The third time I left you in peace but
panic pounded me
and I obsessively checked Google maps for traffic.
I could have been home from Stratford-upon-Avon in two hours.
I set the alarm for six.
Next day, by the bridge,
take-away cups of tea and coffee
on the bench beside us,
we ate cream-filled doughnuts.
You claimed to hate cakes and pastries
but devoured that sweet breakfast
and licked your fingertips clean.
I saw myself reflected in your sunglasses,
did everything not to seem sad and
it worked,
I think,
until we were standing in the road twenty minutes later
hugging out a goodbye.
My dress rose up at the back.
I worried someone would see my knickers.
‘Have a good weekend, honey,’ you said,
which meant:
Let’s not make contact until
office hours.
Did you really believe joy was possible without you?
That being left like that on the side of a road
was a thing any person could simply accept?
All I ever wanted was for you to stay.
And sitting in the driver’s seat,
I watched in the rear-view mirror
until you turned a corner,
disappeared,
and I tried
so hard
to ignore my sugar-sore teeth.
That was the first time:
trying to try.
I can’t do this any more.
We have to be realistic.
What if they found out?
We could call it a break –
give ourselves six months –
see where we are.
Who knows the future?
Promises are pointless.
You know how I feel.
But it happened,
again and again
and
again and again and again.
Together
apart.
In love
in aching.
Tangled
unravelling.
The pain.
The shame.
The knots
and sleepless nights.
Again and again and again.
All the clichés.
The night bus jerked to a stop and I made room for
a woman with a pram, an array of
bulging carrier bags.
She scowled at my hand
holding the rail
too close to the face of her child.
A child who should have been in bed.
A man nearby ate a hot Cornish pasty from a box.
The smell was sickening.
You messaged around nine,
unsympathetic to my headache
or office politics with the partners.
I’ve a residents’ meeting, you texted.
I’m gonna have to hear about everyone’s drains.
I sat on the patio with a Romanian Pinot Noir
the colour of cranberry juice,
looking through case notes.
I’d lost an important one that morning –
a woman written out of her father’s will
when he was in sheltered care,
her brother getting everything.
She had a sick child.
She could have done with a few quid.
Two yellow roses bloomed
at the bottom of the garden,
poking their jolly
blonde heads out from behind the hydrangea –
a flower never quite sure of its colour,
lilting lavender when blue,
and purple when pink.
You messaged once the sun had well and truly set.
They won’t leave.
We’re on to recycling bins.
Actually, I’m peeing.
Thinking of you and peeing.
What are you doing?
Still whinging about work?
I poured a second glass of wine,
thought of you and Rebecca
hosting your residents’ meeting.
You hadn’t mentioned earlier
that it was being held in your house.
A sort of party, really.
Soirée.
I was meant to reply to that message,
be pleasant,
make jokes,
which you would read once the booze was gone,
the guests departed,
Rebecca safely removing her make-up,
eyesight too blurry to see what you were up to.
It is curious,
the things you told me
and thought I would enjoy.
It is a mystery
I never chastised you for it.
Acceptance: it was my bounteous gift to you.
For a while.
A parcel was couriered to my office
the day after your residents’ meeting.
Inside, a sparkling bottle of Ballygowan
and a packet of fast-acting Nurofen.
You wrote a note –
wished me a less stressful day than the one before
and promised to kiss my temples better.
And you did.
You kissed my face
on a bench in Coldfall Wood
and told me you were sorry
about the woman and her sick child,
and sorry I never had time to stop
and sorry you couldn’t take care of me
and sorry you were married
and sorry I was married
and sorry also for yourself.
We didn’t have long together that day.
You had a client meeting scheduled
with a television presenter
about a gaudy extension – ‘a lot of glass
but not much class,’
you said.
It was not a job you wanted
but figured it might get your
name in Wallpaper.
Which it did.
We didn’t have any desire to be locked in a room that day.
It was different.
We crept through a gap in the wood’s fencing
and found the older part of the cemetery,
ivy-eaten headstones, a rusting car.
‘I love you,’ you said.
‘I love you,’ I whispered.
It was the first time we had declared it.
I pull out the sofa bed,
curl up on the mattress without bothering to use a
sheet or find a blanket.
Tanya got me drunk,
promising the binge was for her benefit,
reminding me she was thirty-seven and still single,
two fiancés down, childless.
‘I’m rich, smart and gorgeous.
What do men want?’
‘Someone who isn’t a cunt?’ I suggested.
The mattress springs claw my back.
I message Mark.
Are you free soon?
He won’t reply –
not when he sees what time I’ve sent it.
I wrap my right arm around my body,
imagine you are holding me.
I caress my left shoulder
and am kissing my hand,
desperate for warm skin and spit.
My fingers glide down my belly.
A toilet upstairs flushes.
‘Mum?’
It is Ruth.
‘Mummy, are you home?’
I stay spectral.
And eventually she is silent.
A pile of books
like building blocks
has toppled next to Ruth’s bed –
novels,
facts,
activities.
She is wearing her school socks,
the white soles brown.
The French plait I gave her this morning is
still in, tousled.
I place her heavy head back on to the pillow,
kiss her lips,
her breath orangey and hot.
And I am reminded of why
you could not leave.
Jon is in bed with Paul,
horizontally lying across the end