Fly in the Ointment (2 page)

‘
If
I'm so sure? Aren't
you
? After all, it was your wedding day as well as mine.'

He shrugged. ‘All water under the bridge now, though, isn't it? So what's the point of going on about it?'

I do believe that was the closest I ever came to hitting Stuart. I do remember thinking, ‘One battle at a time,' and as good as dismissing him. I slid my hand over my churning baby. What if I lost this one too, and purely out of temper? I forced myself to wait till I was firmly back under control. Then I picked up the phone and rang my father's number, as I knew he had known I would.

I stuck right in. Without a word of greeting, I challenged him. ‘In the paper it said Mum died “after a brave fight”. Does that mean she had cancer?'

‘Oh, hello Lois.' He sounded almost smug. ‘Yes. That's right. It started in her stomach a year ago last Christmas, and ended up all over.'

I tried to stick to a tone of icy control. ‘And why wasn't I told?'

His answer astonished me. ‘Well, Lois, that's the way your mother wanted it.'

‘She
told
you not to tell me?'

‘That's right.'

I must have sounded like a howling eight-year-old. ‘But
why
?'

I'll swear the smug tinge to his tone deepened to one of pleasure. Clearly this was the moment the two of them had been waiting for through all those hospital appointments and blood tests, recurrences and relapses, and the last slide downhill. I'm sure that, after Mum's death, my father even thought it was a real pity his sick wife couldn't have defied the natural order of things sufficiently to relish the moment properly along with him.

‘What your mother actually said, Lois, was that she didn't think that you'd be interested.'

‘
What?
'

‘Be fair. You hadn't bothered with us from the day you married. No calls. No visits. You couldn't have made it clearer that, now you'd got Stuart, the two of us were just a couple of cast-offs. And so your mother—'

I'm sure he might have carried on for hours, spinning the story his way. But I'd put down the phone.

Stuart was back in the room and looking at me. ‘See, Lois? I
told
you that there was no point.'

And, try as I might, I could not fail to recognize the exact same hatefully smug tone of voice I'd just been hearing from my father.

IS THAT THE
moment when my heart iced over? I was still far too young to realize the truth – that more people than you'd think walk round with no real care or concern for anyone else on earth. If I'd known that, I could have saved myself by feeling pity for whatever it was that tipped all three of them – my father, my mother and even my own ill-chosen husband – out in the world with such ungenerous souls. I could have felt compassion for what was missing in them, and simply gone upstairs and packed my bags. I could have found some drab flat I could just about afford, and raised my child alone, blaming the three of them for the fact that I had to see the poor mite off each morning to a series of childminders or some dismal nursery.

Or I could freeze my heart. Numb all real feeling.
Make sure that everything was paralysed, except for the last few impulses I'd need to make enough excuses for the man I'd married to keep our lives rolling along. Just as in childhood I'd managed to ignore the looks of irritation on my father's face whenever I popped my head up under his evening paper, so, as an adult, I could learn to brush aside my husband's indifference. After all, hadn't I been warned? You make your bed and you must lie on it. If it turned out to be a bed of nails, then I could do the same as other disappointed wives – cushion the pain with pillows of womanly invention: ‘Oh, men are
hopeless
on the phone', ‘Boys grow up with such different skills', ‘You simply can't expect a bloke to understand that sort of thing.'

So that's what I did. I look back now and I'm astonished at the effort I must have put in over the years to tell myself things weren't that bad. I clutched at hints of unhappiness in other marriages. I relished the company of women whose husbands' failings seemed far worse than Stuart's. I think if I'd lived on a street of wife-beaters, gamblers and drunks, I would have spent my whole life pushing Malachy's stroller back and forth past all their garden gates, flattering myself that I'd made an excellent choice (or maybe, in less robust moments, assuring myself that, if I had not drawn my particular marital short straw, I would
have drawn some other). I was a far cry from the woman I'd have been if I had had the sense to listen to my father, or, like so many others, put off the wedding long enough to see whether, in time, attraction soured into disgust and pity into irritation.

Or grave good looks into the constant absence of a smile. For Stuart turned out to be grumpy. Not even the nice sort of grumpy, as when a man sinks comfortably into the depths of the sofa and grouses amiably about the perfidy of the government or the shortness of his daughters' skirts. No. Mean-spirited grumpy. Over the years Stuart must have got round to criticizing every single thing about me: my parenting skills, my dress sense, my cooking – even my spelling. He was the sort of person you'd move away from at a party, and I was so stupid and green that all I ever did was try even harder to please him.

Well, more fool me. The only way to get through to people like Stuart is to bring a frying pan down on their heads, along with a sharp command to ‘Stop that now!' I just went quiet and thought I was doing the right thing by staying. (‘A baby needs his father.') Once there's a child, of course, few women have the energy to deal with larger problems. And so our deadly marriage dragged on for years. Most people know the score: those days of letting the words you think of saying to break the silence echo in test runs
through your brain before you decide not to bother; those nights of sleeping poorly for fear of letting an unguarded leg cross the cool gap between the two of you and be mistaken for a gesture of remorse. Gradually you find that the life you'd hoped to share has been divided into ‘spheres of influence'. Separate development, really. People are right. If you're afraid of loneliness, then don't for heaven's sake make the mistake of getting married.

But Malachy was a joy. There's something so
hopeful
about babies, toddlers, small children. A whole new life just waiting to be unzipped. He was the happiest of boys through all his primary schooling. I blame that secondary school for what went wrong. How do these teachers manage to close their eyes to all that bullying? The wrong sort of clothes, or family, or face? Disaster! The wrong sort of personality? Tough luck on you. You'll simply have to put up with a heap of vicious shoving and hitting all the way to school in the morning, through every break-time, and all the way home at night. Small wonder so many schoolchildren bunk off, turn inwards or take to comforts like drugs. I think my Malachy had less strength of will than most. (I'd hate to think that he was under even more pressure.) And I didn't have the sense to march up to the school and take him out of there, giving those teachers a taste of the truth: ‘Why
should I leave my son with you? He's neither safe nor happy, and what little you teach him is not worth the misery of staying all day to learn it. Forget the whole deal.'

So, for whatever reason – and this is my bitterest regret – I didn't do it. And by fifteen my son was probably a hopeless case. A terrible thing to say. Fifteen? Lost cause? Of course I didn't know it at the time. Believe the comforts people offer you and you can easily manage to persuade yourself that everyone else's teenagers look as sour and pale and moody as Malachy did, spend whole days in bed, and steal from their parents' pockets. Who is to know the shade of difference between healthy rebellion and the slow, steady disintegration of a young person's personality?

Not Stuart. He put a huge amount of effort into staying away from the house. We barely saw him. Meetings. Work trips. Conferences abroad. And not me, either. I only saw what I was brave enough to see, and that was no more than what I felt strong enough to deal with. I only worked part-time (in a dry-cleaner's – perhaps the fumes softened my brain). But they were long enough hours to offer the escape from truth so many parents need.

Now, of course, all this time later, I can face the facts. Already by fourteen Malachy was in with the bad
crowd. By fifteen he was in thrall to drugs. By sixteen he was a junkie – dishonest and snivelling, with a heap of seedy friends who, even when you'd taken Malachy's phone away from him, still managed to find some way of signalling this week's special offer to him over the hedge.

Did we talk about it, Stuart and I? Barely at all, beyond the day-to-day recounting of our son's tantrums and disappearances, occasional paranoid fits and the anxious complaints of the neighbours. I certainly wouldn't have asked for Stuart's help or advice, knowing only too well the sort of wrangle it would have set in train. More of his tiresome accusations: ‘If you'd not spoiled that boy . . .' My counter-arguments: ‘If you had ever been
here
.' No. Better to press on alone, phoning the police to insist that they came round to clear the drug-sellers away from the front of our house; making excuses to drop Malachy off so close to school in the morning that there'd be at least a chance he'd feel too idle even to bunk off; trying to stop him leaving the house for ludicrously spurious reasons at all times of the day and night.

All hopeless. And, once Malachy had finally rubbed enough of his reeling brain cells together to spark the realization that he was now old enough to leave school, a whole lot worse. I dreaded leaving
the house. I dreaded coming home again. And I loathed being in it. So when the social worker, Mrs Kuperschmidt, finally advised me to offer him the choice – full drug rehabilitation in a clinic or leave the house – he sulked, then shouted, but he left the house. The next time I saw him he was hanging round the door to the shopping centre along with a girl with a nose jewel so lurid it looked like a bad sore, and shorts halfway up her arse.

I stopped to talk to him. ‘Look at you, Malachy. Just
look
at you.'

He turned away. ‘Oh, piss off, Mum!'

A spark of interest flashed across the girl's bland face. ‘Are you Mally's mother?'

To this day I am glad I held back the bitter ‘I
used
to be' that sprang to mind and told the girl instead, ‘Yes, I'm his mother. And on the day he finally manages to convince me he's sorted himself out, then I'll be happy to have him back.'

She turned to Malachy. ‘Did you hear what she said?'

He muttered sourly at the pavement slabs beneath his feet.

‘
Well?
' she demanded.

He scowled at her. ‘Well, what?'

‘What are you going to
do
?'

He looked a bit baffled. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I'm asking, are you going back?'

He nodded towards me. ‘What, with her?'

‘Yes.'

He stared at me with venom. ‘Not if she's going to keep on and on at me like before. Not if she's going to be rude to my friends and nag me all the time.'

Oh, blessed are the peacemakers. She turned to me. ‘Well,
are
you?'

‘What, going to keep on at him and shoo off his druggy friends?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, yes I am,' I said. ‘He can come home, but only when he's finished with whatever crap it is he's ruining his life with now.'

‘Oh, right,' she said.

And that was that. Frankly, I couldn't see why she hadn't grasped it first time around, unless she was blasted, or her brains had been rotted by glue fumes. I went into the shopping centre and got the things I needed, along with four big fat juicy and expensive sandwiches and two large bottles of peach and mango juice – Malachy's favourite – to hand over on my way out.

But they were gone, with only a couple of cigarette ends rolling about in the draught from the doors to show that they'd ever been there. I drove home rather too fast, in some distress about my son and irritation
at the wasted expense of the food I had bought them.

If I am honest, it was probably only because this extra shopping was on my mind – could I perhaps pass the beef and mustard sandwich off, with a salad, as Stuart's supper? – that I even noticed that my husband had gone.

Yes, gone. And not just with the jacket he'd have taken with him in case it turned chilly later, but with his long black coat. Curious, I looked in the cupboard under the stairs. His boots weren't there – only the running shoes I'd bought after Stuart's ticking-off at his last routine check-up for not taking any exercise, shoes he'd neither wanted nor worn.

I went to the desk we'd built in under the stairs. At first glance it looked as cluttered as usual. But when I studied what was lying about I noticed it was only paperwork to do with the house. Directories. Bills. Receipts. Nothing of Stuart's and, most unusually, nothing at all to do with his work.

I opened the drawers. One looked suspiciously empty. I tried a sort of test, rooting through for his driving licence or passport – any paperwork to do with Stuart.

Nothing to be found.

I went upstairs, and into the bedroom we shared. I opened the closet to see a couple of suits he never wore, a few shirts that he hated, and shoes I'd bought
him that he had always complained felt as uncomfortable as walking round in cardboard boxes. I pulled out a drawer to find a pair of golfing socks I'd meant to send to Oxfam, a heap of handkerchiefs, and one or two of those sorts of weird little leather straps that are something to do with wearing trousers with braces.

I looked in the pretty raffia bin. Right at the bottom, under a heap of smeary tissues I had dropped in there, he'd shoved a crumpled paper bag. I opened it and found a couple of foil-wrapped condoms he'd clearly tidied out of the back of the drawer while he was packing, and dropped in there to save me (and him) unnecessary embarrassment.