JACK: Friday night,
nineteen days after the split
It takes me ages to warm up. After I dropped you off, I had to sit in the car for hours waiting for you all to go to sleep before I could let myself into the house and up to the attic without being seen.
It makes me nervous coming in and out while there are people in the house, especially after you said you aren’t sleeping well. But I’ve done it so many times that it is easy now I know exactly which stairs are noisiest, which bit of the landing carpet hides the creaking floorboard.
Now, sitting here wearing two hoodies and the sleeping bag, I keep going over and over what happened today. Are you telling the truth? Is there really no more Tom, with his bag of greasy pastries and his too-long hair? Are you coming back to me?
Hope fizzes and pops in my bloodstream.
I look around the attic. Though the walls and ceiling are plastered and the floor is solid, there are cobwebs in the corners and piles of stuff which I have shoved to one end. Suitcases. Boxes of old kids’ toys and clothes. I don’t know how many times I begged you to get rid of them.
‘I’m saving these for when Amy and Ben have kids of their own,’ you always said.
No point trying to tell you that this stuff will seem like it’s from the Dark Ages by then.
I’ve hated being up here. Listening to the noise of bird claws scratching around above my head. Feeling cold, but at the same time suffocating. Yet, now that it looks as if I will soon be moving back downstairs, I find myself feeling almost fond of the place. It has served me well. How many other men in my position have been able to stay so close to their families? Keeping watch on everything they do?
I have a seven-hour shift the day after counselling. Normally, I have my phone on silent while I’m driving, but today I am waiting for you to call me, so I leave the sound on. So I don’t miss it.
You don’t call.
At lunchtime I call in for a sandwich in the usual cafe and send you a text. Thinking about you. It’s short and not too needy. But you don’t reply.
As it’s Friday, it is my evening with Ben and Amy. Your idea is that, eventually, I will have them to stay with me every other weekend. But, until I get a place of my own, I am to take them out every other Friday night. I have pretended to go along with it. But it is never going to happen. See my kids just every other weekend? No way.
We go for pizza. They are pleased to see me at first, but soon they get bored. Ben is missing a night out with his mates. And Amy would rather be home watching Netflix and messaging her friends.
‘You have to stop quizzing us about Mum the whole time,’ she says, when I ask a perfectly harmless question. ‘Just face it. It’s finished.’
‘Or maybe not,’ I say. And smile so they don’t know if I’m joking.
I’m not joking.
I have my phone in my pocket set to vibrate so I will know the second you get in touch. You don’t get in touch. I keep remembering how you leaned into me in the car, wanting me to hold you. Surely it is only a matter of time until you call?
When I go to the loo I check my phone to make sure it is working.
I try to persuade the kids to stay out after dinner. We could go to the cinema, I suggest. I know I will have to stay out until late, waiting for everyone to go to bed so that I can sneak into the loft. The empty hours stretch ahead of me.
But Amy and Ben want to go home. Back to their laptops and their friends. When I drop them off, the house is in darkness.
‘Mum gone out then?’ I ask.
They shrug.
‘The thing is,’ says Ben, ‘it’s not really your business any more.’
He doesn’t say it to be unkind. It is just a statement of fact. Even so, I feel a surge of redhot rage and have to curl my fingers up into fists and count to ten in my head.
I think about telling them that you have changed your mind. That things will soon be back to normal. But there is something about the dark rooms and not knowing where you are, or what you are doing, or who you are doing it with, that stops me.
I park at the end of the road, where I can watch the house. It is after midnight when you arrive home in a taxi and nearly 2 a.m. before I dare let myself in. I am so tired, but I am wide awake. It feels as if there are lines of ants crawling through my veins. At least tomorrow is Saturday, so I can stay up here in the attic all day looking at you.
Lying in my sleeping bag on the loft floor, I turn on my phone and flick through all the camera views – living room, kitchen, hallway – but all are dark and still.
I wish I had put a smoke alarm in the bedroom so I could watch you sleep.