She pressed the TALK key.
At once her sister’s tone, accelerated but contained, suggested she could somehow take control of this situation and fix it up nicely. She could see her three thousand miles away, drooly fat infant slumped across one shoulder, the phone wedged between the other and her ear, her blue eyes shining with the ecstatic confirmation of someone else’s pain.
She said, “I can’t understand how he could do that to someone.”
The beast Despair prowled behind the chemical stockade her two Xanax had erected. Liz’s real self could see it perfectly well in the distance, waiting for the barriers to come down, waiting to enter Lizville, ransack it, raze it to the ground.
Liz replied and Alison said, “I mean do it to you, obviously. I don’t understand how anyone could do that to another person.”
An inability to comprehend the bloody obvious—Alison often expressed this to Liz. Was it real or an act? It was the easiest thing in the world to understand how someone might have sex with someone else. It was the easiest thing because it was pretty much the only thing, the one reliable force in the world, universal human gravitation. Every scandal was confirmation of it. It made everyone act crazy, risk their jobs and lives and families … Oh, someone might pretend—or really have—an interest in, say, sailing or the opera or growing cabbages. But there, beneath it all, was the thing happening, every fleshy particle in the universe attracting every other one … Now and at all times, nearby, very close, people were being pulled towards each other. Bodies tending towards other bodies. Someone was entering, someone was getting entered. Liz loved and hated the sex hum of cities, manifested in a million tiny glances and gestures, in its streets, its cafés, its libraries. It kept everything electric. Alison, mother of two, had had sex presumably at least twice, though she always spoke of it as something distant or alien or beyond her. Or at least she always did to Liz. And now, as Liz, against her better judgment, tried to sketch the details—replacing Alison’s assumed gender pronoun with the correct one—she found herself cut off midsentence, like a student who has given the wrong answer.
“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear all that. Bad enough he was ten years younger. And gay, as it turns out. Okay, whatever. Bi,” said Alison over her sister’s barks of protest. “Nine years younger. You want to split hairs? Sometimes I think you want to be unhappy.”
There it came. The great expected wash of tiredness ran across her. She leaned forward and rested her head against the cool leather of the seat in front. Her body relaxed into sadness and she swallowed hard. She wasn’t going to start crying again. She leaned down and tickled Atty’s head as Alison continued, warming to the theme of Liz’s general fecklessness:
“You haven’t seen Izzy in what? Nine months? Ach, you won’t believe the change in her. She’s up to my chest now. She was just moved up in her reading group. And sure Michael was tiny. Oh, we’re so excited. Izzy hasn’t talked of anything else all week. And there’s Stephen! You’ll get to meet Stephen!”
Two hours later and they were up, away, climbing. The lights in the cabin dimmed and she put the bag on her knees and covered both it and herself with the staticky polyester blanket. Atty popped her head up and panted and panted and finally calmed down, as Liz let her rest her muzzle in her hand. The Ambien that Yahoo Answers had advised her to give the dog kicked in, and Atty fell deeply asleep for the entire flight while Liz periodically worried that she’d killed her. She marked her student essays on mate choice and marriage finance with mostly random tics all the way through their two double-spaced pages, and wrote “Excellent!” at the end.
Goodbye Shirlita Goddard, she thought, and your repellent staccato laugh.
Goodbye Hector Martinez and your outsized silly quiff.
Goodbye Steve. Steve Something. Yellow polo shirt, psoriasis.
Repeatedly she slid her hand into the bag and placed her fingertips on the dog’s chest and felt the little reassuring tom-tom of its effort.
When you found yourself hissing at your baby to shut up, to please for God’s sake just shut up for a bit, it was important to set said baby down delicately in his cot and leave the room. That was Rule Number One in Alison’s Big Book of Parenting. It was true that nothing gave her more joy than to look in Michael’s huge cornflower-blue eyes, which even now at 3 a.m.—especially now—radiated curiosity and attention, and to stroke his smooth fat cheeks, and feel his whole life force settle itself as she held him to her and pressed his small hard skull against her chest. But who wants to feel joy at this time of night? She wanted to feel sleep, to feel nothing, to be unconscious for eight or nine blissful hours. She had left him to cry for twenty-three minutes and then given in and got up again. Exactly the opposite of what you’re meant to do. Maybe if she’d waited twenty-four minutes he might have stopped. This was the infinite puzzle of parenting: You never could know for sure what might have been avoided, what inevitable. The crying wasn’t even the worst of it; he interspersed that with a kind of porcine grunting that intensified and lessened and intensified again, as if he were working out with tiny baby dumbbells.
Rule Number Two: Carry concealer. Apply it each morning in natural light to the deep shadow rings under your eyes.
Number Three. What would number three be? Not to run out of Baileys Irish Cream.
Number Four was not to feel guilty about feeding your baby formula or rusks, or your toddler fish fingers or an Easter egg, or letting them watch telly or do any of the necessary activities that other parents—other mothers—tried to make you feel guilty about. The one-upmanship of the whole thing had to be ignored.
Rule Five was to make yourself laugh madly when one of your wee bairns boked on your black party dress just before you left the house for your bimonthly night out, or when one of them wet the bed, or when Izzy tugged the eight-inch purple vibrator the girls had given you on your hen night out from under the bed and started smacking it against her cheek.
Maybe you made rules in your head because there was no other way to feel in control. You had to keep churning the events of your life and try to skim some sense from them. It all slipped through your fingers otherwise. And what was “it”? Time. Children ate time. Before, days moved at a walking pace, routine and predictable. You could liken time to some natural state or process, a backdrop to events, not an event in itself. But once Isobel came, and now Michael, time itself changed. The minutes hardened into objects that could be counted and traded like money, and she always came up short.
At Izzy’s birthday party last week in the café at the leisure center, as she was planting the four pink candles in the cake shaped like a football, which was the only children’s cake left in Tesco’s and would just have to do, it struck Alison that she was going to be sticking candles in cakes every year for at least the next eighteen, which would take her up to the age of fifty, and the conclusion made her sit back for a second on the edge of a radiator. Judith was slicing open a packet of paper plates with a pearlescent fingernail and Alison had managed to turn to her and say, “Can you believe that Izzy’s four?”
“It just gets quicker and quicker,” her mum had replied, smiling her wisest, most insufferable smile.
Michael’s breathing regulated and Alison inched forward