The One Day You Were My Husband (16)

Robin’s shouting now too, even though we made a pact not to shout at our kids, and Maeve, whose tolerance for being told off is poor after a lifetime of Maeve, stop that!, begins to turn. She’s a highly explosive device once that defensiveness is triggered.

“Just going to do some bouncing,” she says airily, pinging up and down around Raffy’s cushions, but her lovely little face has gone red now.

Raffy, crying, tries to escape but she’s bouncing all around him, so he starts screaming. Robin gets up and moves Maeve from Raffy’s space, but he manages to dump her on the coffee table, which knocks my cooling tea over.

It spills in all directions, dripping down onto the rug Robin told me I shouldn’t buy. The kids will ruin it. Wait a couple more years before you buy nice things like that. I run out to the kitchen to get a tea towel but they’re all wet because Maeve tried to fill her own cup with milk at dinner time and poured half a liter of it all over the floor. In her shame she went through every single tea towel we own to prove that she was more than capable of clearing up her own mess.

Instead, I get a dirty school jumper out of the laundry basket by the kitchen door and race back to the sitting room. Raffy and Maeve are yelling at each other, and Robin is making everything ten times worse by shouting at them himself.

I move Raffy out of the way so I can try to soak up as much tea as possible, but I move him clumsily and he ends up knocking the empty tea cup sideways and onto the flagstone floor on the other side of the rug, where it shatters.

Raffy goes around to look at the broken teacup, with the fascination all children have for sharp and dangerous things, and I yell at him to stop. Maeve is still yelling, as am I, and Robin is suddenly fucking nowhere to be seen, and my rug is clearly stained, and it’s too big to put in the washing machine, and that’s money literally down the drain, and Raffy manages to step on a piece of broken cup even though I told him to stay away, and he starts crying again. I am nearly crying, too, as I pull the shard of cup out of my child’s foot and try to blot tea and blood from my rug while holding his foot with a paper towel, because this is not a disaster at all, this is daily life. This kind of thing happens every single fucking day, and I haven’t had a break from it for years. Not one night, nothing.

“Let me sort this out,” Robin says. He’s just arrived back with the mop and bucket, which makes me even more angry because a mop and bucket is of no use whatsoever for a stained rug and a child with a bleeding foot.

“Can you take them to bed,” I ask. “I’m…I just can’t.”

To his credit, he takes them away without a word, even though I’m sure he’d much rather do whatever it is he was planning to do with the mop and bucket.

I clear up as best I can, which takes a while, then go up to the kids’ room. Robin is reading to them. I give everyone a kiss, manage to say nothing when Raffy tells me it’s my fault he’s got a cut foot, and come back downstairs to load the dishwasher. But then I detour to the sitting room, because I really need a rest first. I take off my shoes and climb onto the sofa, only to impale my heel on a giant shard of teacup that one of the kids must have picked up and left there.

Blood runs quickly from the wound, too quickly for the remaining clean corner of Maeve’s dirty school jumper, and I bleed all over the hallway rug as I limp out to the downstairs loo for the first aid kit.

But of course the first aid kit is missing, because Maeve has probably found it and taken it off somewhere to disembowel, and I end up having to secure a sanitary towel to my sole with parcel tape that will rip all the hairs from my foot when I have to remove it.

I go to the fridge for wine, but Robin must have finished it at dinner, so—unusually for me, but with great speed and ferocity—I end up eating most of a box of cheap chocolates left by our most recent Pig Shed guests.

Sick and bloated, my stomach unused to being full, I sit at the kitchen table and check the emails from Roof to see if there’s a delegate list for the conference. There is, of course, because the organizers are organized. Why didn’t I think of this before? I read the entire delegate list and then enter Johan’s name as a search term, but he’s not on it. Registration closed two weeks ago. He’s not coming.

Within minutes, I’m rebooking my flights, insurance, the same hotel Robin booked for me before. I even go as far as booking parking at Heathrow. And then I sit, quietly, eyes shut. Just breathing in and out.

I’m going to Stockholm.

I find my mother disappointing on many levels, but I’ve never felt the rage Maya’s still working through about Mum prioritizing her career over her children. To me, our mother is courageous, a testament to the human capacity to force change. She loved her children but she needed, on a very foundational level, to do other things, too.

And I’ve come to understand that need very well in recent months. I need to go on this trip.

I reconfirm with Yanika’s secretary and write a quick note to Yanika saying I’m very much on for the placement, I just had a logistical issue that I’ve now ironed out.

I’m going to Sweden. To hell with Johan.





Six.


London, January 2010



I met Johan on an iron-cold day in January, the city around me braced under an empty sky. Back then, young and resilient, I used to leave forty minutes early so I could walk to the hospital from London Bridge. I remember a short, blazing sunrise as I crossed the Thames, orange ripening to pink in minutes, then thin blue. But by the time I reached the Tower of London grayness had already sunk, plague-like, and the sky remained vacant and freezing for the rest of the day.