Friend Request(97)

‘It’s OK, Louise, just be quiet, shhh. Everything’s going to be OK.’

But I have spent too long being quiet. Too long pretending everything is OK, repainting the last few years of our marriage in bright colours. As the edges of the kitchen cupboards bleed into the ceiling and blackness closes in, it no longer matters if Henry wakes up. What matters is staying alive. With everything in me I kick out, but there’s nothing there. I’m kicking uselessly into space. I try again and this time my foot catches a chair leg. I hook my foot under the seat and thrust my leg up as hard as I can. There is an almighty clatter as the chair crashes to the floor.

Sam’s hold around my neck loosens and as his face looms back into focus I can see panic in his eyes. For a few seconds we are both suspended in time, and then a small voice calls from the bedroom.

‘Mummy?’

Summoning every ounce of strength I can muster, I jump up from my chair, pushing Sam’s hands away. I have a sense of his arms falling slackly to his sides as I run into Henry’s room, slamming the door shut behind me and sinking to the floor with my back against it, knees to my chest.

‘It’s OK, H, go back to sleep,’ I whisper across the room, but his eyes are already closed, the noise of the chair having woken him only briefly.

I can hear Sam’s footsteps padding down the hall and I close my eyes, feeling only the hard contours of the door against my back and the soft weave of the blue carpet beneath my fingers. I breathe in the smell of Henry’s room: washing powder, Play-Doh and the faint but unmistakeable scent of Henry himself. I’ve been here in this room so many times in the dark like this, inching away from the cot or the bed, desperate not to make even the tiniest noise that would wake Henry and mean I had to start the whole settling him to sleep process again. I think of the hours I spent sitting beside him with my hand on his back, getting colder and colder, terrified that removing my hand was going to cause him to shift and start crying. That seems like another life now, a life where a woman I don’t recognise soothed her child to sleep and then climbed back into bed into the warm embrace of her loving husband. I want more than anything now to go to Henry, to hold him, but I daren’t leave the door, straining against it, ready to push with all my strength.

The footsteps stop and I feel a pressure against my back as Sam pushes gently at the door. I brace myself, feet flat to the floor and lean back, eyes closed, the taste of saltwater in my mouth from the tears rolling unchecked down my cheeks. Sam’s feet cast a shadow under the crack of the door against the glow of Henry’s nightlight.

‘Please Sam,’ I say, my voice croaky and unfamiliar. The pressure lessens, but the shadow remains.

‘Please don’t do this. You love Henry, I know you do.’ I keep my voice low, my eyes on the small, sleeping figure on the bed across the room, alert for any sign that he is waking.

‘I know how much it kills you to be away from him, even for a week. And he loves you. He loves the good in you, like I did. Like I do. Think of what it was like for you, growing up without your mum.’ Desperation has made me daring. Sam never talks about the missing years where he didn’t see or hear from his mother. ‘Don’t make that Henry’s life too. Don’t let him grow up without me. He trusts you, Sam. Think of the way he looks at you, the way he slips his hand into yours when you’re walking down the street together. The way he doesn’t just wrap his arms around you when you pick him up, but his legs too.’

I need to throw everything I can at this.

‘And what about Daisy, and Catherine? I know you love them too. Don’t do this to them. Don’t let Daisy’s father be this person. Please, Sam, please…’ My voice gives way, no more than a rasp now, my throat burning.

I sit there in silence as the seconds pass. After a minute, maybe two, the shadow under the door disappears and again I hear footsteps, but I can’t work out which way they are going. Has Sam gone back to the kitchen or towards the front door? I daren’t open the door to see, daren’t move from my position on the floor, petrified that at any moment I will feel the slow press of the door against my back, and there will be nothing I can do. So instead I sit there motionless and shivering as hour after hour passes, leaning against the door, my back throbbing with pain, occasionally uncurling a leg to stretch away the stiffness. I once fell asleep on the floor in this room when Henry was a baby. At the time he’d never slept longer than two hours at a stretch, but that night he slept from midnight until 5am, at which time I jerked awake in a panic, frozen and stiff, to find that he had rolled onto his front for the first time ever. With his face turned away from me, all I could see was a bundle of blankets in the gloom and I was utterly convinced for a few seconds that he had stopped breathing, smothered to death while I lay beside him.

Tonight though, there will be no sleep. I keep my silent vigil until the grey morning light begins to seep under Henry’s train-patterned curtains and I see him stirring. We can’t hide in here for ever, so I stand up and go over to the bed, lie down next to him, feeling the warm, solid mass of him in my arms.

‘Is it breakfast time?’ he says sleepily, curling his arm around my neck.

‘Yes. Yes, it is. Jam toast?’ I ask, in as normal a voice as I can muster, every word like swallowing broken glass. ‘Shall we have it in your bed, as a special treat?’

He smiles widely and releases me, starting to arrange his cuddly toys in preparation for breakfast. I stand up and walk towards the door. I pause with my hand on the handle, wondering what awaits me on the other side, whether this is the moment where Henry’s life is changed for ever, irrevocably ruined. Very slowly I push the door open into the silence and peer to my left down the hall in the half-light. The kitchen door is slightly ajar. I look right, towards the front door, which is closed. The flat looks the same, yet it feels entirely different. It’s no longer safe, no longer my home. I don’t know what’s lurking around the corners, hiding in the shadows.