Tom isn’t home when Tom should be home and that’s making me anxious.
I am in a yoga pose in our living room. I have one hand on my heart, one hand on my baby, and I would be in total peace if I couldn’t hear the sound of the number thirty-eight bus pulling in at the stop outside – and bloody Harriet, of course, whistling and talking to somebody next door. I exhale slowly, counting to eight.
But then something stops me.
Suddenly, I can’t breathe slowly any more.
Suddenly, I am not at any sort of peace.
Suddenly, I feel sick.
I press my ear against the wall and I know who the other voice that’s talking to Harriet through the wall belongs to.
He comes home twenty minutes later.
‘Sorry,’ Tom says, pale as he walks through the door. ‘We got delayed. I accidentally told Dan about the baby and he bought some champagne. It felt rude to leave before the bottle was finished.’
Luckily, I have my back to him as I sit on my yoga mat. He cannot see my face. Or my now ineffectual breathing. Lies, I think. I’ve suspected them before but this time, I know that what you are telling me is a lie.
There are no long exhales, when you are thinking the thoughts that I am thinking. Because what reason would Tom have to be at Harriet’s that he couldn’t tell me about? Other than he is having an affair with her. Or have I gone genuinely crazy?
I stay silent then, wait for Tom to speak more to see where these lies go.
But that’s as much as he can be bothered with.
‘I’m going to jump in the shower,’ he says.
I hear the water running and the door close behind him, and I take my hands away from my hammering heart, from my oblivious baby.
Only three more weeks until our scan and then the hope had been that we could begin the next stage of moving on. Buy weird toy sheep that keep children asleep. Book courses. Learn to be ourselves again too, without injections and denials and suspicions. But I know that voice. I wouldn’t get that voice wrong.
And my heart, now, won’t slow down. It won’t slow down even though I am panicking about what this surge of anxiety will do to the baby; even though I am willing my body to calm.
Lately, Tom and I have been optimistic and celebratory, giddy with the newness of all this and with our secret. We have been getting our closeness back, slowly.
But, really, did I ever leave the other stuff behind? That feeling that someone had been in the flat, the condoms, the underwear and Tom, behaving just oddly enough to mean that niggle about his fidelity felt valid. To mean that I think about those emails from Rachel sometimes and I can’t quite file them away as nothing. Ask yourself, she said, and I do, all the time. Especially when I hear my boyfriend’s voice next door speaking to our pretty neighbour, at the same time that he tells me that he is in the pub with a friend celebrating my pregnancy.
As Tom gets out of the shower, we hear the sound of glass hitting the wall on Harriet’s side. It’s loud. We both look at the wall, but neither of us acknowledges what has happened. What is going on here, Tom? What the hell is going on here?