I am halfway out the door when Mark calls to me from the stairs.
‘I’m meeting Roy later,’ he says to his own shoes. He is standing in the hall now. The kitchen door is open; it lets in the day now truly dawned, the undeniable, unstoppable day, the hours I must get through. ‘Golf club. Did my trousers come through the wash?’
‘They’re hung up in the wardrobe.’ My hand is on the catch. My eyes are nowhere near his. He’s there. He’s not there. He’s on the earth. He’s floating in space. ‘Your sandwich is in the fridge.’
‘I’ll probably have something with Roy, to be honest.’
I step out, shut the door behind me.
‘I don’t care what you have,’ I mutter, pounding down the driveway. ‘I don’t care if you’re really meeting Roy at his fancy-pants golf club or if you’re going round to my best friend’s house to stick your nine iron in her eighteenth hole.’
I do care. I care very much. I can see that now, watching myself. I can see that I am shaking, too furious to admit to my own rage. My latent trembling fury. I can see Mark’s fury too, in everywhere he doesn’t look, everything he doesn’t see. Me. He doesn’t see me. I can see, watching us from here, that we are trapped. We are trapped in silent rage. I can travel in my mind’s eye and I can open Katie’s door and step across the minefield of trampled clothes and I can see that even in sleep she is furious too. We are all furious. We are carrying the rage of the world, of this great glass globe that presses on my shoulders, too heavy to carry, too fragile to drop. I can see Anne-Marie. She is laughing at something I said when she was still alive, still a mother, still a wife, still a friend. She is a memory of herself, words on a page, photos in an album – that is all she is now.
I am a memory of myself. My husband is a memory of my husband. My daughter is a memory. My son is a memory. I can’t reach them. They are lost. I am lost.
‘Rachel. Rachel?’ Amanda’s blue eyes have filled with tears. Are they mine or are they hers?
‘You need to stop,’ she says. ‘Let’s take a break.’
Mark’s a good man. Lisa loved to say that. That’s the first thing I tell Amanda when we resume and that’s what was on my mind as I walked to work. She’d always said it, ever since Mark and I had first got together. I thought she meant that he was a good man for me. For me. He made me feel like everything I did was clever and good. He made me want to try to be the person he thought I was – kind, funny, decent. When I got pregnant with Kieron, it was as if I alone had performed some sort of miracle.
How could I have forgotten that?
How had I lost my way to him?
Because I had. I saw it so clearly then I couldn’t fathom how I’d not seen it all these long months. He’d believed in me, always, and now I was shuffling around the streets in my pyjamas, snivelling and fretting to myself, not to mention accosting strangers in the night, while Lisa, Lisa who’d been holding a candle all these years, had taken her chance. When Patrick left, she’d not been able to help herself. The concern she’d had for me this last year fell into a different place. Kindness, concern and love reframed themselves, showed me another picture altogether.
Are you OK, Rach?
Are you sure?
Hormones can play havoc – you know that better than anyone.
Bringing up an episode that happened twenty years ago so that I would think I was cracking up all over again when all the time she was urging me to do just that… lose my mind. Mark is a very passive man. Maybe Lisa thought it was time to get Rachel shipped off to the funny farm, take care of Mark in his darkest hour, a romance born of tragedy. She was beyond help, poor thing. We tried to talk to her but she started this walking thing… We clung to each other with the worry of it all. We couldn’t help it. We’ve always loved each other. And Rachel, well, Rachel had lost her mind. She was talking to strangers, taking them to dark and lonely