The Secrets of Married Women (3 page)

‘Very funny.’ I kiss the smooth cleft of his chin, smell toothpaste on his breath, sneak a hand under his T-shirt, and feel the easy familiarity of my marriage cloak me. Over the years Rob’s middle has turned a bit like a lukewarm hot water bottle, but since he’s rather mysteriously lost some weight recently, he’s got a pretty nice body on him again. He clutches my sore foot between both of his.

‘I missed you, you know.’ He plants a tender little kiss on my eyelid. ‘I always do when I come to bed and you’re not with me. I might fall asleep but I’ve always got one eye awake, waiting for you to come home.’

‘How do you keep an eye awake?’ I prop myself on an elbow and gaze at him. ‘Do you pin its lids back and squirt it with cold water? Or slap it around, or shout at it every two minutes? Shock its socks off?’

He pulls my head back down on his chest again. ‘Very droll, funny clogs.’

Strange, Rob’s been so mushy with me lately. Normally he’s not good with telling me he loves me. Instead, he’ll make up silly little songs, and, in his abysmally off-key voice, sing them to some familiar tune:
My wife. I love her. She is beau-t-i-ful. I think of her all day. She makes me smile. All the while… she has cute little toes, and a turned up nose.

‘Argh, Rob,’ I plant a kiss in the centre of his chest. His skin smells newly-washed, of soap. It strikes me that I can’t remember the last time we had a spontaneous bout of clothes-ripping passion. Something that wasn’t part of a routine, or timed between two good shows on TV. I sometimes wonder if we escaped the seven-year itch only to fall into the ten-year ditch. I push these thoughts away, kiss a trail up his body, up his throat, run my lips along his stubbly jaw, wondering if some affection of the other sort might be in order. But Rob lies very still –a clear case of not-tonight-Josephine. So I stop, noncommittally, as though kissing his jaw was as far as I was going with the mission anyway. I try not to feel flattened, slighted, unfeminine.

‘What you want to do tomorrow then?’ I prod him. Since our marriage seems to have withered on the vine lately, for reasons I’m not quite clear on, I made Rob make a pact with me. I said, let’s make Saturdays our ‘date’ days. Let’s pretend we’re courting again. To try to bring something back that I’m worrying we’ve lost.

Rob considers my question. ‘Anything you want to do, treasure.’ Rob will always leave everything up to me, even when it comes to what he wants to do. I never know whether he’s just being compliant for an easy life, or whether, over the years, he really has just merged his mind with my mind so that now he doesn’t have one of his own anymore. The first is sort of sweet and is sometimes a good thing anyway. The second irritates me.

‘We’ll think of something fun and brilliant in the morning, won’t we?’ I stress
we.

‘You will. My faith in you knows no limits.’ He kisses my cheek then gently pushes me away and turns over.

What did I read the other day in a magazine? That trust, communication, and a little touch of lust are the three ingredients that make a marriage stand the test of time.

Help.

‘Rob can only keep it up for about thirty seconds,’ I tell Wendy on the phone while I sit at my desk at work. (I’m personal assistant to the Head of Finance for Newcastle Football Club.) The girls who sit across from me nearly fall off their chairs.

‘You and your dirty minds!’ I scold them. ‘I’m talking about running! Rob and I are training to run 10K.’ It’s the new ‘us’. It’s healthy, it’s bonding, it’s the perfect way to exercise the dog.

‘Glad you clarified that Jill girl,’ Leanne says to me. ‘Otherwise that would account for a lot about you, wouldn’t it?’

I grin then scowl. ‘Really?’ I cover the mouthpiece with a hand, ‘Like what?’ I hear Wendy chuckle then I try to tune back into her. Wendy is my running guru. She’s also about the fittest person I know, even though ironically—as she will always grumble—she’s not the thinnest.

‘Well Jill,’ she tells me, ‘it takes time to build up your endurance. Your heart’s a muscle too, so you have to work at it to make it strong. That’s not something you can do overnight.’

‘The hardest part, I find, is putting one foot in front of the other and keeping going,’ I tell her. ‘I’m still trying to work that part out. But we did it exactly like you told us to. We followed the programme.’ With our own variation. The first day we started off walking for one minute, then running for two—we did this ten times—sort of. The next day we had to run two and walk for one, and do this twelve times. By day four we had our numbers in a knot and ran for one and walked for about ten and had a good old chatter along the way, and did this three times. Then by the end of the week I had a sore foot and Rob had a pain in his coccyx. ‘We’re really loving it though, just like you said we would. And we’re certainly going to stick with it.’ Once we pick it up again in the winter. As Rob said, it’s getting too warm now to be doing all this extra sweating; it’ll be better when it’s cold. And preferably dark, so the neighbours can’t see us. Besides, Rob said, running isn’t good for bigger puppies; it can displace their hips. I gave my husband’s head a good hard rub, ‘Argh, Robby my big puppy! I wouldn’t want you getting your hip displaced now would I?’ Apparently he was talking about the dog.

I see my boss coming and duck into my shoulders. ‘Gotta go,’ I whisper to Wendy. ‘Adolf’s doing the goose-step, two-step.’

‘I’ll see you in Yoga tonight, right?’

Oh, it’s exhausting this business of trying to age gracefully! ‘Now Wend, what would I do without a friend like you, driving me to be a better person?’

‘I’ll loan you my large bum then you’ll have no problem finding the motivation.’

I’m just about to knuckle back down to work when my phone rings. I recognize the anguished draw of breath and my spirits hit the floor. ‘Dad!’

‘Jill!’ he says. I don’t know how one word can say so much. ‘It’s your mam. I turned my back for one second…. the front door was open… She’s gone!’

Isn’t this just what happened last week? My mam has vascular dementia and my dad can’t cope. He’s becoming more and more helpless but he won’t admit it because northern men were bred to be stronger than anyone else, and he’s afraid someone is going to suggest she goes in a home. ‘Oh Dad!’ My work friends all send me sympathetic looks.

‘She’s still in her dressing gown. I couldn’t get her to get dressed this morning. Oh…’ his voice wobbles; he starts to sniffle.

Hearing my dad cry makes a big lump rise up in my throat. ‘Dad, you know somebody’s going to find her and bring her home! Just like last time.’ Silksworth is small. You couldn’t run away if you wanted to. ‘But, I’m coming. I’ll be there as fast as I can.’ But it won’t be fast. Not in rush hour traffic. An hour probably, at least. ‘Hang on in there.’

‘I’m hanging,’ he says, pitifully.

I ring off, throw my phone and cardigan into my bag. I’m forgetting something… I used to have a very understanding boss, until he dropped down dead before our very eyes about a month ago. But this new guy, Arnold Swinburn, is a different story altogether. He goes around like he’s got a large, splintery plank up his bottom, and he’s always watching me with eyeballs the size of small planets when he walks past my desk in his slip-on tan shoes with leather tassels that have all us girls giggling. I tap on his door. When I go in, he gives me that preparing-to-not-be-amused look over the top of his glasses, and I’ve not even said anything yet. ‘I’m afraid… I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to leave early. I have a family emergency.’

‘Another one?’ he says, as though I get them every day.

I have worked here for five years and have an immaculate record of attendance, punctuality, efficiency. So this attitude does not sit well with me. ‘I’ll make the time up,’ I tell him.

‘You bet you will.’

I feel like I’ve been called before the headmaster and am about to receive the strap. ‘You know, I don’t have children. If I did, I am sure there’d be all kinds of days when I’d have to skip out an hour from work or maybe not even make it in...’ I am talking to the top of his head. I put my best monotone voice on, my polite way of making it known that he needn’t think I’d put this job—any job, or any thing for that matter—before my parents’ well-being, so he really will have to sod off and deal with his disgruntlement, won’t he. ‘My mother is an old lady. She suffers from dementia. She ran away from the house and she won’t know where she is, or where she’s going. She probably won’t even know
who
she is, for that matter, if it’s a bad day for her. Then there are the days where she does remember, but she knows that something is not quite the same in her head, that there’s this hideous confusion, and there’s nothing she can do to make it go away.’ The top of his bald head has broken a fine sweat. ‘That’s what happens with this illness, and it could happen to any one of us.’
Including you
. I chant a few more things silently in my mind that I wish I could say but can’t.

‘See you on Monday,’ he says.

As I creep out of there, I feel his disapproving eyes bore into my back.

Admittedly it didn’t help that I was late in this morning and I missed a Manager’s meeting because that hound Kiefer tried to take our neighbour’s bunny rabbit for a ride around our garden in his mouth. I had to streak around the lawn in my underwear trying to catch him, but he just thought we were playing a game. By the time he took my threats to kill him seriously and I got the bunny back in its hut and got dressed, I knew I didn’t have a rabbit in hell’s chance of being on time for the meeting. So it’s two nails in my coffin in one day. But using that same line to Arnie about
my dog is only a puppy… he barely knows his own name…let’s face it, being a puppy could happen to any one of us
doesn’t work quite the same.

Of course because I’m in such a hurry to get through to Sunderland there has to be an accident on the Tyne bridge. As I sit there in a frazzle, the passenger of an A1 Windows and Doors van that’s idling beside me catches my eye and winks. Next, his buddy is leaning over and doing the same thing, as though they’ve got a prolapsus of the eye muscles. I fix my attention straight ahead of me and do my utmost to tune them out. She’s going to be fine, I tell myself, because I think you have intuition for bad things happening and my gut tells me it’s not going to be this time. But still I worry because I am a worrier by nature. Even when I have little to worry about, I worry. I worry that they’re sleeping, eating, going to the toilet. That they’re warm, get fresh air, turn the oven off, close their windows at night, and don’t answer the door to strangers. ‘What you think we are?’ my dad will say. ‘A couple of stool pigeons?’

‘I think you mean sitting ducks,’ I'll grin at him, and he'll wheeze a laugh, his chest making a melody like a distant orchestra tuning up.

My mother has had this condition for going on three years now. At first it was little things: she’d put milk in the china cabinet, ask questions we’d just given her the answer to. Then came the big one—she forgot it was Christmas Day. Now she gets it into her head that my dad is her brother who is molesting her. Dementia can have you perceiving things in extreme opposites.

Somebody toots a horn. I register that traffic ahead is moving again. The two men in the van pull argh-she’s-leaving-us faces and wave like a couple of half-wits. I give them my women-are-the-superior-sex eye-roll then shift into gear. On the way, I ring Rob and sound off about how I’m really going to have to intervene and do something about my parents, and he comforts me and promises me we’ll think of something together.

My mobile rings as I’m pulling up at their front door. ‘We found her! Jenny Barton found her in the bus shelter. You needn’t bother coming, we’re fine now!’ There’s a pause. ‘Where are you anyway, chucka?’

He always calls me chucka.

‘Look out the window,’ I tell him.

The curtain twitches. My dad’s eyes meet mine. ‘Oh,’ he says.

I push back an overgrown rhododendron bush by the gate then walk up the path feeling a tad impatient and yet hating myself for it. My dad opens the door, near gleeful. ‘Guess what? Your mam gave Jenny a good hiding for bringing her home!’ My dad finds it funny that such a lady-like woman as my mother has taken to smacking people for the smallest of reasons. Then the smile disappears and he looks like he’s going to cry again. ‘Oh, Dad!’ I go to give him a big hug but he says, ‘Get off me!’ and swats at me, because we’re not supposed to be soft with each other in this family. The object of our near heart-failure is sitting prettily on the sofa, dipping Jaffa cakes into a cup of tea and staring bewildered at her fingers that keep ending up with nothing in them. Every time I come through that door I die a little, until she recognizes me, then I’m reborn. It’s called my reprieve from the inevitable. ‘Hello my bonny lass,’ she looks at me, benignly. My mother never was benign. Nor was she razor-tempered, like she can be now. I kiss the top of her fragrant head, unable to take my eyes off her, just massively grateful that she’s still here, powerfully aware that I must treasure each moment I have with her. I still disbelieve the change that this illness has brought about in her, and, as there’s no going back to the way she was, I sometimes think that if I stare at her long enough and hard enough I will somehow manage to preserve her, so she’ll stay exactly as she is and never get any worse. Because I dread worse. I dread it with an agony that fills every corner of my rib cage and pushes and pushes until it threatens to blow me apart into two pieces that will never be welded together again.