I said soothingly, “I understand. I wasn’t implying—” Jenny didn’t stop.
“And anyway, we practically didn’t even see each other any more. Pat said the thing was ‘more active’ at night, so he was staying up late and sleeping half the day. We always used to go to bed together, always, but the kids get up early, so I couldn’t stay up with him. He wanted me to—he kept being like, ‘Come on, I know tonight’s the night we get a look at it, I can feel it’—he was always having some idea that was definitely going to catch the thing, like some new bait, or some tent-type thing over the hole and the camera so the animal would feel safe. And he’d be like, ‘Please, Jenny, please, I’m begging you—all it’ll take is one look and you’ll be so much happier, you won’t be worrying about me any more. I know you don’t believe me, but just stay up this one night and you’ll see . . .’”
“And did you?” I kept my voice low and hoped Jenny would take the hint, but hers looped higher and higher.
“I tried! I hated even looking at those holes, I hated them so much, but I thought if Pat was right then I owed it to him, and if he was wrong then I might as well be sure, you know? And either way, at least we’d be doing something together, even if it wasn’t exactly a romantic dinner. But I was getting so exhausted, a couple of times I thought I was going to fall asleep when I was driving; I couldn’t do it any more. So I’d go to bed at midnight, and Pat would come up whenever he got too tired to keep his eyes open. At first it was like two o’clock, but then it was three, four, five, sometimes not even then—in the morning I’d find him crashed out on the sofa, with all the monitors lined up on the coffee table. Or in the chair by the computer, because he’d spent the whole night online reading up on animals.”
I said, “‘If he was right.’ By this point, you had doubts.”
Jenny caught a breath and for a second I thought she was going to snap at me again, but then her spine sagged and she slumped back against the pillows.
She said quietly, “No. By then I knew. I knew there was nothing there. If there had been, how come I never heard anything? All those cameras, how come we never once saw anything? I tried to tell myself it could still maybe be real, but I knew. But by then it was too late. Our house bashed to bits, me and Pat hardly talking any more; I couldn’t remember the last time we’d even kissed, like properly kissed. The kids keyed up all the time, hyper, even if they didn’t understand why.”
Her head moved from side to side, blindly. “I knew I should do something, stop the whole thing—I’m not thick, I’m not insane; I did know that, by that stage. But I didn’t know what to do. There’s no self-help book for this; there’s no internet group. They didn’t tell us what to do about this on our marriage guidance course.”
I said, “You didn’t consider talking to anyone?”
That flash of steel. “No. No way. Are you joking?”
“It was a difficult situation. A lot of people might have felt that talking to someone would help.”
“Talking to who?”
“Your sister, maybe.”
“Fiona . . .” A wry twist of Jenny’s mouth. “Um, I don’t think so. I love Fi, but like I said before, there’s stuff she just doesn’t get. And anyway, she was always . . . I mean, sisters get jealous. Fi always felt like I had things easy; like stuff just fell into my lap, while she was working her arse off for everything. If I’d said something to her, part of her would’ve had to be like, Ha-ha, now you know how it feels. She wouldn’t’ve said it, but I’d’ve known. How would that have helped anything?”
“What about friends?”
“I don’t have those kind of friends, not any more. And, like, what would I say? Hi, Pat’s hallucinating some animal that lives in our walls, I think he’s going loop-the-loop? Yeah, right. I’m not stupid. Once you tell one person, it gets out. I told you, no way was I going to have people laughing at us—or, even worse, feeling sorry for us.” The thought had her chin out, ready for a fight. “I kept thinking about this girl Shona, we used to hang out when we were kids—she’s turned into a total bitch now. We’re not in touch any more, but if she’d heard about this, she’d have been on the phone to me like a shot. Whenever I got tempted to say something to Fi or whoever, that’s what I’d hear: Shona. Jenny! Hi! Oh my God, I heard Pat’s totally lost it, like he’s seeing pink elephants on the ceiling? Everyone’s just like, wow, who would’ve guessed? I remember we all thought you guys were the perfect couple, Mr. and Mrs. Boring, happy ever after . . . Like, how wrong were we? Gotta go, time for my hot stone massage, just had to say sooo sorry it all went tits-up for you! Byeee!”
Jenny was rigid in the bed, palms pressed down on the blanket, fingers digging in. “That was the one thing we still had going for us: nobody knew. I kept on telling myself over and over, At least we’ve got that. As long as people thought we were doing great, we had a chance of getting back up and doing great again. If people think you’re some kind of lunatic losers, they start treating you like lunatic losers, and then you’re screwed. Totally screwed.”
If that’s how everyone treats you, I had said to Richie, then that’s how you feel. How is that different? I said, “There are professionals. Counselors, therapists. Anything you said to someone like that would have been confidential.”
“And have him say Pat was nuts, and cart him off to some loony bin where he actually would have gone crazy? No. Pat didn’t need a therapist. All Pat needed was a job, so he wouldn’t have all this time to freak out about nothing, so he’d have to go to bed at a decent hour instead of . . .” Jenny shoved the drawing away, so violently that it fluttered off the bed, glided to rest by my foot with an ugly rasping sound. “I just had to hold things together till he could get a job again. That was all. And I couldn’t do that if everyone knew. When I’d pick up Emma from school, and her teacher would smile at me and be like, ‘Oh, isn’t Emma’s reading getting so much better,’ or whatever, just like I was a normal mummy going home to a normal house—that was the only time I felt normal. I needed that. That was the only thing getting me through. If she’d given me some awful sympathetic smile and a pat on the arm, because she’d found out that Emma’s daddy was in a nuthouse, I’d have curled up and died, right there on the classroom floor.”
The air felt solid with heat. For a stab of a second I saw me and Dina, maybe fourteen and five, me jerking her arm behind her back at the school gates: Shut up, you shut up, you don’t ever talk about Mum outside the house or I’ll break your arm— The high steam-whistle shriek out of her, and the stomach-turning free-fall pleasure of yanking her wrist higher. I leaned down to pick up the drawing, so I could hide my face.
Jenny said, “I never wanted all that much. I wasn’t one of those ambitious types who want to be a pop star or a CEO or an It girl. All I wanted was to be normal.”
All the force had ebbed out of her voice, leaving it drained and wan. I laid the drawing back on the bed; she didn’t seem to notice. “That’s why you didn’t send Jack back to preschool, isn’t it?” I said. “Not because of the money. Because he was saying he’d heard the animal, and you were afraid he’d say it there.”
Jenny flinched like I had raised a hand to her. “He kept on and on saying it! Back at the beginning of summer it was just once in a while, and it was only because Pat was encouraging him—they’d come downstairs and Pat would be all, ‘See, Jen, I’m not going loopy. Jack heard it just now, didn’t you, Jack the lad?’ And of course Jack would be like, ‘Yeah, Mummy, I heard the aminal in the ceiling!’ If you tell a three-year-old he’s heard something, and if he knows you want him to have heard it, then yeah, of course he’ll end up convinced that he did. Back then I didn’t even think it was a big deal. I just went, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s only a bird, it’ll go out again in a minute.’ But then . . .”
Something jerked her body, so hard that I thought she was going to be sick. It took me a second to realize it had been a shudder. “Then he started saying it more and more. ‘Mum, the aminal went scratch scratch scratch in my wall! Mum, the aminal jumped up and down like this! Mum, the aminal, the aminal, the . . .’ And then this one afternoon in I guess August, towards the end of August, I took him over to play at his friend Karl’s house, and when I got back to pick him up, the two of them were in the garden, yelling and pretending to whack something with sticks. Aisling—that’s Karl’s mum—she said to me, ‘Jack was talking about a big animal that growls, and Karl said they should kill it, so that’s what they’ve been doing. Is that OK? You don’t mind?’”
That racking shudder again. “Oh, God. I thought I was going to faint. Thank God, Aisling took it for granted it was just something Jack had made up—she was just worried in case I thought she was encouraging them to be cruel to animals, or something. I don’t know how I got out of there. I took Jack home and I sat down on the sofa with him on my lap—that’s what we do for serious talks. I went, ‘Jack, look at me. Remember how we talked about the Big Bad Wolf not being real? This animal you told Karl about, it’s the same kind as the Big Bad Wolf: it’s makey-up. You know there’s no real animal, don’t you? You know it’s only pretend. Don’t you?’
“He wouldn’t look at me. He kept wiggling, trying to get down—Jack always hated staying still, but it wasn’t just that. I held onto his arms harder—I was terrified I was actually hurting him, but I had to hear him say yes. I had to. Finally he yelled, ‘No! It makes growls inside the wall! I hate you!’ And he kicked me in the stomach and pulled away, and ran.”
Jenny smoothed the blanket carefully over her knees. “So,” she said, “I rang the preschool and told them Jack wasn’t coming back. I could tell they thought it was the money—I wasn’t happy about that, but I couldn’t think of anything better. When Aisling rang after that, I didn’t answer the phone. She left messages, but I just deleted them. After a while she stopped ringing.”
“And Jack,” I said. “Did he keep talking about the animal?”
“Not after that. Once or twice, just little mentions, but the same way he’d talk about Baloo or Elmo, you know? Not like it was in his actual life. I knew that could be just because he could tell I didn’t want to hear it, but that was OK. Jack was only little. As long as he knew not to act like it was real, it didn’t matter so much whether he knew why. Once everything was over, he’d forget all about it.”
I asked, carefully, “And Emma?”
“Emma,” Jenny said, so gently, like she wanted to cup the word in her two hands and keep it safe from spilling. “I was so scared about Emma. She was still little enough that I knew she could end up believing in this thing, if Pat went on about it enough; but she wasn’t little enough that anyone would figure it was just a game, like Aisling did with Jack. And I couldn’t take her out of school, either. And Emma—when something upsets her, she can’t let go of it; she’ll stay upset for weeks and keep bringing it up over and over. If she started getting sucked in, I didn’t know what I was going to do. When I tried to think about it, my mind just blanked out.
“So when I was putting her to bed, that night in August after I talked to Jack, I tried to explain. I went, ‘Sweetie, you know that animal Daddy talks about? The one in the attic?’
“Emma gave me this quick little careful look. It totally broke my heart—she shouldn’t ever have to watch herself around me—but at the same time I was actually glad, that she knew to be careful. She went, ‘Yeah. The one that scratches.’ I went, ‘Have you ever heard it?’ and she shook her head and went, ‘No.’”
Jenny’s chest rose and fell. “The relief; Jesus, the relief. Emma’s not a great liar; I’d have known. I said, ‘That’s right. That’s because it’s not really there. Daddy’s just a little confused right now. Sometimes people think silly things when they’re not feeling great. Remember when you had the flu and you were calling all your dolls the wrong names, because everything got all mixed up in your head? That’s how Daddy’s feeling right now. So we just have to take good care of him and wait for him to get better.’