It Could Have Been Her(62)

Nothing’s wrong with you, is what I want to say. You are just trying to stop me taking my daughter out for dinner tonight, but that is not going to happen. Not even if your eyes fell out of their sockets and your feet exploded into mincemeat. Nothing will keep me from seeing my girl.

“It’s probably just a killer hangover,” I say. “You know how that happens sometimes? Especially to women?”

“It’s not a fucking hangover, Stuart! I’m really ill! My God, I just told you, I think I’m dying!”

“Well, then,” I say. “Shall I call for an ambulance? Or I could take you to the hospital, but you’d have to wait until I’ve seen Daisy off for school.”

I know that she won’t want to take up either of these options. She is terrified of medical experts, of their questions, of the lies she would have to tell them about the way she lives her life.

“No,” she says. “No. I just need you to stay with me. Look after me.”

I sigh and run my hands down my face. “I will be here all day, Jess. I will take care of you all day, I promise.”

“And what about tonight?”

“Tonight,” I explain softly, “your mum will be here. She can call me if you get worse. I’ll come straight back. OK?”

“No,” she gasps. “No. She won’t know what to do. She’s hopeless. She’ll just pretend she didn’t hear me, you know what she’s like. She’s selfish, Stuart. She’s not like you.”

I sigh again. It’s ten past seven and I need to wake Daisy up. “Listen,” I say, putting my hand on her knee and then pulling back the covers. “We’ll talk about this later. I need to take care of Daisy now. I’ll come back and check on you in a minute, OK? I’ll bring you some tea and toast.”

“I don’t want toast. I’m too sick to eat.”

I nod sympathetically. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

In the kitchen my heart feels heavy. I knew this was going to happen, yet that still hasn’t prepared me sufficiently for how helpless I feel about it. The whole day hangs over me now, the endless ticking minutes of it taking me to the point in the day when this is all going to explode and erupt into a magma-hot mess of screaming and tears and physical violence and I can’t bear it. I just can’t bear it. But for now, I have a packed lunch to make, a kettle to boil, a child to send to school in the most functional way I possibly can.



* * *



Daisy looks up at me from the kitchen table, where she is putting on the makeup she is not supposed to wear to school. “Is she pretending to be ill?” she asks.

“Well, yeah,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know, maybe she is ill. But either way, the timing is a bit…”

“Suspect?”

I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe a bit.”

I don’t want this house turned into a battlefield with teams and sides, I don’t want Daisy to hate her mum. But equally I have to acknowledge that Daisy’s not a little kid anymore, that she is perceptive and bright and entitled to her viewpoint. “Can I make a suggestion?” she says.

I look at her and nod.

“Go out now. Seriously. Don’t go back to her. Put your phone on silent. Leave the house. Don’t let her get into your head today.”

She’s right. I know she’s right. But I also know I won’t do it. “I can’t,” I say, “I have to walk the dog.”

“Walk him now. Then bring him back. Don’t take your phone. Don’t talk to anyone.”

I nod. I mean, I guess I could do that. I could swing by the old squat, see my old friends, then I could go into town early, buy something nice for Blaise. Just take a whole day off, from this place, from that woman, from the life into which I’ve found myself subsumed.

I hand Daisy her packed lunch. I make it for her every day even though she rarely eats it; there’s always chicken nuggets after school, or a tube of Pringles. She takes it from me and says, “Walk me to the station? With Hugo?”

“I was…” I glance up at the ceiling. “I said I’d be up in a minute, with her tea.”

“She never even drinks the fucking tea. Just leave her.”

My heart races with anxiety at the thought, but I know that the minute Daisy goes, I’ll surrender, submit, I’ll take her her tea, I’ll be pulled back in, and all I want today, all I want in the whole world, is to have a nice dinner with Blaise. I nod.

“OK, yeah,” I say. “Let me just get my jacket. You get the dog.”

I leave a note for Jessamine when I return to drop Hugo home.

“I’m heading out for the day. See you tonight.”

And then I go.



* * *



It’s like a dull metallic ringing sound all day in the back of my head, the reality of what I have done. My phone is on silent, but I keep imagining it to buzz or trill. I have to resist the urge to pull it out of my pocket and look at it. I head over to the squat and have a cup of coffee with Drew and his current girlfriend. I feel the rawest ache of nostalgia as I look around the once familiar kitchen, feel the echoes of the happy times I spent here, see the shadows of the person I was when I lived here, a person who had options, who laughed, who sang. I was the freest person I knew. I mean, I used to pity my brother for having to go to work every day and go home to the same house and see the same people. I thought that was a prison. And now, God, I would give anything for that benign imprisonment. Absolutely anything.