Chapter Eight

 

 

AFTER SPENDING A SLEEPLESS NIGHT in my mother’s spare bedroom, having received no texts or calls from Gage wondering where we are, I start to think he’s happy we’re not there. Or maybe he slept straight through – unlike me, tossing and turning everything over and over.

By seven o’clock in the morning, I’m dressed and impatient to get this over with. I leave the kids with my mother, who’s more than happy to drop Emily at school and look after Rupert for the day. I tell her I’m going to collect some more of our things and to have it out with Gage, once and for all.

On the drive there, my hands go numb and my limbs grow heavy and uncomfortable. Anxiety snakes along my spine, making my neck and shoulders feel tight and immovable. I try to shake it all out, but it’s difficult.

By the time I arrive home, it’s just a little before eight, owing to traffic and the fact that I’ve driven around the block a few times, trying to get it straight in my head what I will say to him. I’m still not sure what I’m going to say, but I know that asking him for a divorce is on my list of priorities, as is confronting him over his antics in Copenhagen.

I sit in my car on the driveway for a while and an image of Sam pops into my head. Sam with his arms around me, Sam with his lips against my skin, Sam with his passion and yearning for me…

I remember what it was like feeling wanted, and half of me wants to brag about it all to Gage, to make him feel bad – to make him see sense and accept his own failure. I don’t think he would be able to handle it, though. I just don’t.

I sit remembering the day we bought this house. Gage had just signed a long-term contract with Hull FC and I was about to give birth to Emily. I thought I’d won the bloody lottery. Five bedrooms! Plus, the master had an en suite – it seemed unreal. For most of my childhood, before Mum and Dad’s chip shops took off, we lived in a flat above the chippy and there was a tiny living area and two tiny bedrooms. The house Gage bought for us seemed like a mansion in comparison.

Then I grew up and realised there were more beautiful things than a nice big house and a husband willing to look after me financially. I realised I had a dormant yearning for passion, travel and finally exploring my ability to string a sentence together. However, Gage has always found ways of distracting me from my own pursuits, with his inability to lift a finger around the house or even offer to look after the kids for an afternoon while I go and get my hair done. He goes on trips with friends and tells me, “You can go away with Het, if you want, leave the kids with your mother…” – but I’ve never seen the point of going on holiday with my friend, not when romance is part of the attraction of a holiday for me – and so throughout our four-and-a-half-year marriage, we’ve never been abroad together. We’ve been to Cornwall and stuff, for a week or two, but we never went abroad. Even our honeymoon was short because I was due to give birth – and we ended up spending most of our time in bed watching TV.

Truly, I always thought it was me. I really did. I felt like I must have made Gage feel trapped and that I’d ruined his life by getting pregnant – and so all these years, I’ve lived with this guilt that I’m the one who’s made his life a misery.

Anyway, there’s no time like the present, as they say. Time to face the music.

I enter the house and the alarm doesn’t go off, which means he’s not gone out for a morning run or anything. He’s still home… unless he forgot to set the alarm.

I walk around downstairs and nothing seems to have been moved or changed since yesterday. He’s not had the TV on or made a cup of tea… or anything. He’s probably been snoring all night while I’ve lain wide awake, tossing and turning, agonising over my marriage and the end of life as we know it.

I take a deep breath and trudge up the stairs, my legs threatening to buckle. It’s horrendous how nervous I feel – how much he’s hurt me and continues to do so.

As I creep closer, I hear the extractor fan. Most likely it’s been going all night.

I shake my head, growing ever angrier at him. He probably hasn’t budged from that bed all night, not one inch.

I push the door open and discover him flat on his stomach, exactly how I left him the day before. Fucking great.

“Gage, come on! It’s time to get up. Don’t you have to get to training today?”

There’s no response as I enter the bathroom and pull the cord to switch off the extractor fan. I roll up the blind in the bathroom and throw some towels in the laundry bin. I notice by the light of day that there’s a lot of feculent splatter up the back of the toilet seat and some has spread to the wall, too.

“I just… can’t. Not today Satan, not today,” I mutter to myself. He can clean that himself.

I throw open the curtains in the bedroom but he’s still not moving.

“Oh, for goodness sake, Gage! You’ve been in bed almost an entire day now!”

The other laundry basket in the bedroom is full to the brim with clothes. When he got home yesterday, he must have just thrown it all in. He didn’t think to put some of it in the washing machine downstairs, did he? No. He never does.

“Fucking hell, Gage! Get the fuck up!” I yell, because I’m ready to have this out with him already.

Then I touch his skin, intending to shake him awake, but it’s freezing cold to the touch.

I cover my mouth with both hands and step backwards.

No.

No.

Tentatively, I step forwards again and roll him over, my hand almost refusing to work as I touch him again. Gage was never small. I always knew he’d never be easy, either. But as I reach out with two hands to shift him, he feels like a gargantuan monolith in my hands. Still, I somehow manage it because I just need to know.

As his huge body moves with some effort on my part, I uncover vomit on the mattress beneath where he lay, and there’s vomit in his mouth and a trail of it from his nostrils, too. He falls on his back and apart from the vomit, he looks as though he’s still just sleeping. He looks peaceful.

I’m shaking violently as I take out my phone, dialling 999.

“Emergency Services, which service do you require?”

“Ambulance, please.”

I’m put through to a non-automated thing and a woman asks, “Can you tell me your name and what’s happened?”

“I’m Liza Fitzpatrick and I’ve got home to find my husband covered in sick and he’s as cold as ice. He’s been home alone all night. I think he was drinking yesterday.”

“Okay, someone’s coming. While we’re waiting, can you check if he’s breathing? Use a mirror… or check for a pulse.”

“No, he’s not breathing,” I determine, “and there’s no pulse. What do I do?”

“Okay, Mrs Fitzpatrick, please go downstairs and wait for the emergency services, okay? They will be with you any moment now.”

“He’s not dead, is he? He can’t be dead. They can revive him, right?”

“Mrs Fitzpatrick, you need to wait for the responders to confirm. I’m very, very sorry.”

Something in me recognises the pity and empathy in her tone of voice, moreover the truth of the matter, but even while looking down at his inert body, I still don’t want to believe this is happening. I can’t.

“They’re going to be with you in two minutes so I’m hanging up now, Mrs Fitzpatrick. Please be ready at the door. Thank you for your call.”

I hurry downstairs and wait by the open door. Soon enough, a paramedic in one of those mobile cars arrives. He drags his case off the passenger seat and heads straight for me.

“Where is he?” I’m asked.

“Upstairs, end of the corridor.”

He hurries upstairs just in case something can still be done, even though nothing can.

I stand in the doorway while he relays it was a DOA to a colleague over the phone.

“Can you tell me what time you got here this morning, Mrs Fitzpatrick?” he asks.

“I got here just before eight. About twenty minutes ago.”

“Where were you last night?”

“I was at my mother’s. She’s looking after them right now. Gage and me, we have two… kids…”

The floor seems to fall away from beneath me and my legs go, and the next thing I know, I’ve got my back against my chest of drawers and the paramedic is getting me to breathe in and out of a paper bag.

“It very much appears he choked on his own vomit, Mrs Fitzpatrick. There’s nothing you could have done. Even if you’d been here. He was unconscious. He wouldn’t have felt it.”

I blub in the paramedic’s arms. I know he’s just trying to make me feel better, but right now, that’s not happening.

“The hospital is sending some people to pick him up. The transport will be here soon,” he says, as he holds me while I continue to cry. “Should I call someone for you?”

“Yes, call my sister, Hetty.”

“Okay.”

I reel off her number to him and vaguely hear him relaying details over the phone. Hetty is good at dealing with things like this. She was going to be a cop before she decided to be a dressmaker. She can cope, whereas I don’t think my mother can. I don’t think I’m ready for the kids to know yet.

The transport arrives and I’m led out of the room while they scour the bed and the bathroom for evidence to corroborate the theory that he drank too much… then choked on his own vomit.

I wait downstairs on my own, hugging myself while they deal with his body and the scene of his death. It all seems like a nightmare and time slows down. Then Hetty comes flying indoors and swoops me straight into her arms. Joe’s here too, carrying Elizabeth who’s crying and screaming, yanked off her mother’s boob no doubt, as soon as Hetty got the call.

“What the fuck has happened?” she asks, still in her pyjamas.

Then Joe stands stock-still in the hallway and Elizabeth stops crying. We all stare bleary-eyed as a stretcher with a black bag on top is whisked down the stairs and out to the black van parked outside.

“Oh my god,” Joe says, breathing heavily. “He’s dead?”

“I should’ve been here,” I mumble to myself, not sure if Hetty hears me because she’s got me pulled so tight into her chest.

“He choked on his own vomit,” the paramedic tells Joe. “There is nothing anyone could’ve done. There will be a post-mortem, but he displays all the signs of alcohol poisoning and asphyxiation.”

“I should’ve been here,” I yell. “I should’ve driven him to the hospital yesterday. I should’ve rolled him over. I should’ve never let him go to Copenhagen. I should’ve made him get his stomach pumped and I should’ve never left him last night!”

Hetty urges the paramedic to go and to call her when there’s news or if there’s anything that needs sorting out.

Once the front door’s shut and all the strangers have gone away, taking Gage with them, I look up at Hetty and beg her, “Please, tell me this is a nightmare, Het. Tell me to wake up! Tell me! Tell me now.”

She’s crying… and Het never cries. She looks down into my eyes and whispers, “He’s dead, babe. He’s dead. I’m so sorry.”

She holds me up as my frail body threatens to fall to the floor, my heap of bones heavier than it’s ever felt before. I wonder if that’s why I felt the way I did this morning… that I already knew something was wrong… that my body was already reacting to his death, even before I knew it had happened.

The next thing I know, I’m in Hetty’s lap and she’s holding me tight, like I’m a child in her arms, bundled up against her. We’re on the kitchen floor and she’s gripping me in a vice. Have I been thrashing? Has she quelled me? Did I attack her?

Time speeds up and then slows again… I lose track… and then I wake up as if out of a coma.

“The demon drink,” she whispers. “It’s got a lot to answer for, Liza. It’s got so much to answer for, babe. Just know that we’re here for you, we understand completely, we’re not going anywhere. We’ll be here with you every step of the way.”

She’s saying all these beautiful things, trying to pacify and comfort me, but the truth is, all I can think about right now is that bed upstairs… and why I allowed him to die in it.