Everything and Nothing. Araminta Hall
all afternoon, which had created a little knob of panic deep in her stomach. She hadn’t been able to get hold of Christian either and now she had no reception on her phone, but Carol had assured her that she’d give him the message and, of course, Aggie was infi nitely capable. She’d find a payphone when she got there if her signal hadn’t come back.
Ruth sat next to Sally by the window near the front of the coach. Sally kept turning her back on her to listen and laugh at her team, as she called them all, which was fine with Ruth as a headache had settled round the top of her head, squeezing pain into her body. She rubbed her shoulders and could feel the tension nestling there like snarling dogs. It was going to be a long night.
Her signal had returned by the time they got there, so she hung back. She noticed Kate, the only other woman in the office with children, doing the same, a concerned frown on her face. She could hear her telling whoever was on the other end that the Calpol was on the top shelf of the third cupboard to the right of the cooker in the kitchen.
Ruth’s message symbol was bleeping. Christian’s voice came through, moaning about the garden. It stirred an immense anger in her that made her want to walk all the way home just to rub his smug face into the dirt he was complaining about. She jabbed a message out to him, not trusting herself to speak to him directly. If you were ever available to take calls about vegetable patches from your kids you would probably have said yes as well and then it would have been a great idea.
Christian received Ruth’s message as Arsenal equalised and he was finishing his third bottle of beer. He’d meant to send Ruth a text saying sorry for sounding so pompous, but after reading Betty three Charlie and Lola books he’d lost the will to live. ‘Did you know,’ he’d said to the cat after returning downstairs from Betty’s bedtime ritual, ‘that Charlie has a little sister Lola. She is small and very funny. Except of course she isn’t. She is annoying and precocious and due to total parental neglect has transferred all her negative attention complexes onto poor Charlie, who should get some sort of medal from Carol Vorderman.’ His outburst surprised him so much he had completely forgotten about anything other than lying on the sofa, shouting abuse at eleven men on a grassy pitch.
Ruth’s sanctimonious tone irritated him and made him glad he hadn’t apologised. He texted back: Get over yourself. It looks ugly. His phone bleeped: It’s not all about aesthetics. He wrote: Have a good time at your party. I’m too tired to argue, having just got our daughter to sleep. He nearly couldn’t be bothered to read the next text: Aren’t you wonderful. Don’t wait up. Arsenal scored again, but Christian couldn’t raise a cheer. Often his life felt pathetic.
Ruth knew she was drunk before she stumbled into the taxi and felt her head reeling. The jolts of corners taken too fast and a spicy smell she couldn’t place were conspiring to make her feel sick. The driver had a small symbol of an Indian god on his dashboard; it was shameful that she didn’t know its name, didn’t even know which religion it represented. Still though it comforted her, reassured her in some indefinable way. She looked at the tiny icon, cheap in its fluorescent plastic, and envied its sense of stability, its ability to inspire wonder. So many hopes and dreams and wishes had been prayed into that image, it made Ruth smile.
Viva had won Best Design and Editor of the Year, so the champagne had been flowing all night. Sally had been in her element and Ruth had felt an unsisterly stab of jealousy watching her old friend so graciously accept her award and make a funny speech about Roger asking her whether she loved him or Viva more. ‘I simply answered that he was my husband, but Viva was my baby. What I didn’t add was that women always love their children more than their husbands, don’t they.’ Sally didn’t have children.
Ruth’s phone was vibrating, but the message she saw was an old one from Christian. Did you call the plumber? There’s no bloody hot water again.
‘No,’ she said out loud. ‘I bloody didn’t.’
‘Excuse me?’ said the taxi driver.
‘No, sorry, nothing.’ Ruth threw the phone down next to her and stared out of the window at the grey streets, passing by like a dreary dream. She found it strange to think of all the sleeping bodies shielded behind all those front doors, encased in walls which felt so familiar and comforting to them, if they were lucky, but would be alien and frightening to her. It reminded her of going on holiday and how you walk into the apartment or cottage or room and feel so out of place you almost want to go home, but within days those new four walls suddenly feel cosy, like you’ve always lived there. Which in turn made her think about that old cliché, There’s no place like home, which she pictured as an appliqué scene in a wooden frame, sitting in her granny’s kitchen.
‘Thirty-four sixty,’ the driver was saying as they pulled up outside her front door. She shoved two twenties at him and only remembered her phone still lying on the back seat after she’d let herself in. She was too tired to feel upset.
Ruth went into the dark sitting room and saw Christian’s plate and four empty bottles of beer by the sofa. It roused a fresh spasm of defeat in her. She picked them up and carried them into the kitchen, wondering who he thought was going to do it. Her husband had a habit of leaving cupboard doors flailing, drawers open at hip-hitting height, wet towels languishing on beds, dirty pants multiplying on the floor. What did your last slave die of ? she’d shout, sounding like the sort of woman she had never wanted to be.
As Ruth stood up from putting Christian’s plate in the dishwasher she caught sight of the tiny fence circling what must be the new vegetable patch. She felt a complete desire to see it rush at her heart, making her open the back door and step into her garden made yellow by the light pollution of night in the city. The patch was a perfect rectangle and she could see the grooves of the beds under a fine meshing. At the end of each bed was a white plastic stick with writing on it. She squatted in the grass and worked her hand inside the mesh to pull out one of the sticks. Betty’s inexpert hand had written carrots and just below it Hal had scribbled something orange.
Her heart contracted so that she wondered if she might be about to die from all the alcohol and cigarettes she had uncharacteristically consumed. But really the problem lay with the image in her head; both her children as they had been as newborn babies, sucking at her breast. She would look down on them as they fed and marvel at the seriousness, the urgency, which accompanied their tugging. It used to feel like her breasts were attached to her heart by a series of thick ropes and that until that moment the ropes had lain slack and dormant. With each suck the ropes grew more taut, so that in the end her heart felt as though it had been pulled free, released like a sail on a ship. Both Betty and Hal had woken all night, every night, and when she had picked them out of their cribs, only half awake and smelling that indefinable scent only possessed by newborns, they had sighed with such contentment that she had sworn to never, ever let anything bad happen to either of them.
Then the wonder of it all. Watching a blank face smile for the first time must be more wonderful than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the pyramids; because don’t all wonders occur only within your own world, really there’s nothing else. Hearing a gurgle turn to a sound, feeling strength in limbs that only a day before had seemed so weak. You wait and wait as a mother at the start, wait for these minuscule miracles which make you writhe with excitement. But then those tiny bodies catch up with their whirling minds and all the things you’ve been searching for suddenly tumble out of them, so that you even miss some things. And then it stops being so precious and you forget, only for something like this to smack you right back to the impact of the beginning.
How had Ruth gone from falling so absolutely in love that she realised exactly where her heart was in her body, to missing the creation of something so fundamentally marvellous as this garden? Surely it was too mean of life to make her choose between herself and her children? The stick dropped from her hand and Ruth sat back heavily onto the already damp grass, covering her mouth with her hands to stop her sobs from waking anyone in the house.
Her crying didn’t last long; self-indulgence never sat easily with Ruth, she became too aware of herself. Instead she made herself stand up and get upstairs to bed. She was drunker than she’d realised and she tripped as she pulled her clothes heavily over her head,