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‘Like what?’
She is silent. The silence presses on his chest.
‘Nothing,’ she says eventually.
‘Tell me,’ he replies.
‘Like Jasmine recognising Mr Sloth and then asking for pockets. Pockets is her name for Neil, yes? It’s what she calls him.’
‘What?’ He can feel he has screwed up his face at her. But he doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about and it scares him. ‘You say our marriage is over and now you want to talk about Abi’s cuddly toy and somehow pin something on my best friend? Really? You want to do this now?’
With a loud sniff, she raises her head. ‘The trouble is, you want me to talk to you but then you don’t listen. After everything you’ve done, I would’ve thought you’d have the grace to take me seriously, but no. Maybe this is why we can’t talk to each other. Talking to each other is not who we are to one another anymore, is it? I shouldn’t have even tried and, besides, you don’t have the right to sit and talk to me over coffee like this. I’m not yours to talk to.’
From the hallway, Fred begins his cough-like cry.
‘Ava, please. I can look after you. We can get better together.’
‘No, we can’t. How can we? You’re no longer someone I trust. I want to trust you but I don’t. I’m sorry about that, more than I can say.’ Her eyes are so wounded he has to look away. He was right: last night was not an argument. It was final. Don’t do this, he wants to say, over and over until she relents, but he doesn’t.
‘You need to pack your things,’ she adds, no longer looking at him.
‘Look,’ he tries. ‘I’ll go in the morning, all right? I’ll take Fred out this afternoon and you can sleep. I’m hung-over and I need to get myself sorted. I can’t possibly—’
Her hand flies up. ‘All right. All right. One more night. But if you’re thinking I’ll have changed my mind by then, I won’t have. You have one more night to sort something out, but tomorrow, either book a Travelodge or sleep on someone’s sofa, I don’t care. I’m serious. I’ll change the locks if I have to. And for the rest of the day, please just stay away from me.’
Twenty-Seven
Ava
It’s midnight. I stand at the door of the spare room and watch my husband sleep. I have no idea why I’m doing this. I am strange, I think. I have become strange.
Matt sleeps noiselessly these days. He used to snore; now it’s like there isn’t enough of him to produce that amount of noise – this rhythmic hushed breathing is all this skinny man can manage. Looking at him without being able to hold him makes me feel lonelier than if he weren’t here at all. But I cannot touch him. We are no longer us. I always hated us falling out. Apart from Fred, he was all I had. Now I don’t have him. Today we have hovered around each other like ghosts. Fred is all that’s left.
I creep downstairs, fix myself a cold glass of milk and drink it standing at the front window of the living room. Opposite, Pete and Shirley’s magnolia tree snakes its branches towards the never-quite-black sky. Not a soul about. On such lonely indoor night prowls as this, I am always struck by how desolate nocturnal suburban streets are. It is as if no one lives here, no one at all.
All day I have tried to turn over what Matt said to me earlier: that he can make amends, that somehow, together, we can heal. But if I can’t talk to my own husband about why that bothers me, what chance is there? I have been stripped bare. Grief has unbuttoned me; betrayal has thrown away my clothes, and now there is no one to hold me, no one to throw a blanket around me and save me from the cold.
And despite all of this, despite the loneliness I have consciously chosen, still a nagging voice calls to me from deeper down. I feel it, bodily, as I feel music; hear the wrong note in the fiendishly difficult, un-spannable chord.
When struck with a fork, a glass with even a hairline crack does not chime.
I know we can all read things different ways; I’m not a fool. And I know I have been battered about, am hormonal, sleep-deprived. But I’m not paranoid. If I were paranoid, I would have suspected Neil that day. But I didn’t. As late as last night, I saw in Neil only someone who loved us, loved our child, someone who would have moved heaven and earth to find her. God knows, I’m not even sure that I suspect him now, only that I can’t for the life of me explain why Jasmine Lovegood would recognise Abi’s toy. Something, something is off.
The loop of that morning has been replaced by the loop of Matt, of Bella, of Neil. Is that mad? Am I mad? Am I seeing things that aren’t there? Neil loved Abi; I know that. And I know that my breakdown is probably why we’ve not seen him and Bella. But why would he follow me out of the party after barely speaking to me for a year? It’s like hehadto talk to me, like the party itself had brought his feelings to a head.
And Bella. Bella was so devoted to Abi; it seems so odd now that she hasn’t doted on Fred in the same way. And like Neil, after almost a year of silence, the painful small talk at the salon, then, by contrast, at the party, it was as if she was trying to tell me something. She had the same urgency Neil had, wouldn’t stop talking about how gutted he was, how it had changed him. Perhaps it was just the drink, but she wanted me to know he loved Abino matter what.No matter whatsuggests something happened. It’s another way of sayingdespite everything. This, and all the rest, is what I can no longer chew over with my husband. Because he is not my husband anymore, not really, and no matter what arguments and counter-arguments fall after one another, it is Jasmine’s recognition of Abi’s toy that is the crack in the glass, the wrong note in the chord. But it seems that I alone can hear it, me,me, Abi’s mother, my bones, my flesh, my heart entwined forever with hers.
Idly I wander back to the kitchen. A year ago, my phone would have been here on the bar, charging, already filling up with notifications: Facebook, Instagram, the Come-and-Play mums’ WhatsApp group that drove me to distraction with its endless reply-all messages:X can’t do that date because he has Monkey Music;Y has a party that day, any chance of another day?The endless loading-up of information I didn’t need, the sheer administration required just to maintain some semblance of a social life. My phone drove me bonkers, if I’m honest. It sucked my life away, made living in the moment almost impossible. But at other times, it was all that connected me in my maternal loneliness to the world. At night, in those dark and silent hours feeding Abi, I would play patience on the screen, and later, when I woke up like this, to drink milk or eat a midnight snack, my body catching up with its own hunger once Abi’s needs had been met, I would sit for ten minutes with the glow of Facebook, laugh at the funnies, quip on someone’s thread, reply with reassurance to someone in doubt, and yes, in those moments, I felt like I was sharing something meaningful.
Now, I cannot see how my life could ever be accommodated in a post or a comment thread. Posting on a comment thread was, in all likelihood, what I was doing when I lost my daughter. Now I have a basic mobile, a real gangster’s burner. I don’t look at it very often. It’s in the kitchen somewhere… ah, here it is in the messy drawer beside a tin of picture hooks, a book of stamps, some gingham ribbon I must have saved from a gift.
I switch it on and search his name before I’m aware of what I’m doing. When I find it, I realise that this is why I was looking for my phone.
Hi, I thumb.R u awake?
The silence thickens. I wash my glass and place it upside down on the draining board. I’m about to give up and go back to bed when my phone buzzes.
Everything OK? N
