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And there we had it. All those sentences had a “me”in them. Why was I doing this tohim? Why hadn’t I involvedhimin my nefarious plan to bump myself off? I’d been in the house barely five minutes and already he was nagging. Anyone would think I’d tried to kill myself for my own convenience. As if, sitting on that bench behind Sainsbury’s, I’d been in a sufficiently cohesive, logical frame of mind to consider the impact on anyone else.
“I don’t understand. You seemed okay. We’ve had a good few months.”
Christ, if a psych nurse didn’t understand how my brain could randomly flip from contemplating buying tickets for an upcoming Franz Ferdinand gig one day, to wondering how deeply I could get away with cutting my left wrist yet still maintain sufficient dexterity to slice through my right, then what hope was there for the rest of us?
“It’s really important you open up to me when you’re feeling low, babe. I’m upset you didn’t call me. You know we have therapeutic strategies in place for this. Calling Phil in a crisis is no use. He doesn’t know anything about mental health.”
If I wasn’t mistaken, that last bit sounded an awful lot like jealousy. Phil might have fuck all knowledge about mental health, but he knew damn well there wasn’t a fucking therapeutic strategy in the world that could reverse the wrongs in my childhood, or bring Brenner back to life. Or, come to that, magically transform Darren Eames into Alexander Valentine. Instead, he offered the next best things; cuddles, clothing, cash for a taxi and unconditional love.
“Sorry,” I mumbled meekly. Because what else was there to say?
“I’m only telling you this because I love you, babe. Because I want you to get better. You do know that don’t you?”
I nodded. I did. Bizarrely, Darren loved me. Cut wrists, downers, overdoses, unemployment benefits, the whole sorry lot. He loved me with a passion bordering on obsessive. Phil reckoned he had some sort of saviour complex or something. Deliberately missing my cue to reassure him I loved him in return, I screwed my face up, as if in pain, causing him to leap from the sofa in alarm.
“Let me do that for you, babe. Close your eyes for a bit. Let the codeine do its work.”
He rearranged me on the sofa again, this time with my head in his lap. He was an excellent hair-stroker, and boasted broad, comfortable thighs. For the next hour or so, I drifted away, too sore, too knackered, and too fucking miserable to do anything else.
CAN’T STAND ME NOW
(THE LIBERTINES)
ALEX 2005
There was something about hotel pillows that always made me wish I’d brought my own from home. My mother unfailingly packed her favourite whenever she travelled. What stopped me copying was that it felt very much like a descent into middle age. A depressing thought when I hadn’t even reached thirty. Especially as I’d developed enough middle-aged tendencies already, such as taking an interest in newspaper articles about pensions, and checking the weather forecast prior to venturing out. I didn’t need to add another.
Anyhow, my head had hardly graced the overstuffed foam boulder before yet another phone call from my wife disturbed my early evening nap.
“I thought you were going to phone me after you arrived.”
“I was just about to, I’ve only this minute picked up the room keys. Everything okay?”
That innocuous query could go one of two ways. A simple fine, or a tearful, hour-long dissection of where we were in Sam’s ovulatory cycle. Given we had reached the end of another month, her mood was low, although I detected the anticipatory peaks and despairing troughs had flattened out of late, into more of a general despondency. I’d started to want this baby almost as much as Sam did, if only to rescue my wife’s sanity, which was at the mercy of her ovaries.
Our marriage was possibly beyond rescuing.
“I’m okay,” she said in a small voice, very unlike the bossy tones she’d displayed earlier. “You know, tomorrow and all that.”
She wasn’t referring to my interview. Tomorrow meant testing day, the earliest day possible to perform a pregnancy test after the end of a cycle and the beginning of another. Throughout the week leading up to it, Samantha became more and more irritable, then fell into a blue funk for the week afterwards, barely speaking to me. And then we started all over again. Somehow, because I didn’t possess a uterus, it was all my fault.
“We’ll get through it, Sam.” My usual, useless platitude. But what else could I offer?
“What if we don’t?” An even smaller voice, and I pictured her curled up in the leather armchair in our cosy kitchen, twin tear tracks running down her cheeks, messing up her mascara.
“You never know,” I said comfortingly, “It will happen one day. Maybe this month we’ll get lucky. We need to be patient, that’s all.”
She let out a despairing little moan. “You keep on saying that.”
“Because it’s true, darling. We’re doing all the right things.”
Infertility had truly become the gift that kept on giving. The tearfulness I managed, even if I did make a poor show of it. Tears, however, tended to be precursors of anger and resentment, mostly directed at me. Being several hours away made not a jot of difference.
“That’s okay for you to say, isn’t it? Mister bloody perfect sperm count! And there’s no ‘we’ in this! I’m the one swallowing tablets that make me sick as a dog and then having my legs yanked up in stirrups, while some bloody doctor guzzles about my insides. So no, ‘we’ aren’t doing the right things. I’m doing the right things and having a shit time, while you’re carrying on as normal! Do you even want this baby?”
And so on. I’d been the recipient of this rant so many times, and I still hadn’t a bloody clue how to handle it. If I tried to soothe her, she accused me of being patronising. If I lost my rag and shouted back, then I was mean. Worse still, I was terrified she’d rile me so much that I’d blurt out something I’d regret, like ‘our marriage is over,’ or ‘I don’t know if I love you anymore’, both of which hovered daily on the tip of my tongue. But what sort of first-rate bastard would I be if I walked away now? For better or worse, those were the vows we’d exchanged at the altar. Sam’s chances of conceiving diminished with every failed cycle of drugs and IVF, and every year that passed. But they’d hit absolute zero without a willing sperm donor. So no, I couldn’t walk out, but Christ, I was tempted. I wasn’t one for bad language, but I was well and truly fucked.
The best tack when Sam lashed out at me was to count to ten and say nothing until she ran out of steam, then drag the conversation towards mundane topics.
