‘Well, who is he?’

‘How the fuck do I know?’ Ian is irritable because he is shamed by being the messenger.

‘Shit.’ My hands are shaking, and I touch the lemonade scar, bumpy and numb beneath my hair. I touch it to calm myself, a nervous tic that connects me to childhood. I realise I’m scared. ‘I’m scared,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Ask her about it.’

‘How can I ask Sonja that? She won’t answer.’

‘Ask her anyway.’

And of course I go home and say nothing. Any words I can conjure up seem unequal to the task of asking Sonja. So we sit in silence, reading, as the sun falls behind the house, leaving the deck in shade.

* * *

I'm siting in Ian’s car, staring at the pedestrians toiling up Park Street and along the Triangle. Some are laughing, walking arm in arm, and I wonder how they do that. How can they do that when I’ve forgotten how? Ian slows down and touches my arm. He says nothing but points across the road to Brown’s and there’s Sonja, sitting out on the terrace, at one of the brushed zinc café tables, holding the hand of a blond, clean-shaven man.

‘Stop!’ I shout, and Ian swerves into the kerb, parks outside the J CR. We sit, saying nothing, watching my wife with another man. Even with her sunglasses on I’m aware of Sonja’s grey eyes looking at him. There’s something strange about the way he moves, the way he angles his head towards her, something awry about the way her hand drifts towards his and brushes it, guides it almost. They gather up bags and stand, their drinks finished, and a yellow Labrador hauls itself to its feet, shakes and looks up at the man, feebly wagging its tail. He feels for the clip on the dog’s yellow jacket and takes hold of the harness.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I whisper, ‘he’s blind. He’s fucking blind. What does she think she’s doing?’

Ian shrugs his massive black shoulders. ‘Well, you’re deaf,’ he signs.

JOAN

3 April 1999

Spring’s late this year and it’s very cold tonight. I sit here wrapped in a blanket on my deck, writing in the light-circle of a storm lamp, the ever-present bottle of whisky at my feet. I sit and look out over Thurlestone’s moonlit bay, the arch and its shadow dark against the shifting, constantly fracturing silver sea. All round the house behind me I can hear the sibilance of young leaves in the chestnuts, feel the spreading gloom of the plane trees. This is what I do every night: write my journal and drink glass after glass of fine whisky, listening to my trees grow old.

And I wonder, Was I a good mother? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I can say that I tried to be, that I tried to be the best I could be. But I’m not sure it was enough. When I see John now, which is not often, I wonder at the distance between us. I wonder if that distance, that gulf, opened Moses-like when I walked out of the hospital and he started to scream and I didn’t go back to comfort him, to fill his silence. I don’t know. I look back at my mother’s life and it’s so alien that I can’t even begin to decide whether I was as maternal, as comforting. I was alone, with a son who changed in a moment from a wild, almost dangerous, boy into a nervous, deaf adolescent. I didn’t know what to do, and who was I going to ask? Now they have all these help groups, counsellors, support networks, psychotherapists. Thirty years ago the only people I could have called to say that my son hadn’t spoken to me in two months, that he cried and whimpered in his sleep, that his father hadn’t visited … well, what’s the point? I could have talked all night but only to the men in white coats.