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.
Francis looks vaguely jaded, as if I have reminded him of something unpleasant. ‘No.’
‘OK.’ I hesitate, knowing I shouldn’t continue. It’s too late; the words are rising to the surface and pushing themselves out of my mouth. ‘So what are you going to do, then? Any plans?’
He slams the laptop shut, and with it the light snaps out of the room, plunging us into near-darkness. ‘No,’ he says again, after a while. I watch his profile for a few minutes, willing him to turn his head and look at me, but he doesn’t move, and in the end I just get up and leave.
In the bathroom, I clean off last night’s make-up and put the new day’s on. I focus on my face in fragments, minutely scrubbing and rebuilding one small area after another. I smear foundation thickly over my skin, trace shadow carefully over my eyelids, run black liner to the corner of my eyes. Last, I choose a dark pink lipstick and apply it slowly across the width of my mouth, pressing my lips together to set the colour. Only then do I step back and stare at my reflection. I look good. Better than I should. Even so, I don’t like looking myself in the eye. I’m afraid of seeing something there that I don’t want to transmit. Disappointment, maybe, or sadness. Anything at all.
‘Mummy, Mummy.’ Eddie’s voice drifts from down the hallway, amicably querulous. I glance at my watch. Already half past seven, and only an hour to get us both ready and out of the house. Then the hurried journey to nursery, the bus back into town to the office, eight hours of sitting at my desk, turning over the mental picture of Francis on his own in the house and wondering what he is doing, what he is thinking. The thought of it all is exhausting.
I could go back to bed. The idea falls into my head, clear and sweet as water, as I walk down the hall and push open Eddie’s bedroom door. Call in sick, pull the covers over my head and sleep for another eight or nine hours. But I won’t.
‘Good morning!’ I sing, drawing back the curtains. I bend down by his bed and pull him into a hug, feeling his hot little fingers closing around the back of my neck.
I start the routine. Clothes, breakfast, teeth-brushing. First one thing, then the next. This is how you get through life. This is how it goes.
‘Nursery today,’ I tell Eddie. ‘What do you think you’ll be doing?’
He cocks his head to one side, an exaggerated parody of thoughtfulness. ‘Don’t know,’ he says slowly. ‘Playing, I think.’
‘That sounds about right.’ I smile, and he beams at me, aware he’s somehow made a joke. ‘Well, make sure you have fun,’ I add.
At half past eight I brush his blond hair carefully twenty times, counting each stroke in my head. He is murmuring quietly to himself, moving two plastic animals across his lap in some complicated game. ‘What are they doing?’ I ask, but he doesn’t reply, swivelling his grey eyes up to mine and narrowing them in what looks like amused mistrust. Sometimes, his expressions strike me as oddly mature, brewed for far more than the two and a half years they have had to arrange themselves on his face.
I finish the brushing and straighten his T-shirt. ‘Go and say goodbye to Daddy,’ I say, and he trots eagerly off to the living room. I hear Francis’s voice, complimenting him on his smartness, advising him to be good and have a nice day. He sounds pleasant, doting even. Completely normal. The thought lifts me, and I hurry down the hall to join them. Sure enough, he’s smiling, stroking the top of Eddie’s head with the flat of his hand.
‘We’ll be off, then,’ I say. Eddie slips out of the room, knowing the drill, clattering down the hallway towards the front door to wait for me. The instant he is gone, the atmosphere drops and folds in on itself. Francis sits down again, wrenching the lid of the computer up and intently focusing on the screen.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
‘You won’t forget to pick Eddie up? I’ve got that work party tonight, remember?’ I ask.
He glances up, irritation flashing across his face. ‘I know,’ he snaps. ‘You told me already. Three or four times.’
I bite back the retort that springs to my lips – the accusation that what he remembers these days seems to be entirely arbitrary, filtered through some invisible system that can hang on to the slightest perceived misdemeanour or thoughtless word for years but let dates, times and appointments drift through it like clouds of finely spun sugar. ‘Fine,’ I say, knowing my voice is harsh and unkind. ‘Well, don’t wait up.’ The petty cliché falls uselessly between us.
Francis leans back in his seat and sighs, a short, defeated exhalation that raises the hairs on the back of my neck. ‘See you,’ he says flatly, and all at once I’m thinking about touching him, wondering how it would change things if I walked over and knelt in front of him and pressed my hands to his forehead, smoothing his hair and kissing his lips. The idea is strangely compelling, but I don’t move.
I tell him goodbye, and search my head for something else to say. But there’s nothing.