He looked down.
I’m sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry. I’ve done it. I’ve told her . . .
He still had my hands between his; I could feel the heat of his palms against the inside of my wrists, the veined part, the arm joining the hand just as he joined words together, put her name in his mouth, next to his teeth, his mouth that had been on hers, his tongue . . .
I creased up my face in a way I knew must have looked repulsive, my eyebrows lowering to my cheeks, my mouth drooping, collapsing. I let words come out.
It’s disgusting. You disgust me.
I’m sorry. I mean it. I really am.
He was almost whining now, a curdled kind of sound. I could feel saliva building in my cheeks, tingling and rising to the surface, nausea starting up again. I thought of spitting in his face. Jake was breathing fast, his eyes clouded. Maybe, I thought, he wants me to do it. He wants to have to reach up and wipe me from his cheeks, off the lenses of his glasses. He wants to be in the right, even if only for a second. But just as I moved my mouth, he dropped my wrists, turned his head towards a noise.
I will never get a precise measurement of it: the exact length of time that Paddy – in his spaceship pyjamas, holding his old toy dog – stood on the stairs, listening to us, maybe even seeing us, seeing his father holding his mother back by the wrists. I only know what we did, once we knew, the way we became his parents, actors switching out of their roles, instantly, as though at a fire alarm, someone collapsed in the audience. I felt immediately sober, my dress too tight, the sourness of wine coating my teeth.
Why do you smell funny? Paddy asked, as we tucked him back in.
Why are you wearing that? He ran his fingers over the diamanté shape, stroked the black smoothness in the middle, his eyes heavy, fluttering. He was barely awake. Maybe in the morning, he would think it was all a dream.
Jake had left before me, as though he couldn’t bear to watch, giving Paddy a quick peck on the head, calling out Goodnight, sleep tight from the doorway. When I got downstairs, he was sitting at the kitchen table. He was drinking whisky from a heavy glass, the top buttons of his wrinkled work shirt undone.
Perhaps, I thought, this was how my mother and father felt after one of their fights. There was nothing we could do to take it back. Nothing in human history that said you could make things un-happen, take them away from memory, away from the mind. I once heard about a drug that gives the recipient amnesia after a traumatic injury or event. But presumably no doctor would give it to Paddy, for having witnessed whatever he’d seen.
I went to sit next to Jake, tried unsuccessfully to pull my dress around my breasts, over my stomach and legs. I reached for my glass of wine from the counter, sniffed it, made a face.
That wine’s been open for like two months, he said.
There was something in his eyes: amusement, I thought at first. His mouth was completely set, it was hard to tell. For the first time in years, I didn’t know what he was feeling. I could not imagine a single one of his thoughts. Only his actions were clear now: the way he reached over his face with one huge hand, moved his glasses up, rubbed his eyes. His other hand fell loose, palm up on the table.
Without thinking much about it, I shifted my hand until it was next to Jake’s, then over it, flattened against it. He was still covering his eyes with his left hand, the fingers close together, slightly cupped. I could see his breath, moving his shirt up and down. We held hands.
It started off as a squeeze, like when you assure someone you are still thinking of them in the cinema, or at an emotional moment at a wedding. But when I pressed on Jake’s hand, he didn’t press back. Maybe that’s why I did it.
I carried on pressing, harder and harder, knowing my nails were digging in. Jake moved his fingers from his eyes; he looked at our hands, entwined on the table, their different tones blurring together. He breathed in sharply, once. He carried on looking, but he didn’t move his hand away.
Only when I’d stopped, my face feeling hot, a little short of breath, did he speak.
That’s what you want, isn’t it, Lucy? To hurt me.
He was folding his lower lip into his mouth, his eyes were bright, moist, but it didn’t feel like an accusation. It felt like a statement, one of his scientific proclamations, a simple observation based on the facts.
~
Am I a good woman? The rare prize the Bible talks about, precious above jewels. I know I am not.
But I know other things too: how easy it is to leap from your life: as easy as your first step, your first period, the first time you let a man exist inside you, feel your body grip him, keep him in place.
~
14
For a few seconds after I woke up, I forgot it all. Without words, with only the sun-bleach of a peaceful mind, I knew that Jake was downstairs making tea, that soon they would all be on the bed, and we would talk about school and clubs and playdates that week, the boys yelling approval or hatred, lying down like puppies to have their tummies tickled.
In these few seconds Jake had not fucked anyone else: our world had not changed at all. I reached my hand across the bed, felt the coolness under the pillow next to mine. I remembered.
Last night, after Jake said it – That’s what you want, isn’t it? – he’d held out his hand again, showing me the nail marks, deep pink crescent moons, a pattern across his lifeline. The marks were clear, indisputable: it was deliberate, this time.
You can do it again. You want to.
You’re drunk, I’d told him. Go to bed.
I’m not drunk. I’ve only had one whisky. He’d held his palm up again, like my dad used to, a wide thing to aim for.
Punch me, my father would say, when I was angry with him about some trivial thing. You’ll break your hand like that, he’d say, moving my thumb to the right position.
Last night, I looked at Jake’s skin, shining in the kitchen lights. There were so many details, so many pathways. I thought of all the times I had kissed his fingers, rubbed them against my own.
Look, he’d said, I know how much I’ve hurt you. I’m so, so sorry, Lu. I don’t know how else to say it. A deep breath here, a gathering. But you can – you can hurt me back. He’d lowered his hand, but kept his eyes on me.
Why don’t you just try it, see if it helps? He was almost pleading.
You can do it a few times, he’d said. How many? Three?
He was smiling, very slightly, his eyes glazed, the muscles of his face tensed. It sounded like a joke. But somehow I knew – through the alcohol, the blur of his hands on my wrists, my fingers pressed down on his skin – that Jake was completely serious.
Three. I’d said it out loud, after he did. It made a kind of neat sense, something religious about its structure. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Peter betrayed Jesus three times. A familiar number, for a good Christian girl like me. I remember being allowed to ring the bell, in church: three times, I was told.
Now, I shifted in bed, and my stomach lurched, threatened to rise up out of my throat. Why should I be the one who feels sick? The thought came to me as though spoken from above, or from a tiny microphone inside my head. Surely, I agreed with the voice, it should be Jake who was being emptied, who had a hand reaching inside him, pulling everything out. Or if not him, Vanessa, gripping her belly, crying out. Or both of them, separately, wailing, swearing. If there was anything that could be compared to the agony of childbirth – which neither of them had experienced – it was surely an upset stomach. Gastric flu. The body at war with itself, the illusion of comfort broken forever.