Fly in the Ointment Page 2

  But Malachy was a joy. There’s something so hopeful about babies, toddlers, small children. A whole new life just waiting to be unzipped. He was the happiest of boys through all his primary schooling. I blame that secondary school for what went wrong. How do these teachers manage to close their eyes to all that bullying? The wrong sort of clothes, or family, or face? Disaster! The wrong sort of personality? Tough luck on you. You’ll simply have to put up with a heap of vicious shoving and hitting all the way to school in the morning, through every break-time, and all the way home at night. Small wonder so many schoolchildren bunk off, turn inwards or take to comforts like drugs. I think my Malachy had less strength of will than most. (I’d hate to think that he was under even more pressure.) And I didn’t have the sense to march up to the school and take him out of there, giving those teachers a taste of the truth: ‘Why should I leave my son with you? He’s neither safe nor happy, and what little you teach him is not worth the misery of staying all day to learn it. Forget the whole deal.’

  So, for whatever reason – and this is my bitterest regret – I didn’t do it. And by fifteen my son was probably a hopeless case. A terrible thing to say. Fifteen? Lost cause? Of course I didn’t know it at the time. Believe the comforts people offer you and you can easily manage to persuade yourself that everyone else’s teenagers look as sour and pale and moody as Malachy did, spend whole days in bed, and steal from their parents’ pockets. Who is to know the shade of difference between healthy rebellion and the slow, steady disintegration of a young person’s personality?

  Not Stuart. He put a huge amount of effort into staying away from the house. We barely saw him. Meetings. Work trips. Conferences abroad. And not me, either. I only saw what I was brave enough to see, and that was no more than what I felt strong enough to deal with. I only worked part-time (in a dry-cleaner’s – perhaps the fumes softened my brain). But they were long enough hours to offer the escape from truth so many parents need.

  Now, of course, all this time later, I can face the facts. Already by fourteen Malachy was in with the bad crowd. By fifteen he was in thrall to drugs. By sixteen he was a junkie – dishonest and snivelling, with a heap of seedy friends who, even when you’d taken Malachy’s phone away from him, still managed to find some way of signalling this week’s special offer to him over the hedge.

  Did we talk about it, Stuart and I? Barely at all, beyond the day-to-day recounting of our son’s tantrums and disappearances, occasional paranoid fits and the anxious complaints of the neighbours. I certainly wouldn’t have asked for Stuart’s help or advice, knowing only too well the sort of wrangle it would have set in train. More of his tiresome accusations: ‘If you’d not spoiled that boy . . .’ My counter-arguments: ‘If you had ever been here.’ No. Better to press on alone, phoning the police to insist that they came round to clear the drug-sellers away from the front of our house; making excuses to drop Malachy off so close to school in the morning that there’d be at least a chance he’d feel too idle even to bunk off; trying to stop him leaving the house for ludicrously spurious reasons at all times of the day and night.

  All hopeless. And, once Malachy had finally rubbed enough of his reeling brain cells together to spark the realization that he was now old enough to leave school, a whole lot worse. I dreaded leaving the house. I dreaded coming home again. And I loathed being in it. So when the social worker, Mrs Kuperschmidt, finally advised me to offer him the choice – full drug rehabilitation in a clinic or leave the house – he sulked, then shouted, but he left the house. The next time I saw him he was hanging round the door to the shopping centre along with a girl with a nose jewel so lurid it looked like a bad sore, and shorts halfway up her arse.

  I stopped to talk to him. ‘Look at you, Malachy. Just look at you.’

  He turned away. ‘Oh, piss off, Mum!’

  A spark of interest flashed across the girl’s bland face. ‘Are you Mally’s mother?’

  To this day I am glad I held back the bitter ‘I used to be’ that sprang to mind and told the girl instead, ‘Yes, I’m his mother. And on the day he finally manages to convince me he’s sorted himself out, then I’ll be happy to have him back.’

  She turned to Malachy. ‘Did you hear what she said?’

  He muttered sourly at the pavement slabs beneath his feet.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded.

  He scowled at her. ‘Well, what?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  He looked a bit baffled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m asking, are you going back?’

  He nodded towards me. ‘What, with her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stared at me with venom. ‘Not if she’s going to keep on and on at me like before. Not if she’s going to be rude to my friends and nag me all the time.’

  Oh, blessed are the peacemakers. She turned to me. ‘Well, are you?’

  ‘What, going to keep on at him and shoo off his druggy friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, yes I am,’ I said. ‘He can come home, but only when he’s finished with whatever crap it is he’s ruining his life with now.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ she said.

  And that was that. Frankly, I couldn’t see why she hadn’t grasped it first time around, unless she was blasted, or her brains had been rotted by glue fumes. I went into the shopping centre and got the things I needed, along with four big fat juicy and expensive sandwiches and two large bottles of peach and mango juice – Malachy’s favourite – to hand over on my way out.

  But they were gone, with only a couple of cigarette ends rolling about in the draught from the doors to show that they’d ever been there. I drove home rather too fast, in some distress about my son and irritation at the wasted expense of the food I had bought them.

  If I am honest, it was probably only because this extra shopping was on my mind – could I perhaps pass the beef and mustard sandwich off, with a salad, as Stuart’s supper? – that I even noticed that my husband had gone.

  Yes, gone. And not just with the jacket he’d have taken with him in case it turned chilly later, but with his long black coat. Curious, I looked in the cupboard under the stairs. His boots weren’t there – only the running shoes I’d bought after Stuart’s ticking-off at his last routine check-up for not taking any exercise, shoes he’d neither wanted nor worn.

  I went to the desk we’d built in under the stairs. At first glance it looked as cluttered as usual. But when I studied what was lying about I noticed it was only paperwork to do with the house. Directories. Bills. Receipts. Nothing of Stuart’s and, most unusually, nothing at all to do with his work.

  I opened the drawers. One looked suspiciously empty. I tried a sort of test, rooting through for his driving licence or passport – any paperwork to do with Stuart.

  Nothing to be found.

  I went upstairs, and into the bedroom we shared. I opened the closet to see a couple of suits he never wore, a few shirts that he hated, and shoes I’d bought him that he had always complained felt as uncomfortable as walking round in cardboard boxes. I pulled out a drawer to find a pair of golfing socks I’d meant to send to Oxfam, a heap of handkerchiefs, and one or two of those sorts of weird little leather straps that are something to do with wearing trousers with braces.

  I looked in the pretty raffia bin. Right at the bottom, under a heap of smeary tissues I had dropped in there, he’d shoved a crumpled paper bag. I opened it and found a couple of foil-wrapped condoms he’d clearly tidied out of the back of the drawer while he was packing, and dropped in there to save me (and him) unnecessary embarrassment.

  The shame of it! I sat on the bed and watched my face go beetroot in the mirror. To have a husband leave, and not even notice! When had the bloody man gone? It couldn’t have been that morning. There hadn’t been the time. The day before, while I was working? Or could it even have been the day before that? I was so used to paying no attention to Stuart’s comings and goings, his calls to say that things were runn
ing late, his talk of cancelled trains and nights in the city. No doubt before he bought that microwave oven (for my birthday!) I might have had some vested interest in actually listening to his excuses and his explanations. These days I tended only to mutter ‘What a shame’ and ‘How annoying for you’ and hope that the call would be over before The Archers.

  I finally worked it out. It must have been the day before, because when I’d come home from work there’d been a note from Stuart on the table letting me know that Martin Tallentire from next door had come round to borrow our ladder yet again.

  But since then, nothing.

  I wondered if I should phone him at the office. Then irritation rose. Why bloody should I? If the man proved to be such a mean pig that he could choose to do a flit without the courtesy of a single word, then let him. I was so furious I strode around the house picking up droppings from our eighteen-year marriage and putting them in bin bags. Then I sat at the table and ate the cheese and celery sandwich (I’d thought the girl might be a vegetarian), and thought things over.

  Try as I might to suffer the flood of worries I thought a person ought to feel in circumstances like mine, only two thoughts kept surfacing. The first was that I couldn’t stay at the dry-cleaner’s. Much as I liked the job, I knew I couldn’t depend on Stuart to fund me for much longer. Even if he changed his mind and came back tomorrow, I couldn’t be sure he’d stay. If I was going to keep a roof over my head, I’d have to brush up my accounting skills and get a proper job.

  The second thought was how very stupid the two of us had been not to split years ago.

  My only actual feeling was relief.

  3

  THE FEELING LASTED. Not just for the rest of the afternoon (and through the next sandwich) but through the long quiet evening. In a symbolic gesture of ‘good riddance’ I put fresh sheets on the bed and took off the downie Stuart had hogged so often, leaving me shivering. Instead, I put on the cotton blankets that I preferred, and could peel off and pull back over again, as my own body demanded.

  Spread like a starfish, I fell asleep in moments. At twelve I jack-knifed upright, fearful that Stuart might have lain awake in his hotel room (or in his lover’s bed – who was to guess?) and changed his mind. I pictured him sliding out from under the covers, pulling his clothes on and getting some taxi-driver to drop him at the end of our street. I even imagined his footsteps coming up the path, his key scraping the lock.

  And then I thought, ‘No, damn it! You can’t walk out without a word and come back just as you choose.’ I hurried down the stairs to run the bolt across the front door. (The back is always bolted.) ‘Just try to get in now!’ I warned him as I went back to bed and then, astonishingly, slept through till morning.

  I woke with the sense that this was all some unimagined gift. I had been given a second chance to live my own life, not the one I’d twisted out of shape trying to fit in with Stuart. The light shone brighter on the walls. The birdsong sounded merrier. Even my tea tasted better. I dressed with care in case Stuart popped into the dry-cleaner’s to tell me he was in love, or off to Thailand, or whatever. I got in early enough to warn Soraya I would soon be handing in my notice, but not so early that she had time to prise much out of me before we were engulfed by the first rush of customers dropping things off on the way to their own jobs.

  I kept hearing singing all day. Yes, it was really like that. I’d hear a voice cheerfully carolling through some upbeat song and look up, startled beyond belief to find it was my own. I swapped sandwiches with Brenda at lunch time even though I hate tuna. I think that I was on a perfect cloud of happiness.

  Till I saw Malachy. He was hanging around in a doorway across the street, obviously hoping to catch me. I felt the usual shaft of irritation that my son’s days were so empty he could start loitering at three for something that wasn’t going to happen before five-thirty. But that is druggies for you. And watching him shuffle round aimlessly did at least remind me why Mrs Kuperschmidt and I had finally toughened up. I saw the stains on his jacket and thought of the countless times I’d had to kneel to clean up his dribbles and vomit. I looked at his filthy haystack hair and my head swam with memories of those perpetual arguments about bathing and changing. I looked at his hands rooting nervously in the depths of his pockets and thought of how often they’d filched money from mine.

  But the longer he stood there, the harder it would be to deny him whatever he wanted. And maybe he had brought a message from his father. So in the end I left Soraya holding fort, and crossed the street. ‘Hello, Malachy.’

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  ‘Feeling all right?’

  ‘Bit groggy,’ he admitted. He trawled through what little was left of his brain for proper manners. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I told him brightly. ‘Have you seen your father?’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking behind him anxiously. ‘Why? Is he here?’

  ‘Not just this minute,’ I assured him. ‘I was just wondering if he had looked you up at all in the last couple of days.’

  I couldn’t tell from Malachy’s blank look if he was even trying to remember. I pushed a little harder. ‘So you haven’t seen him recently? No news? No notes or letters?’

  ‘No.’ Out of sheer habit he started to forge excuses for failing to live up to what he took to be some expectation of mine. ‘But I’ve been moving about a bit . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I recalled Mrs Kuperschmidt warning me not to appear too curious about his life on the streets. (‘It shades all too easily into seeming to sympathize with a choice that he’s making for himself.’) But I did try one question. ‘What, with that nice girl?’

  ‘Which nice girl?’

  ‘You know.’ I touched the side of my nose. ‘The one with the red jewel here.’

  ‘Oh, her.’ He shrugged. ‘No, she’s gone now.’

  ‘What, home?’ (More fool me.)

  ‘London.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ I felt the old heart-sinking chill. There is no fighting this demon. Certainly no winning, even for girls who mean well. Unwisely pushing Mrs Kuperschmidt’s strictures aside, I asked my son, ‘And what about you?’

  Down came the scowl like a shutter. ‘What about me?’

  It all came back in force. The screaming and the tears. The hammering on doors at two in the morning. The brazen deceit and petty thievery. The angry phone calls from other parents. The visits from police and meetings with social workers.

  Never again. Mrs Kuperschmidt was right to have helped me make the decision crystal clear to him: stay clean, or stay out. I nodded back towards the dry-cleaner’s. ‘I’d better be getting back.’

  He shook his head like a dog scrambling out of water. I wondered if he was trying to rattle his brain into some different pattern in which his reason for showing up would become clear to him again. If so, it worked. ‘Mum, can you lend me some money?’

  It was another of Mrs Kuperschmidt’s rules, but still I broke it. While I was rooting in my purse, I told him reproachfully, ‘I bought you and that girl two really nice sandwiches yesterday, but by the time I came out of the supermarket, you had already gone.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  He clearly hadn’t the faintest memory. I tipped more money into his grubby hand than he expected and, while he was still hunched over, greedily counting it, I hurried off back to my own life.

  4

  WHO WOULD HAVE thought a husband of nearly twenty years could vanish with so little fuss? For days on end I went round waiting for the phone to ring. Nothing. I have my pride. I didn’t want to be the one to make the call. I would have scoured his letters for clues but not a single envelope that bore his name fell on the mat.

  That set alarm bells ringing. He’d left the paperwork to do with the house, the mortgage loan and the utilities. But I defy any woman to sit alone night after night, however contentedly, and not think about her future. After a week I borrowed Soraya’s mobile to ring his. I had intended to break off the call as soon
as he answered, but all I heard was a recorded voice: ‘This number is no longer in service.’

  Furious with myself for even wanting to know about a man who was behaving so badly, I rang his office number. A strange voice answered. I didn’t say who I was. ‘I think I might have the wrong extension number,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Stuart Henderson.’

  ‘Stuart? He’s left.’

  ‘Left? You mean, for the day? Or left the job?’

  ‘No longer with the firm. He left over a month ago now.’ The voice sharpened professionally. ‘Is it a matter I can deal with for you?’

  ‘No, no. Can you just tell me where he’s gone?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. You could try the people upstairs. Extension 317. They might be able to help you.’

  They might, but wouldn’t, of course. ‘Data Protection Act . . . previous employee’s privacy . . . blah, blah . . . blah, blah.’ And, to be fair, I didn’t humiliate myself by saying who I was, just asked, ‘Well, is the last address you have for him the one that I have here? 12 Rosslyn Road?’

  There was a pause, and then the man said, ‘Well, since you know it already I suppose there’s no harm in saying that’s where we’ve sent on a few things, and nothing’s come back yet.’