Precocious (8 page)

This is how life works. You go to work, you get married. You pay the bills, do the shopping. It’s an endless cycle. Maybe you have babies. Some people do. But not me, not us.

I stand at the checkout, listening to the ‘beep, beep’, in a daze.
This is my life
, I think.
I’m on the conveyor belt.
But so is everyone else, says a smaller voice, and what’s so bad about it?

And in these endless arguments with myself, as I pack the bags and hand over my card, punch in my number, the overriding question is always:

What if I just jumped off?

There are secret ways I can have you near me when we are apart. I start taking your sugar in my tea. Run my shower colder because I know that is how you like it. Play music I have heard in your car, in your house. Drink your drink – rum and coke. Stop wearing a seatbelt.

You are everywhere.

HM. Your initials. I see them in car registrations and my heart skips a beat. I seek out the letters H and M in newspapers and draw them together with my eyes.

HM.

Him. Him, him, him. You, you, you. Parasite of my thoughts.

Hmm. A thought; a consideration.

Hum. Music. A throb, a buzzing, a beat.

Humbert. Humbug.

I take every opportunity to be alone – taking a bath, popping out to the shops – just so that I can have my thoughts of you without any interruption. So that if a faraway look passes across my face, I don’t have to explain it, won’t have to lie to that most intrusive of questions: ‘What are you thinking?’

Dave and I aren’t used to arguing; haven’t done it for years. It’s a foreign country to us; we can’t speak its language. We fumble for words and end up spewing out half-syllables and slamming exasperated doors.

When he asked me to marry him I cried and cried. He did everything you’re supposed to. He’d done it before, after all. Location: smart French restaurant. Candles … even a violinist! Champagne. Ring: solitaire, naturally. Just as I’d wanted. He always seemed to know what I would like. Never asked, though. Down on one knee. Expectant, hopeful eyes. The little tell-tale box. Subdued rounds of applause from the other diners. Streams and streams of tears and the promise he would always look after me. Then the ring was on my hand and hasn’t moved since, except to make way for its partner, the gold band.

Thinking about it – I never actually said yes.

This has been the anatomy of our marriage: he has made decisions, I’ve gone along with them. So it comes as a surprise to both of us that there is fight in us.

It seems those who love the hardest fight the hardest. And not just for each other but against.

And that ability we have to finish each other’s sentences – I use that as a hammer. Kill every word I don’t want to listen to, snuff it out. It goes like this:

‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘Why do you always interrupt me?’

‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘Maybe you don’t.’

‘I do.’

(I had been surprised to find out only a few days before the wedding, at the rehearsal, that during the ceremony you don’t actually say ‘I Do’. You say ‘I Will’. Makes sense, really. It has a greater air of permanence. ‘I Do’ sounds like ‘I do at the moment, yeah’, or ‘Well alright then – for now’. ‘I Will’ has another word hiding in there somewhere: it has ‘always’ under its breath.)

Fights don’t fit patterns. Do they?

We try to contain them in rounds. We put them in a ring, which is actually a square, with a bell and a referee and a barely dressed girl flashing up numbered cards.

When we were first married, Dave had a failsafe way of deflecting arguments just as they were about to begin. He could see me coming. He would distract me into laughing, by shouting, ‘Ding a ling a ling: Round One!’

But now there is no laughter. Looking around our home all I can see are
things
. Washing machine, vacuum cleaner, fridge freezer, dishwasher. I’m surrounded. I’m a housewife in a 1950s TV commercial. I feel applianced in. Everything has been bought together or bought by parents-in-law, sitting looking at me whitely, quietly, waiting to be divided, fought over, split. All the work we did on this place, the paint colours, the sanded floors, the carefully chosen mirrors and vases and blinds, they’re reminders I don’t want, can’t look at.

I’m starting to fill with an irrational hatred. He’s the block, the barrier to me living the life I was supposed to have. I curse the vanity and greed that led me down that stupid aisle. Dazzled by diamonds and the promise of nothing more than the same kind of life as everyone else has. Why had I gone along with it? How could I not have known that this day would come, when I would be bored and he would be frustrated, and in you would swagger to rouse me from my anaesthesia?

I hate Dave.

You start off seeing everything that’s there in a person,
wanting
to see and know everything. Next you see the faults, the pieces that don’t quite fit. Then you start looking for what’s not there.

I found a You-shaped gap, unfillable.

‘I always feel there’s a little bit of you that’s unknowable,’ Dave said once, in a matter-of-fact way that made it seem like this didn’t trouble him.

I shook my head at it but he was right. The only bit of me he couldn’t have was the bit where you still lived. You carved a nook inside me that no one could see.

Language is unpeeling from me. How is it that these lips, this tongue, all the apparatus of kissing, that once formed the words ‘You are my angel’, now struggle to generate anything but lies?

Each lie is smooth and round, like a marble in my mouth. And it isn’t just the words: my clothes are a lie. The laptop case I bring through the door and set down with a sigh, implying I have been working late. The mints I eat to mask the smell of the cigarettes he wouldn’t approve of. The baths I know I will take to wash you off me, when the inevitable happens, as it must.

I’m planning for it. I find myself in a department store, under unforgiving lights, buying lingerie for a man I’ve barely kissed (this time around, anyway).
Adultery underwear
, I think to myself, laughing in a giddy, guilty way, swinging the bag on the way back to the car, sneaking its contents into a separate drawer, away from my usual things (white and black only; cotton, mostly; utilitarian), as if to prevent cross-contamination. I touch the new satin and lace reverently, bury the violent jewel-colours – ruby, emerald, amethyst – under innocuous towels and sheets. For now.

I’m preparing for something that is coming towards me, unstoppable as a train. Separate drawers, separate lives; these are the necessary precautions and I perform them with the cool precision of a surgeon. I’m almost certain Dave won’t find out, and if he does, my only defence will be, pathetic as a shrug: ‘I couldn’t stop it.’

Lies, arguments, silence, secrets. This is the new anatomy of our marriage.

Diary: Wednesday, 11 November 1992

I phoned HM, he’d just got out of the shower (there’s an image), we talked for a bit. He said he’s got a letter for me, he’s had it for a week and kept forgetting to give it to me! I remember now seeing him at the play rehearsals the other day and he dropped an envelope, then shoved it back into his jeans pocket. I had a feeling it might be for me. He says he’ll give it to me on Saturday – nudge nudge, wink wink, etc.

When I think about it, I have really sort of worked on him, and I feel like I’m getting somewhere. In the space of about a year, I’ve decided I would get close to him and I have. I wonder if this will always work for me? I know I’m not exactly good looking, so it’s not like I attract loads of boys, but I think I have a good mind and once I set it on someone, I get them.

I have got a tiny piece of HM – but it gives me hope. I will get all of him some day.

No one at home questioned why I was going to Mr Morgan’s house on a Saturday, although I didn’t give them the opportunity to. I only told Alex, who muttered, ‘he’s a pervert’, but then, he said that about everyone. ‘Pervert’ was his new favourite word. He even shouted it at Dad once, who just blinked at him as though he didn’t know what it meant.

I was up early, twisting my damp hair into knots to make it curl, humming, slathering cocoa butter onto my skin until the smell made me feel dizzy. Mum was busy ‘cleaning’. Contrary to initial appearances, she wasn’t very domestic. She made a martyred show of housework but was terrible at it. She would spray polish without dusting first, leaving sweet-smelling balls of hair and mites mummified on the furniture. She vacuumed only the centre of rooms, so that the edges turned grey while a central circle of carpet buzzed with colour.

The soundtrack to what she called cleaning was always The Musicals. She loved them all. You could tell what mood she was in by which record she was playing: today was
Phantom of the Opera
so was obviously going to be dramatic. Her quivering voice fought with the vacuum cleaner.

As I edged towards the window she saw me, narrowed her eyes and shouted, ‘Why are you wearing so much makeup so early in the day?’

‘I’m going out,’ I yelled over Michael Crawford. I stood at the window watching for your car, and immediately its blue-green nose rounded the corner I was down the path.

‘See you later,’ I called, my bag swinging behind me.

Even though I hoped I would be staying all day, I ran my eye greedily over every detail of your bungalow: a square, welcoming hall and five closed doors. You opened one of them, to the right, and motioned for me to enter the lounge. Its terracotta walls looked freshly painted. A sofa and matching chaise-longue showed no signs of wear. I looked down. A bold, diamond-patterned rug was positioned in perfect alignment against the polished dark wood floorboards. Even your scatter cushions were
organised
. Reluctant to sit down for fear of creasing something, I retreated and found you in the kitchen (spotless). I watched you from the doorway and laughed when you filled the kettle from a little jug rather than just yanking it from the wall as we did at home.

‘What’s so funny?’ you said without turning around.

‘You are,’ I said. Typically, you didn’t respond to this.

‘Do you like the house?’ you asked, spooning Douwe Egberts into a chrome cafetière.

‘Mm.’ I continued my unguided tour, gently pushing doors open and leaving them that way. In the bathroom was the Aramis I smelled on you every time you leaned over me in class. Toothpaste, cap on. Towels, impeccably folded. I couldn’t find a single thing out of place. Everything was coordinated, not just in each room but from one to another. The colours and textures flowed perfectly, testament to your artistic eye, I supposed. On the walls of your hallway, I was surprised to see your initials at the bottom of three watercolours.

I didn’t recognise the scenes in the paintings. I wondered where and when you did them.

‘Where did these come from?’ I called out. ‘The depths of your murky memory, or your even murkier imagination?’ I jumped as I realised you were standing next to me, holding out a cup of coffee. You laughed and said,

‘Most people—’

‘I’m not most people.’

‘On that we’re agreed. Most people just say they’re good.’

‘Well, I expect they’re just being polite.’

‘So that’s my attempts at art critiqued. Sit down and tell me what you think of the rest of the house, since you’ve had a good nosey.’

‘I sense traces of an ex-wife,’ I lied, because it sounded interesting and as far as I could gather you’d not been separated long, so it seemed a pretty safe bet that the former Mrs Morgan might still be hanging around.

‘Where?’ you asked, puzzled. ‘Everything’s been completely changed since she was here. Well, almost everything.’

‘Exactly,’ I said quickly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you know,’ I deflected, trying to be cryptic because I didn’t know what I meant. You laughed.

‘You think I’ve tried too hard to cover her tracks.’ I nodded gratefully. ‘You might be right. Your little psychoanalyses are really very impressive.’

I was glad you’d noticed, because for months I’d been working on persuading you that you were seriously repressed and needed to ‘unburden’ yourself on a sympathetic ear, i.e. mine, although now that I was here and listening I didn’t feel so sure.

‘I like that wine rack,’ I said, and then moved away and started to rummage in my bag. ‘I’ve got something for you.’

‘Oh?’ You raised an eyebrow. I tossed your dog-eared copy of
Lolita
to you, announcing that I’d read it in two days flat. You looked pleased.

‘What did you think of it?’

‘Well,’ I said tetchily, ‘it’s not exhaustive on the subject.’

You’d set us some work a couple of weeks ago, ‘a story of no more than 2,000 words about wanting something you can’t have’. You had directed a surreptitious wink towards me as you said this, to which of course I scowled.

As I sat in front of a pile of blank white paper the night before it was due in, I knew exactly what you would expect me to write: a none too subtle piece about being in love with an older man, hmm, a teacher perhaps? There was no way I would give you that satisfaction, so I decided to do something different. People like my mum and the nuns at school maintained that a ‘grown’ man couldn’t possibly be attracted to a fourteen-year-old girl. But I knew life wasn’t like that.

So I wrote a fast-moving, and I thought extremely touching, monologue narrated by an ageing, frustrated teacher nursing a tender, secret desire for his most precocious pupil. I called the pupil ‘Jade’, because that was the kind of name I wanted – exotic-sounding and sophisticated – and because in my imaginings she had bright green eyes, so unlike my own which were dishwater grey.

(I didn’t come up with that on my own, by the way – it was my mum. She was really good at pulling these rare stunts of affection, like a bear hug in the middle of the kitchen when you were trying to wash up, or a soft stroke of your hair while you were watching TV. They’d take you by surprise so much she’d then be able to insult you and disguise it as a compliment. ‘Poor love,’ she’d murmured, stroking my hair I think it was this time, yes, must’ve been, ‘dishwater grey eyes and mousey hair. Good job you have a lovely personality, eh?’)