The A-Z of Us (8 page)

‘Fluoride pills, very responsible,” he nodded merrily, as I explained how each childhood morning our father ensured that Molly and I supplemented our Rice Krispies with a small orange tablet.

I like Mr Singh. He always smells faintly of sandalwood and tobacco, and smiles when I enter the room. I feel sick now, curled on the sofa, thinking about his reaction to what I've done. I have proved him wrong. Despite my excellent teeth, I am a bad person, after all.

Oh God. Have I just made the biggest mistake of my life? Have I just thrown something away, because of all the pressure I'm feeling, that will turn out to have been the most precious thing I've ever possessed? I imagine myself watching the
Antiques Roadshow
programme my mother loves so much, seeing a middle-aged woman showing the experts her household treasure.

‘Oh my,' the expert would say, looking at the woman's item with brightening eyes. ‘It's a Raj Singh. Very, very rare…'

‘How much is it worth?' the greedy little woman would ask, avariciously.

The expert would take off his glasses, then place them back on the end of his nose once more with an impeccable sense of timing, and declare, solemnly:

‘Well, I'm glad you're sitting down, my dear. Because I have to tell you that your Raj Singh is nothing short of priceless!'

I want to hurt myself. I wonder if I have the courage for self-harm. But I'm afraid of blades and needles and the glowing ends of cigarettes. I want to scream, but I have no voice.

Why did I say those words? Some things are meant to remain locked away, aren't they, spinning through cerebral voids, churning amidst whirlpool dreams and daytime eddies, never to be rescued from the water.

But I've been keeping quiet about so much. It's inevitable something would seep out, break free.

‘I don't love you.'

It started nine months ago. I remember the day, or at least the day I've chosen to represent the beginning, plotting it on the chart in my head. It was getting late and I was waiting, yearning for Raj to come home. Eventually he came in after eleven, only to start his usual thirty-minute diatribe against his boss and general working conditions. The difference, on this night, was that I had my own news – the contract for the Soho bar redevelopment, project leader Gemma Cook, which had been announced that afternoon (I'd been unable to get my husband on the phone to tell him how excited I was). When he'd finished his monologue, I took a deep breath and informed him of my thrill and pride in being awarded my first solo project, to which he'd smiled, said, ‘That's wonderful, darling. Maybe my office could book its Christmas bash there when it's all completed,' before loping upstairs to run himself a bath.

My anger boiled up, steaming spite, but I kept it in, because he'd had a terrible day and I knew he'd continue to have terrible days for the coming weeks and months, and my work was not as important or well paid.

I lay in bed that night, on the edge of the mattress, blood simmering.

Looking back on it, I think this was my fatal mistake.

The small malignant anger from that evening, diminutive, unnoticeable almost, grew (a fury of cells dividing and multiplying), until it had infected both my mind and body. If only I'd cut it out at the outset. Perhaps I could have saved Raj. Perhaps I could have saved myself.

‘You keep things pent-up inside,' my mother told me after my father's death, ‘and they will kill you.'

Outside, a car engine coughs, dies and is resurrected once more. A man shouts. I sneak to the window and glance outside, pulling the wedding present sheets and duvet around me, for warmth and protection.

When we first moved in, I used to love curling up in this old window seat, surreptitiously spying on the comings and goings in the street below. It was a new area of London to me, the notorious East End, which, if I was honest, I found a little intimidating – the many different ethnic faces, the hard skinny teenage boys smoking cigarettes in expensive tracksuits, the old men sitting on park benches sipping cheap beer, the police cars wailing in the distance. My mother, West End woman number one, thought we were mad moving east, but as I watched from my fourth-floor spy hole, I began to realize that this was just like any other part of London, with its proximity of rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, inherited and self-made: the welfare and Range Rover families, the champagne and Special Brew alcoholics, the lonely of every creed and colour.

As I'd sit in the window seat watching the middle-class mummies pushing their prams into the park across the road, I'd imagine Raj returning in the Audi, with two
little girls skipping from the car up to our front door. They would look up, see their mummy in the window, and wave.

I used to imagine.

I glance out of the window but the street is empty, which is perhaps unsurprising considering it's 2.42 a.m. I focus on number 22, two houses along the terrace, with black railings and a newly painted black front door which shines luxuriously in the soft light from the streetlamp. Raj is obsessed with this house, or more accurately with the man who recently moved in there. He's in his forties, thin as a rake, with slicked back dark hair and sunken eyes. He usually appears on the doorstep to greet the postman or early morning couriers in a silk dressing gown and white bare feet. At night there are always people coming to the house – wealthy looking men and women in suits and expensive streetwear. Some drive large SUVs, others gleaming new Minis. What goes on in the house is unclear – maybe he's just a popular man, with plenty of cool, well-heeled friends. After all, this is one of the capital's up-and-coming areas. Yet the blinds always remain down. There's never a chance to peek inside.

‘The layabout,' Raj calls him. I remember how annoyed I was with my husband; he was so judgemental – anyone who's a bit different ends up condemned by the scathing prosecution of Mr Raj Singh LLB. Partly because of Raj's disapproval, I became covertly intrigued by the rakish man in the silk dressing gown. He was different. He did things his own way, following his own inscrutable plans. I admired that. Secretly I hoped he was running some sort of sex club, or upmarket brothel. It excited me to think
that behind that stately door, all sorts of debauchery was being performed.

But tonight, the black front door remains resolutely closed. The street is silent, just a dull hum from traffic in central London where people are still drinking, dancing, fighting, fucking. Here the dark, empty park is still. It begins to rain, streaks of drops like veins down the window pane.

As the minutes become half, then full hours, I try to banish the thought that nags at me like a bluebottle buzz, that I married Raj because Molly made me dump Neil Farrelly.

Neil Farrelly. I still enjoy saying the words, lingering over the syllables. He was studying Veterinary Science at Liverpool, the career he'd dreamed of since his childhood on the family farm in the Scottish borders. We met two months into our first year at university, during rag week, and started a trans-Pennine relationship that seemed to me as exciting and dangerous as
Wuthering Heights
or
Tilly Trotter
. We met up every weekend, enduring train delays and motorway traffic jams to spend thirty-six hours in each other's company. It was exhilarating, to begin with. I craved the weekends like a desperate office worker rather than an indolent student. In the face of derision and gloomy predictions from friends and family, we survived Christmas, then the spring term, Easter and the first few weeks of exam preparation.

Then, one June night, Neil did not return my call and I panicked. It was as if a huge crack had appeared in a newly finished building. He called the next day, apologizing, saying he'd fallen asleep because he was exhausted from
rugby and revising. We agreed not to speak for a couple of weeks, until exams were over.

On the day of my last exam my sister came to stay. While everyone else was celebrating, I sat with Molly in a pub and told her of my concerns and fears for my relationship with Neil. My sister listened carefully before informing me that her one big regret of student life was having continued to date Mike Peters in her first year, travelling between London and Manchester, when she could have had a much more ‘interesting and wild time' being single at UCL.

‘The whole distance thing, Gem, it's just not worth it.'

I came away from this conversation very worried – less about my own need to ‘explore' student life in Sheffield, and more about Neil and what I was doing to him. Men were different, I told myself. Maybe he was just stringing me along, waiting for the right moment to dump me for someone else, just like my sister had done with poor Mike (I recalled his tearful phone messages, his six letters in one week, and his eventual appearance on our doorstep one Friday evening, when Molly hid under my bed and I was instructed to inform her now ex-boyfriend that she'd gone to Dublin for the weekend).

It was a miserable beginning to the summer holidays for me, as I battled in my mind with my insecurities and sense of morality. What was the best thing for Neil? Should I give him his freedom, if he wanted it?

We booked a holiday together to Turkey, backpacking around the southern coast. It started out well; we got drunk, talked about our childhoods, skinny-dipped in the sharp bright waters, had sex on beaches and hill tops. But
as the dog days brought scorching unbearable heat, so I began to notice Neil's increasing irritation with the things I did – the way I ate honey straight from the jar, the way I wanted to swim before breakfast each morning, the way I folded the corners of the pages of my books to mark my place. Each time Neil seemed annoyed with me, I became convinced that I was holding him back.

By the time we returned to England in the middle of August, I had decided on a plan of action. At Heathrow bus station, I informed Neil that I thought we needed a break in our relationship. We should spend some time apart, and if the inclination came, we should see other people. I suggested that he didn't call for the first two weeks of the new term. He was surprised, but didn't I detect a hint of relief in his protestations?

I returned to Sheffield full of fear but with a strong sense that my strategy would work out for the best. Because I didn't think for one moment that Neil would turn his back on me, that he would abandon me. I was convinced that this was simply a small test of his love. It was only a matter of time (days, maybe hours) before he'd call me, breathlessly, and tell me that he didn't want to have a more interesting and exhilarating time with someone else, that there was none other than me, Gemma Cook: I was the one. It was painful, waiting, but it would be worth it – soon I would have final, conclusive proof that Neil didn't feel about me like Molly had about Mike Peters. I would know that he loved me like no other.

After nineteen days of chewing my fingernails to the core, I called him, and asked why he hadn't phoned. He was quiet, evasive and stumbling in his replies. Following
a particularly unpleasant silence, during which I heard music playing in the background which sounded suspiciously like Prince's ‘Kiss', he admitted he'd slept with someone in his first week back, and he thought I was right, maybe we did need to make the most of our short time at university.

I was distraught, and demonstrated so by slamming down the phone. I sought out Ian in tears and asked him what to do. He told me to go straight to Liverpool and talk to Neil. I did, but Neil would not look me in the eye. He informed me that he'd been hurt by my rejection of him, and had slept with the other woman out of spite. But now, having broken the taboo, he'd come to think it would be better to be single for a while, to see what was ‘out there'. I pleaded with him, saying that I hadn't meant it, that it had been a test of his love. He looked at me with his deep blue eyes and replied:

‘I don't want to be with someone who feels she needs to test me.'

It took me the next three years at university to get over Neil. I had sex with only two men during this time, hardly the wild student experience touted by my sister. As the emotional pain grew less I became more convinced that in the future I would need to show unflinching love. That I couldn't afford to waver, even for a moment. When I finally fell in love again, I told myself, it would be for ever.

Who walks a dog at five in the morning?

I watch the figure (old, young, male, female, it's impossible to tell in the big hooded coat) pace along the pavement, the little white terrier shuffling slowly alongside, as sleepy as its owner.

I try to imagine the sort of person who gets up at 5 a.m. to walk a small dog – insomniac, new parent escaping screaming baby, old person? Or woman rapidly approaching thirty who's wrecked her life by telling her handsome but work-obsessed husband that she doesn't love him any more?

The hooded coat and the terrier disappear into the park.

I think about making coffee, but I haven't the energy. I sit in the downstairs window – my new spy-hole, wrapping the cashmere blanket around me, and make a firm decision not to move for several hours.

I am the outsider who gazes out at the world as it turns, never interacting. The crazy old spinster whom children will point to as they hurry past the dark foreboding house that schoolyard whispers say is haunted. But I don't care. Not any more.

I stare into the empty street. The windows of number 22 are dark. I wonder if the hooded coat is in fact the thin man, Raj's layabout, walking his prize terrier before returning to an early morning yoga meditation session. Or
orgy. It comforts me slightly to think that we are the only two people awake. I need to believe that I am not alone.

But the person and the terrier do not reappear.

Ian clunks downstairs at 8.30 a.m. like a one-legged pantomime pirate, carrying Raj's DVD player. He yawns and smiles, weakly. I know he's got up early to be with me. Ian hates the mornings.