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Naomi.
Naomi, Naomi, Naomi.
The coldness in her narrow red eyes. ‘You’re asking me to live with you and yourgran? Are you fucking serious?’
Himself, tongue-tied, no longer sure his request was even reasonable. Shrugging, shaking his head.
‘I don’t see why we have to do that when we could just do her shopping, couldn’t we? She’s got loads of friends. Sam? Sam? Say something!’
Himself, walking away from her, closing the bedroom door, pulling the holdall out from under the bed. The door opening. Her, a shadow.
‘What? So that’s it, is it? You’re going to her? No discussion? Just… leaving? That’s what you’re doing?’
Himself: the impossibility of finding words, any words at all, against the torrent of hers. He can’t remember the rest, only that it went on for the time it took him to pack his things, continued unrelenting through every return trip from the van for more of his stuff; that somewhere inside he knew he was not leaving for this alone, only that this, finally, had become the reason.
‘If you walk out,’ she shouted after him, ‘you can never come back, you know that, don’t you? Sam? Sam!’
The click of the catch. His own quickening feet. Her primal wail of rage – all that was left now her words had run dry. The pale linoleum of the shared stairwell blurring beneath him, the rapid tap-tap-tap of the metal stair runners against the soles of his boots. The banister cold against his grip. The dizzying descent. And out into the chill kiss of the March air. The metallic thunk of the van doors shutting on the pathetic sight of all he had taken with him: two bags, one filled with clothes, one with books. His gardening tools, his toolbox. A box of vinyl records already loaded up, the vintage Pye record player she had bought for him from Bridport antiques market, a box of shoes, a coffee maker, his mother’s Le Creuset casserole dish.
That’s it, he thought, the enormity of what he was doing growing from some dark corner of himself. This is the material sum of my life. I have failed. I am a failure.
Panic took him towards Uplyme, his mind blank. At the sight of the hundred-foot arches of the viaduct, he swerved the van into the hedge and jumped out, raided his tools and headed up the muddy rise.
Somehow,somehow, he did not throw himself off. Who knows how? Perhaps the extreme height gave him some perspective, the glass rain diving into the black abyss. Whatever, minute by minute, his breathing steadied. He stepped back, climbed down, returned soaking wet through the muddy grass and then on, down to Lyme, to his gran’s, his home since he was ten years old. Joyce had brought him there from Clapham after the death of his mother: a fresh start, a chance, after he’d gone off the rails at school.
‘This is where I grew up,’ she’d told him – still so careful in the way she spoke to him back then, none of the easy teasing that developed between them over the years. ‘I was thinking of moving back anyway once I’d sold the business, so may as well be now. We’ll be happy here – you’ll see.’
She was right. Eventually. In his final year at primary school, his teacher, Mrs Colston, asked him to help her with the school garden. She did this, he realised only recently, to help him get over his crushing shyness, his mortification at being the new kid with the weird London accent. He stayed after school, and together with a few of the other kids, they dug the earth and planted seeds and made an arched dome out of willow, and he felt that churning feeling inside him shrink away.
That summer, he worked with Joyce on her garden, all thoughts of London – the fighting, the spray-painting of obscenities on the school toilet walls, the throwing of eggs at buses – almost gone. Later, together, he and Joyce dug trenches in her back garden. She showed him how to mix concrete, which they poured into the hollowed-out ground. Once it had set, they laid railway sleepers on top and filled the raised rectangles with fresh soil and compost, then stood back and drank their tea from white mugs, and Joyce said,Look at that, would you look at that? We’ve only gone and built a vegetable garden.
When Sam was fifteen, Joe, a local landscaper, let him help on small jobs during the school holidays. He earned pocket money mowing lawns at weekends, learnt how to pave, how to lay bricks. Later, he built sheds, planted beds, levelled ground. He had a good eye, Joe said, a practical brain and the knack for handling plants. That was Sam: in his element in the earth.
Joyce was right about him being happy in Lyme. And when she first met Naomi, she was right about her too, telling him to mind how he went. But as he and Naomi became serious, Joyce said less and less. When he told her they were moving in together, she said only,Wonderful, love. As long as you’re happy,and gave him five thousand pounds towards the deposit.
Just now, in the kitchen, Joyce’s expression had hardened the moment Naomi’s name was mentioned.
And you’re sure it’s her friend’s, this baby?
Could she be right again – in what she’d almost said?
This afternoon, Naomi looked behind her towards the Cobb before she spoke. Was it before or after that that she said she was looking after her friend’s child? He can’t remember. Was still trying to get his sea legs against the rushing wave of her. But he does remember her manner when she said it: nervous, embarrassed, as if caught off guard.
Caught in a lie? Or just embarrassed to see him after their messy break-up?
He rubs in the shampoo, fingertips hard against his skull, trying to disperse the tension. During lockdown, he had to stop himself from texting her to check she was OK, knowing that one text would be the first knot in the noose, the end of the rope wound tight around her delicate white hands.
But that was before today, before he saw her with the baby, whose colouring matches his own, whose age ties in perfectly with a pregnancy that would date from before he left. Did she know about it then, when she shouted after him, accusing him of choosing his grandmother over her, as if he was not allowed to have both in his life?
This afternoon it was as if he’d caught her doing something she shouldn’t. She hadn’t expected to see him there, that much was obvious. He’d burst out from behind the chalets; there was no way she could have seen him approaching. It would’ve been too late for her to make a dash for the car. But then it isn’t comfortable bumping into an ex at the best of times, he imagines – can only imagine since he hasn’t had any direct experience before today. And he was awkward too, embarrassed, tongue-tied.
The pendulum swings back and forth: it was merely the discomfort of lovers no longer together/it was something more. The way that baby stared at him/all babies stare. His blue eyes, his blonde brow/lots of babies are fair with blue eyes.
Oh, but if… and he hardly dares think it, butifthe child is his, Naomi will have known he might suspect, even hope.When they were happy – and they were, at first – all he wanted was to have a child together. Two. Three even. But she refused.
‘Children cripple women.’ Her words, not his.
It was their first argument, an argument they would have over and over again.
