‘Yeah, I see your point,’ said Niamh. ‘So, Robyn?’ I was squinting at the piece of paper Joe was holding up in front of me which said: GOING OUT, BACK SOON. I gave him a look that said,
If you don’t come back, I’d
understand
.
‘Yeah?’ I said.
‘When do you think you might tell Dad about me? You know, like you said you would?’
‘Oh, God, Neevy, I’m sorry.’ It was alarming how self-absorbed I was becoming with all this going on. I’d completely forgotten, I felt
terrible
. ‘As soon as I find the right moment, I’ll do it, okay? I have to do it before I have the baby anyway.’
‘Why?’ she said, and I hesitated. I hadn’t told anyone about the AA plan and I didn’t want to, really. It was Joe and mine’s thing.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Just because.’
I hung up just as I heard Joe leave, pulling the door shut behind him. As soon as I knew he was safely out of the house, I went into my bedroom and retrieved the spotty Ikea box from under my bed. There was a specific letter I wanted to read.
December 1997
Dear Lily
I knew this would happen sooner or later but I’m reeling. I can’t get my breathing to go normal! I just bumped into Saul Butler. I was in the hardware shop, getting some fuses for Dad and he was in there, just lurking in one of the aisles, probably buying something for work.
‘Hi,’ he said. Hi? Hi?!! How can he just say hi to me like nothing happened? When I’m standing there with a bump? The worst thing was I was so shocked, I said ‘Hi’ back.
The one thing I regret most about the whole thing is that as I got out of the car, I told him not to tell anyone. What message would that have given him? That I thought I’d done something wrong. That what happened was like normal sex, like I’d just got off with him and betrayed Joe? Because that’s not how it felt for me. But now it’s occurred to me that maybe that’s how he sees it? That it was all perfectly normal? And me just saying ‘hi’ like that can’t have helped.
At precisely 9.05 a.m. on the Monday after Joe had been down for the weekend, I called Dr Love directly in his office – I was desperate.
‘Beta-blockers during pregnancy? Mmm, I would say, probably not, no.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I was standing in the corridor at work, looking out of the window at London coming alive, failing to hide the disappointment in my voice.
‘Can I ask why you think you need beta-blockers?’ asked Dr Love. I briefly checked that nobody was coming down the corridor and pushed my forehead against the window, talking as quietly as possible.
‘I’ve been having these … panic attacks, anxiety attacks – you know, shaking, beating heart, overwhelming feelings of terror that I’m about to keel over and die.’ I don’t know why I was sounding so cheerful, laughing almost. Years of practice, I suppose.
‘How often?’ said Dr Love.
‘It was just occasionally at first, but now it can be up to several times a day …’ I paused. The next bit was hard to say out loud. ‘It’s starting to affect my work.’
‘Mmm,’ said Dr Love again. ‘Well, Robyn, don’t worry about work, you need to protect yourself and the baby. Although there’s no research to suggest that panic attacks will harm your baby, so don’t load yourself with that worry, too … Do there seem to be triggers?’ he asked.
‘Sex,’ I said
.
It was a bit too late in the day to feel any sort of embarrassment about saying this.
Having sex with the one man in the world I trust, whom I love, who loves me!
I wanted to add. I was so angry with it all. ‘I find it hard – no, impossible, to have sex.’
Also, the smell of turps, chickens and their beady eyes
, I wanted to add,
getting in the front passenger seat of any car, the Tube
– but felt sure he would think I was quite patently mad; I was pretty convinced I was going that way. And what if he deemed me too mad to look after my baby? It had happened to Grace …
Dr Love was quiet for a moment.
‘There is an anti-depressant you could take,’ he said, finally. ‘It would help with the anxiety. It’s an old type of medication and poses no known risk to your baby.’
No
known
risk.
‘I would suggest that you go and see your GP and tell him or her what you just told me.’
‘Okay,’ I said, even though I knew, even now, that I wouldn’t be able to take anything with no ‘known’ risk, so I don’t know how I thought Dr Love was supposed to help me, how anyone could help me now. I was a lost cause.
‘The main thing, I’d say, however,’ he added, ‘is that after what happened to you, it’s entirely normal – especially now you are pregnant again – to be having these feelings. It’s just your mind’s way of processing it.’
Yes
, I thought,
but I haven’t told you everything that happened to me
.
I couldn’t concentrate all morning. At lunch, the strain of keeping everything to myself for so long was proving too much, so I decided I’d talk to Kaye in a casual way about it. Maybe it was just the nature of the job to be anxious and panic-ridden? Working with the mentally ill had to affect you eventually. If I was suffering in silence, then maybe other people were, too.
Kaye and I were sitting, sunning ourselves in the garden of Bella Café; I had my cheese toastie resting on my bump. ‘Kaye, do you ever get affected by stuff at work?’ I said, trying to keep my tone light.
Kaye put down the newspaper she’d been reading. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Well, like, emotionally,’ I said. ‘Do you find it a difficult job?’
‘It depends how you mean … Do I find it emotionally difficult that we never get the chance to talk to anyone properly, because we’re far too busy filling in forms? Then, yes. Do I find it emotionally difficult visiting people like Mrs Patel? Then, also yes.’
I laughed. Mrs Patel was one of those patients it was best to visit in twos. The week previously, Kaye and I had gone, and she’d locked the door behind us, then proceeded to force-feed us an entire Indian banquet for four hours. I rather enjoyed myself. Kaye, unbeknown to me, was secretly on hostage alert, back to the office on her phone, the whole time.
‘Is that what you meant?’ she asked.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I suppose I meant more: Do you take clients’ issues home with you? Does what they tell you ever affect you? You know, badly?’
She put down her paper. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I think I’d crack up myself if I let that happen. I mean, I worry about them …’
‘Oh, okay.’ I bit into my toastie. ‘I just wondered.’
I chewed, feeling Kaye’s eyes boring into me. ‘Are you okay, Kingy?’ she said, eventually.
I looked up. ‘Yeah, fine.’
‘Is something bothering you at work?’
‘No. No, not at all. I just wondered. You know sometimes you just wonder about this stuff but never really ask?’
Kaye looked at me, smiling, but you could tell her mind was whirring away.
‘Okay,’ she said, nodding. ‘Yeah, I get that.’ Then, staring at my midriff, she added, ‘Your bump looks absolutely massive today, by the way.’ Then, she went back to her paper.
Joe and I hadn’t discussed, when he’d got back that afternoon, the fact we’d failed to have sex again. He’d just come home, armed with more paint from Homebase, a Thai takeaway and a DVD, and I’d hugged him, in that slightly platonic and apologetic way that says,
I’m really sorry but I don’t want to talk about this now
, and that was it, we didn’t. Instead, we lay on the sofa, sharing a bag of Revels, watching the film
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(about a couple who have each other erased from their memories – a controversial choice, all things considered), laughing in the right places, making all the right noises; but I knew he was worrying about me, worrying about the baby, about us. As I was too, of course. I was reeling from what Saul Butler had said to Bomber. I was going over and over events in my mind. Had I misconstrued things? Had I had a thing with Butler and forgotten it? I thought back to one night, must have been even before that summer of 1997, when I’d seen him in Boon’s – Kilterdale’s only club. He’d chatted me up: ‘You look nice, Robyn, like the hair …’
And I’d smiled and replied, ‘Thank you, Saul. It’s not every man who notices things like that.’
Had I led him on? Had he kissed me then and I’d been so drunk I couldn’t remember? I was doubting myself. It was like falling pregnant had unlocked a roomful of boxed-up memories from the last time I was pregnant, but they’d been boxed up for so long they’d faded, I couldn’t trust which were real and which were imagined.
What
has always disturbed me most about what happened down Friars Lanes at the end of that summer, is not what happened in the car (although, believe me, that still disturbs me), but what happened immediately afterwards. I knew I was changed, that life would never be quite the same again, but Butler carried on like nothing had
happened, like he’d done nothing wrong. The sky was streaked with pink. The breeze was causing rippling waves across the citrus-yellow fields of rapeseed. Pollen floated about us like minuscule airborne dancers on a lit stage. It was idyllic. How could something horrific have happened here? Maybe because it didn’t?
Because I somehow got the wrong end of the stick. I remember what happened next in minute detail, like I’m looking at it through a microscope. We drove to the party. Saul was chatting to me, looking at me through the rear-view mirror, normal as anything. The radio was on: Prefab Sprout – that song about hot dogs and jumping frogs.
We got to Tony Middleton’s house and I opened the car door as the car was still pulling into the driveway. ‘Easy Tiger,’ Butler said. I was horrified to find when I stepped out that my legs wouldn’t work – like they’d been drained of blood, like they are after you’ve been sitting on them a long time – but I pulled on every molecule of strength I had to stand up. That’s when I told him not to tell anyone. Why had I said that? Because
I
felt like I’d betrayed Joe? I went straight inside the house and searched for Joe. I remembered how when I finally found him, upstairs, in Tony’s room, earphones on, playing on Tony’s decks, I flung myself into his arms. ‘Baby, what’s the matter?’ he said, shocked, wrapping his arms around me. I’d just arrived at this party and now I was saying I wanted to leave. I spun some yarn about feeling ill on the way and would he take me home?
I don’t know what time it was when I got in, but I could hear the bathroom tap running and Dad doing that slightly disgusting thing he still does when he’s brushing his teeth, which is to honk up really loudly and spit into the sink. Fleetwood Mac were on the radio singing, ‘Everywhere …’, which was Mum’s favourite song; and so I stood in the hallway and listened because I thought it might make me feel better, but I knew that song was ruined now. It had been Mum’s favourite song and now it was my worst. And there wasn’t even anything I could do about it.
Dad honked and spat again, then he shouted, ‘
Robyn
? Is that you? I thought you were going to Beth’s?’
I froze to the spot because I didn’t want to see Dad. I didn’t want to see anyone. I just wanted to go upstairs, get in the shower and go to bed.
‘Bobby?’ he called again.
‘Yeah, it’s me,’ I called back, but it didn’t sound like me: my voice was small and weak and like Mum’s when she was lying on the sofa – dying, if I’m honest. I sounded like
I
was dying. I
felt
like I was dying.
I closed the front door, as softly as I could, and put my bag down. The sun was pouring in right down the hallway, so I was kind of standing in this tunnel of light and, it sounds silly, but I imagined it was a sign from Mum. She was there; she was watching over me. She knew everything. I got in the shower. I made the water as hot as I could bear and scrubbed every molecule of Butler off me, but when I got out, I still felt soiled with him. I needed to cancel it out somehow. I went to bed, telling Dad I didn’t feel well, and tried to sleep, but all I did was lie in the dark, images of Butler’s face coming at me, that chicken standing in the middle of Friars Lanes, its horrible beedy eye jerking in its socket.
Dad popped in to check I was all right. He was unshaven and wearing only a pair of white Y-fronts. That was his look most of the time, after Mum died. Niamh and I used to call him, ‘The ghost in white Y-fronts.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, trying to disguise my voice, which was thick with snot and tears.
I’d told Joe I wanted to be on my own but now I was, all I wanted was him. He’d be up now with his parents, watching Saturday-night TV in the cosy vicarage lounge with its Tiffany lamps and its warm red rugs. Normality. Oh, God, how I longed for normal. It felt like nothing would be normal again.
I lay in the dark for hours, not being able to sleep, just crying. I wanted a hug so badly. A hug like only Joe could give me. I imagined his arms around me, my head lying on his chest, listening to his heart-beat, his smell. I imagined telling him everything, but then I had no idea what words I’d use. Above all, I wanted to cancel out what had happened with Butler. I lay there until it was light, and then I got up – it was Sunday morning – and I went straight round to Joe’s. We went to his room and, immediately, I took off my clothes, pretty much threw myself at him. He wasn’t complaining. Then we made love and, even though I was so sore and it hurt like hell, I didn’t make a sound. I had to do it. I had to cancel it out.
I could have predicted almost to the second when Joe would call me at my desk on that Monday morning, after he’d gone back to Manchester: 11.05 a.m. (he had a teaching break starting at 11 a.m.).
‘How’re you feeling?’ he said.
‘Good. Great. Nothing to report,’ I said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible.
‘Did you go for your swim this morning?’
‘Yes,’ I lied. (I’d lain in bed, going over and over the scenes with Butler, wondering if there was anything I’d said, anything I did.)
He paused. I carried on typing.
‘How’s
your
day?’ I said.
‘Fine. Caught some kid dealing weed outside on the college grounds.’