My Name Was Eden, page 19
Then I head back home.
“Where are my keys?”
James is rushing from room to room, emptying out the bag he’s already checked twice, lifting things from surfaces and tables to look under books, letters, a tea towel. I tell him again that I don’t know, even though I know exactly where they are: wrapped in a freezer bag, inside the box of Corn Flakes in the cupboard.
“Lucy! Have you seen my keys?”
“No. Why do you want to go back out, anyway?”
“I’ve got to finish the contract for the Jameson holdings. I told you, I was only popping back for dinner. We’ve got a meeting.”
“Can’t you hold it over Zoom?”
“No. Everyone will already be there.”
He’s lying. I’m sure he’s lying and still he maintains the pretense. He shouts up the stairs. “Eden.” He looks like a thing possessed. “Where are the bloody keys?”
Who is this man? He is not a man I recognize; he is not the man I married.
“Eli hasn’t got the keys, James.”
“Eli. There is no fucking Eli. Jesus.” James spins around and, with a bang, his fist lands in the wall.
I cry out. The crumpled plaster looks like a broken eggshell. Behind us, Bluey squawks angrily.
I’m too scared to move.
“I didn’t mean to do that.” James’s hand is down by his side now, still clenched into a fist. We are both staring into the black hole he has created. “I don’t know where that came from. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t mean—”
I go to the kitchen, retrieve the keys from the cereal box. James comes up behind me and I hand them to him without a word.
“You hid them? Why would—”
“Don’t say anything. Please. Just go.”
He looks at me until I can’t bear it anymore and drop my gaze to the red skin peeling from two of his knuckles. He sighs. In his other hand, the keys jangle.
A few minutes later I hear the throaty roar of the Mercedes starting up, and then I see it moving in flashes of blue, past the wide hall windows.
James has never punched a hole in the wall before. James’s style is—has always been—jocular deflection, defusing situations with banter, not aggression. And if that fails, he usually turns to passive-aggressive acts of revenge, like the time he was told the discount couldn’t be applied to our dinner because of something in the small print. Even though we could easily afford it, it wasn’t about the money but the attitude of the manager who pushed up his glasses with a podgy finger and informed James that “if he’d cared to read the terms and conditions before coming out to eat . . .”
It wasn’t difficult to find the man’s car in the staff car park from his personalized number plate. “I wish we could stick around to watch,” James laughed, on the way home. I’d had a few glasses of wine by then and laughed too, imagining the round-faced twerp getting into his car later that evening and reversing over the glasses James had taken from the restaurant and strategically placed behind each of his four tires. It was funny. At least, I thought so at the time.
But there have been other things, like when I was pregnant and someone overtook him with a beep and a hand gesture. James wouldn’t let it go. He followed the car for the next five miles, clinging on to the man’s bumper and staring out of the windscreen with such fixed intensity I thought he’d gone mad. “Just leave it,” I begged. “It’s not worth it.”
Eventually, he had slowed down and tailed the man into a housing estate, then waited as the man backed his car into a driveway. “What was the point of that?” I asked. “Seriously?”
“No one endangers the life of my wife and unborn child,” he said, his mouth a grim hyphen.
I Blu Tack a recipe for teriyaki salmon, ripped from a free supermarket magazine, over the hole, then go upstairs to see what Eli’s doing. No wonder he didn’t come to investigate—music is leaking faintly from the headphones set firmly over his ears. Some kind of stringed instrument. He’s tapping on his laptop keyboard, creating a mood board, presumably for Art. I lift one headphone, making him jump.
“Want to come and watch a film?”
He smiles, that weird lopsided smile he does these days. “In a minute.”
An hour later, we’re snuggled together in front of the TV. Eli’s chuckling at the hapless monsters in Hotel Transylvania but my mind keeps drifting back to James, replaying his fist striking into the wall. I’ve never seen him so angry, so desperate. But then I’ve never really tested him before; not because I was scared, but because it suited me to not look too closely. And why does he hate the mention of Eli so much? So much for honesty. So much for unconditional love.
Or was it never really about love at all?
After the movie ends and I’ve taken my shower, a message arrives as I get ready for bed:
I’m sorry. Let’s talk tomorrow.
I don’t know where James is, and I have to fight hard to shake the images of him bending Tia over the desk in his office, pushing her naked body against the glass wall, holding her dark, bobbing head as she kneels in front of his erect penis. You and your overactive imagination, I imagine him saying, as I pat my face dry, trying to avoid looking in the mirror at the sunbeams of wrinkles splintering from the corners of my eyes. Me and my overactive imagination. Always my fault.
Lucy
I thought the funeral would be the worst thing and after that things would be better, but they’re not. Dad has gone back to work because somebody has to pay the bills, but Mum hasn’t yet because she’s still too sad. It’s called grieving. Sometimes when she cries, she makes a noise as if she’s laughing and curls up like someone’s hitting her, but there’s nobody there. I hate it when she does that.
Most of the time when Dad is at work though, it’s quiet in the house. Mum used to say “quiet as a mouse,” but mouses aren’t quiet. We went to the pet shop once and they were making lots of noise, scratching in the sawdust and climbing all over each other making squeaky noises. Elliott never got to see a mouse. Or a rabbit. When I think about him now, it feels like there’s a slippery thing inside my tummy and, if I look down at my hands, it’s like I’m tumbling the thoughts round and around inside them. I have to stuff them under my legs to keep them still.
Today, Nanny picked me up from school. I told her I wanted to make Mum happy again, and she gave me a hug and said I was a kind young lady. That made me feel wriggly inside, because I’m growing up and Elliott never will. That’s what everyone says, but I hope they’re wrong. Roshni said they thought her hamster was dead and the day they were going to bury it, it came back to life.
Just like Jesus.
There’s a funny smell in Mum’s room, like when I open my school lunchbox on a hot day. She does that stick-on smile when I go in, the one that doesn’t pull her eyes up, and I think she’s been smoking again because I saw the little squashed-up black and orange worms by the back door. I’m scared she’s going to die. Her hair looks all frizzy and there are red patches on her face.
She doesn’t laugh at my knock-knock joke, even though it’s quite funny. It goes like this:
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Weirdo.
Weirdo who?
Weirdo you think you’re going?
I think she’s fallen asleep with her eyes open at first, because she still has that horrible smile pasted on, but then she pats my hand and says it’s nice, which doesn’t make any sense. I feel a bit cross. Dad was cross with her yesterday too; I heard his voice going up and down like a seesaw when he thought I was in bed asleep. He kept saying he was tired too and she could at least pretend to make an effort, and I wondered if pretending was the same as lying, but I couldn’t ask him because then he would know I was only pretending to be asleep, which is sort of funny when you think about it. In the end, I went to sleep and dreamt of Elliott. I dream about him a lot. Maybe that’s the only way he can visit from Heaven, or wherever he’s gone now. Last night he was biting my face over and over again with his tiny tooth, because he knew I brought the wasp into the car on purpose, and when I woke up there was a big fat fly on the windowsill, buzzing to get out.
I still want to make Mum happy, so I go and start cleaning the bathroom. There’s a wiggly brown cigarette worm in the toilet too. I flush it away and squirt lemon fresh around the bath. After that, I make the towels into squares on the radiator, then go and make my bed. I do such a good job making everything look nice and shiny, I start imagining it’s my hotel and Mum and Dad are my guests, like in Monopoly.
The slippery thing curls around and around in my tummy when I go into Elliott’s room. I’m not supposed to come in here, but I want to make things better, like that advert where everything gets tidy and bright as soon as the lady twirls around. It’s a bit silly, because even I can’t tidy up that quickly, but the lady has a nice smile. I want to see Mum smile like that again.
Elliott’s shape sorter is on the floor, next to a clean nappy that has fallen off his changing table. His jeans are hanging over the side of his cot, inside out, and I think about how naughty he was on the morning we went to the wildlife park. He kept crying and wouldn’t drink his bottle, then Mum had to keep changing his clothes because he had a wee and a poo after she changed his nappy, and I remember how hard I wished that he wasn’t here. It was like he knew the bad thing was going to happen and was trying to warn everyone not to go.
His blanket is screwed up on the bed, and Mr. Monkey Saves the Day is half pulled out of his bookcase, next to the Mr. Men books Dad used to read to me. I push it back in and tidy the books into size order then make his bed, tucking the corners in nice and neat like I’ve seen Mum do. “Right,” I say, and it feels like an important, grown-up thing to say. I take the jeans from the cot and put them in the wash basket, then pick up the clean onesie from the changing table and open Elliott’s wardrobe. There are so many clothes with tags that he never got to wear. I wish he’d worn the fire engine T-shirt and the dungarees with a smiley sun on the front. They were my favorite. In the drawer underneath, I find a packet of bibs with the cardboard still attached and it reminds me of how he used to look like the Hulk when he tried to rip the bib off himself. It was so funny. He used to do this other thing as well, when Mum was getting him changed and he looked like he was pedaling a bike upside down. There were so many things he did that made us laugh. Nobody has laughed since. Not even when I tell my knock-knock jokes.
Later when I’m in my room reading Into the Wilderness, I hear Mum get up. She goes across the landing and then I hear this funny noise, like when you break an egg into a bowl. I’ve got to the bit where Alice, the main character, is lost in the woods and, as Mum starts crying and saying horrible words, I keep reading the same page, over and over again. I don’t understand why she’s upset, I made it so nice in Elliott’s room. I even opened the curtains and sprayed some of the vanilla body spray Nanny bought me for Christmas.
Eventually, Mum goes downstairs and starts clanking about. I don’t know what she’s doing. I don’t even care anymore. I think about running away like Alice does, but then I remember it’s not real life, it’s just a stupid book with talking trees and rabbits. If animals could talk, I would ask that wasp why he stung Elliott in the throat and killed him dead when he was only a baby.
Mum comes upstairs before bed with my milky bed drink and folds her body against my bed like a deck chair. She tells me she’s sorry, but when I let her cuddle me, she starts crying again. Only quiet crying, with her shoulders going up and down and little huh-huh-huh noises, but I don’t like it. Mums aren’t meant to cry all the time. She turns out the light when she leaves the room and I try, I try my best to stay awake for Dad, but I think I must have fallen asleep, because when I open my eyes again it’s dark and ghosts are crawling under the door.
My lamp won’t turn on. There’s a horrible smell that’s getting stronger and sticking in my throat. I’m trying to be strong. I get out of bed to show I’m not scared, but when I grab the door handle, I can’t help it, I scream.
It’s boiling hot.
36
“Where did you go last night?”
I told myself that wasn’t going to be the first question I asked. Even though I try to make it casual, pitching the words in a light, not-really-bothered tone while looking down at the coffee mug in my hand, somehow it still feels loaded.
“Travel Inn,” James says, too quickly. “God, those places are just as awful as I imagined.”
He launches into a description of trippy carpets, stains on the sheets and a kettle with what could either have been a pubic hair or a dried noodle stuck to the spout. James has always said he’d rather sleep in a pothole than a motel, and he gives so much detail—too much detail—which isn’t his style at all. He’s only interrupted when a waitress stops at our table and asks if we ordered two chicken arrabbiatas. No, we didn’t. She moves away and now James seems to run out of steam, the threads of his ready-prepared script floating out of sight.
I look up at the print of a Manhattan skyline hanging behind his head. The restaurant has recently been taken over by new management, and the extensive renovations seem to have ripped out its soul. “Are you going to come back and fix the hole?”
“Of course I am! Lu, I’m sorry, I really am. I know I haven’t been the best husband lately. I didn’t know how to deal with this whole thing—first with Eden, then with Mum. It’s all been so . . .” He drops his head, starts rubbing it furiously with his hands. A message pings on his phone, which is lying facedown beside his elbow. He doesn’t turn it over. He makes no effort to look at it at all.
“El—” I catch myself just in time. James won’t want to hear his name. He doesn’t understand. “Eden asked why there was a recipe for teriyaki salmon stuck to the wall.”
James smiles sadly.
“You scared me, James.” I move my finger around the rim of the mug. “And it’s not just the wall, there’s so much . . .” So much to say. Too much to put into words. “I feel like since Eden’s accident . . . actually not just since then. Before that. For a long time now, I’ve—”
“What?”
“I feel like I don’t know you. I don’t feel listened to; I don’t feel heard.”
“Who said that?” James looks over both my shoulders, cracks a smile. I don’t laugh. The smile drops and he reaches for my hands, suddenly solemn. “What happened last night, that wasn’t me, you know it wasn’t. I’m trying, Lu. Seriously. I know I deal with things by throwing myself into work and drinking, but I don’t know how to do things any differently. Eden doesn’t seem to want to know me anymore and Mum’s death isn’t an excuse, but it’s—fuck, it’s so hard . . .”
He stops talking as the waitress approaches again, this time with our paninis. There’s a seam of oil oozing onto the plate, and I’m not hungry anymore. I watch James as he unfolds the napkin from the cutlery and picks up the fork. I know he will leave the napkin on the table and eat a segment of tomato, before laying down his cutlery and eating the panini with his hands. These habits I’ve noticed over the years, they are so established, like patterns of water boring through rock after centuries of travel; the imprints of my husband. “Hey,” he says, reaching across the table for me when the tears start to swell, hot and fat, before my eyes. “Hey. What’s up? Come on, we’ll sort it. You didn’t used to be like this.”
No, I didn’t. I was fun, wasn’t I, in that way women are at the beginning: when I was happy to share sex and alcohol and laughter, before I had opinions, mountains of dirty washing and a rapidly declining sense of self. But he’s not just talking about that. He means I didn’t used to be so emotional, the kind of woman who’s insecure and needy, the kind of woman I never thought I’d be. And now he’s got me in checkmate: I can’t ask about Tia, or what I found on his computer, because then he’ll think that’s exactly the kind of woman I am.
James stabs the fork into his tomato, making a cluster of pips shoot out the other side. “Got a live one there,” says the old lady on the table beside us, and James laughs politely. Yeah well, I want to tell him. You didn’t used to put your fist through walls, either.
“We’ve both had a lot to deal with,” James acknowledges, when the woman gets up and disappears into the ladies’. “Nothing but honesty from now on, okay? And I promise I’ll do my bit.” He puts the fork down. “I did go to the doctor’s the other day when you phoned. Barney talked me into it.”
Here we go, then. I wait.
“I’ve been diagnosed with depression. Depression. Can you believe it?” James looks up. “I know, I know—don’t stare at me like that. They’ve given me the wacky pills. Mum would be horrified.”
“That’s all you went for? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He spears a second tomato. “You’ve had enough going on. You said you were going to see that therapist so I thought you didn’t need me to worry about as well.”
I can’t think straight. Have I got everything wrong? What about the Google search? I’m about to ask him about it, even though I don’t want to hear the truth—the truth or his denials—but now he’s talking again, asking me if I will please, please sort my own head out too. Now it’s my turn to laugh. “What if my head doesn’t need sorting out?”
“You hid my keys, Lu! You still haven’t got over Eli, fourteen years later, and now our daughter’s messed up from all the years you had it in for her. I admit, I might have buried my head in the sand, but all those things you accused her of doing, when all along . . .”
It was me. I force the panini into my mouth. The bread is hard and dry; it scratches against my gums.
James leans forward. “Come on, Lu. Please. Please, just stop with all this Eli stuff. Get to the doctor, get things sorted—not just for me, but for Eden—I want my daughter back. And you. I’m not going to lose . . .”
