‘Ten ninety-nine?’ Tom takes a swig of his beer, incredulity written in the lines above the bridge of his nose. She follows his gaze to the bottle she is clutching by the neck and for a moment she feels herself on the cusp of laughter that will mutate into sobs if she is not careful. Screams that will reverberate through the house where their children sleep.
How the hell are they talking about the price of a bottle of wine? But he has no reason to suspect this is anything but an ordinary evening, the end of a day just like any other.
‘How was work?’ he asks as she takes a seat beside him on one of the worn garden chairs. It shifts precariously on cracked paving, the same shoddy stones that have been there since her father first bought the place, more than two decades ago. The memory of those days, however complicated they might have seemed at the time, soothes her briefly.
‘Work?’ she repeats, buying herself time, wondering if Tom notices her bristle as she pictures her desk; the job she fought tooth and nail to get and then to keep.
Before she can answer, he continues, uncharacteristically forthright. ‘I’m worried about you, Gabs. This case. Ever since you came back from Moscow …’
‘Jesus, Tom, it’s not supposed to be easy,’ she snaps, immediately holding out her hands by way of apology. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just tired.’
It is true, she thinks: I am so tired. It is not the whole truth but what more can she tell him? She is bound to secrecy, her lips have been sewn shut. As he watches her from across the lopsided plastic table, she registers the sound of a car moving too fast on the street outside. She imagines the needle pushing through the skin at the edges of her mouth. Instantly, she is transported to the bedroom upstairs, just a few weeks after she and her father had moved in. She and her best friend Saoirse in matching crop-tops, kneeling on the floor, her head level with the mattress, her earlobe flat against the CD case, which Saoirse has placed on the bed.
‘You’ve burnt the needle properly, right?’
‘Obviously,’ Saoirse says as she clamps Gabriela’s shoulder with one hand and with the other removes the ice cube she has been holding against her skin. Cold water trickles down Gabriela’s neck. As her friend breathes in sharply, Gabriela feels the remaining ice slide to the floor, Saoirse holding her shoulder a little too tight as she pushes the pin through the soft nub of flesh.
More than twenty years later, she touches her earlobe. The memory of her own cries of pain, tinged with defiant euphoria, ricochets around her head as she looks up to the window of that same room, where now stands the goose-shaped lamp that keeps guard on Callum’s windowsill. The lamp which, now that he is five years old, her son claims to have outgrown, though he never pushes the point. Secretly, she knows he is no more keen to grow up than she is to lose him to the girls and then the women or the men who will inevitably step in to claim him. The hands that would have taken him from her even if she hadn’t already made it possible for them to be torn apart.
Sadie is in the kitchen, already dressed in school uniform, fastening the clips on the violin she chose for her most recent birthday, when Gabriela heads downstairs the following morning. Seven years old: how the hell did that happen? Briefly, she wonders what the fall-out will be for Sadie, after all this. Will it send her over the edge? But there is no point trying to second-guess her daughter, whose emotions are always more nuanced, less discernible than her own at the same age. There is an air of pointedness about Sadie’s refusal to cause trouble for them in the way that Gabriela is prepared for that she finds unsettling. No, she reprimands herself, her fists tightening – it is not Sadie whose behaviour she needs fear.
‘Mum, have you seen my sheet music?’
As her daughter speaks, Gabriela’s eye catches the wine glasses from the night before, which stand marooned on the table where she is packing her school bag.
‘This what you’re looking for?’ Tom squeezes past cradling a cup and drops the pristinely kept wad of paper onto her school bag, winking at her as he settles on one of the chairs squeezed up against the kitchen table.
‘Made you a tea,’ he says and Gabriela fixes her jaw into a smile, moving forward to clear away the cereal bowls that will otherwise languish until she comes home, and then she stops. I will not be coming home. She hears the words as a whisper between her temples. There is a brief moment when she is struck by the enormity of it, but then she sees her son walking into the room and instantly everything is as it was. Once again she is Sadie and Callum’s mother and she is preparing for a normal day at the office, for a job that Tom watches her forfeit so much of their life together, without ever making her explain why. The job in which he has watched her rise through the ranks while he takes bit parts as a freelance architect, picking up the pieces without so much as a suppressed sigh.
‘Want me to walk you in?’ he asks Sadie, leaning back in his chair, rustling open yesterday’s copy of the Guardian. Sadie throws him the same look she has been giving him since she was a toddler – something between despair and total adoration. For the past few weeks, Tom has let her make the short journey alone and Gabriela can’t tell him why it makes her so uncomfortable, their child being so far out of their reach.
Enjoying the familiarity of the rapport between himself and Sadie, the reversal of the traditional parent/child roles, he shrugs, widening his eyes as if to say, What? We don’t have to leave for five minutes.
‘Leave the girl alone,’ Gabriela plays along, batting his feet off the table as she passes, sweeping up the trail of cups and bowls and opening the dishwasher.
‘I’ll do that,’ he calls over from his seat, without moving.
Ignoring him, she stacks the crockery in a neat row.
‘Are you out tonight or in?’
‘Jesus, Tom …’
‘I know, I know, I’m messing with you! I hadn’t forgotten. It’s on the calendar, right there, where it always is. So you’ll be back on Thursday?’
‘That’s right.’ She swallows, keeping her eyes trained on the dirty cutlery she is placing in the stand.
‘You’re going away again?’ It is Callum’s voice this time, and her heart strains so that it feels like it might tear.
‘Oi, what’s so bad about hanging out with your old dad? Come on, love, Mum’s got to work, you know that.’
It’s always Tom’s instinct to dive in to protect her from the decisions she has made, and his refusal to let her defend herself grates on her.
‘I’ll make it up to you,’ she says, the lie lingering in her throat. ‘I promise.’
As she opens the front door, she watches Sadie disappear around the corner of their street. Part of her wants to run after her daughter, to throw her to the ground and to hold them both there – to stop time, her face buried in Sadie’s neck, and somehow to go back and unravel the knot. Not back, she scolds herself as she loses sight of her daughter, for the last time on this street. How could she think that?
The walk to Tufnell Park tube station helps clear her head, gently easing her mindset from the domestic world to her other life. The trees lining Dartmouth Park Hill radiate new energy, their shoots a reminder that whatever happens, the world will go on.
Preparing to cross at the traffic lights, she starts to think through everything she has to do, and only now does it strike her that she has failed to buy credit ahead of time for the second SIM card she keeps tucked in the lining of her handbag. She swears under her breath as the green man fades to red, cursing herself for allowing such a pivotal element to fall through the net. But it’s pointless berating herself for it now – it is not an option, at this stage, to let things fall apart.
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