‘I don’t know … The best I can tell you, Derry, is that I just want something for me. I want one part of my life that no one else can have.’
I felt as if I couldn’t call my soul my own. The girls blithely took my possessions without asking – even my shoes were lent to a friend of Neeve’s – and my time was colonized with careless disregard: the girls issued orders to be dropped here and picked up there without anyone ever asking if it suited me.
With Hugh, our chronic sex-deficit dogged me so badly that my favourite way of unwinding – which was to lie in bed with my iPad – just made me feel guilty. Well, guilty, then resentful, when he arrived and made vaguely lecherous noises about joining me. I’d be thinking, For the love of God, I’m so burdened, can’t you just let me lie here and monkey-brain online from article to article and be unfettered for a short while?
Derry looked thoughtful. ‘You work really hard.’
‘I’m always tired. And I’m always worried. I’ve a near-constant pain in my stomach – it’s there so much I almost don’t notice it. There’s never enough money. There’s never enough time. And nothing I do is ever enough. My house is always manky. I never reach my ten thousand steps on my Fitbit. If I pull off a success in work, it counts for nothing because we still don’t have enough business. I worry about Neeve, I worry about Sofie, and I despise myself for whining when I’ve enough to eat and we’re not at war, but …’
‘Mmm.’
‘And anything I do as a treat – drink, smoke, have a popcorn binge at the cinema – just makes me feel guilty. Listen, will you tell me how it was for you?’
Derry had been in an eight-year relationship with a man called Mark when she started a covert thing with someone else. The new man – Steven – was married.
‘It was shit,’ she said. ‘Lying to Mark, well, the guilt was exhausting, and being Steven’s sordid secret felt super-shame-y. And I felt even more shame-y about poor Hannah.’ Hannah had been Steven’s wife. ‘I never wanted to be that woman, the home-wrecker, the husband-stealer, and you’re a lot more sappy than me, so you’d find it much tougher.’
‘But there must have been good bits because you wouldn’t have done it otherwise?’
‘Yeah, but, it wasn’t real. Like, I’d wait and wait and he’d finally text and then I’d be high with happiness. It was like a drug. You know, it is an actual chemical – dopamine.’
I knew about dopamine. Again, Psychologies. The simple explanation is it’s a chemical the brain produces in response to certain stimuli and it makes you feel nice. And, yes, whenever Josh emailed me a dancing dog or a painting of a Slavic village scene, my mood soared.
‘Whenever Steven texted, I’d get a hit of dopamine,’ Derry said. ‘Or the anticipation of our next meeting could keep me buzzing for days.’
Yes. Looking forward to those Tuesday lunches was thrilling, nervy stuff.
She sighed. ‘I think I was simply addicted to relief. And look at how it played out for me.’
She’d left Mark; Steven had left Hannah; Derry and Steven went public. They’d lasted less than a year.
‘Is that what you want?’ Derry asked. ‘To tell Hugh? To leave him? To set up home with Josh Rowan?’
Jesus. The thought seized me with hair-standing terror. I didn’t want that at all. No. Josh Rowan was just a fantasy thing. ‘All I want is to feel that a hot man is mad about me. What’s so wrong with that?’
‘Be careful, Amy,’ Derry said. ‘You’ve a lot to lose.’
‘Derry, how do relationships survive when one person has a fling? Even if they don’t get found out. Is something lost? It has to be, surely?’
‘Of course. Innocence. Trust.’
‘But is it naive to expect unsullied records? Should people just accept that, in any long-term thing, ruptures will happen and you just have to live with them? Like scars on a body, or flaws in a hand-woven rug. Like, one in three women in middle age have an affair.’
‘I think you should stop seeing him.’
‘I can’t stay away from him.’
‘Dopamine.’ She was dismissive.
‘We only have lunch.’
‘So stop it.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Dopamine.’
I stammered, ‘All I want is some harmless fun.’
‘Harmless fun?’ Derry shook her head wearily. ‘Buy yourself a trampoline.’
47
Sunday, 16 October, day thirty-four
‘Will there be drink at this party?’ I ask, and Kiara, Neeve, Sofie and Jackson promptly dissolve into howls of laughter.
‘Will there be drink at this party?’ Neeve repeats, in a trembly old-lady parody of my voice.
‘Oh, Mum!’ Kiara is in convulsions.
Primly, I carry on scrubbing the hob. What’s so funny?
‘Of course there’ll be drink at it!’ Kiara sings.
It’s every parent’s wish that their children be independent. But I’m not sure I like them acting as if I’m some dithery dinosaur, who needs to be shepherded through the modern world.
While we clean the house, we’ve been discussing a Hallowe’en ‘social’ that Kiara is going to. It’s two weeks away but already she’s planning her outfit. It was just after she said, ‘Derry probably has a dress I can borrow,’ that I uttered my hilarious line about drink.
‘You know there’s always drink at “these things”,’ Kiara says. ‘You’ve gone so strict.’
‘When you’re not showering us with cash,’ Sofie adds.
That’s as may be but I’ll tell you something, it’s hard suddenly being a lone parent. It’s almost like having to relearn everything from scratch. It isn’t enough simply to carry on as I always have, because Hugh and I shared the role. Between the two of us, we applied the rules and rewards in a smooth two-hander, and now that his presence has been wrenched abruptly away, the responses that once felt intuitive no longer do.
‘There’ll be boys too.’ Kiara is teasing me but now I’m worried. Is she sexually active? How sexually active? Should she go on the pill? Sofie is on the pill, she has been for a year, and that conversation – instigated by me, about how sex is an expression of tenderness and love – was so hard I took to my bed afterwards. A similar conversation with Kiara should be easier because she’s so much more open.
But is it too soon? She’s never had a boyfriend, not one that Hugh and I know about anyway, plenty of friends who are boys, but maybe this is the time for that talk and what does Hugh think?
‘That’s my fifteen minutes done!’ Neeve steps away from the ironing board.
‘You only did twelve.’ Jackson looks at the stop-watch.
I stop scrubbing the hob – these rings of burnt-in food are more resistant than hardened lava – and look at the clock. ‘It was only twelve.’
‘Yeah!’ Kiara says.
‘Twelve,’ Sofie says. ‘But you go. I don’t mind ironing.’
‘Freak,’ Neeve says, with affection.
Everyone has preferred household tasks – I’ll happily do the oven, Jackson does the bathrooms when he’s here, and Neeve enjoys mopping the floor – but as ironing is so unpopular, we each have to take a fifteen-minute slot.
I still don’t know if Sofie is officially living with us again. She’s here several mornings a week and shows up most evenings to do her homework, but she disappears for two or three days at a time, sometimes to Urzula’s, sometimes to my mum’s. It’s messy, it can’t be good for her, but I’m just her aunt.
If only there was someone I could unburden myself to, but being with people is difficult. Even though Posh Petra is stressed and miserable, she’s one of the few people I can relax with. Yesterday we went for a walk, just the two of us. I didn’t want to go and neither did she, but she said it would be a good thing – ‘Nature, oxygen, all of that. Make a change from me drinking myself into a stupor.’