‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ I exaggerate the words, slowly rounding them out, mouthing them silently into my mirrors. A conclave of lips, teeth and tongue.
‘What is happening to us?’ I enunciate carefully.
Surveying my reflections carefully in the side-by-side mirrors, I scrutinise the pair of me in our white polka-dot towelling dressing gowns. Both the MDF white, mirrored wardrobe doors are swung slightly open so I can perfectly see me times two. I take another step forward on my spongy beige carpet. I wish at least one of me had the answers. But I don’t. I’m trying to look inside my head. Trying to figure out my own thoughts. Trying to analyse what has gone wrong. My heads fall gently to lean on the glass and my eyes begin to water as I fight them on their primal need to blink.
Am I restless and searching for focus in my marriage? Yes.
Am I really unhappy? No.
Well … no, not really. Not altogether.
However, I am completely confused. I squeeze my eyes shut tight now and I feel the damp of the water inching from eye to cheek. My tongue extends, outstretched to its limit, it blindly finds the salty tear. The tear vanishes but its sour taste lingers on my palate. I’m visualising my age in my mind’s eye. Drawing the numbers in thick black permanent marker behind my eyelids. I pull my head up straight now and stand back, stationary in front of my mirrors, barefoot in my bedroom and squeeze my deep-red-painted toenails into the thickness of the beige. I squeeze so tight it hurts. Cherry Bomb, I think the colour is called. I should know better. I am a grown up. I should feel settled. I should feel content. I should consider myself lucky. I am none of the aforementioned on this murky Sunday morning. The weather outside reports in as dismal and dreary, as winter delivers on its dark dependable consistency. Three and five. I move my head, making the shapes of the numbers. Around and around and across and down and around. It feels almost meditative. I am thirty-five years old. I have two beautiful children, a fulfilling career and a husband.
You will have noticed I didn’t prefix him with a compliment and nor will I recite an appropriate encomium after his name. He’s not a bad man at all, please don’t get me wrong. He is an excellent, loving, committed father and provider, but something has gone drastically wrong between us. Between husband and wife. ‘Till death do us part’ feels way, way too long off. Once my perfect soulmate. One time I couldn’t keep my hands off him. But not now. On this Sunday in early December, our marriage is in real trouble. I have absolutely no desire for him. We cannot find a civil word. There is no common dominator apart from our amazing children. What is commonly known as ‘on the rocks’, I guess? Sing it to me Neil Diamond – sing it to Mrs Ali Devlin.
Right now there is little of anything congenial between us. I don’t know what has happened exactly; I have my suspicions obviously, but not as to how it happened or when exactly it happened. All I do know for sure is that we are drifting like two broken branches, rushing downstream towards a treacherous cataract.
Now might also be the time to mention something else that isn’t helping matters. I have recently started to fancy a guy in work. My friend. My colleague. I’m embarrassed to admit this to myself and I would never admit it to another living soul, but I’ve started to fantasise about him and it’s dirty. Pushing him up against a public bathroom wall kinda stuff. George Michael’s ‘Outside’ lyrics spring to mind. Teenage stuff. Exciting stuff. I cannot get him out of my head.
This is a million miles away from how I feel sexually about my husband. So when I say something’s not quite right between us, you get it now, right? Me, a married mother of two, how could I say such a thing, right? Awful, I know. I totally agree with you. I am ever so slowly, metaphorically ripping, from the bottom up, my marriage certificate. I know that. I keep moving my head.
‘Mom?’ Jade, my eleven-year-old daughter, speaks from my half-closed bedroom door and I snap my eyes open.
‘Yes, love?’ I answer her. Bang back into reality. My Worzel Gummidge Mummy head screws on tight.
‘Seriously, Mom? What’re y’doing in the mirror? And where’re m’grey Hollister leggings with the black stripes down the sides, huh?’ Jade drawls.
‘Er … grey leggings.’ I tip my head repeatedly with my index finger. I must know the answer to this one; I’ve literally finished putting away all the laundry in the house. It comes to me.
‘Ahh … they’re in the hot press but I have just taken them off my radiator so they may still be damp,’ I warn her.
‘But Dad said he’s taking us zip-lining so I need them.’
I look at her slouching in the frame of the doorway. She never used to slouch. Once the most tactile child, she now talks in an American accent and spends hours huddled over an iPad watching videos of random strangers test out random products.
‘Hey guys!’ is all I hear coming from the thin rectangular electronic device. Obsessed with watching Seven Super Girls, which don’t seem all that super to me, talking about nothing worthwhile. Taking selfie after selfie. Pouting at a camera. Image obsessed. It doesn’t seem to bother Colin, that’s the way the world is now is all he says. I don’t get it so I’m finding it hard to get her at the moment. She recoils from my loving advances all the time lately. Oh, I know she still loves me and I worship the very ground she walks upon but her attitude of late is challenging. If this is eleven then what are the teenage years going to be like? Where is my little girl who couldn’t keep her hands off me? The little girl who wanted to marry me. Me and only me. I can, almost, still smell her little girl, pink satin-soft skin.
‘Marry me, Mummy? Pinky promise, so, so, so promise, so promise?’ four-year-old, bouncing pig-tailed Jade would beg of me, extending her tiny pinkie finger for me to link.
‘I will boo boo, I pinky promise, I so, so, so, promise, I so promise.’ I’d join our pinkies before falling to my knees and we would lock lips and I was in a little piece of mummy heaven. My nostrils vacuuming up her wonderful body scent. She would stand on my knees, her tiny pink feet gripping into my flesh and I’d take her two hands as she rocked forwards and backwards. Totally safe in her mummy’s hands.
‘I love you, Mummy, so, so, so, so much.’ She’d kiss me again, so hard, on the lips and for as long as she possibly could hold it.
Seems like a lifetime ago that oath … that bond … as I study her bored expression still slouched in the doorframe. Jade is beautiful if slightly on the too thin side – nothing to do with her diet, she eats really well – genetics.
‘Genetically blessed,’ Corina, my best friend, tells me.
I’m not so sure, I’d rather she was a bit stronger.
‘Let me throw them in the dryer for ten minutes. Did you clean the muck off your trainers from running through all that mud after gymnastics?’
It takes her so long to answer questions nowadays. She thinks before she speaks apparently, so as I stand and await her response I look at her. Her long white-blonde hair is piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She looks more like her dad’s side of the family; she has pale skin, a narrow face, a small nose and bright full rosebud lips. Dressed in her freshly ironed pink flannel cream love-heart pyjamas now she looks so young but as soon as she is ready to go out she will look five years older. She is exceptionally pretty. Her baby-blue eyes narrow at me, the sign her answer is ready.
‘Dawwhh, serioooously, Moooom? Obviiiiiously.’
It’s like a song: every vowel is dragged out. She slouches away.
‘I love you, boo …’ I stop myself as I call after her. She has asked me not to call her boo boo any more and I get it: she is eleven; I just forget sometimes. I shut the wardrobe doors gently and turn to the bed. I pull the goose-feathered duvet up and smooth it out with my right hand. Plump up the pillows. It’s a dark purple leaf print duvet set from House of Fraser. Corina had been given a voucher as a thank you from one of her work clients and she’d insisted I use it. I slept alone under it last night; he must have slept on the couch. Again. I have already made the kids beds, their clothes have been put away and the two upstairs bathrooms thoroughly cleaned. Upstairs is done.
You are probably still wondering what am I doing daydreaming about a thirty-six-year-old guy I work with? About Owen O’Neill. Like I said, he is my friend, my work colleague, and this is all sorts of wrong. Fifty shades of wrong. I’m too young for a mid-life crisis. I’d never actually do anything about it, don’t worry. Cop yourself on, Ali Devlin, I tell myself.
I hang up my polka-dot dressing gown and pull on my cream skinny jeans that are draped across our wicker bedroom chair and slide my size five feet into a pair of black slip-on flats that are underneath. I drag a cosy Kilkenny Shop black wool knitted sweater from my chest of drawers, and pull it over my head. I leave my bedroom. It’s becoming a room I’m no longer comfortable in. A room I try to avoid at all costs when the dark drops down. In this room we cannot pretend.
Across the landing I take the leggings out of the hot press. I pick up a wet towel Jade has just draped across the banisters as I feel the leggings. I press them to my cheek. Not really that damp but my beloved late granny, Margaret, still has me so paranoid about damp clothes and them causing chest infections. I fold the towel and return it to the towel rail in the bathroom. I go downstairs and pass into the kitchen, collecting two glasses that have been deserted on the glass hall table as I go. Milk-stained rim.
Colin, my husband of twelve years, is at the table on his MacBook watching some football match at full volume. The kids’ breakfast bowls and his empty coffee cup and cafetiere sit on the countertop awaiting my attention. I can hear the commentators raging about the billions some player cost. They are very cross and agitated. The aforementioned player has obviously let them all down. Poor unfortunate youthful billionaire. Colin doesn’t look up.
‘Damp leggings,’ I say by way of explanation as I put them into the dryer. I don’t think we spoke one word to one another yesterday. Please let today be better. Yesterday I annoyed Colin because I invited Mark’s friend in to play when Manchester United were on the TV in some cup. The boys were running in and out of the room as the whistle blew and the Red Army lost; Colin was in a foul mood.
‘I get one afternoon to myself all week. One lousy free afternoon! Is it too much to ask I get to watch the match in peace?’ he’d sulked.
‘Well, you don’t like Mark out on the road, so I’d no alternative,’ I’d said and he’d gone up to our room with his MacBook to watch the highlights of other rolling balls.
Now he says, ‘You’re putting one thing into the dryer, Ali?’ He looks up at me, stabbing at the volume button on the laptop with his thumb to lower it. The silence is a welcome relief. The beginning of a new argument is not. We cannot seem to converse on anything without arguing any more.
‘They’re still damp, Colin,’ I inform him as I slam the white circular door shut, twist the appropriate dial and press the ‘on’ button. It only takes seconds for it to whirr to life. The grey leggings are thrown around.
‘That’s a ridiculous waste of energy, Ali. Tell her to wear something else.’ Colin Devlin stands. All six foot two of him. Tall, very broad and dressed this morning in a grey Nike tracksuit with black stripes down each arm and leg, and white runners. He has the hoody pulled up. Colin isn’t one for central heating; he thinks a few extra layers are all we need. He has the exact same baby-blue eyes as Jade, floppy light brown hair and a huge dimple in the centre of his chin. A strong jawline. Athletic. I don’t fancy him any more and I just do not know why. There’s obviously something wrong with me because I can see he is clearly gorgeous.
‘Sexy Col.’ Corina calls him that all the time. Corina Martin is thirty-eight years old, three years older than me, and she isn’t married and she doesn’t have any kids and she tells me she is sometimes lonely but her Facebook page would tell me differently. She’s out five nights a week. It’s her occupation, events manager and sometimes PR person, so she always has various events to organise and attend. I think she isn’t lonely at all, I think she’s having the time of her life. She’s taking about getting a shih tzu but that’s just to make me feel better.
‘It’s work, Ali,’ she tells me every Sunday afternoon at our sacred lunches.
‘Facebook isn’t real, you must believe that, everything you see on Facebook – like, I mean, eeevveerryytthiinngg – is planned and approved and pre-mediated and Photoshopped and filtered out of its little social media mind. It’s up there because people want you to see it … always remember that, although it may make you feel like you are prying, being voyeuristic, you’re not – it’s the complete opposite.’
Over our weekly sneaky glass of wine with lunch, she will reiterate over and over again: ‘You have a real family, a real home. I envy you. I want all that too.’
‘Is Mark nearly ready?’ Colin breaks my thoughts of Corina as he moves beside me. I lean against the swishing machine.
The tension between us is almost comedic. I feel itchy and ill at ease with him so close. It’s like we haven’t seen each other for years. Like old lovers reunited, we are emotionally awkward around one another. I have the urge to laugh. Nervous energy. I look down to the dark slate kitchen floor and slip my foot in and out of my shoe. Cherry Bomb is playing peek-a-boo. I don’t ask him why he never came up to bed last night.
‘I don’t know where Mark is, Colin,’ I say slowly. ‘I’ve been upstairs making all the beds.’ I choose my words very carefully so as not to entice an argument.
‘Alllllll the beds, it’s not a hospital ward up there!’ He drags out the word and half laughs. ‘Sounds tough though, three whole beds … aaaaannnnd two of them are singles!’ He makes this noise through his nose as his snorts air out fast, as a racehorse might do after running in the Grand National. He squeezes my arm. It’s a joke, I know that, but he also knows that by saying what he’s saying and the way he’s saying it, he’s winding me up. We cannot seem to avoid annoying each other. He removes his hand from my arm, he must feel my tension.
I pick up the bowls and scrape the hardening mass of old Weetabix into the open bin. I move back to the sink, his eyes never leaving me, and I twist on the hot tap to wash the dishes. I stuff in the dark stopper with no chain attached, set the bowls, cup and glasses down gently and add some washing up liquid. I swirl to bubble. The noise of the glasses rattling takes the edge off. I stuff the yellow kitchen brush in and out of them.
‘Really? The breakfast bowls in with the cup and glasses?’ He is staring into the sink.
I say nothing but I remove the offending bowls and I lay them on the draining board to be washed separately. Colin is very fussy about how we wash the dishes.
‘What? Don’t make me feel like some kind of dishwashing freak again … the bits of Weetabix will be floating in the water, Ali.’
‘Yup, fine, that’s why I have removed the offenders and I will wash them separately.’ I wish he would just go away. I do not want Jade to hear us arguing again. I’m surprised I have a tongue left in my head, I’ve been biting it so much these last few weeks. How can you fancy someone who irritates the absolute shit out of you?
‘At least you are speaking, I thought you’d had a mini-stroke yesterday.’ He laughs.
‘That’s not funny, Colin,’ I say.
He shrugs his shoulders, his hood coming loose on his head as he does so. He pulls it down tighter with both hands.
‘So you don’t know where our five-year-old son is then?’ he says now. Then he tut-tuts several times, shakes his head at me and smiles. I’m riled. I don’t want to be. I can’t help it. Why is he doing this?
‘No, I don’t actually – but aren’t you supposed to be minding them today? Wasn’t that the deal – taking them zip-lining? You know I’m going for my Sunday afternoon lunch with Corina later.’
He pulls an apple from the brown bamboo wooden salad bowl on the chrome countertop and examines it. Turning it over and over in his hand. As the world turns. It disappoints him, I see, as he makes a face and replaces it.
‘What’s wrong with the apple, Colin?’ I demand.
‘It’s gone off, Ali … It’s soft … withered.’ He stretches his arms high above his head and yawns very loudly, bringing his left hand down slowly to fix his hood.
‘So put it in the bin then, why did you put it back in the bowl?’ I yank the hot tap off and wipe my hands on the black-and-white chequered tea towel that’s on the countertop.
‘Why is it out if it’s gone off?’ he asks me.
‘Are you actually serious?’ I scratch my head hard – something I do when I’m stressed and he knows this. Once it was endearing. Now it makes him wince.
‘Stop scratching … Jesus, you are only up and already you have a puss on you … are you due or something? The never-ending period or what? Calm down … I’m going outside to look for our son.’
‘He’s on the road playing with Daniel, you know that.’ My voice is raised and I don’t mean it to be.
He holds his right hand up behind his ear and screws up his nose. ‘I’m right here, Hilda Ogden … I told you before I don’t think he should be out on the road on his own, he’s too young.’
He shakes his head at me. Another row is brewing. I’m conscious of Jade’s movements upstairs. She’s at the banister leaning over to listen, I just know she is. I lower my voice. I can’t let her hear another argument. My eyes are holding the anger though, I can feel them bulge. Through gritted teeth I say, ‘OK … OK, Colin, so every day after school Daniel calls in for Mark, they play football in our driveway. I can see them out the window. Just why do you want me to keep him in? It’s a cul-de-sac. I’m even slightly embarrassed now when Maeve, that’s Daniel’s mother by the way, comes to collect him that I won’t take her up on her offer of them playing in Daniel’s driveway occasionally because I know you’ll blow a fuse therefore making me look like a psycho, over-protective mother!’
Colin is just staring at my mouth. His eyes never make contact with any other part of my face. I go on.
‘I,’ I bang my chest hard, ‘I, me, Ali – I am the one who has to rush home from work to pick them up at five every day from Laura’s, and then get a dinner ready by six o’clock for four people. Sometimes you join us, sometimes you don’t. You never bother to confirm that any more. I need the hour to do that without him under my feet pleading with me to go out and play … pulling out of me every second.’
‘Life is really tough for you, isn’t it, poor old Ali?’ Colin puts his bottom lip over his top.
I want to tell him to Ffffffuck off! But I don’t. Inside my head I am screaming. I can’t let Jade hear me raise my voice.
Yes! Sometimes it is tough. But I know it’s not that tough. I’m not unfortunate or hapless by any means. Yet he makes me feel like I shouldn’t ever have a little moan or complain about anything. I cannot vent. Cannot get stuff off my chest. Built-up frustration, however trivial, still needs an outlet. An ear. I don’t even think I do moan or complain, to be honest. I just get on with it but then sometimes, like just right now when he picks on how I am managing and points out the faults within my system, I can’t handle it. He just doesn’t refer to the fact I juggle it all. He never sees fit to thank me in any small, minute, miniscule, teeny-weeny way for keeping it all together. It’s like he just expects me to do it. Lunches, uniforms, homework, school pick-ups, parent-teacher meetings, extracurricular activities, play dates, my full-time job, the household – and it gets under my skin. I’m not looking for a marching band or a diamond ring, but now and then maybe a bunch of garage flowers would be nice.
‘Thanks for all you do, Ali.’
‘No problem, Colin.’
He’s the major breadwinner. He has his own company, Devlin’s Designs, a green company who design greeting cards and sell on their own website and on the internet. It’s a growing company and doing quite well. Lately they have been getting their cards in independent newsagents all across the country. He employs four people and one manager, Maia Crowley, who is also a very green girl. Maia drives an electric car and has a compost heap in her front garden. She grows her own vegetables. She is also vegan. Maia looks vegan, I think. Colin used to work for Hallmark Cards but went out to set up on his own. Like I said, his cards are green. His cards care about the environment. His cards are made from waste material. The e’s in Devlin’s Designs logo are green and shaped like the globe with two hands wrapped around them. Caring. Me? I work as a coordinator for an arts’ centre in the inner city, very low wages, but I love my job and they are very flexible with my hours. If I need to be somewhere for the children, if the school rings in the middle of an important work meeting and they are running a high temperature, I’m OK to leave, to go do what I have to do as a mother. My boss is a woman with two grown-up kids, but she gets it. She understands the working mummy. Thank God.
‘It’s on your head then. Look … I’m messing with you. I dunno what’s melted your sense of humour recently, but I’ll take them off your hands till teatime, like I do every single Sunday afternoon, feed them like I do every single Sunday afternoon.’ He moves away to the kitchen door, his large hand resting on the slim gold handle, and then he turns back. I’m not sure he gets just how bad things really are between us.
‘You know that I have had absolutely no problem with you having these Sunday gossips with crazy winky Corina Martin but I think Mark is at an age now where we should all be sitting down together for a family dinner on a Sunday.’ He takes a deep breath in through his nose and releases it slowly. ‘Jade had it for years, until you … well … so, why shouldn’t he?’ His dimple is pulsating, his floppy hair dropping down over his left eye.
‘I cook six days a week, Colin, I don’t want to cook on a Sunday.’ I pick up the chequered tea towel again and walk over to him, wiping my bone-dry hands. I wring it hard between my fists. I detest it when he calls Corina crazy and winky. Again, he knows this, just like I know the ‘until you’ was about to proceed into the whole ‘until you started working full-time’ tirade.
‘Well, I’ll cook then.’ He pushes his hair back and stares down at me. I’m around five foot five in my flats.
Is he trying to put a stop to my Sunday lunches with Corina? Or am I so selfish that I don’t want to do a Sunday roast dinner for my family? True, I used to do a roast every Sunday before Mark was born. I’d start the prep at midday, peeling carrots, parsnips and potatoes to roast, stuffing a chicken or whatever we had and I’d sit down after cleaning up at five o’clock. I became weary of roast chicken, roast beef, roast lamb, roast potatoes, roast parsnips and carrots. The whole roast shebang. Most times Colin would rush it at the kitchen table to get back to see the match. Other Sundays he’d actually be in Manchester at the match. Or in Liverpool, or Southampton, or Birmingham, or Newcastle, or Blackburn. Wherever his Red Army were playing. Most of the dinner time I’d spend coercing Jade into eating the meat and the vegetables. Jade prefers lasagne, or spaghetti bolognese; she isn’t into roast dinners. Colin doesn’t allow food anywhere else in the house except at the dining table in the kitchen. I sigh internally. Maybe we should all be sitting down together. Maybe I’m not a good mother?
‘Fine,’ I give in. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a good mother more than I want to be anything else in the entire world. That is my one true desire. Always has been and always will be. I can’t state that enough. Moving back to the sink, I fold the tea towel neatly into fours once more and place it on the side of the draining board again. He releases the handle of the door with a rattle and follows me.
‘Ahh, look, we’ll see … It’s just … I always had a family dinner as a lad on a Sunday when me da’ was still relatively well … It was important. I loved it when we did it here, Ali. We talked …’ He picks the apple up again and from where he is standing, pulls down his hood, closes one eye and stands on the tippy-toes of his white runners then he fires it into the open bin.
He misses.
‘He shoots! He misses! See ya later, OK? Have a nice gossip.’ He claps his four fingers and thumb together, opens and closes them repeatedly and he leaves the kitchen this time. He also leaves the apple on the floor for me to pick up. I could call him back and argue but everything is an argument these days and I’m tired of it. I’m drained.
‘OK,’ I manage. I have a lump in my throat. He moves away down the hall to the front door and I watch him go out to get Mark. Colin Devlin. My soulmate. My boyfriend at seventeen and then my husband at twenty-three. The true love of my life. Right now I just don’t want to be in the same room as him. What is happening to us?