Fault Lines

Short story on child Estrangement

She’d been telling him about lobotomies, reading from her phone, her face tinted blue from the light of the screen.

'Maybe one of them would sort me out,' she says.

He lets out an exaggerated sigh, shoves his phone under the pillow, rolls over, and turns off the lamp on his side.

She tells him they put a tool like an icepick through the nostril or drilled holes in the skull. Sometimes they did it through the eye sockets. To keep women calm, cooperative. Docile.

He grunts, pulls the duvet over his head. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘My mother had electroconvulsive therapy in the 70s,’ she says, reaching out for her cigarettes.

‘I know.’

‘It used to petrify me every week when she got the bus to the mental hospital in town.’ She thumbs the lighter until it catches, works up the dying flame. ‘I honestly thought she was being electrocuted. I remember watching from the window waiting for her to come back home after Blue Peter had finished.’ She drags on the cigarette, taps at her phone.

‘I know.’

‘These pills we’re on,’ she says, flicking ash into her empty wine glass, ‘they can cause emotional blunting. They can stop you crying. Stop you experiencing positive and negative emotions.’

‘They haven’t stopped you crying.’

‘Says they may decrease the function of brain areas involved in the ability to feel pleasure and pain.’

He turns, thumps his pillow to reshape it. ‘God sake, Sarah. Put your bloody phone away and go to sleep.’

The clock ticks on his side of the bed. Seconds sounding, time moving on without a care in the world for their grief. Their disenfranchised grief.

She heard that UB40 song in the Co-op last week – ‘One in Ten.’ Couldn’t get the words out of her head. Now it’s changed. We are a one in five.

One in five families in Britain affected by estrangement. Ten percent of mothers are cut off from at least one adult child. She told him that last night in bed.

They are a number on a list. A footnote in somebody else’s report.

She drops her phone to the floor, the cigarette into the glass, and lays back staring at the ceiling.

The light from the moon casts a grey haze across the room, the strappy black nightie hanging on the back of the door like a shrunken shadow of the past. Two years and counting.

‘Can you take the batteries out of your clock? I can’t stand it.’

‘No,’ he says. His voice is muffled from under the duvet. ‘It’s the only constant thing right now. Put your ear plugs in.’

‘Maybe we should get another dog?’ Her voice is quieter now. ‘That might help. What do you think?’

‘Go to sleep. Please.’

She stares at the chest of drawers opposite the bed – the silhouettes of perfume bottles, the half-burned fat candle on the marble stand, the mirror she avoids, the space where the framed photo of the three of them used to be. She clasps her hands together, rests them on her chest. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have taken down all the pictures. Maybe –’

‘Christ.’ He throws back the duvet, gets out of bed and strides out of the room.

She yanks at it, pulling it to her chest, then higher toward her chin.

The bathroom door bangs open, the sound of him pissing – long and loud against the side of the pan, then the boiler firing up when he runs the hot tap to wash his hands, then another banging noise – the cabinet door closing, then the sound of pills rattling in a bottle coming closer and closer.

The frame thumps down onto the chest of drawers. ‘There,’ he says. ‘Happy now?’

She turns her head toward the window.

‘You were the one who wanted the photos gone, Sarah.’ He unscrews the pill bottle. ‘It was your idea, not mine. I was just following orders.’ He sits on the edge of the bed, her side, making the mattress dip, holding out his palm with the little white tablet at the centre. ‘Take this.’

She shakes her head.

He presses his palm to his mouth, looks at her wine glass with the sodden cigarette at the bottom, pulls a B&H from the box. ‘We could get another dog, if that’s what you want.’ He doesn’t look at her when he speaks. He drags hard, breathes out noisily, taps the ashless tip at the glass.

She cries without sound.

In the early days the weeping was loud and went on for hours. Both of them. Sometimes at the same time, sometimes separately when they tried to hold things together. She lets the tears fall, teetering at the edge of her chin.

Ash drops to the floor, he bends to rub it into the carpet. ‘Another book?’ he says, sighing, holding up a brown Amazon envelope.

She doesn’t answer, sniffs, wipes her pajama cuff under her chin, takes the cigarette from his hand and puffs on it.

When her phone pings, he picks it up and hands it to her.

‘It’s Alison. Wants us to go to dinner at theirs.’

‘We should go.’ He takes the cigarette from her fingers. ‘Why don’t we go? Do us good.’

‘No.’

‘They’re just trying to be kind and –’

‘I don’t want to hear about their wonderful children with their wonderful partners and their bloody wonderful jobs. I don’t want her shoving her phone in my face, forcing me to smile at her fully functioning fucking family and harping on about never giving up hope.’

He sighs again, drops the butt into the glass. ‘People don’t get it. You can’t expect them to get it. You heard what the counsellor said. Others can’t acknowledge it. Can’t mourn with us. They can’t see our pain as normal or appropriate. Can’t walk in our shoes.’

‘If you want to go, go,’ she says, her voice distant. ‘But don’t expect me to pretend it’s okay. That we’re okay.’

Pushing himself up, he walks to the end of the bed, eyes scanning the room like he's trying to make sense of the emptiness that’s been filling it night after night, month after month. ‘I’m not asking you to pretend. But it’s...’ He trails off. ‘It’s been too long, Sarah. This – longing, it can’t go on forever, can it?’

She pulls the quilt tighter around her as though the weight of it could somehow protect her from the heft of their loss.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispers. ‘Maybe it will.’

He stands there, shoulders hunched. He looks at her, but she doesn’t lift her head. ‘I’m so tired of living like this.’

‘I know.’ Her voice is barely audible.

The clock ticks on, its sound deafening. He stays standing there. Just standing there like he does of a night like this, not knowing what to do with himself, looking at her in the bed.

Finally, he exhales. ‘You’re not alone, you know.’

She doesn’t respond.

Picking up his phone, he says, ‘I’ll sleep on the sofa tonight.’

She turns on the lamp when he closes the door, looks at the framed photo – back in the place it had stood for two years. Their child between them. Their 21st birthday. All of them smiling, Pizza Express. No signs, no signifiers of what was to come six months later.

She doesn’t take the pills, lies to her husband. She needs to stay in touch with herself, with the pain. She doesn’t want her brain numbed, her emotions shelved for the sake of society. That’s what she told Alison the last time they spoke, and it hadn’t gone down well, what with Alison being a GP. But a lobotomy, that still plays on her mind. That would be final – a point of no return.

Reaching down, she picks up the brown envelope, pulls the perforated strip away.

Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them.