“What the fuck, Oli!” yells Mark.
Oli looks startled. His father doesn’t usually swear at him. “Funny, right?” he says, but there’s no certainty in his voice, or stance, or eyes. Oli seems to understand his mistake now. He turns red and starts to walk hurriedly out of the kitchen.
“No, that’s not bloody funny. Do not show that to your brother, do you understand? Do not show that to anyone. Do you hear me?”
Oli doesn’t reply but Mark hears his bedroom door slam. The rage surges through his body. It has nowhere to go. It isn’t Oli’s fault. Mark shouldn’t have shouted at him. This is all her fault. But she’s not here. Not standing in front of him. That’s the problem.
Mark looks under the kitchen sink and grabs the roll of black bin bags. He bounds up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The house seems to shake. Anger is charging around his body like a highly combustible fuel. He might explode. He opens her wardrobe door and starts to wrench her clothes off their hangers and shove them into the sacks. Dresses, tops, jeans tumble into the bin bags and settle like twisted limbs in a mass grave. The process isn’t fast enough for him—he stops wasting time and throws garments into the sacks with the hangers too. He tries not to remember when he last saw her wearing each piece; he refuses to recall how she filled her clothes, sometimes twirled in front of him, happy with her look, or on other occasions groaned she had nothing to wear. The gap that opens up in the wardrobe is satisfying. He wants rid of her. All traces of her. The sack fills up quickly; he grabs a fresh one. Then a third. Everything must go. He wants to wipe her out. He yanks open the drawers where she keeps her underwear and starts to push her panties, socks, bras into the sacks too. Carefully coiled belts, folded scarves and even makeup are tossed away. These things are part of her sham, part of her deception.
“What are you doing, Dad?” Mark jumps as though he’s been scalded. He turns to see Seb staring at him, wide-eyed, scared.
“Just having a clear-out.”
“Of Mum’s things?”
“Yes. I’m taking them to the charity shop. She doesn’t need them.”
Seb looks like he wants to cry again. “She might need them, when she comes back.”
“She’s not coming back,” says Mark. He turns away from his son, because he can’t bear his expression. The pain he radiates punches Mark over and over again in the stomach, the head. He wishes he’d never brought Leigh into their world. He can’t bear the fact his boys are going to lose two mothers. “There is some ice cream in the fridge. Why don’t you go and get some? I’ll be down in a moment. I’m nearly done here.”
Seb glares at him but leaves the room.
Mark always had more space in his wardrobe and as a consequence she stored her wedding dress there. It is not enough to throw that out, donate it to charity. He snatches at the pretty floaty fabric. It’s easy for him to put his big hands on it and rent it apart. Each tear, rip, slash, slakes his thirst for obliteration. Only when the dress is in tatters does his breathing start to slow. Her clothes are now nothing more than chaotic snarls of junk, trash. It strikes him as funny that something can alter in value so significantly, depending on how you view it. He carries the black sacks downstairs. He is red in the face, his back is clammy, but he feels a bit better. He doesn’t feel so much of a fucking fool.
21
Fiona
“What do you think he’s like?” Mark asks.
“Who?” Fiona is pretty certain she knows exactly who Mark is referring to, but she doesn’t want to make a mistake by bringing his name into this home before Mark does.
“Him, her other husband.” He spits out the word. Fiona reaches for the plastic basket in which laundered—but yet-to-be ironed—clothes lie tangled. Mark had pulled the items from the dryer earlier but hadn’t thought to fold and smooth them—that was the sort of thing that only the person who finds themselves responsible for ironing remembers to do, knowing it makes the job easier in the long run. Fiona does all her own ironing—obviously—and it seems like Leigh does all of the Fletcher family’s. Fiona tips the contents of the basket onto the kitchen counter, that she has just cleared and wiped, and then methodically starts to fold the laundry.
“What does it matter what he’s like?”
“Oh, come on, Fiona.” Mark sighs impatiently. Of course, it is mad of her to pretend it doesn’t matter. Other than where Leigh is right at this moment, the only thing that can matter to Mark is the all-pervasive question: What does the other man have that he doesn’t? What had seduced his wife into becoming not another man’s lover, but another man’s wife? It has to be pretty spectacular to instigate a treachery so complete and absolute. Like anyone who has ever been betrayed, Mark is most likely stuck in that deeply disgusting and disturbing place where he is eaten up with a need to know everything about the other person he has been betrayed for. Yet Fiona knows that every piece of knowledge will whip, sting, inflame his sense of inadequacy, confusion, shame. Mark perhaps even knows as much too but he won’t be able to stop himself forensically googling and trailing all the social media accounts he can track, examining any morsel of information he can glean. What does the other man look like? What does he do with his life? Why did she pick him? It is a dark, destructive compulsion. But then, most compulsions are.
“You know, it’s not like she’s just left me for another man. That sort of jettisoning goes on all the time. That’s commonplace, manageable. What she has blown up is not just what we had, but who we are. My past, the boys’ childhood, it is all annihilated. It never existed.”
It is late, the boys are asleep, or at least in their rooms, faking sleep and playing on their phones. Fiona has spent most of the day at the Fletchers’ but even so she hasn’t been alone with Mark. This morning she went to the supermarket, this afternoon he said he needed to take a walk, to clear his head. She offered to go with him, but he asked if she would stay with the boys. “In case she comes home,” Fiona suggested, trying to keep him hopeful.
“Yeah, right, that,” he muttered. He didn’t seem to believe it was a possibility.
He was gone all afternoon, but Fiona didn’t mind. She hung out with Seb, helped him with his geography homework and then watched banal YouTube videos with him that she had pretended to appreciate, and did in a way because they made him genuinely giggle. Oli had heard them laughing and eventually joined them on the sofa. The three of them sat closer than they might normally. There was something comforting about the tangy smell of Lynx body spray oozing off one boy, and fried food and pop off the other. From time to time, Fiona surreptitiously turned her head to catch the scent of them.
Mark returned just before supper, which Fiona had prepared, and they all ate together. She didn’t ask him what he’d been doing all afternoon. Where he had been. Both boys trudged back to their separate rooms after they’d cleared their plates, conversation exhausted. Being together they felt obligated to appear hopeful. It was wearying.
“I’ll come up and turn your lights out later,” Mark offered. He wanted to tuck them in, maybe kiss their foreheads, like he did when they were younger. Nowadays bedtime was more often about negotiating the relinquishing of phones. Oli didn’t respond at all; Seb shrugged. No one wanted to perform any of the usual bedtime rituals that marked the end of another day when their mum hadn’t come home.