People tell Kate she is beautiful, but she’s not really. She’s too tall, her nose is too big, her feet are boats. She’s a great clothes horse, but way too scrawny for a bikini. She’s nothing like the girls boys used to go for at school: cute, bouncy, just the right height to snuggle under an armpit. When boys kissed Kate – and there weren’t too many of those as she grew up, and up – she was the one who had to bend a little at the knees.
She grew into her height, learnt not to slouch, how to enter a room floating, cool, soignée.
She no longer corrects people who tell her she’s beautiful, doesn’t say to them, ‘Unusual, perhaps,’ the way she used to. She’s learnt to accept compliments with a smile and a thank you. She’s even learnt to appreciate the sight of her and Dom reflected in a mirror. A striking couple, a perfect foil for each other.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Dominic said, shortly after they met. ‘Inside and out.’
When he said things like this, she wanted to hush him, tell him he didn’t know her, not really, and if he did he wouldn’t say that. Especially now. Not that she has committed any terrible crime or is hiding some deep, dark secret, but because, truth be told, not only does Kate feel she’s not that beautiful on the outside, she thinks her inside is mean-spirited and small. She looks at her friends with their perfect children and she envies them. ‘Happy Child, Happy Parent Syndrome’, she calls it, and when she allows this rancour to happen she feels stunted and twisted and thinks she doesn’t deserve children, any children. Surely she should be happy? There are women out there whose barren wombs are crying out for children, and here she is with two, unhappy because one of them—
It’s not that she doesn’t love Noah, she reassures herself, and it’s not that she doesn’t want to do everything she can for him. It’s more that she doesn’t feel like she’s a mother to him. Surely, even if a child pulls away, the mother should still reach out, and if the child steps back, the mother should step forward so that there’s never a space between them? If, for every step away, there’s a step to, the gap will never grow.
Kate has taken false steps, not true ones. Why else is there this forever-growing space between her and her son?
She’s good on the surface, to look at, to talk to. Funny even, at times. But that’s all she has to offer. Skin-deep, that’s as far as her beauty goes.
Not that anyone has caught on. Even when she tells them she’s a fraud, they demur.
Now she stands in her kitchen and she feels it again, knows it again. They’ve just come back from seeing Noah. That’s who she should be thinking of. Poor boy, how hard this all is for him.
Instead, she’s consumed by rage. At her husband for starters. How dare he leave this all to her? The thought fills her head so completely that there isn’t room, even at the corners, for compassion, care, concern – all she should be feeling for her son. She leans against the sink and grips tight to the edge because, if she lets go, she might grab something and hurl it at the wall. Something small and breakable, and once she starts, she won’t be able to stop and the kitchen will lie in smithereens.
How dare he? The thought is there again, and the rage. She deals with their son on a daily basis. She had to organise a place for him to stay. Everything, everything. She has done everything.
And Dominic? Anything he’s done has been mean and reluctant.
Take today. Ask him to visit Noah, a small request, and he shrivels into himself. He cannot bear to see his son, let alone stand and talk to him.