Shtum (17 page)

I necked half of it during the remaining hundred-metre walk and hid the rest in my laptop bag, then – suitably armoured – I put my key in the door, fixed the smile on my face and stepped confidently into my other life – jobless, hopeless, but reassuringly pissed …

It is our contention that the LA in this case fundamentally ignored the deteriorating situation within the Jewell family until it became clear that they intended to appeal to this tribunal.

And then the agonies carried on for us and we stopped communicating, everything between Emma and me laden with stress and anxiety.

… I moved to the bedroom doorway and watched her apply makeup in her dressing table mirror.

‘You going out?’

‘Yes, you’ll be pleased to hear,’ she said, without turning round. ‘I’m seeing Amanda, so you’ll have to make something for yourself. Please don’t make a mess and don’t drink too much. I want you up early – or have you forgotten that as well?’

‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ I lied. How could I forget the mechanics of procreation?

I peered through a crack in the net curtains to make sure she’d gone. I watched the heavily financed four-wheel-drive’s headlights disappear down the road and waited for the indicator to stop flashing before I retrieved the remainder of the bottle and plummeted on to the sofa, finally alone. The silence was soothing. But then I remembered the horrors of the day and I thought about the following one. It hadn’t occurred to me to own up, or even to lie about redundancy, or other legitimate reasons for not going to work. It seemed I’d drunk away my capacity to tell the truth, as if all the barriers against deceit, depravity and normal human behaviour were fizzing and dissolving away, leaving no defence against a debilitating, slow death-by-shame.

There was just enough left in the bottle to stain my lips. Before I knew it, I was outside, sprinting. Arms pumped like pistons, feet hammered the pavement, faster and faster, until the neon of Regal Wines rose out of the gloom like Las Vegas from the surrounding desert.

I burst through the door and joined the queue. A verbal battle was ensuing – chardonnay versus sauvignon blanc. Just fucking get on with it! I remembered my confiscated bottle of Cloudy Bay and the anxiety returned, little needles piercing my scalp. The wine conversation was finally over and the Indian man whose name I did not know, but who knew me better than anyone alive, stared at my feet. I looked down. Just socks. I looked back at him and shrugged. He didn’t smile at me, just shook his head and passed me another bottle of vodka. I held the money in my hand, but he indicated I should drop it on the counter, which I did. He took an envelope from beside the cash register and swept it up.

DE VRIES:
Value for money, Miss Price …

PRICE:
But we’re not comparing brands of washing-up liquid. How can the LA, Mr De Vries, not blush when suggesting otherwise. It has tacitly admitted as much by introducing The Sunrise Academy at such a late stage in the proceedings, despite having had two years now to engage with the family on the matter. My clients find it cynical in the extreme.

And I can’t forget how things were before Jonah. I just wasn’t ready to be a father, I was too ill, too fucked up, I was spending every night till two, three in the morning trying to dissolve the anxiety in alcohol. How could I be a father in this state? The alcohol fuelling the fear and vice versa.

I settled down to watch a DVD – beached on a sofa I was still paying for – bottle of vodka perched on my chest, favourite film playing over and over again because I passed out periodically and kept missing crucial bits. I was unnerved by the prospect of leaving the house the next morning with absolutely no idea of where to go for eight hours, or how to lie my way into another job soon enough for the whole sorry mess to have remained a secret. But first, the trauma of the alarm call needed to be negotiated and I feared there would be no escape from that.

It was 2 a.m. and I was drinking a can of 7-Up in the kitchen. My eyeballs had turned to beach pebbles after crawling into bed at midnight. It was almost worth the dehydration just to have felt the relief as my eyes plumped up, moist and taut like shrivelled tomatoes dropped in ice water.

Our bed was king-sized. Emma slept on the left, on her left side, her back to me. I mirrored her to the right. I always waited until she was asleep before I came to bed.

It was 4 a.m. and I lay with my arms behind my head listening to Emma’s snoring. It was funny, sometimes the alcohol sedated me almost into coma territory, but that night I couldn’t even buy a yawn. The curtains in our bedroom were inherited from the previous owners and they didn’t quite fit, so a shaft of streetlight divided our bed in half almost perfectly down the centre. It was like a James Bond-style laser and I fantasised about gently placing Emma’s arm across its beam, the burning smell of flesh as it cut a perfect incision. Then my imaginings wandered to me. Maybe I could have used it to perform a vasectomy? Cutting off Emma at the pass, so to speak.

I couldn’t wait to get out of bed and out of the house again, but as the clock ticked ominously toward six and Capital Radio began to caress my ears, I detected a staccato quality to her breathing. She roused, edged her backside towards me in the bed and I felt myself shrink back further toward my side, as the duvet rustled and she removed her underwear and dropped it to the floor. I wanted to scream. I was screaming in my head. It was the scream of despair from
The Deerhunter
, when Robert De Niro tried in vain to plug the bullet hole in Christopher Walken’s temple. It was the result of his promised last shot in a game of Russian Roulette. I hoped my chamber was empty.

Then I removed my boxer shorts and searched my memory for an image, an encounter – however fleeting – anything that would have provided me with the means to fulfil that service. I moved my hand down to my groin and took hold of myself. I squeezed and pulled in desperation, but there was no reaction. I removed my mind from the room and searched back five years, ten years and the first stirrings, the smallest sensations began to work their way from my brain to my groin and I finally began to swell.

I was with Michelle. We were seventeen, lying on my bed in my parents’ house. We were friends, but there had always been an attraction and then somehow, without warning, she was on top of me and my hands were under her green dress, we were dry humping, my hands had found her breasts. I had admired them for so long, masturbated at the thought of them nightly and suddenly they were in my hands and they were much softer than I had imagined and her nipples were small – two five-pence pieces – and pointed.

And I pushed my torso towards Emma’s backside, pulling my legs and chest back from her so that the only contact was between my daydreaming penis and her dryness. I spat on my hand and wiped it on the end of my cock and pushed and pushed until I was inside and then it was Michelle, on all fours, the curve of her buttocks in my hands, and I was driving and thrusting, my heart pumping until I came and started crying and the illusion shattered and Michelle disappeared and I pulled away, clawing for the side of the bed and escape. I felt sick as I watched Emma prop herself up on her elbows with her legs above her head, businesslike and oblivious – she seemed relentless in her pursuit of a fertilised egg, while I prayed that the alcohol had damaged my sperm beyond repair.

I was in the bathroom, naked in front of the full-length mirror. God, I was a sight to behold. My eyes were bloodshot, whether through drinking or crying, I didn’t know.

BIRCH:
Small time-out rooms are used both at Roysten Glen and Maureen Mitchell and provide an outlet for Jonah when his levels of anxiety increase. These facilities are not readily available at The Sunrise Academy and, it seems, the strategy is perceived by Dr Makarova as a punishment.

Punishment? Yes, maybe this is my punishment for not wanting to be a father. Jonah’s autism, my failed marriage.

My urine was the colour of cola and stung and I had pain where I thought my kidneys were. A sickly-sweet odour rose from the toilet. I had heard of ketones. I wondered if I had diabetes.

The shower was mercifully hot and I leant my forehead against the tiled wall as the water cascaded over my head and down my back. There was a banging on the door.

‘Ben, open the door, I need to use the toilet.’

‘I’ll be five minutes,’ I shouted, above the noise of the shower.

‘Come on, I’m bursting.’

Irritated, I jumped from the shower and pulled back the lock. I returned to the shower as she seated herself at the toilet.

‘I thought you were supposed to be in the bicycle position?’ I said, in a tone edged in mockery.

According to Lisa, Emma’s permanently pregnant friend, lying on your back and doing bicycles for twenty minutes increased the chances of fertilisation by fifty per cent. I wondered whether the introduction of alcohol and anti-depressants had a bearing on that marvellous piece of scientific data. I suspected it did, not that I shared on the subject.

In the kitchen, a Russian coffee steamed my eyes open while I worked out my timings – when to leave, when to get back, lunchtime phone call. I checked my watch – it was seven. I thought I could leave. I drained the rest of my coffee.

‘I’m going. Have to get the bus, remember?’

‘Can’t they give you another company car? How long is it going to take?’

‘I don’t know, couple of weeks?’ I said, buying some time.

Emma looked up from her mug of tea and I saw her bottom lip begin to quiver.

How do people cope with living together? How do they negotiate the minefield? I realise I have no memories at all of living in tranquillity, even as a child.

My parents’ house – that unchanged fleapit. Sat in the lounge, on the floor, watching the test card. My school uniform was still damp from the walk home in the fading daylight, my belly grumbled from the spaghetti coated in butter and black pepper. I was what? Nine? He was home, I heard the front door slam and the muttered curses and the growled ‘Myra!’

She was in the bath, with the Scotch and American I had mixed her. I could hear the radio and her tuneless accompaniment. And then the shouting started, the cat and the lion. I was inured to that
muzak
. It was usual, expected, banal. But then the pitch changed and the cat began to scream and cry and it beckoned me up the stairs to the bathroom and the sight of my father with balled-up fists and my mother screaming and splashing as water crashed over the sides and soaked the lino.

‘Go to bed!’ he screamed and I was caught between my own fear and my mother’s.

‘Bed, Benjamin.’

Her whisky was on her bedside table, oily and sweet, so I drained it as I’d seen her do a thousand times. My throat burnt, but my fear dissolved in the heat and my bed was suddenly a haven of peace, the clattering and banging went on around me but I was transported.

He left with another attack on the front door and the calm extended like drifting incense. Then she was in my room, towel-clad and whimpering. She sat on the edge of my bed with her hand clamped around my wrist.

‘You understand me, Benny, don’t you? We are like two peas in a pod, you and I.’

‘Yes, Mum,’ I replied, with a mixture of pride and revulsion.

‘Good. Then go downstairs and mix Mummy one of her special drinks.’

I did this, but before I poured out the rehearsed two fingers, I slugged from the bottle myself.

I never knew for certain what the arguments were about, but could they have been about anything other than me? Later that night, lying drunk in the darkness, I vowed to be better, to do whatever it took to make her happy.

BIRCH:
Using the early-years assessment from BASII, Jonah was able to demonstrate some skills.
Verbal ability (nine months)
Block building (developmental age of two and a half years)
Nine-piece puzzle (two and a half to three years)
Copying task he merely scribbled randomly (eighteen months to two years)

By any measure, my son is still a toddler and they argue that more of the same will help him? He needs something different! More support, more recognition, more encouragement, less stress. Look what it’s done for him so far …

When I was eleven, I raced home from school with my report, the first from my new secondary school. It was a column of As – not a single blemish, perfect. ‘Benjamin is a credit to himself and the school,’ the headmaster had written at the bottom. I burst through the door: ‘Mum, Mum?’ It was my dad sitting with the
Daily Mirror
on his lap.

‘Where’s Mum?’ I asked.

‘She has gone, Benjamin. Now it is just us.’

‘Gone where?’

‘Ask her, she will call you at seven.’

I sat by the telephone for three hours. Then I ran to the garden and set my report alight with a match.

Emma phoned me at eleven and I scooted from the bar in Euston station.

‘Ben, I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby!’

I didn’t feel joy, just relief and fear. Relief that the sex could then finally revert to the pastime of abandon it once was; fear at the prospect of going home and admitting my job loss and tube-riding fortnight. My feigned surprise and delight gave me cramp. What choice did I have? So I phoned him. ‘Dad, I need to talk, can I come to the warehouse?’ He said yes and I drove straight there.

The steam and the noise from the industrial washer set my teeth on edge. My father stood opposite Valentine as they polished glasses in perfect sync. Neither looked up.