The one where Lizzie delivers logs, attends therapy and learns that Kev just needed 'an oasis', for God's sake...

 Chapter 3

Thursday. End of first week of betrayal management - The boys appear to have clean clothes to wear but I don’t know who’s doing the laundry. Must be me, I guess. They appear to be getting to school on time and everyone except me is eating enough though, the small part of my shattered mind still alert to normality tells me, Eldest is stepping into the breach pretty regularly, putting together meals for himself and his brother, lighting the fires, bringing in the logs, setting his alarm and actually getting up when it goes off. It’s probably good for him, but he must wonder what the hell’s going on.

       So what is going on? I’m not handling the daily chores very well myself because I have a stone in my belly and I don’t know how to get it out. It’s cold and heavy and it eats the warm things I used to feel about the man I thought I loved – eats them for breakfast. I can’t listen to Van Morrison anymore (‘Have I Told You Lately That I Love You’ – our song) so have had to replace all the CD’s in the pick-up with Anastasia, Natasha Bedingfield and Joss Stone. A persistent, angry little voice in my head tells me I should’ve banished him from the house the moment he told me what he’d done. I should’ve burned everything belonging to him, not just his bloody French books, oh no – guitar, clothes, favourite software, blue-tooth phone, bicycle, collection of Arboricultural Journals, driving licence and  passport with that picture of him nine years ago, looking boyish and butter-wouldn’t-melt-ish. It would’ve been over quickly then. Short and sharp. Just a storm, passing quickly to leave brighter weather in its wake. I would have been fine. And Youngest would have had waving goodbye to Daddy dreams, probably for the rest of his life. I’ve been through that once already. I have no appetite for a sodding re-run.

       Bizarrely, the firewood deliveries and the tree surveys serve as my moment-to-moment reason to carry on living. On the firewood front, business is always brisk this time of year so, traumatized or not, I have absolutely no choice but to get out there in sub-zero temperatures, turn Joss up very loud, hurl half ton loads of oak blocks into the pick-up and relentlessly navigate the highlands with one eye on the rear view mirror to make sure nothing bounces out onto the carriageway. There is no way I can disappoint our customers in the run up to Christmas. Why should their festive hearths be cold and empty just because Kevin Gates is suffering an inexplicable bout of free-sex induced dementia? I won’t let it happen. They’re all too precious.

     The Phillips live in a tumbledown cottage high above Beauly and have a dog that likes to menace me vocally in a low register whilst I unload. Rob Gray has a driveway with a tight ‘s’ bend and a steep incline (vital to deliver before sundown while the visibility’s still good). At Katie Cooper’s house in Clachnaharry, I have to park blocking the street and move the pick-up every time someone wants to get past. Same at Mrs Armes in Rosemarkie. She has no access from the road to her back garden, so I unload onto a tarpaulin in her living room and she moves the logs from there herself (very slowly, I would guess.)

     And when I am at home, I have a bundle of tree issues to resolve – householders wanting extensions too close to ancient Oaks, developers planning high-density housing amongst ancient woodland, the genuine character of a site supporting gnarled Elm and crumbling Birch misunderstood by well-intentioned architects who believe that safety and good sight-lines require homes and trees to be strictly segregated. The raw data in support of my arguments sits in muddled piles on the work surface, waiting for me to take it, arrange it and give it enough structure for relevance to emerge. I do this in bouts, between ironing, mopping the floor, tending the fires and making the meals. That is, when I’m well. Now that I’m not, the right words won’t come easily and my sentences are lethargic. I think of the trees, out there in the cold, frosted into stillness while awaiting their fate and, in my head, I deliver destructive Kev a vigorous kick in the genitals for putting me off my stride.
    

He goes out to work and comes in again. Sometimes I think he maybe goes to see her - she doesn’t live very far away. To my continued distress, they’re still communicating on the phone. He used to leave it on the kitchen worktop for me to answer if it rang. Now he hides it, keeps it about his person, in that horrible black fleece with the usefully big pockets he’s taken to wearing. He is trying to prettify the situation. He says he loves me, which I believe, then he says he feels like he loves us both, which I don’t believe and which makes me want to throw up. I don’t know why he can’t see that the warp and weft of his self-justifying fabrication can be brushed away as easily as cobwebs. Loading firewood when angry burns a lot of calories. I am losing weight fast.

     You don’t have to be a well built individual to drive the pick-up but a certain skill level helps. I think I’m just about there but reversing has never been my strong suit and, I have to tell you, the pick-up is a challenge even to propel forward in a straight line. Un-laden, the back end has a habit of skipping out at the merest hint of ice, leaf mould, mud, slurry, gravel, water or squashed pheasant - plenty of all that sort of thing on the rural highland roads. But perseverance has led me to the discovery of some feel-good factors relating to firewood delivery beyond the repeated loading and unloading of logs by hand in all weathers. A pick-up load of something well seasoned that smells nice and is destined to keep the customers warm is always welcomed. They’re also intrigued when a woman steps out of the cab having successfully negotiated a difficult gateway in reverse. Especially if she’s wearing high-heeled boots and plenty of mascara. I consider the acquisition of such skills quite an achievement for a girl who had to take her driving test four times. That’s why it really pisses me off to feel back at square one right now, inability to concentrate due to betrayal-shredded nervous system causing gear-crunching, poor lane discipline and a tendency to reverse into bollards.

    “Maybe you shouldn’t drive when you feel that way,” Kev suggests one evening, like I just need to take responsibility for my state of mind and manage things better. It would be nice to think the comment is a reflection of his re-emerging tender feelings but this is Faithless Kev and I reckon his concern is for the re-sale value of the vehicle rather than for his semi-ex-partner. Maybe the feisty Anastasia would stab two specially sharpened fingernails into his eyes, but I can’t. The stress of the whole situation’s making him think he might be developing Diabetes. He’s been letting his wee dry on the outside of the toilet bowl to see if it glows.

     We eat together and sleep together, side by side, holding hands. He says he thinks he could lie like this with me for the rest of his life. He says he feels he could give up sex completely, forever, and just lie like this, restful.

     I consider the scenario seriously for a full fifteen seconds one evening whilst plucking my eyebrows, and realize there’s no way I can let it come to that.

 

Three days before Christmas – Inverness in the frozen rain. Northern cold, but I love this little city. A tame river runs through it with islands and fishermen and ironwork bridges, and the seagulls swoop and yell around Marks and Spencer. It never gets hot here – only mildly warm round about June. Tourists pose for photographs in May blizzards on the High Street. Today we are nowhere near even bearably chilly but instead of a blizzard, there’s this persistent drizzle, periodically intensifying to something heavier. People hurry by in cars and buses and on foot, hardy pedestrians smiling at us the way Invernesians always do, even though the rain must be blowing uncomfortably down their collars.

Wonder if they can read our purpose as we hurry towards the dolls house building occupied by Marriage Guidance? I have no idea whether it’s my bruised imagination at work, but I feel an emanation of unspoken sympathy from everyone I pass. Maybe it’s not sympathy exactly, maybe it’s more like unspoken solidarity? Isn’t everybody struggling to make it work these days? How many of the people passing me in the street are just getting on with it while some unstoppable drama unfolds in their lives like a little Armageddon?

Following Kev through the narrow hall of the Marriage Guidance building, I take a deep breath and wonder whether I’m not doing this for all of us. I’m lucky, you see. I’m bold/reckless/bereft enough and I knew which number to ring. If everyone out here were the same, my bet is the queue out the door would stretch as far as Dingwall. And maybe then some.

Stella, our Relationship Counsellor, is like a warm bath full of coconut milk. With the rain pattering on the skylight and extremely comfortable chairs we have no difficulty laying out  the bare, broken bones of our situation, then I have to deliver a potted personal history. Stella says a lot of calming things about how important it is to carry on talking and what a good thing it is that we’ve had the courage to come to counselling. Almost as an aside she describes Kev’s behaviour as abusive yet, to my irritation, acknowledges the sense of oasis he thought he’d found. Kev nods at her vigorously and I wrestle with the insult contained in the notion that I am something else entirely – a stretch of arid, treeless desert presumably? Then it’s Kevin’s turn to hesitantly recount his childhood whilst I sit silently resenting his need for an extra-marital watering hole. Or should it be just a hole?  

     He sticks somewhat shyly to the facts. Yes, he changed schools regularly, yes he lost friends that way and found it hard to enjoy schoolwork with the result that, by the time he reached secondary school, he had already opted out. He was aware of his father’s infidelities, having so many siblings had distressed him, as the eldest he’d had to grow up quickly. So what? We both look at Stella as though she might be about to compare our answers with the correct ones and mark us out of ten. We are disappointed. Apparently, nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Stella is so still and so calm I can’t help feeling a certain pressure not to upset her. This is not helpful.

     Then she hands us small pieces of paper and a couple of biros and asks us to write down five things we like about each other and five things we don’t. Mentally, the exercise is easy -  ‘Lies, Cheats, Screws Around, Takes me for a Fool, Dead Stingy…and the good points, er, umm, got it – ‘Showers regularly…knows how to drain sumps…’ But Stella might take against me if I put this sort of thing so instead I write ‘Hardworking, Sympathetic, Good at Fixing Things…’ Kev is similarly superficial yet complimentary, obviously feeling the same heat. Most of his observations centre around housekeeping and my intelligence.  Can’t help thinking he’s over-egging the intelligence thing, unless it’s some kind of sick joke. I feel pretty goddam stupid at the moment.

We read what one another’s written and sit looking at Stella. I am desperate for a cappuccino. She says we don’t have enough to say which apparently means we’re ‘clinging’. Damn right we are! We’re clinging to the precipice of our crumbling ten-year relationship and looking down at a choppy sea of mutual detestation, why else would we be here?

     Perhaps because she hasn’t been able to get much of significance out of us, Stella starts to talk. She talks and talks and talks, a crisis management tapestry of sympathetic sentences, until my head is swimming and my eyes have glazed over. Kev, sex, kids, money, sex, kids, tree surgery. Oh, and sex. And kids. The last ten years suddenly seem an incredibly lengthy stretch, punctuated by stress and trouble and too much work. Stella’s relentless barrage of reassuring words tries to elbow the hurt pulsing inside me out of its position in the limelight, and I start to get a picture of Kev which suggests recent events might be more of a sad inevitability rather than a gross and disgusting perpetration. Overwork affects some men this way (apparently). The poor darlings are prone to try and lighten the load of their many and various responsibilities by, well, by fucking about (apparently). It seems I am probably wrong to be so upset.

     All the questions burning in my head start to gutter-out like candles before they get anywhere near being asked. Looking across at Kev, I can see that he’s also hypnotized into near subsidence. If he leans any further off his chair he’ll slump to the floor like a gorilla stuck with a tranquilizer dart. What does all this mean for our relationship? But the session is over just as I’m getting so desperate for a caffeine boost, I’d consider asking Stella whether she feels she can carry on the therapy from a grubby armchair in Starbucks.   

     We are asked to pencil in some dates for future appointments. Unfortunately it’s now very close to Christmas so our next one will be after the festivities in the New Year. And what a wonderful, frosted-icing-on-the-cake thought Christmas is! Peace on Earth and Goodwill towards Men. Poor overworked, over-stressed, weak, sad, needy men.

     Oh no. I don’t think so. I really don’t think so.

     I leave the building grumpy and dissatisfied. What else has happened except that we’ve been successfully subdued? And why should this be desirable - unless Stella has some urgent last-minute Christmas shopping to do this morning. Isn’t counselling supposed to be about baring your soul? I had imagined comic-book spouting tears, wailing and gnashing of teeth. I had worn something loose in case I needed to fling my arms about and connect with the earth’s female energy. Instead Stella’s contagious serenity has failed to connect me with anything except my severe sleep deprivation and I want to lie on the pavement till an ambulance comes.

Bugger.

 

     I

t could be my resentful scowl as I rue my own past restraint that tips him over the edge, I don’t know. Whatever, as soon as we get back home, seated at the kitchen table for a de-briefing, it all starts again. “She rang me this morning,” he whimpers. “She says she feels so desperate she thinks she’ll have to go to counselling herself! I’m going to have to go and see her.”

     Now you see, how caring! This is not about him at all, he’s doing it selflessly, all for her! Poor desperate, man-less woman for whom he is the ultimate, rescuing Prince Charming. God in Heaven! I so wish I had the capacity to vomit at will, preferably all over him, but I don’t.

     “Look Kev, you, we…I can’t go on like this,” I tell him.

     “What! It should never have started! I can’t let you carry on trying to weigh up whether you’d be better off with her or with me. You’re using me, or her, or us both as safety nets Kevin.”

     “I know there’s no future in it. I just need to talk to her.”

     We are suspended in time for a moment, looking at one another but lost in our own thoughts. It’s only mid-afternoon, but winter and already getting dark. A lamp in the corner of the kitchen, set on a timer, suddenly snaps on. I glance at the clock on the wall. The kids will be home on their buses any time now and I realize I am tired to the point where I’ve just stuck three touch-of-cashmere sweaters in the machine on a sixty degree wash cycle - they’ll fit Chilly the fun fur snowman when they come out. Still, and don’t ask me how, the rational side seems, by the tiniest of margins, to still have the whip hand and I find myself mentally standing back to weigh up the situation. I see it this way:

• If I stop him from seeing her this could go on for weeks, months, years maybe, God, forever even. There’s this thing people need to find for themselves in situations like this – I believe it’s termed ‘closure’. I felt it one day myself shortly after the split with my ex-husband. He had come round to visit Eldest and was standing, hip resting casually against the kitchen worktop, hair swept back from his forehead like a very self-conscious male model. I had thought to myself ‘I so don’t fancy you’ and that had been it. Closure. “Look at it this way, Lizzie Burns,” I tell myself, while Kev begins to roam the kitchen restlessly. “He’s been shagging her for about three months. If it’s all about sex and she’s in denial about that, will it really hurt that much to let him go up there and tell her just how unimportant it was and how over it now is?”

      “Ok.” I tell him decisively, and his face melts like wax into a flushed grimace suggesting some kind of gratitude.

     I have to resist the urge to roll my eyes so hard they’d get stuck in back of my head.

    

Later That Evening - Time goes on. Ironing gets done while I enjoy an uplifting conversation with Eldest. I don’t drink (significant amounts), I don’t smoke, I’m a chocolate fan rather than an addict, but I confess, I am a little bit hooked on up-lifting conversations with Eldest. I know, I know - this is bound to leave him with lasting psychological damage but what else are parents for?

     “You may have noticed Kev and I are having a difficult time,” I begin.

    He is leaning against the wall draped in knee-length black overcoat, exuding bucket-loads of teenage cool.

     “It’s nothing to do with you, you know,” I babble. “I mean nothing is your fault...”

    He is coolly derisive. “Don’t be stupid, I know that! Look, don’t worry mum. Loads of people at school live in messed up families. They’re always having some kind of trouble.”

    Damn! This is not what I want to hear. Despite the ever-present fear we all have that our children will ‘go wrong’, I have been in the habit of patting myself on the back from time to time for being able to provide a ‘normal’ family life for them both -  within the constraints of my living-with-one-bloke-married-to-another status, of course.

    “Yeah. There’s quite a lot of people at school I worry about. I think something about their families has turned them a bit, you know, flaky.”

   “Flaky? Oh my God! Have I turned you a bit flaky? I used to think I had this all sorted out, that I’d done a fantastic job of, well, constructively breaking up with your dad and carrying on. Just lately though I’ve been wondering. - have I had my eyes closed to the great big mess I was making? Go on – tell me! You know you can.”

   He thrusts himself away from the wall and buries his hands in his pockets. This makes his shoulders higher and even more square. He is taller than me. I feel like I am being interviewed by a vampire.

    “What!” he exclaims. “How can you possibly think that?”

This is a real heart-warmer at a time when my heart feels like a chunk of frozen breakfast roll, so I look up and show him I’m paying close attention, hoping he’ll say more. He doesn’t disappoint me.

    “You’ve always done the best you could mum, I know you have. Sometimes I think you try too hard. You want everybody to be happy and sometimes you should just accept that you can’t make it happen if it won’t.”

     I rest my head on my elbows and lean thoughtfully over the tattered cover of my ancient ironing board. This ironing board was a hand-me-down from my ex husband’s mother twenty years ago – I don’t believe in spending money on the furniture of domestic slavery. Wonder if she does? I wonder if the prospect of being waited on hand and foot domestically is part of the attraction? I wonder if fantasy shag also keeps house like it’s the only reason for her existence and has a pantry full of Lavender-scented distilled water for her top-of-the-range steam iron with in-built radio?

    Despite my sudden, contemplative silence, Eldest senses I still have something I want to get off my chest so he hangs around, hands still in pockets, 6ft tall, long-haired, and a permanently underfed air about him. I decide to ask him a pertinent question.

    “So…what would you do if a very close friend of yours, at least, someone you thought of as your friend, I mean someone you trusted, let you down very badly?”

     It’s as if he’s been waiting for this. He doesn’t ask, “let me down how?” or “can you be more specific?” In fact, the answer comes almost before I’ve finished the sentence.

     “I wouldn’t have anything else to do with them.” He says, and I feel strangely admonished, like some kind of a push-over, a sap, a clinger. Anastasia, Natasha and Joss would all squeal melodically with revulsion if they thought I was ‘hanging-in-there’ or even worse, ‘letting-him-off-the-hook’. And Eldest, it seems, is very much on their wavelength.

     My stomach lurches as I realize I am actually pressing one of Kev’s t-shirts.  “Yes, well, I feel a bit washed out at the moment,” I mutter pathetically, through a cloud of ironing steam. “And, you know Eldest, life’s so very, very complicated! Just when you think you’ve gained enough knowledge and experience to really make things work, it all seems to backfire. You won’t understand till you’re older…”

     “Oh I think I understand,” he says quickly, proceeding to employ one of his many enlightening computer game metaphors. “It’s as though you’ve made it to the next level but you haven’t acquired enough health or ammo on the way. I hate that! You have to go on but you know you’re facing Game Over long before you manage to complete anything. It’s the ultimate in frustration…”

     The ultimate in frustration. That’s one way of describing the ruination of your family-foundational love life I suppose. I stare at him critically, trying to make up my mind whether or not to take any notice at all. Eldest’s resemblance to Sir Steven Hawking has often been remarked upon. It only manifests itself under certain conditions but, when it is observable, it makes you catch your breath. He’s very thin and, at this moment, very hungry. As I watch, all six feet of him sinks slowly into a chair, long limbs too weak to be controlled, neck bent, head lolling to one side while he looks at me through half-closed eyes from behind steel-rimmed glasses. He’s a teenager, physically peculiar as only a teenager can be, but I can’t deny he so often makes some kind of off-the-wall yet genuinely supportive sense.

     Switching off the iron and throwing Kev’s T-shirt into a dingy corner of the room, I stand staring uselessly into space and then I sigh, heavily.

     “Mother,” instructs the broken form from the depths of the chair. “Pull yourself together and feed me pie…”

 

Later Still – I feed us all pie but only manage a miniscule slice myself. Then we watch Sarah Beeny convert a three-bed, red-brick semi in Slough into a minimalist Lad’s Pad. Eldest reminds me he has a flight booked on Christmas eve down to his dad’s place in Surrey and I worry about how much I’m going to miss him.

     Christmas. Fucking Christmas. Time of tinsel-clad affectation rendered doubly hollow by the deceit and dishonour currently raking my life like machine gun fire. I did most of my shopping before the bomb dropped, yes, I bloody well did. And how much did I spend on Kev before I knew he was shagging someone else? Quite a bloody lot, that’s how much.

What I Consider Very Late -It’s almost nine before he’s back. I don’t know exactly what I expected, but his entrance doesn’t give me the kind of warm, that’s-her-out-of-the-way glow I could use right now. He strides eagerly into my arms with that peculiarly inappropriate sense of new-found self-importance still hanging off him like a sea fret. When he hugs me to his chest I wonder just what it is he’s so grateful for. His presence seems to twist reality and crack it like glass, distorting everything. I am wary and anxious as a rabbit thrust into the lion enclosure. Pressed against his shoulder so I can hardly breathe, I entertain for just a moment the serious possibility that he might be suffering some sort of mental illness. Could a mid-life crisis be a mental illness of sorts? Can extra-marital sex lead to brain damage?

I badly need to know down-to-earth things like whether or not he has achieved ‘closure’, like is he glad he and I are still together, or, having talked with her, have his feelings now swung the other way? What was said for God’s sake? How did she react? Are we still trying to put things back together and, if so, have we moved forwards, backwards or perhaps sideways into an unappealing parking area without facilities?

     “I was passing Tesco so I got you some yoghurt,” he says, releasing me and holding out a striped carrier bag. Eldest is lurking thoughtfully beside the woodburner. I look from Kev’s face to Eldest’s, to the striped carrier bag, and back again to Kev. This is not the right time to fire questions at him. The hidden message in the exotically flavoured Lemon Meringue yoghurt will have to do. But what is it? It says ‘finest’ on it. That’s good. He was obviously thinking well of me, at least when he wandered past the chiller cabinet. It’s yoghurt, which is good for you, which suggests he cares. Only two pots – one for me, one for him. Would three pots have been a bad sign?

     My attempts at a superficial analysis of the situation don’t progress any further. Youngest has burst his lip trying to ride the back of the sofa like a Bucking Bronco and the screams are straight out of a horror movie. Kev’s home, he brought groceries, I’ve made pie, Youngest is making a racket – could anything be more ordinary? Would it be a good idea just to put the whole thing out of my head and presume we’re now getting on with our lives?