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The words wouldn’t come. What I really wanted to say was ‘I don’t like being called a woman’, but that thought was such a surprise to me, so out of the blue, I knew it would be an even bigger one to Petra.
“Oh, bollocks,” she murmured. “I’ve fucked up, haven’t I? I’ve really upset you. I… I can fix it. On Monday, I’ll go to Anastasia in the florist and get you some flowers. I don’t know when, but I’ll go. Peonies are your favourite, aren’t they? They’re right in season – I’ll get some on Monday, I promise. I’m so sorry, it was just-”
“Forget the fucking flowers!”
My expletive-ridden shout surprised the both of us. Petra’s gabbling cut off mid-flow, leaving her mouth hanging open. Out of both of us, she was the shouter and the swearer. I rarely did either, contrary to my teenagehood, and so this uncharacteristic vociferation rung in the air, leaving us both speechless.
Face on fire, I scrabbled to collect myself.
“Really, Petra. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” she sobbed, and fled the room.
I collapsed down onto one of the kitchen chairs, and my fingers stroked my wrist quite without conscious thought. It had been a long time, and I thought I’d left all that behind, but they both suddenly seemed to itch and tingle. I forced my hands into my lap, then sat on them for good measure, before exhaling a shaky breath.
“Okay,” I whispered to myself, and I could hear Lyndsey’s voice supplying me with words like when she gave me her famous pep talks. “Okay, okay, okay. Backtrack. What made you fly off the handle? Go through the scene again, and map out your emotions.”
Fatigue had been present right from the off – the consequence of eight hours at work on a busy Saturday. That, by its very nature, served to amp up emotions. Then, I had been surprised to learn that Petra was cooking orzotto, and after that, concerned by the lowness of her spirits.
The tension within me had gone from zero to one hundred by the declaration: “You’re both women.” I realised that now.
But why? It was a simple fact, wasn’t it? Her mother was a woman, and I was a woman.
My mouth went dry.
But what if you’re not? Somehow?
Chapter Fourteen
Having eventually stirred from my gender-related torpor at the kitchen table, I realised that the saffron orzotto was burning. By its very nature as a relative of risotto, the dish required water, and when that water boiled away, the dish burned. Petra’s disappearance, and my subsequent failure to take over the recipe, had left us with a gelatinous, charred lump of almost-unidentifiable substance. The only place for it was the bin.
Petra stayed upstairs the whole evening. Facing her again would have been difficult, so it suited me just fine. When I eventually did go upstairs later in the evening, she was in bed, fast asleep. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to lay down next to her, so I quickly washed, brushed my teeth and returned downstairs. It was tempting to jump on my laptop and message Gemma – not for anything meaningful, just to be ‘vibing together’ as she put it – but I was too tired, and lay back down on the sofa.
It was the first time we had slept apart in our entire marriage.
I was awoken by a soft gasp, and Petra’s concerned face above me.
“Jean,” she whispered. “What are you doing there?”
“Sleeping,” I mumbled, trying to flex my muscles but failing due to the cramped position. I also seriously needed the toilet. “Aargh.”
“You shouldn’t be sleeping on the sofa! Come on, let’s go to bed.”
“What time is it?”
“A quarter to three. I woke up, and realised you weren’t there. I thought… I don’t know what I thought.”
I rubbed my eyes and scrambled to a sitting position, and she sat down in the space my legs had vacated. It was only then, in the dim light, that I noticed the pallor of her skin, the translucency of it. She looked like a ghost.
“I’m sorry for earlier,” I said. “For my language, and my aggression. I shouldn’t have gotten so frustrated.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “You were tired, and I was emotional. I was just thinking about my parents. And my siblings.”
“Have you heard from Nicholas recently?”
She shook her head. Her youngest brother was the only one of her five siblings with whom she had contact. They normally exchanged cards on birthdays and Christmases, but he’d missed her birthday two months ago and her calls to him had gone straight to voicemail. The voicemails had gone unanswered.
“I wonder if the rest of them have finally gotten to him,” she sighed. “There’s only so much backbone one can have, even in the Andino family. It’s entirely possible they’ve finally convinced him how much of an evil witch I am, and he’s washed his hands of me.”
