My House Is Falling Down Page 12

‘Helpful.’

  ‘It’s tense. It’s like being in a waiting room. He’s a hero, sitting it out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘He could have walked away. I’m such a mess.’

  ‘You seem to forget that he just buggered off when your kids were little.’

  ‘He was working!’

  ‘He was running away, big-time. You were practically a single parent. And now you’re angry.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Mate, wake up! He’s an amazing guy but he’s selfish.’

  ‘He loves us!’

  ‘That is so not the point.’

  I bite my lip.

  She says, ‘This is the man who left you on your own with twins and postnatal depression for a millennium.’

  ‘He had a lot of people banging on his door.’

  ‘I don’t give a flying fuck,’ she says. ‘He neglected you. Bloody men! What makes them think they can reproduce and then just carry on as if nothing has happened?’

  ‘That’s not entirely fair.’

  ‘It is entirely fucking fair! Listen, I understand he doesn’t know how else to be but it’s not your job to teach him. Yes, he’s this cool artist who’s overcome so much, etcetera, etcetera. But he’s also just a middle-aged bloke with a wife and kids that deserve some attention. He needs to get over himself. Being unusual is not an excuse for being a crap partner.’

  ‘I guess.’

  She says, ‘Right. So it’s not just you that has some thinking to do. He has to step up. Though you could stop idolizing him. That would probably help.’

  When the twins were about six months old I realized I was afraid of almost everything. It wasn’t something I really understood until I drove to a builder’s merchant’s out of town to pick up a new tap for the sink in the barn and felt compelled to write myself lengthy directions before setting off. It was only eleven miles and I knew the way perfectly well but I had lost confidence. I had the twins in the back of the car in their car-seats and all the way there I was badly on edge. Twice, I negotiated a couple of roundabouts to be sure I had the correct exits. I dithered at junctions while people behind me hooted their horns and flashed their lights. Eventually, traumatized, I pulled over and sat in a parking spot with the ignition switched off until I realized that I was going nowhere and there was no point just sitting there. When I re-joined the traffic, I found it aggressive and alarming: a turquoise Transit van was on my tail and everyone drove fast and with purpose, blending effortlessly with one another. It was as if they were communicating in a language I no longer understood but in which I had once enjoyed the ease and confidence of fluency.

  Mark kept asking me when I might want to go back to work.

  ‘Of course, we’ll need help with the girls,’ he said.

  He might just as well have offered to sell them, or leave them out for the goblins to steal. If I was going to do one damn thing well, it was be a mother. Besides which, work that once meant quite a bit to me seemed both daunting and colourless.

  Mark told me I was not myself. When I said, ‘What the fuck do you expect?’ he replied, ‘My point exactly. You’re so tense all the time. You barely speak except to criticize. It’s not like you.’ I told him I wasn’t like me any more: I was a mother to twin babies and I was knackered beyond belief. I said, ‘I can’t think. I can’t listen to music. I can’t remember anyone’s name. I don’t even know what day of the week it is.’

  He said, ‘Do you think you might be depressed? I mean, I do. I think you are – depressed, I mean. You never laugh. You’re not eating properly.’

  ‘I am.’

  He said, ‘Babe, you don’t talk to me any more.’

  I looked at my husband, in his jeans and checked shirt, leaning against the kitchen door-jamb, one hand in his pocket, the thumb of the other hand in a belt loop; his pelvis tilted very slightly forwards. I thought, What on earth does he think he is doing, standing there like that? I did want company and in truth, I wanted only Mark’s, yet looking at him then, I had a perplexing desire to tell him simply to go away. Nursing Mel, and unable to relax into her blissful, milky somnolence for I knew that Miranda was next – she was whimpering beside us on a flocculent, cream blanket – I could not give my husband the attention he demanded, just as he demanded to know what was wrong with me.

  ‘I am not depressed. I’m tired.’

  ‘It’s more than that.’

  ‘How the hell would you know?’

  ‘Luce,’ Mark insisted, ‘listen to yourself.’

  He suggested getting some friends over for supper, he thought it might be nice. Didn’t I want to see people?

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’re lonely.’

  ‘I have the twins.’

  ‘And me,’ he said. ‘You have me. We have each other.’

  My GP is away and his colleagues are fully booked. I see the locum, who says I badly need more sleep: she is concerned I am on the verge of severe depression.

  ‘Can your husband help?’

  ‘Not in the daytime.’

  ‘How about at night?’

  ‘He’s deaf.’

  ‘How does that stop him helping?’

  ‘I told you, he’s deaf. He doesn’t hear the babies. He doesn’t wake up.’

  ‘Do you think that’s reasonable?’

  On her swivel chair, she sits with her hands folded in her lap and her head slightly to one side, frowning slightly. Does she believe that people who are really listening sit that way? Has someone taught her that?

  ‘Reason doesn’t come into it.’

  ‘Okay, I know that but—’

  ‘Right. So only I can hear them and once I’m awake, I’m disturbed. It’s not his fault. It’s not ideal but being deaf is not ideal, with or without small babies, though some would argue otherwise on the latter point.’

  The locum smiles weakly.

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ I say. ‘I mean, for heaven’s sake. Poor guy.’

  ‘Have you noticed,’ she says after a long pause during which she continues to nod gently, ‘that you are defending him when in fact you are the one in need of some support right now?’

  ‘I’m not defending him,’ I say, ‘I’m describing the difficulty.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, slowly, ‘I understand.’

  You do not.

  ‘It must be tough,’ she continues. ‘Deafness is a disability that others can’t easily see, yes? It must be challenging.’

  I think, Why don’t you go to an audiology conference? Read something on the Internet. Ask someone else. Just leave me alone.

  She suggests I sleep during the day and let Mark take care of the babies: ‘Your husband is at home, so he could do the afternoons, perhaps?’

  I point out that he’s working.

  ‘But from home.’

  I ask her whether she would say that of a father who works somewhere else, like in an office.

  ‘Probably not,’ she concedes. ‘But he doesn’t.’

  ‘It’s a common misconception,’ I sigh, ‘that people who work from home can do what they please. They can’t, not if they’re going to survive. Plus, he travels a lot. I’m often by myself.’

  ‘Do you have friends nearby?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Anyone who can help out?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘All right, then. What about your mum?’

  ‘My mother?’

  Fresh from my travels, I would spread my photographs across the table, a feast for my mother to enjoy alongside my carefully chosen gifts of textiles or scented oils.

  She was keen to discuss the incidence of malaria, cholera, typhoid and stillbirths.

  I wanted to tell her that I had never seen a sky so vast or so blue; that the smells and sounds of places touched me as much as the light and colours I tried so painstakingly to capture.

  Her response never varied: ‘But what have you learned?’

  Women in iridescent saris wit
h stacks of gathered kindling on their heads and men squatting around a brazier, their taut-skinned calves coated with a layer of road dust that had turned their toes silvery grey. I said, ‘Look, they’re preparing pakoras.’ Skinny dogs in the streets. Black seals stuck fast to beaches like giant garden slugs. Children en route to school in crested blazers, small day-packs on their backs: ‘Mum, look at those neat plaits between their shoulders. You’ve never seen such beautiful kids.’ She wanted to know about literacy rates. When I showed her some rusting merchant ships on the Namibian coast, and men emerging at the end of the working day from a breaker’s yard on the edge of Swakopmund, she asked me what proportion of the country’s GDP came from shipping. At that point, momentarily, I cracked; I told her that their stance had made me think of Wilfred Owen’s broken soldiers, bent double, like beggars under sacks. She said, ‘Maybe. The trouble with pictures alone is they tell one so very little.’

  So, I pulled out my ace cards. I took with me, to every country I visited, a mini cassette recorder. I gathered the dawn cries of the muezzins and the distant screams of high-circling vultures in the hot lull of a Delhi afternoon. I caught the yaps of the nocturnal infant tea-sellers as they jostled on the station at Darjeeling – their throaty assertions of ‘chai-i, chai-i’ in concert with the low rumble and metallic strain of the braking, midnight trains. I said to my mother who loves music, ‘Listen! This takes you right there!’ I played to her a group of miniature whistling frogs chirruping in a rainforest; I explained how I had had to sit stock-still and silently at the foot of a baobab tree, in order to capture the wild harmonies. She told me she had read something recently, about the country’s lax sustainability policies. I said, ‘But did you like the frogs?’ She said, ‘I would not have known that’s what they were, from the recording.’

  To the locum I say, ‘What about my mother?’

  ‘Does she live nearby?’

  ‘No. And even if she did.’ ‘Okay,’ the locum says. ‘I see.’

  ‘Devon,’ says Angus, tapping the newspaper lightly with his forefinger and sighing contentedly. ‘Now, there’s a gorgeous place. Love to go there with you, one day.’

  He twists around on the sofa to reach for his cup of coffee. The Travel section of the newspaper slides from his lap and spills on to the Persian rug.

  ‘Bother,’ he says. ‘Can you pass that back to me, please?’

  I gather up the pages. Photographs of Cornish beaches; descriptions of a petulant TV chef’s trip to Vietnam.

  ‘Thanks.’ He settles himself back into the cushions. ‘Are you happy, my darling?’

  ‘Very. I love being with you.’

  ‘You’re my sweetheart.’

  He says this a lot. I think he likes the way it sounds. You’re my sweetheart.

  ‘And I love being with you, too,’ he adds. ‘I haven’t felt this easy with anyone, ever.’

  ‘Oh, darling. Me neither.’

  ‘It’s just so nice,’ he exclaims, as if he is in receipt of an unexpected bequest, ‘being with someone who doesn’t pick a fight!’

  ‘Did Gill pick fights with you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But what did you argue about if you didn’t live together?’

  ‘Not living together.’

  ‘Who wanted what?’

  ‘She wanted it, I didn’t. And she wanted to live in a house.’

  ‘God forbid!’

  ‘My sentiments exactly.’

  ‘What’s she doing now?’

  ‘She’s happily married, to someone she likes much more than she liked me.’

  ‘Good for her. What about your other girlfriends? Did they argue with you?’

  ‘All the time. In my experience, women pick fights pretty easily. You don’t.’

  ‘Why would I fight with you?’

  ‘I don’t know but it’s a jolly nice change.’

  At home with Mark, all sorts of things trigger my irritation, and his, and increasingly these days we make little distinction between what is worth contesting and what best left undefended. In short, we are happy to bicker about trifles. We expect easy escalation, can accelerate from stand-off to siege in a matter of minutes, and although we rarely succumb to spite, we have become unafraid of any impact that routine exasperation and pettiness may have upon our alliance. In short, we have grown dangerously unapologetic. If married couples are indeed complacent, it is because we stop being fearful. More fool us.

  With Angus, however, my behaviour tends always towards the concessionary rather than the disputatious. Time is always too short and to waste it on minor grievances would be foolhardy, so I am more forgiving, and kinder, in my handling of the differences between us than I have ever been with anyone. I feign indifference. I conceal. Subterfuge and restraint. I believe our relationship is too fragile to support the weight of hefty disagreement. Angus disagrees, but he doesn’t know what it is like to live in the better-fortified edifice of sworn partnership. He doesn’t understand why I will neither take him for granted nor take him on; it doesn’t occur to him that we could, all too easily, turn our fervour to our mutual disadvantage. He says, ‘But what are you so afraid of?’ and I explain that the relationship is not conducive to more heat than we already generate. He says, ‘Nutcase, I don’t quite follow you,’ and I tell him we can’t afford to burn our boats. He is genuinely puzzled. ‘Don’t be daft,’ he says. ‘If something’s wrong, you must tell me, always.’ But I don’t, ever.

  It troubles me, though, this inclination of mine to sidestep anything difficult. Just because every minute counts almost as much as every hour, and a day lost to simmering and carping could mean the possible ruination of that fortnight’s precious allotted moments, doesn’t make it right. I may never have lied directly to Angus but I am deceiving him at a fundamental level into believing I am someone I am not. On a boat named for truth, and willingly more self-exposed than I have been with any man, I fail repeatedly to face my own questions or respond to his, about our relationship, or our future, or our lack of one. On a boat named for truth, I dissemble like a courtesan.

  I console myself with caveats: at least my equivocation – I hesitate to call it insincerity – is confined only to Angus. To Mark, faithfully, I deliver the truth always, however abrupt the admission – and sometimes, it is brutal. (‘Yes, I’ve already said so: I love him.’) But I am permanently queasy. I have set myself far higher standards than in my marriage. With Angus, the sparks that might ignite a row between Mark and me are given no oxygen, and – from this distance I have put between myself and my husband – I can only wonder now what might have been; what might have happened had I behaved this way with Mark.

  I was fascinated by Mark when I met him. There was something so intense about the man. He seemed intent upon taking everything that bit further than everyone else. Prone on sun-loungers during our first holiday together, a trip memorable for its capricious weather, we agreed that nothing compares to the sensation of one’s naked body being gently caressed by a warm breeze; that there are few things quite so sensuous. Yet on that same holiday I noted how, for Mark, moderate pleasures were rarely sufficient. The warm breezes we enjoyed were not enough for him. He was drawn to extremes – to profound gratification and ungovernable environments. Whether browning until he was positively carbonized, or head down in gale-driven rain on an altitudinous hike, his body acute-angled in dispute with the wind, it was easy to see that if ever a man took the elements personally, it was Mark.

  ‘Angry,’ Jay remarked, once. ‘Mark is angry.’

  Jay is wrong. Mark isn’t angry, Mark is on alert – and that’s different. If his quarrel with life appears never to let up it’s because there are always things to consider; things that produce difficulties, or demand extra effort, like being in rooms too dark in which to lip-read, or with people who turn sideways whilst they talk. There are fire alarms, smoke alarms, car alarms; public announcements on tannoy systems; television programmes without subtitles; the high-pitched whine of a fai
ling machine; the kindly stranger trying to warn him of something from behind; or the driver yelling, ‘You fuckin’ deaf, or what?’ Years ago, while still at university, Mark got stuck in a lift. Unable to tell whether he could be heard calling for help, he had no choice but to wait, hoping the building was not on fire. Being suspended in the dark between the fifth and sixth floors of an office block was a sobering reminder of his vulnerability. In that lift – the last one he ever got into unaccompanied – being profoundly deaf felt as potentially lethal as deep water to a non-swimmer, and in a world filled with these particular perils, hazards and intimidations it’s no surprise that he grew watchful and slick, ahead of the game. Quite apart from which – he explained to me once – a bit of strife here and there is invigorating. When you don’t have noise, you need a substitute. When you can’t even hear yourself breathing, you need to remind yourself you are alive.

  Thus, Mark was always the life and soul, right there at any party’s beating heart. Women, he could have them if he wanted them. Their physical presence he adored but his ability successfully to seduce them had a huge side benefit: it was proof of his superiority in this ultimate of male contests, despite an invisible but sometimes obstructive disadvantage. As a result, he spared himself the need to take on other men directly. He was a winner, Mark, not just of public awards but of private endorsements – from all those women across the rooms in their short, black dresses. He might have been too scared to get in a lift but he always got the girl.

  And yet, despite Mark’s best efforts and a lifetime of experience of keeping the challenges of deafness at bay, dullards make it through at times:

  ‘How do you drive?’

  ‘Surely if you turned it up full volume, you’d hear something.’

  ‘You lip-read? Can you tell what that bloke across the room is saying?’

  ‘You can’t be deaf, you don’t sound it!’

  ‘How do you and your wife communicate?’

  ‘So why don’t you just get one of those implants?’

  ‘Deaf or blind?’ (a bunch of friends once contemplated, around our kitchen table). ‘Which would be worse?’