What we do when the world goes away
After they’d gone, I was a spare part. I dropped them at the airport — my wife, my mother-in-law, and our eight-month old son, and then I drove to the supermarket and bought a bar of chocolate and a tin of cold coffee. I came back to the empty house, closed all the blinds and took off my shirt.
Without a family, I was now free to do all the things I wanted, all the things that being a husband and a father prohibited. I turned on the TV, and then I sat and I watched and I drank my tin of coffee in silence. What would I do now that they were gone?
I sat around and thought about it. I had a car. I could drive somewhere. I could drive down to the coast and watch the sunrise over the sea. Instead, at 11pm, I drove to the supermarket again and sat in the car park and listened to the radio. I drank another tin of cold coffee and then drove back home.
The question was moot anyway. There was only one thing I could do now that they were gone: work.
Go into London. Do a job I hate. Come home. Sort out the slow travel of our own personal effects over the two years we’d lived in this run-down hole. Getting things done wasn’t easy though. Early parenthood had taken what little clarity we possessed and replaced it with a state of near-constant fatigue.
When my dad came round to make sure I was coping, he told me I was “killing myself” while running a cloth over the kitchen surfaces. I hadn’t seen him run a cloth over anything in thirty years. I didn’t understand why he was here, now, cleaning my kitchen.
He had a point though. I had a pot of basil, a pot of coriander and a pot of parsley on the kitchen counter. All three were dead. Not just dead, but long dead, dead so that they were three pots of earth with twig corpses sticking out of them. I didn’t know how many mornings I had walked past them cramming cereal into my mouth before work. I’d watered them, I had. But they had died anyway.
It was fine though. It was all fine. I was fine. My own time is the thing I’ve missed most since getting married. I hadn’t had a single day to myself in five years, it was starting to look like I never would again. Some people tend to go stir crazy without other people around, but I was stir crazy to begin with, I have something of a natural affinity for it.
With this said, the complex arrangement of coping mechanisms that I must subconsciously manage had been nudged dangerously out of alignment by the abrupt disappearance of my wife and son. Maybe I’d changed.
“I’m not coming back,” she had said.
It was meant as a joke, but neither of us had laughed. The first few months of parenthood had taken a toll. She needed a break. I needed a break. This seemed like a compromise of sorts. Her break would involve the continued twenty-four hour supervision of our son in sunny Turkey. My break would be throwing myself into manual labour.
Our house is a tiny two-bed cottage in the middle of nowhere. It’s on a main road between London and a satellite town, so there is the continued hum of heavy traffic on the road throughout the day. There’s no space in the house, so our washing machine, dryer and fridge are in an outbuilding behind the cottage. We never go in there because it’s horrible. At some point during its history, someone decided to install an office there, so they plastered the walls and put a carpet in. It was a nice idea, but poorly executed. The carpet was soaked through most days from the leaking fridge, damp lined the plaster, the plastic skylight at the back leaked when it rained and the old bricks at the back had crumbled. The whole room smelled awful.
Whether my family returned after my son had grown into a desperate middle-aged man like me, or after he had learned to crawl, I was determined in one endeavour: I would tile the floor in that outbuilding.
The first week, I spent my evenings after work ripping the mouldy carpet and underlay out and carrying all of our stored possessions into the house to sift through.
The fridge I pushed back to the passage where the skylight and the washer/dryer combo was, out of the main space. I could only afford the tiles for that area, so that’s what needed to be cleared.
At the end of that week, I took delivery of the tiles, seventy-eight of them, and carried them through the house four at a time, heavy, expensive slabs. I also ordered two sacks of floor adhesive, and a sack of anthracite grout. Then I set about the business of sorting through our collected mess.
We had two suitcases stuffed with pieces of paper, our respective filing cabinets. I carried them up to the top of the house and went through them. After I’d thrown away all of the junk mail that we’d inexplicably chosen to keep, and sorted my pieces of paper into piles and then folders, I found pictures of us back when we were just starting out, I found faded ticket stubs for movies we went to see, museums we visited. I found notepads with things I’d written down, that she’d written down, in coffee shops, in parks, years ago, the pieces of our life together that had remained, that we’d not lost or thrown away.
I remembered all of the moments of our life leading up to now. We’d journeyed from being complete strangers on different paths, to married couple, to house owners, to parents. We’d been learning about each other for all that time since our paths converged, now we were learning all over again.
In the digital age, every second is documented — hundreds of photos and videos exist to prove it. My son will hold memories of us looking up from behind smartphones. For my parents, a single book of about thirty photos document my first months. Thirty that made it out of the suitcase and into an album.
I remember walking with my dad to school. I’m five. He never spoke much, which is why the childhood memories that play in my head are always silent I guess.
We don’t connect over much, my dad and I, don’t really talk about much — books, occasionally music, and DIY. He’s useless at DIY, but he launches into projects with infectious enthusiasm and will blindly skip over steps in the process, making approximate measurements on a piece of paper which is later misplaced. All he sees is the end result. I am my father’s son in that regard.
I’ve told him about the tiling project. I don’t invite him but he turns up anyway, every day of the week that I’ve taken off to do it.
I do the work and he tells me what I’m doing as I’m doing it. He strides about wearing goggles and ear protectors while I cut the tiles, watches while I mix the adhesive, hands me a tile when I’m ready to lay one down. He is my self-appointed project manager and gopher.
By the end of the week, it looks great. I almost can’t believe how well it’s turned out in spite of our ineptitude. There’s no moment where we stand back to admire our work, or where he pats me on the back to let me know I did a good job. But after thirty years we’ve got to the point where we can shake hands and he’ll lean in and pat my shoulder when we’re saying goodbye.
In the final week before I fly to Turkey to collect my wife and son, I fall off the train each evening to add coats of sealant and polish to the floor. I ready the house for their arrival. I have kept the tiling project a secret from my wife, it’s going to be a surprise.
Then I’m on a plane flying to Istanbul. It’s the day of the suicide attack in Atatürk airport but I don’t know that yet, won’t know that until later that evening when I’m hugging my wife in her mother’s apartment. My boy is sleeping soundly in the back room on two beds that have been pushed together. I go to check on him while my wife makes me a snack.
We sit together in the kitchen and she talks while I eat. She tells me that she’s been waiting for me. She tells me that the butterflies are just like the first time we met. Then she asks if I heard what happened.
When I turn my phone on, I get a few concerned texts from friends who knew I was flying to Istanbul today. Nothing from my folks. I text my parents to let them know I’m okay. They are like me, none the wiser, haven’t even heard that terrible news. I’ll read about it in the days to come, feel that now familiar numb sorrow at the senseless loss.
It’s late now and we’re both tired. We all sleep in the same bed, my wife, my son and I. I don’t sleep though, I lie awake and imagine I am lying on my tiled floor, watching as my son plays with his toys.
