The House Swap(40)

Mark and Kirsten are hovering in the waiting room, making discreet little coughs and rustlings designed to make me realize it’s almost ten minutes past.

I usher them into the room. ‘Get yourselves settled.’ They both look bloody awful, like they haven’t slept in weeks and have spent their days screaming at each other with the occasional break for cigarettes and hard drugs. Having said that, they’re looking at me as if they’re thinking the same thing. I didn’t look in the mirror before I left this morning. Haven’t done for a while. I can do without the disconnect.

‘So,’ I say, when I’ve sat down, ‘tell me about the past few weeks. How have things been?’

Mark just shrugs and stares at his feet. Early on, I remember we had frequent moments of awkward but genuine connection, he and I – it was relatively easy to crack the shell and get to what was inside. I can already tell that’s over. He’s gone into lockdown, where the no-man’s-land outside his fortress stretches so far everyone else is just mist and shadows.

Kirsten is talking, a relentless barrage of words. ‘Nothing’s changing. I just keep hearing the same promises, and things get better for a short while, and then we just go round again. It’s like it washes over him. In one ear and out the other.’ Her fingernails are bitten down, streaked by remnants of hot-pink nail polish. She hasn’t washed her hair in a while and the roots are faintly glistening with grease. From what I remember, she used to keep herself in pretty good condition. I wonder if it’s a tactic, an attempt to show Mark how he’s wearing her down. If so, I know from experience that it won’t work.

I suggest that Mark responds to what she’s said, but he shrugs again and mumbles something about doing his best. We go back and forth for another twenty or thirty minutes this way – a bizarre counterpoint between trying to get blood out of a stone and battling to hold back a tsunami. Kirsten’s had enough. They’re finished. It would have more power if it weren’t the hundredth time she’d said something similar, and it’s clearly lost all its force on him, if it ever had any at all. I don’t think he’s drunk right now. Just in the fog. It comes to much the same thing.

‘You know something,’ Kirsten says at last, when she’s exhausted the litany of Mark’s wrongs. ‘I was watching telly the other day and that old clip came up of Princess Diana talking about her marriage. You know, when she says there were three people in it so it got a bit crowded.’ She’s crying now, although none of us is acknowledging it and she doesn’t reach for a tissue or make any attempt to wipe away the tears. ‘And I thought, bloody hell, I’d rather that than what I’ve got right now. There’s only one person in this marriage. It’s the opposite of crowded. It’s – empty.’

The last words are jerky, half drowned by the uneven rhythm of her tears. Mark glances over at her, and I think I see a flicker of something in his eyes, the first stirrings of some kind of understanding or compassion. I know I should pounce on it and push at that door. But something in her words has set something off in me and my moorings are suddenly lost and I’ve forgotten who I am and why I’m here … and all I can think is that they’re doing one better than we are because I’m not sure there’s anyone left in my marriage at all.

We push on through the next ten minutes, but the bleakness in my head is unfurling, suffocating everything else. I’m watching their mouths move and responding on autopilot, barely even sure of what I’m saying. A glass partition has risen between us. Thick, impenetrable. The pale yellow walls of the counselling room are fuzzing and shimmering like static on a screen.

I get them out and, when they’ve gone, I go to the desk drawer and pull out the envelope from the back. I said I’d have nothing until this evening, but trying to hold back this tide is impossible and all I want is for this spreading numbness to stop and check out for a while. I shake a few pills out and swallow them. I used to keep track of my daily consumption, set it to a certain mg and didn’t take more, but these days I have no idea what the limits are, and I stopped counting long ago. Besides, like I said, days don’t have much meaning any more. Some are longer than others, and something tells me this is going to be a fucking record-breaker. Better be prepared.

I’m not sure how long I stay in the clinic before I remember the parked car and the double-yellow line. When I do, I heave myself up from the armchair and lurch out of the room and down the stairs on to the street. Fresh air. It shakes me out of my head and, all of a sudden, I wonder if I should be driving right now. Just like this morning, though, there doesn’t seem much option. Can’t leave the car there for ever. I’m walking down the road towards it and, as I do, I’m thinking about the fact that choices seem to be things that happen to me rather than things I make for myself, and I’m on the verge of some thought that feels significant and profound, but it slips out of my grasp. I feel it a lot, this trembling sense of being on the edge of something important that never comes.

There’s no ticket on the windscreen – it’s a petty victory but I stick two fingers up to whoever should have caught me out. I sling myself into the car and turn the key in the ignition, steer it carefully out on to the main road. Only two or three minutes in, I realize I’ve made a mistake. The road is blurring in front of my eyes and my hands on the wheel feel like they’ve been slicked in oil. Signs and lamp posts rush up on me at the speed of light, then veer away and disappear. It’s a computer game, a virtual nightmare.