THIS IS HOW I live my life since Liam died. I stay up all night. I write, or I don’t write. I walk the house.
Nothing settles here. Not even the dust.
We bought eight years ago, in 1990; a new five-bedroom detached. It’s all a bit Tudor-red-brick-with-Queen-Anne-overtones, though there is, thank God, no portico and inside I have done it in oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate. It is a daytime house so late at night I leave all the lights on with the dimmers turned up high and I walk from room to room. They open into each other so nicely. And I am alone. The girls are just a residue; a movie protruding from the mouth of the machine, a glitter lipstick beside the phone. Tom, my high-maintenance man, is upstairs dreaming his high-maintenance dreams of hurt and redemption in the world of corporate finance, and it is all nothing to do with me.
Oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate.
I started with all sorts of pelmets when we moved in, even swags. I wanted the biggest floral I could find for the bay window at the front-can you imagine it? By the time I had the stuff sourced, I had already moved on to plain Roman blinds and now the garden is properly grown in I want…nothing. I spend my time looking at things and wishing them gone, clearing objects away.
This is how I live my life.
I stay up all night. At half eleven, if he is home, Tom puts his head around the door of the small study and says, ‘Don’t stay up all night!’ as if he didn’t know that I will not sleep with him, not for a good while yet, and perhaps never again-which is how all this started, in a way, my refusal to climb in beside my husband a month or so after Liam died, my inability to sleep in any other bed than the one we used to share. Because I will not have the girls find me in the spare room.
What else can I do? We could not afford a divorce. Besides I do not want to leave him. I can not sleep with him, that is all. So my husband is waiting for me to sleep with him again, and I am waiting for something else. I am waiting for things to become clear.
So we do nothing. We divide our time. At least I do. I take what Tom has left me of the day-there is plenty of it-and I live in his sleep. At seven a.m., when his alarm goes off, I get into bed and he turns to me and complains at the coldness of my rump. He says, ‘Did you stay up all night again?’
‘Sorry.’
As if this was the problem. As if we would have sex, if it weren’t for the coldness of my ass and the eternal, infernal awkwardness of our schedules.
He gets the girls up and out, and so I sleep until three when I drag my face around to the school gates. After which, I ferry them to their ballet or Irish dancing or horse riding, or just home, where they might be allowed to watch telly before tea. I limit the telly-I say it is for their own good, but really it is for me. I like to talk to them. If I don’t talk to them I think I will die of something-call it irrelevance-I think I will just fade away.
So I get a daughter on the sofa and manhandle her into loving me a little: Rebecca who is so dippy and kind, or Emily, the cat, the Daddy’s girl; a bit hopeless, a bit cold, and her Hegarty-blue eyes the place where my heart founders most. We cuddle up, and there is messing and chat, then there is shouting about homework, or uneaten food, or bedtimes, and at half past nine, when the shouting and the messing is over and they are asleep, I start to prowl.
They don’t really want me, I think. They are just putting up with me for a while.
Sitting room to living room to dining room to kitchen, a single flow of space around the stairs; the ground floor is open plan with a small study tucked on the other side of the hall door. If Tom comes home I will go in there. Some nights I go online. But mostly, I write about Ada and Nugent in the Belvedere, endlessly, over and again.
At half past eleven, Tom puts his head around the door and says, ‘Don’t stay up all night!’ and when his footsteps are gone, the world is mine.
And what a crazy world it is!
There are long stretches of time when I don’t know what I am doing, or what I have done-nothing mostly, but sometimes it would be nice to know what kind of nothing that was. I might have a bout of cleaning around four. I do it like a thief, holding my breath as I scrub, stealing the dirt off the walls. I try not to drink before half past five, but I always do drink-from the top of the wine bottle to the last, little drop. It is the only way I know to make the day end.
Late at night, I hear voices in bursts and snatches-like a radio switched on and switched off again, in another room. Incoherent, but quite cheerful. Stories bouncing off the walls. Scraps of lives, leaking through. Whisperings in the turn of a door handle. Birds on the roof. The occasional bleeping of a child’s toy. And once, my brother’s voice saying, ‘Now. Now.’
I listened for him again, but he was gone.
As I open the fridge, my mind is subject to jolts and lapses; the stair you miss as you fall asleep. Portents. I feel the future falling through the roof of my mind and when I look nothing is there. A rope. Something dangling in a bag, that I can not touch.
I have all my regrets between pouring the wine and reaching for the glass.
Sometimes, I go up to look at my bed, without me in it. Tom sleeps on his back. He does not snore. Sometimes, when he is sad in his sleep, he turns on his side and his hands gather under his chin. My husband, twitching as he dreams.
Tom moves money around, electronically. Every time he does this, a tiny bit sticks to him. Day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. Quite a lot of it, in the long run.
Liam, my brother, spent most of his working life as a hospital porter in the Hampstead Royal Free. He pushed beds down corridors and put cancerous lumps into bags and carried severed limbs down to the incinerator, and he enjoyed it, he said. He liked the company.
I used to be a journalist. I used to write about shopping (well someone has to). Now I look after the kids-what’s that called?
Tom had sex with me the night of the wake-as if Liam’s death had blown all the cobwebs away: the fuss and the kids and the big, busy job and the late nights spent strenuously not sleeping with other women. He was getting back to basics: telling me that he loved me, telling me that my brother might be dead but that he was very much alive. Exercising his right. I love my husband, but I lay there with one leg on either side of his dancing, country-boy hips and I did not feel alive. I felt like a chicken when it is quartered.