‘Yes,’ said Kit instantly.
I beat the urge to scratch until we were on the pavement outside, when the itch was almost overpowering. I attacked already broken skin with my fingernails. Kit circled my forearms with his one good hand and held them fast when I tried to pull away. Beth’s voice came to me. You don’t realise how much stronger than us they are.
I couldn’t get away from her. My thoughts folded in on themselves. Just because she’s mad doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.
Would I ever be sure?
The counsellor they sent me to was good at overcoming the physical symptoms of anxiety; mindfulness techniques and exercises that could train my soma to outwit the psyche and get the prickling and shivering under control. But I could never tell her what I alone knew to be the root cause of the problem. The counsellor wasn’t stupid: she knew I was holding back. Sometimes I thought about making up some childhood trauma to explain things away. In my darkest session, I thought about attributing it to grief at the loss of my mother.
Kit got me through it. He had saved my life twice: once in the fire and again, every day, every night, when he would get up with me and play cards and watch back-to-back Seinfeld DVDs in the small hours, brushing my hair, stroking it, plaiting it, while I fought the urge to scratch at my arms. I was so caught up in my own secret, self-imposed hell that it’s only now I appreciate how much he sacrificed to look after me. It was out of the question that I continue to work, and no matter how much teaching work he took on there was no way he could support us both on the bursary for his doctorate. As soon as his consultant gave his scarred hand the all-clear, he took a part-time, temporary job as a technical assistant in a high-street opticians, snapping cheap lenses into spectacle frames where once he had stared through high-grade lenses at stars without name. He never once complained that it was beneath him.
Four weeks after their flat burned down, Laura Langrishe and Kit McCall, formerly of Clapham Common, SW4, exchanged wedding vows at Lambeth Register Office; Christopher and Laura Smith left the building and returned to their new rented home, a one-bedroom flat on Wilbraham Road, N8. There was no wedding breakfast, no carrying the bride over the threshold, but consummation was sweet and tender in the newly marital bed. The honeymoon was spent with the bride in twice-weekly psychotherapy, the groom working double shifts at his lab technician’s job to pay for her sessions on top of the rent.
We were still only twenty-two and the quiet intensity of those weeks was too much for a couple of kids. While other couples our age were umming and aahing about commitment, we were so utterly enmeshed that we had the opposite problem. What is commitment to a relationship that is only darkness? Even sex, our one previous respite, lost its playfulness. We were all need and no want. When would the fun start again?
We had been living in Wilbraham Road for five months when Kit came home with a long thin tube under his arm.
‘What’s that?’
‘Watch me.’ He unfurled a map of the world and Blu-tack’d it to the blank wall over the fireplace. He’d bought – or more likely got from Adele – some red embroidery thread. Finally, he scissored off a length with a flourish and pinned a red thread across central and southern Africa.
‘Zambia, January,’ he said. ‘There’s a little festival. Just a few thousand people. Not Ling or Mac. Just us. We can keep to ourselves.’ He smiled his old smile. ‘There’s virtually zero chance of precipitation.’
I knew that this was something we had to do if we were not only to survive but to thrive. That only by reclaiming the eclipse, and by standing under the shadow, would we again find our light.
Chapter 40
LAURA
20 March 2015
‘Why’s everyone so obsessed with feeding me?’
Ling is as familiar with my kitchen as I am with hers; without looking, she picks a ladle from the drawer and slops chicken and sweetcorn soup into bowls.
‘Sit,’ she commands.
‘That’s easy for you to say.’ Instead of a table in our kitchen we have a booth tucked into one corner, like something you’d find in an American diner, leather benches running either side of a Formica surface that’s so old there’s a half-inch gap at the join where it’s peeled away from the wall, full of gunk and crumbs. I’ll tackle it the week before the babies come, when everyone says I’ll have a sudden urge to start washing windows and straightening cushions. I sit down and slide along the bench, back against the wall. I can see the whole kitchen from here. ‘I’m not getting back in here till these babies are on the outside,’ I say, feeling the squeeze.
Ling sets the bowl in front of me and watches me not eat, arms folded.
‘I want to want it,’ I say.
She lowers her brow in concern. ‘Isn’t losing your appetite one of the early warning signs?’
‘Oh God, is it? For what?’
‘For anxiety. Why, what did you think I meant?’
‘What if the reason I’m not hungry is because the babies aren’t growing properly? Or worse?’ Ling doesn’t need me to articulate what worse means. She was there for all the times it didn’t take.
‘Sweetheart, you’re a nervous wreck,’ she says. I am; she doesn’t know the half of it. ‘I was the same in both my pregnancies. It’s normal, I promise. Look, we’re literally on the way to get a scan. If it was an emergency they couldn’t see you sooner. They’ll put your mind at rest, I promise – are you even listening to me?’