Read by Katy Darby (fourth story in podcast here, at 47:25)
It was that limbo week between Christmas and New Year, five years ago. It was the first limbo week I had spent alone with the kids, after their dad left me. I say me, because he insisted he did not leave them, only me. I say left, because he said I was being melodramatic when I used the word abandoned, and so even now, in private, between you and me, I’ll try not to be melodramatic. Even now, his version of events wins out. Even now, I can be charmed by him, as is everyone, still.
Zach, as round as he was tall, was playing on the floor with Duplo. I kneeled next to him and passed him bricks, while Lily lay on her stomach and watched TV. She told me without moving her head that there were so many presents under Daddy’s tree, they reached higher than the star.
Oh yes, who were they all from? I asked, with assumed brightness.
Grandma and Grandpa, Auntie Emily, Daddy, oh, and one from the girl at Daddy's work.
The girl at Daddy's work?
You know, Becky, who works in the office.
I didn’t know, because I’d never met Becky, though I knew her name. She had started in the office shortly before Matt left me. My heart beat faster. My voice grew higher.
Oh. That's nice of her. What did she get you?
A board game.
Lily’s legs were bent up at the knees, socked feet crossed in the air, her head propped uncomfortably on her hands. She stared ahead at the TV, frowning. I handed Zach a red arch, to build a bridge. Which game, darling?
I don't know, we haven't played it yet.
What colour is the box? I pressed on, needing more details to skewer myself with.
I don’t know. Green? Dark blue maybe?
Oh, Triv! I exclaimed, too loudly. Zach looked up at me, a thickset Duplo postman clasped in his plump hand.
Trivial Pursuit? Am I right?
I don't know Mum. Lily pushed her hair out of her eyes and frowned harder at the glowing screen. We. Haven't. Played. It. Yet.
I touched Zach’s head. He looked up at me. I whispered, Is Becky Daddy's new girlfriend?
Zach pulled himself up to standing, and put his chubby arms around my neck. His sticky hands rested in my hair. Yes Mummy, he said seriously. Becky is Daddy's new girlfriend.
He pulled me towards him and kissed me all over my face, though I knew he didn’t know, and that he didn’t even know what he was saying, or what I was asking and that I was just hurting myself for putting those words in his mouth, that warm, cherubic mouth that kept kissing me, even after his father no longer would.
Mushroom! Lily shouted suddenly. Mushroom! It’s not true Mum, Daddy doesn’t have a girlfriend. Zach doesn’t know anything.
I knew that. Matt said there was nobody else and I believed him. He was a good man. I knew he only left me because he had no choice. It was the bravest thing he’d ever done, he told me.
After Matt left me, my dad told me he would have left me too. That I am too much.
That is the narrative Matt spun, and that rests lightly over everything still. That he left because I am too much. He told me that, five years ago, sitting in a darkened pub. He stayed for 15 minutes to tell me that my constant criticism had left barbs in his skin that would never come out. I was shaking, and yet even in that moment when everything was lost, I looked at his strong white arms that lay on the table, shirt sleeves rolled up, and I swooned. I went to touch them, and he flinched, and moved his arms away, and my blood ran cold and I didn’t dare try and touch him again. I never touched him again. He got up and left then, and I stumbled outside and rolled myself a cigarette, still shaking, while a mum I knew from school looked at me through the pub window, then averted her eyes when I caught them.
He was a good man, everyone agreed. I was lucky to meet him when I did, 38 and at last-chance saloon. When I told my nan he was good at DIY, she lifted her stringy arms above her head and shook her fists and shouted, That is what you want!
He bought me designer dresses, cooked roast lamb with potato gratin, and apple crumble for pudding. He plastered our ceilings, installed toilets, built gazebos and dug vegetable gardens. He was too good to be true. He got up early with the children every morning, played with Lego, built marble runs, but he was always gone by 7, because he was a hard worker. A provider.
Then, he would hand me the children, wide awake, but I would be sleep-stuffed. I should have enjoyed these lie-ins but instead I felt left out. So why didn't I get up, regardless of how tired I was from breastfeeding through the night? Because I didn't have to. Because he did.
After he left me, I’d lie in bed still, unable to move, but this time pinned down by the reel that played in a loop in my head, reliving the moment he left me, and all the moments before that might hold clues as to how this came to pass. The conclusion was always the same – that it was all my fault, firing those barbs. How could I get up, knowing the devastation I’d caused?
Zach, then two years old, would pull on me and scream at me to get up but I was numb, nauseous, immersed in painful reverie. Instead, seven-year-old Lily took him downstairs and made their cereal. She found the Ws, his favourite letter, from the Alphabites box and he would line them up by his bowl. She got annoyed if he picked out Ms and said they were Ws as the angles were not right. She knew not to use the toaster or the kettle by herself, and so she would bring me up brioche and milk, as if I were the child, and she the parent, and that is what we were.
At bedtime, when reading to Zach, my voice would turn ugly and strange when Stick Man found his way home to his family, or, after the Tiger had eaten all the food, and drunk all the drink, Sophie and her Mummy heard Daddy’s key in the lock.
Lily would come into the bedroom with her hands on her hips and tell me, You need to get on with your own life Mum.
But Zach would wipe away my tears, and kiss my cheeks, and I would fall asleep in the crook of his arm, and wake up with his large round toddler head high above mine on the pillow, his short pudgy arm around my shoulder, like a tiny boyfriend.
I would get up then, and go into Lily’s room, and apologise over and over to her, and in the end she had to have a safe word, to use when I said too much, or started talking about my feelings.
Mushroom.
The pain was enough to slay me. My barbs might be in his skin, but he’d pushed a knife deep into my stomach and my blood was gushing out, and I didn’t know how to make it stop. I drove too fast down quiet streets and out of junctions without looking, on purpose, the children oblivious in the back. Walking along the pavement with Zach’s small hand in mine, I resisted the urge to step out in front of traffic, but only because Lily was at school and I couldn’t leave her behind.
I piled up sleeping pills given to me by my GP to get me through, because I had to stay strong for the children, and planned how I would crush them up and put them in their milk and then we’d all get in bed and take them together and that was the best way because I couldn’t leave them, but I also couldn’t do this for one more day. I couldn’t do this, without him, and with the knowledge it was all my fault.
I was too much, even for me.
I paid $50 to a stranger on the internet who guaranteed he could get my boyfriend back. Every morning I would wake to an email from Kevin in Minnesota, with a daily task that, if followed assiduously, Matt would come back and everything would be all right.
Thanks for purchasing the Ex Back Permanently program. According to the questions you answered, you have a 43 percent chance to get your ex-boyfriend back.
My therapist, Parvita, insisted it was not my fault, despite my insistence to the contrary. She insisted, week after week, that I never stood a chance, that for years, without my knowledge, Matt was chalking up my misdemeanours, collecting evidence against me. The word chalk, and the way Parvita rolled it in her mouth, as if the word itself was made of chalk, fascinated me. Her Indian enunciation, clear and pronounced, turned the word chalk into chalk. She repeated it, Matt chalked up this evidence against you. I could see the words on the wall, written in white chalk. They left dust in my mouth.
On holidays he would take the children off so I could sunbathe. He did all the washing-up. He bought me a vintage Saab as a surprise, despite telling me we couldn’t afford a new car. He went skiing with his friends after telling me we couldn’t afford a holiday. He told me he was too busy to come to Lily’s tonsilitis pre-op and so I took her with Zach strapped to my chest and when the three of us were shooed out of St Thomas’s because of the chicken pox appearing in real time on Zach’s head, and I called his work to let him know, they told me he was busy clearing leaves off the roof, so couldn’t come to the phone. He secretly bought drugs to take at his 40th birthday party, a week before Zach’s due date.
My dad said he would have left me too, but the difference is, he would have come back.
*
This Christmas, five years after that first, terrible one, Matt called to let me know he was in a new relationship, and wanted to introduce her to the children. It was good of him, my friends agreed, to let me know first.
What’s her name, I asked?
You don’t know her, he said. It’s a girl from work. She joined after we split up.
What’s her name, I repeated, although I knew it already.
Lily is 13 now, still bold and brave. She’s putting Zach to bed at this moment so I can write these words to you. She reads him stories and never cries at the end, but then he’s eight now and the stories end with poo jokes instead of a yearning for what we don’t want any more.
Matt is in a WhatsApp group with my parents, that he set up, so he could share pictures of their grandchildren with them. I’m not in the group. They tell me how much they enjoy seeing pictures of the children.
Matt is still a good man, out in the world, outside this story, in the other narrative that everyone lives by, my parents, my children, Becky, even me, but no longer in this secret one, that I write to you.
Mushroom.
(c) Melanie Carvalho, 2023
Melanie Carvalho (left) is a writer and artist, and an obituaries editor for The Guardian. She is currently working on her first novel, Xim, which was longlisted for the inaugural Cheshire novel prize, and is one of this year’s London Library emerging writers cohort.
Katy Darby writes novels & short stories, teaches Creative Writing at City, University of London, runs Liars’ League & won the Ronny Schwartz scholarship to the Oxford School of Drama. She’s appeared in over 40 productions in Oxford, Edinburgh & London.
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