Not happy when the people next door saw me struggling with bags of shopping.
‘Here, let me take that,’ said the man next door. He’d been cutting his grass and he’d seen me.
I knew I was in trouble when I unlocked the door and Mr Next Door came in with the bulging grocery bags.
My husband was sitting in an armchair watching sport. He’d watch two flies walking up the wall if he could bet on it.
He barely turned around until Mr Next Door said: ‘Mate, you can’t have your missus dragging in all this stuff in her condition. She’s about to pop.’
Oh, I knew I was in trouble, then.
‘Let me take it!’ he said, leaping to his feet. ‘I tell her not to go by herself but she sneaks off,’ he said cheerily, rescuing the bags off Mr Next Door.
‘Women: they’re all the same,’ laughed Mr Next Door, pleased there was a reason for this.
People don’t want to see.
They’re happy with a reason for slightly odd behaviour. Considering what the reality might be – that’s too shocking. Nobody wants to go there.
He swiftly put the bags on the counter and told me to get my feet off the floor.
‘It’s a lovely day, sit in the garden. I’ll bring you a cuppa, love,’ he said.
I sat in the garden even though I didn’t want to. I wanted to go to bed, to lie down and rest my belly. But I was scared to do that.
Mr Next Door was still there. I was guaranteed safety by his presence.
‘You need to rest,’ said Mr Next Door, poking his head outside when my husband brought me tea. There was no sugar in it, of course.
I took sugar. He knew that. Not that he brought me tea normally. I was the cook, the cleaner, the housemaid, the maker of tea. But not adding sugar was a little reminder that I was in trouble.
Mr Next Door had a beer in his hand. He lookedhappy, grass-cutting forgotten. Seeing his heavily pregnantneighbour staggering in with the shopping had been a misunderstanding. All was right with the world.
The two men drank a few beers and watched the sport. I sat in my deck chair and, eventually, went upstairs to lie down. The baby was a kicker, full of energy.
I was lying there, hungry and wondering if it was safe to go back downstairs, when he came in.
‘He’s gone,’ he snarled. Mr Next Door. ‘Why did you do that?’ he hissed.
‘I didn’t want to bother you,’ I said in my fawning voice.
I was a wonderful fawner. You don’t choose your trauma response: it just appears.
I never tried freezing or running away.
No. I fawned.
‘You’ve had a hard week at work, you need a break. It’s all OK, though, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ he said in a voice colder than the North Pole.
He turned and left then, his whole body stiff with rage.
He ignored me for the next three weeks.
That doesn’t sound like much – he could have hit me, after all. But he didn’t do hitting. The silent treatment was a very powerful weapon.
Imagine living in a small house and trying to exist when one of the people in the house refuses to speak to the other for three whole weeks. When their rage taints the atmosphere, their coldness can freeze a person.
