It's Friday night and I'm sitting in the conservatory, watching the repeats of the earlier Superleague game.
It's after midnight, and the girls are in bed. I can hear what's going on in their bedroom via the baby alarm; they're seven and nine, but their bedroom is at the front of the house and the conservatory at the back, so we still use the baby alarm.
Karen's out. She's doing the rounds of the pubs with her workmates, celebrating one of the lasses coming back to work after childbirth with a drinking session in Durham city centre. I'm not really baby sitting; the girls are too old for that. I'm just having a beer and watching the sports channels. It's a dad's equivalent of multi tasking, with the silence of the girls bedroom as a kind of empty soundtrack. It's like meditation, listening to silence and interpreting it as signals that everything's OK.
It's not far off half-time in the game when I hear Karen come in. She comes in the front door, at the diagonally opposite corner of the house to the conservatory, and heads straight into the kitchen. I'm bored enough with the rugby to go across to meet her, through the office and the dining room.
She's standing at the worktop, mixing sparkling mineral water and apple juice in a glass. She doesn't look that drunk. Tipsy maybe, but not falling down drunk. Her lipstick has gone, and if she'd been more sober I'd have made a joke of that, but not tonight. Her hair is tousled out of its normal feathered bob, not in a 'through a hedge backwards' kind of way, but in a way that's not usual for Karen. She looks like she's had an energetic night. I've seen her spend five minutes using the vanity mirror in the car to put her hair right after a walk round Tesco's, so maybe energetic isn't the right word.
Then I notice the mark.
It's a white stain on the front of her trousers. They're trousers she's incredibly fond of; a soft cheesecloth like material, but brown so that they're not so see through. The stain's the shape and size of a teaspoon, the handle part running down towards the thigh. Instinctively, in that pattern matching way that our brains work, I know it's a man made stain, evidence that she's been with a guy.
What to do? I could ignore it, but I'm angry and miserable at the same time. We haven't had sex in two weeks, and we haven't had good sex in months. It's been a bone of contention between us. Karen's become nervous and fretful in bed; the girls will hear, or she has to be up for work, or it's the wrong time, or a hundred other reasons. None of them are the root cause. The root cause is we've stopped trying.
Why've we stopped trying? Because it's easier than arguing. Because arguments about different tastes or how we feel about each other scare us both. I have my tastes in sex, and Karen feels they're too different to what she wants. It's not a frequent argument; it's been too fraught when we've had the argument to repeat the experience. That doesn't mean the argument has gone away; we both fear the intensity of the argument and what it might say about a relationship we both enjoy. Nothing about those arguments made me think that Karen would cheat on me though. I tried to laugh it off, to make clear I'd seen the stain but thought nothing of it. She took one look down and ran out of the room; by the time I'd followed her upstairs she'd bolted the bedroom door.
I was pissed off, at myself as well as at her. Did I mishandle the situation? I didn't make a fuss, didn't stamp and shout, just went downstairs to the conservatory and watched the rest of the rugby. Not much else I could do. Not without waking the girls. So I watched rugby, set the alarm on my phone and tried to sleep with a sofa cushion for a pillow. It wasn't the pillow that kept me half awake; it was the reality of a relationship that we both liked too much to give up on while not wanting to give up enough of ourselves to make it work.
I needed the alarm set because I'd promised to drop the girls at their grandmother's house at half seven on Saturday morning. They were going to spend the weekend at Haggerston Castle; all we had to do was drop them off and let gran take over. After four hours of fitful tossing and turning on the conservatory sofa I managed to get the girls up, dressed and to their gran's on time. If she noticed that I was a little dishevelled I think Gran assumed I was suffering from drink. She's not always thought the best of me.
I stopped on the way home and bought a paper. It gave me more time to wonder what on earth I'd say to Karen when I arrived. I'm not in the paper reading habit, not since the web happened. I stood in front of the rack and tried to work out which paper summed me up. Guardian? Daily Mail? I settled for the Journal, complete with a weighty property supplement in full colour. I did ask myself what Karen would be feeling or if she'd have anything to say to me, but mainly I used the time to think about how I felt, and what our marriage said about me.
She was in the kitchen when I arrived, dressed in her gym gear; grey sweatpants, a yellow tee shirt with a round neck and thick leg warmers above her trainers. Her hair was pinned back by steel hair grips, away from her face, tight around her ears. If I had to guess I'd have said she hadn't had a good night's sleep either.
She was making toast and coffee, and took an extra mug out of the cupboard when I came in. It seemed natural for me to sit down on a stool and wait for her to decide to speak. So I sat and waited while she fussed with the coffee pot, meticulously wrapping a paper towel around it, depressing the plunger slowly and methodically. It was a study in precision and tidiness. She put the mug in front of me without any eye contact, and went back to stand on the other side of the island unit, as if she was putting space between us.
I waited. I didn't figure there was anything to be gained by making the running. Better to let her start the conversation. She started to speak, paused and then started again.
"I'm not going to argue or have to defend myself..."
I took a swig of coffee, wondered if I'd conjured the bitter flavour out of my subconscious, then put the cup down and picked my words.
"That wasn't what I had in mind."
"So what did you have in mind?" The stress on 'did' suggested she genuinely didn't know.
"You were the one who seemed upset last night Karen, not me. I'm just keen to see you be happy..."
"So why did you have to comment about it? Why couldn't you just ignore it?"
If you think about it, feeling bitter is a strange expression. We don't say we feel sweet when it's something we like; so why do we say we feel bitter? Probably because you can taste the bitterness that comes to your mind at times like this. There was nothing wrong with the coffee. It's bile and inner hurt that burns in your throat with the flavour of stomach acid.
"It only has to be ignored if it's a bad thing. What if it's not a bad thing?"
Karen looked away again, as if the answer was outside the kitchen window.
"If I did something wrong, it's because something's wrong in our marriage. If I didn't do something wrong, then I didn't know it was okay to do it and that means something's wrong..."
I smiled at her. I couldn't help it.
"You call me complicated..."
She screwed up her face, angry and yet unable to hold the mood.
