Gone Viking Read online

  ‘Anyway, I’m happy,’ I protest. ‘We go on holidays …’ In truth, I can’t remember when the last one was. Holidays have always seemed to me something of a time-hungry indulgence – a distraction from getting on with work/being a grown-up. ‘And there’s a Starbucks opening near here soon,’ I add.

  Melissa doesn’t look impressed and I’m annoyed that she’s bearing witness to the moment I realise my life to date has proven underwhelming.

  ‘Do you hang out with people from work much?’ she asks. I shake my head. ‘Old school mates?’

  ‘What old school mates?’

  Melissa folds her arms and gives me her over-the-garden-fence face, as if to say, ‘I rest my case’.

  My insides shift uncomfortably and for a moment I wonder whether I’m going to vomit again. But then I identify the sensation: it’s not nausea, it’s sadness …

  I can’t remember the last time I spent an evening with girlfriends. Or even went for coffee. Or had a phone call. Is it me? I think. Have I let things slide? Is it them? Or have we all been a bit crap?

  ‘Do you and Greg get out much? On dates and things?’

  ‘God, no!’ I scoff, then feel embarrassed by this admission of marital failure. ‘I just mean we’re busy. I’m busy. And there are always … better things to do.’ I realise as soon as I say this that it’s further ammunition for Melissa’s campaign of hating-on-my-life. ‘All right, so we’re not yabadabadoo happy,’ I go on. I haven’t heard Greg laugh for months now. He just watches News 24 and eats junk. The kind of food that makes him smell a little like a decaying, milky cow. And it’s not just the quality of what he shovels into his unsmiling Eeyore mouth that irks me, it’s the quantity, too. I married a hungry man. I shudder at the thought of the stack of pizza boxes I found around the back of the bins last week. Or the chocolate bar wrappers stuffed into trouser pockets and just left there, to ferment, stickily, until some mug (me) thinks to empty them before doing the laundry. I had presumed that this was normal – the average flotsam of an ordinary marriage.

  But what if I’ve been wrong?

  I’m not some naïve teenager in her first flush of love: I’m not stupid enough to think you can go through life fancying only one person. We’ve been on separate tracks since the kids came along – but that’s life. Isn’t it? And I find ways to cope. Ways to prevent a knot of stress developing in my stomach every time a new book idea goes awry or he gets overly involved in a news story on political strife in a country I couldn’t pinpoint on a map. Like in bed the other night, when I’d shaved my legs and hadn’t even put in my retainer yet (two kids in, this is foreplay …) and he told me that the Czech Republic has an unemployment rate of only 3 per cent. I asked him if he was joking and he told me, ‘It’s a very buoyant economy.’ And so I listened to a podcast on women who kill their husbands, went to sleep facing away from him, and deliberately burnt his non-Paleo, nutritionally bereft white-bread toast at breakfast. He slept in his study the night after that.

  There might be time for romance when the smoke’s cleared, I tell myself. When he gets a job, or gets back in shape, or when we start liking each other again …

  It’s never been exactly Casablanca. I’ve never had time for long piano solos or Vaseline-lensed close-ups. Greg was meant to be my sensible life partner who could hold down a job, liked me enough to put up with me, and was prepared to build a life together and be a good father. I know, it’s the stuff of Coldplay songs. Greg came along after that boyfriend, the one we’ve all had. The one I met at Fresher’s Week, who played the guitar, wore a lot of product in his hair, and dumped me at the end of every term so that he could be single for the holidays. You know the sort. So when I met Greg – safe, predictable Greg, who smelled of Right Guard – I was ready. He seemed OK. And by the time I started to harbour doubts about this, I felt as though it was already too late. As though maybe I was just one of those people who see problems where there are none. But just recently, everything has seemed up for re-evaluation. Recently, I’ve started to wonder what will happen if we never like each other again.

  What if this is it? A hardening fist settles in my gut at the thought – but what’s more terrifying, even, is that I can’t imagine an alternative. I was a daughter, then a wife, then a mother. And a dentist. That’s all I’ve ever been.

  I was destined to be a dentist from the age of five. There was something about sitting in a clean, white room – quiet but for the occasional hum of the electric blinds that closed with the touch of a button – that appealed to me. Even when I had braces fitted as a teenager, I didn’t mind the bimonthly appointments to tighten the screws on my train tracks. It hurt, of course, but in a good way. And in a way that was a distraction from the gaping, hollow kind of pain that was starting to engulf me at home. Early on, my course was set: I would wear white clogs for a living and operate a hydraulic reclining chair. So I became a dentist. And now, that’s what I do, in addition to running a house/crèche. Like a finely tuned machine. I work hard and keep working until each item on my to-do list is ticked off in turn. Until lately. When the day’s activities have started to overlap, like the scales on a fish.

  Suddenly I feel terribly tired of being a dentist. And a wife …

  ‘You should do something different,’ my human Labrador of a sister suggests. ‘You need a break.’

  ‘It’s not Sliding Doors,’ I tell her. ‘This is my life! I chose this. I’ve got two kids who ignore me and bills to pay. I can’t just get a pixie crop and open a tapas bar …’

  Melissa looks at me like a wounded puppy and I want to cry again. But I don’t. Because I never do. I excel at the art of ‘taking care not to make a scene’. Some may call it ‘bottling up’. I prefer ‘breeziness’. We can’t all fall apart … No matter how much I want to shout and cry and scream, I always do my utmost to keep it together and never succumb to The Rage. This is a policy that has seen me through tragedy (our mother dying), humiliation (breakfast buffet barf-gate; being married to someone who prefers Question Time to sex …) and the impossible (root canal surgery on an exceptionally stubborn gum; getting the kids to eat vegetables at least once a month, before scurvy strikes …). My only way of coping is to keep it together. I can’t lose it. Because … well, then everyone will have lost it.

  And I’m the one with the four bags for life in her car …

  After Mum died, everyone told me, ‘Take time to cry’; ‘Make space to grieve’. But I didn’t. Because Melissa did enough for both of us. I couldn’t compete with her extravagant displays of anguish. So I just had to get on with things. That’s what was best for all of us, I decided. And I am, largely, fine. And if there’s ever a glimmer of doubt about this, I remind myself, on loop. ‘I’m fine; I’m fine; I’m fine …’ So when, very occasionally, it all gets too much, I implode. My heart breaks inwards, mess-free. Fuss-free. I’m considerate like that.

  There are many things I’m good at: I can check your oral cavity; I can carefully examine your soft, fleshy parts in a position and circumstance where the majority of people feel at their most exposed and vulnerable. I can plan a family calendar two years in advance; prepare a ready meal for four in five minutes flat; and remove splinters with a 100 per cent success rate. I know, just call me Peggy Lee.fn2 I can clear up other people’s messes and inflict pain when necessary, when it’s The Right Thing To Do. But if you want someone to reminisce for hours about The Good Old Days while eating ice cream and watching Beaches? You’re looking at the wrong woman. I’m busy. I’ve got stuff to do. In fact, next on the list …

  ‘Kids?’ I croak down the stairs. ‘Come and do the pillow cases, please.’

  ‘Blimey, it’s a hoot round your house … broccoli and bed linen?!’

  ‘Professional success in life has been linked to doing chores as a child,’ I tell Melissa, ignoring the sarcasm. ‘Starting as early as possible.’

  ‘Yawn!’ She does an exaggerated stretch then pretends to fall asleep.

  I decide that now migh
t not be the time to mention the twenty minutes of maths I do with them each night or my mantra that ‘every moment of the day represents a learning opportunity’. Instead, I share my other favourite adage. ‘Effort is like toothpaste – you can always squeeze out a little more.’

  She mimes hanging herself in despair.

  ‘Greg didn’t know how to work a washing machine when we met!’ I persist, defending myself now. ‘Do you really want that inflicted on anyone else?’

  ‘No,’ she concedes, then mutters, ‘though I’m not sure I’d want Greg inflicted on anyone …’

  ‘You know that thing where you talk out of the side of your mouth? You know I can still hear you, right? You’re not speaking any more quietly,’ I inform her before trying another yell: ‘KIDS!’ The exertion sends me back on my heels, dizzy. So I keep quiet after this and go on folding the piles of (I hope) clean laundry, agonising for a moment as to whether one pair of blue pants belongs to me or my daughter. I hold them up to my face for further inspection.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Melissa looks at me as though I’m insane, so I explain.

  ‘These – I wore them last week but now I’m thinking that maybe they’re Charlotte’s.’

  ‘They’re child-sized …’ She lets the ellipses hang.

  ‘They were a bit snug …’ I admit. Things were rather chafe-y …

  Melissa continues to look at me as though I’m insane.

  ‘Yeah, that’s creepy.’

  ‘No, it’s not!’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘No … ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There should never be any doubt,’ she clarifies, ‘as to whether a pair of smalls belongs to a six-year-old girl—’

  ‘She’s seven, actually. Nearly eight—’ I interject, but Melissa carries on.

  ‘Or a grown woman. It means a) your bottom’s too small; and b) you need to eat more. You barely touched lunch. What do you run on? Vapours? Do you plug yourself in to the wall every night then power down like one of your devices?’

  I tell her that this sounds tempting round about now and she does a very bad face at me then puffs out her cheeks.

  ‘There’s a lot of wood to be chopped here …’

  I explain that I’m not familiar with her ye olde worldy fairy-tale woodchopper metaphors so she paraphrases, ‘It’s just that your life sounds a bit bollocks at the moment. And I say this with love …’

  ‘Bloody hell! What would that have sounded like without love?’

  She holds her hands up as if to say ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ and I want to protest. But I’m becoming increasingly suspicious that she might be right. I work. All the time. I’m often so exhausted that I feel sick. Even when I haven’t bathed in a vat of Shiraz. My visible hipbones, which had been a source of pride post childbirth and were admired by the other mums struggling to lose baby weight, now jut and hurt when I accidentally bash them on things. Which I do. With growing regulatory (see ‘exhausted’). And there have been times recently when the sight of Greg on his day bed, watching News 24, or staring at the Breville toastie maker, have made me want to headbutt a wall, so acute is my loathing of him.

  ‘How can I put this kindly?’ Melissa goes on. ‘I can’t, OK: your husband’s an idiot.’

  Melissa has never had a high opinion of Greg so this isn’t a total surprise, but I feel compelled to defend my life choices in some way.

  ‘I … I think he might be depressed.’

  ‘I think he might be an idiot.’

  ‘OK, maybe. But he’s my idiot. Contractually speaking, at least.’ I reach automatically for the next pair of pants to fold, then realise that they are Greg’s and that they’re definitely not laundry fresh.

  ‘Urgh, are those skid marks?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I say, expressionless. Mystery: thy name isn’t the man you’ve been married to for years.

  ‘That’s disgusting!’

  This? From the woman who trod excrement into my house and eats leftover pasties? Good grief …

  ‘You don’t understand; it’s all part of family life.’ I toss them into the laundry pile, attempting to convince myself, then try one last time to summon my offspring: ‘KIDS!’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, just because you remembered to have children.’

  ‘No! No, I didn’t mean that, I …’ I tail off. A large proportion of what little time I spend with my sister is occupied with trying not to rub her nose in the fact that I have a family and she hasn’t. Yet. She’s always maintained that she doesn’t want children, but, well, how can she know? I think benevolently. So I try to keep kids off limits.

  There’s an awkward silence after this. So that by the time Melissa finally speaks, she catches me off guard. ‘Well, listen, robot woman. Why don’t you get away for a while? Have some time off work and the kids and Skid Mark Greg? It’ll be good for you!’

  I find I’m so grateful for a respite from the awkwardness that I respond in the positive. ‘Mmm, maybe, one day.’

  I plan to do a lot of things ‘one day’, knowing full well there isn’t an allocated ‘self-indulgence’ slot in the two-year family calendar.

  ‘Great.’ Melissa seizes on this. ‘We could do something together. It’ll be like Brownie camp!’

  ‘What, being picked on by the Guides and then eating burnt baked beans?’

  She looks hurt. ‘You might have fun!’ she retorts.

  Yeah, that’s not going to happen, I think. ‘Not enjoying things’ is my forte …

  ‘Don’t you want to come away for a week with me?’ she says, pleadingly.

  A week? So long … is what I want to say. But instead I try another tack. ‘I’ll come away with you once you get your wisdom tooth taken out.’

  We both know this is unlikely.

  Melissa has a phobia of medical professionals that she puts down to Mum sending her to a dietician briefly when we were growing up.

  ‘If you’d been weighed like a prize heifer each month, you wouldn’t like specialists either,’ Melissa says.

  ‘That’s not the same thing at all!’

  I then start down a well-worn path of defending accusations against the dead, of which neither of us have proof either way and I have scant recall. ‘If you get your tooth sorted, it won’t hurt any more!’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ Melissa corrects me, ‘it aches occasionally. And twinges.’ She cradles her jaw. ‘I just don’t like medics, no offence.’

  ‘Plenty taken.’

  ‘Plus, I’m healthy as an ox.’ Maddeningly, wisdom tooth aside, she probably is.

  ‘Shame. There might have been a sticker or a toy dinosaur in it for you.’

  Melissa perks up. ‘Really?’

  ‘No, you’re not five years old.’

  ‘Then I’m definitely not going.’

  ‘Fine. You stick with your slowly decaying tooth that’s making your gums swell and your soft tissue inflamed and I’ll stick with my usual routine.’

  Dodged a bullet there, I think.

  ‘Is it lonely being right all the time?’ she snaps.

  ‘I really wouldn’t know.’

  She reflects on this for a while, during which time I fit sheets to two single beds, make piles for three different loads of washing (whites, coloureds, delicates), and run the Hoover around, reeling now, from the enervation. Finally, Melissa does a really slow blink. It’s like taking a holiday in the mind of a Teletubby, I think.

  Then, she speaks. ‘OK. I’ll do it.’

  ‘What?’ I’ve got one hand up a single duvet cover and a fist full of feathered down in the other.

  ‘I’ll book an appointment. Next week. And a trip. For the two of us.’

  Oh crap.

  ‘Sort you out.’

  I’m planning to remonstrate that I don’t need ‘sorting out’, when I remember several distinct indicators that I may be ever so slightly unravelling of late. These include, but are by no means limited to:

  �
� Googling ‘Best of Bublé’ the other night.fn3

  – Administrative errors and/or typos. Like signing off an email to a pharmaceutical rep with a kiss, and telling the new, male, orthodontic therapist that I was ‘very busty’. I’m not. I meant ‘busy’.

  – Failing to be cross, or even surprised, when Greg ate the sandwiches I’d made for Thomas’s birthday party because he thought they were ‘going spare’.

  – Taking showers sitting down.

  – Mr Teeth …

  The churning starts up again in my stomach at the recollection. So I do what I always do: I bury it. Gone. There! Ta da! There are a lot of bad feelings buried in my back garden. But my private unspooling of emotions makes me think that maybe, just maybe, I might be losing it a little. Like a frog in a pan of water that’s slowly being brought to the boil. What if I’m having a breakdown without anyone actually noticing? That’s just the kind of thing I’d do. I silent-panic for a few moments more before tuning back in to hear Melissa say, ‘… you can get some great help these days, too—’

  ‘“Help”? I don’t need therapy!’

  ‘Who said anything about therapy?’

  ‘Oh …’ My voice is a little tighter now. ‘No. No one …’

  ‘I meant help to book something. Ooh, we could go ultimate-paintballing!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go Ape?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pony Painting?’

  ‘Painting? ON a pony?’ Is she on glue?

  ‘Yes! They don’t mind, apparently. They find it relaxing, like a massage.’

  ‘Oh. How about a spa?’ I could handle a spa, I think; It would be quiet. There would be robes. And I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. After this, I’m physically present, but mentally I’m in a white fluffy dressing gown somewhere listening to whale music. Alone.

  ‘OK,’ I tell her, surprising even myself. ‘I’ll go away with you.’ What’s the worst that can happen? A spa might be just what I need, I reason.