He shook his head again.
He bent his head, pinched the dummy’s nostrils and gave it two breaths. The dummy’s chest rose to show that he’d done it correctly. He lifted his head and recommenced compressions and Clementine saw, with a kick-in-the-stomach sense of shock, that tears were sliding down his face and dripping onto the dummy. She’d never seen her husband cry, properly cry, not on their wedding day, not when the children were born, not when Ruby was not breathing, not when she woke up the next day. And she’d never questioned it because she’d never seen her father cry either, and her older brothers weren’t criers, they were door slammers and wall hitters during their angry-young-man years. Her mother got teary at times but Clementine was the family’s only true crier, she was always in floods of tears over something. Maybe all those staunch, stoic men around her had resulted in her internalising that ancient cliché: boys don’t cry, because it was absolutely astonishing to Clementine that Sam could cry like that, that his body was even capable of doing that, of producing that many tears. As she watched his tears drip onto the dummy, she felt something break inside her and a great welling of sympathy rise within her chest, and the terrible thought occurred to her that perhaps she’d always unconsciously believed that because Sam didn’t cry, he therefore didn’t feel, or he felt less, not as profoundly and deeply as she did. Her focus had always been on how his actions affected her feelings, as if his role was to do things for her, to her, and all that mattered was her emotional response to him; as if a ‘man’ were a product or a service and she’d finally chosen the right brand to get the right response. Was it possible she’d never seen or truly loved him the way he deserved to be seen and loved? As a person? An ordinary, flawed, feeling person?
‘Oh, Sam.’
He stood up so fast from his kneeling position that he nearly toppled backwards. He averted his face, rubbing his cheek hard with the heel of one hand, as if something had stung him. He turned and left the room.
chapter eighty
‘Sorry,’ said Clementine to the teacher. ‘I’ll just go and check on my husband. I think he’s not feeling well.’
‘Of course,’ said Jan. She added, hopefully, ‘Let me know if you need me.’
Clementine left the classroom and looked to the left. He was already nearly at the far end of the corridor. ‘Sam!’ she called, half-running past classrooms filled with adults bettering themselves.
He seemed to pick up his pace.
‘Sam!’ she called again. ‘Wait!’
She followed him to a quiet, deserted passageway with a glass ceiling that connected two buildings. The walls were jammed with grey lockers. Sam suddenly stopped. He found a narrow column of space in between two blocks of lockers, the sort of hidey-hole the girls would gravitate towards, and he sat down, his back against the wall. He rested his forehead on his knees. His shoulders heaved silently. There was a round patch of sweat on his shirt. She went to touch his shoulder, but her hand hovered uncertainly for a few seconds before she changed her mind.
Instead she sat down opposite him, on the other side of the passageway, her back against the cool metal of a locker. There were squares of sunlight all the way along the corridor, like a train of sunshine. She felt strangely peaceful as she waited for Sam to stop crying, breathing in the nostalgic fragrance of high school.
At last Sam looked up, his face wet and puffy. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Well, that was dignified.’
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘It was the compressions,’ said Sam. He ran the back of his hand across his nose and sniffed.
‘I know,’ said Clementine.
‘It felt like I was there.’ He used his palms to rub his cheekbones in a circular motion.
‘I know,’ she said again.
He looked up at the ceiling and did something with his tongue as if he were trying to get food out of his teeth. The sunlight shone on the wall behind him and made his eyes look very blue in the shadowiness of his face. He looked simultaneously very young and very old, as if all the past and future versions of himself were overlaid on his face.
‘I always had this idea in my head that I was good in a crisis,’ said Sam.
‘You are good in a crisis.’
‘I thought if I was ever tested, if there was a fire, or a gunman or a zombie apocalypse, I’d take care of my family. I’d be the man.’ He made his voice deep and contemptuous on the word ‘man’.
‘Sam –’