The House Swap(39)
With a lurch of nausea, I realize that he is serious. ‘No,’ I repeat. A pulse is starting to beat in my head, colouring the scenery around me in a tremulous pale blue haze. I can barely remember the feeling of my hands on the steering wheel, the way the engine flared up and sputtered when I turned the key in the ignition. It comes to me now in flashes – evil little glimpses peeking through the blackness. The long, narrow road I last drove up. The gleam of headlights scattering light on to the asphalt; you sitting beside me, your hand resting at the edge of the skirt rucked up to my thighs; the last few minutes beautifully free of what was to come.
The sky darkens, and I lie down, closing my eyes. I’m shivering, suddenly light-headed.
I can feel Francis watching me, and after a while he speaks again. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘there’s really no reason not to.’
It’s unfair, but I feel rage pushing its way to the surface. He knows nothing. Doesn’t understand. I remind myself that I can’t expect him to. It’s like trying to turn a juggernaut, forcing the anger back into its box and packing it safely away, out of reach.
Another minute’s pause, and then he sighs. I hear the sound of scuffling as he settles back down. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘We’ll stay another couple of hours, then. Wait for it to wear off.’
Silently, I nod. I don’t open my eyes.
Home
Francis, May 2013
THE TRAINS ARE fucked again. As soon as I get to the station, I see the departures board striped in pale blue: delayed, cancelled, status unknown. Down on the platform, dozens of people are milling restlessly and muttering to themselves like maniacs, jabbing at phones and swigging coffees.
A bored announcement filters through the hum of noise every so often. Trains to London Waterloo are subject to delays and last-minute cancellations. This is due to a fatality on the line. We apologize for any disruption this will cause to your journey. Some clever dick has thrown himself under a train. Of all the ways to go, it’s one of the hardest to imagine. Cinematic, comedic almost – a high-speed impact and an extravagant gush of red. I read once they sometimes find limbs miles away from the site of the crash. Nasty. All the same, there’s something about the idea I like; it’s the closest you can get in death to sticking two fingers up to the machine. Inconveniencing a few hundred fat cats on their way to work isn’t a bad by-product of self-obliteration and, normally, I’d be all for it, only of course, this time, it affects me, too.
The announcement is looping around again. We apologize for the disruption. The apology is aggressively stressed. We’ve said sorry, so fuck off. I leave it ten more minutes then walk back home and take the car. Usually, I avoid driving in because there’s hardly anywhere to park near the clinic and the roads can be snarled up at this time of day, but there doesn’t seem to be much choice. Strangely, I’m in quite a good mood. I turn the radio up and concentrate on the road. My hands are shaking and there’s a familiar pulse aching in my head, but that’s minor stuff. No pills this morning. Maybe not until the evening. I’m singing along as loud as I can and my head is white noise.
The drive is quicker than usual, but I spend more than ten minutes crawling around the roads by the clinic waiting for a space. Nothing’s doing and, in the end, I give up and park on the double yellow. These days, this sort of rule feels even pettier than it did before, and the idea that there are people who make it their life’s work to prowl the pavements looking for somewhere to slap their little tickets seems so irrelevant and inane it isn’t worth bothering about. Besides, if I don’t get inside soon, I’m going to have to go straight into the session without even having a coffee, and I can’t face that.
As I duck across the road, a Chelsea tractor comes bombing around the corner and the arsehole up front slams on the brakes, blaring his horn as if he’s the one with right of way. I give him the finger and stare him down for an instant through the windscreen before carrying on to the other side. Life is chock full of these lovely little interactions. Warms the cockles of your heart, doesn’t it? That said, it’s the closest I get to human contact at the moment, if you take out the hours in the counselling room and the odd ships-in-the-night moment with the woman I think I’m still married to, only she’s barely said a word to me in weeks and I can’t remember the last time we slept together. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we slept in the same bed. Night-time is something of an artificial construct for me at the moment. When you spend half the daylight hours asleep and half the dark ones awake, the days blur into one and it’s harder with each rotation to tell where one ends and the next begins.
By the time I’m in reception pouring myself a coffee and checking my notes, what passed for a good mood is already hanging by a thread, and it snaps entirely when I clock who it is I’m seeing. Going in blind isn’t something I used to do, but it’s getting harder to plan ahead and, so far, it seems to have worked out all right. In this case, though, forewarned might have been forearmed. It’s a couples session – Mark and Kirsten, a pair of forty-somethings who’ve been dipping in and out of counselling for almost three years. He’s a drinker, and she doesn’t like it. He keeps saying he’ll knock it on the head, and she believes him then gets uptight when, lo and behold, he decides he might as well just stick to the status quo.
Sometimes, my job is far too obviously open to self-reflection. There might as well be a neon sign hanging from above the clients’ chairs, flashing in capital letters: REMIND YOU OF ANYTHING? No one understands – Caroline, least of all – that it isn’t awareness that is the problem. We all have our sickening moments of clarity, our hours of bleak revelation in the greying dawn. But in the background, life is grinding on and, sooner or later, the machine takes over and we’re swept along in its wake, and getting off that treadmill seems like a pipe dream in the face of the inexorable progress of habits and compulsions that have been hard-wired for years.