My whole body is tensed, like a bow drawn, ready to fire. Every fibre of my being is on alert, not only trying to work out my next move but also listening for Henry, terrified that he’s going to wake and come into a scene he’ll never be able to leave behind him. I daren’t even think about the other possibility, the one where he never gets a chance to remember. With Henry asleep in his room, Sam has me trapped here as effectively as if he had tied me to the chair with iron chains.
Sam untangles his fingers from my hair and I struggle not to flinch as he runs his hand briefly down the side of my face.
‘I remember when we first got together,’ he says. ‘I used to wake in the night sometimes to find you staring at me like you were trying to imprint my face permanently in your brain. It was so easy, being with you, especially after the years before. I’d never been looked after the way you looked after me, cared for me. I was the centre of your world. And we were happy, weren’t we? But when Henry came along, I can’t pretend it didn’t change things. I got shifted out from the centre, replaced. I was left hovering somewhere around the edges, peering in. I loved Henry, of course I did, but I didn’t love what he did to you, to us.’
Tears start in my eyes for the first time tonight. I knew things had changed after Henry was born. Once the obligatory six weeks were up, Sam had expected things in the bedroom to return to normal. Except what he wanted to do wasn’t normal, even for us. It was as if someone had flicked a switch in his brain, and the games we had played before were no longer enough for him. It was as if the illusion of hurting me no longer satisfied him. He wanted to see real fear in my eyes.
‘Don’t blame Henry,’ I whisper.
‘I don’t,’ he says simply. ‘I blame you.’
I can’t stop shaking. I sit on my hands, unable to predict what they will do otherwise. I can’t scream because I might wake Henry, and even if I did, what would happen? Would anyone hear? What about silent Marnie upstairs? Would she call the police? Or simply pick up the remote control and turn up the TV?
Sam pushes back his chair and the chair leg screeches against the floor. I wince, listening desperately for any sound from Henry’s room. But there is nothing, only silence, as Sam gazes out of the French windows into the darkness.
‘Oh God, oh God.’ He beats his forehead gently against the glass. ‘Why did I have to mention Nathan?’
I am struck by a memory of another time: a time when Sam went too far. He had really hurt me and he knew it. He was standing just where he is now; penitent, begging me to forgive him. Of course I did. I didn’t know then who I would be without him; if I would even be anyone at all.
‘Just pretend you didn’t,’ I blurt. ‘I won’t say anything. Just go, please. I’ll never tell anyone, I swear. Please Sam. What about Henry?’
He turns to me with tears in his eyes.
‘I’ll look after Henry. I love him as much as you do. You don’t think I’d hurt him, do you?’ I don’t want to think so, but I don’t know; I don’t know anything now.
‘Henry needs me, Sam.’ I slide my shaking hands out from under me and grip the edge of the table. ‘Children need their mothers.’
‘He’ll be OK, like I was,’ he says, but there’s no feeling in his voice now. His eyes look out into the darkness where he can see nothing, and I know he is miles and years away, in that grotty little house with cigarette burns on the Formica kitchen table.
I think of how Henry wakes me up every morning by putting his face so close to mine that when I come to, all I can see are his eyes, blurred and out of focus, his eyelashes tickling mine and his hot breath on my face. Of how he gets into bed with me, pressing his small, warm body into mine, curling into me as if he would like to get back where he came from, inside my body. Me and Henry, we used to be one, I want to say to Sam. We may look like two, but really, we are one.
Sam walks slowly back around the table and sits down next to me, turning his chair so that we are knee to knee. He closes his eyes and reaches out to stroke my hair with first one hand and then the other. I begin to shake violently and saliva rushes to my mouth.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he says under his breath, eyes still closed. He puts his mouth to my hair and kisses it, breathing me in. I sit very still, my breath coming fast, feeling the blood flowing around my body, right down to my fingertips. His hands are running over my hair, smoothing it down, just as he used to as we lay in bed at night, me falling asleep to the soothing rhythm of his stroking. I should run, fight, do something, but I am practically catatonic with fear. The hideous shock of what is happening combined with the familiar feeling of his hands on me, gentle yet filled with terrifying intent, has paralysed me.
‘You have to be quiet, Louise, please, please be quiet,’ he murmurs into my hair, and I can feel him glancing anxiously towards the room where our son is sleeping peacefully.
His hands are moving lower now, his lips still pressed to my hair, his fingers curling gently around my neck. The strange torpor begins to lift, but it’s too late. I am already struggling to breathe, his fingers squeezing harder and harder. My shallow gasping breaths are the only things that break the silence that we are locked into by our love for Henry, our desire to protect him from this scene. I scrabble uselessly at his hands, trying to get between them and my neck but there’s no space, they’re closing in.
‘Shhh,’ he whispers into my hair. ‘Don’t wake Henry.’
I pull desperately at his fingers but he’s too strong, and I can feel myself fading, surrounded by the shadows of the other times I felt his hands around my neck, in our games. They were never this tight, though. I was never this close to darkness.
I can feel the chair solid beneath me, just as it was this morning when I ate my breakfast here in this room. The things are still there on the side, unwashed: two plates coated in toast crumbs; one cup, half an inch of cold tea in the bottom; a glass filmy with sticky fingerprints, just a dribble of apple juice remaining. Are they going to be the last things I see?
I can’t pull his hands from my neck so I stop trying, instead flailing wildly around trying to find something, anything that I can use to get him away from me. It’s getting harder and harder to get any air into my lungs, worse each time I try. I’m going, I can feel it; it won’t be long now. My vision starts to blur around the edges and the kitchen where I sit with Henry each night as he tells me about his day swims in front of my eyes, melting into a haze of pain and fear. Oh Henry. My hand hits the kitchen worktop beside me and I grope around, unseeing, hoping to find something I can use to hit him, or at least shock him into releasing me, but there’s nothing there, my hand is grasping thin air.
‘Shhh,’ whispers Sam again, his lips on my ear now, caressing it gently. I try to mouth ‘please’ but nothing comes out and he’s not looking at me anyway; he’s lost in a world where what he’s doing is OK, just one of our games, his way of showing his love for me.
‘It’s OK, Louise, just be quiet, shhh. Everything’s going to be OK.’
But I have spent too long being quiet. Too long pretending everything is OK, repainting the last few years of our marriage in bright colours. As the edges of the kitchen cupboards bleed into the ceiling and blackness closes in, it no longer matters if Henry wakes up. What matters is staying alive. With everything in me I kick out, but there’s nothing there. I’m kicking uselessly into space. I try again and this time my foot catches a chair leg. I hook my foot under the seat and thrust my leg up as hard as I can. There is an almighty clatter as the chair crashes to the floor.
Sam’s hold around my neck loosens and as his face looms back into focus I can see panic in his eyes. For a few seconds we are both suspended in time, and then a small voice calls from the bedroom.
‘Mummy?’
Summoning every ounce of strength I can muster, I jump up from my chair, pushing Sam’s hands away. I have a sense of his arms falling slackly to his sides as I run into Henry’s room, slamming the door shut behind me and sinking to the floor with my back against it, knees to my chest.
‘It’s OK, H, go back to sleep,’ I whisper across the room, but his eyes are already closed, the noise of the chair having woken him only briefly.
I can hear Sam’s footsteps padding down the hall and I close my eyes, feeling only the hard contours of the door against my back and the soft weave of the blue carpet beneath my fingers. I breathe in the smell of Henry’s room: washing powder, Play-Doh and the faint but unmistakeable scent of Henry himself. I’ve been here in this room so many times in the dark like this, inching away from the cot or the bed, desperate not to make even the tiniest noise that would wake Henry and mean I had to start the whole settling him to sleep process again. I think of the hours I spent sitting beside him with my hand on his back, getting colder and colder, terrified that removing my hand was going to cause him to shift and start crying. That seems like another life now, a life where a woman I don’t recognise soothed her child to sleep and then climbed back into bed into the warm embrace of her loving husband. I want more than anything now to go to Henry, to hold him, but I daren’t leave the door, straining against it, ready to push with all my strength.
The footsteps stop and I feel a pressure against my back as Sam pushes gently at the door. I brace myself, feet flat to the floor and lean back, eyes closed, the taste of saltwater in my mouth from the tears rolling unchecked down my cheeks. Sam’s feet cast a shadow under the crack of the door against the glow of Henry’s nightlight.
‘Please Sam,’ I say, my voice croaky and unfamiliar. The pressure lessens, but the shadow remains.
‘Please don’t do this. You love Henry, I know you do.’ I keep my voice low, my eyes on the small, sleeping figure on the bed across the room, alert for any sign that he is waking.
‘I know how much it kills you to be away from him, even for a week. And he loves you. He loves the good in you, like I did. Like I do. Think of what it was like for you, growing up without your mum.’ Desperation has made me daring. Sam never talks about the missing years where he didn’t see or hear from his mother. ‘Don’t make that Henry’s life too. Don’t let him grow up without me. He trusts you, Sam. Think of the way he looks at you, the way he slips his hand into yours when you’re walking down the street together. The way he doesn’t just wrap his arms around you when you pick him up, but his legs too.’
I need to throw everything I can at this.
‘And what about Daisy, and Catherine? I know you love them too. Don’t do this to them. Don’t let Daisy’s father be this person. Please, Sam, please…’ My voice gives way, no more than a rasp now, my throat burning.
I sit there in silence as the seconds pass. After a minute, maybe two, the shadow under the door disappears and again I hear footsteps, but I can’t work out which way they are going. Has Sam gone back to the kitchen or towards the front door? I daren’t open the door to see, daren’t move from my position on the floor, petrified that at any moment I will feel the slow press of the door against my back, and there will be nothing I can do. So instead I sit there motionless and shivering as hour after hour passes, leaning against the door, my back throbbing with pain, occasionally uncurling a leg to stretch away the stiffness. I once fell asleep on the floor in this room when Henry was a baby. At the time he’d never slept longer than two hours at a stretch, but that night he slept from midnight until 5am, at which time I jerked awake in a panic, frozen and stiff, to find that he had rolled onto his front for the first time ever. With his face turned away from me, all I could see was a bundle of blankets in the gloom and I was utterly convinced for a few seconds that he had stopped breathing, smothered to death while I lay beside him.
Tonight though, there will be no sleep. I keep my silent vigil until the grey morning light begins to seep under Henry’s train-patterned curtains and I see him stirring. We can’t hide in here for ever, so I stand up and go over to the bed, lie down next to him, feeling the warm, solid mass of him in my arms.
‘Is it breakfast time?’ he says sleepily, curling his arm around my neck.
‘Yes. Yes, it is. Jam toast?’ I ask, in as normal a voice as I can muster, every word like swallowing broken glass. ‘Shall we have it in your bed, as a special treat?’
He smiles widely and releases me, starting to arrange his cuddly toys in preparation for breakfast. I stand up and walk towards the door. I pause with my hand on the handle, wondering what awaits me on the other side, whether this is the moment where Henry’s life is changed for ever, irrevocably ruined. Very slowly I push the door open into the silence and peer to my left down the hall in the half-light. The kitchen door is slightly ajar. I look right, towards the front door, which is closed. The flat looks the same, yet it feels entirely different. It’s no longer safe, no longer my home. I don’t know what’s lurking around the corners, hiding in the shadows.
I walk down the corridor, hesitating just before I reach the sitting-room door. Taking a deep breath, I swing around through the doorway. It’s empty, exactly as I left it. I do the same with my bedroom, the pristine still-made bed irrefutable evidence that last night really happened. Next is the bathroom: also empty. From the doorway I can see my face in the bathroom cabinet mirror. My skin is sallow and there are dark shadows under my eyes, which are spidered with red. Something moves behind me and I spin round, my heart hammering, but there’s nothing there: just the flickering of the sunlight through the bathroom blind reflected on the wall behind me.
I tiptoe down the hall towards the kitchen. My breathing is laboured and I wonder what damage has been done as I try to inhale and exhale as quietly as I can. As I reach out to open the kitchen door a sudden noise makes me gasp and jump back, but seconds later I recognise it as the sound of the wisteria rattling against the French windows in a gust of wind. With a surge of bravery I thrust the door open. The wine bottle and two glasses sit abandoned on the table, and the chair I kicked still lies on its side on the floor. In the dawn light, the room is full of shadows, but Sam has gone.
I pick up the chair with shaking hands and pour the wine from the glasses down the sink. As I do so, I hear a noise coming from the hallway. Oh God, no. I dart out, every inch of me in fight mode, but it’s just Henry coming out of his room and heading for the bathroom. I breathe deeply, gathering myself; then while he’s in there, hurry to the front door and double lock it, putting the chain on for good measure.
Back in the kitchen, I fill the kettle, take bread from the breadbin and put it in the toaster; assemble butter and jam, plate and knife, all the while staring at my hands as if they belong to someone else.
When Henry’s toast is ready, I take it along with my phone and a cup of tea into his room. I climb into bed beside him, careful not to disturb the breakfasting bears.
‘Thank you, Mummy,’ Henry says with his customary graveness.
‘You’re welcome,’ I say, sipping my tea and pulling him close. I am thankful beyond measure that he has no idea what happened here last night, but his innocence, his blind faith in the happiness of his own life, and mine, breaks my heart this morning.
I tap away at my phone, stumbling over the keys, as he painstakingly tears his toast into small pieces, giving one to each bear. A few minutes later my phone buzzes, and even though I know Bridget won’t be messaging me any more, my stomach lurches in response.
Twenty minutes later, as I stand at the sink rinsing toast crumbs from tiny plastic plates, the doorbell rings. I advance slowly up the hall, wiping my hands on a tea towel.
‘Who is it?’ I say with difficulty, my voice hoarse.
‘It’s me,’ she calls.
I stumble to the door, fumbling with the chain, my fingers slipping on the locks. Finally I get it open and there is Polly, her hair wild and unbrushed, still in her pyjamas with her oversized Puffa coat over the top. She takes in the pallor of my skin, my bloodshot eyes, the faint marks on the sides of my neck.
‘Oh my God,’ she says, and takes me in her arms. My legs give way beneath me and I crumple into her, sobbing with relief, finally able to let go.