Woman Last Seen(53)

He isn’t an idiot. Loads of his friends’ parents are divorced. Usually their dads started banging someone else, usually younger and usually someone they met at work. That was the pattern. He didn’t know of any mums who had affairs, though. It was so weird. What was wrong with his dad? How dare she? He had followed them. It was nuts but what else could he do. He didn’t want to look at them, but he couldn’t take his eyes off them either. They walked for ages. It was a hot day. The bloke took his suit jacket off, threw it over his shoulder. Oli scooted along on his board, sweat pooling at the base of his back. Following someone isn’t as easy as they make out in the movies. He kept his distance, but he was scared he’d lose sight of them. Unlikely, though, as the man was a fucking giant. He was sure his mum was just going to turn around and spot him, but she didn’t. She was too absorbed in the giant. It made him fucking sick.

They went back to this really flash apartment block. He couldn’t work out if it was a hotel or what. It looked like apartments but there was a bloke at the reception desk. What was that about? They went inside. Through the huge glass wall, Oli watched his mum chat to the receptionist. They were all friendly, not in a rush. She should have been ashamed; she should have been skulking. Hoping not to be spotted. But she was so relaxed.

He waited for ages for her to come out. She didn’t. He’d have waited all night but the bloke at the reception desk came out and asked what he was hanging around for. “Get along home, or I’ll call the police.”

“What have I done wrong?” Oli yelled back. Fucking loser. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but he moved along anyway. He had a feeling his mother wasn’t going to come out of the apartment block anytime soon.

Oli didn’t know what to do with the information. He got up every day and wondered, is this the day she tells Dad and leaves us? He didn’t want it to be. Yet he did. It made him nervous, angry. He watched her to see if there were any signs that she was more or less happy than usual. There were none. She was just the same as ever. Just as reliable. Just as interested in his friends, school and football, just as uninterested in his Insta, his obsession with trainers. She didn’t change and that should have reassured him, but it didn’t, it worried him. He started to wish she would act differently, say something. Rowing or crying or something, maybe even leaving, would be better because her not changing meant this was her norm, and he began to wonder just how long it had been going on.

He couldn’t look at her in the same way. He hated being alone with her. He backed off and that was desperate because it just made her try harder with him. She cooked his favorite meals, turned up to every match every weekend, she was constantly asking, “You okay, Oli? Anything worrying you?” What was he supposed to say to that? He felt embarrassed that he knew this weirdly intimate thing about her. It made him feel mad, alone, cheated, and he didn’t know what to do with those feelings. He started calling her Leigh. He didn’t want her to be his mother anymore. She had poisoned his home. His life.

She was so smug. Going about her life as usual. Tricking them all into thinking she was a nice person. That she loved them. He wanted to spoil things for her. He wanted her to taste some of her own poison.



23


Kylie


Wednesday 18th March

The room stinks. I stink.

Here’s the thing. I have been a better wife to both of them because I have two husbands.

Or is that just what I’ve always told myself?

When I was a child, it was always clear when my father was seeing other women. Unlike some sorry-assed adulterers he did not try to smother his culpability with compensatory acts of sorrow or regret; he did not buy my mother guilt flowers. He did not recognize his own fault and responsibility. Far from it. Instead he blamed my mother for not being enough for him. He punished her for making him stray. My father did not like to see himself as a bad person, an adulterer. He reasoned that she made him behave worse—be worse than he wanted to be—because he was somehow, on some level, forced into adultery because of her failings. Madness, I know. But his own particular brand of madness and we all have one.

Guilt and unacknowledged self-loathing meant he itched for opportunities to blame her, to find her lacking so that he didn’t have to blame himself. A poorly ironed shirt, a tea bag left in the kitchen sink, a differing opinion on a TV show could lead to a humdinger, knockout, nasty knuckleduster of a row. A fight. He never physically hurt her—he didn’t have to—his words wounded. Mortally. He would accuse my mother of being cloying and beneath him. This confused me later, after he told me there are women you marry and women you fuck. My paraphrasing. He said there are women who are something, others who are nothing. But in that case, what was my mother after he stopped being married to her? An ex-something? Was Ellie really the only something?

It didn’t matter what he said to Mum, how much he insulted her, blamed her, ignored her, he couldn’t make himself feel better—he could only make her feel worse, which was what he was running from in the first place; hurt feelings.

My mother was strongly disinclined to fight back. She often said, “Hush now, Hugh, you don’t mean that. Stop saying things you’ll regret.” But he would rail anyway, yell, blister, bark, squall for hours. Eventually, she learned not to fuel his fire with platitudes which he thought were cowardly, and over time she resorted to silence or tears. It was cruel. Hard to watch.