I’m looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling.
The inside of my head thrums and pulses in sickening waves. Have I had an accident? Maybe I was hit by a car and I’m in hospital.
I run my tongue over my dry lips, grimacing at the terrible taste in my mouth.
As I turn my head and look to the right, I can see a pale blue wooden bedside table. It looks far too pretty and upmarket to be in a hospital. That’s not all. The wallpaper is textured with roses and looks like raw silk. Gauzy curtains shimmer and flutter at a window where a light breeze drifts in. The light is the pale bluish milk of very early morning.
My brain scrambles to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of jagged information.
Computer club. A party.
Laughing and then feeling peculiar.
Oh no, oh no, oh no …
Memories crash into my mind with the violence of bumper cars. I’m talking too loud to the couple whose faces are frozen with embarrassment. I’m on the landing, feeling queer. And then I’m in Tilly’s room and …
Oh my goodness. I start to cry a little, but am so dehydrated I don’t seem to make any tears. All I can do is a strange sort of mewling, like a cat in distress. That’s when I remember poor Bertie. My darling boy has been alone all night long. My guilt and horror increase tenfold.
I groan and turn onto my other side. I wish I could hide in this room forever but I can’t leave my boy any longer. I have to get up. I have to face what I have done. Peering at my watch with eyeballs that don’t seem to fit the sockets anymore, I see that it is only 5 a.m. in the morning. I must leave, but I will somehow have to make amends later.
It’s then I notice the glass of water next to the bed and a packet of paracetamol. The kindness of this simple act twists my insides with more guilt. I don’t deserve it. I start to cry again. But my head hurts too much for that so I stop.
Almost without realizing I’m doing it, I reach for the soft skin of my inner arm and pinch myself viciously. The thin, tender skin burns and the pain makes me gasp but I deserve the pain after what I have done. I won’t take the medicine or the water. I will take my punishment, at least while I am still at the scene of my crime.
Clambering out of the big soft bed, my balance wobbles and I almost fall back down again. Nausea rolls over me, coating me in a clammy layer of sweat, and I try to breathe steadily for a moment. I mustn’t be sick again!
Finally steady, I walk to the middle of the floor. There’s a full-length mirror on a stand in one corner but I can’t bear to look. I try to rake my fingers through my hair, knowing it to be a futile gesture. My hair feels dirty and matted with sweat and I can taste something horrible. Sweetish and rotten.
Slowly, with shaking hands, I make the bed and try to rearrange the beautifully soft cushions on the floor, presumably tossed carelessly there by me last night. But I don’t really know what to do with them. They are imprinted with a river scene like something from a Chinese painting, with tall herons standing proudly in water. But they look all wrong however I arrange them. I don’t have a flair for that sort of thing, like Melissa does. Frustrated, I give up and just lay them in a neat row.
A throw made from heavy cotton in a deep turquoise colour lies half on the floor and it is so lovely I can’t help but hold it to my throbbing forehead for a moment. I hope to catch some kind of comforting scent from it. But it is curiously without any odour at all. I place it neatly along the bottom of the bed. This, at least, I can do because I have seen it on decor programmes on television. The bed is so perfect, even with the cushions out of place, that it fills me with a strange sense of longing, and then, another hot blast of shame.
Poor Tilly. And poor, poor Melissa. She must hate me for this. I can’t understand how it happened. I don’t even remember the last time I was under the influence. It must be years ago. Any tolerance I once had must have completely disappeared.
Miserably, I slip my feet into my court shoes and that’s when I notice a globule of something pink and lumpy on the toe of my right one. Disgust ripples through me as I reach for a tissue from the neat metal container at the side of the bed and rub at the crustiness, trying to quell the heaving sensation in my stomach as I do so.
There’s no way I can put the tissue in the bin for poor Melissa to deal with, so, shuddering a little, I fold it over as much as possible to obscure the shameful contents and push it inside the cuff of my blouse.
When I open the door, I listen for a moment, willing with every fibre of my being that no one will be around. I will come back later, with flowers, to apologize. I simply can’t face seeing anyone yet.
It’s as I creep towards the stairs that I hear a door opening behind me. Oh please no …
But it isn’t Melissa, or Mark, or Tilly. It’s a man.
I have no idea who he is. He is perhaps in his thirties and he is dressed only in his underwear. He’s not very tall but all muscled chest and arms. Then my eyes are drawn downwards and I gasp in shock; I can clearly see the tented distortion of his boxer shorts.
He gives a deep, throaty laugh. ‘Oops, sorry, Grandma,’ he says. ‘Morning glory and all that.’
My cheeks flame. I scurry down the stairs as fast as I can. I am sure I can hear mocking laughter behind me.
Thankfully the front door isn’t locked. Wrenching it open, I almost throw myself down the front steps, twisting my knee a little in the process.
Home! Please let me just get home.
I run up my own steps. It’s as I get inside, relief flooding my veins, that I realize the tissue containing the vomit must have fallen out of my sleeve. Panicking, I quickly retrace my steps but it isn’t on Melissa’s steps either. It is obviously lying somewhere inside.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,’ I whisper.
Bertie runs from the kitchen, yapping wildly. Telling me off, no doubt. I pick him up and hug him to my chest, kissing his rough little head and murmuring my apologies, but he scrambles to be put down. When I open the back door, he darts outside and squats straight away. The poor thing; what a clever boy he is for not having an accident on the floor. He must be hungry too.
I think then of someone else washing up my ‘accident’ on the floor, and I have to close my eyes at the poisonous sensation of shame. I go straight to bed.
When I awake, I am shocked to see it is the afternoon already. Forcing down tea and toast, I run a bath, and ease my aching body into the water.
It is almost hotter than I can stand, and when I lift my leg the skin is bright and mottled. I’m not at all comfortable but I feel I am being purged. If only the shame could be leached from my skin along with the traces of alcohol.
Images from last night keep racing through my mind: talking to that woman at the start who kept laughing like I was the funniest woman ever. Saying ‘Pimm’s o’clock!’ to someone and finding it almost unbearably funny. Someone (Tilly?) speaking to me gently and telling me a ‘nice lie-down’ would ‘sort me out’.
My mind drifts to that man on the landing this morning. Who on earth was that? He didn’t look at all like one of Mark’s friends. Come to think of it, where was Mark?
He had tattoos. I keep picturing the coarse black hair on his chest and arms. Some men are like monkeys under their clothes. And the sight of … that. Mocking me with his lack of modesty.
I close my eyes in disgust.
My head still aches, despite the aspirin I forced down with my cup of tea when I got back. So much for taking my punishment. But it did hurt so very much.
It really is odd that I should have had quite such a strong reaction to the alcohol. I’ve never been a drinker but I’m sure I didn’t have that much Pimm’s. Maybe it is just more potent than I ever realized? The memory of its cloying taste makes my stomach churn again, and I close my eyes then sink under the surface of the water, allowing it to close over my head like a baptism.
When I emerge I am crying in great gulps. I keep picturing Terry laughing at me being in this state. Oh yes, he would have found this very amusing, I’m sure. He was always trying to encourage me to ‘have a drink and let go a little’.
I was always the butt of his jokes. Always the ‘funny old thing’ who took things too seriously and didn’t seem to know how to enjoy herself. Funny old, silly old Hester.
This is another reason to avoid alcohol. It causes all sorts of unwanted memories to surface. The dirty silt at the bottom of my mind has been stirred up.
‘Leave me alone, Terry,’ I gulp into the steamy air.
He once suggested we take a bath in here together, in the early days. I was quite unable to think of an excuse. My parents were gone by then and the house was all mine, but it still felt wrong.
But I agreed. It was the early days, as I said.
We met at Bentley’s, the engineering works that has long been closed down. I was an Office Manager, having started as an assistant straight from secretarial college and working my way up. He worked on the shop floor.
It took a year of him asking before I gave in and went out with him for a drink. At 35, I was seeing colleague after colleague leave to have babies and time was beginning to pinch.
I went for the drink, then we had some country walks together. He told me he was ‘really falling for me’, after a couple of months. He’d been married before, but she died quite young. As for me, well, I’d never really met the right person.
He had all sorts of ideas and he was quite unlike anyone else I’d ever met. He liked to invent things in his spare time and was always saying he would come up with a gadget that would make our fortune.
It all turned out to be rubbish, of course, from the remote control that was also a holder for a cup of tea (for goodness’ sake) to the teddy bear that contained a ‘nappy pouch’. Rubbish, all of it. No one wanted to invest in any of his ideas, and in the end he had to set up a painting and decorating business. He couldn’t get a job anywhere else after Bentley’s closed down. I didn’t know about how weak and useless he was in the early days. He behaved like a gentleman and seemed to have something about him, so I suppose I was fooled.
When he proposed, after a rather lovely evening in an Italian restaurant, he went down on one knee, and I think I was genuinely happy in that moment. The future seemed so rich and full of possibility.
In those early days, I still thought that the ‘other’ side of things would start to be more enjoyable with a little practice.
When he made the bath suggestion, I’d tried to laugh it off, saying it was far too small. Then he’d caught me up in his arms and whispered into my hair that it would only be nice and snug. So we tried it and it was every bit as uncomfortable and unpleasant as I’d imagined. He insisted that I lay between his legs, facing away from him, and I could feel bits digging into my lower back straight away.
I closed my eyes and pictured the wonderful prize that was waiting for me after all this: a smiling, pink-cheeked baby.
I had so much love to pour into a child. I would have been the very best mother. It had always been my goal, ever since I was small. I had a baby doll called Susie-Sue that I loved until she was merely a torso with staring eyes and a grubby grey patina to her once-pink flesh.
I even thought I might call my own daughter Susie, although I also loved the name Rachel. For a boy, I had William and Daniel picked out long before there was any chance of a conception.
I waited so long. So very long.
‘Damn you, Terry,’ I say loudly, shocking myself when the words bounce back at me. I realize I have been digging my fingers into my arm again, the old habit resurfacing today. It is almost as though I have been outside myself, and I blink, a little shocked to see I am still in the bath and that the water is now quite cool.
I’m only aware now of an insistent sharp ringing and realize with a start that it is the front doorbell. I can’t possibly answer. Whoever it is has to go away.
But what if it’s Melissa? I don’t want her to think I wasn’t going to apologize.
I quickly climb out of the bath and pull on my robe, which clings unpleasantly to my damp, mottled skin. Stuffing my feet into slippers, I hurry out of the bathroom, calling out, ‘Hang on!’ in a voice that sounds shrill even to my own ears.
There are two shapes lurking behind the frosted glass and I hesitate as I get to the bottom of the stairs. It could be Jehovah’s Witnesses or something. Whoever it is, they are very insistent. The doorbell rings sharply again.
‘All right, I’m coming!’ I say to shut them up and fling open the door.
‘Oh,’ I say.
Jehovah’s Witnesses suddenly seem like very much the better alternative.
‘Hello Hester. I’m sorry if we got you out of bed.’
Saskia is wearing highly age-inappropriate shorts, a tight t-shirt, and oversized sunglasses that obscure most of her face.
Nathan looms just behind her. He’s looking down at the toe of his grimy white plimsoll as if it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen. Most bizarrely, he’s holding two bunches of flowers wrapped in brown paper that I recognize from Petal and Vine, the overpriced flower shop down the road. One must be for Melissa, to say thank you for the party. But why the heck are they here, on my doorstep?
Have they come to tell me off? I am incensed by this thought and find myself blurting words out before Saskia can speak again.
‘If you’ve come round here to make me feel guilty,’ I say, ‘then I can assure you there is no need. I plan to apologize later. You can’t possibly make me feel any worse than I already do.’
Saskia reaches out her hand to touch my wrist, but I take a step back. She’s always touching people; it’s like she can’t speak without making physical contact with the person opposite her. Well, I’m in no mood for her nonsense today.
‘No, no, you’ve got it all wrong,’ she says in a voice that is even more gravelly than usual. ‘We’ve come to apologize to you. At least, Nathan has. Haven’t you?’ She says his name sternly and he steps forward.
The boy – and he really looks like a boy today – turns his strangely coloured eyes on me and his cheeks flush a deep pink under his light tan.
‘Yeah,’ he says and clears his throat before continuing. ‘The thing is, I did something really stupid. So it’s sort of my fault you puked up everywhere.’
I flinch at his coarseness. As if I need reminding!
‘Fuck’s sake, Nathe!’
I tut, loudly. She’s almost as bad as he is! No wonder he speaks like that. The boy shoots a panicked look at her.
‘Sorry! Um, what I mean is, I did a really moronic thing for a laugh. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.’
‘What did you do?’ I want nothing more than for these ghastly people to disappear.
‘I spiked your drink,’ he says in a rush, glancing at his mother. The thin, tight line of her lips reveals the true age of her face.
‘What?’ I can’t seem to make sense of any of this.
‘You asked for a Pimm’s and I added a massive slug of vodka to it,’ he says, blushing harder.
My stomach seems to drop. ‘Why?’ I manage to breathe. ‘Why would you do something like that?’
He shrugs with one shoulder. I want to slap him hard around the face for being such a childish, pathetic specimen of a boy at sixteen.
‘I dunno, I only did it for a joke,’ he says. ‘I thought it would be funny to see you a bit pissed because you’re always so …’
‘Nathan!’ barks Saskia.
‘Sorry,’ he shoots another panicked look at his mother, then turns back to me. I can’t help feeling this entire apology is only really aimed at her.
‘I mean, I just didn’t … think,’ he says.
‘No,’ I say.
I can imagine so very clearly what it would feel like to strike that cheek. The smoothness, despite the speckle of juvenile beard. It’s so vivid in my mind, the satisfying slapping ring, the warm tautness of his young skin against my palm, that for a second I think I have actually hit him.
They are both staring at me, a little curiously now.
‘I really am sorry, Hester,’ he says, a bit more boldly. ‘I bought you these to apologize.’
I eye the flowers and then reach for them. They are beautiful and totally out of my budget. But I can’t bring myself to say thank you.
‘He bought them with his own money,’ says Saskia, a wheedling note to her voice. As if I should be impressed!
I want to tell them to go away but force myself to be polite. I will not stoop to the level of these appalling people.
‘I have things to attend to,’ I say. ‘Good afternoon.’ And I close the door in their faces.
I do still have some vestige of dignity.