Seeing Other People (17 page)

‘Of course not! That day was the first time I’d seen her in months. It happened just the once and then I cut off all contact with her. I wanted her out of my life.’

Penny shook her head with disgust. ‘Ever the gentleman.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said again, even though it was exactly like that. ‘I just let myself get carried away, that’s all. I didn’t love her. I didn’t care for her. I didn’t even really know her. I just let myself get carried away.’

Penny laughed. ‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better, is it? Am I meant to take solace from the fact that the kids and I weren’t even a consideration? You’ve ruined absolutely everything, Joe. We had the best thing ever and you ruined it with one selfish act. Don’t you think I’ve had offers? I’ve had plenty if you want to know. Only last week an old boyfriend of mine messaged me to see if I’d like to meet up when he’s in London for business.’

I bristled. ‘Which old boyfriend?’

‘You’re missing the point! He’s not important. That I didn’t even reply to his message is. That’s what you do when you’re married. You don’t dip your toe in to test the water. You don’t put yourself in harm’s way. You don’t do anything at all that could hurt the thing you love the most. But you did, Joe. You just jumped in there with both feet and you didn’t give a damn about the consequences.’

Rob/Dad, sensing that our discussion was in danger of getting out of control, took the opportunity to intervene. ‘Right, there’s certainly a lot of food for thought in what’s been said. But I think going forward we probably need to unpack some of it and see what we can tease out.’ He looked over at me. ‘Joe, why don’t you go first? What I’m hearing from Penny is that the affair has caused her a great deal of heartache and – correct me if I’m wrong – that she feels let down by the explanation you’ve offered for your actions. As Penny was speaking I found myself jotting down the following question: “Why does Joe think he chose to have an affair?”  ’

It was a good question. One that got to the very heart of the matter. And if it hadn’t been asked by a man who bore such an uncanny resemblance to my deceased father maybe I would’ve bought it, but this along with everything that had been going on of late was just one step too far. This really was a dream. I wasn’t losing my mind after all. I was coming to my senses. I’d been mugged and was unconscious and had created a whole nightmare landscape populated by people from my past. There was nothing real about this world. Not a single thing. So it stood to reason that if I challenged it directly it would disappear and I’d wake up where I’d fallen after the mugging.

I took a deep breath. I had to do something drastic if this was going to work. I looked at Rob/Dad.

‘Do you really want to know why I did what I did?’

Rob/Dad smiled. ‘That’s why I asked the question.’

‘And you want me to tell the truth? I mean, there’s no point in any of this if I just make it up is there?’

‘No,’ said Rob/Dad. ‘There would be no point at all.’

‘OK,’ I replied. ‘Well here it is.’ I turned to Penny and took a deep breath. ‘I know that what I told you the other day must have really hurt and I’m more sorry about that than you’ll ever know but when I said I’d had an affair I wasn’t telling you the truth, I was telling you what I thought was the truth. I know it’s going to sound weird but hear me out. That night – the night that y’know – well, I was attacked by – and I know
this
is going to sound
really
mad – Fiona Briggs, my dead ex-girlfriend. She knocked me out with a cricket bat but she did it to save me . . . to save us, and right now I’m lying unconscious on a pavement in a dodgy part of town and I’m hoping that telling you all this will help me to wake up.’

There was a long silence. Penny and Rob/Dad exchanged awkward glances. Clearly neither of them knew what to make of this. Was I joking or was I insane? Even I had to weigh the question up in the light of their reaction and the more horrified they became the more my confidence faltered. Did Rob/Dad really look like my own father? They had slightly similar features, but so had a million other old men. And yes, his voice had sounded familiar at first but now I thought about it I wasn’t so sure.

I’d been so convinced of my own argument but now my words were out there all they served to do was make it clear just how bonkers an idea this was.

The longer the silence went on, the more I doubted what I’d said. This was horrible. Truly horrible. If I continued to insist that the world wasn’t real, when it clearly was, Penny would have no choice but to get me hospitalised, maybe even sectioned, and who knew where that would end? Like Bruce Willis in
12 Monkeys
, babbling on about being from the future and locked up in a mental institution? Did Rob/Dad have a panic button hidden somewhere behind a box of tissues which he’d reach for at the next opportunity? I needed to think fast.

They always say that the most straightforward answers are most likely to be true. How likely was it that my dead ex-girlfriend had attacked me to save me from cheating on my wife? Wasn’t it infinitely more plausible that I’d actually done it and was so overwhelmed with guilt that I’d blocked it out and the episodes with Fiona were my way of dealing with it? Surely this was a case of extreme stress and nothing more: the mind doing odd things to keep itself from short-circuiting. It didn’t mean that I was mad or in danger of losing my mind. It simply meant that I had to get out of here, grab a good night’s sleep and get back to being my old self. I needed to rest.

I sat forward in my chair, the tension palpable, then I laughed and held my hands up in surrender. ‘Anyone would think you’d never heard a joke before.’

Rob shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I think the most politic thing to say here, Joe, is that when it comes to humour context is everything.’

Penny stood up, her face livid. ‘I can’t believe you, Joe! You begged me to work on our marriage, made me feel guilty for giving up on us and now this? Is this all just one big joke to you?’ She shook her head. ‘I wasn’t going to say this until the end of the session but seeing the way things are going I don’t see the point in keeping it to myself any longer: I want you to move out. I’m tired of lying to the kids every day, I’m tired of all the subterfuge. I’ve had enough.’

Rob held up his hand. ‘Maybe we should take a break? In my experience decisions made in the heat of the moment aren’t always the most helpful.’

‘No,’ said Penny. ‘I want you out, Joe. I want you gone.’

17

Saturday. Mid-afternoon. The seventeenth floor of a high-rise block of flats not far from Lewisham station. A two-bed ex-council flat that had three things going for it: a bedroom each for Rosie and Jack (so long as I slept on the sofa), a living room large enough for me to imagine the kids and me spending a rainy afternoon playing games in without tripping over ourselves and most importantly the fact that I could just about afford it. On the other hand, of the several things it had going against it – being a high-rise, the lifts not working, and the smell of urine in the stairwell – the thing that was really putting me off right now was the sound of the couple in the flat next door hurling expletive-riddled abuse at each other.

‘How much for this place again?’

The estate agent grimaced. ‘Let’s just say,’ he replied pointedly, ‘that the rent is definitely up for negotiation.’

Despite days of me apologising Penny had absolutely refused to budge on her request that I moved out of the family home. I had explained away my attempt to tell her what I saw as the truth saying it was a stress response to the situation, a bit like laughing when someone dies. Following, I suspect, a phone call to the counsellor she had come to accept this, albeit begrudgingly, and even agreed to return to counselling. Not however with me still at home. From her point of view my moving out was the only way forward. How could we ever hope to return to normal when my being around the house did nothing but make the situation worse? Every morning we ate breakfast together like a normal family was just another reminder that we were pretending to be something now that Penny didn’t feel we were and she hated it. I couldn’t stand to see her so unhappy and so I agreed to start looking for somewhere to live.

Desperate to stay close to my family but acutely aware of my meagre budget, my choices were seriously limited. Like most London couples Penny and I had mortgaged ourselves to the hilt in order to get the most for our money and with Penny working part-time there wasn’t a lot of spare cash floating around. That said, as relatively cheap as the B&B had been in the short term returning there in the long term wasn’t an option and so while Penny took the kids to her Mum and Tony’s for the weekend, I started my house search in earnest.

The second place I saw that day was another ex-local authority flat, five minutes away from the first property. It was in the middle of a large council estate and the area reminded me of the kinds of places Penny and I had first looked at when we’d decided to move on from house shares to getting a place of our own. The overwhelming impression I had of the flat was that it stank, of cigarettes, grease and desperation. It seemed to be ingrained in the walls and the carpets, and sewn into the very fabric of the back street charity shop-style furniture. Seeing the disappointment on my face the estate agent had offered me a deal where the rent would be discounted significantly if I was prepared to spruce the place up a bit at my own expense but I think we both knew that little short of knocking the whole building down and starting again would make it habitable.

I spent what remained of my weekend and the week following looking at flat after flat and being so disappointed that I began to wonder if there was any decent rentable accommodation left in London. I saw flats that had chronic problems with damp, ones that overlooked railway lines and others with a full generational set of antisocial neighbours. It started to look like I was never going to find a home. Then at my boss’s suggestion I posted a request on the
Correspondent
’s online internal bulletin board, and as luck would have it by the end of that afternoon I received an offer from an ad sales executive from the fifth floor.

‘My fiancée and I have just bought the place,’ he explained over coffee at the local Starbucks – ever since my run-in with Bella I’d avoided Allegro’s like the plague. ‘It’s structurally sound but in need of updating and we can’t do the work until my flat in Enfield is sold which could take at least six months because we’re having problems with the lease extension. In the interim I’d be happy to let it to a fellow
Correspondent
employee for a reasonable rate just to keep it occupied. You’re more than welcome to come and take a look tonight if it sounds up your street though I must stress it isn’t in a great state.’

He wasn’t joking. The house was a wreck. A deceased estate, previously owned by an elderly man who though obviously a keen gardener hadn’t exactly been an interior decorating wizard. The orange and green carpets, sludge coloured anaglypta walls and brick-built fireplace complete with fully functioning fake-log-effect gas fire made me feel as though I’d travelled back in time to the late seventies – and not in a good way – but the house’s one saving grace was that it was only ten minutes from Penny and the kids. It was a winner.

The ad sales guy and I shook hands on the deal. A guaranteed six-month lease at minimal rent and given his plans to totally renovate the place I could decorate it any way I wanted in the meantime. As deals went it was the best I could hope for.

‘I feel bad charging you anything for this place,’ he said as we left the house. ‘It’s a total tip. You must really be up against it to want to live here.’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ I replied.

At the end of our counselling session the following week I asked Penny if she had time for a coffee as I had some news I wanted to share. She agreed and we went to a little place just around the corner. We ordered our drinks at the counter and then took up seats near the window. Penny must have sensed how difficult this conversation was going to be because for the first time in what felt like forever she made small talk.

‘How’s work?’ she asked.

‘OK,’ I replied. ‘Nothing much to report really; I interviewed quite an interesting guy at the start of the week. He’s a director who for the last year or so has been making a series of films about his family and posting them online. Fascinating stuff. How about you?’

‘Same as ever: too much to do, too little time to do it.’ She smiled awkwardly. ‘That was a good session wasn’t it?’

‘It was,’ I replied, even though for me it had been anything but. In the middle of the session Rob had asked us if, prior to the affair, we’d thought we were happy. I’d said yes straight away because I’d assumed that he meant happy as a couple which I had been because as far as I was concerned my problems had been with myself, not with my marriage. When Penny took her turn however she revealed that there had been times when she’d wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake getting married, which had completely been news to me.

I looked at Penny. ‘Did you mean what you said?’

‘About what?’

‘About sometimes wishing you hadn’t married me?’

‘That’s not what I said. What I said was that sometimes I wished I’d never got married – not just to you – to anyone.’

‘Because . . . what? Marriage is a terrible institution?’