The Perfect Girl

TESSA

As I drive away from Chris and Maria’s house, I feel absolutely wrung out. It’s eleven o’clock at night and I need my bed. I send a text to Sam, who I hope isn’t waiting up for me, to say that I won’t be coming round because I need to go home and sleep. We didn’t have any sort of definite arrangement, but he knew I went to the concert alone, and that I might have an opportunity to visit him afterwards, so I feel I owe him the courtesy of letting him know at least.

I always feel guilty when I see Sam, and that’s never easy, but I don’t seem to be able to stop myself going back to him, because, although I love Richard, I’m tired of his joyless existence.

We’ve tried everything to lift Richard’s spirits: a chemical cosh, a course of therapy, a holiday, hobbies, a different diet, exercise, and more. And we’ve tried all kinds of different combinations of the above, but, in the end, none of them have worked.

Richard’s black dog is his constant companion, and he leavens the intensity of their relationship with alcohol. If I have a role in his life any more, it’s to make sure that while he’s in the teeth of the dog, the rest of his life doesn’t disappear. I do this because I hope that his depression will lift one day. If it never does, I’ve made a very bad call. His addiction will have got the better of me. It’s ironic, really, as it’s my life’s work to cure and to rehabilitate.

It means that I dread going home. I dread it every day. I dread the monotony of his despair and the way that he can leach the colours from everything. I dread his inability to enjoy even a hot cup of tea or the smell of a freshly plucked mint leaf. I sympathise with his feelings, because I understand depression, or at least I think I do, but I dread it too, with every cell of my body.

It was why I was extremely happy for Maria when she met Chris. She was in the teeth of the black dog too up until then, put there by Zoe and by the shock of the loss of their world on the farm in Devon. You don’t think of farming families imploding, or I never did. There’s something about the continuity of their way of life that makes it seem, from the outside, more stable than the choices the rest of us have made. But clearly, I was wrong. So when Maria met Chris, and things between them developed, I was glad for her, and I was glad for Zoe; in fact, I was unbelievably relieved.

Richard hasn’t found that thing which will allow a slice of light to pierce the darkness in his head yet, and if I’m honest I’m not sure why the darkness ever fell so completely. He had disappointment at work, for sure. He was passed over for a prestigious appointment, which should have been his, because he was never good at playing the politics in his department, but others have survived that kind of thing without succumbing to such a complete breakdown.

I sometimes wonder whether our childlessness has deprived him of what might have been a source of happiness. Would the Richard who worked so enthusiastically in his department, who loved to travel, who decorated our house, and so carefully planted up our garden in the early years, and dreamed of blooms and sunshine in the summer, have been saved by becoming a father? Would that have made the difference? Or would I have spent my time explaining to our confused offspring why Daddy wasn’t getting out of bed today, or hadn’t smiled even though it was Christmas.

I’ll never know; it’s just something I wonder about when I’m looking for reasons. Alone, I’m not enough to anchor Richard in the present, and so of course I wonder if a family would have been.

So many ‘what if’s. It’s something that must roll around Zoe’s head too. What if I hadn’t got in the car that night? What if I hadn’t gone to the party? When Zoe was in the legal process, surrounded by lawyers and court papers, and police reports, the thing that got to me was how her case bowed every head. Sam would talk about that too. How the police handled her with kid gloves, how everybody around her was sunk by the misfortune of her situation.

Maria would have felt the ‘what if’ factor then too. What if I hadn’t tried to save face? What if I’d let her plead guilty in the first instance? What if…

I park in the driveway of my house and, when I let myself in, I find that it’s completely quiet, though a light glows from the landing upstairs.

Richard is in our bed, on his back. He’s asleep and his snoring is loud and persistent. The bedroom is clear of bottles, but I find one stuffed into the poky dark area at the bottom of his cupboard. The neck of the bottle is still damp and smells of fresh wine. My heart sinks because it probably means he stashed it there before passing out on the bed, and that probably means that his bladder is full but he’ll be too drunk to feel it. I sigh because it means I’m going to have to wake him.

I spend a good ten minutes shaking him into a state resembling consciousness so that I can persuade him to pee. He manages it, unsteadily, lurching along the landing like the drunk he is, words slurring and sliding out of his mouth, as clumsy as his physical movements. When he’s done, he passes out on the bed again, exactly the same as before, and I’m left with aching arms and a pounding heart from supporting him down the corridor, from talking him through what he’s got to do, and from dodging the amorous advances that he always makes when he’s this far gone, but which we both know won’t amount to anything once he’s horizontal again.

Down in the kitchen I clear up the mess he’s made heating and eating the lasagne and I lock the back door, which he’s left wide open to the stifling night air.

Then I sit at the kitchen table, now scrubbed as clean as my surgery at work, and think about the conversation that he and I will have in the morning, an old conversation, where we both know our lines off by heart. It’s a conversation about going to rehab, and how I want him to, and how he doesn’t feel it’s necessary because he feels he can get better on his own, and when I think of that, and of Tom Barlow, and all the things Maria will be having to explain to Chris tonight, weariness and loneliness saturate me and make me cry, just for a moment or two. And suddenly I crave company, not sleep, so I do what I shouldn’t: I try to phone Sam.