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Downstairs, she makes herself a cup of tea and sits on the sofa. If Emily is going to sleep, she can at least put her feet up for five minutes.
There was a young girl, easy led,
Whose husband took many to bed.
She stands up, walks over to the record player. Tom Waits is on the turntable. She’s not in the mood for that maudlin growl but can’t be bothered to flip through the other discs.
And now she’d be better off dead.
Stop it. If only there were some biscuits in the house, but Peter doesn’t like her to eat too much sugar. And he’s trying to persuade her to take up running. He says it’s good for low mood and excellent for aerobic fitness, though she suspects he is keen for her to lose the half stone she gained during pregnancy. Just the thought of running makes her feel tired. Besides, the Fitbit he bought her tells her she walks almost ten kilometres with the pram every day. How much air does one pair of lungs need?
… better off dead.
Stop. It. She could make some toast. Or call her mum. Or take a nap.
No chance.
Peter’s wine glass is still on the table. She puts her mug next to it and lies down. The cushions shift; she can’t get comfy. Her eyes sting. She opens them, props herself up on her elbow. The cushion slants. The corner of what looks like one of the plastic bags she uses to store her breast milk pokes out from behind the cushion. She pulls at it. A moment of resistance and it comes free. In it are coloured pills.
‘Oh my God,’ she says aloud. ‘You are joking me.’
She puts the bag to her nose and sniffs inside. It smells of nothing; she has no idea why she even did that.
‘What the hell?’ she asks no one at all, the habit of talking to herself one she has acquired since Emily. Is this what Peter does when she’s out teaching – gets Emily to sleep and then takes drugs? In their home? Her head throbs.
The pills could have been there for ages. He offered her Ecstasy many times in the early days, though never calling it by that name and never in pill form since that first night.Fancy a cheeky bit of Mandy?he would say, orFew sprinkles in your wine?She always refused, telling him to go ahead, which he did the first few times, then didn’t. And he has not offered her anything since she was pregnant, before that even. She assumed he’d forgotten all about it, had moved on now that they were a family.
But they have never openly talked about it. A mistake.
She wonders if and how she can broach the subject. It isn’t as if Peter was out of it just now. Which points to him having forgotten about them. In fact, it’s possible they got lodged behind the sofa cushions the first night she spent here. It’s not like they’re at risk of friends discovering them. Apart from her mother coming to stay that one time, they’ve never, in all the time she’s lived here, invited anyone over.
She pushes the bag back where she found it. She will pretend she hasn’t seen it, check in a few days and see if it’s still there. If it is, she can make light of it, or maybe pretend to discover it by accident when he’s here with her.
‘Peter,’ she could say, the trace of laughter in her voice. ‘Look what I just found. Shall I throw them away now that we’ve got Em?’
Yes, something like that. They’re a family now. Peter is nearly forty. He can’t expect to hold on to his youth for ever.
Fifteen
The week goes pleasantly enough. Samantha takes her cue from Peter, who doesn’t mention the poem again, though that doesn’t stop her students flying about her mind like spirits. She reminds herself over and over that the poem didn’t mention any names, that there’s no point dwelling on it, that to talk about it is to give it oxygen.
And she doesn’t mention the pills.
How easily and how soon she has slipped into secrecy, she thinks sometimes. She remembers her mother’s one daily cigarette, smoked at the back of the farmhouse.Don’t tell your dadwas all she said when Samantha caught her. And despite being barely twelve, Samantha understood that this was a confidence never to be broken, that it had to do with the unique and subterranean solidarity of her sex, the secret armoury of survival in a world made by and for men. Her father’s secrets were a different kind. They were weapons of destruction.
And so, in secret, she checks the sofa every day and finds the pouch of pills still there. On the second day, she has the presence of mind to count them – there are twelve – and at the end of the week there are still twelve.
‘It’s obvious,’ she says to Marcia over the phone. ‘They’ve been there for ages. He must have forgotten all about them.’
‘So throw them out,’ her friend says. Of late, her tone has been impatient. She is doing a PG Cert and it is tiring her out, although it’s always possible she’s curt because she finds Samantha’s situation ridiculous. Even more possible is that she still harbours resentment for Samantha’s sudden abandonment of her and the flat they shared. Peter did pay the remainder of the rent, but now that Samantha is out of the heady reel of the first year of romance, now that she has faced childbirth and its aftermath, she can see that, at least for Marcia, rent wasn’t the point. Friendship was the point, and at that thought Samantha’s cheeks blaze with regret.
‘I can’t throw them out,’ she says. ‘If he remembers them, he’ll know I’ve found them and chucked them away.’
‘So? Tell him you don’t want to bring your daughter up around drugs. Fair enough, isn’t it?’
‘It’s hardly bringing her up around drugs, Marcy.’
‘Well, leave them where they are then. Listen, I have to go, I have a load of Hamlet essays to mark.’
