Today, for us, there was no routine farewell, no kiss goodbye. Even Jake, the expert in normality, couldn’t manage it. He waved instead, while turning around, no eye contact. From the door, I watched him take off with the boys, his hand wrapped around the school bags they refused to carry, his voice marshalling them to cross the road. He was wearing a thick coat, a knitted hat. Under his coat, a good jumper his mother had given him. Under that, a cotton shirt: off-white, blue stripes. Under that, I knew, was the scratch: even paler now, peach-coloured, the skin already beginning to close over it, to regrow.
Jake would have known the proper terms for the healing: he could name it exactly. He had a scientific mind, was a biologist by profession; he studied bees, would bring home the tiniest fragments of his work, facts dangled on sticks, things I could understand. Apparently, he told me once, the name Queen Bee is misleading: she doesn’t control the hive, her sole function is to serve as the reproducer. But over this, she has almost perfect control.
~
At school, the teachers asked why I always drew her: the woman with wings, her hair long, her belly distended. Is she a bird, they asked me? Is she a witch? I shook my head, refused to tell them anything.
I never shared her with my friends, never named her in our games. I kept her inside me, at the edges of my vision, moving in and out of sight.
~
11
After they left, I felt my mind fall, its scattered attentions sinking into the watchfulness of empty rooms. It was in this house that I first started working from home, as in living from home, relocating my entire existence to these rented walls. I had lived in this town for most of my life – only leaving to go to university in its similarly privileged twin – and had never managed to own a piece of it. But here, in this house, I belonged, if only for a fixed term. Wasn’t life temporary, anyway, I asked myself; wasn’t permanence a fantasy? But I couldn’t help but want it: a mirage of safety, the pretence that four walls could keep your life, could hold you present on the earth.
We were, in our earlier years, cavalier about owning a house, or too poor, or too afraid – depending on which story we told – until it was no longer possible. Jake’s career progression had been modest, mine had been in reverse, and meanwhile the prices in our area had risen quickly, silently, like mould along the inside of a neglected jar. The only people who could buy here now were bankers, corporate lawyers, high-level employees of multinational pharmaceutical companies, people whose values seemed somehow at odds with their aesthetics, their Edwardian stained glass, wooden bookshelves filled with books from their days at university.
In these houses, most of the women stayed at home; their husbands were busy enough that they wanted a housekeeper, a nanny, a constant, hovering presence. The woman – the wife – could be all of these things, and she could keep her hand in, she could join the PTA.
I don’t know why I thought I was any different; I was surely the same, with less money. Today, as on every other work day, I was writing copy: a manual for an industrial gluing device. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer, imagined I would write something more meaningful than the sentence I had perfected today: To avoid accidents lay the cables so that they will not cause any risk of stumbling. But perhaps I could never have written anything as useful as this, anything that would prevent a death.
Pre-children, I found work at a university press, still within touching distance of intellectual life, of the PhD I had once abandoned. I moved between lines of dense, taut prose, seizing mistakes, making it perfect. I even stayed there when I had Paddy, submitting cringing apologies for every illness he had, every forced day off. I was surrounded by male colleagues working late, picking up speed, their sweat permeating the small office. Ambition was here, somewhere, I knew. But when I went freelance – after Ted was born, to be more available for the children – I was hired by whoever would have me: hotel brochures, private school prospectuses, company training materials. I told myself that I was seeing the world, that I was writing the world. Maybe I was.
But today I couldn’t concentrate. I walked in and out of rooms without purpose, looking out of windows, trying to find something to see. I watched a mother crossing the road with her children, all colour drawn from her face into the street around her, the houses, her children’s wide faces and bright clothes. As they moved across the street, she put her body in front, before theirs, the first thing that would be hit.
In the kitchen, I made a cup of tea, tried to drink it before it was cool enough, felt the scorch on the end of my tongue. I couldn’t stop thinking of Vanessa: her quick glances, her self-possession, the way I’d seen her smiling at Jake. Like a son, I used to think. My stomach turned. I closed my eyes, tried to slow my breathing, but all I could see was the shape of Jake in the dark, the quickness of my movement towards him, the spectral outline of his scratch: like a drawn-on mouth, trying to speak.
12
Jake was late that night, and I knew it wasn’t the trains. I had checked them online while the boys were in the bath, crouched on the loft stairs, the light from my phone a cool comfort in the twilight. My thumb streamed through the arrivals: every single one had a green tick beside it, running on time. These were just facts, I reminded myself, pieces of information: they weren’t personal.
There was no text. There was nothing from him, the expectant blankness of my phone reminding me of evenings – early on – when I had waited for him to reply. The first days of mobiles, the elegant, longhand notification: 1 Message Received. I would leave the phone in my room and go for baths for two or three hours, putting off the moment when I had to return to the screen. Jake and I were practically children when we met, I used to tell people. We were twenty, idealists, babies intent on saving the world. We didn’t know what we were doing.
I got the boys out of the bath, lifting each of them high, rubbing their hair, pretending to be some kind of robot – the drying robot! – blowing raspberries in their necks. They went along with it, laughed at me, leaned back their heads and let me do it. Ted snuggled in my armpit after, wriggled with delight. But as Paddy brushed his teeth I saw him watching me, his eyes tipping down, something like suspicion making them narrow, his mouth full of toothpaste foam. He watched as I flipped the plug up, as I grabbed the bath mat, shaking it vigorously, scooped dirty socks from the floor with one hand while guiding the toothbrush back in Ted’s mouth with the other.
Are you okay, Mummy?
For their sake, I tried to calm down. Surely there were plenty of explanations for lateness; accident, illness, mechanical failure. Terrorist attack. Or: Jake could have decided to go for a drink with a colleague. He had done that before. I watched a wave of my own ignorance gathering at the edge of my thoughts, low, like tsunamis seemed to be from a distance, threatening to overtake everything.
How, I wondered, had I believed him so many times, barely even listened, in fact, to his excuses? Often, I knew, I was relieved when he didn’t come home. After a day of the children’s bodies soaking into me, I wanted nothing more than quiet, bathwater, my own skin. I had always needed a lot of time alone; in this way, you could say I was unsuited to marriage from the start. But we were happy, for a long time: I knew we were. There were pictures of us from the day we got engaged, standing at the top of a hill. Our faces were so young they seemed to blend into the sky. We were squinting, disappearing, our grins almost erased by the sun.