Kerry Fisher - The Island Escape

I’d trained myself to find one child noisy enough.

No, I didn’t want to go to Octavia’s. I wanted to disappear up to the second floor of my own home and lock myself in the guest suite. Every bit of me yearned to snuggle under a clean duvet, pull down the blackout blinds and blank everyone else out.

Octavia rolled to a halt under the big chestnut tree outside our house. ‘Shall I come in with you?’

‘No. You’ve done enough, thank you. I’m not going to talk to Scott now, even if he’s still awake. Don’t wait. You’re going to be worn out at nursery – go and get a few hours’ sleep.’ I gave her a big hug. Everyone needed someone they could call in the middle of the night.

I pointed the fob at the electric gates, got out of the car and walked up the lonely drive of my life, the cold slicing into my lungs. My key wouldn’t turn in the front door. I stood fiddling with it for a moment, but I knew. Of course, I knew. Scott had dropped the latch.

Bastard.

Octavia’s car still hadn’t moved. Her concern was beginning to smother me. I wanted her to go so I could sift through the debris of my life in peace, even if it meant sleeping in the summerhouse.

I flicked the fob at the garage door and it rolled back. I waved at Octavia, forcing a smile, making shooing motions with my hand. This time I heard the creak of her ancient suspension as the car lumbered into reverse.

I picked my way past the gas barbecue and huge gazebo Scott used for summer parties, in his guise as the neighbourhood Lord of the Manor. The door into the utility room was unlocked. Not a total bastard, then. I put my boots in their little space on the shelf and tiptoed upstairs. The house was still. I prayed that Scott was asleep. The morning would be soon enough for that confrontation. Our door was shut, thank God. I looked in on Alicia, bunched up into a tight ball. I smoothed her hair, tucked the duvet round her and hurried to the top floor.

I could smell the stale air of the police station on my skin. The en suite shower was singing its siren call to me but I didn’t want to wake Scott. Before I did battle with him, I needed some sleep. I stripped off my clothes, then hesitated. I put my underwear back on. Some discussions couldn’t happen naked. I climbed under the duvet, my shoulders and neck releasing tension into the fat, downy pillows. Contrary to my expectations, sleep sucked me down into immediate oblivion.

And Scott catapulted me out of it.

He strolled into the room, clean-shaven, favourite blue shirt, handsome. A more sophisticated version of the spirited surfer boy who’d enchanted me in Venice nearly nineteen years ago. Far too flaming refreshed for someone who should have been lying awake, guilt-ridden and repentant.

‘Hi. What time did you get back?’ He sounded as though I’d been up to London for cocktails with the girls. He put a cup of tea on the nightstand. I was failing to match the affable man in front of me with the vindictiveness of the previous evening.

My head felt as though someone had filled it with stones. My eyes were dry and gritty. It was years since I’d gone to bed without cleansing and moisturising. I was blinking as though I’d been living underground, my mind slowly ordering the events of the previous day.

‘I don’t know what time. About three-thirty, maybe, no thanks to you.’ I was scrabbling for accusations and anger. I had expected to fly at him, grab him by the perfectly ironed collar of his shirt and shake an explanation out of him. Instead, I was like the split beanbag in Alicia’s den, a million little polystyrene balls littering the floor, leaving an empty casing in a heap. I waited for him to piece together some fragments of the puzzle that had transported me to that pit of a police station.

Instead Scott drew the curtains a fraction, running his finger along the sill. ‘I’ve never understood why this room suffers so much with condensation.’

I hadn’t either, but unlike Scott, that conundrum was number four thousand and twenty-nine on my list of immediate worries. Silence sat in the room. I just wanted him out of there, so I could have a shower and pull myself together. ‘You’re up and about early.’

Scott rarely scheduled any meetings before ten-thirty. ‘Mum’s landing at 11.30. You never know what the traffic’s going to be like round Heathrow.’

I started. Adele! I had to get up, get going. The cleaner had changed her bed, but I needed to sort out some toiletries, towels, pop out for some flowers. I wanted to check that Alicia was OK before Adele swept in, taking over with her incessant chatter.

Scott standing there so nonchalant filled me with fury, giving life to my limbs. I felt as though I might leap out of bed and start snatching pictures off the wall to crash over his head. My throat had tightened so much, I wasn’t sure I could force enough air through it to produce speech.

‘Just so you know, I’m staying for Christmas. For Alicia’s sake. Over the next few days, I am going to forget what you did to me and do my best to carry on as normal. But when your mum has left, we need to have a serious talk.’ My jaw was so tense, I could feel my wisdom teeth grinding together.

I expected him to bristle and start off down the ‘Don’t threaten me’ route. He shrugged a brief acknowledgement. I waited for an apology or an excuse. Something that indicated that he understood I wouldn’t just brush this under the carpet along with all the other hurts that had gnawed away at the great monolith of love we’d started out with. This time he’d pushed me too far. Instead he said, ‘After you left yesterday, I took that quiche you were making out of the oven and put it in the fridge. Wrapped it in silver foil. Hope that was OK.’

Quiche. My God. I’d been in a cell half the night and we were talking about quiche. We’d be auditioning for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest next. It was like being trapped in a reality show where the participants were selected on their ability to behave like lunatics. I could easily have obliged, launching myself at him, pummelling his chest and clawing his face with sheer frustration that all the love that we’d treasured, fought for and defended, lay shattered around us, with barely enough strength to plead for one last chance.

Scott walked towards the bed as though he was going to kiss me goodbye.

Before I could react, he stopped a couple of feet away and waved. ‘I’ll be off then. See you later.’

Either he’d read my face or he saw that there was something of the great unwashed about me. Scott was a man who liked his women fragrant, plucked and waxed. I didn’t know whether I could go back to being that person now. I tried to imagine going downstairs, packing my stuff and walking out of the door.

The problem was I couldn’t conjure up any images in the black beyond.

There weren’t many days when I regretted setting up my holistic nursery but today, two days before Christmas, was one of them. My eco-ethos meant I couldn’t fob off the kids with sticking a bit of glitter on a few polystyrene stars. Instead, we’d done a full-scale expedition down to the woods to gather ‘material’ for decorations. This had led to a couple of four-year-olds getting covered in dog poo, a little girl collecting rabbit droppings to use as food for Rudolph and another boy sitting in a puddle pretending he was a duck. The morning had ended up being less about decorations and more about turd control.

By the time I’d picked the girls up from my mother’s and popped into the supermarket on the way home, I was officially knackered. My heart lifted as I squeezed the car in next to Jonathan’s Rover. His company had obviously found a little Christmas cheer and let them go early. He could help me lug in the shopping. I’d fought my way round Tesco trying not to barge into people who’d left it until the twenty-third of December to decide they needed a Christmas pud. I’d got all the basics in place but I liked my vegetables fresh. Immi and Polly had bickered from start to finish: the illogical mind of an eight-year-old pitched against the pedantic tendencies of the ten-year-old. They were still having a ding-dong over who was having the chocolate Santa on the Christmas tree. With the last pinch of patience I could muster, I told them to ring the doorbell to ask Daddy to come and help. Charlie eventually came to answer, bringing with him the distinct smell of an unshowered teenager who’s been glued to a screen all day.