Page 27 of Things We Never Said
He has always known that neither of his parents approved of his marriage to Catherine, but he always saw it as little more than part and parcel of their generalised disapproval of everything he did.
But he hadn’t known that his mother had actually had words with Catherine. He never knew that she had been rude to her, and on their wedding day to boot.
As he clicks on the corner of a window and resizes it to fit the proportions of the wall, a rattling sound startles him, and he looks up to see that it has started to rain heavily. The wind is blowing the rain against the eastern windows with gusto.
The rain on the windows is actually a blessing in disguise, because Sean realises that he has forgotten an essential part of the brief for this job, namely that the windows must be cleanable from the inside, without ladders or any form of external access. He’ll just have to change the hinge mechanism so that they can flip over 180 degrees for cleaning purposes. He really needs to stop thinking about Catherine and his mother. He really needs to concentrate.
In a way he blamed Catherine a little for her fraught relationship with his mother, he realises. Oh, he blamed his mother more, but if he’s honest with himself, it was only because it was easier for him that way. It was Catherine he lived with, not his mother, after all.
He tries to think back to all the times he and Catherine discussed his parents. Though he can’t remember actually having reproached her in any way, there were times, he reckons, when he could perhaps have been a little more understanding. He could have apologised more often for his parents’ behaviour.
The last tape message made him angry, specifically because he had wasted the entire Saturday visiting Cynthia at The Cedars. The message made him wish he hadn’t bothered. It had made him want to never bother again.
But this familiar feeling puts him in conflict with himself. It pits the Sean who wants to be loyal to his dead wife against the Sean who feels obligated towards his parents no matter what they might have said or done. Lordy, those blood ties run deep.
It’s just before three when Sean gets home, and though the sky is threatening, the rain has now stopped.
On the doorstep, he finds a family-sized apple crumble. It’s wrapped in a plastic bag, which also contains a Post-it note from Maggie.
Came to see you but you’re out! Which is a good thing! Eat this! Love Mags. xxx
Sean lets himself into the house and peers into the empty refrigerator before heating up half of the apple crumble in the microwave. He had been intending to order a pizza, but he suddenly finds himself too hungry to wait.
While he waits for the microwave to goping, he pulls the box from the cupboard and retrieves the next envelope.
Snapshot #9
Polaroid, colour. Faded. An exhausted, shiny-faced woman holds a swaddled baby in her arms. The baby’s face is almost as pink and blotchy as the mother’s.
‘Huh,’ Sean says, fondly. He reaches out and runs the tip of his finger over April’s tiny head, as if, perhaps, he might once again feel the warmth of her newborn skin.
He had been desperate to touch her, that was the thing. It had seemed as if only touching her skin would make the moment real.
The labour had been difficult. Actually, he hadn’t known at the time whether this labour was more or less difficult than your ‘average’ labour, but certainly no one could, or ever did, describe Catherine’s labour as ‘easy’.
She had screamed and screamed for hours. She had screamed blue bloody murder. She had begged him to make it stop, as if such a thing was somehow in his power. Was this not his fault, after all? She had cried that it was a mistake, that her mother was right, that she wasn’t ready for this, that she’d never be ready for this.
All of this, the nurses assured him, was ‘normal’.
Eventually, the screaming had stopped and his fear that Catherine was dying had been replaced by fear that something was wrong with the baby. Because this baby looked like no baby he had ever seen on television. This baby, covered in blood and blotches, looked like a baby from a horror film.
The nurses told him that this too was normal, but he hadn’t been convinced.
But as soon as she had cried, everything changed and he had switched from being scared to being desperate to touch her, just to confirm to himself that she was real. She had looked so much like a tiny, plastic dolly, albeit a tiny, plastic Halloween dolly.
When he did get to hold her, a strange sense of pride had washed over him and the concept of ‘unconditional love’, which he had recently discussed with Alistair, suddenly made sense. He understood only then how you could love someone, how you could be proud of someone, simply because they were, simply because they existed. He had vowed, then, never to be like his own parents, whose love had always seemed entirely conditional on recent performance. He had promised himself that he would never allow himself to forget this feeling no matter who April became, no matter what she ended up doing, no matter what her life choices turned out to be.
Alternating in waves with that sense of pride was fear. Because being a father felt like a whole different thing. It felt vast and terrifying. And in those moments of fear, everything his parents had said, everything Perry had said, seemed true. Because no, he wasn’t sure about this. And no, he wasn’t ready for this at all.
A nurse had taken April from his arms and handed her back to Catherine then, and this had prompted Catherine to start crying. Her emotions would be all over the place for weeks to come, but they didn’t know that yet.
As Catherine wept, her tears falling on baby April’s face, Sean had momentarily returned to his initial fears that something wasn’t right with the baby. Catherine had now, he thought, spotted it, too. It was the only explanation he could come up with for her looking and sounding so heartbroken.
He had tried to comfort her then, but she had laughed maniacally through her tears, insisting that she was fine.
Even this, the nurse said, was normal. Nurses, it seemed, had different definitions for words like ‘normal’.
‘Go get yourself a hot chocolate from the machine at the end of the corridor,’ the nurse had told him. ‘Give us a chance to clean things up here, eh?’
