Chapter 31
Evening falls around us as I make my way to Pearson Airport in a taxi.
There is no amiable conversation about my new life with the driver, just shame filling the vehicle.
I cannot seem to get my breathing under control.
It sounds jagged. Panicked. I want to punch the ceiling of the car and hear the sounds of pounded metal.
‘Please hurry,’ I beg him, and no doubt he spends the rest of our taxi trip wondering why we are hoofing it to the airport.
I stiffen every time I hear a siren. Somewhere out there, I think as I whizz past the city, other people are living lives with purpose and promise.
People are in love with people who love them back.
They have good friends, money, a home. They’re comfortable.
Was my old life, with its data-entry job and its Heat magazine lunchtimes and its Nice Guy husband, really as awful as I made it out to be? I can’t handle thinking about it properly for any amount of time.
I spend the two hours before my hastily booked flight to London in the toilet, waiting for men in uniforms to beat the door down and bring me back to Ted and Alice, and whatever they had in store for me.
The realization comes in a sickening wave.
I have somehow locked myself out of my entire life because of this trip. Its door has bolted behind me, and I’m standing here, outside, in nothing but my underwear, in the snow.
I am in no mood for conversation during the long flight.
I am in a strange state of disbelief as the plane takes off, leaving the city lights of Toronto behind me.
I crane my neck and keep an eye on them as we take off.
They are glistening down below, the city oblivious to my leaving.
I nurse the heartbreak, which has eventually downgraded from blistering to something more simmering and heavy, all the way across the Atlantic.
I cannot bear to think of how blissful and optimistic I felt as I arrived the other way, looking down on to the newness of the city.
The cabin crew try not to notice as I weep into my sleeve during dinner service.
One of them offers me a second and third tiny bottle of vodka from the drinks cart with a sorrowful little wink, and I feel even more pathetic than ever.
The vodka and the hum of the jet conspire to make me woozy, and every so often I keep an eye on the flight tracker.
London is four hours away, then three hours away, then forty-five minutes away, then somehow two minutes away.
The sight of the buildings below us, which once contained the orderly pieces of my life, almost hurts my eyes.
I check myself into a budget hotel near the airport. The moment with the credit card feels like Russian roulette, the time waiting to see if the payment will go through is a genuine eternity. I collapse on to the hotel bed, hearing the deadness of the thump.
I sleep so fitfully that by evening the bedsheets have been liberated from their mattress corners. The feelings are coming in great waves, and so quickly that I can barely pull them apart: sadness, rage, confusion, guilt, relief.
By the following afternoon I am still prone on the bed, occasionally giving my armpits a sniff.
I haven’t eaten in two days, and the cramps in my stomach feel like a comfort.
Whatever I’ve been running from for the last while has finally shown up and is lying on top of me, breathing on to my face.
I put a hand to myself and realize that I’ve just started my period.
Another grim reminder of the inexorable march towards the day when I’ll find nothing up there but cobwebs and dust.
Clearly in the mood for some self-flagellation in among the underboob sniffing, I take a peek at Johnny’s Facebook page and see that he has changed his profile photo again.
He is sitting on the grass, a classic summer festival picture.
Off to his left, I can just about make out the form of Work Wife.
‘So that’s that then,’ I tell the hotel-room coffee-maker.
The following day, I sleep for twelve hours.
When I wake in the London half-light, I can barely tell whether it’s dawn or dusk.
I go to the closest corner shop and spend ￡20 on oversized bags of crisps, Maltesers, popcorn and sour candies.
Back at the hotel, I lie on the bed and shovel fistfuls of the salty and sweet stuff into my face, reaching a sort of calm as I try to outrun the creeping nausea.
Eventually, all I can do is turn my head to the side, tip myself over the edge of the bed and vomit twenty quid’s worth of junk food on to the floor.
I stagger to the bathroom, grab a bathrobe and cover the entire mess, resolving to deal with it in the morning.
Naturally, I forget all about the bathrobe and the puke underneath it when I wake, starting the day with an unceremonious squelch the second I step out of bed.
Fitting. It’s the sound of utter humiliation.
It is enough to make me pick the phone up and delete Essie Marie’s Facebook page on the spot.
‘We’ll miss you!’ the website tells me, asking if I’d reconsider not deleting my account and sticking around a while longer.
But I cannot kill Essie Marie fast enough.
I message Johnny, short and to the point because I can handle no more than that. ‘I’m back in London. Would be good to meet.’ I’m not sure what about, or what I will even say, but this needs to happen.
He leaves my text message on ‘read’ for four hours. Is he trying to offer me a taste of what he has experienced in the last five months, or is he busy with someone else? Either way, he capitulates at the four-hour mark.
‘Our usual place,’ he replies. ‘Lunchtime tomorrow.’
Still recovering from my attempt to rip my stomach asunder with sour candies, I meet Johnny in a cafe a hundred metres from the flat we shared, which is now occupied by an Australian couple unknown to us.
I walk past it, looking up at the windows that now have some sort of purple tie-dye curtains hanging in them.
The Anthropologie ones that I broke my arse to buy must be in a box somewhere in Neasden.
How it is that this window, which means nothing to me now, was once the centre of my whole universe?
As I meet Johnny, surrounded by the dreaded Boden mums, I expect him to look much the same as when I left him, but everything is so strikingly different.
He has a beard, for starters. It’s more like excessively grown-out stubble – the sort that cool, trendy women advise their boyfriends to start growing.
It looks good on him, and I wonder why he never thought of doing it before.
That’s not the only way that I know he might have a girlfriend.
The prickles of unfamiliarity are weird; unsettling, but like something inside me is also waking up.
Being back where I started before any of this happened somehow makes me feel exhausted.
Johnny can barely look at me. The earnestness has been bled out. His eyes are doing that thing that so many other men’s seem to do. Appraising. They are cold. There’s a weird, gruesome novelty in how he looks at me. He seems like a stranger. But it makes me only more determined to win him back.
‘Blonde ambition,’ he says. I’d completely forgotten that he has never seen me as a blonde. I can tell he doesn’t like it. I pull at the fringe, laughing lightly.
He stays silent. He has waited long enough for an explanation and doesn’t want to wait another second. He clamps his lips shut and juts out his stubbly jaw – a sign that he is waiting for me to talk.
‘It’s been like a prolonged moment of madness,’ I start, trying to make sense of the last year myself, in real time.
‘Just …’ He stops me. ‘Did you cheat on me?’
‘No,’ I lie straight to his face. ‘And besides, you’re one to talk. What happened with your one at work?’
‘Who?’
‘The one in your phone as Work Wife.’
‘Yeah, she got married last month.’
‘Oh.’
‘So I’m asking you again. Did you run away and leave our marriage for a guy?’
‘I did not run away with anyone,’ I say, leaving off the ‘technically’.
He is unconvinced. ‘So there’s no one else.’
‘Well …’
He looks like he is about to blow his lid. ‘Esther, will you just fucking well TELL ME. Jesus TONIGHT.’
I exhale. ‘So, I went to Toronto for a while. I had started chatting with this woman online, and she has also lost children and was like some sort of grief expert.’
‘So you decided to leave your job and your husband and your life to go to Canada for five months to meet’ – he stops for dramatic effect – ‘an expert in grief.’
‘Well, that’s not all,’ I tell him. The words are coming like white wine puke, toxic and horrible.
‘She is Ted Levy’s sister.’
‘Ted Levy … the actor?’ He still isn’t joining the dots.
‘I just thought that there might have been something there.’
‘Something like what?’
‘I don’t know.’ Saying it all out loud feels like too much. I am quietly molten with shame as he pieces things together.
‘You left for Canada for five months to … see if you could hook up with a famous actor?’
‘Well, when you put it like that …’ I try to laugh.
Johnny’s transformation from husband to someone entirely different is complete. He doesn’t recognize a single cell of the person in front of him. He sits spluttering for a while, until something gives way and his mouth forms into a perfect little ‘o’ of disgust.
‘Esther, you need help,’ he says, so gently and sincerely that my heart breaks into pieces. ‘I can’t give that to you. This is serious.’
‘I know,’ I tell him. ‘And I’ve been thinking about it. Once I get help, it will be fine. We will be able to find a way back to each other. I mean, we still love each other. There’s enough raw material there to keep going. And if I really concentrate on myself for a bit …’
‘You want me to pretend like my wife didn’t move country to get away from me because she thought she was going to get into a relationship with a famous actor?’
‘It was a moment of madness!’ I’m officially registering as shrill. I feel the weight of the Boden mums’ curious stares on top of us. They’ve slowed down a bit to listen. ‘I know that now. It was just everything: the baby, the job. I set fire to it all to make … to try and make something good.’
‘I’ve really heard the lot now.’
I’m flailing. He is not making this easy for me.
‘Johnny, I don’t make sense without you. I really don’t.’
Now it’s his turn to soften. ‘I think we both know that’s not true.’
‘Please.’ I try to keep the begging note out of my voice. ‘I think we’ll be able to get through this if I’m the one putting the work in. You don’t have to do anything. I know that now. This is on me.’ And then, because I’m stuck for a way forward, I blurt it out. ‘Mushroom vol-au-vent, right?’
He takes my hand and looks with such softness into my eyes that I’m almost sure everything is going to be OK – somehow.
‘I’m just going to be the one to say it. You know it and I know it. You will make more sense on your own.’
‘Hold on, you’re now walking out of our marriage?’ I tell him. We let the hypocrisy settle between us.
‘I think we both need to walk out of it. Even before you legged it, we weren’t in a good place, were we? Not if we’re being totally honest with ourselves.’
‘Is this because you have a new girlfriend? You do have one, don’t you?’
‘I don’t, and it’s not,’ Johnny replies patiently. ‘But you know it and I know it. Just because I’m the one pushing this off the cliff doesn’t make me the bad guy here.’
I begin ugly-crying. I make one last attempt to pull it all back from oblivion. ‘If I get help …’
‘I just don’t think so. Too much water,’ Johnny says.
He picks up the salt shaker absent-mindedly.
‘I fucking adored you,’ he says quietly, brimful of pure sadness and confusion. ‘You were my safe space.’
Truly, I’d rather take a box-cutter to the face than ever hear him say it the way he does, ever again.
I take a look around the cafe. Heads turn away, embarrassed for us.
Stoke Newington, with its effortless mums and happy children, feels like a prison.
It’s as if I’m underwater, unable to get used to the way of things around here.
Always with my nose pressed up against the glass, waiting to be let in and to be allowed to belong.
I want off the treadmill.
‘I’ll call you in a while,’ he says. ‘We need to talk about the flat, that kind of stuff.’
I nod.
‘Also, your little adventure cost us ten grand. So, there’s that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
We pick up and leave. We’re not sure how to sign off, so we try an awkward goodbye hug.
A hug that is supposed to signify an ending.
How can a body that was as familiar as my own feel so weirdly foreign and unyielding?
He gives me a smile, the same smile he did while we had our mushroom vol-au-vent talk back on our wedding day, and in that moment I know.
I have completely and utterly fucked it.
He walks away and it really does look as though he is striding away into a whole other life.