Chapter 32
My feet take me towards Liverpool Street train station, almost of their own volition.
At one point, I see Francesca on the opposite pavement, walking and chatting with a woman who I assume to be my replacement at work.
As Francesca chats with urgency, hands making circles in the air, the other woman’s gait seems resigned and sleepy, and I feel a stab of familiarity as I just about make out her soul-dead eyes.
Francesca and I lock eyes for half a second and I could swear that something approximating hostility crosses her face, but she doesn’t break stride.
I’m someone she used to work next to, no more than that.
To think we once shared eight hours a day under the same fluorescent strip-lighting.
There is only really one other person I need to see on the Esther Contrition Tour apart from Johnny, so I take the train out to a small village in Buckinghamshire, where Carrie now lives.
She opens the door of her rose-covered cottage.
Of course there was going to be a rose-covered cottage.
The baby Marianne, now a toddler with her divine rolls and pudge, is stacked on her hip.
Carrie has never looked more … moisturized.
The baby doesn’t just fit her, glove-like; I can barely remember what Carrie looked like without her there.
The child is an extension of her. Her tiny dark eyes look at me sceptically, and it’s no more than I deserve.
She opens the door wider, and I feel something like shame follow me inside. I worry that I’m going to get it all over the cream-carpeted stairs, the hardwood floor, the bright, clean-lined kitchen. How am I supposed to explain the last five months without sounding totally unhinged?
‘Did you find the place OK?’ Carrie starts, no doubt trying to put off the inevitable showdown for a few more minutes. Everything between us feels so fragile. She disappears into the kitchen to make tea, and I welcome the time to gather my thoughts.
I follow her into the kitchen, where she is putting the child into some sort of jumping contraption suspended in the doorway. Marianne bounces happily, and something in her contentment breaks my own heart a little. I should know her a lot better than I do.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just … I’m sorry. I was a complete asshole to you,’ I tell Carrie.
She stops fiddling with tea leaves and strainers. ‘Yeah. You were.’
‘I dunno. I was envious of your happiness, I think.’
Carrie has the next bit very well rehearsed: I can tell.
‘So the thing is, envy is what you feel when you covet something someone has that you don’t. Jealousy is when you are worried someone is trying to take what you have.’
‘OK …’
‘Yeah, so anything that happened to me by the time you were being a bitch to me, you already had. So why were you being so horrible about it?’
‘That’s a really good question.’
‘You already had the great husband. You’d bought your flat. You had the big impressive job. And when I got even just some of that, you couldn’t handle it.’
‘It’s not really that, I don’t think.’ Was it?
‘No, actually, what you needed was a friend who was always in the shit all the time so you could tell yourself that you were so much better by comparison,’ Carrie says coldly. ‘Oh, there’s Carrie, fucking up again, at least I’ll never be that bad.’
Was she right? I’ve never heard Carrie talk so much sense.
She softens a bit. ‘I know you were hurting after the miscarriage, but that didn’t mean that me having a baby had anything to do with what was going on with you. I wasn’t taking away your chance. I wasn’t taking away your happiness.’
‘Wow, how did you get so wise? What have you done with my mate?’ I say feebly.
‘Just grew up a bit, I suppose.’
‘I think I’ve been going backwards,’ I tell her. Do I tell her about Ted? I can barely stand to tell it to myself.
‘Yeah, I heard you left Johnny. That was a bit of a weird one all right,’ she reflects.
‘I know it looked all great from the outside, but it probably wasn’t,’ I tell her.
‘Yeah,’ she says, smiling sadly. ‘I suppose I did notice he never made you laugh.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’
Carrie shrugs. The point has been proven. That was never her place.
The baby is restless in her jumping thing, demanding to be set free.
‘Well, you did it,’ I tell her, gesturing towards the doorway. ‘We were all trying to run towards the same thing and you got yourself here. You’ve arrived at contentment. Plain and simple.’
Carrie’s laugh is unkind. ‘It wasn’t like it was easy.’
‘Wasn’t it?’
Her face turns hostile. ‘Did you know that I got ripped from here to here?’ she says, pointing at her stomach and then around to the small of her back.
‘I thought I was going to die. Marianne’s birth was one of the worst things to ever happen to me.
And when I finally got to take her home, to here, it felt like coming back to a house that was suddenly underwater.
I was just in shock that people were expecting me to live like this and that they thought it was perfectly fine.
’ She pauses to let it all sink in. ‘It hasn’t been easy for me, you know. ’
‘I’m really sorry I wasn’t there for that,’ I tell her, and I genuinely am. ‘I didn’t know. I just saw you on Facebook looking really happy.’
‘Well, maybe don’t believe everything you see on the internet,’ she tells me, turning her attention back to Marianne.
As Carrie picks her up again, I notice the picture of her, Marianne and Billy, her small but perfectly formed little family, held on the vast American fridge by a Peter Rabbit magnet.
‘I can’t believe you’re living with someone I haven’t even met yet.’
‘I’m not sure I even want you to meet him,’ she says bitterly, an old reflex kicking back in.
This last sentence makes my eyes go hot and wet in their sockets, making something loosen in Carrie.
‘Well, if you want to stick around, he should be home from work in about an hour or two.’
‘I can’t, in any case. I’m heading back to Dublin on the ferry tonight.’
The old Carrie would have freaked out, begged me not to go. The new Carrie barely reacts.
‘You don’t seem all that bothered by that,’ I accuse her.
She gives a gentle shrug. ‘The only person that needs to be bothered or unbothered by it is you, my love.’
The ferry home to Dublin feels a bit different this time. Where once it was like returning to double maths in school, I see the green expanse of land ahead of me as welcoming, more nourishing somehow than the last time around.
My mother is waiting with the car idling in the car park, fingers drumming on the steering wheel, Neil Diamond’s voice escaping through a barely open window.
It’s a miracle she’s come out to the ferry terminal at all.
As I open the boot to throw in my suitcase, she stays motionless.
I knew we were not exactly going to fall into each other’s arms. I’d settle for civility and help with a way forward at this point.
As she drives, she has the posture of someone who has found herself sitting next to a grenade. She is afraid to move a muscle.
‘Am I allowed to even ask what was going on in Toronto?’ she says. She sounds like a woman who has held a breath in for almost a year and finally been allowed to exhale. ‘Some manner of affair, was it?’
‘Jesus, it wasn’t an affair,’ I say decisively.
‘Well, that’s what Johnny thinks it was.’
I don’t have the words, the bandwidth, to explain it, even to myself. ‘I just needed to get away for a bit,’ I start.
‘Oh, right, “get away” for a bit,’ she spits.
‘Most people take a weekend off. They go an hour or two away from home, to a spa, and read a couple of novels, and then they come back and get on with their lives. But this. Leaving us all stupid with worry for months and months on end. The most selfish and insane fucking thing I’ve ever heard. ’
We carry on in silence, even though I can hear the constant whirring in both our brains.
‘Is this thing out of your system, then? You are going to get back on with your life now, aren’t you? Back to London, to Johnny.’
‘I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, Mum.’
Her foot goes heavier on the accelerator pedal. ‘Have you had any idea at all what it’s been like for Johnny, for me …’
‘Well, if you have been talking with Johnny, you will know full well by now that we’ve had a conversation and realized that we’re not right for each other.’
She cannot countenance the very idea. ‘Whatever happened to working on these things? Talking it through? You took vows.’
‘Coming back here was clearly a huge mistake.’ And yet here I am, fresh out of options.
‘You’re going to go back there and sort this out,’ she says, side-eyeing me. ‘I didn’t raise someone to walk away from a perfectly decent marriage for no good reason.’ Mum talks in a way that suggests that is that.
But that isn’t that. That is so fucking far from that, it needs its own postcode.
Up until this point, I was clean out of fight, but like a wasp in the dying days of summer, a last gasp of rageful energy surfaces out of nowhere.
‘If I took marriage advice from the likes of you, I’d be married to some prick who wouldn’t be happy until my guts were all over the sitting-room walls!’ I shout.
Mum’s mouth drops open slightly, her eyes fixed on the road.
‘“Stay in your lane!” “Be happy with what you’ve got!” Fuck me, Mother, it isn’t exactly like this has served you well down the years.
There’s no one less qualified in this life to give me advice than you.
’ It’s all coming out now, tumbling out, and I half expect her to skid into the hard shoulder, lean over me and push me out on to the road.
Instead, her mouth closes again, tightly.
Mum blinks, struggling to comprehend the last few moments, and this tiny gesture is enough to break me. I sit and weep and it feels glorious.