Sam walks slowly back around the table and sits down next to me, turning his chair so that we are knee to knee. He closes his eyes and reaches out to stroke my hair with first one hand and then the other. I begin to shake violently and saliva rushes to my mouth.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he says under his breath, eyes still closed. He puts his mouth to my hair and kisses it, breathing me in. I sit very still, my breath coming fast, feeling the blood flowing around my body, right down to my fingertips. His hands are running over my hair, smoothing it down, just as he used to as we lay in bed at night, me falling asleep to the soothing rhythm of his stroking. I should run, fight, do something, but I am practically catatonic with fear. The hideous shock of what is happening combined with the familiar feeling of his hands on me, gentle yet filled with terrifying intent, has paralysed me.
‘You have to be quiet, Louise, please, please be quiet,’ he murmurs into my hair, and I can feel him glancing anxiously towards the room where our son is sleeping peacefully.
His hands are moving lower now, his lips still pressed to my hair, his fingers curling gently around my neck. The strange torpor begins to lift, but it’s too late. I am already struggling to breathe, his fingers squeezing harder and harder. My shallow gasping breaths are the only things that break the silence that we are locked into by our love for Henry, our desire to protect him from this scene. I scrabble uselessly at his hands, trying to get between them and my neck but there’s no space, they’re closing in.
‘Shhh,’ he whispers into my hair. ‘Don’t wake Henry.’
I pull desperately at his fingers but he’s too strong, and I can feel myself fading, surrounded by the shadows of the other times I felt his hands around my neck, in our games. They were never this tight, though. I was never this close to darkness.
I can feel the chair solid beneath me, just as it was this morning when I ate my breakfast here in this room. The things are still there on the side, unwashed: two plates coated in toast crumbs; one cup, half an inch of cold tea in the bottom; a glass filmy with sticky fingerprints, just a dribble of apple juice remaining. Are they going to be the last things I see?
I can’t pull his hands from my neck so I stop trying, instead flailing wildly around trying to find something, anything that I can use to get him away from me. It’s getting harder and harder to get any air into my lungs, worse each time I try. I’m going, I can feel it; it won’t be long now. My vision starts to blur around the edges and the kitchen where I sit with Henry each night as he tells me about his day swims in front of my eyes, melting into a haze of pain and fear. Oh Henry. My hand hits the kitchen worktop beside me and I grope around, unseeing, hoping to find something I can use to hit him, or at least shock him into releasing me, but there’s nothing there, my hand is grasping thin air.
‘Shhh,’ whispers Sam again, his lips on my ear now, caressing it gently. I try to mouth ‘please’ but nothing comes out and he’s not looking at me anyway; he’s lost in a world where what he’s doing is OK, just one of our games, his way of showing his love for me.
‘It’s OK, Louise, just be quiet, shhh. Everything’s going to be OK.’
But I have spent too long being quiet. Too long pretending everything is OK, repainting the last few years of our marriage in bright colours. As the edges of the kitchen cupboards bleed into the ceiling and blackness closes in, it no longer matters if Henry wakes up. What matters is staying alive. With everything in me I kick out, but there’s nothing there. I’m kicking uselessly into space. I try again and this time my foot catches a chair leg. I hook my foot under the seat and thrust my leg up as hard as I can. There is an almighty clatter as the chair crashes to the floor.
Sam’s hold around my neck loosens and as his face looms back into focus I can see panic in his eyes. For a few seconds we are both suspended in time, and then a small voice calls from the bedroom.
‘Mummy?’
Summoning every ounce of strength I can muster, I jump up from my chair, pushing Sam’s hands away. I have a sense of his arms falling slackly to his sides as I run into Henry’s room, slamming the door shut behind me and sinking to the floor with my back against it, knees to my chest.
‘It’s OK, H, go back to sleep,’ I whisper across the room, but his eyes are already closed, the noise of the chair having woken him only briefly.
I can hear Sam’s footsteps padding down the hall and I close my eyes, feeling only the hard contours of the door against my back and the soft weave of the blue carpet beneath my fingers. I breathe in the smell of Henry’s room: washing powder, Play-Doh and the faint but unmistakeable scent of Henry himself. I’ve been here in this room so many times in the dark like this, inching away from the cot or the bed, desperate not to make even the tiniest noise that would wake Henry and mean I had to start the whole settling him to sleep process again. I think of the hours I spent sitting beside him with my hand on his back, getting colder and colder, terrified that removing my hand was going to cause him to shift and start crying. That seems like another life now, a life where a woman I don’t recognise soothed her child to sleep and then climbed back into bed into the warm embrace of her loving husband. I want more than anything now to go to Henry, to hold him, but I daren’t leave the door, straining against it, ready to push with all my strength.
The footsteps stop and I feel a pressure against my back as Sam pushes gently at the door. I brace myself, feet flat to the floor and lean back, eyes closed, the taste of saltwater in my mouth from the tears rolling unchecked down my cheeks. Sam’s feet cast a shadow under the crack of the door against the glow of Henry’s nightlight.
‘Please Sam,’ I say, my voice croaky and unfamiliar. The pressure lessens, but the shadow remains.
‘Please don’t do this. You love Henry, I know you do.’ I keep my voice low, my eyes on the small, sleeping figure on the bed across the room, alert for any sign that he is waking.
‘I know how much it kills you to be away from him, even for a week. And he loves you. He loves the good in you, like I did. Like I do. Think of what it was like for you, growing up without your mum.’ Desperation has made me daring. Sam never talks about the missing years where he didn’t see or hear from his mother. ‘Don’t make that Henry’s life too. Don’t let him grow up without me. He trusts you, Sam. Think of the way he looks at you, the way he slips his hand into yours when you’re walking down the street together. The way he doesn’t just wrap his arms around you when you pick him up, but his legs too.’
I need to throw everything I can at this.