Chapter 9
Stephen went to bed early that night with a headache brought on by the stress of Bonnie’s news, so he said, so she claimed the front room and flicked to the news, but it was all doom and gloom. CCTV footage of a student raped on a street, a bomb blast in a holiday resort in Egypt and yet another death of a small child who had slipped through the net of social services. The image of the little boy’s face remained in her brain long after the point where she turned over. He was smiling, despite a split lip, looking up at whoever was taking the photo with big blue eyes full of light which would be extinguished just a few days later. Bonnie gulped down a throatful of tears. How could someone who had carried such a beautiful little boy for nine months treat him so cruelly? There were too many people in the world who shouldn’t have children but did, and too many who should but couldn’t. It was an imbalance that Mother Nature hadn’t managed to rectify yet.
There was no gynaecological reason why Bonnie couldn’t have children. She’d always wanted them. She hadn’t had them with her first love Joel, because he was a metronome that swung wildly between two versions of himself: a balloon that sailed high and carelessly with the clouds and a dragging dead weight that couldn’t lift its head from the ground. The High Joel, the exhausting, full of life, happy, funny Joel would have made a wonderful dad. That Joel loved everyone and everything, he was a Red Setter pup in a beautiful man’s body. Low Joel couldn’t see beyond himself. A dark half of paranoia, sadness and self-loathing who tried to alienate Bonnie, pushing her buttons to prove the self-fulfilling prophecy that he was unlovable, but she had stuck firm to him whatever he threw at her, always hoping the doctors would find the combination of medicines that would allow them to be a normal couple, doing normal coupley things like socialising, holidaying, having a child. But no amount of wishful thinking had helped defeat the black forces at work in his head. He had bailed out of his white-knuckle roller-coaster life and left her crushed.
As for Stephen, the subject of starting a family hadn’t risen up in conversation before they were married. Not much had, she’d realised with hindsight. She’d been lost, disorientated, struggling under the weight of her failure to help Joel or her father and he’d been on the scene, a self-imposed guide-rope through the confusion, patching up her broken heart with kind words and patience and she’d married him through gratitude masquerading as love. She had thought he would lead her into the light, but instead he had pushed her into the dark.
They hadn’t slept together after the first few weeks of their marriage. They’d tried to have sex just a couple of times and it was awkward and cold and it was obvious that Stephen had no interest in that side of marriage at all. He had suggested that Bonnie might want to move into the bedroom across the landing, the larger one with its own ensuite and Bonnie, hurt but stoical, had complied. They had quickly settled into a sexless companionship of a relationship, with not much companionship.
It was half-past eleven when Bonnie turned all the lights off, checked that the doors were locked and went upstairs. She read in bed for another half hour until she felt her eyelids dropping. She liked Midnight Moon romances, where heroes were strong and handsome and heroines feisty and beautiful and passion flared between them like a factory-full of fireworks. Stephen frowned on them because he said they were ‘lesser books’ and Bonnie didn’t disagree with him, not because she thought he was right, but because he would never accept he was wrong. Her books were her escapism, they gave her hope that there was a strong, handsome hero out there with her name on his heart. She knew she was too young to settle for the life she had, but she had been forced to accept this quagmire of complacency because she had nowhere to go, no money to go with, and she was scared to make the break.
She used to feel sorry for Stephen. He had no friends, nor family since his mother had died – just her. She gathered he wasn’t a popular person at work; one of the grey people who came in, did their job efficiently, needled a few people by being a Norman-know-it-all and went home. He’d promised to look after her, keep her safe and he had. Safe from everyone but himself. She lived in a nice house with him, they had no debts or pressures and he wasn’t bad to her, but neither was he good to her. They went abroad once a year on holiday for seven days, always to the same quiet Spanish place. Bonnie read a lot in the sun, Stephen walked and took photos of buildings and try as she might, Bonnie could not recall any of the conversations they must have had over dinner at the hotel before retiring to their twin beds in any of those years. He had tricked her into believing she was loved. He needed her, but not for love. She used to feel sorry for him, but she didn’t any more.
She had recurring dreams in which she was eighty years old and she was still in this house, married to him, and she would wake from them feeling as if all the air had been stolen from the room. She was bored beyond belief by her life.
But tonight, for once, she was going to bed with wishes and hopes in her heart that tomorrow was not going to be just another same-old, same-old day. She could have kissed the old lady with the Gulvase for dropping her in it with Ken Grimshaw.