After the Party (5 page)

Today, his head clogged with tiredness, his body aching with loneliness, the thought of his unfinished, uninspiring canvases
awaiting his attention overhead and the sound of his baby boy screaming for his mother across the hallway, Ralph felt that it had come to a premature end. And it was with that thought in his head that he stepped into the new day with a sense that something had to change.

I
beg your pardon?” Jem looked up from the sausage she was dissecting into disks for Scarlett's tea and hoped for a hint of a joke in Ralph's facial expression. But there was none. He was being serious.

“California,” he said again, his face coloring slightly. “Next month. Just for a week.”

Jem felt something extraordinary happen to her brain at these words, like a piece of elastic snapping inside it. The disbelief she was experiencing was so pronounced that it almost physically hurt. “Just for a week,” she repeated, almost like a mantra.

“Yes, it's his birthday.” Ralph hopped nervously from foot to foot while squeezing his left fist with his right hand, as though he were nursing sore knuckles.

“Right. So it's Smith's birthday. And you want to travel all the way to California to celebrate it with him?”

Ralph nodded, and stalked across the kitchen to the fridge to get himself a glass of orange juice.

“And me and the kids stay here?”

Ralph stopped what he was doing and sighed. Jem threw a look at his back, which was slumped and facing toward her. The reality of what Ralph was saying to her was so at odds with
anything that she could reasonably have expected him to be saying that it seemed to warp the very air she breathed.

“You are kidding, right?”

Ralph turned to face her. He looked peeved. “I know it's not ideal . . .”

“Oh, and what makes you say that?” she asked, sparing not an ounce of sarcasm.

“Look, it's not just a holiday, it's—”

“It's a holiday, Ralph.”

“No!” he shouted. Ralph never shouted. He collected himself. “No,” he repeated in a more measured tone, “it's not. I need . . . I've lost my . . .”

Jem dropped the plate of sausages and mash in front of Scarlett, who was too busy watching
LazyTown
to notice. Jem spun round and glared at Ralph. “Your what? Your
min
d
?”

“No. Well, yes. Maybe. I've lost . . . whatever it is that makes me want to make art, create. You know, my mojo. It's gone.”

“Right. And you think you're going to find
your mojo
with Smith in California, do you?”

Ralph grimaced. “I don't know,” he muttered. “I don't know.”

“And you think now is a good time to be doing this? You think now, with a three-month-old baby, when I'm trying to get back to work, this is a good time to piss off to the other side of the world to get drunk with Smith?”

“No!” he shouted again. “It's a bloody shit time. I'm not stupid, I know that. But I'm feeling like if I don't do something now, if I don't
change
something now, my whole being, my existence is just going to come to a grinding halt. I feel like I'm almost paralyzed . . .”

Jem poked the sharp bit of a plastic straw through the foil hole on top of a strawberry smoothie and handed it to Scarlett.
She took a deep breath. She let a moment pass while she tried to find a way to form a reasonable response to what, it was now clear, was a genuine cry for help. But even as she tried to reason with herself—
he's a human being, he's the man I love, he's calling out to me, I must at least consider his request as I would a request from any friend in need
—her less fair-minded instincts rose to the surface, bashing reason out of their way.
What about me
?
What about everything I've been through these past few years, what about the toll on my body of four pregnancies, two births, what about all the sleep I've lost doing the nighttime wake-ups, what about the endless, thankless cleaning and cooking and sorting and clearing and arranging and fixing and remembering that is my sole responsibility all day every day from before I even open my eyes in the morning? Where's my holiday? Where's my break?

She felt herself begin to bubble over with rage and had to turn away from Ralph for a moment to calm herself down. “Fine,” she said, turning back to him, “fine.” The words felt the wrong shape in her mouth; they weren't the words she wanted to say. But she pulled the alien words from her mouth, like stray hairs, and decided that now that they were out she quite liked the sound of them. They sounded like the words of a sane and endlessly patient woman, a woman who was marching briskly up the moral high ground, flag in hand, leaving her selfish, useless husband floundering at base camp. “If that's really what you need to do,” she continued, “then do it. If you're really feeling that bad about everything then how the hell can I tell you that you can't?” She paused and then smiled as something like relief flooded through her.
A week without Ralph
. A week without his uselessness being felt in every bone in her body. A week without feeling guilty for not wanting to have sex with him. A window of fresh air and possibility.
An opportunity
.

“You so owe me.”

Ralph's face relaxed into a smile. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Don't spoil it for yourself,” she snapped. “I've said yes. But seriously, I will make you pay for it.”

“What, in sexual favors?” He threw her his wonky smile, the wonky smile that used to make her feel like the luckiest girl in the world, that now just made her think, yeah yeah.

“Ha. Ha. Ha.”

“You never know.” He grinned again. “You might miss me so much that by the time I get back you'll be gagging for it.”

She looked at him and blinked.

“You never know,” he said.

She blinked again. “Go away from me now,” she said.

He grinned at her and turned to leave, but at the kitchen door he turned back. “Did you know that it was the anniversary of the art gallery yesterday?”

She pulled a piece of paper towel from a roll and gazed at him. “Was it?”

“Yeah,” he said, “eleven years ago yesterday.”

“Christ,” said Jem, “last of the great romantics, aren't we?”

“Not right now, we're not,” said Ralph, his voice tinged with regret. “Not right now.”

•  •  •

Ralph and Jem's relationship was, it was agreed by anyone who knew them, a yardstick by which all relationships should be judged. From unconventional beginnings—Ralph and Jem had met while sharing a flat, after Ralph had spent weeks reading her diaries and snooping round her bedroom and while Jem was going out with Ralph's best friend, Smith. It was not an auspicious start. But then, how many relationships really begin with eyes meeting across rooms? How many marriages are predicated
upon pink roses and blushed cheeks and the right words whispered at just the right moment, while the perfect song plays serendipitously in the background? They'd made up for it, though, for the first three years of their relationship. Jem's sister had put it like this: “Whenever I'm with you both, I'm smiling.” Being together had felt so obvious, like something that they'd been half expecting to happen all their lives, that when they finally did find each other on a damp March evening at an art gallery in Ladbroke Grove, when Smith showed himself to be a poor excuse for a boyfriend and Ralph glowed with pure, unsullied love, when they'd rushed home, giddy with it all, and shared their first kiss on a blue sofa, it had felt like the last, breathy page of a novel.

They'd built on the perfection of that moment, let the magic they'd sparked that night grow and multiply and not been afraid of it. They rented a flat in Battersea, they sat in pubs and curry houses, they let in the other bits of their lives—the parents and sisters and best friends and bosses—they went to Bruges, they went to Cornwall, they bought a kitten and called it Smith, they trusted each other, they liked each other, they had couple time, they had friend time, their lives rolled out before them, day by day, like lovely bolts of fabric, glimmering and soft, full of splashes of color and blocks of mellow beige. Life was sweet.

Until they had a baby.

Ralph had
quite
wanted a baby. Jem had
really
wanted a baby. They talked about it every now and then and each time they'd decide to wait, wait until they could afford a house, wait until Ralph's terminally ill mother was dead, wait until the big order came in for ten poppy paintings, wait until the housing market slowed up, wait for the right moment. Eventually, as Jem approached her thirty-second birthday, she decided that the right moment had come and gone a dozen times and that they could
play the waiting game indefinitely. She was not old, but certainly not young if she wanted the option of having a big family, and certainly not young if it turned out for any reasons that conception didn't happen and that they would need a helping hand.

It was the first decision in their relationship that hadn't been reached mutually. Jem, uncharacteristically, but knowing she had no option, had forced the issue.

“I mean it, Ralph,” she'd said, one night over Thai on Battersea Park Road, “I don't want to wait anymore. I want to start trying.”

“Is that an ultimatum?” Ralph had said nervously.

“Should it be?” said Jem, suspiciously.

Ralph had shrugged noncommittally.

“You've said all along that you want children,” she said. “It's not as if we haven't talked about this.”

“Yeah.” Ralph poured the end of his Tiger beer into his glass. “I know, but what's the hurry?”

Jem had laughed, in exasperation. “Ralph, we've been together for four years! You're thirty-five! What exactly are you waiting for?”

He'd shrugged again. “I don't know,” he said. “To feel ready, I suppose.”

“Well,” Jem had said, “I feel ready and that will just have to do, as far as I'm concerned.”

Ralph, a gentle soul, and something of a realist, accepted his fate. Three months later Jem was pregnant.

S
mithy,” Ralph began the email, “the missus says yes! I told her you were having a birthday party so if you happen to talk to her, which obviously you won't, but just in case, go along with it. And if you did actually fancy organizing yourself a birthday bash, so much the better. Looking into cheap flights now. Will let you know as soon as I've booked them. See you in a few weeks!”

Ralph pressed send and felt a strange cocktail of dread and euphoria sitting in the pit of his belly. He hadn't really expected Jem to say yes. He'd been ready for a fight, ready to really lay it on thick, and she'd acquiesced, rolled over like a soppy cat, just like that. He was slightly unnerved and it occurred to him that maybe she'd been inside his head, knew the strange and unexpected machinations that had led him to make the decision to go away. Maybe she was sending him away to test him. In what way, he didn't know, but he could definitely feel something untoward beneath the surface of things.

But it wasn't just the unexpectedness and peculiarity of Jem's acceptance of his trip abroad that was unsettling him, it was also the fact that it meant that he was actually going. In just over three weeks' time he would close the door on his studio, kiss his family good-bye, climb into a Boeing 747, close his eyes and wake up in America. Alone. Ralph had not been anywhere
alone since 1996. He felt simultaneously excited and scared. This trip was so important to him; without it he could see himself going down under the pressure of work, family, his own feeblemindedness. But the week of his visit also felt like a large white void. He had no fixed mental image of Smith's abode, his lifestyle. Smith was a secretive bugger, his emails terse and to the point, never more than a line or two. It was almost as if he felt that he were still here, still sharing a flat with Ralph, that he didn't need to expound on the details of his existence or his circumstances, his emails the equivalent of passing Ralph outside the bathroom and throwing him a vague, “All right?” He didn't even know if Smith lived on his own or with friends.

Ralph pulled down the lid of his laptop and exhaled. This was good, he thought, this was good. To get away from this room, this house, this world in which he'd become less and less essential, more and more ordinary, just a bloke at the top of the house painting flowers, changing the occasional shitty nappy and annoying his partner. Whatever happened in California, whatever kind of a trip he had, things would change when he got back, change for the better; he would make sure of that.

And with that thought, instead of heading downstairs to help Jem tidy up after tea, instead of sitting on the sofa with his baby boy in his arms, instead of admitting to himself that the paintings could wait, that his presence up here was not so vital, that there were better things going on downstairs and that the time to make a change could be right now, he picked up his Marlboros and a green Bic lighter and headed for his balcony, where he smoked a cigarette in contemplative and solitary silence.

J
em saw Joel again three days later. It was a blustery morning and she was taking Blake and Scarlett to Brixton library for parent and toddler story time. Blake was strapped upon her chest, small heels flopping back and forth against her abdomen in leather booties, his head covered with a blue fleece-lined deerstalker that kept twisting around and covering his eyes. Scarlett was in the buggy. Scarlett was too big to be in a buggy, but due to a combination of her own indomitable spirit and the reality of how long it would take for her to walk there without it, Jem had acquiesced with a weary “Okay then” when she'd come upon her daughter in the hallway, jaw set with determination, already strapped in.