6 months after That Day (April, 2012)
The next night, at one o’clock, Fynn sent me
•
in an otherwise blank text. I opened the door to him and we were hushed but quick as we moved upstairs. The kids knew Fynn came over at all hours, they knew we sat in my bedroom talking at all hours, they were used to finding him sleeping on the sofa downstairs, but this was different, for this it felt necessary to sneak around.
The bed was off limits, this time the floor. No words, no speaking. The door secured, clothes cast aside, mouths locked onto each other, movements fluid and natural, the powerful, freeing release at the end. And then calmness that allowed me to sleep. Curled up in his arms, drained for a little while of all the horror and sadness and pain. He left without speaking at five. As he left, I knew it couldn’t happen again.
On the fifteenth night, when we’d done it every preceding night since that first one, everything changed. Fynn ignored me urging him to get on with it, instead, after a few long, deep kisses, he held himself above me for a few seconds, capturing my gaze with his. I understood immediately what he was going to do and the fear of that bolted through me.
He broke eye contact and lowered his head to tenderly place a kiss at the base of my throat. Slowly, adoringly, he kissed a soft path from my throat to my navel, setting me alight with every gentle touch of his lips against my skin. As he reached my belly button, he retraced his trail of kisses up my body again until he reached my chest. His gaze flicked briefly up to my face before he took my left nipple in his mouth, sucking and licking it until my nipple was pleasurably, painfully erect.
Instead of stopping him, as I knew I should, I writhed beneath him, encouraged him, as he moved to the right nipple, and worked on that until it was as hard and sensitive as the left. As I gasped silently, relishing the sensations I thought I’d never feel again, he kissed another gentle path down my body, moving lower and lower until his mouth was between my legs. Another inaudible sharp intake of breath from me as he gripped my hips. He held me in place and his tongue immediately began to explore me. Each touch flooded me with what felt like a mini-orgasm, each movement against him drenched me with an exquisite agony until I could feel the approaching rush of bliss that would come with the final release. As it rose through me, he pulled back, took the orgasm away, and instead brought his face level to mine and pushed into me. At the same time he cupped my face with his hand and his thumb stroked across my cheek in time with every slow, precise thrust into me while his gaze held mine.
He was creating intimacy. We’d been intimate, but this was intimacy; closeness and desire – an emotional manifestation of what we were doing. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want intimacy, nor for him to fall in love with me, which was where doing it like this could lead. I wasn’t capable of falling in love with him. I was already in love. The man I loved had left me, yes, but that didn’t stop me from loving him; from knowing in the deepest recesses of my heart that it was all a big mistake and he’d somehow find his way back to me. My body and mind craved release and relief, but not love. With my memories of Joel, I had no shortage of that kind of love.
Fynn and I continued to move as one, our bodies in perfect time, our eyes visually locked until we came together; our orgasms shuddering smooth, gentle ripples of euphoria through us and into each other.
Afterwards, he was even more gentle: kissed the top of my head, briefly nuzzled his face against mine, and fell asleep stroking my shoulder. Once his breathing regulated, told me he was drifting in DreamLand, I opened my eyes. Listening to him sleep, I stared into the dark. I had to say something. Before he went home, I had to tell him we couldn’t do it again. Not if it was going to be filled with intimacy.
He affectionately stroked my cheek before he left and I didn’t find the courage to say anything before he walked out.
Come back, I silently called at him. I want to do it again.
*
Fynn leans against the worktop, right beside me, his arms folded across his broad chest. He’s watching my every move as he waits for me to start this conversation that I never want to have. Even if I did want to have it, where would I start? Frustrated with him, angry at myself, I slam the carrot I have picked up from the colander down on the wooden chopping board. The thwack it makes reverberates around the room. Fynn doesn’t react, doesn’t even flinch. He’s going to wait for as long as it takes.
7 months after That Day (May, 2012)
‘It’s Uncle Fynn,’ Phoebe said as she returned to the table after answering the door. After three days of ignoring his middle-of-the-night ‘.’ texts, Fynn hadn’t contacted me at all in two weeks. I missed him. I ached for him to be back in my life. Everything felt off-kilter without him, but I knew if I didn’t take a step back, we’d end up somewhere even more painful.
I’d also had my period in that time, which had been a timely reminder of how reckless I’d been, the risk we’d been taking, another problem I could have added to my list because we hadn’t used anything. Joel had a vasectomy six months after Zane was born so I hadn’t had to think about contraception in years. In those two weeks with Fynn, during the day, I hadn’t allowed my mind to go anywhere near what I did at night, it was a room shut off from my everyday world, and at night when he was with me, all I thought about was the miracle of having the ability to feel again, the release of orgasming and the relief of being able to sleep afterwards. It’d been so irresponsible. The bright red streak on the toilet paper had reminded me of that. ‘Dodged that bullet, huh?’ as Joel would have said.
‘It didn’t even occur to me that it’d be dinner time,’ Fynn said. I hadn’t heard his voice in a month, I realised. It was such a lovely sound, even and deep and so very kind.
‘It’s not, usually, is it?’ Phoebe said and returned to her seat at the table. ‘Usually we’ve eaten by now and we’re doing homework.’ She was making a point that I hadn’t got myself together quickly enough for her that evening.
‘Dinner’s a bit late today,’ I explained, while not looking at him. ‘Don’t know why, really, it just is. It’s my version of jollof rice with chicken, we’ve enough if you want some?’
‘You sure?’ Fynn asked, still by the door.
‘Of course.’
‘So, Unc,’ Zane said. He pulled out the chair next to him, a place for his uncle to sit. ‘What you been up to? Ain’t seen you for a while.’
Fynn sat in the proffered chair and I dished up the tomato-red grains of rice, studded with pieces of chicken, peas, green beans, carrots and sweetcorn onto the plate I’d got out for myself and placed it in front of him. Instead of sitting down to eat, I began to clean up the kitchen because I had, for some reason, lost my appetite.
Later, Fynn called, ‘Thanks for dinner, Saff, I’ll see ya’ to me on his way out. He’d gone up with Zane to take him through his bedtime routine and had obviously stayed until Zane fell asleep. He’d returned to the kitchen to ruffle Phoebe’s hair as she sat watching television – and she’d moved her head in their usual affectionate ‘gerroff’ shorthand – but he waited until he was at the door to say goodbye to me.
I threw down the tea towel I was using to dry up and dashed to the door. I caught up with him before he stepped out.
‘It’s been nice to see you,’ I offered as an olive branch to check that after my moment of madness which had cast us out into a dangerous flood, we were all right again, we were back on dry land. Our friendship could go back to being safe and grounded.
His face softened, his mouth turning upwards, the creases around his eyes deepening as he nodded and grinned. I’d almost forgotten the warmth that radiated from a genuine, easy Fynn smile. ‘Yeah, you too. I’ll see ya.’
‘I’ll see ya.’
The craziness was definitely over with because I’d found a better way of coping, another way to ease the pain and anguish that wouldn’t drag in one of the people I loved most in this world, damaging and hurting him in the process.
*
‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ I admit to Fynn. ‘Can’t we leave it? I have far too many things happening right now to deal with this.’
‘Really? Well, it looked like you were more than able to deal with getting all cosy with your new friend, there.’
‘It’s not like that, I told you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
‘I’m calling you deeply in denial.’
I drop the knife and the carrot, and face him properly. ‘Look,’ I say. ‘Look, what happened …’
‘I get it,’ he says, ‘I know what happened was just—’
‘Sex,’ I say at the same time as he says, ‘Grief.’
Fynn draws back, his face bathed in shock. ‘Sex?’ he repeats.
I nod.
I can’t tell him everything, that it wasn’t only ‘just sex’, because I can’t have this conversation right now. There are lots of things I don’t want to talk about and most of them do me the courtesy of staying locked away in the box I have tucked them into. If they do escape, try to become seen by the light, I go through the ritual, the stuffing away so that I can function. Fynn isn’t allowing that to happen.
‘You mean it could have been with anyone?’ he asks, bewildered.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But that’s what you meant.’
‘No, no, that’s not what I meant at all. I don’t know how to talk about this with you. I was impulsive, stupid – not you, you’re not stupid, it was. I was. I think I wanted, I mean, I know I wanted se – I trusted you. I trust you. It was safe to—’ Everything I say sounds wrong. I can’t explain it to him without telling him the rest of it, all of it.
Fynn takes several steps away from me until he is in front of the kitchen table. ‘I thought it was shared grief. We’d both lost someone we loved so much and I thought what we were doing was sharing that. But it was only sex to you?’ He rubs anxiously at the area of his forehead above his right eyebrow. ‘Be honest with me, Saff, do you feel anything except friendship for me?’
‘You sound like you’re dismissing friendship as unimportant. You know it takes a lot more to be a proper friend than a lover.’
‘Answer the question, please.’
‘This isn’t the time to talk about this, Fynn. There’s so much going on, we can’t talk about this and anything good come from it.’
‘I’ll take that as a no then.’
‘I didn’t say that. Don’t put words or feelings into my mouth.’
He stares at some point over my shoulder. ‘I don’t even know what I was thinking. It’s not as if we were ever … I’m a fuckwit, aren’t I?’
‘Don’t talk about yourself like that. And it’s not true.’
‘I’d better go.’
‘Go? What about dinner? The kids?’
As if my talking about them has summoned them, the front door yawns open and the corridor is alive with the sounds of Zane, Phoebe and Aunty Betty chattering about what havoc they have wreaked in Brighton.
‘Who do we know that wears shoes like these?’ Zane calls.
‘I don’t know,’ Phoebe says as loudly as her brother.
‘Probably someone who wanted to be a racing driver,’ Zane laughs.
Fynn stares at me as he desperately tries to pull himself together, tries to mask his pain and shock so he can be normal with them.
‘Oh yes,’ Phoebe adds, ‘that’s right, he had to give it all up because he couldn’t hack it.’
‘Oi!’ Fynn says. He sticks his head out the kitchen door and I know he has pasted on a grin. ‘I could hack it, thank you, they couldn’t hack me showing them up.’ A pause. Then: ‘Oh my word! Is that Aunty Betty? I knew I felt a sudden influx of beauty into the general Brighton area, I should have guessed why.’
‘My darling Fynn,’ Aunty Betty drawls. ‘It’s been far too long.’
‘What, since two weeks ago?’ he replies with a laugh.
Two weeks?
‘Aunty Betty’s living with us now,’ Zane explains, happily.
‘Oh is she now?’
‘Yeah, she got thrown out for doing something bad,’ Phoebe says. ‘She won’t tell us what, even though we’ve offered her all our pocket money.’
‘Wow, that must have been bad,’ Fynn agrees. ‘Usually you’re all for confessing your wrongdoings. And anyway, Elizabeth Mackleroy, it’s a good thing I came here today, isn’t it? You weren’t going to tell me you’d moved, were you? You would have let me go all the way up there to see you to find you were gone.’
If I thought I couldn’t feel any worse before, I was wrong: the shame and the guilt return, this time as a huge, towering wall of emotion that collapses over me, almost completely burying me in the process. Fynn has been quietly, conscientiously, visiting Aunty Betty in Joel’s place.
Fynn lurks by the kitchen door because from here they can’t see how much of an effort he’s making to sound normal, to be normal.
I hate myself for this. I hate myself for starting the madness.
‘OK,’ I shout. ‘You all need to be washing your hands and coming out of the corridor.’
The three of them grumble as they kick off shoes, hang up jackets and generally reintegrate themselves into the house. While they do this, I tug Fynn back into the kitchen.
‘Please stay for dinner,’ I beg quietly. ‘We can talk afterwards, when everyone’s in bed. Properly.’
He won’t look at me; his gaze flits around various points of the kitchen but avoids me directly. ‘No,’ he says firmly. ‘I need to go. I’ve got a lot to think about.’
‘Please, Fynn? Let’s not leave it like this, you’re my best friend.’
Now he looks, turns his agony-laden eyes on me. ‘And you’re mine. Which is why I know you’ll understand that I need to go right now. I can’t stay here. Will you cover for me with the others?’
I nod. ‘Course. We’ll talk again soon, though, yeah?’
He gives a short nod but doesn’t speak. I don’t like it when Fynn doesn’t speak. It means nothing good.
*
‘Why didn’t Uncle Fynn stay for dinner?’ Zane asks as I sit on the end of his bed, chatting to him before sleep.
‘He had something to do he’d forgotten about,’ I reply.
‘Do you think he misses Dad as much as we do?’ Zane asks.
I’m hijacked by the question. Zane rarely talked about his dad in terms of people missing him. It was always to ask what I thought his dad would say about something, what he might think, if he’d laugh about something. Even those questions were few and far between, as though asking them would admit to himself as well as me that he was starting to forget. That every day moved us further away from his dad and nearer to a time when he couldn’t predict or even accurately guess what his dad would do in any given situation.
I try to help keep Joel alive and present by behaving how Joel would, by reacting as much as possible in the calm, considered way that their dad would, but I get it wrong sometimes. I get it wrong a lot of the time. This question is new, though. Unexpected.
‘Yes, he does. Uncle Fynn knew your dad for a long time, even before me, so yeah, I think he misses him.’
‘Do you think Dad misses us? And Uncle Fynn? And Aunty Betty? And Granny and Grandpa, and Grandma and Granddad?’
Joel. Joel found it easy, necessary even, to surround himself with others. He had such a capacity to be with people, to spend time with them, enjoy them for who they were, no matter how different they were to the people he knew or to who he was. That’s why I hope he’s not alone, where he is. I hope he’s surrounded by people, even if they aren’t the ones he loves.
‘Yes, I think he does.’
‘I think so, too,’ Zane says. ‘And that’s what Uncle Fynn said when I asked him. He said Dad loved to be surrounded by people but even if he had lots of friends in Heaven or wherever he was, Dad would still miss us.’
That’s the sort o
f answer Joel would have given, of course. I don’t know what Lewis would say in that situation, but I do know what Joel would say. What Fynn did say.
I think of Fynn while I wait for my son to fall asleep and my heart aches with the echoes of all the things I want to say to him.
Friday, 19 April
(For Saturday, 20th)
Saffron.
This is a genuine question: how is it that you can still function? I mentioned it before but I am truly interested in how you can carry on. I know I can’t.
When I lost him my life ended, nothing was ever the same.
It seems nothing has changed for you, really? You still go to work every day, you still hug and kiss your children, you sleep with the blinds open as if you have nothing to hide. Is that blue World Cup 2006 T-shirt you sleep in his? I see it every time you go past your bedroom window with your hair all piled up on top of your head brushing your teeth. See? It’s things like that – you can fix your hair for bed and you can brush your teeth. I found it almost impossible to do those things for so long and struggle with them now.
It’s just, it seems like you’re playing a role? Do you understand what I mean? I’m not trying to upset you, because you do look the part of a grieving widow, with your hair like that, the lack of make-up, and wearing your late husband’s clothes. But it’s all look and no substance.
I’m genuine when I say I’m not trying to upset you, but I thought you might like to know how you come across to the outside world. And how it comes across to the world is that it’s a front and you’re not really grieving.
I mean, you even went out to a pub on Friday night. You had two gentleman callers at your house today when you were all alone. That’s not how widows behave.
I’m not behaving like that, I’m not really sure you should be, either. If you truly loved him with all your heart, like I did, you wouldn’t be behaving like that.
I didn’t mean to give so much away or to start to let you know what our friendship was truly about, so I’d better end here.