The A-Z of Us (2 page)

The bastard! The childish, self-important, immature bastard! It was so fucking typical, he always did this, he always overreacted rather than be calm and listen and talk and work it through! This was exactly the problem! For someone who earned his impressive living from a measured, patient analyzing of the facts, he was like a stroppy little boy when it came to working out his own emotions.

Almost immediately, my anger turned, a coin tossed; to guilt. He'd left because of me, because of what I'd said. Oh God, why had I said those things? I was so stupid. I'd tried to excuse it as he rushed around the bedroom – throwing clothes into his Burberry bag like a thief – it was my period, I was under stress at work, I hated the thought of turning thirty, I was drunk (none of these close to the real reason, but who could face that?).

But it was no good apologizing. I'd said it. It was out. Like seeing someone naked, like losing my virginity, like cutting off my ear, I could never turn back.

If only he'd call, maybe I could placate him. I was good at calming him after a stressful day at work, after he'd had another run-in with the senior partner.

But this time it was different. I was the perpetrator. I was the one who'd upset him.

‘I don't love you.'

How had this happened? It wasn't like we were a couple who argued. We got pissed off with each other, of course,
who doesn't? But big blow-up arguments? It wasn't our style. We prided ourselves on being skilfully restrained. Whenever we were at dinner parties and a couple would row, we'd glance at each other with imperceptible nods, confident in our self-control, in our maturity.

How had we been transformed from the most peaceful couple in London, a poster-couple for clever, successful, loving bi-racial relationships, into World Champions of marital abuse, hurling spite into each other's faces like acid?

Oh fuck! I felt tears coming, but I fought them back, gulping in air, my hands in tight fists. This wasn't what I did. I was measured, in control, with a strategy for every occasion. I was not a woman who gave up, who changed her mind, her direction.

I needed a plan. I needed to take control.

I looked around the bedroom. The walls had been stripped, but not yet rendered. Exposed bricks mocked me, the uneven floorboards jeered me, the gaping wounded holes in the walls scorned me. I thought about the plans that I'd drawn, such loving and detailed drawings with their own essential order and beauty. They bore no relation to the chaotic mess I was now lying in the middle of.

‘Bollocks,' I said, loudly. My voice echoed in the empty space. ‘… ocks… ocks…'

There was only one thing for it. Downstairs, I opened another bottle of wine. Painfully aware that I was fulfilling the stereotype of the recently-abandoned-woman-approaching-thirty, I turned on the portable television and
proceeded to drain the bottle while waiting for the phone to ring.

Every so often I pressed the mute button on the remote control and listened, but the phone remained silent.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. FUCK!

If you said it loudly enough, it made you feel a little better.

It didn't help that my parents, Susan and Bill Cook, were happily and resolutely married for twenty years until my father's sudden death from a brain aneurysm at the age of fifty-six. I'd been his favourite daughter, mainly because I loved to run and climb trees and hit golf balls and watch James Bond films, unlike Molly who preferred the more feminine pursuits that our mother encouraged, such as buying dresses, trying on make-up and watching
The Sound of Music
.

‘My little urchin,' my father used to call me, tousling my short cropped hair. Later, when I entered puberty and fought constantly with my mother, I always sought out ‘daddy' in his study, where occasionally he allowed me a puff on his cigarette, a Dunhill that made me splutter and choke from laughter. He was an accountant for a City firm, a safe, dull job that concealed what I saw as his inherent strength and energy, which he expressed most visibly in his garden – an
avant-garde
creation heavily influenced by Japanese design and philosophy, which he studied intermittently.

He went to work one Thursday with a smile and a wave; he dropped dead in his office near Waterloo Bridge. The postmortem indicated that the wall of one of his cerebral
arteries had thinned, like a worn car tyre, and popped suddenly, causing a massive rupture into the brain.

‘It was instant,' our mother told us, her shoulders wracked with sobs.

I didn't cry at his funeral. I told Mum that I didn't want to talk about Daddy. Three weeks later, I attacked a girl at school who'd made a comment about my new Converse high-tops, leaving her with a bloody nose.

The headmaster informed my mother that I would be suspended for two weeks, a lenient punishment, granted solely with regard to the family's recent bereavement. Outside in the car park, my mother's face hardened, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, as she turned to me and asked:

‘Why don't you ever tell me anything?'

I could not answer. Since I was little, I'd always chosen my father rather than my mother to confide in. When he died, I was unable to transfer the allegiance, preferring instead to speak to my father in my head, a habit I continued for a year or more, until one day I woke and told myself that he was dead and gone and I would have to cope on my own.

I wish things were different. I wish I could call Mum and tell her about Raj. I wish I could just pick up the phone and spill out everything that's happened in the past couple of weeks, like those daughters whose smugly glowing accounts of their ‘wonderfully honest' daughter–mother relationships adorn the various women's magazines I pretend not to read.

But I'm not ready for another lecture. I have no desire
to hear my mother blame me, telling me that I've always been an introverted and self-centred girl, unlike my older sister who sometimes blunders into caring for others more than is good for her. (As was evidenced by how badly Molly was treated by the evil and heartless Will.)

It's so unfair. Molly got divorced two years ago, and yet our mother laid all the responsibility for the break-up at the size twelve feet of Molly's ex-husband Will, whom she categorized as a weak, infantile philanderer. Yet I know my mother will view her younger daughter's situation differently, as she always does. She will side automatically with Raj, whom she loves for his posh voice, good manners and expansive bank account. In Susan Cook's mind, her two daughters' personalities have been clear since childhood – Molly, good, Gemma, not so good.

I can almost hear her wail:

‘How could you, Gemma? What will I do for grandchildren?!'

I wonder if I can tell Molly? I want to. She also lives in London in a chic Clerkenwell apartment that estate agents label ‘urban loft', but I think is sterile and unimaginative. But again something stops me. Because Molly is The Victim. Will Masterson screwed an easyJet stewardess from Glasgow – ‘she lived up to the company name' is Molly's tragi-comic refrain. In contrast, I am The Perpetrator, The Guilty Bitch.

Like my mother, Molly will judge me. Even though my elder sister is far from the saint our mother classifies her as – to her credit, Molly readily and frequently points this out to both mum and I – she does possess our mother's tendency towards moralizing, towards seeing the world
in cheerfully black-and-white terms. She'll ask me for reasons, seeking explanation, looking for swift and absolute clarity.

I have no answers.

Why did I do it? I don't know.

Do I really not love my husband? Maybe, maybe not.

What's going to happen now? I've no idea.

I spent the next few days waiting for Raj's return. I was constipated (my stomach resisted my rebellion and was as tight as a walnut each morning). My head felt like someone had dropped a heavy iron on it. And I looked like shit.

On Monday morning, I stood and surveyed myself in the bedroom mirror for the first time in two weeks, as if challenging my reflection to explain what had happened, and where I was going to go next. I touched my left breast, tentatively, a child prodding meat. God I hated my body.

I've always hated my thighs. My face is still pretty, even with the bloodshot eyes and bags under them, but those fucking thighs. I've often fantasized about taking a kitchen knife and cutting down the length of them, like severing cheese. But hating my breasts is something new.

I went to work because I couldn't decide not to. I followed habit, sat down at my desk, drew plans, did meetings, met contractors, ignored my boss's flirtatious asides, and drank numerous cups of coffee, as if nothing had happened.

Then my boss, Duncan Archer, came up to my desk, sat on the corner and told me ‘in strictest confidence' that he was getting a divorce and he'd very much like to take me out for dinner one of these nights, ‘just for a wee chat'.
When he'd departed, disappearing around the model of the new tower KPSG were designing in Southampton, I stood calmly and walked to the ladies' toilets.

I sat for half an hour in a cubicle. I would not cry. I could not cry. I was blowing my nose with toilet paper when Sophie Watson knocked on the toilet door.

‘Are you pregnant, Gemma?' she whispered, in a voice that could not disguise the hope.

‘Piss off, Sophie!'

‘We're worried about you, that's all.'

‘You can't have my bloody job! I'm not fucking pregnant! Just piss off and leave me alone!'

So much for the fucking sisterhood! So much for fucking mutual support amongst women, helping each other on the jagged way up the corporate ladder! Sophie couldn't wait to get me fired. I wondered, just for a moment, if the evil bitch hung around the ladies' toilets taking urine samples.

I'm not pregnant. That's one thing I'm sure of. More sure than I've ever been. You can't get pregnant if you don't have sex. Raj hasn't been inside me in two months. He was too tired, I was too tired, we were both too fraught. I'm glad in some ways. I can't be pregnant. Not now. I can't look after myself, let alone a human being the size of a telephone directory.

And anyway, Raj doesn't want kids yet. He's afraid that any hint of impending children might harm his chances of a partnership.

‘If they think something might detract from your concentration on the job, forget about it. Thank God Jerome's getting married next year, there's no chance they'll choose
him,' he informed me, happily. I smiled and nodded, feeling a mixture of pride and concern that Raj's senior partners weren't worried that he had anything in his life to distract him from his work.

‘The house will be our baby,' he added, with a big smile.

At the time, I was inspired by this remark. The house could be our baby, I agreed, it could bring us closer together. We could create our own nest, our own perfect Gemmarajworld, Rajgemmaworld.

In the end, the house was exactly like a baby – it gave us sleepless nights, caused us to row and drink more, and took nine months to get to a state where we could see its true, solid form.

And now I hate it, our child. It's nothing like my dream. It's dark, dank and unruly, and will never be finished. It's in an area far from my friends, an area full of young mothers and laughing, shrieking children. I don't want to think about it any more. I don't want to think about anything any more.

Raj did not return. On the third evening I drank more wine, trying to muster the strength not to call him. I missed talking to him. I missed preparing stories in my head, waiting for the sound of his key in the door, lying in bed recounting my day until he fell asleep. After half a bottle of Australian Merlot I dialled his mobile number.

The conversation lasted approximately four minutes. He told me that I was selfish, which I acknowledged, and that we had nothing to talk about, which I did not acknowledge. He informed me that he was in the middle of a very complex merger deal and needed to concentrate
on more important things than a woman who didn't love him.

I called him again the next day, forcing myself to be calm and strong, to mimic the detached tone of my husband. Before I could ask him when he was intending to come back home and talk about things like a normal, mature-minded adult, he explained in careful language worthy of a high-flying lawyer that he felt his eyes had been opened and he was doubtful whether he wanted to be married to me any more. I tried pleading with him, asking if we could just meet somewhere to talk things through, but he put down the phone.

This left me in a state of small shock. I'd been so obsessively preoccupied by the thought that I didn't love Raj, and by how I could possibly express this to him, that I hadn't stopped to ask myself whether Raj loved me. I'd simply assumed it – he'd always seemed so grateful to be married to me, his ‘cultured, stylish, beautiful woman' (his words). I couldn't believe that this had been a pretence, that he didn't seem to love me either.

I took the pictures in the silver and gold wedding present frames and placed them in a box, face down.

On the second Sunday morning after he left, I woke feeling so alone. I was the smallest, most inconsequential thing on the planet. I was unloved, and unable to love. It was as if I was already dead and forgotten and the world was hurtling towards a future that I would be no part of.

And what was worse was that I knew Raj was feeling just as alone, and there was nothing I could do to make him feel better. It was all my fault.

I went downstairs, made some coffee and took out the plans I'd drawn for the house. I stared at them. The straight lines, the solid marks on white paper. The numbers, words and angles. The drawings reassured me. I breathed; out, in, out. As long as I concentrated on the A
₃
paper and the mapped-out integral worlds delineated there, I felt okay.

But you can't look at plans for ever, Gemma. You have to look up and see the reality around you.