makeup. This is not about seduction, he has to see that.
I can feel my heart starting to race as I step up to his front door and press the bell. No one comes. The lights are on, but no one comes. Perhaps he has seen me outside, lurking; perhaps he’s upstairs, just hoping that if he ignores me I’ll go away. I won’t. He doesn’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with.
I ring again, and then a third time, and finally I hear footsteps on the stairs and the door opens. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a white T-shirt. He’s barefoot, wet-haired, his face flushed.
“Megan.” Surprised, but not angry, which is a good start. “Are you all right? Is everything all right?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and he steps back to let me in. I feel a rush of gratitude so strong, it feels almost like love.
He shows me into the kitchen. It’s a mess: washing up piled on the counter and in the sink, empty takeaway cartons spilling out of the bin. I wonder if he’s depressed. I stand in the doorway; he leans against the counter opposite me, his arms folded across his chest.
“What can I do for you?” he asks. His face is arranged into a perfectly neutral expression, his therapist face. It makes me want to pinch him, just to make him smile.
“I have to tell you . . .” I start, and then I stop because I can’t just plunge straight into it, I need a preamble. So I change tack. “I wanted to apologize,” I say, “for what happened. Last time.”
“That’s OK,” he says. “Don’t worry about that. If you need to talk to someone, I can refer you to someone else, but I can’t—”
“Please, Kamal.”
“Megan, I can’t counsel you any longer.”
“I know. I know that. But I can’t start over with someone else. I can’t. We got so far. We were so close. I just have to tell you. Just once. And then I’ll be gone, I promise. I won’t ever bother you again.”
He cocks his head to one side. He doesn’t believe me, I can tell. He thinks that if he lets me back in now, he’ll never be rid of me.
“Hear me out, please. This isn’t going to go on forever, I just need someone to listen.”
“Your husband?” he asks, and I shake my head.
“I can’t—I can’t tell him. Not after all this time. He wouldn’t . . . He wouldn’t be able to see me as me any longer. I’d be someone else to him. He wouldn’t know how to forgive me. Please, Kamal. If I don’t spit out the poison, I feel like I’ll never sleep. As a friend, not a therapist, please listen.”
His shoulders drop a little as he turns away, and I think it’s over. My heart sinks. Then he opens a cupboard and pulls out two tumblers.
“As a friend, then. Would you like some wine?”
He shows me into the living room. Dimly lit by standing lamps, it has the same air of domestic neglect as the kitchen. We sit down on opposite sides of a glass table piled high with papers, magazines and takeaway menus. My hands are locked around my glass. I take a sip. It’s red but cold, dusty. I swallow, take another sip. He’s waiting for me to start, but it’s hard, harder than I thought it was going to be. I’ve kept this secret for so long—a decade, more than a third of my life. It’s not that easy, letting go of it. I just know that I have to start talking. If I don’t do it now, I might never have the courage to say the words out loud, I might lose them altogether, they might stick in my throat and choke me in my sleep.
“After I left Ipswich, I moved in with Mac, into his cottage outside Holkham at the end of the lane. I told you that, didn’t I? It was very isolated, a couple of miles to the nearest neighbour, a couple more to the nearest shops. At the beginning, we had lots of parties, there were always a few people crashed out in the living room or sleeping in the hammock outside in the summer. But we got tired of that, and Mac fell out with everyone eventually, so people stopped coming, and it was the two of us. Days used to go by and we wouldn’t see anyone. We’d do our grocery shopping at the petrol station. It’s odd, thinking back on it, but I needed it then, after everything—after Ipswich and all those men, all the things I did. I liked it, just Mac and me and the old railway tracks and the grass and the dunes and the restless grey sea.”
Kamal tilts his head to one side, gives me half a smile. I feel my insides flip. “It sounds nice. But do you think you are romanticizing? ‘The restless grey sea’?”
“Never mind that,” I say, waving him away. “And no, in any case. Have you been to north Norfolk? It’s not the Adriatic. It is restless and relentlessly grey.”
He holds his hands up, smiling. “OK.”
I feel instantly better, the tension leaching out of my neck and shoulders. I take another sip of the wine; it tastes less bitter now.
“I was happy with Mac. I know it doesn’t sound like the sort of place I’d like, the sort of life I’d like, but then, after Ben’s death and everything that came after, it was. Mac saved me. He took me in, he loved me, he kept me safe. And he wasn’t boring. And to be perfectly honest, we were taking a lot of drugs, and it’s difficult to get bored when you’re off your face all the time. I was happy. I was really happy.”
Kamal nods. “I understand, although I’m not sure that sounds like a very real kind of happiness,” he says. “Not the sort of happiness that can endure, that can sustain you.”
I laugh. “I was seventeen. I was with a man who excited me, who adored me. I’d got away from my parents, away from the house where everything, everything, reminded me of my dead brother. I didn’t need it to endure or sustain. I just needed it for right then.”
“So what happened?”
It seems as though the room gets darker then. Here we are, at the thing I never say.
“I got pregnant.”
He nods, waiting for me to go on. Part of me wants him to stop me, to ask more questions, but he doesn’t, he just waits. It gets darker still.
“It was too late when I realized to . . . to get rid of it. Of her. It’s what I would have done, had I not been so stupid, so oblivious. The truth is that she wasn’t wanted, by either of us.”
Kamal gets to his feet, goes to the kitchen and comes back with a sheet of kitchen roll for me to wipe my eyes. He hands it to me and sits down. It’s a while before I go on. Kamal sits, just as he used to in our sessions, his eyes on mine, his hands folded in his lap, patient, immobile. It must take the most incredible self-control, that stillness, that passivity; it must be exhausting.
My legs are trembling, my knee jerking as though on a puppeteer’s string. I get to my feet to stop it. I walk to the kitchen door and back again, scratching the palms of my hands.
“We were both so stupid,” I tell him. “We didn’t really even acknowledge what was happening, we just carried on. I didn’t go to see a doctor, I didn’t eat the right things or take supplements, I didn’t do any of the things you’re supposed to. We just carried on living our lives. We didn’t even acknowledge that anything had changed. I got fatter and slower and more tired, we both got irritable and fought all the time, but nothing really changed until she came.”
He lets me cry. While I do so, he moves to the chair nearest mine and sits down at my side so that his knees are almost touching my thigh. He leans forward. He doesn’t touch me, but our bodies are close, I can smell his scent, clean in this dirty room, sharp and astringent.
My voice is a whisper, it doesn’t feel right to say these words out loud. “I had her at home,” I say. “It was stupid, but I had this thing about hospitals at the time, because the last time I’d been in one was when Ben was killed. Plus I hadn’t been for any of the scans. I’d been smoking, drinking a bit, I couldn’t face the lectures. I couldn’t face any of it. I think . . . right up until the end, it just didn’t seem like it was real, like it was actually going to happen.
“Mac had this friend who was a nurse, or who’d done some nursing training or something. She came round, and it was OK. It wasn’t so bad. I mean, it was horrible, of course, painful and frightening, but . . . then there she was. She was very small. I don’t remember exactly what her weight was. That’s terrible, isn’t it?” Kamal doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t move. “She was lovely. She had dark eyes and blond hair. She didn’t cry a lot, she slept well, right from the very beginning. She was good. She was a good girl.” I have to stop there for a moment. “I expected everything to be so hard, but it wasn’t.”
It’s darker still, I’m sure of it, but I look up and Kamal is there, his eyes on mine, his expression soft. He’s listening. He wants me to tell him. My mouth is dry, so I take another sip of wine. It hurts to swallow. “We called her Elizabeth. Libby.” It feels so strange, saying her name out loud after such a long time. “Libby,” I say again, enjoying the feel of her name in my mouth. I want to say it over and over. Kamal reaches out at last and takes my hand in his, his thumb against my wrist, on my pulse.
“One day we had a fight, Mac and I. I don’t remember what it was about. We did that every now and again—little arguments that blew up into big ones, nothing physical, nothing bad like that, but we’d scream at each other and I’d threaten to leave, or he’d just walk out and I wouldn’t see him for a couple of days.
“It was the first time it had happened since she was born—the first time he’d just gone off and left me. She was just a few months old. The roof was leaking. I remember that: the sound of water dripping into buckets in the kitchen. It was freezing cold, the wind driving off the sea; it had been raining for days. I lit a fire in the living room, but it kept going out. I was so tired. I was drinking just to warm up, but it wasn’t working, so I decided to get into the bath. I took Libby in with me, put her on my chest, her head just under my chin.”
The room gets darker and darker until I’m there again, lying in the water, her body pressing against mine, a candle flickering just behind my head. I can hear it guttering, smell the wax, feel the chill of the air around my neck and shoulders. I’m heavy, my body sinking into the warmth. I’m exhausted. And then suddenly the candle is out and I’m cold. Really cold, my teeth chattering in my head, my whole body shaking. The house feels like it’s shaking, too, the wind screaming, tearing at the slates on the roof.
“I fell asleep,” I say, and then I can’t say any more, because I can feel her again, no longer on my chest, her body wedged between my arm and the edge of the tub, her face in the water. We were both so cold.
For a moment, neither of us move. I can hardly bear to look at him, but when I do, he doesn’t recoil from me. He doesn’t say a word. He puts his arm around my shoulder and pulls me to him, my face against his chest. I breathe him in and I wait to feel different, to feel lighter, to feel better or worse now that there is another living soul who knows. I feel relieved, I think, because I know from his reaction that I have done the right thing. He isn’t angry with me, he doesn’t think I’m a monster. I am safe here, completely safe with him.
I don’t know how long I stay there in his arms, but when I come back to myself, my phone is ringing. I don’t answer it, but a moment later it beeps to alert me that there’s a text. It’s from Scott. Where are you? And seconds after that, the phone starts ringing again. This time it’s Tara. Disentangling myself from Kamal’s embrace, I answer.
“Megan, I don’t know what you’re up to, but you need to call Scott. He’s rung here four times. I told him you’d nipped out to the offie to get some wine, but I don’t think he believed me. He says you’re not picking up your phone.” She sounds pissed off, and I know I should appease her, but I don’t have the energy.
“OK,” I say. “Thanks. I’ll ring him now.”
“Megan—” she says, but I end the call before I can hear another word.
It’s after ten. I’ve been here for more than two hours. I turn off my phone and turn to face Kamal.
“I don’t want to go home,” I say.
He nods, but he doesn’t invite me to stay. Instead he says, “You can come back, if you like. Another time.”
I step forward, closing the gap between our bodies, stand on tiptoe and kiss his lips. He doesn’t pull away from me.
