“Well? You coming to clean this up then?”
“Can’t you see to it, Tel?” Simone protests, still watching her unmoving child, but she gets up.
“Brainless place to put a bowl.”
Simone follows Terry down the corridor and enters the kitchen. She sees the bowl that has smashed, and instinctually, she laughs. “That wasn’t me, Tel. Must be one of your ex’s. I haven’t touched that shelf.”
As soon as she utters the words, she realises that Terry is looking at her with a foreboding intensity. This alone wouldn’t be unsettling – Terry’s always been intense, it was one of the things that first drew her to him and it shoots often through his eyes: that penetrating blueness, dotted unpredictably with mischief and passion. She’d felt so special at the start – she the only one to see the softness in the blue. But today Terry’s eyes have a hue of red about them. The skin underneath is dark and puffy. His sometimes soft, wispy hair is thin and flat against his head. He hasn’t showered. A few days ago he went on a binge and hasn’t scored since. She should have noticed all this sooner.
Softly, Terry takes her wrists, one in each hand, and pulls them slightly downwards. It is not hard, yet her body feels weighted. Leaning forward he sticks his face an inch before her own. She can smell beer and something stale on his breath. He is waiting for her to look at him. Slowly, she meets his eye. For a second, he holds her gaze. Two seconds. Three.
Until suddenly, he snickers. “Well, Milly’s a dense cow also!”
Now there is an explosion of laughter, first from Terry, then from Jasmine who has finally unfrozen and followed them into the kitchen, and eventually from Simone who smiles and tentatively joins in. Terry thinks he has been hilarious. He releases Simone’s wrists with a flourish and lifts Jasmine high into the air. She seems fine now, Simone notices. Unbothered by the tension that has preceded this moment and perhaps was only ever in Simone’s head. As her father starts throwing her up and down, she giggles profusely, louder with every flight.
“Jassy,” Terry shouts as he launches her. “Jassy!”
Simone feels her own chest relax. Everything’s fine. She was being paranoid again, typically, seeing problems that aren’t there. Terry’s always telling her she’s doing that. And he’s always had a dark sense of humour. Given his childhood, he does well really to be as balanced as he is. She should be more understanding of that, more mindful. Especially when he’s on a comedown. Especially with the move. Jasmine shrieks again and now Simone laughs a little louder, with careful pleasure. Noticing her mother, Jasmine giggles even more generously, gesticulating for her to join in. But as Simone moves closer, reaching for her daughter’s outstretched hands, Terry stops still. Face instantly devoid of lightness, he spins around and stares at her again, as though her presence is a rude, unwelcome intrusion, and they haven’t moments ago been laughing together. She feels she should back away or disappear into the floorboards.
“Go on then,” he says.
This time, the curtness to his tone is unmistakeable, not imagined, and the relief of the previous moment is replaced with a shooting panic. What does ‘go on then’ mean? What does he want her to do? Back away? Could he hear her thinking? The TV is still blaring, politicians arguing about something irrelevant, and the room feels unbearably loud. Confusion creeps. They were just playing, weren’t they? Laughing? Go on then. She’s worried she hasn’t heard him properly, or that she’s missed something, and if she asks for clarification he’ll think she wasn’t listening, that she’s making him look like a mug. She hesitates for a second. Two seconds. Three. But her anxiety is still misplaced. Again, she’s read things wrong.
“Go on then,” he repeats, and this time he says it in a coaxing, sing-song voice, as if it’s a great joke, or as though he’s talking to Jasmine, as though Simone is a child herself. She is still unsure of the instruction, but he helps her now with a wave of his hand. Tentatively she picks up the dustpan and brush to which he is indicating. “Stupid Mummy,” Terry tells Jasmine, shaking his head as he hurls her into the air again.
It is not the right time to tell Terry about the job. Maybe later, once he’s had a line or two. Or when their friends are round. Or once Dominic is home from school and has eaten the chocolates from the silly blonde woman next door.
Veronica
Veronica had managed to unpack all of the boxes, with the exception of the ones labelled for George’s study. Those were sitting neatly piled in the third bedroom atop the olive green carpet she had finally managed to convince him was coming back into fashion, and anyway a good colour for channelling the fields and calm-inducing pastures of their childhoods, which they did not see in the city. Despite being a stone’s throw from Regent’s Park, landscaped gardens fanned the mind with precise, ordered beauty; they didn’t drench the soul with wild terrain. She and George both agreed that during their teen years, they would have been lost without such wilderness. Their boarding schools, it turned out, were less than five miles apart in the Kent countryside and they have often spoken of how while she was performing in her school’s open-air drama festival, he may have been shooting down a frosted pitch, legs muddied and hands bloodied in worship of the fast-clasped rugby ball. Over a decade since his last match, George retained a steel pin in his left shoulder, a knee that was in constant need of physiotherapy and a nose that would never be quite as straight as God may have intended. But like her love of American rock music, and a series of dalliances with unsuitably young male English teachers, her husband wore these badges like the proofs they were: attestation to the years of privilege and opportunity and community and neglect.
He had promised to tackle the boxes at the weekend, but for the time being Veronica had shut the bedroom door to hide them. It may have taken her until almost midnight, but tomorrow they would wake up in the house they had been visiting at various stages of demolition and resurrection every week for the past six months, and it would be just as they had dreamed it. Even the wedding china, which while they were in the flat languished in storage, had now been meticulously removed from bubble wrap and placed on the exact shelf of the exact cupboard that she had been planning. For his part, George had fitted the feet of every chair and table and moveable piece of furniture with thin felted cushions, so as to protect the dark oak floor. He had read all of the instructions for the gas and electricity metres, for the boiler, for the alarm system. And he had phoned the council to find out which days each of the different bins were collected. He had not, yet, touched her.
Their bed had a high romantic headboard, waffled in cream, and the wardrobes and bedside tables were painted a slightly peeling white in the shabby chic style of Louis XIV. These were pieces they had garnered over a series of months, visiting showrooms and antique fairs, each fastidiously chosen to complement the sweeping floor to ceiling windows and luxurious cream shag rug at the end of the bed. The effect was a success. Despite the dust, which even a professional post-build cleaning crew and three attempts by herself had failed to dispel, the room exuded airiness, tranquillity, and, of course, amour. This last was an added pressure she had not accounted for. Since the miscarriage, everything was a pressure. Yet without discussing it, Veronica felt that both she and George had been viewing the house as a new start, building it up in their minds as the fresh slate upon which their dreams, their family, would materialise. The only problem was that now the house was complete, there was a call for action. Now they had to do something. Not something, one specific thing. And now, all they could do was lie on opposite sides of their soft, vast bed, petrified by the prospect of continued catastrophe, continued ways in which they had failed and would fail each other.