Love Will Tear Us Apart Read online

  The weekdays were just me and Harry and, with some surprise, I looked forward to them. He consumed my days the way my job had, and I needed him and loved him all the more for it.

  Maybe I didn’t make enough space for Paul. I fed Harry constantly. Curled up in front of the TV or in bed, stopping to feed on park benches on the Heath. His hunger was my hunger, his pain was my pain. When he had his baby jabs and his squidgy little legs were injected with vaccines, and his eyes looked at me with sudden despair, it was more than I could handle. In pain and disbelief, he clawed at me, with desperate wet eyes as if the whole world was ending. I was so upset and felt so guilty that I welcomed the pain of his hands scratching at me. I welcomed too his furious and frenzied chomping when he fed on me through his teething. That willingness to be hurt because he was hurt, that was a whole new dimension. Who knew? Paul didn’t know. Paul didn’t love him like that, he didn’t get the chance, and he knew it too.

  Harry grew, unfurled and became a little person. We went out to cafes and walked in the park, or went to see the animals in Mudchute City Farm. His tiny little hand in mine, or drowsy-eyed, listing out of the side of the buggy on the way home like a drunken sailor. Harry was my platonic date, my constant companion, the love of my life.

  It was a kind of furious intimacy. Everything was heightened, especially panic. We’d emerged from the maternity ward on his second day of life with the world’s heaviest car seat, newly concerned by everything. My domestic world shrank, circling Harry and me like cling film. The world outside seemed bigger and swollen with danger.

  One of the couples from our NCT group lost their baby at a few weeks old. I horrified myself and the rest of the group with the visceral and frenzied reaction to get as far away from them as possible. I deleted their phone number from my mobile phone. As if their grief was catching in some way. Their reality left the door open for more, brought those distant fears closer. Those poor people, abandoned like they carried a deadly disease.

  But my boy was everything to me, and that was all that mattered. A blind, wild, prehistoric love. I loved him so much that I wanted to trash the world, burn it to the ground before it could burn him. I sound mad, I know, but it was a thunderbolt and brand new to me. Other people probably have more of a hint of what’s to come when they have a child. But while I loved him with every fibre, I also learned two things.

  One: I despised my parents, suddenly and totally, for their inability to love me like that.

  Two: I had never, ever loved anyone so completely before.

  During the pregnancy, I’d been too scared to think about life after pregnancy – life with the baby. To imagine a little wrinkled face, tiny toes, romper suits and baby giggles felt like tempting fate. For months, the pregnancy felt like a held breath. When I finally saw him on the screen at our first scan, when he was really there, where he should be, oblivious to the world outside, I burst into shuddering tears.

  1995

  At first, I’d worked on low-level clients during my early years at TMC. Eventually I moved on to women’s fast-moving consumer goods. Tampons, face wipes, pantyliners and such. Lucrative accounts, but after I’d put in the minimum time with blue liquid pseudo-science, I made myself more and more available to broader accounts. Staying late to help brainstorm for pitches, doing research at the weekends and offering it on Monday without strings. Eventually it paid off, and I was part of a winning pitch team for a new alcoholic drink aimed at women. Aimed, really, at the grey area between teenagers and women. Alcopops, as they were known by the tabloids. A slur we were strictly forbidden from using.

  Our client wanted a slice of the new Bacardi Breezer market, and was coming from behind with a sweeter, more ‘refreshing’ taste. It actually tasted like lollipops and car sickness tablets. Part of the reason I was awarded the work was the sheer quantity I was willing to drink, even though the smell made me gag.

  In my early twenties, I was the perfect age to work on an alcopops account. Soon I was the go-to girl for all things sticky, sweet and intoxicating.

  I’d go back to my shared house lugging coolbags full of single-serving bottles in watermelon, cherry or grape flavours. My flatmates would pull faces through the taste but drink them down. They weren’t in a position to turn down free booze, and I needed the extra insight.

  ‘Why would you buy these?’ I’d ask as they gagged.

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  My disinterested flatmates were fair-weather uni friends who I had nothing in common with by then. One day I told my work friend Lucy that I wanted to move and she smiled broadly. ‘Why don’t we move in together?’

  It was a flippant comment at lunchtime and a full-blown plan by the time we left the work bar that night.

  We moved into a converted flat in Stratford; East London prices suited our salaries.

  Our flat was on the first floor of a converted house in Bluebell Road. It was technically a three-bedroom but was really a two-bedroom plus box room. We talked about using the extra room as a spare bedroom, but in reality it was a de facto extra wardrobe and dumping ground. We did keep a sleeping bag in there though.

  An old lady lived downstairs, a Haitian ex-nurse whose husband had recently died. She wore huge hoop earrings and bright colours, looked exceptionally glamorous and hated our guts.

  Lucy came from a large and cheerful family. We weren’t wrong to imagine people coming to stay. Our living-room sofa was a temporary bed for – at various times – her two brothers, numerous cousins and Lucy herself, who gave her own bed up for her parents. Her father was one of the first black bus drivers in Bristol after the famous Bristol Bus Boycott in the 1960s. I’d been too embarrassed to admit I hadn’t heard of this, and treated him like he was a minor celebrity. Her mother was a small blonde hairdresser who’d met her husband riding his bus home after a job interview at a city salon. Which she didn’t get, and still had opinions on. They were funny and relaxed. Lucy’s whole family were sweet and kind. And living with Lucy was fun.

  We were both account executives but on different teams so we weren’t in each other’s pockets and there was no pecking order between us. I’d started to formally specialise in booze. Alongside the teeny-bopper drinks, we looked after high-end spirits that looked like perfumes in fancy bottles. Lucy was more on the bread-and-bakery side of ‘fast-moving consumer goods’, more family favourites and nostalgic adverts. And that suited her, really. She was a cuddly, cosy kind of a person. Living with Lucy was fun.

  We were in our early twenties, living in London by ourselves and working somewhere with a free bar. There would have been something deeply wrong with us if we weren’t having fun.

  1996

  I’d been working on alcohols for a year when we won the cider account. It was a departure from my usual work. Some brave souls were trying to make an upmarket scrumpy – a traditional south-west cider – to package up and sell as a slice of country cool to urban daydreamers. Never mind that real scrumpy tastes like rocket fuel and is twice as deadly, we were going to help sell this as some kind of nuclear apple juice.

  During the early tastings of Apple Rock, which most of my team bailed on after a couple of sips, I found myself transported straight back to 4 Church Street, and watching the Generation Game through woozy headaches with the Loxtons. I’d not spoken to Viv in so long by the time I tasted that sour drink but I imagined her pottering around that same little living room, ironing her nurse’s uniform in front of Casualty and The Bill, overlooked by clusters of photos of Paul and maybe still a few of me. I later learned that she’d never taken down the collage she and I made from pictures on the beach, her thumb carefully cut out and added on top, which still makes me laugh.

  I got back home from work after the tasting, edges rounded off by the Apple Rock, and found our flat empty. Lucy must have been visiting her brother or out at step aerobics so I picked up the phone and called a number that was permanently etched in my brain.

  Viv was so pleased to hear from me that she let ou
t a little squeak, like a chick. We spent the next hour catching up. I told her all about London and my job, about Lucy and the flat. Viv told me about her work, the big extension on the hospital and the changes in the village. She told me that my dad had driven past her a few days before our call but he hadn’t recognised her.

  I asked about Paul. Viv drew a breath.

  ‘He got a first in his degree, Katie, he did really well. I had to beg him to go to his ceremony but he gave in,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve got a picture of him bloody furious in his cap'n’gown.’

  ‘What’s he up to now?’

  ‘He’s working in a bookshop.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He’s applying for writing jobs all the time though, he’s got an interview at a magazine next week.’

  ‘Is he still living in Bristol?’

  ‘He lives in a shared house with a few other lads but I don’t think he’s too keen on them. I worry he never leaves this room except to go to work.’

  ‘He never did like spending time with other people,’ I said.

  ‘Except you,’ said Viv, and I left that where it lay.

  We had barely spoken since our first year of university, no-one had mobile phones then. I never went back to my dad’s house in the holidays, choosing to spend summer in the city. Months turned into years but I couldn’t shake the idea of Paul fading away in a bookshop, his big brain straining at the leash. That September, I sent him a birthday card. I’d had to call Viv to get his address in Bristol and I heard Viv speaking through her smile as she read it out. The card was made to look like an old mixtape and it had reminded me of him when I saw it in the WHSmith at the station. He didn’t send anything in reply, but years later that card was among the few belongings he brought with him when he moved into my flat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  1987

  That cheesy thing about not needing to speak? Paul and I had that. The funny thing is, now, I often panic. Try to fill a silence. The gaps loom too large. But back then, we could spend hours without words. We even got to the stage where one of us would put on a tape, knowing it was the one the other wanted to hear. We’d listen to each side and then the other would put on the next perfect tape, all without conferring. Sometimes, the one listening rather than DJing would just give a little nod. Or a slight smile. The peace would only be broken when Viv called up for dinner or I realised it was time to go home. If I was going home.

  When it was warm and bright, I walked back, scuffing grit into the stream. But on dark days, I’d get a lift from Mick. I sat in the front, in Viv’s seat. Once I hit my teens, every car journey with Mick began with me reaching under the seat for the lever and sliding back to give my legs enough room. For Mick, it was a handy excuse to get out of the house, which meant he could pop into The Swan for a pint and a bag of nuts before going home.

  Mick would fill the quiet with blather, or put the radio on. There was a swollen feeling in the car, like there was the potential to talk about anything. Eventually, I started to ask questions. About Mick. About his childhood, growing up in the same village I’d grown up in but in very different circumstances. He told me the prices of things in the shop when he was my age, about the headmaster with a fondness for the cane, about his own father’s fondness for fists.

  Mick was a teenager in the sixties. But sixties Somerset was not swinging London and Mick and his friends had to hitchhike to Bristol if they wanted to experience anything close to those scenes.

  ‘I was there when the Beatles played Colston Hall,’ he would say. ‘I was fifteen and it was November sixty-three. And if you add up the number of people who say they were in Colston Hall that night, you’ll have twice the population of Bristol. But –’ he’d smile and raise his finger ‘– I really was there.’ And then he’d whistle ‘Twist and Shout’. ‘You couldn’t hear the fab four for the screaming. Brilliant night.’

  As I got older, those short drives gave me a snapshot into the young man who emerged as Mick. The capers, the swindles, the girls he chased and the scraps he had. He was sixteen when he met Viv and in his stories she would alternate between ‘her indoors’ and a queen. Even then, in 1987 – nearly twenty years after they first met – he was both pinching himself that he’d snagged her, and scrabbling to free himself.

  We never mentioned Lorraine, the barmaid. The casualness of the scene I’d walked into on that day years earlier had told me, with hindsight, that there was a degree of comfort with the deceit, that it came easy. That I hadn’t seen the first or the last indiscretion, I just happened to see an indiscretion.

  Over the years, I saw the tenderness between Mick and Viv. I also saw how she looked down at him. I wasn’t surprised that he’d struggled to say no to flattery. Plus, I think he was bored; I think they were all bored in that village. We were all bored. But it always surprised me that only a few of us dreamed of escaping. Of hitchhiking to see the Beatles, or making it to London to buy the magazines I loved first hand.

  One of Mick’s friends died suddenly of lung cancer that spring. A breakneck circuit from late diagnosis to funeral. He got sad and angry, and talked about death a lot. I didn’t think it at the time, but looking back I realise that, as a nurse, Viv was constantly surrounded by death so she seemed to see it in more philosophic terms. Sure, her bit of the hospital looked after people in their final days. But other parts had babies being born in them, lives being saved, children being cared back to health. Death slotted in. But Mick didn’t have access to death in his day-to-day life and his brief obsession bled into Paul and me.

  Nobody had told me where the cancer had been in my mum. I’d focused on the big picture of it, and never dared ask the details but I wondered if I should. I overheard some TVAM segment about breast cancer one morning after I’d stayed over, and for the first time wondered if I had ticking time bombs up my school jumper.

  ‘No,’ Viv said when I asked her. ‘But you must get yourself checked when you’re grown up. Everyone needs to get themselves checked but I want you to be extra careful.’

  I took this to mean that I had extra risk and dared not ask any more, it was just too much. I wonder now if she’d meant that I was extra-special, to her.

  Anyway, that morning in the kitchen she told me about new tests called smear tests, where they swab your bits to see if your cervix is at risk. She described it in jolly terms, but the squint she did suggested she hadn’t much enjoyed her first smear. And she told me about checking my breasts for lumps. Immediately after our conversation, I pretended to need the toilet and scurried off to squeeze my growing boobs in the bathroom until they were sore, panicking at how decidedly unsmooth and, dare I say, lumpy they were.

  ‘I have lumps,’ I said, quietly and forlornly as I re-joined her in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh,’ Viv said, putting the teaspoon down mid-mash of a teabag. ‘Oh, love. I shouldn’t have worried you. That sounds fine, Katie. Every boob is a bit lumpy and bumpy, but when you’re older you just need to check for new lumps. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Every month, okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Paul had flopped down the stairs, running late for school.

  ‘What do boys have to check?’ I mused.

  ‘Just their balls,’ Viv answered, without taking her eyes off the mug.

  ‘Oh God, I’m going to school,’ Paul wailed, practically running for the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  November 2012 – Thursday morning

  I go for Well Woman screenings every year and when they ask me for details of my mum’s condition, the treatment they tried, I just shrug and say, ‘I don’t know.’ If pushed, I say, ‘Whatever they tried didn’t work because she died,’ which tends to draw the questions to a close. I plain don’t want to discuss it. Paul never asks about the specifics of my mother’s death. He barely mentioned it at the time, even though my mother died on his mother’s ward and I did my grieving in his pyjamas.

  It wasn’t something you ta
lked about. Not in a family like mine. Besides, everyone was more reserved back then. If someone was terribly ill, the old ladies in the village shop would ask relatives, ‘How is he in himself?’ Or if someone was at death’s door, they’d say that ‘Mrs Such-and-Such is poorly.’

  ‘Poorly’ covered everything from the common cold to renal failure. I’m not sure if anyone knew my mum was ‘poorly’ until she died, anyone outside of my family and the Loxtons. No-one in the shop ever asked me how she was in herself, that was for sure.

  1997

  It was spring of 1997 that I met Steven Miller at a conference about alcohol regulation and advertising in Victoria. He wore a pinstripe suit and was mostly handsome, with dark auburn hair. When he approached the bit of the bar I was drinking in, he made a crack about us being in ‘the ginger corner’.

  I was used to being propositioned back then. I’d taken to wearing very high kitten heels that accentuated my height, had invested in a lot of good-quality black clothes and dyed my hair a brighter red. In short, I decided to stand out. I wanted to make a name for myself and planned to use everything at my disposal.

  Steven certainly wasn’t the first guy to approach me in a hotel bar after a seminar or conference. Not interested in a boyfriend, my main source of dates were industry functions. Charismatic men who would flatter me, feed me and screw me a couple of times. I’d already clocked Stephen before he came over, and had made a decision to say yes.