The Younger Wife(35)

‘It’s true,’ she said.

A few metres away, in the kitchen, the boys were semi-quiet because they’d been granted more screen time and an extra Kit Kat. In her peripheral vision, Tully could see Miles eating his Kit Kat directly off the kitchen table – a new eating technique that Sonny put under the ‘kids are weird’ umbrella, but Tully knew it was more.

‘But . . .’ He held up a battery-operated torch he’d found in the pile. ‘A torch? We have half-a-dozen of these. Much better quality, too.’

‘I know,’ Tully said. ‘I wasn’t going to keep it.’

Sonny looked like he was trying very hard to understand, and failing. ‘You weren’t going to keep it, but you stole it . . .’

‘It’s like a release,’ she explained. ‘Imagine my anxiety is like air in a balloon. It builds up and up until I feel like I might burst. But when I steal something, it’s like pricking the balloon with a pin. The anxiety rushes out of me and I feel kind of . . . breathless and elated. Does that make sense?’

Sonny’s face said it didn’t.

‘Afterwards I feel so ashamed,’ she continued. ‘I hide all the stuff in the garage or a drawer or under the bed. Periodically I get rid of everything – take it to a charity shop or the tip – but within a few days I take more stuff. I tell myself every day, You won’t do this again, Tully. But by the end of the day, I’m shoving a chocolate bar or a packet of Tim Tams into my pocket at the supermarket. I can’t control it, Sonny.’

Sonny closed his eyes and massaged his temples with the thumb and middle finger of each hand.

‘I know it’s hard to understand.’

‘It . . . is hard to understand,’ he said slowly. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Since I was eleven.’

‘Since you were eleven? How did I not know this?’

‘I guess . . . it’s not the kind of thing that you confess to the new guy you’re dating: Hey, I’ve been shoplifting since I was eleven and I still do it. By the time we got married it just felt too shameful. Besides, I always thought I would stop.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

Sonny started to pace. In the living room, Miles was using his chin to nudge the Kit Kat closer to the edge of the coffee table.

‘You went to a counsellor a few years back, right?’ Sonny said. ‘Did you talk to her about it?’

Tully had indeed gone to a counsellor a few years back, a serious young woman with thick black hair and a perpetually confused look on her face. The sessions had been pleasant, but not especially helpful, as Tully had found herself unable to admit the problem. Anxiety, she said, when she was asked what she was doing there. And strange compulsions. It wasn’t as if she could just come out and say, ‘I steal things. Meaningless things that I don’t even want and that I can afford to pay for.’

‘What kind of strange compulsions?’ the serious woman had asked, looking confused.

It was little wonder she looked confused. It was, after all, a high-end practice in a very nice area. The serious woman likely spent her days talking to women who thought they had problems because their husbands couldn’t send them first class to Europe for the second time this year. Or trying to put their marriages back together after their husbands strayed. The serious woman’s clients wouldn’t steal! Tully couldn’t bear to admit to the woman that she did.

‘Like . . . eating dirt,’ Tully said finally. It was the best she could come up with on the spur of the moment. She remembered hearing during her pregnancies about a pregnant woman who started craving things like dirt, metal and rocks. It was a legitimate condition apparently, though Tully herself had only ever craved carbohydrates during pregnancy. In any case, as the direction of counselling began to steer towards what she should do the next time she started to crave dirt, it didn’t seem pertinent to continue the counselling and Tully dropped out a few weeks later.

‘I tried,’ Tully said to Sonny. ‘But I could never manage to say the words out loud.’

Sonny exhaled. ‘Tully, what you’re describing doesn’t sound like regular shoplifting to me. It sounds like kleptomania.’

Tully had heard the word. She didn’t like it. It sounded so . . . awful. Like necrophiliac. Or paedophiliac. Nothing Tully wanted to be associated with. She preferred to think of it as her ‘little problem’.

‘Matt defended a kleptomaniac a few years ago. It was a similar story. A young mother who had more than enough money and yet she kept stealing. They were things she didn’t even want. Apparently, she was desperate to stop, but she couldn’t. It was like an addiction.’

‘Yes!’ Tully nodded desperately. ‘An addiction. That’s exactly what it is.’

Sonny began massaging his temples again. As much as Tully wanted to plead with him to understand, she knew he needed a minute to process this.

After a couple of minutes of silence, she asked, ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I’m thinking that I haven’t got the faintest idea who you are.’

‘Sonny,’ she started, and then the Kit Kat fell onto the floor and Miles began to scream like he was being attacked by wolves.





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