The House Swap(3)

‘OK …’ I say, just for the sake of speaking, and as I do I can feel panic starting to rise. I’m already missing Eddie, and the bridge he provides between us, the shared love and focus we can turn on him. Now there’s only the sudden, claustrophobic terror of being trapped in this unfamiliar house with my husband, for seven whole days, with each hour feeling like a potential landmine that we will have to tiptoe around, avoiding anything that might explode the still-fragile truce we have woven over the past two years. It feels oddly apt that this house is so empty: stripped back, with nowhere to hide. And that was the point, of course. We’re both tired of hiding. Sooner or later, we will have to take a step back into the light and take a look at what we have, and find out if it is enough or not. When I rub the flat of my hand across my face, my palm is damp.

‘Better get unpacked!’ Francis’s tone is casually cheerful. He is busying himself with unzipping our suitcase on the bed, pulling out clothes and briskly shaking out their creases. ‘Might as well get it out of the way.’ He’s smiling, his eyes full of warmth, but I think I can read the message behind the smile. Time to move on and bury the moment back where it came from.

‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ I say, ‘and then I’ll come and help you.’ I need a few moments to smooth my frazzled nerves. Heart thumping, I walk down the corridor towards the bathroom. My footsteps sound surprisingly loud on the polished floorboards, sharp, echoing bursts of sound in the silent air, and I find myself speeding up. For an instant, I’m oddly reminded of the way I used to hurry down the corridor between my parents’ room and my own as a child – the vaguely supernatural sense that I wasn’t alone.

I shake the memory off and push open the bathroom door. It’s another gleamingly untouched room, polished to perfection: marble surfaces and metallic fixtures. The window has been left open an inch or two. Light gusts of air are blowing through the gap, ruffling my shirt collar.

I want to move forward, but I am rooted in the doorway, staring at the vase on the windowsill. It holds a bunch of pale pink roses, beautifully arranged and just coming into flower. I try to fight the thoughts, but they’re too quick for me. A pulse of despair thudding through my body – the split second of inevitability before the memory hits and explodes, too vivid to ignore. All these months of careful suppression and denial, and all it takes is the sight of some curled pink petals. Just like that, you’re back in my head.



Home


Caroline, December 2012


I WAKE UP alone again. In my sleep, my limbs have uncurled and stretched, sprawling across on to his side of the bed. The sheets are smoothly cold. I can’t remember if we started the night sleeping together or apart.

The bedside clock reads quarter to seven and the room is filled with dull, grey light, seeping through the curtains. I lie there for five or ten minutes, listening for sounds inside the silence. Nothing. Slowly, I clamber out of bed and pull on my dressing gown. An ache is already spreading across my temples and I reach for the glass of water I keep on the bedside table, but it’s empty. I fumble for the little packet of painkillers anyway. Swallow two down, wincing at the scrape of chalk against the back of my throat. The sight of my own face, briefly caught in the tilted mirror by the door, brings a throb of vertigo. Pale skin, eyes stained with rubbed mascara. I seldom bother to take it off before bed any more. Like so many things, the point of it seems lost, sucked up into the effort of existing.

I step quietly into the hall. Now I can hear the tinny, relentless waves of sound ebbing from the living room: dramatic music, the staccato murmuring of voices. I push open the door and peer inside. Light buzzes from the computer, faintly illuminating the darkness. He’s sitting there, head propped on one hand, elbow resting on the arm of the sofa. Staring at the screen. Some kind of Scandinavian cop show: cream and beige furnishings, haggard men in uniform speaking a foreign language in clipped, miserable tones.

‘Francis,’ I say, but he doesn’t react.

I’m shivering as I perch on the edge of the sofa. ‘You didn’t come to bed,’ I say. It’s a guess, but he doesn’t challenge it, his shoulders moving almost imperceptibly in a shrug.

‘Fell asleep here,’ he says at last. ‘Then woke up.’ His eyes are flat and glazed, still focused on the screen. These days, he seems to do little but sleep, and yet to look at him I am reminded of nothing so much as the black-and-white photos I have seen of torture victims kept awake for days on end by their captors.

‘That’s a shame,’ I say uselessly. If anything is shaking him awake in the middle of the night, I have no idea what it is. His head is no longer the open cave it once was. I used to be able to climb inside it as easily as breathing, read and touch the quality of his thoughts as if they were my own. Now, it’s a fortress. I spend my time fumbling in the dark for a key that isn’t there.

The episode on the computer ends. Credits roll, small and blurred against a grey-washed background. A wall of sound unfurls bleakly behind them, the kind of sinister, relentless music that makes me feel as if I am suffocating. I realize that my skin is hot. For a moment, I think I might faint. Blinking hard, I press the tips of my fingernails into my palms. ‘Are you working today?’ I ask. ‘Any appointments?’ As I ask, I realize that I can’t remember the last time he definitely went to the clinic. I try to imagine the man next to me sitting in his therapist’s chair, listening to his patients. It’s worryingly hard to do.