A Special Relationship (20 page)

‘Well, of course it hurts,’ Sandy said when I phoned her around noon that day. ‘Hell, I used to dread every moment of it.’

‘Really?’ I said, grabbing on to this revelation.

‘Believe me, it didn’t give me a big motherly buzz.’

I knew she was lying – for my benefit. Because I was often in and out of Sandy’s house in the months right after the birth of her first son. And she didn’t display the slightest sign of discomfort while breastfeeding. On the contrary, she was so damn adept at this business that I once saw her ironing a shirt while simultaneously suckling her son.

‘It’s just a bit of a shock at first, that’s all,’ she said. ‘When are you going back to the hospital?’

‘Tonight,’ I said, hearing the dread in my voice.

‘I bet he’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Do you have a digital camera?’

‘Uh, no.’

‘Well, get one and you can start emailing me photos.’

‘Right,’ I said, my voice so flat that Sandy immediately said, ‘Sally … tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘Tell me what’s going on?’

‘Nothing’s going on.’

‘You don’t sound good.’

‘Just a bad day, that’s all.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. Because the truth was …

What?

I had no damn idea what the truth here was. Except that I
didn’t
want to go back to the hospital that night. As soon as I hung up the phone I escaped from the workmen who were everywhere in the house, and took refuge in Tony’s study. I sank down into his desk chair and stared at the pile of manuscript pages stacked face down to the left of his computer keyboard. There was the large black Moleskin notebook, underneath a circular pen holder. I always knew that Tony was an inveterate keeper of diaries. I found this out the first night we slept together at his shambolic Cairo flat – when I woke up around three to take a pee and discovered him in the living room, scribbling in a black-bound book.

‘So what do I rate – a five, an eight?’ I asked him, standing nude in the doorway.

‘That’s private,’ he said, shutting the book and recapping his pen. ‘Just like everything in this book.’

The tone was pleasant – but coolly firm. I took the hint and never asked him about his notebook again … even though, over the coming months, I’d often see him writing away in it. Someone once said anyone who kept a journal was a bit like a dog going back to sniff his own vomit. But to me, anyone who chronicled their day-today life – and, simultaneously, their deeply personal reactions to those closest to them – ultimately wanted it to be read. Which is why – I surmised – Tony had casually left his Moleskin notebook on top of his desk. Because though he knew I respected his privacy, to the point of never coming into his study, I couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t also playing a subtle
passive-aggressive
game with me, silently saying:
There it is … go on, open it if you dare.

Then again, he might have just left it there by accident … which meant that all my psychobabbly thoughts about his alleged tactical behaviour were further examples of my heightened fragility.

I was feeling pretty damn fragile right now. So fragile that – as tempted as I was to open the notebook and learn whatever horrible truth was contained inside
(‘We are a terrible match’, ‘Why is she so bloody literal about everything?’, ‘I have constructed a prison of my own making’.
I really was having inventive flights of paranoid fancy) – I knew that I would be venturing into territories best sidestepped. Anyway, who in their right mind really wants to know the private thoughts of their spouse?

So I pulled my hand away from the notebook, and also resisted the temptation to read a few manuscript pages and see whether Tony was playing Graham Greene or Jeffrey Archer. Instead, I simply unfolded the sofa bed, opened the wicker box where Tony kept the duvet and pillows, made the bed, pulled down the shade on the dormer window, turned the phone on to Voice Mail, took off my jeans, and got under the covers. Even though there was an excessive amount of hammering and sanding on the lower floors, I was asleep within minutes – a fast, blacked-out tumble into oblivion.

Then I heard a familiar voice.

‘What are you doing here?’

It took a moment or two to work out where I was. Or to adjust to the fact that it was now night, and the room had just been illuminated by the big floor lamp that stood to the right of the desk, and that my husband was standing in the doorway, looking at me with concern.

‘Tony?’ I asked, my voice thick with sleep.

‘The hospital has been trying to reach you …’

Now I was completely awake.

‘They
what?
’

‘Jack had a minor setback this afternoon. The jaundice returned.’

Now I was on my feet, grabbing for my clothes.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, pulling on my jeans. Tony put a steadying hand on my arm.

‘I’ve been there already. It’s okay now. They were worried at first that it might be a serious relapse. But the blood tests showed only a very minor overload of bilirubin, so there’s nothing to worry about. However, they did move him back to Paediatric ICU …’

I shrugged off Tony’s hand.

‘Tell me in the car.’

‘We’re not going …’

‘Don’t tell me we’re not going. He’s my …’

‘We’re not going,’ Tony said, holding my arm with more vehemence.

‘If you’re not going, I’m …’

‘Will you listen?’ he said, his voice suddenly raised. ‘It’s nearly midnight.’

‘What?’ I said, sounding genuinely shocked.

‘It’s seven minutes to twelve.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘You’ve been asleep all day.’

‘That can’t have happened.’

‘Well, the hospital has been trying to ring you at home since three this afternoon.’

Oh, no …

‘And I must have left you ten messages on your mobile …’

‘Why didn’t you try the builders?’

‘Because I didn’t have their bloody mobile number, that’s why.’

‘I was taking a nap after seeing Jack this morning.’

‘A twelve-hour nap?’

‘I’m sorry …’

I gently shook off his grip and finished getting dressed.

‘I’m still going over there,’ I said.

He blocked my path towards the door. ‘That’s not a good idea right now. Especially after …’

‘After
what?
’ I demanded. But I already sensed the answer to that question.

‘Especially after the difficulties you had this morning.’

That bitch, Nurse McGuire. She shopped me.

‘It was just a feeding problem, that’s all.’

‘So I gather – but one of the nurses on duty said you nearly yanked Jack off your breast.’

‘It was a momentary thing. He hurt me.’

‘Well I’m sure he didn’t mean to.’

‘I’m not saying that. Anyway, it wasn’t as if I threw him across the room. I just had a bit of a shock.’

‘Must have been quite a shock if the nurse reported it to her superior.’

I sat down on the bed. I put my head in my hands. I really did feel like grabbing my passport, running to the airport and catching the first plane Stateside.

You can’t do this … you’re a maternal disaster area …

Then another calm and lucid voice entered my head, repeating, over and over again, a soothing mantra:
You don’t care … You don’t care … You really don’t care.

Why should a catastrophe of a mother like me care about her child? Anyway, even if I did care,
they
(the doctors, the nurses, my husband) all knew the truth about me. They had the evidence. And they saw just how …

How
what?

How … I wasn’t understanding any of this.

How … one moment, I was wracked with grief and guilt for what had befallen Jack … the next, I couldn’t give a damn.

Because I’m unfit. That’s right, U-N-F-I-T. Like that old country-and-western song about D-I-V-O-R …

‘Sally?’

I looked up and saw Tony staring at me in that quizzical, peeved way of his.

‘You really should go to bed,’ he said.

‘I’ve just slept twelve hours.’

‘Well, that was your decision.’

‘No – that was
my body’s
decision. Because my body’s noticed something which you definitely haven’t noticed … the fact that I am completely run down after a little physical exertion called “having a baby”. Which, I know, in your book, is just about up there with stubbing your toe …’

Tony gave me a thin smile and started stripping the sofa bed.

‘Think I’ll go to work now,’ he said. ‘No need to wait up for me.’

‘I’m not going back to sleep.’

‘That’s your call. Now if you’ll excuse me …’

‘You don’t care what’s going on, do you?’

‘Excuse me, but who ran to the hospital this evening when our son’s mother turned off all the phones and put herself out-of-touch with the world?’

His comment caught me like a slap across the face – especially as he said it in an ultra-detached voice.

‘That is so unfair,’ I said, my voice a near-whisper. Tony just smiled.

‘Of course you’d think that,’ he said. ‘Because the truth is usually most unfair.’

Then he sat down in his desk chair, swivelled it away from me, and said, ‘Now if you’ll excuse me …’

‘Fuck you.’

But he ignored that comment, and instead said, ‘If you do feel like making me a cup of tea, that would be most welcome.’

I responded to this comment by storming out of his office, slamming the door behind me.

Marching downstairs, my initial reaction was to fly out the door, jump into a taxi, tell the driver to floor it to the Mattingly, march straight into Paediatric ICU, demand to see Jack immediately, and also demand that they find that Irish stool pigeon, so I could confront that Ms Holier-Than-Thou with the lies she’d peddled about me. And then …

I would be bound and gagged and dispatched to the nearest rubber room.

I started to pace the floor. And when I say pace, I
mean
pace. As in a manic back-forth motion:
here-there, here-there, here-there.
Only when the thought struck me –
look at you, treading up and down the room like a laboratory animal on amphetamines
– did I force myself to sit down. At which point I had a bad attack of the chills. An arctic wind had blown down Sefton Street and had somehow penetrated the very fabric of my house, leaving me convinced that the floorboards were rotting, rising damp was prevalent, and this entire shit heap investment, this mean little example of domestic Victoriana, was going to be blown off its dirt foundations, leaving us destitute and in the street.

But then, the climate changed. The mercury soared eighty degrees. I’d left mid-January in the Canadian Rockies and was now somewhere in the tropics. Aruba,
baby.
Forget the frostbite.
We’re having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave.
Like one-hundred-and-ten in the shade, with ninety-six per cent humidity. Suddenly, I was sweating. So drenched in perspiration that I had to strip off all my clothes.

Which is exactly what I did – not noticing that our front curtains were open and someone was getting out of a black cab parked right outside, and the driver was gawking at me, wide-eyed, and I felt like turning full-frontal towards him, and showing off my Caesarean scar. Instead, some intrinsic modesty took over and I made a dash upstairs for the bathroom, and turned on the cold tap full-blast, and jumped under the downpour (thank God, I’d insisted on an American power-shower), and then …

What are you doing?

I turned off the water. I leaned my head against the tiled wall. I felt another stab of panic – because I was so completely adrift and out-of-control. What was scaring me most was the realization that there seemed to be no logical progression to these strange, manic interludes. I had become an emotional pinball, bouncing wildly off every object in my path. In the midst of these mood swings, there would be moments of extreme, painful clarity – like the one I was negotiating right now, where I felt like beating my skull against the wall and repeating over and over again,
What are you doing?

To which I could only answer: I really don’t know. Because I don’t even know how things operate within me anymore.

Oh, listen to yourself. Little Miss Self-Pity. A mild postnatal dip in your equilibrium – something any sensible, balanced person could handle – and you cleave in two. Tony’s right to treat you as some sort of silly recalcitrant. Because you’re making an idiot of yourself Worse yet, you keep going down this manic road, and questions will start being raised about your sanity. So get a grip, eh? And while you’re at it, go make your husband a cup of tea.