She was sitting in the gallery at the Sobell Centre watching the tail end of Sadie’s gymnastic class the following Saturday when her phone pinged in her pocket.
Callum, who had just returned with Tom from the soft-play area, was sitting on the bench beside her, his cheeks red with heat, his fringe plastered to his head. Reaching into her coat, Gabriela breathed in the signature scent of stale foam and ancient leather on his skin, carried over from the hour he’d just spent happily careering in and out of a pit of plastic balls encrusted with other children’s saliva, heaving his tiny body up and down miniature slides, building precarious towers out of brightly coloured geometric shapes.
Tom, who had lost this week’s argument as to which one of them would accompany their son while the other parent got to hang out on the seats outside the gymnastics area, keeping a vague eye on Sadie, was queuing for a drink. From this distance, he smiled sardonically at her, miming the process of hanging himself with an imaginary noose as she reached into her pocket, mouthing for him to get her something.
‘G and T?’ he replied, eyeing up a fridge stocked with Ribena and Capri Sun.
She rolled her eyes amusedly, playing along with this well-worn routine of his, before pulling out her phone and instantly feeling the seat beneath her drop several feet.
The number was unrecognisable but the source of the message was instantly clear:
Gabriela. Sorry I haven’t been in touch. How are you?
She must have unconsciously made a sound or a sudden movement because Callum looked up. ‘Mama, what’s the matter?’
‘I’m afraid there was no Bombay Sapphire, so you’ll have to make do with lukewarm Diet Coke.’
Tom’s voice overlaid Callum’s and she jumped, dropping her phone under the seat in front of hers.
‘Shit,’ she muttered under her breath.
‘I’ll get it,’ Tom said, but before he could lean in Gabriela leapt from her seat, kicking the phone away from his hand.
‘Whoa,’ he said, pulling himself upright, searching her face.
‘Sorry,’ she placated him, leaning forward, struggling to play down her jitteriness as she stuffed the phone into her pocket.
Leaning in conspiratorially, she whispered, ‘Not that I was looking at presents for your birthday next week and didn’t want you to see or anything …’
A thought moved across his face as he looked at her, waiting for a moment before passing her drink over.
‘Right,’ he said with a tone that unnerved her.
She sipped quickly from the can and the force of the bubbles gushed up her nose, causing the liquid to rise in her throat.
‘Jesus, are you drunk or something?’ he asked as she clapped her hand over her mouth, spilling her drink over her sweatshirt in the process.
‘Shit,’ she said again, mouthing sorry to Callum when he looked up at her, signalling his disapproval at her use of a prohibited word.
‘I’m just going to go to the loo, try and wash this off,’ she said, standing unsteadily. She imagined herself under surveillance as she moved through the leisure centre, the echoes of balls slamming in the distance, children screaming in ecstasy and frustration.
There was an overpowering smell of disinfectant as she slid the lock of the cubicle door closed and settled herself on the lid of the toilet seat. Reading the message again, a ripple of apprehension shivered over her. How could she not remember giving him her number? Racking her brain for a memory she knew she would never have misplaced, for a moment she wondered if he could have taken it without her knowing. Had he snatched her phone from the table when she went to the bathroom and dialled his number from it, waiting for her own number to flash on his screen before saving it to his contacts list and returning her handset? He couldn’t have, because she had taken it with her, every time. Hadn’t she? She wasn’t so removed from reality that she would risk Tom calling and Ivan thinking to answer the call.
And then she remembered. As they bustled into the back of the taxi on the way from the bar to the restaurant, the panicked moment when she felt for her phone and found it wasn’t in her bag. Convinced that she must have left it at Davy’s, she asked Ivan for his phone to call hers, and when it rang it was in her coat pocket, exactly where she had left it. Without even realising it, she had given him her number, stored casually in his recent calls list.
Had he known in that moment that he had it? she wondered, ignoring the thrill that rushed through her. Had he intended all along to make this more than a one-off event? What had he thought when he looked at her?
It was there, in the taxi, that he had wrapped his arm around her for the first and only time that evening, and, for those moments as they swept through London, the rain against the window restricting the outside world to nothing more than murmurs of light against black, she allowed herself to rest against him.
Her fingers hovered between Reply and Delete until she heard Sadie’s voice from the other side of the cubicle door. ‘Mum?’
She stood and flushed the toilet. ‘Hey, Sadie. You all finished?’
‘Yeah, Dad told me to tell you to hurry up. We’re going to get pizza.’
‘OK, darling.’ She switched her phone off and stuffed it in her back pocket. ‘I’m coming right now.’
‘What were you thinking for dinner?’ she asked once they were back at home, following a brief post-lunch trip to the playground on the Heath where they’d watched the kids hurtling across the same obstacles they’d been tackling since they were toddlers.
‘I wasn’t – I’m not that hungry, we just had lunch.’
She paused, but already Tom’s reaction rattled inside her, vibrating so that there was nowhere for it to go except outwards; it was as if they had passed through some invisible door in their relationship so that any respect she might once have held for the notion of treating each conversation with Tom, each interaction, in isolation, had been permanently lost. Now and seemingly for evermore, every exchange between them was a continuation of a previous one; every syllable he uttered that irked her simply the next instalment in an ongoing dialogue designed in a way that seemed it would never end.
She felt herself lurch from zero to ninety in a single sentence, though nothing was any different to how it had always been; Tom ordering twice as much as everyone else, merrily pulling out the joint card only she ever paid into when the waitress arrived.
‘Yes, Tom, but the children need to eat three times a day, if you hadn’t noticed. Anyway, no one else ate quite as much as you …’
‘All right, I didn’t realise we were on rations …’
‘There’s nothing in the fridge,’ she continued, slamming the door shut with unnecessary force.
‘All right, Gabriela. Well, one of us can go to the shop.’
‘One of us?’ she replied. Where was this rage coming from? And yet, she felt justified in her frustration. All week, Tom stayed at home, picking up bits of work here and there as he fancied, the time between dropping the kids off and picking them up completely his own, his mind free from the constant threats that rotated in hers, the tornado of questions Tom never thought to ask let alone answer, and he couldn’t even manage to stay on top of the occasional domestic task that would otherwise inevitably fall to her. How could it be she who paid the bills and yet it was still her job to remember to stock up on food as well?
‘I’m sorry, Gabriela. Are you insinuating I don’t do my fair share?’
‘I’m not insinuating anything, Tom. I am simply saying it’s nearly four o’clock and in an hour or so the kids will need to eat again, and there is no food in the fridge.’
‘And that’s my fault, is it? Do you have any idea—’
‘You know what? I don’t need another argument with you.’
She walked out, ignoring the sound of him calling after her as she moved up the stairs to the bathroom.
But despite what she’d told him, the truth was she did need an argument. Anything to make her feel like it wasn’t her fault, all of this; anything to alleviate the sense of shame that was creeping up, pushing through the cracks in the doorframe as she moved into the bedroom and slammed the door, picking up a pillow and screaming into it until her throat burned.