Chapter 7 Now
Now
The clock in this room is broken, but it still incessantly ticks.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
James said he’d get the battery replaced months ago and I’m mad at him for not doing it. But then again, I said weeks ago that I’d take care of it, too. And yet here it is, still stuck just before midnight, or midday, depending on how you look at it. Stuck, second hand flicking back and forth…
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Just like James and me.
From somewhere below, someone cranks up the volume on the speakers. I try not to let the panic about the noise preoccupy my thoughts. I try not to dwell on how absurd it is having this conversation with my husband while the Cha Cha Slide takes place beneath us.
“So can you explain it to me? From the beginning?” I ask.
James nods, head hanging low, body still quivering.
“I’m going to need you to get it together if we’re going to have this conversation, James.”
He nods again, sits a little taller. Exhales, slow and steady. The tears don’t stop entirely, but the shaking stops. He looks like he’s about to speak when a voice echoes through the door.
“Nat? You still up here?”
I’m unsurprised she’s still here; she’s always one of the last ones standing.
Still, as much as I like my friend and old colleague Ama, she has no need to see the sorry mess James and I are in, especially having worked for the business before.
Ama had been the previous sales manager at East London Chill, and as she was the only other Black girl, we’d become fast friends.
If she catches a whiff of something awry between James and me, the gossip will spread through the office like wildfire.
It took one afternoon for the former office manager to become known as “Mad Mary” to everyone.
It’s been years since she quit and people still call her that.
Shit sticks. Even Ama, who’d slipped into a sort of filial relationship with the woman at work, started calling her that.
She says Mary’s dimpled smile reminded her of her aunties at first, but the increasingly crazy eyes morphed that smile into something sinister. Alien.
“Wait here,” I say to James in a hushed voice.
I’m up on my feet and out the door. One hand wants to hover on the handle behind me, guarding it, but I know how suspicious that will look, and so I let it go.
Ama is just cresting the top of the staircase, neck craning to see me.
When she does, she smiles, bright and wide.
Despite the low light, her dark skin gleams, and I make a note to self to ask her for her skin-care routine again.
“There you are! Everything okay?” she asks.
The smile I return is almost as warm. “Yeah, all good. James and I have just been having a moment. We’ll be down soon.”
She gives me a knowing look, eyebrows raised. “Getting some quality time in, eh?” She follows this with a mock frown. “Kind of rude in the middle of your own party.”
I simply laugh. “Did you need something?”
“Oh yeah—you got any Ping-Pong balls?”
“Surely not rage cage at this hour…”
She shrugs. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”
“There’s a box under the kitchen sink.”
She claps her hands together, already turning to head back downstairs as she replies, “If you two lovebirds can keep your hands off each other long enough, you should join us for a round!”
“We’ll see!” I’m not sure she even catches my response in the din, swallowed by the party before the words escape my lips.
I turn back around, pausing at the threshold. I need to switch gears again and it’s not easy. It doesn’t feel good stepping back into that room with my broken husband and our broken marriage, but I have to. And so I open the door.
James is blowing his nose when I return.
He seems more in control of himself. Perhaps Ama’s interruption has been a useful reminder that he needs to keep it together; he can’t risk coming apart entirely at this party.
Half the people here either currently or used to work for his business.
It’s also perfectly possible that he’s just been able to take a breath in the moments I’ve been gone.
Either way, it feels like a conversation should be possible now.
Almost as if to prove this point, James gestures to the space next to him on the bed. I sit.
“I know how much having a baby means to you. Means to us,” he says.
I feel my own lip quiver at that, but it comes to a quick stop. I’m more adept at keeping my emotions under control than he is.
“And this was our only chance, James.”
He nods. “And this was our only chance.”
He reaches for my hand and that dangerous anger flares up again.
But the letters flutter before my eyes, tokens of blank nights heralding bloody mornings, and I quiet it.
I can do this. Be a good, normal wife. And if not good, at least not dangerous.
Even if I’m soon to be an ex, let the separation be the end of it.
“So, can you explain to me why you canceled our IVF treatment and stole twenty thousand pounds of my money?”