Love Will Tear Us Apart Read online

  A couple of times, I was taken aback by a ball of tears that welled up in seconds and splashed all down my face. I would reach up and touch my face in surprise, finding it wet and contorted. When that happened, I would sometimes see Viv in the corner of my eye, her own mouth barely open, trying to find the first sound. Generally, tears happened alone. I cried a lot on the toilet. The sudden silence of the bathroom slapping me.

  Paul got home from school at just gone four o’clock and we’d go straight upstairs to play music while he did his homework and I read a copy of Jackie that Viv had brought home for me, folding the corners of the pages with hairstyles or clothes I liked.

  The Z-bed sagged perfectly like a memory mattress and sometimes I dozed while I waited for him to finish his schoolwork, the sound of his Parker pen swiping across the pages soothing me like a lullaby. I’d half offer to help him, but he didn’t need my input. He was always smarter than me, and more dedicated to perfecting his work. His penmanship was beautiful, it still is. Though all he ever writes these days is cheques, or ‘Daddy’ in birthday cards to the children. He still has a fountain pen, a beautiful Graf Von Faber-Castell with a discreet herringbone pattern along the shaft of it. It was a gift from our old CEO when Paul was promoted to Creative Director.

  On the Sunday before I started school again, as Paul and I finished washing up and drying the plates from that afternoon’s roast dinner, my father knocked on the door. I heard his voice as he was invited in, the tautness of it unsuited to a house used to chatter.

  ‘Katie,’ Viv called. ‘Your dad’s here.’

  I walked out of the kitchen carrying a tea towel. I did this for show, I’ll admit now, because I wanted him to see me taking part in the domesticity of family life – another family’s life.

  ‘Hello,’ I said solemnly. Although it had only been a week and a bit, he looked older and thinner. He was approaching fifty then, but he could easily have been past sixty. His neck was scrawny with a spray of new grey hairs creeping down from his nape. It made me think of the roast chicken carcass that was being boiled for stock and stinking out the kitchen.

  ‘Hello, Kate. Are you ready to come home now?’

  It was an odd question, and an odd sensation – being given the power of veto to something that really should have been enforced.

  I shrugged. I had hoped that one of the Loxtons might have vetoed for me. ‘Oh, please let her stay’ or ‘She’s one of us now’ or just ‘Would you like to stay a bit longer, Katie?’ but my father took my shrug as a sign of readiness and told me to go and get my things together.

  Paul and I went upstairs in silence and he sat on the bed watching as I stuffed my clothes into my bag.

  As I went out to the narrow landing, I could hear my father downstairs offering Viv and Mick money for my keep. In her rebuttal, Viv’s voice had a haughtiness to it that I hadn’t heard before.

  ‘I’m sorry if I offended you,’ my father said in his crisp manner. ‘I didn’t ask for any of this but I appreciate your support to Kate.’

  ‘I think you should go and wait in the car now, mate,’ Mick said. He was topless, shaving foam on his neck with drag marks through it, the final strokes left to go. ‘We don’t need your money,’ he added. ‘We’re happy to do this for the girl, we’re not after anything.’

  ‘No, I, I’m sorry. I’ll wait in the car.’

  When I left, I hugged Mick and Viv in turn and thanked them for having me, even though I stayed several times a week without such fanfare. I started to go through the front door but looked back to wave to Paul. ‘Thanks for sharing your room with me, Paul,’ I said.

  ‘You’re alright,’ he said, half-smiling.

  ‘See you after school tomorrow?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. See you. Good luck with the bitches.’

  I returned to school a celebrity. Somebody, possibly Mrs Baker, had called the school office to tell them about my mum.

  I think my form tutor had spoken to the girls in my class before I got there. On my return, girls that I had been in school with for ten years, who had never acknowledged me unless forced, were putting their arms around me. I was offered sweets, asked to be their partner in science. At lunch I was even invited to sit with the boarders – cool, aloof kids who I realise now were sad as hell. I was even given uneasy smiles from teachers for forgotten homework. It was bewildering.

  The Wednesday after I returned, Harriet Blythe, the reigning queen bee in my class, had asked me to her house for dinner and I had to bite my lip to slow my giddy acceptance down. Ten years, and that was my first invite to a classmate’s home.

  Her father worked away in the Emirates (‘It’s an emerging marketplace,’ Harriet had told me confidently) but her mother and two younger sisters were home. We were collected in a green, mud-splattered Range Rover Classic that bounced over cattle grids like an armoured tank.

  They lived in a huge converted farmhouse, with a long drive through fields that belonged to their estate. Harriet, her mother and her sisters, Rebecca and Rosie, all had golden hair and round blue eyes. Like Hayley Mills in Pollyanna, but without her chutzpah.

  Harriet and I dropped our bags by the front door and we all ate Chelsea buns and drank orange juice that had been laid out for us like a TV commercial. Harriet showed me to her room. ‘Let’s put make-up on and take pictures. Mummy gave me her old camera and I’ve got loads of film,’ she trilled in a rehearsed and earnest voice. Then she opened a small trunk full of makeup, laid out in a rainbow with professional-looking brushes.

  I painted her face first, carefully brushing her cheeks upwards as instructed. I applied green and gold eyeshadow, like a kingfisher, and two coats of mascara. She looked in the mirror afterwards. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ve done this before, have you?’ I’d actually practised that exact look myself, copied from a photoshoot with Grace Jones that I’d seen in one of my mother’s old fashion mags. But I didn’t argue. I watched as she ‘fixed’ the look into something more akin to Shirlie from Pepsi and Shirlie.

  Eventually, she turned to face me. ‘Now, let’s do you.’

  I’d never had a problem with my red hair. Despite it giving classmates yet more ammunition (it’s so easy to boost an insult just by adding ‘ginger’ as a prefix), I liked the way it looked. This was the era of Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, Kate Bush and Cyndi Lauper. I still like my red hair, still boosting it to a brighter red, rather than adding gold as hairdressers are always keen for me to do.

  But back then, Harriet seemed embarrassed for me. ‘Let’s call you. . . strawberry blonde,’ she consoled.

  I know, and have always known, that I have a relatively limited make-up palette that works for me. That palette doesn’t involve pink. But Harriet insisted on adding magenta, baby pink and flicks of purple to my eyes, hot pink cheeks and a kind of lemony-pink lipstick. I looked like I’d had an allergic reaction.

  Nonetheless, still desperate not to destabilise the burgeoning friendship, I posed for all the pictures as instructed, pulled every face, and kept the make-up on for the rest of the afternoon. ‘You have such a. . . striking look,’ Harriet had said and I tried to hide my huge smile.

  Their place was more lived-in than my home and a bit smaller. I asked to use the bathroom and noticed all the toothbrushes in the holder, even though there must have been several bathrooms, probably an en suite or two.

  I hitched up my skirt, tugged my tights and knickers down and sat on the loo, looking at a hodge-podge of books on the windowsill. I didn’t notice it at first, the smear of dark brown blood lying dormant on my underwear. I’d been prepped for this moment for years, hearing all the other girls bragging about their periods and their tampons and their this and their that. We even had a special lesson on it in science, although that was far more theoretical than practical. I cleaned up as best I could with toilet roll and looked around for something I could use. Nothing. I washed my hands and looked inside the mirrored medicine cabinet over the cream-coloured basin. No
thing useful, just a lot of pill tubs and a bottle of TCP.

  Harriet was waiting for me outside when I opened the door. ‘You’ve been ages. Are you okay?’

  ‘Um, I need some towels or something,’ I whispered.

  Her brow furrowed. ‘Towels? Have you made a mess?’ she asked, eyes widening as she tried to peer around me and into the bathroom behind.

  ‘No, not those sort of towels, like, y’know, tampon towels. Or tampons. Or, y’know, whatever you use.’

  Harriet lifted her head back and made an exaggerated ‘hawww hawww’ sound. Eventually she stopped, but not before attracting the attendance of her younger sisters in their matching Sunnygrove uniforms and golden pigtails.

  ‘You don’t call them tampon towels, Kate.’

  ‘No, I know that, I was just—’

  ‘Don’t you have any with you?’

  ‘No, I, this is my first—’

  ‘Oh, Kate.’

  I didn’t say how suspicious I found it that Harriet, the great period expert, laughed at me for being a ‘late starter’ but didn’t have any sanitary products of her own to share. Instead, Harriet’s mother, stifling a laugh at my makeover, gave me a brick-thick wedge with strings hanging out of it to attach to stockings I didn’t have. I stuffed it into my knickers, pulled my tights up and hoped for the best.

  Later, when the Blythe females had dropped me home, I took a deep breath and ventured into my mum’s abandoned bathroom, gathering up everything I needed and tucking them into my wardrobe.

  The next day, I went to Paul’s after school as usual. My belly aching with a new pain, trying to forget how quickly it had spread around school that I’d had a ‘giant period’ all over Harriet’s house.

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ he asked.

  ‘A friend’s house.’

  ‘What friend? I thought you didn’t have any friends?’ He wasn’t being unkind, I had told him this many times.

  ‘Well, I won’t be going back.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because she’s a bitch, just like the rest of them.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s embarrassing.’

  ‘I won’t tell.’

  ‘Who would you tell?’ I sniped, and then felt bad. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s just. . . Something happened at her house, she said she wouldn’t tell and then it was all over the school today. I just hate that fucking place so much.’

  ‘Fuck them,’ he said. ‘Let’s get some chips.’

  We played ‘who would you have on your celebrity list’ at a dinner party once, a couple of years ago, While I reeled off five famous men I’d happily sleep with, and then switched one of those for another, Paul ran out at two: Nicole Kidman and Molly Ringwald, for which he was roundly abused.

  ‘You been to see the latest Molly Ringwald film then, Paul? Or doesn’t your time machine work?’

  ‘Certainly got a type, haven’t you, mate?’

  I knew full well who his celebrity crushes were way before that game, because if Paul has a crush, he angles the conversation their way or inserts the object of his affection into situations. This is why we went to the cinema to watch Eyes Wide Shut despite the reviews, and how I knew, over two decades before, that Paul like liked a girl called Anna in his class.

  ‘Oh,’ he said out of nowhere one day, ‘Anna told me that they’re opening a Burger King in Yeovil. Wimpy won’t like that!’

  ‘What are you talking about? Who is Anna?’

  ‘You know, Anna from my class. I sit with her in science. . . sometimes. I sat with her today and she said that they’re opening a—’

  ‘Burger King in Yeovil, yeah, I heard, but. . . so?’

  ‘I’m bored of Wimpy, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve hardly ever had one.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but—’

  I sighed. ‘Tell me more about Anna.’

  The Anna project rumbled on over the weeks, with Paul bringing home titbits of conversation to dissect. ‘I think she likes you too,’ I said finally, although something irritated me about that. I guess I’d spent so long with Paul that I felt a private sense of ownership. That she, this ‘Anna’ who Paul had proudly pointed out from his class photo, with her shiny chestnut hair and brown doe eyes, was swooping in to take over from the careful friendship he and I had built.

  I would never in a million years have admitted to Paul that I was jealous, I didn’t admit it to myself at the time. Instead I rolled my sleeves up and approached the situation with fervour.

  ‘Let’s write her a letter,’ I said, thinking about the mating rituals of my classmates. ‘Girls love getting notes from boys.’

  We crafted it carefully, scrapping several drafts and eventually reaching the point where it wasn’t going to get any better.

  ‘Spray it in aftershave,’ I suggested but obviously, being a smooth-faced thirteen-year-old, Paul didn’t have any. In the end, we dabbed our fingers in Mick’s Old Spice and smeared a couple of greasy print marks across the Basildon Bond paper we’d swiped from Viv’s treasures box.

  The next day, I rushed to Paul’s after school, desperate to hear what went down, at the same time nauseous at the thought of it. I imagined Paul strutting home, a girl on each arm, somehow sporting a moustache and a foot of extra height. Moustachioed imaginary Paul would look down at me as he glided past with his harem.

  ‘Who’s she?’ the girls would chirrup.

  ‘Her?’ Paul would laugh. ‘Oh, she’s nobody.’

  I waited outside the front door, chewing my nails. Paul was the same height when he came into view by The Swan. His face was still smooth. There were no dolly birds on either arm. And, far from laughing, he looked thunderous.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ he snapped, as he fumbled with his key to open the door.

  The relief ran through me like cold water.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘She’s got a boyfriend,’ he mumbled. ‘And she’s not going to sit next to me any more.’

  I took a big breath because I didn’t have a clue what to say. ‘Ah,’ I said, awkwardly. ‘You’ve still got me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  November 2012 – Wednesday evening

  Paul once said that he knew deep down that I could fade away like my mother. He was drunk, I wasn’t. I was still nursing Izzy and barely awake most evenings. At the time, I argued that I would never do that to my children. I could never retreat from them, never leave them to pick their own way haphazardly like I had.

  And yet.

  Sometimes, like right now this afternoon, I imagine I’m watching myself from above.

  I drift higher and higher, my body becoming smaller and smaller below until it’s barely a pin prick. And that feeling of disappearance feels just slightly right. As if the whole world might be smoother without my little dot disrupting its surface. But I’ve never said this to Paul. Instead, when he measures me with his eyes, probes me about my health, I smile as naturally as I can and thank him for caring.

  Did my mother choose to fade away? Did she even know what was happening to her? I didn’t know at the time and could never ask her. Only Viv offered a breadcrumb trail of revelation too many years too late, when the damage was long done.

  ———

  The kids are in bed and Paul is asleep on the sofa, half a glass of amber-coloured wine losing its chill on the side table.

  I’m the only one awake in this house. I could slip out of the door and no-one would know until morning. I love the kids so painfully but I sometimes explore, in exhaustive detail, the other lives I might have had. The life I could be living now if I’d followed colleagues to New York in the nineties. The Kate I’d be if I worked in fashion. The life I could have lived back in Somerset, facing my mother and father’s memories down and creating an actual life there. But I know I’d have ended up here anyway. This is the bed I made. And if I feel like that, the rescued, the grateful. . . how does Paul feel? Does he imagine the other wives he could have had?
The journalism career he walked away from? To think I believed I’d rescued him, once upon a time. I shudder at the naivety.

  The evening has long given way to black night and I check in on the kids casually, walking in to their rooms just far enough to hear their breathing and smell their sweetness. When Harry was a new baby, I could never have imagined such a flippant whistle-stop. For months, he slept in a cot by my side while I barely slept. Instead, I stared at the little, pink, wobbly creature in disbelief.

  I’d heard people talk about ‘new baby smell’ and assumed it was in the same spectrum as ‘new car smell’. Something along the lines of fabric conditioner and milk. But there’s no describing it, that perfume that’s like a thumbprint, unique to them. That you don’t just learn to recognise your baby’s unique squawk, but you could pick them out of a line-up blindfolded, just by sniffing the top of their head. I lost hours sniffing Harry’s scalp, nuzzling him like something tending its young on the Serengeti. Sometimes, I’d sit in the chair in his nursery, curl him up in my arms like a little prawn, and just rock and hum. It wasn’t for him, he was asleep already. Sometimes I would catch Paul watching me, hovering nervously in the doorway like he had many years ago. I felt momentarily strong, curled around my little prawn baby, basking in my own ability to fall in love.

  Paul always wanted to be a very hands-on father with Harry. But there’s not a lot of space for a father’s hands early on, and he was back at work so soon. He changed his fair share of nappies, he was very capable and solid. He would take the baby downstairs on weekend mornings, curl him in his nook while he made coffee and read the paper or made notes on upcoming campaigns. It would feel like barely a blink, a morsel of sleep before I would hear the door creak open quietly and the snuffling of a baby preparing to yell for milk, Paul passing him to me apologetically. I was grateful for every minute of sleep I got, but I also wanted to grab Harry from Paul the second I saw them.