I know shame cannot be a vehicle for change. I should sit David down and say, ‘I’m not angry, I’m disappointed,’ like I would with a student who’d messed up. But this isn’t true. I’m so angry I want to spit at him. I want to pull a knife from the kitchen drawer and stab him repeatedly. I want to humiliate him. I want to tell everyone what he hid from me and have it reveal who he is and what he will always be.
º
I played with dolls far longer than was socially acceptable, and at a certain age had to carefully choose the friends I might be able to trust to visit my house. Some wouldn’t have cared about me lining up my dolls along the bed in size order, but some would have held this knowledge as a weapon to be stored and used in whatever social drama was playing out.
By eleven I had only one friend, Elizabeth, who I dared invite over. I realised she was safe because after a school concert one evening her mother told my mother that Elizabeth had asked Santa for a Mr Frosty for Christmas. I was jealous, wondering whether Elizabeth would really be gifted something so frivolous. At break time I said, ‘I can’t believe you still believe in Santa.’ I could have announced this in front of a group, but I said it quietly, as we queued for lunch.
‘Shut up,’ she said.
‘Your mum said so.’
‘You have to let them think you believe to get better presents.’
I didn’t know this, and guessed it was why Mum revealed the savage truth when I was only five years old.
‘I bet you asked for a doll too,’ I said warily.
‘Yes! Winter’s Eve Barbie. Have you seen her?’ I hadn’t. I needed to get a copy of the latest Argos catalogue. I invited myself over to her house later that week.
Instead of clothes inside Elizabeth’s wardrobe, there were ratty pieces of tiny furniture made from egg boxes and yoghurt tubs. This was an opportunity to sneer and win tokens to buy her loyalty, but I was too impressed by what she’d created to be mocking. We played with her makeshift doll’s house for hours using different voices for each doll, dressing and undressing them over and over, making them argue, threaten, placate and acquiesce. I wished that we had had a Ken doll to torture and complain about.
After that day, Elizabeth and I took turns visiting one another’s houses, playing with our dolls and even sharing them. I preferred this to playing with Jacinta who was too young to keep up with the complexity of the dolls’ relationships. And I learned about sex from playing with Elizabeth, when she lay one on top of another and rubbed them against each other until something mystical happened to make them stop. Elizabeth also suggested we get them to kiss one another’s privates. This seemed entirely pointless to me, but we did it anyway, and then I wanted to do it every time we played together. Elizabeth would say, ‘Why doesn’t my one have a car crash and almost die?’ And I’d say, ‘And then mine is so upset they start cuddling.’
I can’t remember when we stopped these games, but I know we smoked our first cigarette together, in the middle of the night, with my bedroom window wide open and Jacinta asleep on the floor. I didn’t inhale, but I’ve never enjoyed a cigarette more than that one. Not in my whole life.
Elizabeth left school after getting ten very good GCSEs and knocked up by a local butcher. She’d had four children with him by the time I started teaching.
º
After getting my number at Leonard’s get-together, David called and asked if I liked the theatre. I told him I did, though I’d only ever been to see Cats and a couple of pantomimes. He said an older cousin of his was in a production of Berkoff’s Kvetch and he had some comps if I was interested. ‘We could eat afterwards. I don’t recommend dinner beforehand as the performance may cause mild nausea.’
‘Surely you have meds for that.’
‘I do have access to a lot of drugs yes. Will you come?’
I wore a red dress with a thin gold thread in the fabric and wedge heels. I’d imagined a swish evening. I didn’t want to show myself up. But when I arrived and saw the state of the place – a run-down grey façade next to a boarded-up letting agency – and David himself dressed in jeans and an old pair of trainers, I realised I looked ridiculous. I wanted to turn around and run home. It was the sort of thing Mum or Pete would have done – not understood the tone of an occasion – and the sort of thing Jacinta and I would have been mortified by. I worried that David would think I was ignorant and common.
But he waved and half-leapt towards me. ‘You look great,’ he said. ‘I’m a vagabond.’ He opened his jacket to show me a ratty T-shirt beneath. ‘I was trying to be cool. I shouldn’t do that. It rarely works out.’
I wasn’t sure whether he was genuinely self-conscious about his clothing or whether he was trying to make me feel better about the gaudiness of mine. Either way, I relaxed. He kissed my cheek lightly. ‘This is going to be diabolical. I’m sorry. I would simply ask that you slit your wrists after the show, not in front of the performers.’
He was funny. And he was polite. And the play was funny. And his cousin was polite. Her name was Freya and she made David promise to bring me along to every show she was ever in because I was the most attentive audience member in the stalls, she said. The dress circle was empty. She was thankful I had laughed in all the right places, and that I hadn’t been distracted by the stage manager’s galling whispers. ‘Plus, you’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘And we value an attractive audience.’
No one had ever called me beautiful. I knew I was attractive enough to pull in wolf whistles and dates, but beautiful was not what I was. Beauty was a thing possessed by people with elegance, with innocence. Or something like that.
At the Cantonese restaurant on Upper Street, David told me he’d not been able to forget about me since we’d met at Leonard’s barbeque years before. ‘And the only reason I went to the bar in Islington was to see you.’
‘Sadly you had a girlfriend when we first met.’
He nodded. ‘I was scared of her and you were nice to me when everyone else told me not to be such a pussy. She was from Hull and could have wrestled me to the ground. She would have on a few occasions, if I’d not squirmed my way out of it.’ I laughed, but I doubted this. David was slim but not weedy: until he’d left university, he’d been a rower. His wrists were toned.
He searched the dish in front of him with a fork until he found a slither of bok choy and popped it into his mouth. ‘I would have asked you out, if she’d not been there that night.’
‘You hardly spoke to me.’
‘I tried to. You ran away. Leonard said you were embarrassed about your hair or something.’
‘You’re misremembering.’
‘Or you’re restructuring the past.’ He laughed and so did I.
‘I lie every day,’ I said. ‘It’s not some nefarious thing, but I’ve noticed I tell these little lies to avoid hassle, to get out of meeting a friend for tea or to explain why I’m returning a pair of shoes I don’t like. I suppose everyone does it. And every job requires it to some extent. You can’t be a teacher and tell the truth. Can you imagine? I’d have to admit to my entire class of Year Tens that they’re going to fail their exams and end up on benefits.’
‘Have you lied to me?’ he asked earnestly.
‘No. I don’t think so. Wait, yes, I have. I was very embarrassed about my hair when we met.’
The waiter came to clear our plates and we moved on to lighter topics: the best dive bars in North London; controversial Oscar wins; the pointlessness of changing the clocks twice each year. We talked whenever we had something to say and the silences were easy. David kept his eyes on me the whole night. He didn’t make me nervous or feel I had to say the right thing. I ate all my dinner and ordered a dessert.
Walking me to the tube station, he took my hand. ‘Marry me,’ he said.
‘Alright,’ I agreed.
It was a joke. Of course, it was a joke. But he asked me the same question again eighteen months later and it wasn’t a joke. And I gave the same reply.
Alright.
º
Our first kiss was in a train carriage. We were on our way to a Camden comedy club, standing and squished up against not only each other, but fellow passengers, the space becoming more congested at every stop. My chest was next to his, my mouth close to his ear. It was early evening. A lot of people were loud and drunk, which always made me nervous, especially if I was with a date. Nothing is more appealing to a drunk man than a sober man, especially a tall one. David was also the kind of handsome I imagined lesser men envied.
I said, ‘We should have taken a taxi.’
He said, ‘If we had, I’d have kissed you already.’
I said, ‘Kiss me now.’
‘OK.’
He put his lips against my neck and it felt like the most erotic thing that had ever happened to me. I glanced at the woman behind him who looked away, mildly disgusted. I took an awkward step backwards, into a teenager wearing headphones, and David kissed my mouth. He tasted of nothing. Not cigarettes or beer or onions or coffee. It was like I could imprint myself onto him through his lips, like both of us had just been born.
I wanted to ask him to marry me. As a joke.
º
Leonard called me at work. ‘I can’t talk,’ I said. I had a maths class to cover plus a child in my office with a headache he was claiming might be a brain hemorrhage. His grandfather had died from one a week earlier.
‘David sent the thing to me,’ Leonard said.
I turned in my desk chair so I was facing the window and not the hypochondriac student. ‘What?’
‘The bloody doll. He had it delivered to my office. He told me it was a telescope. He said he couldn’t send it to your house because you guys were away in Hertfordshire for someone’s birthday and the hospital wouldn’t accept personal deliveries.’
‘When?’
‘Like seven or eight months ago.’
‘Seven or eight months?’
‘Did you even go to Hertfordshire?’
‘We go all the time to see his family, but we never stay over.’
‘Fucking hell.’
‘Fifteen years, Leonard,’ I hissed. ‘I’ve been with this person for fifteen years. What am I meant to do now?’
The child behind me coughed and said, ‘Miss, can I call my mum?’
I turned to him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Stewart. You probably need a glass of water.’ He looked like he might cry.
Leonard said, ‘I’m pissed off too, to be honest.’
‘Why?’
‘He bullshitted me, Dolores. Fucking lying weasel.’
‘Yeah,’ I replied, as Stewart scampered out of my office. He’d left his phone on the floor. I put it into my drawer and went to cover the maths lesson.
º
I thought I had experienced love before I met David, that the panic which came from waiting for a man to like me, call me, pick me, was the definition of passion. Once David came along I wasn’t sure; I looked back at my previous romances with suspicion. With David there was no holding off or holding back. He called when he said he would, showed up early rather than late for dates and told me matter-of-factly how he was feeling about our relationship, which invariably was satisfied. He offered to pay for meals out but when I told him it was my turn, he put away his wallet and let me have my dignity. At night, without him, I felt no loving ache in my body. My mind was storm-free, and I slept quickly and well. I was determined to keep him. To see what it all meant.
º
When Jacinta wouldn’t pick up, I was forced to text her a summary of the situation. She called back immediately. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. In the background loud horns and roaring engines. I assumed she was on her way to the studio.
‘What don’t you get?’
‘Any of it. Explain from the beginning.’
‘There is no beginning, Jacinta. It’s what I told you. Two days ago I found a silicone sex doll in the garage, and I am quite certain I wasn’t the one who put it there.’
‘But David?’
‘Yeah.’
‘If it was an affair with another woman then…’
‘I know.’ It wouldn’t have been easier, but it would have been something I could have understood. ‘A part of me wants to find it funny,’ I said.
‘It isn’t funny,’ Jacinta shot back. ‘Not at all.’
I described the doll to her and she sighed and tutted and said, ‘Oh, for the love of fuck.’ Then she said, ‘Catch him in the act. That’s what I’d do.’
‘Jacinta.’
‘I don’t mean actually doing it. Jesus. I mean going into the garage. If he’s in there for longer than what, three minutes, you know what he’s up to.’
‘Three minutes? It would take at least that amount of time get her out of the bag and into a comfortable position.’
‘Fine. Five minutes. You have security cameras. Use them.’
She was right. We had several cameras installed after our neighbours were broken into and their car keys stolen. The thought of a stranger invading my home while I was in bed was something I couldn’t handle.
‘I’m not sure that’s necessary,’ I said.
‘It’s entirely necessary. Your issue when you finally confront him will be a lack of evidence. Anyone can deny anything without it.’
º
I believed in the law of attraction, the idea I could manifest a reality if I learned to focus positive thoughts towards my goals. I had some vague notion that my mind was in part responsible for a promotion at work, my loud neighbours moving to another city and meeting David.
David and I had been dating a few months when I explained the theory to him. We were in bed, had just had very quick sex. We were having a lot of quick sex at that time, mostly because David worked long hours and if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have had sex at all.
‘You’re not serious,’ he said.
‘There’s something to it. You need to watch the film.’
‘No, I really don’t. Because by that rationale, if I want a plane to crash, I only need to use my mind to bring it down. It would make the 9/11 suicide terrorists feel a bit silly.’
‘You’re making me feel silly.’
‘I’m not trying to, my sweet,’ he said. ‘But you’re a scientist. I know you can’t have fallen for that claptrap. You’re too clever.’
‘I’m a scientist. Exactly. I’m talking about neuroscience, psychology, cognition. The way we direct our thoughts impacts the outcome because it causes us to take particular actions and it moves us unconsciously towards our intentions.’
‘But just because I want a little boy who’s been operated on to survive cancer doesn’t mean he will.’
‘What little boy?’
‘No little boy. It’s an example.’
‘Is there a little boy who has cancer?’
David sighed and kissed my nose. His lips were cold, chapped. ‘There are lots of little boys with cancer.’
He was right. So I began to think about this, and steer my mind away from driving a Mercedes, and towards those little boys getting well again. I didn’t believe in magic. But I did believe in some things I couldn’t explain.
º
I started telling people that Gavin was my brother quite soon after he moved in because it made Mum and Pete happy when we pretended we had always been a family. This effectively erased my real father, which wasn’t a problem for me.
I told David the same thing when we met. ‘I have two siblings. A little sister, Jacinta, and an older brother, Gavin.’
Even so, David never liked Gavin. Before he knew much about him, and before he knew we weren’t related by blood, he told me that Gavin’s openness was a veneer, that his laughter hid a darkness. He found him double-sided: watchful one minute, matey the next. It made celebrations awkward, David’s commitment to these cynical feelings. I tried very hard to explain that Gavin was complicated, that he’d been abandoned by his mother as a child and had a vacuous, high-functioning drunk for a father.
But David does not live in nuance. There is science and faith, fact and fiction, good and evil, innocence and blame.
I knew very early on in our relationship that there were some things I would always have to keep from David, some things he would never understand.
º
Leonard judged all his relationships on whether or not he felt he could be intimate with the men he met. I said, ‘What does that even mean?’
‘It means letting someone sees bits of you that are normally kept hidden.’
‘I doubt you hide your bits,’ I told him.
He hadn’t the energy to argue with me. But it did make me wonder about honesty and love and whether omissions were lies. How could they be? How could we possibly tell another person everything about ourselves? It would take a lifetime. It would be incredibly boring.
º
When they were both alive, David’s parents lived in a cul-de-sac in St Albans. My first impression as we pulled up outside the semi-detached property where he had spent his entire childhood was how civilised it was. The blue front door had little panes of stained glass and there were red geraniums in pots along the driveway. Not one weed or scrap of moss bled between the pathway’s paving stones.
His mother came out to meet us and seemed very pleased that I’d brought an apple pie for dessert.
His parents nodded with raised eyebrows as we ate our chicken tagine, a dish I’d never heard of before, and I told them about the students I taught and my sister’s fine art degree. His father helped to clear the dishes and his mother smoked a cigar in the living room while we drank filtered coffee and ate the pie I’d brought.
When his younger brother Hugo arrived and invited us to a gig he was playing that night in Edgware – Hugo was the frontman with a band he’d formed at Oxford University – both parents gleefully encouraged us to attend, explaining that their youngest son was going to be the next Mick Jagger. Hugo said, ‘I’m focused on process rather than success right now.’
David rolled his eyes, though not unkindly. ‘We have work tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Another time, yeah?’ He was so cordial, like Hugo was a work colleague and not his little brother.
And Hugo responded with equally good manners. ‘No worries. I know you’re crushed at the hospital.’
Before we left, I went upstairs to use the bathroom and accidentally opened several bedroom doors until I found the loo. Each room was painted lavender, the beds adorned with floral cushions. They had the smell of used spaces, not spare rooms as I’d have expected.
On the car ride home I said, ‘Do your parents share a bedroom?’ We were at a set of traffic lights.
David stalled the car and had to restart it. ‘Why are you asking?’
‘Just wondered.’
‘I don’t think so. They never did, even when I was a kid.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s how it is. Mum gets hot at night. Dad wakes up early to read the paper.’ He turned on Radio 4 and we listened to a segment about the challenges facing working mothers.
I looked out of the passenger window. The car next to us was a green Jaguar. The woman at the wheel was in her fifties and seemed angry about something the driver in front of her was doing or not doing. She turned to me for a moment and I smiled, but she didn’t smile back.
We were almost at South Mimms when David spoke again. ‘No one in my family has ever been divorced. Not even separated. Not one uncle or aunt or cousin. Anyone who got married stayed married. Isn’t that something?’ He turned off the radio and began to hum, opening the window to let the air in.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘There must be a lot of very unhappy marriages in your family.’
Back at his flat, David hung up his coat and said, ‘Shall we get a take-out later? I can’t be bothered to go to the supermarket.’ This wasn’t like him at all. He relished an errand, a quick trip out to buy milk or fish or sesame oil, and coming home with a treat for me: a bag of chocolate buttons or a packet of malted milk biscuits.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I can pick it up.’
‘I have an early, so it isn’t worth you staying over. I’ll drive you home after we’ve eaten.’
‘Did I upset you?’ I asked.
‘I’m not upset. Do I look upset?’
‘Yes.’ The muscles in his face were tense. And he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. ‘Look, David, everyone is a little bit fucked up. You’ve met my family.’
‘Your family aren’t that fucked up.’
I could have disagreed with him, elaborated. I said, ‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘Look, I’m fine,’ he said.
‘Truthfully, it makes me like you more. Knowing your family isn’t perfect.’
He smiled warmly for a few seconds, and I sensed he was allowing himself to be seen. It was a rare thing. But I offered nothing in return. He sighed. ‘Please stay over. I didn’t mean it. I was being a dickhead. Work is stressful. I’m tired.’
This wasn’t true: he had confronted something unpleasant about his parents’ relationship, his own childhood, and wanted to explain away the disagreeable feelings before they ambushed him. And it was his right: to face whatever it was he was feeling, or turn from it.
‘I’m afraid we’ll end up like them. We won’t, will we?’ he asked.
‘God, no,’ I said.
He put his arms around me. ‘You’re right. And with the way London house prices are going, we’ll never be able to afford a place with two bedrooms anyway!’
º
I don’t remember the exact day my dad left, but I do remember that Mum got us a grey whippet-mix from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home to distract us from the experience. Jacinta wouldn’t stop asking questions about where Dad was, when he was coming back and who he was with. She wasn’t distressed. She just wanted answers. So Mum said that in exchange for an end to the investigation, Jacinta would get to name the dog.
She went for Timothy. She said Timothy was the name of a boy in her class with blue eyes and the dog reminded her of him.
‘What about Bruno?’ I asked. ‘Or Ash.’ It felt like an unparalleled opportunity to be creative and Jacinta was wasting it. But she wouldn’t budge on Timothy, not even to Tim or Timmy, so though I adored that dog, I was embarrassed calling him back when we went to the park, which, to be fair, wasn’t all that often. It was the name you’d give a man. And not just any man; a man from Surrey who wore pink slacks and striped T-shirts.
At first Jacinta didn’t like to leave Timothy alone. Whenever we went out, she’d have a meltdown if we were gone too long. Mum said, ‘It’s a dog, Jacinta. Remember that. It’s a feckin’ dog.’
Within a few months of us getting him, Timothy died of an infection after biting his own tongue. I was sobbing uncontrollably in the car as we drove home from the vet. Jacinta took my hand in her own and said quietly, ‘Try not to cry. It was a dog, Dolores. Just a feckin’ dog.’
º
I didn’t think David was a monster. The furthest my mind could stretch to was that he was depraved, yet I hated that word and what it said about me and my righteousness because that’s not who I was. I was a liberal in the real sense of the word – not a far-left maniac who couldn’t see the humanity of anyone less far-left than themselves. If I could forgive serial killers for being less fortunate than I was, I was prepared to grant an amnesty to any friends who still voted Tory.
David had always been a socialist. Even when he started to make serious money. He signed up when fundraisers knocked at the door and worried about the state of the care system. He volunteered at a women’s domestic violence shelter for over five years.
So depraved seemed an unfair assessment.
What had he done anyway, apart from stick his penis into something? It wasn’t a patient or a prostitute or, God forbid, a child. It was a toy and half the population had something similar hidden in a bedside drawer. I owned one, though the battery had gone and I’d lost the charger.
I Googled for an answer to my dilemma and found an article on micro-cheating. Small deceptions. Minor indiscretions. What harm if no one knows?
I thought about the fact that we are specks racing through space and the luck of consciousness seems to make everything meaningless anyway.
I got on with emailing parents and I told myself to relax.
º
In the same way we rarely mentioned Seamus O’Shea, Pete and Gavin didn’t talk about Gavin’s mother. All I’d heard was that she’d run off with a tree surgeon when Gavin was six, leaving Gavin alone in the house for several hours with a letter addressed to his father.
Then, one day, a phone call came. I heard raised voices in the garden, Pete waving one arm wildly and shouting into his first ever mobile phone as though it were a walkie-talkie. Gavin looked up from the beetroot he was grating and said, ‘What a cunt.’
We were alone in the kitchen. Gavin was making himself a raw energy salad for lunch. I was boiling pasta for the rest of us. ‘Your dad?’ I asked.
His eyes flashed. ‘Mum.’
‘Oh.’ I wanted to know more but Pete had put his phone away and was coming back into the house.
‘What does she want?’ Gavin asked.
‘She wants her beach towels back,’ Pete said.
‘What beach towels?’
‘I don’t know what ruddy beach towels, Gavin.’
Pete pointed at the pan on the hob. ‘No one likes mushy pasta,’ he said.
I used a fork to taste it and the boiling water that hadn’t drained from the little tube of penne burnt my tongue. It was still crunchy. Gavin reached for a red onion and began to finely chop it. He cleared his throat. ‘Did she ask about me?’
Pete was looking into the bowels of our house, seemingly transfixed by the bare lightbulb hanging from the hall ceiling. His mouth was turned down. I’d never seen him cry, but he looked like he might. He must have been about forty-five then. I thought he looked like an old man. Someone with a terribly sad history. Someone who didn’t have long left. ‘She got cut off,’ he said. ‘I cut her off.’
Gavin nodded. ‘She didn’t even…’
‘No, Gavin.’ He turned to his son. They were rarely gentle with one another, but on that day Pete’s voice was soft. And he said, ‘That salad looks alright. Can we share it?’
º
There is nothing as irritating as a returning student who shows up during the school day to say hello. The actual reason for the visit is always to peacock: I’m a lawyer now; I got a first from Edinburgh; I moved to Amsterdam. None of the kids who got knocked up at sixteen and live in council flats ever turn up; none of the kids who became addicts or homeless or took a job working as a supermarket cashier make an appearance. Yet those are the ones I want to know about, the ones I think about from time to time. The others, I realise, I don’t care about at all, probably never did, the intimacies between us simply part of a performance. I take no pleasure in hearing about positive achievements, even if they are peppered with thank-yous. The visits also highlight my inertia. ‘Here I am, exactly where you left me, wearing the same smart suit and complaining about the teaching assistants.’
And when the returning student finally leaves, both of us gunked from the awkwardness of an interaction that should have been a shared moment of sentimentality, I might see a current student, an especially troubled one, and be overwhelmed with love, forgetting that, really, I am nothing in that child’s life: I am already a part of their history.
º
Jacinta and I both became school teachers. I taught biology and chemistry, she taught art. Then, ten years ago, she called to tell me she was being bullied at work by management. They’d explained that she must find ways for more of her students to get top grades or her job would be at risk. This meant, she knew, doing the work for them. Jacinta was the head of department at an independent school in Winchester and living on site, in rooms owned by the school. With no free time, her life effectively devoted to her wealthy students, she had stopped painting, going to galleries and living her life. At the time my sister had enough expendable cash to wear clothes without obvious labels that only rich people would appreciate, but the only rich people who saw her were the students’ demanding parents. She said, ‘I’m so unhappy, Doughy.’
I’d never heard her talk like that before. Even when she was young and listening to a lot of PJ Harvey.
I said, ‘Get another job. Try a state school. I don’t know how you cope being around jumped-up little arseholes all day long.’
She sniffed. Or perhaps she snickered. ‘I’m not ready for that sort of change,’ she whispered.
I had been reading a lot of Anne Lamott so replied very quickly, ‘No one is ever ready for change.’
Jacinta left the school a week later, without giving a term’s notice, and moved to Brooklyn where she lived with a drag queen and worked in a bar on the Lower East Side. The following year she began an MFA at Columbia. And a few years later she had a solo show in a small Chelsea gallery where her cheapest canvas sold for $8,000.
‘Come and see the paintings,’ she’d said. ‘There’s one of Pete.’
‘Is there?’
‘No. Of course there isn’t.’
‘Mum’s becoming forgetful,’ I told her.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Still. Please come and see the show.’
º
My dad died in a house fire six years after he left. It was the summer I turned sixteen. We weren’t told much more. And we weren’t asked to attend the funeral in Buncrana where his family had a plot ready for each of their children. His girlfriend sent me his leather wallet. It had a fiver in it, plus an expired video shop rental card and a passport photo of a young boy. Jacinta got nothing, so I gave her the wallet and we spent the fiver in McDonald’s on cheeseburgers and nuggets.
º
A family of Jehovah’s Witnesses moved in next door. The eldest son saw me dancing through our sprinkler in my school uniform, Del Amitri on the radio in the kitchen. He shouted down from his bedroom window: ‘You’re going to hell.’ His hair was shaved so close to his head he looked less like God was his light and salvation, and more like a neo-Nazi.
I took off my shoes and socks. ‘Do you want a strawberry Cornetto?’
He hesitated. ‘I can’t save you,’ he said.
His name was Aaron. He had a parakeet and five sisters. We sat with our backs to one another, a splintery fence between us, slurping on the cones until his father showed up and he scurried inside. Pete arrived home from work not long after; he worked for the council, something to do with computers in the social care department, but he was hammered and fell asleep on the sofa in front of Grange Hill. My mum told Jacinta to take off Pete’s loafers and put them into the hall with the other shoes. Jacinta refused because she hated the smell of sweaty leather.
We set the table for four but only three of us sat to dinner. Mum said, ‘Jacinta, if you don’t start practising your violin, I’m cancelling your lessons.’ My sister shrugged. She was sketching in a notebook with a biro. This wasn’t allowed at the table when Pete was conscious. Mum said, ‘Dolores, elbows.’ Gavin was in his third year at university by then. I had my old room back but I slept on Jacinta’s floor sometimes. I was nervous being in my own bedroom.
Aaron’s room was next to mine and if I pressed a glass to the wall, I could hear him praying, his tone was steady, tedious.
When he finished, I’d knock: Rat-a-tat-tat.
Nothing.
I’d knock again. Rat-a-tat-tat. And sometimes he’d reply. Tat. Tat. This meant hi. It might also have meant, I want you, Dolores O’Shea. I want you so much. And I love you too.
º
Del Amitri: ‘from the womb’. It is both a very sexy and very not sexy name for a band.
º
I unzipped the bag the whole way so I could see from the crown of her head to her painted toenails. I turned her slightly onto her side and realised, then, she wasn’t entirely lifeless. A cable was tucked in under her arm. So she could talk. If charged. She could probably tell me things, if asked. The sex doll in the garage was more than she appeared.
She was also a machine.
A beautiful, intelligent machine.
º
David puts people to sleep for a living. And he is responsible for waking them up again. Asleep. Awake. Alive. Dead. Passive. Inert. Quiet. Crying. Unable to consent. ‘Only psychos become anaesthesiologists,’ Pierre said.
º
My praying neighbour, Aaron, jumped in front of a train at Potters Bar station when he was twenty years old. I was back home for the holidays when Mum casually mentioned it. ‘Silly lad,’ she said. ‘He wanted to be a zoo keeper. His poor mother told me. God bless her and save her.’ Pete was struggling to open a jar of mayonnaise and groaned.
‘Why did he kill himself ?’ I asked.
Mum frowned as if the question were ignorant. ‘He didn’t want to be alive,’ she said. ‘People find it hard to live with themselves sometimes. Maybe he had a secret.’
Pete threw the mayonnaise jar across the room, smashing it against the opposite wall. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I did that. I’m a bastard.’ Mum didn’t flinch. She rose from her chair, found a spray bottle and some cloths under the sink and started to clean.
‘You’re doing your best,’ she told him.
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I agreed to marry David on one condition: we swap the double duvet for two singles to stop us arguing about who was hot and who was cold every night. I remember him plaiting my hair while we watched the Commonwealth Games on television. I remember he painted my toenails and blew on them to prevent the varnish from sticking to my socks. I remember he came home from a work trip to Belgium with his pockets full of dark chocolate truffles because I was addicted to them. When I looked sad he’d say, ‘What’s wrong, my sweet?’ and more often than not I’d say, ‘Nothing,’ or minimise my hurt even if something bad had happened. I wanted our lives to be joyful. I didn’t want to be the cause of any strife. Sometimes he’d push. ‘Tell me, Dolores.’ And still. I’d not know how to begin. And David would look discouraged. But not for long.
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When Jacinta first moved to Brooklyn, she called ridiculously early in the mornings to complain about her problems. She wouldn’t respect the time difference. David said, ‘I have a real job, unlike Georgia O’Keeffe over there.’ He liked and respected Jacinta but, even so, he took to sleeping in another room, which frightened me. I told him I’d put my foot down, that Jacinta understood and respected us. The truth was I simply silenced my phone and we didn’t hear her cries for help.
It took Jacinta a long time to get to grips with America. The health care system was one of her biggest concerns. She asked me to make appointments for her with various doctors and also speak to the insurance company to find out how much it was going to cost her to have a blood test or be prescribed birth control. She didn’t understand how to file her taxes and very quickly owed money to the IRS. She hated their supermarkets and the exorbitant tipping culture. ‘Hairdressers expect twenty per cent,’ she said. ‘You can’t get out of a salon without handing over two hundred dollars.’
‘Come home,’ I told her after a few years. She’d made something of herself and would easily find a gallery to show her work in London.
‘No chance,’ she said. ‘I’d rather eat a wheelbarrow full of fresh shit.’
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I came across a podcast about a charming self-help guru who convinced his followers to remain inside a makeshift sweat lodge until several of them passed out and three of them died. The guru fled the scene but many of the followers stayed loyal. He ended up in prison and when released continued to run wellness workshops. He had very white teeth. His wife looked like Olivia Newton-John. He said that pain makes you stronger, that people can harness loss and transform it into power, use it to build a more complete character. But who’d walk into pain willingly? And who stays inside a fucking tent that’ll roast you alive?
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Mum’s front door was wide open again. ‘Mum?’ I called out, closing it. She shuffled out of the kitchen in a pair of large wellies and waved like I was standing at the end of a long pathway. ‘Mum?’ I said again.
She kept shuffling, a docile zombie, and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled earthy. ‘I thought you were Helen,’ she said. Her voice was a croak. I assumed I was the first person she’d spoken to that day.
I wanted to say, ‘You’re too young for all this, Mum.’ I said, ‘Who’s Helen?’
‘Margaret?’
‘Who’s Margaret?’
She pinched her eyebrows trying to remember something and let out a small whine.
‘Mum, you shouldn’t leave the door wide open. Anyone could come inside.’
She glanced at the closed door and back at me. ‘Did you remember the ibuprofen? I have a terrible pain in my neck. I need better pillows. And I should start yoga. You can do it at any age.’
‘I can get you some pillows.’
We had tea and digestives and I helped her hang washing on the line. The day was overcast. A magpie perched unsteadily on the fig tree and barked at us. She said, ‘How’s David? I never see him. Is he busy?’
‘He’s fine,’ I said.
I assumed he was fine.
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I lay awake wondering whether I should have moved the doll to a different location. This would have forced David to ask me about it. But in the end, I took Jacinta’s advice. I changed my security cameras’ settings to alert me immediately of any movement along the side of the house, which was the way we usually entered the garage. I couldn’t imagine David using the up-and-over doors at the front to access his toy, but even if he did there was a camera there too. I also had one set up at the back of the house and at the end of the garden. He couldn’t hide.
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Ryan Porter was the creator of a cartoon getting passed around Year Ten. In the cartoon, Miss Shannon Coleman, his English teacher, was whipping a boy with a cat-o’-nine-tails whilst he read a copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge. His erection was huge, as were her nipples. Ryan was quite the artist. I told him this and then, ‘But it’s inappropriate, Ryan.’
He was fifteen years old. His mother had died the previous year and his Norwegian father, who he’d only ever seen during the summer holidays, moved from Stavanger to care for him. Ryan’s blazer was too big. He kept his hands in his trouser pockets as he slouched in the chair opposite. He was a relentlessly disruptive student, who I liked more than he deserved. ‘It’s a laugh though,’ he said.
‘It’s sexual harassment, Ryan. You can’t do this sort of thing.’
‘Miss Coleman is shagging Oliver Sminton in Year Thirteen. Did you know? That’s illegal. I might tell the police. I might go to the station, yeah, and be like, there’s a paedo teaching at my school. She’s fit, but she’s also a paedo.’
I had heard this rumour before and seen Shannon Coleman and Oliver Sminton in the sixth form common room sitting close together, leaning over books like they could be engaged in legitimate learning despite the fact she didn’t teach him. Shannon was twenty-four years old with jaunty boobs and a fashionable fringe. Oliver had stubble.
‘I don’t think that can be true, Ryan. But I’ll look into it.’ Ryan scanned my office, the various papers taped to the walls, the stacks of files and books on the desk. ‘Do you have any work you can get on with until your next lesson?’ I asked.
‘Did you get your car fixed, Miss?’
‘Yes, I did.’
He sat up. ‘What was wrong with it?’
‘A puncture, that’s all.’
‘Right. Yeah. Well, if it’s seen better days, I can arrange to have it stolen for you and written off, for like eighty quid.’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ I said, though I was impressed. ‘Can you promise to behave in Miss Coleman’s English classes please? Next year I’ll arrange to have you taught by Mrs Norman who I know will kick the humour out of you, if you misbehave.’
He snorted. ‘Yes, Miss.’
‘Promise.’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘No more nasty illustrations.’
‘No, Miss.’
When he left, and I was alone again in my office with a backlog of emails from disgruntled parents, I had an urge to summon him back. I had an urge to keep Ryan there with me.
He was knowing. He was playful. He was a brave little bastard.
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As a young teacher I would raise my voice to get a group’s attention. Now I know better. To make yourself heard, you get very quiet.
It instils fear.
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David should have been in theatre, but he wasn’t. He was slinking along the side of the house and using a key to unlock the garage door. I watched him step inside and twenty-eight minutes later, I watched him leave.
I called him. ‘David?’
‘What’s up?’
‘Where are you?’
‘I forgot something. I’m at home. I’m leaving in a minute. You alright?’
‘What did you forget?’
‘Huh?’
‘What did you forget? Why are you at home?’
‘My iPad.’
‘Where had you left it?’
‘On the hall table. Has something happened?’ Nothing in his voice betrayed his sin. It made my stomach heave.
‘I’ve got parents’ meetings after school. Can you sort out dinner?’
‘Sure. Shall I pick up some salmon?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.
‘OK. Well, text me.’
‘David?’
‘I’m rushing, Dolores. Just spit it out for God’s sake. What’s wrong?’
I put down the phone.
Then I watched a live stream from the front camera: David getting into his car and driving away. I couldn’t make out his expression.
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Gavin crept around at first, when he and Pete moved in. He was five years older than I was and nothing like his father. Better or worse, I cannot say. He kept a bearded dragon in a vivarium in his bedroom and fed it live locusts. He convinced Mum to let us get a kitten. Jacinta called her Longstocking. She got hit by a car a few roads away. The driver didn’t even stop. The cremation cost more than the kitten herself. Gavin made Jacinta a sympathy card that she left out in the rain. He bought us sweets sometimes and hid them under our duvets.
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You only have to look around to know that your problems, however difficult, don’t make you special.
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I am trying to explain.