Oli didn’t know what to do with the information. He got up every day and wondered, is this the day she tells Dad and leaves us? He didn’t want it to be. Yet he did. It made him nervous, angry. He watched her to see if there were any signs that she was more or less happy than usual. There were none. She was just the same as ever. Just as reliable. Just as interested in his friends, school and football, just as uninterested in his Insta, his obsession with trainers. She didn’t change and that should have reassured him, but it didn’t, it worried him. He started to wish she would act differently, say something. Rowing or crying or something, maybe even leaving, would be better because her not changing meant this was her norm, and he began to wonder just how long it had been going on.
He couldn’t look at her in the same way. He hated being alone with her. He backed off and that was desperate because it just made her try harder with him. She cooked his favorite meals, turned up to every match every weekend, she was constantly asking, “You okay, Oli? Anything worrying you?” What was he supposed to say to that? He felt embarrassed that he knew this weirdly intimate thing about her. It made him feel mad, alone, cheated, and he didn’t know what to do with those feelings. He started calling her Leigh. He didn’t want her to be his mother anymore. She had poisoned his home. His life.
She was so smug. Going about her life as usual. Tricking them all into thinking she was a nice person. That she loved them. He wanted to spoil things for her. He wanted her to taste some of her own poison.
23
Kylie
Wednesday 18th March
The room stinks. I stink.
Here’s the thing. I have been a better wife to both of them because I have two husbands.
Or is that just what I’ve always told myself?
When I was a child, it was always clear when my father was seeing other women. Unlike some sorry-assed adulterers he did not try to smother his culpability with compensatory acts of sorrow or regret; he did not buy my mother guilt flowers. He did not recognize his own fault and responsibility. Far from it. Instead he blamed my mother for not being enough for him. He punished her for making him stray. My father did not like to see himself as a bad person, an adulterer. He reasoned that she made him behave worse—be worse than he wanted to be—because he was somehow, on some level, forced into adultery because of her failings. Madness, I know. But his own particular brand of madness and we all have one.
Guilt and unacknowledged self-loathing meant he itched for opportunities to blame her, to find her lacking so that he didn’t have to blame himself. A poorly ironed shirt, a tea bag left in the kitchen sink, a differing opinion on a TV show could lead to a humdinger, knockout, nasty knuckleduster of a row. A fight. He never physically hurt her—he didn’t have to—his words wounded. Mortally. He would accuse my mother of being cloying and beneath him. This confused me later, after he told me there are women you marry and women you fuck. My paraphrasing. He said there are women who are something, others who are nothing. But in that case, what was my mother after he stopped being married to her? An ex-something? Was Ellie really the only something?
It didn’t matter what he said to Mum, how much he insulted her, blamed her, ignored her, he couldn’t make himself feel better—he could only make her feel worse, which was what he was running from in the first place; hurt feelings.
My mother was strongly disinclined to fight back. She often said, “Hush now, Hugh, you don’t mean that. Stop saying things you’ll regret.” But he would rail anyway, yell, blister, bark, squall for hours. Eventually, she learned not to fuel his fire with platitudes which he thought were cowardly, and over time she resorted to silence or tears. It was cruel. Hard to watch.
I would not be like him. I refused to be. That much I have always been sure of. I know what the universal opinion is of people who have affairs. They are unilaterally dismissed as bad, undisciplined, selfish. I love both men and I have always been good to both men. I married them to be something better than a common adulterer. People who have affairs always think they are so special, so groundbreaking and different, but they are not. They are ordinary, predictable, boring.
At least I am not that.
I would not have a constant seesaw of affection. Favoring one man because he was the first, the next because he was a novelty. There was no hierarchy. No other man. Not that such a concept exists for their gender. We hear of the other woman, not the other man. No one thinks a man can be anything other than center stage. He is never just a bit on the side. He is never called a homewrecker. But there are names, humiliating tags that I would not permit. I would not have a cuckold and a lover, both labels marred with preconceptions. One pitiful, the other unstable. And I would not blame Mark for not being enough, Daan for being too much.
It is not much of a defense, I know, but I did at least take onus. I owned the guilt and grief; I absorbed it all. I rarely row with either man. In fact, things that Mark and I might have usually argued about, had indeed previously and reasonably bickered about—like whose turn was it to go to the supermarket or where we were going to go on holiday—I have let go since I married Daan. I smile. I brush it aside. I let him have his way. I always go to the supermarket. He always chooses our holiday destinations.
The stench of my waste lingers in the air. I can’t get used to it. I can’t ignore it. I’m so hungry again.
“Please, this is enough now,” I wail out loud.
I am a better wife to Mark because I am married to Daan.
I am a better mother too. More patient, more fun, more alive. I am better because there was an excess of energy, garnered from my other life. I never mummy slump. When out for a family walk, I don’t leave them to trail, heavy-footed behind Mark and me, heads bent over phones or earbuds in, trapping them in a world I can’t access. Instead I walk alongside them, sometimes I hop or jump, behave childishly. Which they enjoy. It diminishes the difference between us, moves me closer to them. I set challenges. “Race you to that tree.” “Race you up that tree.” I build camps in the woods with them. At home I play FIFA on Xbox with Seb and Warzone with Oli, I talk to them about more than schoolwork. Our conversations flit from rappers to YouTubers to haircuts, friendships, girls, travel, sport. My absences from my boys are inexcusable. I know it. Possibly inexplicable. But when I am with them, I am at least 100 percent with them. I do not spend my time nose buried in my phone or out on long, private runs. All parents have outlets. Everyone needs an escape.
I have never confided the particulars of my situation to anyone. How could I? But if I had, they would have asked, “Why not just leave Mark? Why not just divorce?” There are myriad answers to those questions. I still love Mark. I thought that would change but it didn’t. I trust Mark. I have a life and a home with Mark. The boys. I don’t always trust Daan. I can’t have children with Daan. Or anyone. I owe Mark. I am indebted to him for giving me his sons, children I’d never have any other way. I couldn’t bear to hurt Mark. Daan doesn’t need me as much as Mark does. Mark doesn’t want me as much as Daan does. The reasons collide, mesh, mash. They never stop flooding my brain. There is one reason.
The boys.
I’ve loved them with every fiber of my soul since the moment I clapped eyes on them. They fill me up with so much love and meaning that there are times when I’ve thought I might explode with the joy of being their mother. And I fill them too. They need my love—they need me. I know that it was part of my appeal to Mark that I loved them so entirely. He wanted a lover, maybe even a wife, but he needed a mother for the boys. Someone to unfurl his boys. I put my cool hand on the heat of their grief and drew it away, soothed. What you need and what you want being perfectly aligned is a rare and wonderful thing. Mark grabbed it with both hands. The boys blossomed under my care. When I married Mark, I officially adopted them.