The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (31 page)

“I’d thrust the finger in and out, twice. Then just as suddenly, I’d take it out and she’d be left wondering whether it really happened or whether she’d just imagined it, but she’d be left wanting it to happen again more than she’s ever wanted anything.”

I want it, I want these things. But I want to have a wax first and be moisturized all over and to be wearing expensive silk underwear. I don’t match this. I’m not good enough. I want it but I want to escape. Please don’t say anything else, I will explode. Please say something else, go on, please talk, please touch me, do those things. Cara stands up.

“Then, I’d take that very same finger and start stroking the tops of her thighs and then swirling around to below her navel, making damp circles that spiral in and in, closer and closer. Until, finally, I’d get there and start flickering in exactly the right place. I always find the right place. Just a little bit higher than anyone else and a little bit lighter. I’m better even than she is herself.”

The phone goes again. It’s Joel. I cut it off once more and am about to switch it off when it goes again immediately. “What?” I snap into it.

“It’s Gabe. He’s all hot.”

“Has he got a temperature?”

“I can’t find the thermometer.”

“It’s in the bathroom cupboard.”

“I looked there, but I couldn’t find the plasters or anything. Just the tape measure.”

“The tape measure? Why don’t you try looking for the thermometer where the tape measure goes, then?”

“Where’s that?”

“In the cupboard above the washing machine. Call me back.”

I look at Cara and see a look of disappointment. Not her own, but disappointment in me. Like I’ve let myself down. “Sorry about this. I’m sure we’ll be able to sort it out. He’s just going to phone back.” We sit in silence. I feel myself desiccating inside and out. The phone goes.

“Did you find it? What is it?”

“Forty. What’s that in the other one?”

“Double it and add 30. A hundred and ten. That can’t be right. Change the button on it to Fahrenheit.” Come on, come on. “A hundred and four? That’s not good. Have you given him some Calpol?”

“I tried.” His voice is rising in panic. “It wouldn’t stay in. He’s sort of listless.”

“Does he have any rash or anything?” Please god say no.

“I don’t know, not that I can see. Let me look. He’s got a rash on his tummy.”

“Do the glass thing,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “You roll it over.”

“Then what?”

“It disappears.”

“The glass?”

“No, the rash. It’s good if it disappears. I think. Oh shit, Joel. Look in one of the baby books. Or on the Net?”

“I tried. It didn’t make sense.”

“Have you rung NHS Direct? Use your instinct, do you think he’s really ill?” There’s silence. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

I breathe in. I must stay calm. There is no point in not being calm. I must be, for Gabe’s sake. “Call a taxi. Take Rufus to the neighbor’s and then take the taxi to the ER. I’ll see you there. Try to get some more Calpol down him. Take your phone with you. Get there as soon as you can.”

I grab my bag and mutter something to Cara. I don’t know what. I cannot even bear to look at her. It’s my fault. Gabe has meningitis or septicemia or something and it’s all my fault. I am a bad mother. I am being punished for drinking martinis and listening to a seductive woman talk sex to me. I am being punished for liking it so much.

“There you are.” I run toward Joel and Gabe, who are sitting on a bed in the children’s section of the Emergency unit.

“How is he?” Gabe is asleep across Joel’s lap. I want to rip him away from Joel and hold him close to me. It’s me that looks after the children when they’re sick, it’s me that they fall asleep on.

“He’s asleep. He shouldn’t be asleep, should he?” Joel’s voice is cracking and his eyes are filled with tears. I want to be able to cry, but I can’t and I envy him his ability to weep.

“It’s eight o’clock, he’d normally be asleep. Has a doctor seen him? Have they seen his rash? Where is everyone?”

“A nurse did triage on him and said she’d get someone.”

At that moment a young woman walks in. She has that natural, glossy-hair-scraped-back-into-a-ponytail look of a beautiful actress playing a doctor in a busy ER, which makes her a completely implausible real doctor in a real ER.

“I’m Dr. Harcourt, the pediatrician. This must be Gabriel.”

“Have you seen his rash? He’s got a rash,” I say. “Did you tell them about the rash?” I ask Joel.

He gapes wordlessly.

Dr. Harcourt takes my sleeping boy’s temperature and then looks at his rash.

“Is it meningitis?”

“Possible but not probable,” she says and I feel patronized. “We need to rule it out, though, so we’ll take a lumbar puncture and do some blood tests.”

“Lumbar puncture?” I feel sick.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ll be back shortly.”

“Was that good or bad?” asks Joel.

“I don’t know. Possibly good. Probably good.”

“Ursula says that meningitis is the most common falsely self-diagnosed illness that hospitals see.”

“What does that mean? Why were you talking to Ursula about it?”

“I rang her.”

“Why the hell did you ring her?”

“When I couldn’t get hold of you. Where were you, anyway?”

“Out.”

“Not answering your phone.”

“So this is my fault, is it?”

“No.”

“You could have brought him here sooner.”

“So it’s my fault, is it?”

“I didn’t say that. But you could have taken his temperature.”

“Not if I couldn’t find the thermometer.”

“This is why I’m always telling you to put things back where you found them. So we can find them again later.”

“And you always put things back, do you?”

“Mostly, yes.”

We sit in silence with poor Gabriel still lying floppily across Joel’s lap. His lashes flutter against his cheeks. He must be OK. Of course he’ll be OK. Things always are. He moans slightly.

“He kept on saying his head hurt. He wanted it to be dark,” Joel says.

Finally we are ushered into a room where Gabriel wakes up and seems embarrassingly perky, though his mood is soon spoiled by the lumbar puncture and the blood tests. As I hold his arm tightly to be leeched by the needles, I am reminded of the last time I clasped him this hard and feel another geyser of shame. When the needle goes in, his beautiful eyes water with hurt, the look that silently says “How could you do this to me?” while his full lips make a moue. His body is spatchcocked across an examination table as they prod the now almost disappeared rash and shine torches into his eyes. The scream is no longer silent, it’s echoing around the wards. It’s all my fault, I think again, it’s all my fault.

Eventually the doctor says that oft-repeated medical phrase: “It’s just a virus,” followed by that other mantra: “Give him lots of fluids, Calpol every four hours and keep an eye on him for any behavior that’s out of the ordinary.”

“It’s definitely not meningitis?” I ask.

“As far as we can tell. It would seem highly unlikely,” Dr. Harcourt says.

“But don’t you think you should keep him here overnight? For observation?”

“I really think you’d all be better off at home than in a hospital. You live nearby and can come back if you see anything to worry about.”

“But what about all those stories in the newspapers? The ones where the parents go to the doctor and the doctor says it’s just a
cold and they keep coming back and then it turns out to be meningitis all along.”

“My wife is obsessed with those stories,” adds Joel. I really hate him now.

“Like I say,” says the doctor, who has let down her hair now, to full flicky effect, “you must come in if you have any concerns, but we are as certain as it is possible to be that Gabriel has a virus that will right itself.”

“Thank you,” says Joel.

“Yes,” I repeat, dazed. “Thank you.”

Gabriel is settled in our bed and we’re sitting in the kitchen. My head hurts and I feel like I have a premature hangover. I’m desperately tired yet feel like I’ve been mainlining espressos and will never be able to sleep again. I look at my phone. There are no messages. I think about Cara and then I feel ashamed that my thoughts can drift in her direction after what has happened. I know I shall never hear from her again. I have disappointed her.

“He’s fine, Maz. We’d both better get some sleep.”

I shake my head. “We need to check him every few hours.”

“OK, we’ll check him. I’ll set the alarm if you’re worried.”

“Of course I’m worried. We had a son who went floppy with suspected meningitis this evening.”

“But he’s fine. You heard the doctor. I don’t know why you can’t let it go.”

I’m about to make some smart answer to this, but the words don’t come out. Instead I hear an unfamiliar sound and my eyes begin to itch. I begin to cry, to sob like I haven’t for as long as I can remember. Great wracking, snot-inducing sobs. I want to say something to counteract these tears, but I can’t speak. I don’t cry, I scream inside, I am not a crier. But clearly I am, I am crying and I am not speaking. This is not me.

The tears continue. I don’t know where all the water comes from. How can I have been wet with my own bodily fluids twice in one day in such different ways? Joel looks momentarily shocked and then stands up and puts his arms around me. They are so enveloping. I feel as small and helpless as Gabe looked when he lay with his head in Joel’s lap at the hospital.

It is as if all the tears unshed from the last 20 years have finally found an outlet. I’m an over-filled water butt, a flooded river, a tube of yogurt squeezed by Rufus. I am so tired, I have six years of cumulative tiredness catching up with me and I shall never feel rested again. This makes me cry some more. Joel holds me, then leads me upstairs and lies me down next to my son, where we will both sleep fitfully until morning.

The List isn’t updated that night. Funny that in all my list-making, I didn’t write a debit one for me that included the transgression:
Contemplated hot sex with a cool brunette
.

9

Ruskin’s Wedding Night

I’m lying across the sofa with my laptop, totting up transgressions. A hundred was the grand total that I allowed Joel for six months, over and above the two daily debits he is allotted. He would be over the limit already were it not for the 20 positives I gave him in compensation for what happened or nearly happened that night. In some way, then, you could say that my near-miss with Cara or Gabriel’s near miss with a fatal illness saved our marriage.

Though both did not so much save our marriage as offer it some reprieve. There is still a month to go and not much allowance left. He is tottering toward the limit. Sometimes this makes me feel sad and frightened. At other times, I am filled with a giddy sense that something, at last, will change. Something has to change.

I’m just relieved that the something didn’t involve a child with a life-threatening infection or me indulging in a bout of Sapphic eroticism with my best friend’s girlfriend. And I know that whatever other calamities might befall us, Cara will never call me again.

“You look nice,” says Joel as he comes into the living room. I look down at my old jeans and stained T-shirt with surprise. “You do natural so well,” he goes on. Is “natural” a euphemism for unkempt, I wonder, like curvy being one for fat? “Would you like a foot massage?” he continues.

“Thanks. What’s this in aid of?”

“Nothing. Can’t I give my wife a foot massage?”

“Of course you can. Hmm, that is nice.” The laptop is propped up on my stomach and I take care to shield it from him.

“I picked up some scallops at the fishmonger near work. I thought I’d pan fry them with some bacon for supper tonight.”

“Delicious. Why do they talk about pan frying? What else can you fry a scallop in?”

I look down at my lap and refer to the positives section of The List, find the code for compliments, foot massages and fine cooking, and add
P
1
, P
3 and
P
8 to today’s date. For the first time ever, Joel is heading for a day when his positives outweigh his negatives, a debit-neutral day. It’s like he’s just taken a flight but planted a whole rainforest. I switch the laptop off, enjoy the massage and look forward to my shellfish supper.

“Let’s sit outside,” says Becky. “I’m smoking.”

“You are looking pretty hot,” I say.

“Ha ha, very funny, but I look like shit.” She does. Becky’s looks walk such a fine line between handsome and odd that it takes only a throat infection or unwashed hair for her to cross over to the dark side.

“Since when are you smoking again? You weren’t smoking in Norfolk, were you?”

“No.”

“Was it being in Newcastle that made you start again? Was it very stressful?”

“No, it’s coming back that’s got me reaching for the smokes. How long is it since we’ve seen each other?”

“Over a month. No, longer, Norfolk was the end of May bank holiday.”

“Whatever happened to our regular Monday lunch?” she asks.