LISTEN
THE night I heard what Peter had done, we fought. We did what we had always done. We got angry, I perched on the single stool at the end of the island in the kitchen and then I cried. He rubbed my back and apologised.
A week later I screamed. It was a Tuesday, I was alone in our house and I had just made myself my mid-morning cappuccino with lactose-free milk. I took a sip and noticed for the first time that it was a watery, sour drink. I had spent the week crying. It took those first seven days for my auto-response of the fight, cry, allow-myself-to-be-comforted to reveal itself as faulty. It offered no relief whatsoever. Something was dying inside me, but it was something I knew I had never wanted, and so I welcomed the death and I could see there would be no way back. I accepted the facts of what Peter had done immediately, and I think that is the trick. I did not look back. We cannot live our lives again. If we were hoodwinked for twenty years, we were hoodwinked for twenty years, and the moment a woman realises that, it can be beautiful too, because life is shot through with beauty, and in the horror of loss, we are nonetheless alive.
That week, as I processed the truth, I kept noticing that I didn’t like the things I had collected around me. This surprised me, it was as if I had woken up in someone else’s life and I was confused by this indecisive, joyless woman that I was. The little systems I had in place to carry me through the day seemed weightless and strange. I put the cappuccino down beside the Nespresso coffee machine, took the keys and left the house. I walked to the lake I can see from our bedroom window, I walked to the water that I can see most mornings when I sit up in bed. The treelined path was muddy and relief came as I sunk my white trainers into the soft earth. Half way round, I stopped and raised my head to the sky. I breathed in and I let out a sound.
My scream was so loud and long that I hit blue. I’d never felt blue inside me before, I only knew it as the colour of sky and oceans and then in things like the Blue Cross, which I supported ever since the dog was killed on the road, and my daughter’s blue Leaving Ball dress. I was alone, outside. I felt fearless afterwards, as if I had been split open and something had been let out. This was a new feeling, but it was also as if I knew the fearlessness from a long, long time before, I know it sounds crazy, but I mean from before I was alive.
That day I stopped offering my daughter, Amy, lifts and stopped cooking for the three of us. I lost interest in food. I stopped drinking watery lactose-free cappuccinos. I had been overweight for twenty years and I suddenly felt like the answer was simple: don’t eat when you are not hungry. I ignored breakfast. I had never really needed it.
For Amy, the fact that I was suddenly disinterested in the kitchen amounted to something unnatural. I was abandoning her before she got round to abandoning me. A few days after the scream, she told me she was worried because I was becoming ‘detached’.
‘You are nineteen. I love you,’ I said as a reply.
‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘It’s like you don’t give a shit about anything anymore – well, anything but yourself. You should go and see someone,’ she said.
I didn’t tell her about the blue. There had been a week of fighting and crying between Peter and then it stopped. That is all she could see. I began making plans. I wanted her to see that. The only way I can explain it is that I wanted to hurt her a little; I was ready to watch her from a distance. I was no longer scared of finding out the things I didn’t know. Perhaps I understood I could never protect her from what happened to me, so I wanted to sense who she was becoming.
I saw she too, was struggling, she was nineteen but she had had no initiation into life. I had not been able to offer her the pattern of it because it is only happening to me now. I asked about a trip to language school France which she had planned for the summer.
‘How’s the sorting going for Paris?’ I asked. Before the scream I would have asked her what I could do to help.
‘Usual.’ Her head was in the fridge, checking the date on a tub of hummus. It was a distraction in her that bothered me, as if her going was tangential somehow to her life.
‘The deposit was €500.’
‘I know mum.’
‘You’re so lucky to get to spend the summer in Paris.’ She made a sound, a clipped affirmation. ‘Who are you going for?’ I pressed.
‘What?’
‘Who cares if you go to Paris? If you don’t want to go, why are you going?’
‘It’s something to do.’ She was looking at me now. ‘Mum, what is your problem?’
I wasn’t even angry then. She was silent. She cocked her head to the side and looked at me through the corner of her eye. It was a look of disbelief. But it didn’t affect me. It was as if I had been floating down a river with her and now I was out of the water and on the banks and I could see it all. Maybe she sensed that I’d left her in the water.
‘Right,’ she said and walked out. Within three weeks I was gone from the house.
Peter was always a brilliant father. Amy had been a surprise and he fell desperately and immediately in love with the pea sized life in my body. I didn’t. After the birth I felt as if I had been in a car crash and in the first few we​eks even changing Amy’s nappy seemed like a Himalayan task. Peter was working very long hours but he did the night feeds so I could sleep. I’ll never forget that. He stood with Amy at night, feeding her my bottled breast milk. He loved it. He spoke to me about the light outside and the secret life of the night. He wanted me to smile. I was tired all the time. I suppose his generosity of spirit attracted me to him in the first place.
Peter and I minded and tended each other like fires for twenty years. He was a good husband. He was tall and handsome, he has a natural charisma. At work he was known as a man capable of taking well-calculated risks; he made things happen. He was a cool chopped apple under an August sky type of good for our whole lives. But when I screamed that disappeared for a while. I see it again now, although he is everything now, black ice and apple under the sky. I have to look at him from a distance and it has brought out something new in me, a feeling of awe and peace – I think it is joy.
Two nights after I screamed, nine days after I found out what Peter had done, he came into the dining room. I am giving you days, two nights, nine days, because time is important to me now, no matter what eternity I find peace in. We are here, aging, falling, opening, closing, we are on our way. This is a true fact. When he came into the dining room, I was researching coach trips around America. We had stopped speaking about America soon after Amy was born and we moved to Birmingham. We avoided films about New York and I lost contact with my friends who studied graphic design and moved there. The whole subject of me and America was in solitary confinement. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of time.
Peter came up behind me and rubbed my shoulders. I stiffened under his touch. I sensed he was terrified and that soothed me and I loosened.
‘Anna, what can I do for you?’ he said.
‘I’m fine, how was your day?’
‘Good… good.’ He kept digging his thumbs into my shoulders, seconds were entombed. ‘Are you hungry, sweetheart?’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to head out and get some food, are you sure?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Whatever you think Anna. So long as you’re happy.’
He gave my shoulders a final squeeze and left the room. I ticked off the familiar sounds of his shoes on our Victorian tiles, the jangle of keys and the door slam. Those moves, from the key hooks to the door, take about eight seconds. The sounds ran cold through my body. Whatever you think Anna. So long as you’re happy.
The next night, three days after I screamed, he asked me if I wanted to go to a Bring the Wife evening in London that was coming up. It might seem strange that I hadn’t left him, gone, but after the scream all the details around me became smaller, we were communicating but I was free of him. He had no idea how to deal with my peace. He could not work out if we were OK or not. I did not care what he thought. I could see he was trying to hold onto the life he had built. But our foundations were gone, and he also knew that, his goodness told him that. He asked me gently if I could come to London for the thing and I said I didn’t fancy it. He shook his head but said nothing. I was finally disappearing. I didn’t want to fight, I wanted to move into the space I could see, into blue.
I told Peter that I had my sights set on New York on our very first date, 21 years ago. We were having pizza near his flat in Wimbledon.
‘I have a five-year plan,’ I said.
The half metre pizza was on a little stand in the middle of the table and we were speaking across the top of it. He said five-year plans were very Stalin of me and I laughed. ‘I give myself five years to have my own business in the Big Apple.’ AnGraphica Designs, that was going to be the name of it.
He raised his eyebrows. He was impressed, I could tell that. He said he loved me very soon after that date. He said he loved everything about me, how I slid pizza off the stand, how I laughed, my ambition and how I made him feel. He said he could see that I love loving. I have found a prayer which I say every day now, about seeking to love rather than to be loved. I should say that what I have found out has not made me sceptical about love. It has made me want to love more. I mean, my experience of love is more profound. I give myself the coffee that gives me pleasure as an act of love. I do not want to rattle around in time. In this prayer there is a line about seeking to forgive more than be forgiven. I have done that now. I have forgiven, and I am strong and hungry for experiencing new ways to love.
Soon after we met, Peter and I were obsessed with each other. We did the showers and the nakedness and the restaurant disabled toilet sex, we dressed up, slouched around, I gained a little weight, we drank, I ran with him sometimes. He would leave presents at the door of my flat in Streatham; flowers, and letters. I told him that when I first bit into a jack fruit I couldn’t believe how delicious it was. The next day he left one outside my door. I doted on him. He met my friends, I met his, I told him all my ideas and he listened and gave me others. He started a job in HSBC. He spoke to me about his day, the people in the office, how he solved problems, and then he asked me what he should do with the problems he couldn’t solve.
We leant into a life. It was a life perhaps best told in the way we came to be in bed at night. Our lamps; the rhythm of our conversation. We were sparer with each other the closer we got until, in bed, we only asked and gave what was essential, what we needed. We made love when we had sex. I know we were both able to serve each other like that, with scarcity and absoluteness in that realm. That was total. But sex allows you to be selfish, Peter could give me space only when we were in each other’s arms. Then we had everything, I could say anything, share anything. I know now there is a selfishness at the heart of Peter that ate him up. I cannot ever imagine robbing his dream like he robbed mine. But he was desperate. Desperate people do terrible things. I still love Peter, but I don’t like being near him.
The finding out began when he lifted his head from a book he was balancing on his thighs one night and said Alan and his family had moved up to Birmingham from London and Alan’s wife, Catherine, was looking for stuff to do. Alan worked with Peter at the bank.
‘I have her number,’ he said. He seemed annoyed.
I had seen Catherine a few times at Bring the Wife events over the years, but we had barely spoken. Still, I rang her the next day and asked her if she’d like to come along to my book group the following night, and gave her my sister’s address.
When I arrived they were chatting around a table with the usual aperitivi of wine, parma ham, sundried tomatoes, celery and hummus. Catherine was already nestled in amongst them. I had been on a constant diet for twenty years and I was clutching a bunch of celery.
Jen, my sister, hugged me and said they were introducing Catherine to the world of Malbec and Milton.
Catherine was sitting between the two other women, Florence and Laura.
‘Honestly, you would have thought I was heading to Vegas this evening, the way my husband was carrying on.’ Catherine shook her head. ‘He told me to go out and make friends, but tonight that means has to collect our son from football at eight thirty. He’ll have to go straight from the station. It’s as if I’ve asked him to hit his mother.’
‘You just have to train him to understand that you-time is sacred. It’s great that you made it,’ I said. We smiled at each other.
‘Hear, hear,’ Jen raised her glass. I put the celery in the middle of the table.
‘If Dave ever tried to stop me doing anything, I’d leave him,’ said Laura.
‘Poor Dave,’ Jen said.
‘Poor nothing.’ Laura took a swig of wine.
‘Well I admire you Laura,’ said Catherine. She picked up a sundried tomato and slipped it into her mouth.
I poured myself a glass of wine.
‘It’s our other halves that get it easy,’ Florence said. She is the wife of a managing director in Santander and gave up her job in the bank to mind the kids. She seems happy though. ‘They think they are doing all the hard work, but I swear if Luke did a day in my life he would crack up.’
We were listening to a Spanish guitar music which makes me remember this scene as urgent and full of momentum. But we had said these things so many times before; that the men didn’t understand how hard we had it. But in some way we – the women - could never put a finger on what made us so angry. We loved these people we shared our life with and they were doing their best. We couldn’t place our anger. We felt guilty about it. There was a trick we couldn’t name. I realise now, I have got to name mine.
Catherine was wearing a black polo neck and a necklace with a big blue shell on a snake-like chain. A thick silver chain. I liked it. She sat among us as if she had always been there. She was very attractive. Her movements seemed to overshadow everything she said so it was hard to concentrate on what she was actually saying. I got a feeling from her before she said the words she said. I also recognised her immediately as something important.
‘I’ll never forget what Alan told me about one of the guys in London,’ Catherine was shaking her head in disbelief. ‘This was years and years ago, but the story stuck with me. This guy was due to transfer to New York for the wife’s work, but he changed his mind - just didn’t want to go. He liked his job in London or whatever, and was due for a promotion.’ She scratched the upper part of one arm slowly. ‘His wife was pregnant at the time and he just hid her passport. Didn’t discuss it with her. Just, whoop,’ she flicked her wrist as if she were throwing a passport over her shoulder. ‘He got pissed one night and told Alan.’
Jen said afterwards that she looked straight at me and could tell it hadn’t clicked. I was shaking my head in sympathy for the poor woman in the story.
‘Alan said he felt sorry for him. Unbelievable,’ Catherine said. I was shaking my head looking at her and she was looking at me. ‘I know.’ she said slowly and raised her perfect eyebrows. And then it happened.
‘Peter.’ This was my first blue, it was different to my words before. ‘Peter.’ I felt a delicious wave of pain.
I knew it was us because a haunting had lifted as I looked at this woman and now she said the words that explained it. I felt pain. But it was a good pain, like the slice that releases the pressure of an abscess.
‘Anna?’ The light caught the shell around Catherine’s neck. ‘Wait, Anna, I don’t even know if that story is true.’ But Catherine knew it was true, and I could see she had suddenly realised it was Peter and I too.
I walked to the door. Jen followed. Laura, Florence and Catherine hovered at the door of the kitchen. I lifted my coat from the peg. They were saying things to me and I was making smiles and saying I was ok. I knew how to do that so well.
‘I’ll ask him,’ I said for everyone.
‘Anna, stay, wait,’ Jen held my arm. I didn’t wait. I went home.
I moved in with Peter twenty years ago, six months before I planned to leave for New York. I had let my flat go early so that I could save for the move.
Then I got pregnant. I was devastated and wanted to terminate the pregnancy. Peter didn’t. He said he would come with me straight away so we could have the baby. He had planned to come out eventually, but now he was ready to come straight away. He would request a transfer. He said he loved me and the life that was possible together. I was terrified but I could see us doing it. I loved him and I began to see this as a wonderful chance. We would live in New York and start a family, I would dedicate myself to building the business. I could see it. There are some visions we can see so clearly it is as if they are cut from the rock of the earth itself. I accepted what happened and his love. I delayed my flight as he began to prepare to make the move at the same time as me.
Peter booked the flights and I remember I had my passport details in my diary, so I read them out him. He asked me that day where my passport was and I said I wasn’t sure. That I thought I had put it in a folder in a box in the bedroom. I knew it was there in one of the folders.
A few weeks before we were due to go I couldn’t find it. As our searches became more and more frantic, Peter looked for later flights to give us time to re-apply for a new one. I became desperate. I was also sure the passport was in the house. We booked two flights for two weeks later. We couldn’t leave it any later given the pregnancy.
The British Embassy wasn’t far from the bank and Peter went whenever he could to try and speed up the process. Each time he came back unsuccessful my heart dropped and I cried and he hugged me and told me everything would be ok. It was the height of summer and there were thousands of urgent applications, which meant Peter always came back unsuccessful. I understood. But I was sure the passport was among my things. I turned the house upside down. We missed the second set of flights. I told him to go anyway, to begin his new job on the transfer date he had been given and he could fly back when the baby was born and we could then we could move together.
But he couldn’t bear to leave me pregnant and alone in London and risk missing the birth. His office agreed to delay his transfer.
‘America is your dream,’ he said as I rested my head on his shoulder. ‘I just can’t go over there and begin without you.’
I remember his gentle kisses. So many tender kisses. I was so grateful to have his love because the pain of letting this chance slip felt unbearable. ‘You will do this, we will go to America, I promise,’ he said.
It was there then, the first hum of blue, it was there all along, like a ghost. Something seemed incomprehensible, something about that situation didn’t seem real to me. It was a glimpse into another space, fortressed by pain.
Six months after Amy was born we moved to Birmingham. On the morning the sale was agreed, Peter said that as soon as we were ready to go to New York, we would go. I actually think he meant it. He said the house wouldn’t be an anchor, but I was still overwhelmed by the thought of a trip to Tesco. The months after the birth in London were some of the hardest in my life. I could barely function. I found it hard to love the child, I no longer knew who I was. I was lost.
I screamed twenty years after two empty seats flew over the Atlantic. From the night we missed the second set of flights, I have had an urge to scream. I have been scared of an unnameable thing, something essential and autonomous at my core, beyond reasons and explanations. I have been scared of the part of me that sensed an unnameable darkness. Instead of becoming conscious of this thing, this darkness, I began to talk about the challenges of an unexpected pregnancy, I apologised in confusion at how I couldn’t get my shit together to change Amy’s nappy, I felt pathetic and undisciplined hauling around baby weight for two decades. At times I was so grateful for Peter’s love and physical attention, I would cry when we made love. I learnt to live with a deep, deep unease. I wanted to scream but it felt selfish. It seemed too private and too public.
Peter said he hid my passport because he loved the way we were in London; he said he was up for a promotion at work; he said he thought it was important that my sisters and my mother were close when Amy was born. He said he hid my passport because he knew no argument would have stopped me from going to New York and he was scared things would fall apart. He said he couldn’t see it. He said he wasn’t sure I would be able to handle the child alone. He said America was expensive and that he never intended to stop me from going altogether. He said he was scared. Scared that things would fall apart. We had a rhythm and he wanted to keep it. But it was an order, his order. There is no fixed order except love.
Catherine called me a few days afterwards, terrified, apologetic. She said she had no idea that it had been Peter, that the story had just slipped out. I believe her. It is a story you would remember, it was a story that might come up if a group of women are complaining about the dynamics of their relationships. Peter called Catherine a bitch. I had never heard him speak like that. But when he did I felt relief, it gave me permission, it gave flow to something that had been building in me for twenty years. There was a part of him that I had not been able to see.
I imagine some people never glimpse the entirety of their power because we don’t face it unless we have to. We logic away the shadows and hunches and fear or we keep them in, hide them away. But they are there. And in darkness nothing is transformed. The incredible thing is that I got to give the shadows back to the world, I let them go and I am once again filling with light. I don’t dream of living in New York, I cannot say that I have been given the chance to go now… that moment has passed. But I have the truth back. I was given this second chance. Maybe there is only loss for you to look at here, but inside I feel choirs of angels. We are constantly being directed by our gut, god, something, and I know now that is real. When darkness falls, ask yourself if there might have been a trick. See what you must love and where you must go anyway, despite, despite, despite.