‘You were at such a loose end, and the timing couldn’t have been worse really. But … yes. He painted such a perfect picture of our future, and there only seemed to be space for me and him. He pretended to want to include you, and Mum, and my friends, but he didn’t, not really.
‘This is another of those things I’ve only realised since – that it started early, the way he used to try and control everything. He’d buy me clothes that I didn’t really like, that weren’t me, but he’d tell me how beautiful I looked in them and that made everything all right. He’d arrange nights out with his friends, but never mine. He told me my job in the lab was a bit of a waste of time; that it was beneath me … that I could do better. I suppose he told me things that I wanted to hear, so I went along with them.’
She pauses here, and we both drink some more, and I eat one languid runner bean. I feel like screaming at her, truth be told – because it might have taken her years to figure out, but I could see all of this about Gareth from the very beginning. I hated him with a passion – and yes, she’s right, I was jealous. But I was also worried that he was eating her up one mouthful at a time. God only knows I had a shitty way of going about it, but I’d wanted to protect her.
‘Okay,’ I say, when her pause looks likely to stretch into a maudlin silence. ‘I get all of that. And there are things I’d like to say here that I won’t, because it might result in us both exploding – but after. After … the thing that happened. Why didn’t you realise then that he was the world’s biggest Bastard?’
‘The thing that happened?’ she echoes, bitterly, pointing her fork at me as though she’s considering aiming it at my heart. ‘You mean the thing where you had sex with my boyfriend, Poppy?’
If she’s trying to hurt me with that, she’s on to a loser. I’ve felt so bad, for so many years, that there is nothing more she can do to me. That one act – that one pathetic, sweaty, disgusting, drug-fuelled act – has consumed my entire life.
I have never regretted anything more, and I include breaking my mother’s heart in that. I’ve said I’m sorry a million times; spent months writing her letters and trying to speak to her, begging her forgiveness – and I was always met with a stony silence. It was as though I simply ceased to exist, while they went on to play happy families.
‘Yes. That … Lest we forget,’ I reply. ‘I didn’t do it alone, you know.’
She slams her fork down, and gravy splatters across the tablecloth. She looks angry and tearful at the same time, and I am sure it is only the thought of Mum hovering around in spirit form that stops her from getting up and walking out.
I can practically see her counting to ten and breathing deeply as she tries to calm herself down. I sit opposite, sipping C, and undoubtedly looking cool as a cucumber even if that’s not how I’m feeling. I can’t blame her for hating me, for all kinds of reasons.
‘I was hurt,’ she says eventually, not meeting my eyes. ‘Bloody devastated. But when the dust settled, when you’d run off back to Mum with your tail between your legs, he was still there. We still had a flat together. A bloody cat, for goodness’ sake. You didn’t know this, but he’d also persuaded me to hand in my notice at the lab just before New Year, so I didn’t even have a job. My whole life was tied into his – and he grovelled. God, how he grovelled.
‘He seemed just as devastated as me – even worse, in fact, because it was all down to him. He told me he was sorry, and how much he loved me, and how he’d made the biggest, most stupid mistake of his life. That he was off his head on drugs, that you made the first move, that he didn’t even realise what was going on until it was too late. That he’d do anything to win me back and make it up to me. And then, after weeks of this, he came home with an engagement ring and proposed to me.
‘I might not win any Feminist of the Year awards for it, but I wanted to believe him. I wanted to be loved, and adored, and looked after. I wanted to forgive him, and live the life he’d said we could live – so I did. We got married, we had Joe. It seemed to be what he wanted, at the time, but I know now it wasn’t. It was like … well, like a game to him. He had to win, no matter what the cost – but once he’d got me, he wasn’t that sure he wanted the prize.’
Part of me had stopped listening as soon as she said that one line: ‘you made the first move’. That was so far removed from the truth that my blood was boiling, and I was furious – with him for saying it, and with her for never, ever listening to my side of what was admittedly a pretty sordid story. I realise that I am repeatedly stabbing a potato to death, and force myself to calm down.
‘Go on,’ I say. ‘What happened after Joe was born?’
‘Well, a lot of things happened after Joe was born. I had a mini nervous breakdown – I didn’t have a clue how to look after a baby, and felt like a huge failure. I couldn’t settle him when he cried, I couldn’t breast-feed properly, I was exhausted, and I was depressed. It’s like the whole world expected me to be euphoric – I was happily married, and had this gorgeous, healthy baby boy – but actually I wasn’t. I was falling to pieces.
‘And Gareth … well, Gareth suddenly became very busy. His career started to really take off, and he was out all the time. Having meetings, ruling empires, shagging secretaries – who knows?
‘All I knew was that my reality had changed beyond all recognition – he’d come home, often near midnight, and I’d just be this huddled wreck of a woman, sobbing and gibbering. It went on for months, and it was awful. He seemed to love Joe, and made a show of supporting me … but it wasn’t real. He’d do things like buy me a gym membership, because I couldn’t shift the baby weight, but never be there to look after Joe so I could actually go to the gym. Then he’d make sarcastic comments about how the only pounds getting lost were from his bank balance.
‘He’d want to have sex, but it was always when he was drunk after a night out, or when I was knackered – which was all the time. And after we’d done it, he’d just collapse next to me without saying a word, like he’d performed a bodily function rather than made love to his wife.
‘Mum came up a few times, and when she was there, he was perfect – made a big show of doing the dishes, and ordering takeaway so I didn’t have to cook, and saying he was considering “getting me a cleaner” – as though I was so incompetent I couldn’t do any of those things any more, and he was the big man helping me through my rough patch.
‘It got to the stage where I felt like I was living with a stranger – and, to be fair, he probably did as well. It wasn’t all his fault. I lost interest in everything other than survival – getting through the sleepless nights, dealing with the mind-bending tedium of looking after a demanding baby, living on biscuits and a secret brandy bottle I kept in the nursery. Honestly? I was a mess – and the worse things started to get for me, the better they seemed to go for him.
‘It was like there was only so much happiness to go round, and he had it all – constant promotions, trips abroad, winning awards, new cars. It got to the stage where I was too embarrassed to go to work parties with him, because I was definitely ashamed of myself, and he found ways to let me know that he was ashamed of me too.
‘It started with little digs – he used to joke, all the time, about my weight, or my mumsy clothes, or living in leggings, or how my conversational skills had been reduced to “goo goo” and “ga ga”.
‘He did it in a way that made it seem funny – like he was just having a laugh – so I could never really challenge him on it. In fact I thought I was going mad – imagining it all. Because when we were with other people, he was the perfect dad, the perfect husband – so I came to the conclusion that I had to be imagining it. Even when I caught him staring at me with complete disgust while I slobbed out in front of the TV, I told myself I was just being paranoid.
‘When he started calling me Fatty Dumpling – calling it a term of endearment – I told myself I was being too sensitive. And when the sex got even worse, until it was just a cold, horrible, painful thing, I told myself it was my fault – that I’d become so unattractive, no man would really want to sleep with me, and I was lucky Gareth was still interested at all.
‘By that stage I had nobody around to tell me any different. I had no friends, no colleagues. I didn’t have you. I pretended to Mum that everything was fine, although I’m never sure she believed me. My whole world revolved around Joe, and Gareth, and what Gareth thought about me – I saw myself through his eyes only, and his eyes really didn’t like what they saw, no matter how hard I tried.
‘I remember this one night, when Joe was maybe ten months old, deciding I’d make an effort. I cooked dinner, and did this stupid dress-up thing – greeted him at the front door dressed as a French maid, you know, with one of those frilly caps and an apron? It was meant to be fun, to try and put some sparkle back into things. He just looked at me, as if I’d gone completely mad, and said something like, “I think you should have ordered that one a few sizes up, don’t you?”
‘Nothing I ever did was good enough, and it almost came as a relief when he left, to be honest. Of course he swore there was nobody else, but I’ve discovered different since – there were quite a lot of someone elses.
‘By the time he packed his bags and walked out of the door, I was a wreck. I begged him to stay, practically held on to his ankles as he went for his car keys, Joe screaming away in the background – but it was weird. Once he’d gone – once I’d stopped crying and wailing and snivelling – I realised that I was relieved. That I could be fat without anybody telling me off for it. That I could wear tatty old leggings and nobody would see. That I could have my meltdowns in peace.
‘It was hard. It was horrible, being on my own with a toddler – and I hated myself so much by this stage that I couldn’t do all the things I was probably supposed to do, that Mum suggested. Like join mother-and-baby groups, or go to coffee mornings in church halls, or make new friends at single mums’ events.
