The Safest Place (24 page)

And he scowled, and shuffled over a little, to the side. He was listening to us too, though I paid no heed to that at the time.

Melanie poured some more wine into our cups.

‘Your trouble,’ she said to me, ‘is that you can’t move on. And you’re on edge all the time. Worrying about your kids. Worrying about everything. He’s got you
right under his thumb, even now.’

He being David, of course. I sipped at my drink, too cold and too numb to argue. Besides, why would I argue? What she said was true enough.

‘And it’s wrong,’ she said, uncurling one finger from her cup and jabbing it at me. ‘Do you think
he
worries about his kids? Do you think he even thinks about
them while he’s off shagging his mistress? No. Because he doesn’t need to. You’re doing it all for him.’

‘Helloo!’ Ella cried, sticking her head out of the tent.

‘Shut up!’ said Sam.

Max smirked and neatly rolled himself over, moving himself closer to Melanie and me.

‘You want to loosen up a bit,’ Melanie said.

‘I am,’ I said. ‘What more can I do?’

‘Jesus,’ Melanie muttered under her breath, and louder, ‘Don’t make it so easy for him.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You
are
.’

Oh what it is to be criticized when you are already so low. To be picked over like a chicken carcass, your character dissected bit by little bit, all in the name of friendship. I stared at the
middle distance, tears stinging my eyes. How bleak, how miserable, how utterly grey the English landscape can be at dusk with the rain driving in. And this was supposed to be fun.

‘Look at you now,’ Melanie said. ‘You’re all pent-up. Your husband is out having a wild time thinking about no one but himself . . . but you . . . you’ve no idea
how to enjoy yourself.’

Accidently, I caught Max’s eye. And oh what big eyes, so wide with sympathy. I was uncomfortable talking like this with the boys listening, though for Melanie there were no such
boundaries. Take me as you find me, she’d say, and that dictate applied to her kids too.

‘What you want,’ Melanie said, ‘is to get yourself a new man.’

Max laughed a gentle little ho-ho-ho, and Sam’s entire body jolted as if he’d sat on a nail. He twisted away from us, not wanting to hear any more, then instantly twisted straight
back again, unable to stop himself listening in.

‘The last thing I want,’ I said, ‘is another man.’

‘But why not?’ Melanie said. ‘It would do you good.’

‘It would not,’ I said.

‘Yes it would. And besides which, it would show him.’

‘Show who?’ asked Ella, sticking her head out of that tent.

‘No one,’ hissed Sam.

‘Show him you’re having fun for a change,’ Melanie said. ‘See how he likes it then.’

‘I am having fun,’ I said.

Max rolled onto his back, chuckling to himself, and Melanie said, ‘Oh please.’

We’d finished that bottle of wine, and she heaved herself out of her deckchair to reach inside our tent for another, and opened it, and filled up our mugs. ‘I swear,’ she said,
‘you are going to have a good time if it kills me.’

She balanced her cup down on the grass next to the wine bottle and disappeared into the tent, and started poking around in the little holdall in which she’d brought her few clothes. She
muttered to herself, rummaging through knickers and socks and T-shirts. Then, ‘Ah! Here we are,’ she said. And out she came again, grinning, and holding something hidden in her
hand.

Max clearly knew what it was. ‘Aw, mum,’ he said, a little too gleefully.

‘Courtesy of Colin,’ Melanie said, unfolding her fingers to reveal a knotted-up plastic sandwich bag, filled with what could easily have been chopped herbs. ‘Thought we might
be needing it.’

Max was laughing properly now, a kind of
what-is-my-mum-like
? laugh, as he lay on his back, staring up at the absence of stars. Sam on the other hand sat there rigid as a stick, his
face dark with fury, tangibly emanating . . . what? Hatred? Then hatred of whom . . . of me? I looked at him and I looked at Max, or rather I looked at Max and how he was with his mother, and I
felt so overwhelmed with sadness and with envy. Why couldn’t Sam be like that with me, so at ease, so accepting? The affection between Melanie and Max was palpable, yet she didn’t spend
her life fretting over him, worrying for him, moving halfway across the bloody country for him. Oh no, Melanie’s take me as you find me mantra stretched both ways. She was totally uncritical
of her kids, and, it seemed, they of her. Apparently, she had got it right. Whereas it seemed I had got it all so wrong.

She sat hunched over in her deckchair, balancing a Rizla paper on her knees, doing her best to shelter it from the wind, and rolling us up a nice fat joint as if it was the most natural thing in
the world. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, suddenly turning to look at me and smile reassuringly, ‘it’s home-grown. Perfectly harmless,’ as if remembering what kind of
a person I was.

Oh me, me. I so didn’t want to be me.

‘There we are,’ Melanie said. ‘Done.’ She lit up, and took a long slow drag. ‘Lovely,’ she said, and handed the joint to me.

‘Mum!’ Sam hissed.

‘Oh be quiet, Sam,’ Melanie said. ‘You can’t tell me you boys don’t like a little smoke now and again.’

And Max laughed, and rolled a little closer to us, big brown eyes like a puppy’s, awaiting his turn.

And do you know how exciting it was, how thrilling, to be doing something really bad? This wasn’t about Sam, or Ella, or David or the confines of my ordinary life. This was just about me,
trying to let go. Being only me again, not mother, not wife. So I ignored Sam sitting there glaring at me, and I took a puff on that joint. It was no big deal to Melanie; it need be no big deal to
me.

And oh how we laughed the next time the girls popped their heads out of their tent to see what was going on, and we had to hide what we were smoking from them because they were too young. How
funny it all seemed, then. And how funny Sam was too, all bug-eyed with outrage, scolding me like he was the parent.

‘You want to leave your mum alone,’ Melanie said languidly, waving the joint at him. ‘She’s been the good little wifey for far too long. It’s time for her to let
her hair down.’

Let my hair down I did. I had not smoked dope since I was a student. Combined with the wine, and my poor state of mind, it slammed me.

Vaguely I remember the boom-boom in my head as my eyes tried to focus, the chair that I sat in and the tent, the drizzle in my face and my kids’ distorted bodies whooshing in and whooshing
out again. I remember Sam’s face up close to mine, his mouth moving, popping like a fish’s, yelling senselessly. And Max laughing that high-pitched crack of a laugh, saying, ‘Sam
you’re so square, you’re like a fucking old man.’

And Melanie, God damn her to hell and God damn me too, saying in that jokey-jokey way of hers, ‘Well you know he is just like his dad . . . ’

Sam threw up his arms and stormed away from me. I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d tried. I was stuck in that old deckchair, limbs boneless and heavy, beyond use. And there was Ella
now, crying about nothing in particular, her face frightened, as if this was some kind of a row, an upset. In my heart I screeched for them both, but also, oh, how I longed to be free.

I was sick. I know that. The little pile of it was still there in the morning, at the side of the tent. And at some point in the night it started raining, properly, soaking its way through that
rotten old canvas as quickly as if through a sheet. Water dripped on my face, rousing me. And squeezed in between Melanie and me was Ella, squashed up close to me and shivering with the cold, her
hand on my arm. She was whimpering in her sleep.

The rain that started in the night carried on into the next day, heavy, relentless. Our stuff was soaked, as were we. We’d no choice but to pack up and leave, and thank
God for that. Melanie and Max thought the events of the previous night were hilarious, but I didn’t, and neither did Sam nor the girls. Sam would not speak to me; he would not even look at me
as he tried to squeeze the water out of his sodden sleeping bag before rolling it up and miserably dismantling the tent poles. The girls whispered to each other as they pulled the pegs out of the
ground, and repeatedly stared at that pile of sick with wide-eyed horror, fascinated by its slow spread and disintegration in the rain.

My shame was absolute. I had the hangover to end all hangovers and felt like my head was splitting in two, but no physical suffering could alleviate how bad I felt in my heart. Fixed behind my
eyes was the image of Sam, stamping his feet, shaking his hands at me, pleading with me to just stop. But we three, Melanie, Max and I, had just laughed at him. And surely that is the lowest of the
low.

Sam did not speak all the way home. He sat in the back, staring out the window, mouth locked shut with fury. Ella, who was tired and tearful and didn’t understand what
was going on, whined the whole way. I drove that car feeling like shit. I gripped the steering wheel with shaking hands, straining my eyes through the rain, the steamed-up windscreen and the hell
inside my head. No doubt I should not have driven at all.

Sam’s silence didn’t end when we got home. He kept it up for a good few days. We were home on the Friday but had expected to be camping till Sunday, and so
I’d put David off coming – I had that small grace at least. He phoned though, to speak to the children. I loitered within earshot, dreading what they would say when he asked if
they’d had a good time, as he would, of course. Yet each of them replied in the same way, as they did to all his questions on the phone. Just, ‘Yes’, and ‘Fine’, and
occasionally, ‘OK’. These conversations crucified me, as they did the children, and no doubt David too. Sam and Ella hated being questioned, and they responded to David as if to a
teacher at school or a stranger. But how else was he to know what was going on in their lives, to show an interest? I listened in, and I recognized the similarity to how I had responded to him when
he used to phone me from work, asking how I was, how the children were. Resentment had driven me monosyllabic, too. I had held back, deliberately, and Sam and Ella now did the same. Never believe
that stupid saying about distance making the heart grow fonder. It doesn’t. It just takes the person you love away.

But how glad I was, right then, for my children’s unwillingness to talk.

They were starting back at school the coming Wednesday, Ella moving up, now, to Renfree Park. There were things to buy and organize and sort; I threw myself into the tasks. I did my best to be a
good mother again, seeing that clothes were labelled and folded into piles. I wrote notable dates on the calendar and polished shoes; I fussed about. I tried to make up for my failings by being
subservient, hoping they would forget, hoping I would please them despite the awful memories.

Yet still Sam would not speak to me.

I tried to talk to him, often – too often. I tapped on his bedroom door and walked in, uninvited and unwanted. ‘Understand what it is to be me,’ I said, ‘to feel as I do,
to have to go through what I have been going through.’

He didn’t, of course. He didn’t want to. Nor did he want me barging into his room, railing at him. To him I was just his mother; I began and ended there.

The memory of our camping trip entertained Melanie and Max for weeks. ‘Oh what a laugh we had,’ they’d say. ‘Didn’t we, Jane? Didn’t we have
a laugh?’

I’d met with their approval, at least.

A new standard had been set in my house now. Boundaries can only be breached when boundaries exist. By getting stoned and behaving as I had in front of my kids and their friends, I’d shown
that I had none. Anything went, now, in my house. Oh sure, Max would do me the honour of not lighting up indoors and he was discreet around Ella, but who was I to complain now if he and perhaps
Will and Tommy nipped out the back for a smoke when they were round? Especially as they always took care to offer me a toke, although I did, please note, always refuse. Oh no, I’d joke, not
after last time.

In my effort to please Sam again, I courted his friends. I was nice to them, thinking that then they would be nice to him, and so he in turn to me. If Sam was popular, Sam would be happy. That
was what I told myself, and that is what, in my desperation, I believed.

‘We need to sell the house.’

How gently David said those terrible words. I knew it would come to this, sooner or later. But I didn’t want to face it. I didn’t want to see ahead because there lay only emptiness,
an unbearable end.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Jane, we have to. I’m sorry.’

Again I said, ‘No.’

We were sitting in the living room, late on a Sunday afternoon, David at one end of the sofa, me at the other, both of us perched forward on the cushions. He leaned towards me slightly as he
spoke, as if in empathy, as if in concern; in truth just to soften his words. He had taken the children out earlier to gather the last of the blackberries and now they were dispatched to their
rooms to finish homework so that he and I could have
time to talk
. The silence in the house was ominous.

Slowly, he said, ‘I need to get a place near work, just a flat, just something small . . . but I can’t afford it as well as this place.’

How reminiscent of previous conversations; and of last winter when he sat glued to his computer searching through London flats for sale and rent; all those grotty, forbidding little dives that
drove him to shack up with Diana. How strangely life just goes round and round, mirroring itself.

‘You want to sell my home,’ I said, ‘our children’s home, so that you can get yourself a nice little London flat? Why can’t you just stay where you are? Is her
place not big enough?’

Carefully, he said, ‘I’m not . . . it’s not like that between us any more. It hasn’t been for a while. We’re friends’ – he added this last quickly, as
if he needed to make the point – ‘but we’re not . . . together.’

I stared at him, dumbfounded.