The Child Inside (14 page)

I refocus my eyes; instead of staring out at the dark I stare at the glass of the window now, and at my reflection in it, distorted, unworldly. I see myself as a ghost, captured out of time, just passing through this life. I see myself at sixteen, hungry for life, for newness, believing that the world was out there for me, in all its unknown possibilities.

And here I am now, cooking other people’s meals, tending to other people’s lives.

I turn away from the window and the kitchen crowds in on me.

‘Jono, supper is ready,’ I call down the hall.

I can hear the false, chippy laughter of American TV.

‘Jono.’ My voice is hollow, an echo of itself, a repeat on autodrive. ‘Jono.’

‘I’ll come when this has finished.’

‘Come now, please.’

His spaghetti is in a bowl, waiting for him. His fork is there too, and his spoon. And his orange juice, and a small bunch of grapes, the small, sweet, red seedless ones that he likes. All ready for him, all waiting. I wait. And eventually, when it suits him, he comes. My son, the lord of this house. He sits, he eats. I sit opposite him, I watch him eat. I make conversation. I watch gratefully as each strand of spaghetti disappears inside him, and I ask: how was school, tell me about your day, do you have any homework?

And he reacts as though I am interrogating him.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he complains. ‘Stop going on.’

And I say, ‘Jono, I’m only asking.’

‘Well, don’t,’ he says. ‘You ask me the same things, over and over.’

‘Jono, I’m your mother,’ I reply. ‘I care.’

He frowns at his plate, his cheeks flushed and puffy as a toddler’s. I get up and turn to the sink, and start clearing up.

I see myself inside a vacuum, sucked in until the sides are all gone. I see my face, pulled long, trapped on the same old words. I cannot move, I cannot breathe. I see myself growing old, putting out plate after plate of food for those who grudgingly come to eat it. I hear myself, pleading for a return.
How are you?
I plead, at the door, on the way out, on the way in. At the bottom of the stairs, the top of the stairs, in the morning, again at night, on the phone. Soon, it will always be by phone. My shrunken face, talking into the nothingness:
How are you?

And Jono, wherever he is, however far from me, however longed for, never, not even once, asking me the same thing back.

Andrew is going to be late. He phones me to tell me so.

‘I’ve got to get this report out. I don’t know what time I’ll be home,’ he says in a warning tone, the same sort of tone that a plumber or a builder might use to brace you for a ridiculous quote. He uses this tone because he expects me to object. After all, I would have done once upon a time. Only nowadays I realize that I am just as much on my own when Andrew is in the house as when he is not.

‘Oh’ is all I say.

And then he asks, ‘How’s Jono? How did he get on at school today?’

‘Okay, I presume. He didn’t have a lot to say.’

Now it is Andrew’s turn to say, ‘Oh.’ Then there is a pause, during which I can hear him tapping at a keyboard. ‘Well,’ he goes on, ‘I’d better get on, or I’ll be here all night.’ And then, as if it is an afterthought, he says, ‘And how are you?’

And, as usual, I say, ‘Fine.’

And so there are just Jono and me in the house, but Jono is busy with his homework. I cover Andrew’s supper with a bowl and stick it in the fridge, and then I move about the rooms, picking this up, putting that away. I move slowly; my headache is more or less gone now, but the memory of it hangs there like a threat. And then, faintly within the quiet of the house, I hear the muffled ringing of my phone and my heart jumps. I know it’s Simon. It could one of any number of people, but I know that it’s him. My phone is in my bag still, in the hall. By the time I get to it the ringing has stopped. I dig my phone out and stare at the screen. One missed call, it says, and up flashes the number, a new number. And then the voicemail message pops up. I sit on the bottom of the stairs and my heart is thumping. Jono is just across the hall in the dining room, doing his homework. I press the voicemail answer key and put the phone to my ear.

I hear his voice, familiar now. ‘Rachel,’ he says, ‘hi. It’s Simon.’ He pauses, as if thinking what to say, then, ‘I hope this isn’t an inconvenient time. I just wanted to thank you for seeing me today. I’m sorry I had to rush off like that. It was so good talking to you. I’d really like to see you again.’ There is another pause, and then, ‘I don’t want to put pressure on you of course if you’d rather not . . . but, well, I do hope you will return my call.’

The self-doubt in his voice pulls at my heart. Again I imagine him at Vanessa’s funeral, looking around at all those familiar faces, at all those people who’d piled in and out of his house at the weekends, all of them there except for me. I saw Leanne’s invitation to the funeral; she’d put it on her dressing table, up in her room. The very idea of a funeral invitation seemed strange to me. It was a small, square card with coiled silver lettering, much like you’d get for a wedding invitation or a christening.
A celebration of the life of Vanessa Lydia Reiber
it read, or something like that. I suppose Yolande must have gone through Vanessa’s address book, though surely some of the others would only have heard the arrangements via word of mouth. Not everyone would have got an invitation. I wouldn’t have been the only one who didn’t, and yet why did I act as if I was? Why did it feel as if I was? Leanne and I could have gone together, but she never said anything along the lines of
Are you coming?
Just as afterwards, when she talked about it, she never said that I was missed. No, it was very clear to me that I wasn’t included. I was an outsider. I knew and adored Vanessa, but I was the audience on the other side of the rope, reaching over. I never had the chance to become more than that.

Maybe I should have just gone to the funeral anyway. I wish I had gone now, but I was too hung up on my sense of rejection. And Simon was right, I did just disappear. I thought it was everyone else, but looking back now, I see that it was me.

I sit there at the bottom of the stairs and am flooded with a wave of regret, not just about the funeral, but over the loss of all those friends: Vanessa, Leanne, Tristram, Annabel . . . And for the loss of myself as I was back then; so free and alive under the light of so much fun. It all came to a stop so suddenly. It came to a stop and what did I do? I went to college, to university, I worked hard, I travelled, I married, I had a son . . . I did a lot. But I don’t think I ever really had fun again. Not real, pure fun, like I did back then when I was a teenager, before I became aware of how quickly the good things can be snatched away. I feel as far away from the girl I was then as it is possible to be. I feel the loss, like an imprint inside my bones.

In the dining room Jono slams his books shut and scrapes back his chair. I stand up quickly and, like a guilty child, I hide my phone behind my back. The dining-room door flings open and he almost walks into me. He stops short, as though faced with something unpleasant. I see the shutters come down in his eyes.

But still I force a smile. ‘Finished your homework?’ I ask in my good-mother voice.

‘I’m going on the PlayStation,’ he says by way of an answer and manoeuvres around me, to run off upstairs.

‘Okay,’ I call up after him. ‘Not too long now, though; it’s getting late.’

Then I walk back to the kitchen, taking my phone with me, and close the door. I sit down at the table and store Simon’s number in my phone. And then, before I have time to change my mind, I press the call button. His phone rings for quite a while, for much longer than mine, which switches to voicemail after just seconds, and I sit there with my heart hammering, panicking suddenly. I try to picture him in a home environment, with his wife, with his children. I try, but I can’t.

And then he answers. ‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t want to speak to me.’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I just didn’t get to the phone in time.’

‘It was good to see you today.’

‘It was good to see you too.’

My heart is pounding. I feel like a teenager, stuck suddenly for words.

‘I’m sorry I had to rush off,’ he says. ‘You must think me so rude.’

‘Not at all, really.’

‘I feel very bad for abandoning you like that.’

‘Really, it’s okay.’

There is a pause. In it, I notice the silence of the background at his end, and I wonder where he is. Then, ‘Are you always this forgiving?’ he asks and there is something in his tone, in his choice of words, that disturbs me, but then I remember suddenly that he said the same thing to me once before, or something similar. At one of those parties, at that stage in the night when everyone was drunk and crashing out, he tripped me up. Not deliberately; he was sitting on the floor near the door to the den with his legs stretched out, and as I stepped over him he moved. I tripped, and would have landed on my face, but he sat forward, caught me and steadied me. ‘Forgive me,’ he said dramatically, his voice thick with beer, and when I laughed he leant back again. ‘Of course you will,’ he said. ‘Rachel is always so nice. Rachel is always so forgiving.’

These memories. These abstract little things, forgotten for so long, spinning back now to life.

‘Rachel,’ he says now, ‘can I see you again? Soon? I’ve got a case on this week, but Monday maybe, or Tuesday? We could meet after work perhaps; would that be possible?’ He talks fast, nervous now. ‘I feel so bad that we couldn’t talk longer at lunchtime. And . . . I really do want to talk to you, Rachel.’

I sit there at the table in the oppressive silence of my kitchen, and my heart slows to a hard, dangerous thump. ‘Tuesday should be okay,’ I say.

And he says, as though he really means it, ‘Thank you, Rachel. Thank you.’

When we hang up, I go straight upstairs, switch on the computer and look up Kingham. And I see it there, with all its tourist-board photos.
An idyllic village in the heart of Oxfordshire.
There are photos of the pub and the village green, and an abundance of Cotswold-stone houses, complete with rose-filled walled gardens and golden thatched roofs.

This is where Simon lives, with his wife, and his daughter called Charlotte, and his two nameless sons. Which is his house? I feel I am looking at it on the screen, I feel it is one of these buildings. I feel it must be. I stare all the harder. In some pictures there are people, and so I search for him. I find a photo from a couple of years ago of a village fair. He’s there, I know he is. I stare and I search. It’s a hell of a commute to London. At least an hour and a half to Paddington, and then on from there by Tube. So two hours, I reckon, at least, door to door. And another two hours back home again, to his wife, his daughter and his sons and their rose-covered cottage in their idyllic Cotswold village.

There is even a residents’ notice board. I scrutinize the messages. Some dispute over parking around the pub, another over the removal of a bench on the green. There is a fete planned in May, with an invitation for children to come forward for the parade. I see messages posted by Harriet, Louisa, Clare and Jane. Which one of these is his wife? Which one? I look up everything I can about this place, which I had never heard of until now. I look it up on Google maps. I trace the route by road to London, to Kew, to Surbiton.

I stare and I search until my eyes burn. And then the voice of reason snaps into my consciousness:
What am I doing?
I shut down the computer. I turn away from the screen and look at the window, at the black of the night and the rain still beading against the glass. From the spare room I can hear the fuzzy roar and blast of a million aliens exploding at will on the PlayStation, long after he should be in bed. I wonder if Andrew is sitting at his desk still, with his tie loosened and his jacket slung over the back of his chair, frowning over the importance of random, faceless numbers. Or will he be making his way home now, standing on the platform at Guildford station, sheltering from the rain? I picture him, huddled under his umbrella, wrapped up in his silence. And I picture him bringing that silence home.

Inside my heart is a dark and secret place. I close my eyes and imagine myself trapped within a vast cave, and in that cave there is a deep and still lagoon. I pick up a pebble, I throw it, and I watch it disappear. I watch as the black surface of the lagoon ripples open and then closes again. I see myself, standing at the edge, ready to dive.

On Saturday I take Jono to Oliver’s house. He’s been invited for a sleepover, and I drop him off there, mid-afternoon. Jono is anxious, I can tell, and it strikes me that there is something wrong about being nervous to see your friends. It’s as if he’s stressed at having to perform and is worried that he’ll get it wrong somehow. He’d never admit anything like this to me, but that is the impression I get, and it seems to me to be very sad. I think back, and wonder: was I ever like that as a child? And the answer is: no, I’m sure I wasn’t, not at that age.

Now maybe. But now things are different, every social interaction a weighing-up and a judgement, a laying-out of assets to be displayed. I have a handful of real, close friends who I have known forever, but they live in Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire, and Bath now. I hardly ever see them. We speak on the phone. We meet now and again, and I love them as I have always loved them.