The Secrets of Married Women (19 page)

Before I whisk Rob off for the weekend though, I pay my mam and dad my regular visit. When I walk in their door, I’ve obviously just missed some big eruption because I can feel the desolate wake of it in the air. My dad is stooping to pick up bits of broken teapot. A harrowed, pathetic little face looks up at me, eyes sunken in head. ‘I don’t know what I said to upset her. She was fine one minute, then she started saying how I’d taken her pension money, I was stealing off her.’ He wipes the back of his hand across his brow that has broken out in a fine sweat. ‘I said don’t be daft. Why would I steal off my own wife? But she said I had some other woman. I tried to tell her not to be ridiculous. But she wouldn’t see it…’

I know this is the hard part for him; he knows he can’t reason with her because she is past that, yet the stupidity of some of her claims makes him feel he has to try. ‘I told her I wasn’t listening to this, I was off to make a cuppa tea, but she followed me in here, took the teapot off me, dropped it.’ He mimics dropping something from up high. ‘You should have seen the temper on her face.’ He shakes his head, disbelievingly, sadly. ‘She loved this teapot. Had it for years. Remember how she kept gluing the handle back on?’

‘I loved that teapot, Dad. It seems like it’s been in this family longer than I have.’ My dad puts his head in his hands and I hear a tiny whimper come out of him.

‘Oh, Dad!’ I go to cuddle him, but he flaps me off.

‘Stop that. You’re making me sweat.’ He wipes at his eyes. Together we pick up bits of broken brown ceramic, like chunks of a kid’s smashed up chocolate Easter Egg.

‘It’s only stuff, Dad. Just stuff. It should have been binned years ago.’ I’m just saying this to make him feel better, but we all know I’d never have thrown it in the bin. If there were one thing I could have taken from this house when the time comes for everything to go, it would have been that teapot. My dad stares intensely at the ground, fresh tears poised on his bottom lid. ‘I know, love. I know.’ But he doesn’t know. None of us knows anything anymore. We sit down at the small Formica kitchen table.

‘Dad…’ Now is as good a time as any to bring this up, I suppose. “I’ve been looking into care homes that’ll take her for a weekend. Just like a little holiday –’

‘Holiday?’ His sad eyes bore into mine. ‘You want to put her in a nut home? Would you go in a nut home for a holiday?’

‘But Dad, it would just to be –’

‘Oh Dad!’ he mimics my voice. ‘Rob and me aren’t going to Spain this summer, we think we’ll go in a nut house instead!’

‘Dad!’

‘Holiday!’ he practically spits the word at me. He gets up, throws a hand in the direction of the front door. ‘There’s the door. Walk though it. Don’t come back. You’re no daughter of mine.’

‘Okay. I’ve got the point. Now you’re being ridiculous!’ I get to my feet. ‘All it would be is for the weekend. To give you some time off. Nobody’s suggesting—’

‘- I don’t need time off. I’m not in the army. I didn’t marry her to abandon her in her hour of need.’ He sinks down into the chair again. I stand there and watch him hold his head in his big, upturned hands, his elbows up by his shoulders, bony fingers clutching either side of his skull. ‘Once they get their hands on her she’ll never come home. I’ll never see her again.’ His voice is staggered with anxiety.

I keep standing there looking at him and I don’t know what to say. Because part of me knows he’s right. We stay like this in silence for moments then he looks up at me.
‘
I’m telling you one thing and it’s final, s
he’s
not going anywhere!’ He’s annoyed now. ‘I’ll tell you another thing if you like. If
she
goes,
I
go. So think about that.’

I’m about to, but then the kitchen door flies open and I just about get knocked off my feet. My mother glares from my dad to me, lucid eyes of seafoam green. ‘She! She!’ She says indignantly, as she must have overheard him. ‘Who’s she? The cat’s mother?’ She continues to stand there staring at us, indignantly, like a spinster headmistress in a tizzy.

My dad looks at me and I look at him. And in that instant, everything diffuses and we have a small chortle. Then comes the weirdest baritone song from my mother’s tiny little body. “
You’ll never miss your mother, till she’s gone!”

~ * * * ~

‘I thought we’d go to Stolley’s and have a look at a carpet,’ I tell Rob when I’ve got him in the car after I’ve dropped the dog off at the kennels. ‘I fancy a new one for the bedroom.’

He groans. ‘Carpet? Bedroom? On a Friday night?’

I try not to smile. It’s raining again. The wipers are going like the clappers and I can barely see.

‘This isn’t the way to Stolley’s Jill.’

‘You’re clever.’

‘Well what are we going this way for then?’ He studies my side-profile and I try not to smile. Then I tell him about our getaway I have booked for our anniversary, and he’s floored. ‘You booked this?’ I nod massively, squeeze his hand.

‘Shit Rob, I pressed your shirt before I left and now I think I’ve left the iron on.’ I’m just braking hard as the traffic’s slowing down. The car hydroplanes.

‘Which iron?’ Rob gives me that look.

‘Oh… I suppose it was the shut off one.’ I wink at him.

When we get moving again I take off gingerly as the car seems to be pulling back on me as I try to accelerate. ‘You’re driving like a senior citizen,’ my husband says.

I barely get the words, ‘I think there’s something wrong with the car’ out of my mouth when my ‘battery low’ light comes on. ‘Oh, shit! The battery’s going flat.’

‘Ignore it. Those lights have come on before when there’s been nothing wrong. We’re not far now. I bet we’ll get there just fine.’

‘Shouldn’t we call the AA?’

‘Well you know how long we’ll wait. Let’s just get there. We’ll call while we eat dinner.’

I do my ‘you win’ sigh. Rob gives my hand his ‘I know best’ squeeze. We turn off the motorway and follow a trunk road. But it looks suspiciously like we’ve arrived in a field of sheep. ‘I think you missed the turning,’ he says in that God-you’re-useless tone.

‘I don’t think I did!’ I peer through the splashing rain hoping to find the main road again. I don’t get far when our car seizes, the dash lights up, and then everything dies. ‘Right,’ I say, in that tone.

‘Right, what?’

I want to kill him. I always listen to him and it always buggers everything up. Any minute now he’s going to say ‘I told you so’ and then I’m going to kill him. We sit there moments, me mentally counting down to it coming.

‘I tol—’

‘Hup!’ I wag a finger. ‘Don’t even think about saying that.’

The rain pelts a broken tune on our roof. We have some stupid argument now about who’s going to truck to the nearest sign of civilization to find out where we are, so we can tell the AA where to find us.

‘You are because I’m not wearing a coat!’ he says.

‘You are, because I’ve got good sandals on, plus I did all the donkey-work for this weekend to start with because you couldn’t get a romantic idea in your head if your life depended on it! And besides, in case you haven’t noticed, you’re the man and I’m the woman, and this isn’t going to be another example Me Tarzan, You Jane, where I do everything and you just cop out. And besides it was me who wanted to call the AA right away, or did you just forget that, Mr. I’ve Seen The Bloody Lights Come on Before?’

‘All, right, all right!’ he says. ‘I think I got the point!’ And he gets out of the car, swearing and pulling his collar around his ears, and I watch the navy blur of him disappear down the road and I swallow a small chuckle.

An hour later I’m shivering like mad. Some sheep come up to my window and go Mehhhe! God this is great, isn’t it? Where did he go? Canada? I bet he’s taking longer just to annoy me. And I’m cold and I’m famished and my gastric juices are devouring my stomach lining. I always keep chocolate in the glove compartment for these sorts of emergencies. I pull the thing open. Pity I always eat it when I’m not supposed to. Rob comes back days, weeks, months later, like a drowned rat. ‘The tow truck’s on its way and it’ll tow us to the hotel and then take the car to the closest garage. Fuck,’ he says, water dripping off his nose end. I start to laugh.

‘It’s not funny!’

I hear another ‘Mehhhhe! and take fits of the giggles.

He sits chattering his teeth, smelling of fresh air and woken-up cologne. ‘Are you very cold and very wet, or by any chance just very wet?’ I hide behind my hands while he playfully bashes me. I peep at him out the corner of my eye. Rob. I love him. I do. My head, my heart and soul are just filled with him. I wish he’d just take me right here in the car!

Look up there I see a pig flying.

Another hour later a walking tattoo with a central nervous system tallies us up at his big back end and then we hop in his truck and off we go. Rescued. Rob slides an arm across my shoulder. We fall into the nearest pub and eat. By the time we get to the hotel it’s after ten o’clock.

They’ve let the room. We didn’t guarantee it for late arrival.

Twenty quid in taxi fees and seven guest houses later, because apparently the world and his wife come to Bamburgh since it got written up in the Mail on Sunday’s Best Romantic Getaways, we manage to find a room. It’s hardly the place you’d open a bottle of expensive champagne in. More like the home for a cheerful glass of Henkell Trocken. But do we care? Let’s get this straight: we do not care. We are just so knackered, and I have that awful burpy stomach because I went so long without food then ate greasy crap.

Rob goes upstairs to the shared bathroom to take a shower. ‘I hope you’ve brought your own toilet paper. There’s none up there.’

I look at him, sexy with his towel around his waist. All his chest hair is glued up with this white stuff. ‘Ergh!’

‘Yeah, the shower’s not working either. Bastard sears you like a minute steak, then you get soaped up… nothing.’ He puts his T-shirt on, climbs into his underpants. ‘You smell something funny in this room?’

I sniff up. ‘Like what?’

‘Death. Formaldehyde.’ He climbs into bed.

Methinks I’ll save the nursey outfit for tomorrow. ‘Ow! Heck!’ I catch the front of my shin on the bed-frame and hop around in a circle. It’s Rob’s turn to smile. ‘God, Rob, these sheets smell like dirty old man’s hair.’ Plus the carpet’s got those sticky, leathery black marks. I must remember not to stand on it in my bare feet when I get up to pee in the hand basin in the middle of the night. I just knew this was going to be a ball. Balls up, more likely. I climb into bed. Rob moves his arm for me to snuggle under. ‘Happy anniversary, treasure,’ he says, and then, ‘Thanks for bringing us here’—like he actually means it! Two minutes later he’s snoring, like the Northern Sinfonia drowning in the North Sea.

When we wake up, the rain hasn’t let up any. We go to pick up the car then walk around the town, looking in gift shops and ducking in for cups of tea. Tonight’s the night. Oh yes baby. Champers. Dinner. Dress up outfit—pathetic attempt to prostitute myself to my own husband. I can’t wait. We wander around Bamburgh Castle and stare across one of its walls at a very foggy Northumberland beach that’s completely deserted except for one of those birds with a very long neck on a rock. Where is everybody? Probably in the hotel we should have been in, spending the day in bed. There’s something serenely beautiful about this though. The castle, the beach, the fog. Nobody around but us. We stare across the sea that, today, looks like a big grey undulating prison blanket, and I remember our honeymoon when we had sex in the dunes and I got sand-mites up my you-know-where. Then I say something brave. ‘I was thinking the other day that maybe we should adopt a baby.’

Some seagulls do a shocking scream overhead but Rob doesn’t even look up. I wait, look at his profile, his long, slim-bridged nose with its perfectly rounded tip, his right eye that’s not blinking, the dark blue of its centre and the fringe of long black curly lashes. ‘I thought you said you weren’t bothered about having a kid.’

‘I’m not really. But sometimes…Well, like the other day at the barbeque, I just thought how I could see myself having a daughter like Molly, who I could be close to like I’m close to my own mother. I think that would be very nice.’

‘Not one that sings all the time.’

‘Good God I hope not.’ He’s being remarkably good-humoured. ‘But also Rob, my main reason is I sometimes think when we’re old who’ll be there to call in on us? Who’ll come for Christmas? Whose weddings will we go to? We’ll have literally nobody. There’ll be nobody to care whether we live or die.’