Truly Madly Guilty

It's past crunch time, Sam. You need to get over it, to get on with it, leave a goddamned umbrella at the front door. Why did tiny things like that seem so impossible these days? Ruby's head tipped gently against his arm. He pulled up the armrest and she snuggled up to him.

Clementine was getting on with it. He'd seen something change in her after the visit from Vid and Tiffany and Dakota. 'I feel better after seeing them,' she'd said, 'don't you?' He'd wanted to shout, 'No! I feel worse! I feel much worse!'

Did he actually shout that at her? He couldn't remember. He was becoming a shouter, like his own father used to be, before age softened him.

He shifted about in his seat.

'You're wriggling,' whisper-shouted Holly.

'Sorry,' said Sam. The popcorn tasted like salt and butter-flavoured cardboard but he couldn't stop eating it.

Yes, something was definitely changing in Clementine. There was a new impatience about her, a brittleness, except brittleness implied fragility and she didn't seem fragile, she seemed fed up. She wanted to move on from Ruby's accident and she was right. There was no point dwelling on it. There was no point replaying it over and over. Sam had always considered himself the more emotionally resilient one in their relationship. Clementine was the one who made too big a deal of things, who got dramatic, sometimes to the point of hysteria, over tiny things, like her auditions, for example, although of course auditions weren't tiny, they were a big deal, and nerve-racking, he got that, but she used to let them consume her. Once Sam had heard Holly telling Ruby, 'Mummy is sick with an audition.' And he'd laughed because it was exactly like that. An audition hit her like a virus.

But that didn't seem to be the case with this latest audition, even though it was one of the most important of her career. She wasn't saying a word about it. She was just getting on with her practice. Sam wasn't even exactly sure of the audition date, even though he knew it had to be coming up soon.

Once, he would have been able to say exactly how many days it was until an audition because that was how many days it would be until he'd be getting sex again. But that was a long time ago, when sex was still a natural, normal part of the equation, before it got complicated. It was strange how sex had got so complicated, because for many years he would have said it was the least complicated aspect of their relationship. He would have put money on it staying that way.

Right from the beginning, their very first time, it had felt so natural. Their bodies and libidos had been in perfect sync. He'd been in enough relationships to know that sex often started out awkward before it got good, but with Clementine it was straight away good. There were other red flags about their relationship: he wasn't musical, she'd never even been on a date with a non-musician before; he wanted a big family, she could have been satisfied with an only child. But there was never a red flag over sex. He actually remembered thinking, in his youthful, innocent, idiotic way, that their amazing sexual compatibility was proof that they were meant to be together because that's when they were their honest, true, raw selves. The rest was nothing but details.

Sam and Clementine had never needed to talk about sex, and that was such a relief after Daniella, his previous girlfriend, who he had very nearly married, and who had liked to discuss and dissect their sex life, and to follow each encounter with an immediate debrief: How can we work together to achieve better outcomes next time? (She was a business consultant. She didn't use those words but he could feel their intention.) Daniella had no qualms about beginning a conversation over the breakfast table with a comment like, 'When I was blowing you last night ...' which would make him choke on his cereal and blush like an altar boy. ('So cute!' Daniella would crow.)

He loved the fact that he and Clementine kept an element of mystery about their sex life. They treated it with a shy kind of reverence. Sex was like a beautiful secret between them.

But maybe Daniella had had the right idea all along. Maybe all that bloody reverence had been their downfall, because when their sex life slowly changed and began to seem perfunctory and rushed, they didn't have the words to talk about it. He couldn't work out if Clementine even liked sex anymore (and he didn't want to hear the answer if it was no). The idea of 'performance' had begun to announce itself in his head. Everything still operated as it should but for the first time ever he'd begun to wonder how he compared to those ex-boyfriends; if their musical ability had somehow translated into sexual ability.

He had known it was probably nothing. All parents of young kids went through this. It was so common it was a cliche. There would be a renaissance, he had told himself. When both girls started sleeping reliably through the night. When they weren't so tired and stressed. He had been looking forward to the renaissance.

And then that night of the barbeque it had seemed like Tiffany was offering them the key to the door they'd accidentally closed on themselves. She was the gorgeous ringmaster crying, 'Right this way for amazing sex again, folks!' It had suddenly seemed so easy again. He'd seen it on Clementine's face. She'd seen it on his.

And then the universe had seen fit to punish them for their selfishness in the cruellest way imaginable.

He saw it again: Oliver and Erika lifting up his baby girl. He saw it a dozen times a day. A hundred times. He would never, could never, get over it. He couldn't see a way out of this. There was no solution here. He had to change something. Fix something. Break something. He remembered how Clementine had flinched when he talked about separating. For a moment she'd looked like a frightened child. He felt bad, or he was aware that he should have felt bad, but really he felt numb and strangely detached, as if it was somebody else who was saying these cruel things to his wife.

'Daddy,' said Holly. 'You've eaten it all!'

Sam looked at the empty bucket of popcorn.

'Sorry,' he whispered. He couldn't even remember eating it.

'That's not fair!' Holly's enraged face was illuminated by the light from the screen.

'Shh,' he said helplessly. His throat felt scratchy. There were tiny flakes of corn kernel stuck between his teeth.

'But I hardly got any!' Her voice rose to an unacceptable level. Someone muttered disapprovingly in the row behind.

'If you can't be quiet we're going,' said Sam in a low, shaky voice.

'Greedy Daddy!' she shouted, and she snatched the container and threw it on the aisle floor next to her. It was calculated, wilful naughtiness. It couldn't be ignored.

Bloody hell. He picked up the soggy umbrella at his feet, lifted the dead weight of Ruby over one shoulder, stood, and grabbed Holly by the wrist. Something twinged painfully in his lower back.

Holly screamed blue murder as he dragged her out of her seat and into the aisle.

Consequences. He and Clementine made fun of that sort of parenting jargon but Holly and Ruby had to learn what it had taken Sam all these years to discover: Life was all about consequences.

chapter seventy-four