Page 103 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“Do not give our children the broken childhood you had, Carrie. Do not turn into your mother.”
I end the call.
Johan’s still watching me. He doesn’t say a word, although there’s the slightest ember of a smile in his eyes.
I look away from him and come back to myself, to the quiet andstreamlined space in my head. This was me in an emergency operation. One action, then the next. Never any bigger-picture panic. Just this action, now. It was what made the best surgeons, Yanika had always said.
After a few minutes I pick up my phone again. I have my next action.
I open up Google and type inAndrew Heynes Foundation redundancies.
I scroll through six pages of results before giving up. There is nothing there about mass redundancies.
Six months ago, Robin told me he and “countless others” were made redundant because his long-term boss, Andrew Heynes, had been charged with financial fraud.
No redundancies were reported at all. The Heynes Foundation is still going strong, and indeed there’s a picture of Andrew opening a new women’s health unit at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee just a few days ago. I have no idea why Robin left, but it had nothing to do with redundancies. And Andrew Heynes never committed fraud.
Briefly, I wonder why I never looked any of this up at the time, but I know the answer. I’ve never questioned anything Robin has told me. Not a word.
Johan gets up and turns the kettle on. He’s going to make anotherteh tarik; I know it. This is what he used to do for me at midnight when I was still studying. Workaholic Carrie, Carrie who didn’t always manage to eat a full dinner, Carrie who misjudged her work-life balance most days. He didn’t try to change that Carrie; he made no attempt to protect her from herself. He simply watched her do her own thing, and loved her anyway.
Robin used to pick me up from my desk and carry me upstairs, both of us laughing, if I worked past eleven. He essentially force-fed me when I was too anxious to eat. He made my appointments, took on most ofour admin, ran our diary. And I used to allow this; I loved him for it. I reveled in the unfamiliar sensation of being cared for.
But is it really care, when we are protected from the consequences of our own mistakes? When we are rescued the moment things get tough? I think that can only ever be control.
I pause for a moment, considering my next action, then I call my mother.
“I have a job for you,” I say when she answers.
“Good. I need a distraction. I’m close to going around to that hotel and burning it down.”
—
We walk up through my garden and onto the open moor. A few purple feathers of cloud hover here and there, but mostly the sky is a great symphony of stars.
Johan stops, wordless, staring up at the layers on layers of stars fading to pinprick traces as the millions of miles pass. A satellite travels slowly across our vision, stately and silent.
It’s cold. Very cold, but we’re both wearing thick coats and besides, I can’t feel anything right now. I watch the vapor plumes of our breath fanning out ahead of us, two distinct clouds, until they find each other and become one. I remember this happening the second time we met. The longing I had to know this man better, to touch the paint on his skin.
I don’t know how I feel about him now. I know only that I need to be up here, on the ceiling of the world, the anarchic, heady contours of the moor spreading around me in ancient disarray. Here I feel safe enough to accept that my father is dead, that my husband is little more than a story, that everything I’ve spent more than a decade believing is incorrect.
“You can see the light from the squid-fishing boats from space,” Isay after a while. “The ones we used to watch from the beach bar at night.” I feel him turn to look at me, but I keep on staring at the sky.
“I used to get up in the middle of the night, when my head got too busy, and look at them online. When it all felt too much. I’d stare at those photos until my thoughts settled.”
Johan is silent. Nearby, in the coppice owned by the neighboring farm, an owl calls very softly, as if testing its voice.
I breathe in the sharp scent of cold, damp earth. I need the help of this mythical land again. I need it to hold me like it did when we moved here and I no longer knew what safety felt like.
My phone starts to vibrate. It’s now nearly three in the morning.
“Mum?”
“It’s bad,” she says.
I close my eyes.
One of Mum’s colleagues once likened the reach of Mum’s network to the mycorrhizal network of a giant underground fungal organism, which was a little weird, but also entirely accurate. Mum can connect people from entirely disparate branches of the charity world in a matter of seconds.
