Missing You (9 page)

It’s a picture of Sean with his arm around the shoulders of a woman. The woman is beautiful. She has dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, a long nose, and the confidence in front of the camera that only ever comes with real beauty. In the picture, Sean’s hair is a little shorter than it is now, his face less tired, and his forehead touches the woman’s forehead, so she must be quite tall. The woman is wearing a chic, short-sleeved black dress. An expensive-looking, cream-coloured handbag is tucked under her elbow. Propped into the bottom corner of the frame is a smaller picture. It’s a photograph of Amy as a chubby toddler on a Mediterranean beach, smiling, her hair in bunches, holding up her hands to whoever is taking the picture, asking to be picked up.

Fen puts the photograph back on the carpet, nudging it under the bed so that she can vacuum the room without Sean realizing she has been spying. She strips the bed and piles the linen, the duvet and the pillows on the floor. The mattress is stained and smells of ammonia, the familiar farmyard stink of stale child-pee. Fen pushes back her hair and then she grabs one side of the mattress and, heaving, hurting her fingernails and straining the muscles in her arms, she tries to turn it. She has pulled it half off the bed, when she sees the little blue notebook that had been hidden between the mattress and the bed frame.

Fen knows she shouldn’t intrude on Sean’s privacy, but having done so already, albeit accidentally, she has no qualms about what she does next. She opens the notebook, its cover circled with coffee-mug stains, and reads the words inside. It is filled with lines of poetry, scribbled out, amended – no, not poetry, she realizes, but lyrics. The songs are all love songs. On some pages are little sketches of a woman illustrating the sentiment of the lyrics. Some of the drawings are beautiful, some are ugly. On the second to last page, Sean has drawn a naked man with his head in his hands and then scribbled obscenities over the drawing.

Tomas used to write illustrated poems about love. He used to hide them too. More often he destroyed them so that nobody else could read them and misinterpret them. He set fire to them or else he tore them up and dropped the pieces over the side of the bridge that took the road over the river in Merron. The pieces of paper fluttered like leaves to the water, where they met their reflections, and were carried, spinning, downstream. And there was a beauty to the destruction of the words, there was a poetry.

He was fascinated by the conflict between water and fire. Sometimes he would make paper boats and float them at night, setting fire to their paper sails with the yellow flame of a disposable lighter.

‘Water always beats fire,’ he said, sucking the side of his thumb because the lighter wheel was rusty and had made it sore.

He and Joe wanted to go to Japan to watch the peace ceremony at Hiroshima. Tomas told Fen there was an eternal flame burning beside the peace pond and it would only be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon was destroyed. He said the beauty of this symbolism was designed to mask the horrors it hid. He said men would never get rid of nuclear weapons so the flame really was eternal. It would burn until the sun began to swell and sucked the planets and moons of the solar system back into it, like a multiple birth in reverse.

Now Fen sits on the unturned mattress and she reads what Sean has written. She strokes her lower lip with her middle finger. The lyrics could be turned into an opera, an elegy to Sean’s marriage. She enjoys the gentle, funny, erotic and pleading words but does not care for the angry verses. She supposes the emotions they describe are part of what’s happening to him, they have to be expressed, and at least Sean’s expressions are creative, not destructive. She flicks back to the beginning of the notebook and reads her favourite lyrics again. She touches the pages. She whispers: ‘Oh, Sean.’

He could have been describing her loss. His missing Belle, finding out things he did not know about her, and could not have imagined of her, wanting her back, is the same as her missing Tomas. It’s the same terrible not-knowing. And the guilt. The thinking: If only I had done this, or that, or said this, or that, anything to stop what happened from happening.

Sean is as lost as she is. He doesn’t know where he is, or what’s going to happen next. The tentative stepping into each new day, feeling the way forward, blind because all certainty has been taken away, as if the projected backdrop to a life has been lifted and replaced by another and completely unfamiliar scenario, is the same for Sean as it is for Fen. And she wishes he would turn away from Belle because it is obvious there is no happiness for Sean with her; she wishes he would look forward, instead, towards a happier future.

And she realizes that this is precisely what the people who still care about Fen have been saying to her for years.

When she has read the notebook several times, she hefts the mattress back onto the bed. She cannot turn it now, or he would know she has seen the book. She switches on Sean’s CD player, to listen to whatever it was he was listening to last night. A man’s gentle voice comes from the speakers. He sings an appeal to a woman who is no longer his. Fen gathers up Sean’s bedding and lies down on the mattress, her head on his pillows, and she holds to her face the used sheet he has slept on for the last week. She wraps her arm around the linen, nests her cheek in the sheet and inhales the musky, musty man-smell of his skin: the smell of Sean, sleeping.

She stays there, immersed in Sean’s sheet, and his music, half-dozing on Sean’s bed until she hears the hoot of Connor’s bus outside and runs downstairs to greet him back from school.

Fen spends the first part of the evening in the dining room, sewing at the table by the window. The room is warm and cosy, the curtains are drawn, Connor is sleeping and Fen should feel content. She enjoys her work; she’s making cushion covers for Lina and Lucy, Christmas presents, using scraps of fabric she has collected over the year and stored in carrier bags. The covers are turning out beautifully, and Fen knows her friend and her sister will be surprised and pleased, but all she can think about is Sean.

He is in the living room, watching television, and she is acutely conscious of him being there, and of the wall between them. All she has to do is cross from one room to the other, it’s not far, only two or three metres, but she feels illiterate in the language of man-and-woman, and it is so long since she has practised. One clumsy move could ruin their quiet relationship, she knows that, and also she is terrified of humiliation. She would rather cut open her wrists than embarrass him and reveal herself as needy. Yet the connection she sensed when she watched him in the shower is deeper now, because she knows they have both lost somebody they loved. They are both refugees. They ought to be able to help one another. Only there is no way to broach a subject so intimate without sounding mad, or desperate, or like one of those people who enjoy probing into the unhappiness of others, peeling back the protective veneer that hides their misery and sticking their dirty fingers in the infected wounds that lie beneath.

When she finishes putting the zip on the last cushion cover, she turns off the machine, goes into the kitchen, tidies up and sets a load of laundry to wash. It’s not even ten o’clock, and there are no other domestic chores to fill the time. Fen checks the fridge, to make sure there’s a bottle in the chiller, then taps on the living-room door with her fingertips and goes in. The television is still on, friendly blue-grey faces in the corner are taking part in a current affairs quiz, but the volume has been turned low. Sean is sitting on the chair, very quietly picking out chords on his guitar. He raises his eyes and his hand in greeting when he sees her.

‘Hi,’ she says, nervously, and her voice sounds high-pitched and stupid.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Am I making too much noise?’

‘No, no, not at all. It’s nice . . . Sean,’ she says, and she enjoys the sound of his name on her lips, ‘this morning, I went into your room to change the bed and there was a CD on the player, and I turned it on. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Beck,’ says Sean. ‘The album’s called
Sea Change
. I was listening to it the other night.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ says Fen. ‘It’s sad.’

‘I’ll make a copy for you, if you like.’

‘Thank you.’

Sean’s eyes drop down to the guitar again. It is cradled in his arms. Fen feels a pang of jealousy for the instrument. Sean’s hair hides his eyes. She can see the top of his head, the pattern of the crown. She sees the way his arm is curled around the lower half of the guitar, his sleeve rolled up to the elbow, the dark hairs on his arm and the boniness of his wrist, and the way the fingers are splayed . . . She has to swallow the thrilling memory that floods into her mind and bloodstream. She steadies herself against the door.

‘My brother used to like Beck,’ she says.

Sean continues to play, but he looks up.

‘I’m sure Tom saw him play live. He had all his CDs.’

‘He’s into music, then, your brother?’

Fen nods. ‘Yes.’

Sean smiles politely, but he doesn’t seem to want to talk. He looks as if he’d rather be left alone to play his guitar.

‘I was just wondering –’ Fen persists, and again she sounds gauche, far too awkward – ‘I was going to have a glass of wine. Would you like some?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, I’m all right,’ he says, ‘but thanks anyway.’

‘OK,’ says Fen. She stands there for a moment longer, but he is engrossed with his guitar and she can think of nothing else to say. ‘Well, goodnight,’ she says.

‘Goodnight.’

And she goes up to bed with her book.

twelve

Sean spends Christmas week with his parents.

His old bedroom has been commandeered as the headquarters of his mother’s new internet retro-fashion business. The room is full of faintly smelly, old afghan coats; brown, orange and purple mini-, midi- and maxi-dresses on wire hangers looped over the curtain rail and door; platform shoes, flared trousers and flowery shirts with matching ties. There’s an ironing board and various paraphernalia for wrapping the ordered goods. On the desk by the window, where Sean was supposed to do his homework when he was at school, there now sits a flash little laptop with wireless broadband access. The computer is never turned off, and pings irritatingly through the night as orders come in from countries in different time zones. Sean has to move armfuls of newly washed charity-shop finds off the old single bed in order to lie on it. The overriding smell in the room is of Bold 2 in 1.

‘It’s my busiest time of year,’ says Rosie unapologetically, as she climbs over Sean’s rucksack to access the computer on Christmas Eve. Her cheeks are flushed like the cheeks of a Russian doll. She calls it her ‘sherry blush’ even though she’s not drinking sherry but Southern Comfort and lemonade. She’s pretending it’s sherry because her mother-in-law, Vera, is over for Christmas and Vera is a stickler for tradition. Sean is pretty sure Vera is on to Rosie; he can sense disapproval emanating from her pores.

His parents are being unnaturally jolly and are trying to keep Sean busy so that he won’t have time to dwell on his situation, but he knows what they’re up to and nothing, not even alcohol, helps ease the ache. He misses his home, he misses Amy, but most of all, and angry as he is with her, he misses Belle.

His father says it’s Christmas that’s making Sean feel so bad. He says it’s a bloody time of year at the best of times and that there’s nothing more guaranteed to depress a man than being told he should be enjoying himself. But that can’t be entirely accurate, because Belle was never one for making a big deal of Christmas. She refused to be drawn into the consumer frenzy. At home, their decorations were minimal: candles and some tasteful greenery, nothing that glittered or sparkled or played a tinkly tune, ever. They gave money to charities that supplied drugs to HIV-infected people in Africa, or to Amnesty International, and their house was a religion-free zone. No carols, no cards, no symbols. When Amy was two, Belle relaxed the rules a little, because she wanted to share Amy’s excitement over presents, and she concurred with Sean that Amy be told the Father Christmas myth so that she wouldn’t feel out of things at playgroup. Still, for Christmas dinner they usually ate a light curry or a risotto and then they would sit up late, the three of them, watching classic videos, the adults drinking wine and Amy snuggled between them in her nightclothes.

Last year, Sean realizes, Belle was already seeing the Other at Christmas. She must have wanted to be with him. He remembers how she went out on Christmas Eve and stayed out late. She said her tutor group was meeting for drinks. Sean thought it a little strange at the time, given that term had ended a fortnight previously. He watched her spray perfume on her wrists as she studied her reflection in the big mirror in the hall before she left. Her hair was glossy, straight, her eyebrows arched; her fingernails were perfect, polished, pale pink. She looked beautiful, so beautiful she took his breath away. He was flooded with that familiar sense of his own good fortune that he was married to such a wonderful woman. She must have felt his gaze on her back because she turned to smile at him over her shoulder and the earring in the curl of her lobe refracted a flash of lamp-light.

She said: ‘For goodness’ sake, Sean, have a shave. You look like a cowboy.’

‘I thought you liked cowboys?’ he whispered, slipping his arms around her waist. She pulled away.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘You’ll crease my dress.’

Sean didn’t remember seeing the dress before. It was ivory-coloured, simple, silky. It did not look like the sort of dress anyone would wear if they were going to be spending the evening sitting in a crowded pub with their fellow students. Of course
now
it’s obvious that Belle was lying about the group social. She and the Other would have been enjoying some intimate evening somewhere private. His house? His car? A restaurant? A hotel? They would have been making up for the forthcoming enforced abstinence. They would have been regretting the time spent apart even before it happened, looking forward to the end of the holiday when they would be able to resume their relationship unencumbered by Sean being at home for ten days. Was Belle hoping, then, that it would be the last Christmas she ever spent with Sean? Or had she not made up her mind at that point? Sean’s heart beats a little more slowly. He wishes he could stop remembering things like this.