Chapter 6

(Same night... more highly unlikely explanations deftly parried by our Lizzie on behalf of all womankind...)

Two hours later - Two hours of trying and failing utterly to sleep. With compressed exasperation causing sweat to run down my chest, I prod the back of his neck and re-start the conversation as though we never stopped. There is a necessity, I suspect, to plumb the depths of this peculiar compensatory self-love, with the aim of, maybe, finally discovering just what my Kev is missing on the inside that causes him to seek the ego-boost of romancing a second misguided female while the first continues to provide the umbrella of a secure home life.

     “What is it you think she wants, Kev?” I ask, in a voice much more controlled than I feel.

     “Um? What’s that?” He pretends I’ve woken him from the deepest of slumbers with a very stupid question but I know he’s been lying there grinding his teeth neurotically. I could hear him. And I can feel his heart rate through the duvet. Nobody with a heart rate that fast is asleep.

     “I said, what is it that she wants?”

     Another sigh. “I think she wants me.”

     Oh my God. It’s so much worse than I thought. I swallow the suddenly re-emerging contents of my stomach yet again and, since I am, most definitely, speechless, decide once more to shut up.

    

Another hour later -. The deepest, loneliest part of the night. I cannot stay silent any longer.

     “Don’t be stupid Kev!” I explode. “What the hell do you think you’re talking about? It’s never that simple” (or that perfectly flattering.) “We all want the same things don’t we? A future, a stable home, love, a reliable bloke (preferably with a bit of dosh but you know that can be optional – look at us? You didn’t have anything apart from your van when we got together, didn’t make a fat lot of difference to me even when we were living in that appalling house with no drains where the contents of the upstairs toilet used to turn up again under the peach tree in the conservatory…)” My angry voice has an only-half-awake quality. So does his. But he isn’t angry. More anxious. Trying to find a road out of swamp he’s dropped himself in, but pretty clueless in the attempt. Could it be his up-bringing that has left him short of the tools of self-analysis necessary to orientate a successful extrication?

    

 

     “Well, I don’t know then…” He mutters, rolling over on top of me and starting to stroke my hair. He is such a clueless idiot. It would be wonderful just to push my head into the warm space between his neck and his shoulder and drift off to sleep like I always used to. But that would be, frankly, just a little twisted right now.

     “You don’t know?” I challenge him instead, pulling far enough away to get my breath. “Don’t you think it’s really important you find out?” He also pulls away just a little. He too just wants to shut his eyes and hold on and hope by the morning it’ll all have gone away.

     “She said she wanted a baby,” he says.

     There’s a dull expectation in his voice, a heaviness. It’s as though at least a part of him expects me to accept this statement as testimony to his, his what? Soft-hearted generosity? Altruistic nature? His extra-ordinary capacity for ‘love?’

     I bite my lower lip in silent disbelief and try to work out which is the greater act of stupidity – allowing oneself to be seduced into siring a mid-life, cure-for-marital-abandonment baby, or recounting this story to one’s established partner and expecting her to look on one’s motives kindly.

     “A baby?” I manage, a little hoarsely. “A baby at forty? You?”

    “It’s all she’s ever wanted, kids,” he rambles on, talking with his eyes shut as though he’s finally getting the feeling he might be making a complete arse of himself. “But her husband was older than she was, you know - she had trouble getting pregnant.…”

    There’s a very dry laugh stuck in my throat. Could be the onset of hysteria, or meningitis, or that difficult to define euphoric state that accompanies silently communicated derision.

     “And what?” I ask in a falsetto. “You interviewed for the job?”

     Directly after Youngest had been born I’d marked crosses on my abdomen in biro, thrown myself onto a gurney headed for theatre and begged the men in green gowns to tie the necessary knots. My understanding had been that there was no way in hell Kevin wanted any more children. Parenthood (step or real) was not something he’d taken to readily. He found the demands stressful and wasn’t afraid to admit it. Watching him trying to communicate with young children was like watching white settlers trying to make peace with suspicious natives. Nappy contents made him curl up in a corner with his arms over his head.   

     He doesn’t reply. “Kev, honestly,” I try. “Tell me, truthfully. You don’t really want more children, do you?”

     “No. No, of course I don’t! But…”

     “But what?”

     “Well, I suppose, I don’t mind making them if someone else’s gonna bring them up…”

      The silence is like a big, wet blanket enveloping the pair of us. So, I think to myself, wide-eyed in the dark. So. Kev, it seems, has slipped into an alternative reality where the alter ego we probably all have lurking in the shadowy recesses of our personalities has suddenly become King-of-the-Hill. It hurts and it’s frightening to see Self-important-Sexist-Pig hogging the limelight but at the same time, because this so patently isn’t the Kevin Gates I believe I once fell for, these lowest-layer of society opinions and his woefully irresponsible attitude are not the powerful spur to indignation any right-thinking female might guess they’d be. In fact, his request for help is suddenly uppermost in my mind. Somewhere deep inside, I can feel the beginnings of an urge towards a rescue effort.

     I wrap my arms around him and pull him close. He knows what he just said. Maybe there are people he’s kept company with who would swallow the kind of rubbish he just trotted out but he knows I’m not one of them. The tension in his body suggests he’s not entirely sure whether I intend to cradle his aching head or to wrench it violently from his shoulders. 

     “You said you needed my help,” I whisper in his good ear (the duff one has to be shouted into). “Well, what if I ask her to talk to me?”

     Gulp. I wasn’t entirely in charge of those words when they came out. I don’t really know whether I want to…

      “Maybe you should, oh God, maybe you should…” he says in rush, and I freeze. Kind of jumped at the chance, didn’t he? I mean, ran at it, like a footsore desert traveller spotting a watering hole. Bugger. I’ve really done it now.

     “But how?” he says eagerly, almost to himself.

      My mouth’s still bone dry and now my nose has pins and needles in it.

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“Well it would be good if she’d meet me somewhere neutral…” I mutter, without even the slightest hint of conviction.

     “No, no, no. I think she’d be too afraid to do that.”

     “Afraid? Afraid of what? Afraid of me?”

     “Only natural isn’t it? She’s the Other Woman. She’s afraid of your anger.”

     “Well she’s right I’m angry. But it’s you I’m angry at Kev. She doesn’t know us – she just believed what you told her…”

     Then a thought occurs. Could she really be angry at me? At what point in an ill-advised incident of betrayal does the wife become the threatening Other Woman? At what point does she have more, in total, to be afraid of than I do? The answer is, I decide, when the man (in this case my Kev) has given the impression of having shifted his loyalty so decisively that Other Woman believes the pre-existing relationship is dead as a doornail – only the pre-existing partner doesn’t know it. When it turns out something else is true, her world turns on its head. This could really mess her up and there’s not a thing she can do about it. She’s been had. Like it or not, Kev’s still here. We aren’t dead, we’re bleeding and, as far as I’m aware, only live things bleed.

    “It’ll have to be a phone call, just a phone call. Oh God, I don’t know,” he says, still almost to himself, and I know he’s trying to visualize the whole thing which makes me think, one way or another, it is going to happen. “Oh God!” he goes on, more loudly now. “I don’t fucking know! It might just be worth doing but – you have to promise me something Lizzie…”

     “What?”

     “That you’ll be really, really gentle with her…”

    Of course it’s very, very galling that he seems more worried about her feelings than about mine but still, this odd phone call idea and his expressed concern about whether she’ll cope with it puts us in quite an interesting place. For some reason I don’t feel afraid to phone her. I don’t even feel nervous. Nothing will be behind Kev’s back but at the same time, he won’t be able to mess either (or both) of us around (nothing worse than three-way Chinese whispers). No, this will be a gentle woman-to-woman thing. We’ll discuss our feelings in a civilized way and I’ll find out from her whether Kev has really tripped over something undeniably right for him or if she’s having him on. I know him. I’ll be able to tell.

     In a million years or more I would never have imagined things could work this way, but the thought of it makes my shoulders relax. A plan. Something to do at last. Something that might move things on. Maybe now I can sleep.

 

Fat chance.

    

What will Lizzie find to say to the gentle Juliet?
Is a man who can't laugh at himself worth the saving? Will anyone ever get any sleep and, if not, who will succumb to delirium first?

Read on - Chapter 7