‘I wouldn’t say his name. Not until you say it first,’ Joe said quickly.
We both stayed quiet for a few minutes as I let the reality of Joe’s words sink in. I had done this before. Twice before. Once just three weeks after it happened, and the last time about a year later. They were both boys. Around four years old.
‘Although there is the other thing to consider,’ Joe said eventually.
‘I know what you’re going to say.’ I looked away. I could feel the stinging sensation of tears now prickling behind my eyes. Joe was the only one who could extract this sort of emotion from me.
‘I know you know what I’m going to say, and I think that’s why you are here, why you have said that you have had all these feelings recently again. I think the real reason you came, the real reason you wanted to see me and assess your emotions, was because you needed someone else to say it. To verify it.
‘I think you are ready to be a mother again. I think you want to see him again, your other son. And I think you know he is missing you. He’s what? Fifteen now? I think it’s time.’
29
Then
Olga, it turned out, was a nice woman; a good egg. She was incredibly helpful and didn’t ever overstep the mark. She was polite and always checked with me if something needed doing before she did it. When I finally got over the shock of her presence, I began to ask her some questions about herself.
She said she was twenty-five, yet she looked so much older, as though she had been through so much already. I tried to extract more information from her, such as where she came from and what work she had done before, but she was good at holding back information. I even had the courage to ask her how much D was paying her. Her face went pale and she said, ‘He has been very generous.’
Her answer made my blood run cold. Was she offering him services separate to the housework, or was he taking advantage of her? Even though I hated him for every bruise he had given me, he was my first love. I still felt a spark of something for him, some kind of ownership. He may have been cruel and flawed in many ways, but he was all I had.
D was away more and more, and so we women fell into a routine of waking early with the baby. I would chat away to Olga whilst she mopped and tidied. She even took over the cooking, which, in a way, was a relief, but it also meant that I never really learned how to cook; something that made me quite sad. I had wanted my husband and then my son to look at me with gratitude when I presented them with a hearty meal.
I suppose it was a blessing when Olga arrived. It would have been so lonely with just me and the baby otherwise. It was nice to have someone in the house with me, day and night; someone I could rely on to be consistent with their behaviour. When it was just us girls in the evening, we would pour ourselves a small glass of sweet wine, wrap ourselves in cardigans and blankets and sit out on the patio under the gas heater. We would giggle about stories we had seen in the news or TV programmes we had watched. I enjoyed having a girl around that I could relate to. I was so young, even though I did not feel it at the time. The saddest part was it made me realise I had never actually had a girlfriend before. I was so busy being there for Mum and then the first time I moved out, it was to be with D, so friends had always fallen by the wayside. There weren’t any siblings or friends who were doing the domestic-bliss thing that I could relate to. It was just me. I knew deep down that there was something fundamentally wrong between me and D, that this wasn’t the usual set-up; this was not how families worked. I even knew then I should have been fearing for the safety of my child more. I knew he wasn’t safe, and yet I did nothing to protect him. I stayed. I don’t know why. I suppose I had nowhere else to go? If I left and went to my mum’s, he would only come for me and how would my mum – as frail as a ninety-year-old woman at just forty-five – protect herself and two others? I would not want to put that stress on her. She deserved a quiet life. She had suffered enough already.
One day, D came home and found Olga and I stood at the kitchen island laughing so hard over something that had begun with an unusually shaped vegetable and evolved as the wine took hold of us.
I froze when he walked into the room. His jaw was set hard, his eyes fixed on me; he was ready to pounce. I could feel my heart pounding hard in my throat. But Olga was up and round the other side of the island, talking quickly at him. First, a string of compliments about the house, how much she had settled, how grateful she was. Then she told him to get himself comfortable in the lounge. She told him how I had been assisting her with his dinner preparations and it was almost ready. I watched in wonder how the tension in his jaw slackened and his eyes were drawn away from me and towards the cold beer Olga was handing him. He shuffled out of the room, clutching his beer, to the sofa where he would probably drink himself unconscious later.
Olga returned to the island and busied herself finishing the meal. She must have
