Rob had never really lied to me before, or when he had he’d always caved in at the moment I’d challenged him. But this time he’d looked me in the eye and dug in. He wasn’t going to tell me, and that annoyed me a bit really.
Perhaps it was understandable – though without actually knowing the contents it was impossible to be sure – but that lie festered a bit. It niggled me.
What upset me more than the lie itself was the way the lie had been delivered. Because for the first time ever – that I knew of – Rob had lied and been utterly convincing. Which made me wonder if his infamous inability to lie had been a double-bluff all along. Had he lied badly about all the small stuff so that he could get away with the big stuff? And if that was so, then whatwasthe big stuff?
NINE
LOSING TRACK (BY ROB)
I got bored with it all.
I know how pathetic that sounds, how inexcusable, too, but it happens to be the truth.
Dawn and Lucy had been everything I’d ever wanted but though I could still remember that as a fact, my life with them suddenly bored me to tears. The reality of our family had been exhausting and I think resentment was probably quite a big chunk of it. Boredom and resentment can sometimes be hard to separate.
Whatever the cause, I felt chronically, depressingly tired.
Lucy had finally calmed down and was living with her Polish chap, Aleksei, in Ashford. He seemed nice enough, though, it has to be said, by then she’d set the bar quite low. As long as he wasn’t hitting her or dealing drugs (and it appeared he did neither) it was OK with us. But now the brackets of her madness had closed, I felt more resentful about it than relieved. Because other than to ruin ten years of our lives, what on earth had been the point of all that?
As for Lou, everything was so perfect, I felt jealous. Jealous of my son. Yes, I know that’s a bit pathetic too.
He had a job that he loved with a cool video game company, and a big room in a shared house with good people. He had a turntable and vinyls and a whole string of gorgeous girlfriends who, like a fashion show, appeared one after the other. He rode a motorbike and went to concerts and raves, and rode across Europe one summer with a curvy Norwegian girl who looked like Raquel Welch circa 1967. I did feel proud too, and I told him so, but the dominant emotion was jealousy.
I bought stuff, lots of stuff, and for a while it seemed to help.
I bought new clothes and a better hi-fi and – to be like my trendy son – a retro turntable for vinyls. I got just about every gadget Apple released and bought Ray-Bans and a cross-trainer and traded the BMW for a TT.
When Dawn jokingly called it my ‘midlife crisis’ I managed to laugh convincingly.
I could trace the beginning of these misery years – these years where I felt I had a gaping hole in the middle of me – to that trip to Wales. But identifying the start didn’t help.
I’d seen my parents hurtling towards oblivion that day. I’d never really thought about death before, or at any rate not in a way that really got to me. But as I’d driven home from that dreadful visit, a veil of misery had settled on me, a deep damp blanket of imminent decay.
Because this was it, wasn’t it? This was as good as it would get.
Thiswas a wife who seemed to be doing her damndest to look like a witch – who didn’t like sex – or at any rate not with me – and who, perhaps worst of all, I didn’t even mind not having sex with.Thiswas a daughter who’d wrecked the best ten years of our marriage and, though now she was perfectly fine, could still wreck the rest as well, if she merely decided that’s what floated her boat. Beyond that, the future was aches and pains and dementia. My back was already playing me up and I had a twinge in my shoulder.
What was next? What was there to hope for? A piss-scented old people’s home that would be so bad I’d actually welcome death?
I suppose we all have to realise this stuff at some point, but how anyone copes with it gracefully is beyond me.
As the weeks and then years went by, I tried to think myself out of the rut. I really did put serious effort into it.
I had a pretty daughter – now saved and reasonably sane – and a handsome, successful son. I was with the woman I’d always wanted to be with – a woman who I agreed with on just about every subject – and owned a business that ran smoothly, feeding multiple bank accounts with cash.
But for what? That was the thing I couldn’t work out. What was the point of any of it?
Even the good-news fact of Dawn and me getting on so well, I found boring.
We’d tailored our thoughts and tastes over the years so that they fitted perfectly together. We now voted for the same party, listened to the same music and tended to choose the same foods, sometimes even the same wine. The few things we still disagreed about – nuclear power, whether Bill Gates was truly good, Nicola Sturgeon – we’d learned never to mention. And that was great, that made things run smoothly. Supposedly, according to Andy, it was proof that we were soulmates.
But where were the passionate discussions? Where were the new bands, the new foods, the new holiday destinations, the new experiences another person was supposed to bring into your life? Why did I feel like I was living with a doused-down version of me? More to the point, why did I feel likeIwas a doused-down version of me?
To jazz things up a bit, to try to step out of our routine, I bought a motorbike. It was an old, perfectly reconditioned XT500. I bought a leather jacket and two helmets and some boots.
The Yamaha was the same model I’d owned when I’d met Dawn way back when, a bike I’d sold before she’d ever once climbed on behind me. At the time, I’d needed the money to put towards the deposit on our first house.
I rode the bike back from the seller’s place, past Dungeness power station, a road Andy and I used to race down in our youth. And for a moment, just for a moment, it worked and the feeling returned. I felt young again. I felt free.
