I say nothing, shocked at his upright body language, the door still vibrating after it banged against the wall, his accusatory, wide stare.
‘You haven’t even asked,’ he adds sadly.
It’s true, I think, swallowing hard, the hole in my chest opening up as though it is a cavity. In my own trauma, I have ignored Reuben’s.
‘Tell me …’ I say.
‘I’ll tell you. I’m ridiculed at work. Or people ignore it entirely. They’re embarrassed for me. Because of what you’ve done …’
I hear the ellipsis. His tone isn’t harsh. It’s sad, drawn-out. The drawl I used to love so much. No. Not used to: still do.
‘I …’ I say, gesturing stupidly, my hands flapping by my sides like a child’s. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I add. ‘It’s hard for me. It’s hard for everyone. I know.’ I raise my eyes to meet his, even though it embarrasses me. ‘I’m sorry. It’s shit luck, and I’m sorry.’
His jaw is clenched, the way it is when he’s building flat-pack furniture and doesn’t understand the instruction manuals.
‘I work for the muslim community,’ he repeats.
‘You said that.’
He looks away, towards the door, running a hand through his spiked-up hair. I should have said, I knew what you meant by that, but I don’t. I’m not ready. I’m not ready for the man whose gaze didn’t leave mine as he slid my wedding bracelet on to my wrist to accuse me of being a racist.
‘It’s not just that,’ he says, sidestepping it too. ‘I feel …’
‘What?’
‘I feel irrelevant,’ he says simply.
The hollow feeling is back in my chest.
‘Reuben will be fine. Reuben’s always fine,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, feeling like his problems are heaping on top of mine, like a teetering tower.
‘I can’t cope with this,’ he says simply.
I blink, stunned. It’s not a sentence I’ve ever known him utter. He can cope with anything. Is always calm, measured, capable. I’ve never known him become incensed by life; only by injustice.
‘Do you think about him?’ he says, shooting me a look.
‘Yes. He’s got a bloody brain injury. He doesn’t know what drinks he likes,’ I say. It was the most important detail to me and yet here, under the beam of my husband’s inexplicable criticism, it sounds trite. Like I don’t care, like I am trivializing his problems.
‘Because of you,’ Reuben adds.
‘Yes, because of me.’
‘Did he bleed?’
‘No.’
‘How hard did you push him?’
‘Hard enough, Reuben,’ I say softly.
‘I could cope with it, you know. When you would hide congestion charges and overdue bills.’
‘Could cope with what?’ I say.
‘You. And your avoidance.’ He spreads his arms wide in the bedroom, like an eagle squaring up to its prey. ‘But now it’s – don’t you see? You won’t let me discuss it.’
‘Then discuss it.’
‘How did it make you feel?’ he asks.
‘Horrendous. I regret it every day,’ I say. I sound crackly, like my voice is being played on a gramophone.
‘You’ve never said.’ He looks at me through narrowed green eyes, like I am a curious specimen to him; a mystery. Like meeting someone with whom you get along well and then find out that they believe in the death penalty, or live in a yurt. ‘Throughout all of this … you’ve never, ever said.’
‘Well, I do think about him. All the time. I regret it. All the time. But I’m – I’m being charged. So my focus is … in defence of myself.’
I don’t add that I didn’t want to worry him; that I didn’t want to moan all the time or make our entire life together about my trial. My crime. I should add it, but I don’t. He should know, I find myself thinking. Doesn’t he know me to be good? Why is he presuming my silence is to do with a lack of remorse, and not the landmine that’s been detonated in the middle of my life?
‘You had so much going for you, Jo,’ he says, sounding sad, mournful. His voice is full of broken glass and he’s not looking at me. His wedding bracelet slides down his arm. The red hairs have tangled around it and they catch the hall light, shining a strawberry blond.
‘I didn’t have anything going for me,’ I say. ‘A third-class degree. No career. All I had was you.’
He doesn’t dispute the past tense.
‘You need to bloody well get over that,’ he says. ‘So what if you got a third? You were twenty-one. Plenty of people stuff up their life at twenty-one. Look at my young people.’
I swallow. I can still remember the moment when I found out my grade. There seemed to me to be an ocean of difference between a 2:2 and a third. A whole universe. Nobody got thirds. Plenty of people got 2:2s; laughingly called them Desmonds. A third was a joke. I went out, told Wilf and my parents the next day, when my hair smelt of smoke and my breath of wine. None of them said the kind thing; that it was still a degree, and a degree from Oxford. That I still mattered to them.
Nobody, that is, until Reuben.
‘I know,’ I say quietly. He’s said this to me a hundred times before. ‘But it was all that … potential.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ he says, waving the arm with the bracelet on again. ‘Your school plays and your A-stars and your prizes for the best maths score.’
‘Yeah, those,’ I say, moving backwards, hurt by his words, his dismissive tone. As though my achievements are nothing at all. And, anyway, aren’t they? They’re relics. They could be uncovered by archaeologists, they’re so irrelevant. Literally covered in dust in my parents’ attic: the A-level results transcript I was so proud of; the reams of naturally gifted written on my school reports. They all turned to nothing. They didn’t materialize, like hundreds of seeds that failed to sprout, to grow.
‘What about the Jo of now?’ he says. ‘The one who can finish any crossword, even the cryptic one, before anyone else in the room? The one who remembers verbatim every single conversation she has?’
As he lists my attributes, I dismiss them in my mind, like pop-ups that need to be closed. Crosswords aren’t a talent. Wouldn’t it be better if I had one interest? I’m just a hobbyist. I’m a hobbyist at life. And as for my memory; a good memory isn’t intellect. It’s innate, like having a big nose or long eyelashes.
I think about what I actually do enjoy.
I love waking up on a Saturday morning when I have nothing – at all – to do, and making a coffee with whole milk and brown sugar, and taking it back to bed. I liked, at university, the feeling of leaving a lecture or seminar as it was just getting dark, and I would skip the library and go home and cook and have a bath and do nothing. I liked the first change of song as I stood in Oxford’s dingy clubs, hearing the new beat and feeling like the night could go on forever. I liked the first smell of the cut grass during schooldays because it signalled that summer was coming. I like the first sip of a white-wine spritzer in early May. I like the feeling of leaving a shop with a posh bag full of lovely shopping, the string handle cutting into my hand.
I grimace, now; but what do all of these things have in common? It’s that they are nothing. I like doing nothing. I am a loser. A woman without a Thing by which to define herself. A woman who, when faced with a dissertation due in at nine o’clock the next morning, simply turned her computer off at midnight, had ten hours’ sleep, and conceded a fail. And now, here I am, my trial upon us – mere weeks away – and I’m doing the same thing. Avoiding. Ignoring. Wishing it wasn’t happening.
‘Or the way you add up everything as we go around Sainsbury’s. No calculator needed. Or the way you understand everybody’s motivation, just like that. You’ve got them worked out in a sentence because of their shoes or their facial expression. You could do anything.’
His words lift me, as though I am rising steadily up in a hot-air balloon. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I still can do anything. Maybe this crime wasn’t inevitable because I’m a shitty, flawed person. Maybe, maybe, maybe.