The Ex
Have you ever had the feeling that, for reasons beyond your control, you find yourself in the middle of a living nightmare?
I remember Riley trying to tell me about a nightmare she’d had, once. She recounted it something like this:
“So, I was in the house on my own. Well I wasn’t on my own – Peter Dinklage, as Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones was there. And it wasn’t actually my house and I’ve never even seen Game of Thrones, well, not the whole series. So, anyway, I came rushing into the kitchen and someone had left the fridge door open and there was blood pouring out of it. Except, it wasn’t blood, it was the soft centres of Lindor chocolate balls and it wasn’t exactly pouring, it was more like oozing because the centres are quite thick, right? And so, I went to close the fridge door and I knew then that it wasn’t my fridge; it was my mum’s fridge. Only it was the one she had before the Smeg.”
In other words, a nightmare, as well as being scary, can be a rambling mess sometimes. You can’t control it, because, how can you? You’re asleep. Living nightmares are much the same. Only trouble is, no matter how bizarre, dreadful, frightening, or downright weird the living nightmare you find yourself in is, you have no control. You can’t wake up; you won’t be rescued from it by the alarm clock – you’re stuck there. So how do you eventually escape it? With great difficulty, I have to tell you. Especially when you are upset or angry, or a mixture of both.
There I was angry and upset as hell. I knew I should try to drag myself out of the nightmare but … I couldn’t. I’d lost control and I couldn’t help what came next.
I was at the kitchen table. It was my table and it was my kitchen. The front door opened and Anthony walked in. It was Anthony, not Tyrion Lannister and he was humming to himself. He didn’t come straight out to the kitchen to see if I was home, didn’t even call out for me. Instead, he went into the living room and put on some music.
Since being home I’d ripped off my red dress and the sexy underwear and replaced them with a T-shirt and stripy leggings. I sat fuming for several angry minutes listening to Foo Fighters seeping in from the living room. I hated that band. Anthony generally played their music when I was out of the house.
After several annoying bars of Best of You, its lyrics a telling sign of where Anthony’s mind was, I barged into the living room. Anthony was lying on my red sofa, feet on the arm and head on a silk cushion. He jumped when he noticed me and hit the remote to lower the volume.
‘Oh, hey!’ he said sitting up, arm over the back of the sofa. ‘You’re back home early. I thought you’d still be at work at this time.’
‘No, I was in the kitchen.’
‘Oh, don’t cook anything,’ he said. ‘Let’s just order something in and finish packing for Guadeloupe. Bet you’re looking forward to the wedding.’
I nodded and sat on the sofa opposite my red sofa. Anthony sat up properly and patted the seat next to him.
‘I won’t bite,’ he said.
Normally I couldn’t resist an invitation like that. Not one that meant cuddling up next to Anthony and having his arm around me. But I did that night.
‘You won’t believe the day I had,’ I said, not budging from my position in the middle of the sofa, leaning forward, arms on my knees.
‘What happened?’ He looked genuinely concerned.
‘I was almost hit by a taxi.’
‘Oh my God. No way.’ Anthony came over to sit next to me and started rubbing my upper back. ‘You’re okay though? I mean, Christ, if something happened to the wedding planner just before the trip …’
I shifted in my seat so that he had to move his hand. ‘It’s not a joke.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that, I just meant –’
‘What about you?’ I asked turning to look at him. No – to inspect him. I’d never known Anthony to lie to me and I wanted to witness what he’d look like if he ever did lie. Somehow I was expecting him to do just that.
‘What about me?’ he asked.
‘Well anything unusual or out of the ordinary happen to you today?’
‘Um …’ He screwed up his brow, drawing out the gormless response and looking at the coffee table. A screwed-up brow. Was that his “tell”? ‘Oh, well, I had that interview thing today. You know the one I told you about? The director was there with a cameraperson, and there was the interviewer. The whole bit. I felt like a celebrity, or at least I would if it wasn’t airing on an internet channel.’
‘Oh yes, the interview.’ I nodded. ‘That was today was it?’
‘Mm-hmm.’ He nodded in the affirmative and didn’t elaborate.
‘And …?’ I pushed.
‘And what?’
‘And that’s it? I mean you’ve had an interview before so that’s not unusual or out of the ordinary.’
He leaned back against the sofa, hands behind his head. He still had the remote for the music player in one hand. He looked at it and tossed it into the corner of the sofa.
‘Nothing else happen?’ I asked, eyebrows raised.
‘Nope. Nothing.’
I got up out of my seat. ‘You can turn it up if you want. I’m going to run through my packing checklist.’ Most of that last sentence was said walking out of the living room. I ran up the stairs saying, “I knew it!” in my head with each step I took. It was a living nightmare so of course Anthony wouldn’t come clean. And if he couldn’t mention the fact that he was meeting his ex-fiancée for lunch then something extremely and most definitely suspicious was going on between them.
I flopped onto the bed, prodding the open suitcase with my toe. In no time at all I heard Anthony on the stairs, taking them two at a time in that juvenile way of his, the way I once thought of as adorable.
He put his head around the door, saw me with my arms so tightly crossed around my body I had cleavage in a high-neck T-shirt, and then he stepped into the room.
‘Magenta?’
I looked up at him.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘I’m sorry if I didn’t sound sympathetic about you almost being knocked down by a taxi.’
‘You just think I’m being overly dramatic don’t you? Well it did happen.’
‘Of course it did.’ He sat beside me and touched my arm. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Christ’s sake, Anthony, don’t treat me like some psychiatric patient. I coped with it, okay? What I can’t cope with is being lied to.’
‘Who’s lying? I am concerned about the accident. Don’t you want to talk about it? Normally you would have pounced on me before I got in the door and told me everything. But then, what’s normal around here these days?’
I drew in a loud breath. ‘You dare to ask me that?’ I hissed.
‘What did I do wrong this time?’
‘This time you blew it, Anthony. This time you lied.’
‘What? What did I lie about?’
‘You didn’t tell me you had lunch with Inez!’
Anthony’s mouth was stuck between an “Ah” and an “Oh” or maybe it was an “Oh shit”.
‘I was there,’ I said. ‘I came to meet you for lunch. I stood staring at the pair of you and neither of you were even aware of me. You-you looked like you did when you and her were … when she was …’
‘No, Magenta. No, you got that wrong.’
‘You mean she wasn’t there? That I’m making it up?’ I blasted.
‘No, I mean, I wasn’t looking at her like anything. We’re over. You know that. What you saw was two people, being friendly, having a light snack … in the middle of a busy restaurant. Don’t make it into something else.’
‘I don’t need to. By lying about seeing Inez, you’ve told me all I need to know.’
Anthony rose from the bed. He pointed at me. ‘You see, that’s why I wasn’t going to say anything. Not right on top of the wedding. I knew I’d have all this explaining to do and with things the way they are right now …’
‘What things? You keep saying there are things. The only thing I see going on is that I don’t trust you,’ I said. The words came rushing past my lips like a steam train, no time for editing.
With that, Anthony fell to his knees in front of me almost colliding with the open suitcase by the bed. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say you don’t trust me.’
‘I don’t. How can I?’
‘Because we … because I didn’t do anything,’ he said, voice going up in pitch. Another “tell”?
‘So you didn’t do anything but she did?’ I asked.
‘No, no, no. Magenta, you’re just twisting everything I say. Just like you always do.’
‘Huh!’ I got up and stomped over to the window, almost sending him toppling over.
Anthony sat on the floor where he was, knees high, his arms balanced on them as he looked to the floor. I stared at him for a few seconds before looking out onto the mews. Nothing was going on outside. As usual, our little mews was quiet. The only noise was coming from us.
In a while Anthony came and stood behind me, not daring to touch me.
‘Magenta, ever since we … ever since the miscarriage, you haven’t been the same with me. I don’t know where I am with you.’
‘So you having an affair is my fault?’
‘What affair? I’m not having an affair. Please, just look at me.’
I didn’t turn around.
‘Magenta, look, I’m not blaming you,’ he said. ‘I’m finding it hard to say or do the right things without you either giving me the silent treatment or talking so fast I can’t get a word in. I don’t understand what you want from me any more. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything about Inez. The truth is I’ll probably never see her again.’
‘Probably?’
‘I won’t see her again. Inez moved offices when we broke up, went up to Manchester. She’d seen the exhibition up there and, just by chance, we bumped into each other. We spoke for about five minutes. Never saw her again. Didn’t even think it was worth mentioning. I was surprised when she turned up at Slater’s. She didn’t know I’d be there. She came down to London for a meeting.’
‘If she saw the exhibition in Manchester, why come again?’
‘People do that, Magenta. Go to an exhibition more than once … if they even come at all.’
That’s when I spun around. ‘I have a business to run,’ I practically shouted. ‘I said I was sorry for not coming to the exhibition when it first went up.’
‘You forgot.’
‘And I apologized. I came in the end. I was there a second time, but then so was your ex.’
‘Let’s not bring it round to that,’ said Anthony. ‘That’s not what this is about.’
‘You’re right.’ I brushed past him. ‘It’s about me not trusting you. It’s about me not wanting to even look at you. It’s about me wanting you to go and leave me alone.’
‘You what?’ he said it in a spluttered laugh but his eyes weren’t smiling.
‘I mean it, Anthony. What’s the point to us if I don’t trust you?’ I said.
‘You should trust me, Magenta. I messed up but I didn’t do anything wrong today. This –’ and here he pointed at the space between us ‘– is about a lot more than today. That’s what we need to talk about.’
‘You know what, Anthony?’ I threw up my hands. ‘I’ve had enough of talk. I don’t want to talk to you. I want you to go.’
He laughed again but again not with his eyes. It was a nervous laugh. He searched my face to see if I would budge but I wasn’t joking. I meant and felt every word.
‘You seriously want me to go?’ he said the words slowly, as if it would give me time to take it all back, say I got it wrong.
‘I want you to go,’ I said, as slow.
‘Magenta, your parents’ wedding trip is tomorrow morning. Don’t you think we should stop all this arguing and concentrate on that?’
‘That’s what I want to do. Concentrate on the wedding and not you. I don’t want you at the wedding and I don’t want you here when I get back.’
‘Just like that? Just like that you want to give up on us?’
‘I think we stopped being an “us” a long time ago.’
‘Now you really are being overly dramatic, Magenta. You can’t mean you want me to move out. Out of your life?’
I nodded and left the room. I went into the bathroom after stalling on the landing and wondering where on earth I could go in this little house that was far enough away from Anthony.
While I was in there I heard him storming about in the bedroom. I heard things being moved around and then I heard him on the stairs. He left the house and that was the end of our relationship. I planted my trembling body onto the floor next to the bath, leaned my arms onto it, and sobbed like a wounded animal … all night.