ONE DAY(131)

Well must close now! Be happy and be good and get on with life! Seize the day all that bollocks. I think that is what Emma would have wanted.

Best wishes (or at a push, love I suppose)

Ian Whitehead



‘Dexter, can you hear me? Oh, God, what have you done? Can you hear me Dex? Open your eyes, will you?’

When he wakes, Sylvie is there. Somehow he is lying on the floor of his flat, jammed between the sofa and the table, and she is standing awkwardly above him, trying to pull him out of the narrow space and get him into a sitting position. His clothes are wet and sticky and he realises that he has been sick in his sleep. He is appalled and ashamed but powerless to move as Sylvie grunts and gasps, her hands beneath his armpits.

‘Oh, Sylvie,’ he says, struggling to help her. ‘I’m sorry. I f*cked up again.’

‘Just sit up for me will you, honey?’

‘I’m f*cked up, Sylvie. I am so f*cked up . . .’

‘You’ll be fine, you need to sleep it off that’s all. Oh, don’t cry, Dexter. Listen to me, will you?’ She’s kneeling with her hands on his face now, looking at him with a tenderness he rarely saw when they were married. ‘We’ll get you cleaned up and into bed, and you can sleep it off. Okay?’

Glancing past her he sees a figure loitering anxiously in the doorway: his daughter. He groans and thinks he might be sick again, so powerful is the sudden spasm of shame.

Sylvie follows his gaze. ‘Jasmine sweetheart, please wait in the other room, will you?’ she says, as levelly as possible. ‘Daddy’s not feeling very well.’ Jasmine doesn’t move. ‘I told you, go next door!’ says Sylvie, panic rising in her voice.

He wants very much to say something to reassure Jasmine, but his mouth is swollen and bruised and he can’t seem to form the words, and instead he lies back down, defeated. ‘Don’t move,’ says Sylvie, ‘Just stay exactly where you are,’ and she leaves the room, taking their daughter with her. He closes his eyes, waiting, praying for all of this to pass. There are voices in the hall. Phone-calls are made.

The next thing that he knows for sure is that he is in the back of a car, curled uncomfortably on the back seat beneath a tartan blanket. He pulls it tight around him – despite the warm day he can’t seem to stop shivering – and realises that it’s the old picnic blanket which, along with the smell of the car’s scuffed burgundy upholstery, reminds him of family days out. With some difficulty he lifts his head to look out of the passenger window. They are on the motorway. Mozart plays on the radio. He sees the back of his father’s head, fine silver-grey hair neatly trimmed apart from the tufts in his ears.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m taking you home. Go back to sleep.’

His father has abducted him. For a moment he considers arguing: Take me back to London, I’m fine, I’m not a child. But the leather is warm against his face, he doesn’t have the energy to move, let alone argue. He shivers once more, pulls the blanket up to his chin and falls asleep.

He is woken by the sound of the wheels on the gravel of the large, sturdy family home. ‘In you come then,’ says his father, opening the car door like a chauffeur. ‘Soup for tea!’ and he walks towards the house, tossing the car keys jauntily into the air as he goes. Clearly he has decided to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and Dexter is grateful for this. Hunched and unsteady, he clambers from the car, shrugs off the picnic blanket and follows him inside.

In the small downstairs bathroom he inspects his face in the mirror. His bottom lip is cut and swollen, and there’s a large, yellow-brown bruise down one side of his face. He tries to roll his shoulders, but his back aches, the muscles stretched and torn. He winces, then examines his tongue, ulcerous, bitten at the sides and coated with a grey mould. He runs the tip of it over his teeth. They never feel clean these days, and he can smell his own breath reflecting back off the mirror. It has a faecal quality, as if something is decaying inside him. There are broken veins on his nose and cheek. He is drinking with a renewed sense of purpose, nightly and frequently during the day, and has gained a great deal of weight; his face is podgy and slack, his eyes permanently red and rheumy.

He rests his head against the mirror and exhales. In the years he was with Emma he sometimes wondered idly what life would be like if she weren’t around; not in a morbid way, just pragmatically, speculatively, because don’t all lovers do this? Wonder what he would be without her? Now the answer is in the mirror. Loss has not endowed him with any kind of tragic grandeur, it has just made him stupid and banal. Without her he is without merit or virtue or purpose, a shabby, lonely, middle-aged drunk, poisoned with regret and shame. An unwanted memory rises up of that morning, of his own father and his ex-wife undressing him and helping him into the bath. In two weeks time he will be forty-one, and his father is helping him into the bath. Why couldn’t they just have taken him to hospital to have his stomach pumped? There would have been more dignity in that.

In the hallway he can hear his father talking to his sister, shouting into the telephone. He sits on the edge of the bath. It requires no effort to eavesdrop. In fact it’s impossible not to hear.

‘He woke the neighbours, trying to kick his own door down. They let him in . . . Sylvie found him on the floor . . . It seems he had a bit too much to drink that’s all . . . just cuts and bruises . . . Absolutely no idea. Anyway, we’ve cleaned him up. He’ll be fine in the morning. Do you want to come and say hello?’ In the bathroom, Dexter prays for a ‘no’, but his sister clearly can see no pleasure in it either. ‘Fair enough, Cassie. Maybe give him a call in the morning will you?’