My House Is Falling Down Read online

  ‘No contest. Blind is definitely worse.’

  ‘Absolutely. No way I’d opt for that.’

  I mouthed the word ‘opt’ to Mark. He raised his eyes to heaven.

  I have never known anyone opt for blind as the lesser of two evils, deafness always wins, but only once the assembled company has taken a short imaginary excursion across soundless terrain.

  ‘I’d miss the blackbird singing in the morning.’

  ‘And music. I’d die without music.’

  Blackbirds first. Then music. Every time.

  ‘I’m still breathing!’ Mark chimed.

  I glanced at him, thought of the numerous occasions on which he had asked me, ‘What’s it like? Does it sound lovely?’ All those times when friends rocked with laughter at quick-fire remarks that moved like balls too fast for Mark to catch: ‘What’s the joke?’ he’d enquire, sotto voce. If we were out, I couldn’t let my mind wander during conversations in case Mark missed details and afterwards wanted to know what exactly had been said. I couldn’t say, ‘Nothing much,’ as nothing much is precisely what you miss when you are deaf. Nothing much is the hue and tone of voices, the non-sequiturs, the nuance of tiny colloquial diversions. It’s the bond between you and others that relies upon everything that is not mere content or transaction and feeling included depends on it.

  ‘Sorry, Mark. No offence.’

  ‘None taken.’

  ‘Whereas sightless,’ the conversation rumbled on predictably, ‘you’d have no independence whatever. You’d need someone around, or a dog at the very least.’

  ‘Couldn’t drive.’

  ‘So limiting.’

  ‘Couldn’t read, except for the odd book in braille.’

  ‘You’d have audiobooks, I guess.’

  ‘Couldn’t see your kids smiling at you. Or the moon – or stars.’

  It’s usually this way: music and the dawn chorus pitted against the faces of innocents and the bloody night sky.

  ‘You’re so right,’ Mark replied. ‘Deafness is a breeze, by comparison.’

  ‘Pal, I’m sure it’s not.’

  ‘No, it is; I’m serious. How can I mourn the beauty of birdsong when its sound – were it suddenly made known to me – might not be the thing I thought I had missed all that time? I have no way of summoning up even the faintest aural idea of what it is. Sound is like a vacuum to me, a nothing. I can’t miss something that for me doesn’t even exist.’

  And so, conclusions were drawn that Mark is better off than most and everyone else far luckier than they generally recognize.

  ‘We take so much for granted,’ went the refrain.

  Afterwards, Mark said, ‘Don’t you just love other people.’

  ‘They’re not thinking, babe. That’s all.’

  ‘You’re not kidding. Fucking birdsong. There are a thousand other considerations.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Bastards,’ Mark snarled.

  ‘They forget, babe. It’s because you’re so adroit.’

  But Mark’s arms were in a circle on the table, his head upon them: he resembled a child slumped across homework that has defeated him. I put a mug down beside him, touched his shoulder. He looked up.

  ‘Coffee.’

  He shut his eyes and put his head back on his arms.

  The few who understand there is nothing to recommend one life sentence over another tend not to get into conversations about deafness with Mark. Those others who do (sometimes because they are curious and sometimes because they want to reassure themselves about their own insufficiencies, and sometimes – to be fair – because they have no idea how sorely he minds) like to tell him, ‘At least you can do stuff if you’re deaf. At least you can live a normal life. I mean, you’re just brilliant, Mark. You’re amazing. Look at everything you’ve done. Look at what you’ve achieved. Look at you.’

  ‘Look at me,’ Angus sighs.

  He is peering in the bathroom mirror. Briefly, he reminds me of my father, inspecting something substandard over his glasses.

  He says, ‘I’m going greyer.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Am I going greyer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really?’ He moves closer to the mirror. ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. In places, anyway. Those streaks at the sides.’

  ‘Well, bugger this for a lark.’ He pulls at the thick strands of hair at his temples, turning his head from side to side. ‘Are you sure? Since when has this happened?’

  ‘Since I’ve known you.’

  ‘That’s about ten minutes.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. But it was definitely a bit darker at the sides when we met. What’s the problem? It’s sexy. You look like a badger.’

  ‘I don’t want to look like a sodding badger!’

  ‘Badgers are cool. Did you know they can unfurl hedgehogs?’

  ‘Unfurl? What, like a parliamentary scroll? Do they eat them?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes. They eat lots of small mammals. Mainly grubs and earthworms, though.’

  ‘Blimey, the things you know.’

  Angus peers more closely into the mirror, running his fingers slowly through the hair above his right temple. He wrinkles his nose.

  ‘Stop preening. You’re gorgeous.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m old. I’m falling apart.’

  He turns and looks at himself sideways on; he sucks his stomach in, pats it; sighs.

  ‘I don’t know what you see in me.’

  ‘Your self-pity.’

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Well, stop whining. I can get that at home, from my children.’

  He looks at me. ‘My godfathers,’ he says. ‘Tough talk.’

  ‘Well, you’re being ridiculous. You’re only sixty, for God’s sake. And I love you to bits, I think you’re amazing. I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘You won’t always be.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Why do you say these things?’

  ‘Because it’s true. Quite apart from everything else, you will eventually find me too old. You won’t want to come and look after me when I’m infirm, and who could blame you.’

  If Angus knew how much I love his splendid, impressive face. If he had any idea just how beguilingly sexy I find all the evidence of a once-perfect frame in a body that has begun to creak a little and bend very slightly into itself. His skin is so soft and such a beautiful colour and it puckers a bit under my fingers. What is it that fascinates me so? I wish I knew. Is it the coexistence of strength and susceptibility? As for Angus’s seniority, it feels like a sanctuary to me. He doesn’t know that life without him seems impossible now, and he has no idea how hard I work to pretend I think otherwise.

  I say, ‘You will never be too old. You will always be my love.’

  He puts his arms around me and treads on my toes. We are barefoot and the gesture is careful and deliberate. He places the ball of his foot across the top of mine and presses down firmly. I am shocked, for Mark does this, too, in almost exactly the same way, and I pull back slightly, as I never have and never do when Angus rolls towards me in bed and lifts me – his strong, flat hands in the small of my back – to position me exactly where he wants me, and where I too want to be.

  I pull my feet out from under his. It is absurd that I find it harder to accept his bare toes upon mine than his entire naked body, but I do. This is something that previously belonged only to me and Mark. ‘Penguins’ we called it, because we believed – possibly mistakenly, now I think about it – that Emperor penguins stand on each other’s toes, and this we took as evidence of affection between these patient, portly birds; something uniting that also keeps the chill at bay. ‘Penguins’ became another element to keep us warm.

  Where the shock lies: realizing how much and how little we share with another person that is unique. The combined history, the banter, a whole union’s shorthand with which you understand that this is the marriage you are in, to that person and n
o other: what details of this fusion can we never expect to find with another person, in another relationship? What strange synthesis – that is already too extensive to recount and too abstruse or explain – belongs only to us? What sequestered familiarities? ‘Penguins’? Not any more, it seems. Even they have negotiated with surprising ease the uncertain crossing from marriage to new romantic terrain.

  I look down. My toenails are fuchsia pink, freshly polished. I am wearing a pair of rock-climbing trousers, in which I have scaled no rocks, and a checked shirt made from thick, brushed cotton that I bought years earlier in Canada: it is a man’s shirt, small, part of what Jay once termed my ‘no-bullshit wardrobe’. It was a compliment, coming from Jay, but not everyone would see it that way. Angus has never seen this shirt on me before. In it, I fancy I look ready for anything: log-piling, chainsawing, digging ditches. In this shirt, occasionally, I imagine myself the wife of a Newfoundland fisherman. My hair is in a ponytail. The fisherman tweaks it as he walks past me, swinging a large diesel-stained oilskin bag on to a worn kitchen table and hanging the keys to his pickup on a hook in the wall.

  Had I married Rich that is what I might have been, though Rich has probably given up fishing by now. He always believed we should leave the ocean well alone even before cod stocks hit an all-time low and the Canadian government closed so many of the fisheries. I wonder how he is these days. I think perhaps I will email him and find out. Funnily enough, Rich’s feet loomed pretty large in our relationship. Except when there was ice or snow on the ground he would walk almost anywhere without shoes. His soles were filthy and the skin on his heels horny. Come to think of it, he was never quite clean enough for my liking but his ocean-salted, golden hair I loved, and the faint sweet smell of his hard, nut-brown chest.

  I think back to the previous night, to where my feet were then; on Verity’s hazardous foredeck, glazed with rime, then padding around on her sanded floorboards while Angus cooked. As darkness fell, I perched them on the edge of the oval bath, my ankles crossed and my toes brushing Angus’s left ear as we chatted until the water grew tepid and filmy: later, my heels jammed into his calves.

  He takes my face in his hands.

  ‘Imagine if we were married.’

  That means unimagining everything I have.

  He says, ‘Okay, never mind. But please don’t frown at me. A man can dream.’

  A man with a woman can dream, and he should. But Angus and I are unable to plan anything, and dreaming is pointless, so we are denied one of the most fortifying elements of togetherness – restricted instead to shuffling pictures on the wall, chucking out chipped mugs and buying new bed linen in a role play of domestic rearrangement. One afternoon, we move the sofa to another spot as if to underline our capacity to make changes against all odds, but it looks absurd and temporary; it was much better where it was in the first place. We put it back, to the spot where Angus originally parked it years earlier, by himself.

  He says, ‘Damn. I was really hoping for a change. Let’s go out.’

  So we hunt for a new kettle in John Lewis. I wait while Angus talks to an assistant about the model he wants that is not on display. The assistant needs to ask his supervisor. I get bored.

  I say I’ll see Angus in ten. I roam around, uninterested in Kitchens and nauseated by Perfumes. I take the escalator up one floor where, like a child emerging from the stuffiness of a wardrobe into a glittering fairy-tale winter, I am transported via Menswear to Lighting, before arriving in Bathrooms, where I find relief, at last, amongst synchronized displays of cream and white towels. And although it is months from Christmas and nowhere near Mark’s birthday, I am overcome quite suddenly with the desire to buy my husband a thick-piled, shop-soft, dove-grey bathrobe. It is hanging right in front of me, in a row of other identical bathrobes: some are coffee-coloured, others white, but I want dove-grey. I know that once washed it will never feel quite the same again but the word ‘dove’ has made me feel calm, soft and airy – and I want that feeling to last. I want to feel dove-like. Even more, I want a dove-like husband. I picture Mark in the robe in our kitchen, coffee mug in hand, barefoot.

  My phone pings.

  ‘Nutcase, where are you?’

  ‘In Bathrooms.’

  Through a small square arch, I spy bottles of gold- and silver-coloured liquids laid out along large white cubes. Maybe I should buy Mark aftershave instead. I can’t leave empty-handed.

  Angus appears from behind me.

  ‘There you are!’ He peers over my shoulder and into the bag: ‘Ooh. Someone’s bought herself a new bathrobe!’

  ‘It’s not for me.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ I smile, embarrassed.

  ‘You total sweetheart!’ He grins. ‘Am I allowed to put it on as soon as we get home?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Of course.’

  Angus doesn’t want to put any pressure on me but he does want to know whether I think things will ever be different for us, and if so, when.

  He also wants to know at what point we might spend longer together. He says he understands my commitments but I know for a fact that he cannot begin to picture the reality: Mel and Miranda in bed with me on a Sunday morning, or all of us trailing round in our T-shirts and pyjama trousers, open books face down on the kitchen table beside cups of cold, greying tea, and the girls’ bowls, cereal stuck like grouting to their sides, abandoned on the carpet by the television. Once, I tell Angus that on Sunday mornings I make scrambled eggs for the girls – by which I really mean all four of us, but I don’t want to say that. Angus knows this and says he would like creamy scrambled eggs on Sundays, too. He is going to hold me to it.

  And so, because I do not want to try his patience too much, I am sitting with my phone and looking at my diary and going half-crazy with the seeming impossibility of the logistics, thinking, I can’t do that Saturday: Mark has a workshop in Bristol. Sunday is impossible: I promised to take the children swimming.

  I look out of the window. It is beautiful here today. Early summer. The sun is still up and the light forgiving. More time with Angus. Music, conversation, and lovely things to eat. The warmth of his skin down the length of my body. Best of all, his easy mood: a man that smiles when he sees me; always.

  Mark could take the kids swimming by himself, I suppose.

  I look at my diary again. Next weekend is impossible, and the weekend after that, and the one after that. Little things, commitments here and there, act as impediments that are not as great as my reluctance to upset my family’s routine but are impediments nonetheless.

  ‘If any of you know cause, or just impediment, why these two persons should not be joined together in holy Matrimony, ye are to declare it.’

  You can hold your breath on your wedding day and breathe a sigh of relief at the silence that follows the question, yet sooner or later – when it comes to impediments declared and undeclared – you will find that marriage is full of them. Margie used to mutter, ‘You can’t get a quart into a pint pot.’ I never understood what it meant at the time because for me, imperial measurements came under the aegis of history, not maths, but I think of it now as I wonder how I can divvy up my time so that I may fit the two lives that I have and the two men that I care about, into one – I know what Di would say if she were to finish that sentence; she’d say, ‘Woman,’ and I would say, ‘No, Di, bugger off, it’s not like that.’

  Indeed, I do say precisely those words to her, at some point: ‘It’s not like that, Di. It’s not the way it looks.’

  But that’s because I can’t admit to Di how these days I reject Mark; that I cleave to my side of the bed and flinch when his foot brushes mine. I can’t tell her that when I see my husband naked I look away as instinctively as if from a stranger; that the sight of him engenders feelings of such violent opposition I feel sick with guilt. I know it is in my expression sometimes, the visible rebound from what I once found lovely. Mark catches me not looking at him and I find it so hard to accept the pain it
causes us both that I say to myself, even at those moments, ‘But it’s not like that. It’s not the way it looks.’

  ‘Darling, arrival time? xox’

  ‘About 8. xox’

  ‘How hungry? xox’

  ‘Very! xox’

  ‘Then I shall feed you until you are replete . . . xox’

  If anyone were to read some of our texts, they might think it is exactly the way it looks.

  He doesn’t mean just a couple of days, he means an actual holiday.

  ‘Do you fancy a few days in Devon?’

  ‘A few days? Darling, are you crazy?’

  ‘Of course, you can’t.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. I thought I’d just ask.’

  ‘It’s always worth asking, hey?’

  He says, ‘You can’t do anything long.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Or at short notice.’

  ‘Not easily.’

  ‘I can’t just whisk you off somewhere.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not mine.’

  I put my arms around him. There are things I can say to console, or things I can say that are truthful.

  Angus sighs.

  He says, ‘I belong to you but you don’t belong to me.’

  The television offers distraction from the decadent insignificance of our woes. We watch a documentary about a soldier who lost the better part of three limbs in an explosion in Afghanistan. Afterwards, he had one arm left. He was courageous and determined and said you have to let go of anger. He used the word ‘selfhood’ a lot and insisted he was still himself, still Phil – or Pincher, as he was known to everyone who loved him. His girlfriend had stuck by him through the lot: the injury and devastation, the rehab, the new house with its bars and rails and modified shower, and a bed with remote-control settings. She had to do everything for Pincher now. With the zeal of a religious convert, she too talked about his wholeness; she said what a great dad he would be in time.

  Afterwards, I lie awake, worrying for Pincher and his girlfriend, wondering how whole you can be with one arm and no legs? At what point do you cease to be you? And if – like a film run in reverse – your limbs, one by one, were miraculously replaced, when might you say, ‘That’s enough! I am myself again!’? You are what you contain and not what contains you, that’s the current thinking, and it’s the way that Pincher and his girlfriend survive: but is it true?