Letting Him Stay

unrelenting in my approach and I am hoping to appear in control as though nonplussed with some sort of action plan.

  I asked Tom the question I did not want an answer to in reality. I could never have envisaged in my wildest dreams that I would ever need to ask it. Could he tell me I whispered hoarsely whether the new woman in his life had borne him a son or a daughter. There is a falter now, a flicker and a nervous twitch around his mouth the sort of which I witnessed when he left his partnership with Giles and lost so much money we had to start again. When we were pressed by the building society to give up our family home that had cost us thousands in capital to build and to restore, also so much of our time over so many years we’d had to downsize to this little box. It had become our prison, our hated quarters, beige painted with no outstanding features. I had never blamed him because we were in it together, always.

  There was a long uncomfortable silence and he was gulping a little. Mr. Thomas Kinsella, my lover, my man, my husband, my boy, my only one. Our eyes were locked and we were conversing silently like two computers locked in an unbreakable connection. Suddenly our programmes were both fully loaded and we held a full understanding of each other and everything that was true. There was no space for fantasy. Everything was drawn in black and white with no grey areas. He sat down in the chair opposite to me, placing two mugs of down shakily onto the side table. His hands were so unsteady he held them together in a grasp. He seemed frightened and still didn’t speak as though he was terrified of committing himself verbally. He was assessing my reactions and the expression on my face, which was cold and murderous. I didn’t want to spare him; I wanted him to be as deadly scared as I was. Surely there is a code of conduct for moments like this; after all I had already assumed the role of the flattened hedgehog, which he hadn’t even noticed. When he did speak, although it was spoken so softly I almost didn’t hear him. On reflection I felt that it would have been better if I had been blindfolded to receive his answer as it was like taking a bullet from a family heirloom shotgun. His bulls eye news impacted and penetrated sharply through me. It opened up a large hole causing me to feel immediately empty and exposed, unprotected and unloved. Immediately I became a discarded person and a remnant of my former self, a shadow.

  When he whispered that he had a new baby girl whom they had named Grace it was as though he was completely severing himself from me. I left my body and rose up to the ceiling in disassociation, blasted away from his side into nothingness and left in smithereens. I could never hope to scoop myself back together again and I would remain dismantled. There was a hissing sound crashing inside my head, similar to the time when I had begun pushing to deliver Joe our first-born. It was a point of no return such as now. Childbirth did hurt and everyone had lied to me back then about it including my best friends. Well meaning lies meant to protect.

  “Oh God this hurts more.”

  The pain was unbearable and pushing life out of my heart. I begged my soul to find a way to make it stop. Surely somehow I could salvage my life and regain control. My memory worked like a clockwork train in reverse as I rewound it back to this time last year. We were on holiday in Dorset and I had felt so safe. This proved to be an insensible thing to do. History now emphasised to me that I hadn’t been safe at all. In this timeframe he had yet to make her pregnant. It was probably the very best and most intense time of their relationship. All the happiness I had been feeling back then, the hopes and aspirations for the rest of our life together after losing so much financially was in reflection embarrassingly naïve on my part. I envisaged them sharing jokes about me and this was excruciatingly painful. I imagined Tom describing to her my mood and manner on holiday, how I had been all seductive and coy having purchased raunchy new underwear embracing a newly found sexually playful side of myself. I rewound the clock further back still, to the year before that when he hadn’t even met her.

  “Make it then God and somehow I can put this all right.”

  Like Dorothy from the film ‘Wizard of Oz’ I wanted to click my shoes together to get back home. I knew that I was home yet we were no longer a family in its own unit. I then reached a new found low. I wished their baby dead. She epitomised their future and their togetherness. It was a thought so base and horrific to me that I backtracked from it immediately in personal shame. I begged God for forgiveness. Yet somehow I couldn’t accept this child existing and that she belonged to my husband. How strange and unexpected! So many people had openly expressed how much they envied the way Tom adored me, how we loved each other so obviously. I couldn’t work out what was right and wrong about the way I was thinking at this point. I felt myself to be chaotic and unhinged. I couldn’t rely on myself to even appear sensible and make choices. I had no choices! My future had been mapped behind my back. I could embrace death so easily now and I wanted the pain to stop. Yet simultaneously I wanted the blackness swirling within me to become less heavy and to let light through giving me a glimmer of hope. Deep down I knew that I wanted to live.

  A sound came from me quite guttural and animal like and he had stood up to cover his face. I must have hit him. Now his arms were wide open trying to catch me but I was falling into a long black hole and as yet I hadn’t landed. My arms were out-stretched as though I was blind and I realised that although I was lashing out I was not making contact with anything. I had thought I could take it, hear it, deal with it, I had pre-prepared sentences for this moment, profound ones that would make him think, care, stop him in his tracks, remind him of his love for me, but I hadn’t prepared for my inability to breathe. My gasping was now disabling me and I doubled in two clutching forward, grasping at cushions. No, I was on the floor and my face was pressed into wood grain and a splinter had gone into my lip and finally I breathed again. He tried to touch me but I rolled into a ball and I was transported back to the time when my own little baby girl had been born but hadn’t breathed and I felt myself shrink to become as small as she had been. I wanted to be with her in the stars. With the weight of her gone from inside me the space she had occupied became an unfilled void, creating an emptiness within me that caused my heart to cleave into pieces, so irreplaceable was she, so irretrievable, so torn from my body. He has a daughter and our daughter our beloved Catherine was gone. She hadn’t lived to witness her father’s kitchen smile.

  The room grew cold. I could sense him still in the room quite near to me and somehow I felt guilty, as usual, that my behaviour spoiling his life. Was it I who was stopping him from going to see his baby? Obviously it was as he couldn’t detach himself from my side, but he must want to see her, them. I unfurled myself and found strength to tell him to go. He didn’t understand my command. His eyes were questioning, his features and expressions so familiar to me. He was awaiting clarification, proper release orders. He wasn’t sure what I meant, leave the room, go to the hospital, or leave me. I meant for him to go to them, his new family and didn’t know what would happen beyond that. I couldn’t be bothered to help him out and I asked him to leave me alone. I felt better for saying this because I wanted to wither and shrink and to do this in privacy. I usually apologise after being so un-accommodating and abrupt having expressed my feelings, but not today.

  He told me that he would go. I wondered whether he would and could leave me forever. Often I’d tease him about being free to leave me any time he wanted, assuring him he was a free agent, my false bravado an effort to assuage my terror of losing him, and he always teased that he might do so one day just to teach me and to show me what he meant to me. I didn’t need him to do that I knew exactly what he meant to me, everything, life itself. It was our way of keeping each other on their toes. How devastating the cruel turn of events. What did he think could happen next or did he already know? When I realised he hadn’t left the room I understood that he still wanted something from me. It was my job to push him away absolving him of responsibility, to make it less painful for him, to help and save
him. I had forgotten about his weakness in his new position of complete power, forgotten what might still need me to be for him. I desperately wanted him to go and simultaneously I needed him to stay and to hold me tight. Usually I face pain head on and then sink into it. I don’t think I wallow in it, yet perhaps I do. I feel comfortable in it only because it is a familiar foe and I haven’t been far removed from pain since the loss of Catherine. Suddenly I wanted details. How slim, how beautiful, how good, how young, how often, how different, how fucking exciting?

  “Do you think I wouldn’t like some mind numbingly heady illicit sex?” I shouted. “Instead I get pain, that’s my bag.”

  I shouldn’t have asked such questions because what he said next I could never have predicted. As though he was talking to a business associate he informed me that it was in fact his second child with Kate. The fact that he had uttered her name when I had asked him not to hurt me shocked me. What he was saying was