The House Swap(76)

‘Daddy, Daddy,’ I hear Eddie singing next door, and I push open the nursery door and see him lying in his bed, grinning and waving, his fair hair tousled and tangled on the pillow. When I first started to surface from the dream I’ve been in for years, his presence was a shock. He had been there all along, but I hadn’t. Suddenly, we were in this together, father and son, and to my surprise I found that the weight of his expectations on me was easy to carry. I’m patient with him. Firm but fair. I take him to the shops or the park and he trots along beside me, his small fingers curling their way around mine. When I tuck him in at night his breath is warm and sweet on my downturned face. Small things. Before, if I noticed them at all, they were daggers to the heart – just more reminders of a life that couldn’t be enjoyed and that was irretrievably out of reach. Now, I build my world around them. It’s a smaller world than most, but that suits me. For now.

‘Morning.’ Caroline appears behind me, slipping her way into the nursery and leaning against the wall, smiling. She’s wearing a dark green vest top that barely skims her thighs and a small pair of black knickers underneath. An image of the night before flashes into my head: her face turned to one side on the pillow in abandon, her legs hotly clasping mine. The thought gives me a surge of desire and I have to stamp it back down. These days, it sometimes seems I can barely think of anything else. It was one of the first things that came back, after I stopped the pills. The delirious realization that this was still something I could do – the bizarre novelty of fucking my own wife. She’s watching me, looking as if she’s reading my mind. ‘Are you off soon?’ she asks.

I nod. ‘Got that early appointment.’ It’s a new patient, a last-minute request. I’ve been building back up slowly. A new clinic, new practice. Another clean slate. Not taking on more than I can handle, not caring what other people think. Giving myself the space to breathe. I’m doing this right. It hasn’t been perfect, but it’s still moving in the right direction.

‘Well,’ she says, going over to Eddie and taking his hand to pull him out of bed into a cuddle, ‘I’ll be around when you come back. Day off, remember? I’ll take him in to nursery and then maybe we can have lunch together or something?’

‘Sounds good,’ I say. There’s an unexpected stinging across the bridge of my nose, the hint of approaching tears. My emotions aren’t always predictable. Sometimes, I have no idea where they have come from or what they mean. I’ve learned to sit back and let them take over when they want to, and then to pack them carefully away in their box. Take your feelings out to lunch, my sponsor said to me a while ago, and then tell them to fuck off. That’s what I do. So I give myself a moment, let the strange tenderness and sadness linger, and then I toss them away.

Caroline comes with me to the front door and winds her limbs around me, pressing her body up against mine. She’s clingy at the moment, desiring. I don’t mind. It makes a change from all those months back in the dark times, when she was slippery like mercury and shrank away from my touch. ‘See you later,’ she murmurs.

‘See you,’ I say, kissing her. I pull back and look at her, taking her in. There are lines on her face that weren’t there a few years ago and I can see the tiredness in her eyes, but she’s still beautiful. More so to me than ever, really, now that she’s mine again.

I stride down the main road towards the station in the bright sunshine. The trees are still laden with lush green leaves and the sky is blue and cloudless. It’s a film set, a picture of perfection. I’m thinking of Caroline and the smell of her perfume as she wrapped her arms around my neck. Something tremors at the edge of the image. I let it stay there, knowing I shouldn’t ignore it. These memories are still there, and it’s useless to deny them. Now and again, it still comes in a rush of bitterness and surprise: the knowledge that another man has been inside her and made her believe that she loves him. Every time, it feels like the first time. It isn’t going to go away. It has to be lived with, just like everything else.

I carry on walking, and now I’m thinking about that July night, so long ago, when she came back crying and wouldn’t tell me why. Standing in the middle of the lounge with tears streaming down her face, lost in some private space that she couldn’t explain and which I had no way of reaching through the fog that was suffocating my every breath. It should have been a wake-up call but it only drove me further underground. The few weeks that followed were a disjointed montage of broken sleep, slurred insults, abortive attempts at reconciliation, punctuated by the pills at every hour, until I had completely lost any lingering sense of who or where I was. And finally, the calm stillness of the September evening when she came to me and told me she was leaving. I’m taking Eddie down to my parents in the morning, and I’m leaving you. I’ve had enough. I don’t want this life any more.

What cut through was the relief. Hidden in the pale, tense lines of her mouth, the half-defiant lift of her chin. She’d made her decision, and at least part of her was happy. Strange that that’s what it took for me to see that I couldn’t let her go. I stayed up all night and I didn’t take any more pills. It was the first time I’d gone more than a couple of hours without in weeks. I’ll never forget that bizarre, dreamlike sense of surfacing – the first bubbles of air popping into my body and dragging me up and out, skinned and reborn.