I dart into the living room, towards the back door. It’s locked. Shit! Did I lock it again when I came in? Where are my keys? I hear Beth humming to herself, pottering about in the kitchen. I can tell by the opening of the fridge and the slamming of a cupboard door, she’s getting a glass of wine. Shit. She’ll come in here to drink it. I hear the glug sound of the wine pouring, search my jeans pockets. Shit! As I hear Beth’s steps pace across the marble hallway, I do the only thing possible and hide behind the curtains. When Beth ordered them about five years ago, I was horrified by their sheer floor-to-ceiling size and the cost. Cost aside, I’m now grateful for their mass. Racking my brain, I come across an image. My keys. I left them by the bathroom sink while I was handling my toiletries. Shit!
From behind the curtain, after an entire episode of The Apprentice, I pray she’ll get another drink. C’mon, Beth, you always have two, why not tonight? Or have a pee? Your bladder is like a sieve, surely you need a pee? As if on cue, she heads to the kitchen. I listen for the swish of the fridge door opening but hear the sound of the kettle being filled instead. It is quickly followed by the closing click of the cloakroom door.
I race out of the living room and up the stairs. I grab the keys, listen from the top of the stairs and take my chance. I’m in the hallway, just short of the front door, when she emerges. Leaning against the door to the coats cupboard, I catch my breath. She can’t see me from inside. She’d need to actually come out into the hall. Once she settles down to the TV again, I can open the door and slip out quietly. Passing by, she stops and turns the lamps in the hallway on, from a switch just inside. The room is now bright; if she moves just a half metre to her right I am screwed with a capital ‘S’.
She doesn’t. Instead she takes her place on the sofa by the laptop again and drinks her cup of tea. I can tell all of this by sound alone. The irony is, I haven’t seen her. I can’t tell if she looks well, or drawn. I take a deep breath and then I see it, a floodlit message written on the hallway wall in paint:
I am Beth. I am strong. I am middle aged. I like champagne, chocolate, the ocean, lacy stockings, Ikea meatballs, flip-flops, Touche Éclat, music and lyrics. I don’t like politicians, call centres, size zero women, snobs, punk rock, horseradish, dastards and women who sleep with dastards
I can’t help but smile as, without even one item of fresh clothing, I slip silently out through the front door. Horseradish … Who knew?
Her office is cold today. I shiver visibly as soon as I take my seat, rub my hands together. Without moving from her chair, Caroline leans back and tweaks a thermostat on the wall behind her.
We chat a bit about the minutiae of my life and then it’s as if she goes straight for my solar plexus. ‘Tell me about Simon?’ she says. ‘How he died, if you remember how you felt at the time?’
I’m suddenly mute, assaulted by memories of the little boy who was my brother. His dark curly hair, his tiny, ticklish feet, his laugh … I realize I haven’t thought about Simon for a very long time.
‘He was,’ I finally speak, ‘the sweetest child, a cherub, always laughing. He chatted all the time, such a little chatterbox and … he loved me. It was meningitis …’ I hesitate a moment. ‘Meningitis killed him.’
Caroline is listening, not a poised pen in sight. Briefly, I wonder if this is some new tactic of hers.
‘What do you remember of the time around his death?’
I nibble along the width of my top lip. ‘I just remember him being gone. The house emptied. That’s how it felt, like a vacuum. Hollow …’
‘What did your parents tell you?’
‘That he’d been sick, that he’d gone to heaven. My dad described it and it sounded such a beautiful place that I just didn’t understand why we couldn’t all go there. Together …’
I clamp my teeth together, take a deep breath through my nose, and release it slowly through my mouth. ‘I haven’t thought about this for years,’ I confess.
‘It’s painful, obviously; an incredible loss for you at such a young age. For someone you loved, someone who was there for half of your life up to that point, for them just not to be there ever again. It leaves a big hole.’
My eyebrows stretch upwards.
‘And, of course, your parents would have been different afterwards.’
It’s a question without it sounding like one. I nod in silent agreement. I’m not ready to talk about my parents and the almost disintegration of their marriage after Simon died. I didn’t understand it then and don’t really understand it now. Besides, I’m here to discuss the disintegration of my own.
Caroline senses she has almost lost me. ‘Let’s park that for now if you’d prefer?’
‘I’d prefer,’ I tell her, ‘but I’d also rather get it over with. The truth is my parents were in trouble for years afterwards. A couple living together, but mentally apart … I became their everything and I became their nothing.’
Oh shit, her pen is up. It’s like it’s appeared from nowhere and she’s writing. ‘That’s a powerful statement. “Their everything and their nothing”,’ she repeats. ‘Can you elaborate?’
‘I was quiet, thoughtful, pensive – their only surviving child, yet I was nothing like him, a constant reminder of their loss. Simon had filled the house with laughter and joy, and suddenly it was gone. All of it.’
‘Did you feel guilty?’
I sigh. ‘I think, even as a child, I knew how useless that would be, so no … “guilty” isn’t the right word. But I did feel like they’d been short-changed and that I had too. I’d lost my brother and I knew I could never fill that hole.’
‘You had …’ Caroline taps her pad with the nib of her pen. ‘You had been short-changed, all of you …’
We’re both quiet for a minute, then she is first to speak. ‘Do you see any parallels between your own and your parents’ marriage?’
‘Other than the fact that they both hit the skids at some time, no …’
‘Who was it that mentally left your parents’ marriage, if you had to say? After Simon’s death – your mother or your father?’
Really? Sometimes this woman has a talent for making me wince with her jabbing questions. I don’t reply, not out loud at least, now that I can see where she’s going with this particular train of thought. Yes, my father was the bastard. Yes, Adam is the bastard.
I lean forward. ‘How is any of this relevant, Caroline?’
‘Maybe it’s not.’ She shrugs. ‘But it’s probably worth exploring.’
‘Can we park it for another time?’ I use her expression for ignoring it at the moment.
‘Of course,’ she says, making sure that, as she says that, our eyes lock; making sure she lets me know that she knows I’m merely hiding.
Caroline assured me before I left today that most learned behaviours can be unlearned, most bad habits broken. It’s six p.m. and I’ve just drunk a half-litre bottle of sparkling water, brushed my teeth, popped a chewing gum into my mouth – anything to try and convince myself I don’t want crisps. I can unlearn my salt-and-vinegar crisp habit. I do not need crisps. They are wasted calories. My image looks back at me from the mirror in the hallway, the one that’s wall-mounted above the console table. I tilt my head left and right slowly, releasing the creaking tension. ‘What you looking at, bitch?’ I ask my inner saboteur.
‘Not much,’ she replies in