Growing Away From Me

It was Kathy who gave me the idea.  We’d met as we always do on a Wednesday morning at The Merrie England Coffee shop.  She’d ordered something frothy which possibly only became liquid two millimetres before the bottom of the cup, a muffin and a slice of cake.  I’d stared behind the teenager serving me at the confusion of abuses of the English or Italian language on the chalkboard which were used to describe their drinks and opted as always for a “A pot of English tea”.  Instead of the usual chatter about husbands, jobs and kids she’d announced as we sat down that she had something important to tell me but it was in the strictest secrecy.  I can’t imagine why she felt the need to add that. Who was I going to tell? Richard? As sweet as he is and as much as I love him he has no interest in anything Kathy says.  Nor anything I say if I’m honest but when I’m telling him something about me he’ll utter an occasional grunt, stray fart or harrumph to indicate interest or surprise.  I’m not sure when I moved from lead actress to background artist in the story of his life.  He views Kathy as a shallow and trivial person and can’t understand why I give her any more than the time of day.  He’s partly right.  She is a shallow and trivial person and for me that has always been what attracts her to me. 

 

Her big news turned out to be that she was having an affair.  I was a little disappointed and almost completely unsurprised.  It’s not that she’s some sort of strumpet but she is, thanks to a diet largely of muffins and cake, unsubtly curvaceous in a way most men would love and is very pretty and witty.  More importantly, her husband, Pete, is a deeply unattractive man in both looks and personality.  Their marriage and first child were the result of a prophylactic malfunction in the third week of a relationship which Kathy regularly assures me otherwise wouldn’t have reached its one month anniversary.  She was particularly pleased that at thirty eight the man she had become involved with was only twenty one.  That did surprise me.  There are older things in my closet.  She described him as shy and reserved and somewhat inexperienced with women.  At first she joked about his body in comparison to Pete’s and how she saw it as her responsibility to teach him about sex and what she called “the ways of manhood”.  She said that they’d had sex in her car, against a tree in Bailey Woods, done things in the back of a taxi and in a wardrobe with her hanging from the clothes rail. 

 

She then spoke more seriously about how special and attractive he made her feel, the softness and firmness of his skin, his indifference to her stretch marks, his gentle exploration of her body and then, importantly, how free she felt when they lay and held each other post-coitus.  She told me that “When we lie there.....sometimes talking....sometimes not.....sometimes getting ready to go at it again there is a quiet, a slowing of the clocks, a timelessness.  It seems that since I was seventeen I’ve been rushing from one thing to another, constantly with a million things going on in my head.  And none of them have really been invited. Not by me.  I don’t really want to be worrying about what to cook for tea, making different meals for fussy kids, getting the clutch on the car looked at, getting texts from Pete saying he told his sister she could borrow the hedge trimmer and that I’d drop it off or any of that stuff.  I didn’t realise this until the first time Alex and I had sex and collapsed onto each other and I felt that all of those stolen bits of my brain had been returned to me.  You and Richard always seem so settled and connected to each other you won’t understand but this is more like having an affair with the real me than with a man who isn’t my husband”.  There appeared to be no end to the ways in which she could describe this new lease of life. 

 

I didn’t say much in response to Kathy and her clear love for Alex and a version of herself she’d rediscovered.  She wanted to tell me something not get advice or an opinion.  I did ask if she was happy.  She answered “No. Happiness always seems to be something brief and elusive.  This feels like home.  I’m, I’m....................content”.                      

 

Later, that day I’d thought of the peace Kathy described as I peeled vegetables and watched Rob and Simon kicking a ball around the garden and the girls playing with their dolls on the patio.  Richard was complaining about having to discipline a new teacher in his department who’d made an unfortunate attempt at humour about the surname of a girl called Lucy Swallow.  The girl’s father had claimed she was traumatised and that the teacher should be on the Sex Offender Register.  Richard was very pleased with his retelling of this story.  I knew very well he’d develop it and shoehorn it into every dinner party conversation for years to come.  I thought of Kathy’s head resting on Alex’s chest and the sense of silence and stillness and contentment.    

 

It was Kathy who gave me the idea but I’m not like her.  Richard is pompous and rigid and increasingly indifferent to me but I chose him then and would still make that decision now.  The children fill the house with love and laughter and chaos and they are all that I could wish for them to be but....what Kathy described I recognised.  Or rather I recognised a need to find parts of myself that don’t seem to be required by anyone in my life other than me.  I didn’t take a lover though. I’ve no idea where I’d find one and I’m not sure that sex against a tree would be good for my back or the fabric of any of my clothes and I don’t think I’d be able to keep a straight face if I was being penetrated whilst hanging between some combat trousers and a hoody.  At my age I’d just look like a garment in need of ironing.  Instead I’m having an affair with myself, with silence, solitude and I’m experimenting with contentment.  Twice a week for the past two months when Richard thinks I’m volunteering at a local care home I’m actually not.  I’m actually in one of the study rooms at the town library.  They have big comfy chairs and acres and acres of silence.  At first I didn’t know what to do with myself and I left soon after arriving.  Then I took a book but couldn’t switch off the noise in my head.  I took some knitting but felt guilty that Richard would be ruining fish fingers at home and the children might have lost something only I could locate but with time and practice I’ve come to enjoy the silence.  I embrace it now.  It was Kathy who gave me the idea but I really think I’ve improved on it.




Patrick