After the chicken was cut I squeezed an entire lemon over the top, like my mother taught me to do. My mother didn’t like cooking, but she knew certain things. She knew about clamping your fist down on the thick yellow skin, digging your nails in, squeezing tight. As I did it I noticed – apart again, from a small space away – how it made me feel, as though a cool wind was blowing through my chest. I squeezed harder, the juice falling into the sizzling pan, my teeth coming together, my jaw clenched. I kept doing it, feeling my face contorting into an ugly shape. When I had finished – when there was not one drop of lemon juice left in that fruit – I turned around to throw the skin away. Ted was there in the doorway watching me, his mouth hanging half open.
~
There is a trail of anger flowing through my bloodline, from my great-grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me. Perhaps it goes even further back too, to my great-great-grandmother, who had twelve children, three of whom died.
One of them, so the story goes, was left out in a pram until his face blistered over in the sun. This is a story I have known since childhood, but when I told it to my mother, she said that I had made it up. I am left with the mystery of this woman of many children; was she too busy to notice the baby in the pram? Did she forget?
~
5
It was the worst-case scenario: he was back past eight o’clock, the boys asleep, me wide awake, curled in Ted’s bed, my arms around him for comfort. It is wrong to look to your children for comfort, I knew that. And yet I had so many moments like this: after a bad afternoon, a bad year, his body against mine, his sleep the most soothing rhythm I could imagine. I had sung Ted to sleep that night; he’d asked for it, even after Paddy clamped his hands over his ears and howled Shut up! Both boys, in fact, had lain down quietly in the end, and I had sung until my throat was sore and the phone message seemed abstract, only very distantly dangerous, like a firework alight in the sky.
I heard the scrape and accordion-like breath of the door, so familiar, Jake’s steps, his bag going down on the chair beside the table. I didn’t move. Jake called out, softly, from the bottom of the stairs. He might have thought I was still wrestling with the consciousnesses of our children, pushing them into the softness of sleep. Too often, he had come up just at the point when Ted’s eyelids were drooping, and I’d had to start the whole process again. So he only called once. I heard him go into the kitchen, shut the door, put his dinner in the microwave.
I think my parents were liberal with television too, because all I saw when I imagined dramatic scenarios in my life were those in TV shows: certain episodes I’d seen over and over, that seemed to have greater texture than my own existence. I could not think of a way to confront Jake that did not feel scripted, stilted, too cheesy or on the nose. I could fling myself at him, pummel his chest with my fists, demand that he tell me everything. I could, carefully and without crying, cut every single one of his work shirts into shreds. I could—
Ted stirred, his arm surprisingly heavy and strong in his sleep, falling backwards like part of a sail turned by the wind. He moaned something indecipherable, made an attempt to stretch out on the whole bed. I was going to have to leave. I thought of creeping upstairs, to our room, pretending to be asleep, but the thought was too lonely, too cold somehow, as though I could already feel the emptiness of the sheets, the particular creak the bed would make when Jake eventually came up, found me with my eyes closed.
As I started down the stairs, I briefly considered acting as if I didn’t know, but the precariousness of this was obvious – she would tell him. And at the thought of her – the name had become unbearable, suddenly – something changed. Something became untethered inside me, as I had often feared it would, one organ seeming to break free from the rest, left to float, uprooted, around my body.
For as long as I could remember, I’d had a terror of my own heart. As a ten-year-old, I insisted that it was missing beats, ended up with my flat chest covered in circular plastic suckers at the doctors. My heart, it was proclaimed, was healthy. At sixteen, wracked with exam stress, I was even given a heart monitor, a hidden plastic visitor meant to record the incidents I kept feeling, my heart fluctuating, squirrelling, trying to break free.
I had been given the all-clear that time too, and no longer felt I could mention the things my heart did, all of its dives, its inversions, its battle for release. I gripped the railing of the stairs, feeling wrongness squirm and flip somewhere unseen. By the time I was standing in front of Jake, I was sweating, breathing quickly: I hardly needed to say a thing.
6
Jake got me a glass of water, running the tap until it was cold, testing the temperature with his hand, so that the glass he gave me was slippery with wetness, its contents fresh and cool as though they were from a spring. I gulped the whole thing, gasping between swallows.
He kept his eyes on me: usually by this point he’d be moaning about the train, about the other commuters – so packed, so bloody rude – speaking with his mouth full, gesturing with his fork. But now he was placing the food into his mouth slowly, deliberately, watching me.
How was your day? he said instead, putting as much normality into the question as possible. Sometimes I thought this was the worst thing about being married: the way you get to know exactly what every tone means, every gesture, every single movement. Sometimes, even before this happened, I would long for a misunderstanding, to have no idea what he meant.
I put the glass down, pulled the sleeves of my cardigan over my hands. I let the silence be for a few seconds, feeling the innocence in it, the reality of our life, the thousands of days without this knowledge.
Jake, I spoke to – for a second I thought that I was going to forget his name, that this is what would save us, after all. Forgetfulness, some boring name given to someone decades ago lost, slipping by, letting Jake get away with it.
David Holmes – there it was, words caught on a hook. He told me – about you and Vanessa.
I swallowed, looked up. Jake held his fork in mid-air. I had expected immediate remorse, his face crumpling with it – this would be new, in fact. I had never seen that before. But instead he looked angry, that old dog, the irritation creeping up his features. He shook his head.
Fucking wanker. He dropped his fork so that it fell on the plate, such a small, domestic noise. Nothing that the neighbours would notice. He scraped back his chair abruptly – they might have noticed that, the walls were thin – then walked around the kitchen leaning his neck back, cradling it in his own hands.
He seemed to have forgotten that I was there, feeling tiny now, at the table, my legs crossed, the panic subsided and replaced by the water I had drunk, its waves breaking inside me.
He carried on walking up and down, as though deciding something. He came towards me, his face different, younger somehow, new emotions, new skin, his knees down on the ground, his hands reaching up for mine.
Lucy. Lucy, please – it was – it’s not—
He was trying not to speak in clichés, I could tell. Trying not to say all the things we’d both seen, a thousand times. All of those stupid, broken, fictional couples on television, not even able to find their own original language. And here we were.
Vanessa? I couldn’t help it. Her name filled my mouth, sat on my tongue. Vanessa? That sound at the end, sibilance giving way to an open mouth, a gape.