The Body Lies Read online

  Bipolar, he said, with a who’d’ve thought it shrug. He was now on medication, and it was weird and he didn’t like it. He felt fuzzy and flat. Ironed out. Couldn’t write. And if he couldn’t write what was the point of the MA. He’d come to tell me he was going to drop out.

  But. He wanted to apologise for the way he’d been when he was on a high; for not submitting work, the MA was one of his crazy plans—he often had crazy plans on a high—and now he was being realistic. He wasn’t ready for it.

  “But you can’t leave!”

  He sat back, looked surprised and pleased. I’d meant it, but not the way he took it: I had no idea at all if he was even any good. But I did know that I couldn’t lose him as well as Nicholas; I couldn’t let the whole damn thing collapse around me.

  “You just have to push on through,” I continued. “With a long project, everyone has a moment, or a week, or a month, where they feel like this. If you push on through, you’ll have a novel at the end of it, but if you give up now, you won’t.”

  This clearly made sense to him; he looked lighter for it. But I felt a twinge of guilt. I’d told him to do what was best for me, not necessarily for him.

  “You know,” he said, “One thing I’ve found really hard this term is the way that Nicholas has just dropped off grid. I think that was part of what tipped me over. I’d thought we were friends. I thought he’d have messaged me, or something.”

  “He’s not in touch at all?”

  He shook his head. “Meryl hasn’t heard from him either. And they were close.”

  I became very conscious of my own gaze. I glanced at my boots, swung a foot back and forth.

  “Look, the main thing right now is you take care of yourself,” I said. “I’m sure Nicholas will turn up next week with a dodgy excuse and a skier’s tan…”

  “Do you think?”

  “I’ll chase him up again anyway. Don’t you worry about it. And keep writing your novel. If you don’t do it, no one else will do it for you. Stick with it. And submit something to class, eh?”

  He thanked me and took himself off.

  Half an hour till I had to pick up Sammy.

  I got out my mobile, then I put it down again.

  I wrote down a sentence on scrap paper. Then another one. And then an alternative, just in case. And a fourth. I filled a side of A4 with phrases and boxes and arrows. A whole potential conversation flow-charted, in which I would be pleasant and careful and clear. I would apologise for being out of touch for a while over the Christmas vacation. I would ask that we would draw a line under what had happened between us that night—without seeking further to define what had happened between us that night—and we would agree a way forward from here. He’d come back to class, and we’d say and do no more about it. On the understanding that he didn’t write about it again. He couldn’t write the whole truth anyway: nobody could. This would be one of the things he’d have to leave out.

  Twenty minutes till I had to pick up Sammy. I rang Nicholas’s mobile. It rang and rang, and went to answering service. I cut the call, set my mobile down.

  I lifted my chunky office telephone and dialled the landline number listed on our student contact form. I could see the big house, the cold rooms, the phone buzzing away on the baroque console in the hall. It rang and rang and rang and I held on, teeth gritted, well beyond the point where an answer could be reasonably expected; then, at the far end, the receiver was lifted.

  “Palmer residence, Andrew speaking.” The voice was old, and rich, and brusque.

  I said, “Hi. Um. Is Nicholas there?”

  “He’s out. Who’s calling?”

  “Uh, do you know where he is?”

  “He’s at the university. He had a class this afternoon. Who is this?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll try again another time.”

  “Who is this? What do you want?”

  I dropped the handset back into the cradle.

  If I was on the other end of that call, I’d dial 1471. I’d want to know who I’d been talking to. But there was the main switchboard between that phone and mine—you had to dial 9 for an outside line—so Mr. Palmer might find out that it was someone from the university, but my extension shouldn’t come up. I swept up my stuff and ran to pick up Sammy.

  But if Nicholas was not at home, and not in class, where was he?

  * * *

  —

  Mark was due that Saturday, around lunchtime, for half-term.

  It would be the first time we’d seen him since Christmas. He’d warned me that he’d have to bring some work up with him.

  Sammy was bright awake at six, giddy with excitement, Daddy coming, and no settling him to anything. By late morning he was climbing the walls; I suggested we go for a walk, take a little picnic. He didn’t want to leave in case Daddy came while we were gone.

  “How ’bout we head up the hill? We can look out for him from there. Like pirates.”

  And that did the trick.

  I pocketed a couple of juice cartons and a snack pack of Bourbons and threw the breakfast crumbs out for the birds and we set off for a walk. That big blue-and-pink beauty was swaying on her branch—a jay, I’d learned a little from Sammy’s Pop-Up Book of British Birds. She watched us, head tilted, as we left, and the smaller birds swarmed and fluttered and squabbled behind us.

  We headed up, hand in hand. We’d never been that way before; weekdays we just raced for the bus; if we went for a walk at weekends we ambled down towards the village. After a hundred yards or so of road, the tarmac crumbled and fell apart and became a white limestone track. A wooden sign pointed the way through a gate, and up towards open moor. We followed the line worn into the grass, climbing through the buffetting air. The world around us became alien: bleached grass, coiled nubs of ferns, scabs of grey stone. Clouds tumbled overhead and their shadows dashed across the hillside. I felt like I had dreamed this place. Sammy and I chatted and huffed and puffed, but I looked around me and I was haunted by the sense that this unknown place was already familiar.

  The brow of the hill was like the surface of the moon; the bare grey limestone was riddled with cracks and gullies, blotched with emerald-green moss and patches of grey or mustard-coloured lichen. Here and there stood twisted starveling trees. From where I stood I could see as far as the Lake District hills, blue and purple in the distance. Sammy clambered up onto the outcrop. I gazed round me. I felt like I’d failed to pay proper attention, had missed something, was now straining to catch an echo, to catch up.

  “Careful.”

  I sat down as Sammy tottered and poked around. The wind dropped and for a moment it was calm. I held out a steadying hand to Sam and he leaned to peer into a hollow, then squatted to get a better look, then finally plonked himself down.

  “Picnic,” he announced.

  “Picnic.”

  We could see the roof of our own little house, and below it the rag-taggle cluster of the farm buildings and the folds and dips that hid the village and the river below. Over to the right there was the town, the glimmer of the sea. You could see the university from here, perched on its own answering hilltop. The motorway a grey river. Everything echoed, but I couldn’t catch it.

  Sam lay back and stared up into the sky. Mirrored clouds tumbled across his dark irises. He blinked, and I caught the echo. Nicholas. He had written this place; he’d written this stone, these hills, this sky. This was his territory.

  “Get up.”

  Sam lifted his head to look at me.

  “Get up.”

  I scrambled off the stone outcrop, turned to scoop up Sam and swing him down onto the grass. Downhill the path was slithery and difficult.

  “Come on.”

  He pulled against my hand. “But, picnic.”

  I rifled out the packet of Bourbons, opened them and thrust them
at him, but he needed both hands to take one out and he squirmed his hand out of mine and stopped to give his whole attention to the biscuits.

  “Give.” I snatched the packet off him, took one out, handed the biscuit back to him. “There. Happy now?”

  He burst into tears, and I saw myself as he was seeing me. Angry for no reason. Unpredictable. And therefore scary.

  “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry, love.” I scooped him up, onto my hip, hugged him close as I strode along. “It’s okay.”

  His face was pressed wetly into my shoulder. I carried him down the hillside, aching with remorse. Also just aching: he was getting big.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s okay. It’s okay. I didn’t mean to spoil it. I was just worried we’d be late.”

  He went quieter at this, muddy wellies dangling at my thighs, breathing soft on my throat. I rested my cheek against his head as we bumped along. And then, like a wish fulfilled, a little red car came scooting along the distant lane like a beetle, then slowed and took the sharp left at the crossroads.

  “Cos, look,” I said. “Daddy’s here!”

  * * *

  —

  Sam dragged Mark from the car up to the house, jabbering nonstop, all sunshine now. He skipped oblivious through the drift of feathers on the front path, but I stooped to pick one up. It was soft, and tiny, and pinkish grey. I glanced around the trees and bushes, looking for the jay, but the branches were bare, just a lace of twigs against the sky. I let the feather go and followed the boys indoors.

  Mark was tired and stiff from the drive. We hugged in the hallway. He let me go and said, “You okay?”

  And I told my easy lie—just tired—and he accepted it.

  I made soup and crumpets for lunch. Mark lingered in the kitchen, shifting round while I opened cupboards and drawers. We talked about Sam, and about Mark’s work; what had been going on with me, I told him, was too boring and annoying to even begin to describe.

  “D’you know, the way things are at work,” Mark said, “I’m so busy I don’t know I’d see any more of you if you were in London.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It’s not bad,” he said. “It’s just busy.”

  “Well, thanks for making it up here.”

  “Well yeah, of course. That’s not what I mean.”

  I suggested we go somewhere, while the weather held. The seaside, town, a playground, anything anywhere but here. Nicholas wasn’t at home and he wasn’t going to uni; we were on his turf, caught in the landscape of his imagination. He could turn up at any moment.

  Mark said he couldn’t face getting back in the car again; couldn’t we just have a quiet time today…So I put a DVD on for Sam, and after lunch Mark fell asleep on the sofa, his weight dragging the throw down off the back of it, so that the worn blue fabric was exposed.

  I went upstairs and I found my notebook. I could hear the rumble and jingle of the film below, and the rush of the wind in the trees, and I wrote about the fear that hit me on the hillside, and how fresh and cold a fear it was, nothing to do with what had happened to me on the street in Anerley, or on the blue sofa in my own front room; to do instead with the prospect of being caught up in someone else’s story, of being written by someone else; the fear of having no say in who I was at all. After a while the sounds changed from below—I heard the title music to the film, and Sammy beginning to pootle around again, which might wake Mark, so I put my notebook away, went downstairs and we got out his Lego, and together we built a castle.

  Then I had Sammy help me make the dinner. We peeled vegetables and smashed garlic; I let him tumble it all together in a bowl with salt and pepper and olive oil. We picked rosemary and sage in the garden, washed them in a mug and tweaked the leaves off the stems. Sammy chewed a sage leaf and pulled a face and shuddered. He stuck out his tongue and wiped it with his hand. I took the mangled leaf off him and dropped it in with the peelings.

  “It’s much nicer when it’s cooked.”

  At dinner he picked his way carefully around the herbs, forked in couscous and mouthed a bit of parsnip and that was that. He seemed distracted, happy, turning from one of us to the other, watching, smiling to himself, trailing couscous down his front.

  Later, when I was putting him to bed, he kicked his feet around under the duvet and grinned and wriggled. I asked why he was so excited, and he said it was because we were all together here at once in the same place.

  “Ah, that’s lovely,” I said. “Bless you, sweetheart.”

  I wanted to say sorry for earlier, for being grumpy on the hill, but I didn’t want to remind him. I brushed the hair off his forehead and kissed him. I knew we couldn’t go on like this. It wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t doing any of us any good.

  “Okay?” Mark asked as I came back downstairs. He had opened a bottle of wine; he handed a glass to me. I took it, held it for a bit, then set it down on the mantelpiece. Even the smell of wine now.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  “Steady on.”

  “I know. I’ll get all giddy.”

  “But what were you thinking?” he said, glancing at his phone, pocketing it. No signal here of course.

  “That this isn’t fair on you,” I said. “All the travelling. Living alone down there. You look exhausted.”

  “That’s life.”

  “But maybe it shouldn’t be.”

  “I don’t follow.” He sounded impatient, weary.

  “I was just wondering. Should we tweak things? Could we try doing things a little differently?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I realised—” I said. “Well, the thing is, I was desperate. Because of the—that man. The man in the blue anorak. I just wanted to get away. That was all I could think about, just getting away. I didn’t think through all the implications. Not for you. Or for me either, or for Sammy. But maybe we could take the time now to think of something else. Together.”

  “You were desperate.”

  I nodded.

  “For three years you were desperate.”

  “I suppose the point is, the point I’m trying to make, is that whatever we do it shouldn’t just be me who wants it. It should suit us both. Suit us all. Not this, or just back to where we were, but some third thing we haven’t thought of yet. So what if—what if you look for a deputy headship somewhere? We could move wherever. I’d get a job, any kind of job, take care of Sammy and fit in around you. And then if you wanted, we could maybe have another…A little sister or brother for Sammy. How would that be?”

  “Don’t you like your job?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Aren’t you happy here?”

  “I should have realised. It’s not just me, is it? There’s us.”

  He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “After all this, all these years, all this—upheaval. Now is when you start thinking about us?”

  He doesn’t get angry often. I’m not used to it. It scares me. He stood in silence for a moment, and then he said: “You made him your priority. That asshole.”

  “No—”

  “You made him the priority when there were better things, more important things, you could have been thinking about: your family, us, our little boy.”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “It’s true.”

  “I wish I’d dealt with it better,” I said. “I wish I was better at dealing with that kind of thing. But I was just trying to—cope. And it was never just about me. I wanted Sam to have a nice place to grow up. Somewhere safe.”

  “That doesn’t include me.”

  “I hoped it would.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters. You matter. You’ve always mattered. I never meant for things to end up like this. And I think
that’s half the problem, thinking like that. We haven’t ended up; this isn’t an end. We’re still in the middle; we just have to figure out what comes next.”

  “I’ve been very lonely,” he said.

  The cow’s lick up in his fringe, highlighted now with grey. The freckles on the cusp of his forehead. I noticed it all now again in a way I hadn’t for years—the way the lines formed at the corners of his eyes, the way his lips twisted—because I knew. You can know that stuff before you hear it. He said: “I’d been lonely for years.” The slip in tense. Not lonely any more. He looked up at me, those blue eyes. “Will you have a drink?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s so quiet here,” he said. “It’s so empty. It’d drive me to drink.”

  I could hear the wind in the trees and the hum of the pylons and the cows down in the Metcalfes’ farm. I could hear a curlew call. I knew it wasn’t empty. Every inch of it was occupied; Nicholas permeated the whole landscape, his words wove through it, his breath touched everything. He had disappeared into this place.

  Mark refilled his glass, gestured to mine with the bottle.

  I shook my head.

  His lips were stained with wine. “Look, the thing is, it’s not easy. But I have to. We agreed we would, this weekend. We’d start the process.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Amy—”

  “You and Amy?”

  “—we were both lonely. In our marriages.”

  “Amy from work?”

  “And it’s reached a point where we have to acknowledge that we have needs, where we have to put those needs, if not first, then at least on the list.”

  “Amy from work?”

  He nodded.

  “Your boss.”

  “She’s senior management, but that doesn’t mean that she’s my boss. I’m not finding any of this easy, you know.” He was blushing.

  “Okay, yes, but can we just pause all that, please. Rewind.”

  He and Amy were not “we.” We were “we.” Him and me and Sammy were “we.”