Page 71 of Mad About You

‘Was it anything in particular?’

‘I didn’t think so at the time, it just seemed to be all the paraphernalia. I had some awful association with it, the way you can never eat a certain food once it’s given you poisoning. Aged about twenty-five, having to make up excuses to my then-girlfriend about why I nearlyburst into tearswhen she thought it was funny to leap out from a cupboard on October thirty-first, while wearing a bed sheet …’

Harriet put a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh and said: ‘Sorry.’

‘It is funny, I know. I went to counselling, as CBT wasn’t as much of a thing then. To my amazement, we discovered that I’ve been repressing a memory from when I was seven. Of a pumpkin lantern in the back of a static caravan.’ He paused. ‘The counsellor’s talking me through this and as we dissect the scene – I forbid you to laugh at this – we find that the caravan with the pumpkin is rocking.’

Harriet wince-laughed. ‘Yikes.’

‘Yeah, yikes. What I’ve blocked out is that when I was seven years old, my dad took me on a “camping holiday”, and instead we went to a caravan park where his then-mistress was also staying. He dumps me with board games and bags of Wotsits and spends the whole time at hers. On Halloween, I’d got nervous being by myself and gone wandering the site, looking for him. Obviously I was too young to understandthe implications of any it. Why my dad disappeared for hours at a time, why there was a pleasant woman staying there who seemed to know him, and gave me sweets. Or why, on the way home, he wanted me to rehearse a story about the fishing we’d not done.’ Cal shook his head. ‘Looking at the pumpkin, I knew bad things were happening that I couldn’t give a name to. Therefore, the terrible associations. Unnamed fears are the worst fears, I think.’

He sighed, and Harriet committed that line to memory, for later examination.

‘By the age I was in counselling, I knew my dad was chronically faithless. Finding out I’d been directly exposed to it and used as an alibi, while he neglected me, gave me a whole new level of rage and disgust.’

Harriet grimaced. ‘That’s horrific. What if something had happened in the caravan he’d left a seven-year-old alone in?’

‘Oh totally. The revelation cured me of my pumpkin aversion, however. Carve all the gourds you want; I will not flinch.’

Harriet smiled and wondered at how much of the unruffled Cal she knew had been shaped by this. He’d seemed like someone very unfazed by life to her, until now.

‘Have you ever confronted him?’

‘Yes, we had a huge fight after he shagged my mate Lily when I was twenty, and didn’t speak for months. She was someone from a summer job in a pub I had. My dad gave her a lift home when she’d been round mine and wouldn’t you know it! He took ages. Turns out he’d had a “breakdown”. I waited up for him and when he gave me the AA calloutspiel I said,oh they dispense Viagra now, do they. All hell broke loose. We had a gigantic row. I didn’t move home after university as a result.’

‘Did he deny it?’

‘Oh, of course. Then when I made other accusations, I got lots of deflecting. Lots ofthat’s not what happenedandlife is complicatedandI don’t owe you an explanation of myself. He knows it’s indefensible, so you don’t get any sense out of him. Futile.’

‘I can’t believe he shagged a friend of yours! Ugh!’

‘It’s actually worse than that …’ Cal rubbed his temples. ‘I’m going to say this very fast so I’ve said it, and then we can never think about it again.I’d-slept-with-her-tooaaaaaaargh.’

‘Oh, God!’ Harriet said.

But instead of it only being discomfiting to him, it landed entirely differently than Harriet expected: she got an undeniable pang of possessiveness at this information.

It was as if a mist had lifted and the last hour’s events revealed themselves fully to her: Harriet wasn’t simply offended on a point of honour to overhear Cal say he wanted her to go. It was personal. She’d, against sense and logic, developed some kind of feelings for him. What an idiot. She bloody knew that having a heartbreakingly handsome landlord would come to no good. She definitely had to move out soon, for the opposite reason he thought.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Cal said.

‘Like what?’ Harriet said, startled. She very much hoped her specific emotions weren’t on display.

‘Like you think I should be sheep-dipped in Swarfega.’

‘Ah, well,’ Harriet cleared her throat. ‘At least you went first?’

‘Argh.It’s not going to be the thing you think of when you think of me from now on, is it?’ Cal said, looking genuinely rather upset.

‘Definitely not,’ Harriet responded, unable to say that what she’d just learned about herself bothered her more.

‘Where is your mum in all this?’ Harriet asked, thinking they both needed to move on from Lily’s multi-layered psychological impact.

‘My mum ignores it. She pretends it’s not happening. She’s like Tom Jones’ wife, except my dad’s not sold a hundred million records. At least Melinda got the Los Angeles mansion out of it.’

‘Your poor mum.’

‘Yeah. He had a dalliance with one of her friends when we were young and I think there was a proper bust-up over that, otherwise it’s a blind eye. I don’t know what it is, if she won’t be alone? Self-esteem thing? I got quite furious with her in my angry young man years. I wanted to know why she’d not leave him or at least call him out on it. She said, “your father and I are happy” and I was blowing up some old indiscretion into more than it was. I said, “Oh come on, he’s been in more beds than a travelling mattress salesman and you know it.” She looked devastated by that. I felt like a complete shit. I added to her humiliation.’

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