Amy rolled her eyes towards the ceiling and took a deep breath before replying, and I looked away out of the kitchen window and tried to think about something else – anything else. ‘No, I do, Ben. I love your dad very much,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to live with him any more. I want to live with Ant.’
‘I’ll just stay here then, I think,’ Ben said matter-of-factly, as if the subject was now closed.
I heard Amy stifle a gasp.
‘The flat is a bit small for all three of you,’ I suggested, turning back to face them, trying to help Amy out by making this about the flat rather than about her. I could see she was close to tears. ‘Why don’t you leave Ben with me this week and see if you can get the other place sorted? You can take him out on Saturday or Sunday instead until you get a bigger place.’ I turned to Ben and asked, ‘Would that work better for you?’
Ben shrugged, but deigned to nod vaguely at the same time.
‘And then, once they’ve got a place where you have your own room, you can take some stuff over and make it your own, and stay there on school nights so that I can work late. OK?’
Ben took a fistful of Wotsits and stood without replying to the question. ‘Can I go now?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ I said, reaching out to ruffle his hair, but failing because he flinched from my touch.
The cat jumped up to take Ben’s warm seat the second he was gone, and as Ben left the room Amy stood. ‘I need to go now, as well,’ she said, giving Riley a brief stroke.
But as she moved towards the door, I jumped up and caught her by the sleeve. ‘Amy,’ I said. ‘Are you sure about this?’
She paused and looked back at me. ‘Am I sure?’
‘Yeah, are you sure?’
‘Well, it’s not ideal, is it?’ she said. ‘But I don’t really see that we have a choice.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ I told her. ‘I mean all of it. Are you sure this is what you want? Really?’
Amy shook her head. ‘No, Joe,’ she said, sounding sad. ‘No, I’m not. I’m not sure about anything any more. But for now, this is where I’m at, so . . .’
Once she had gone, I grabbed a beer from the fridge and necked it straight from the bottle. I thought about the fact of her not being sure any more and wondered if that opened a window of hope for our future. I hated myself a little for still wanting it. If I had more pride, I thought, I’d have closed that window myself.
I went upstairs to Ben’s room. He was playing Pac-Man on his new Atari console.
‘You OK, champ?’ I asked him.
He nodded, but didn’t pull his eyes from the screen.
‘Do you want to talk about all this, because I do get that it’s all a bit messy and difficult to understand.’
He shook his head and carried on playing.
‘I’m here for you, that’s all I’m trying to say.’
He shrugged.
‘I’m pretty good at Pac-Man, you know,’ I said, trying to sound chipper. ‘Do you want to challenge me?’
But again, my son just shook his head.
So that’s how things stayed throughout September. Ben lived with me, meaning that I had to come home early, and on Saturdays, while he spent the day with Amy and Ant, I’d do my best to catch up on work.
I worried constantly about my living arrangements, wondering why there had been no news of Amy’s move and expecting every crossing of our paths to be the one where she’d announce I had to leave.
I needed to knuckle down and find a place of my own to live in, I knew I did. But I was working like crazy, and my only day off – Sunday – was the day all the estate agents were closed.
The Internet, of course, remained open, and I did half-heartedly look at rentals on the laptop from time to time. But I couldn’t imagine myself in any of them. Moving out would seem like driving the final nail into the coffin of our marriage. As long as I was living here with Ben, there was something for Amy to come back to. Once I moved, it would be well and truly over.
On the last Saturday in September, news arrived that they had moved. It was Ben who told me, while Amy was turning her car around in the driveway. He was angry, confused and tearful. He didn’t want to stay there, he insisted.
I did my best to reason with him and I tried to get him to express why he was so upset. But the truth was that both were pointless because what Ben wanted was what I wanted: for everything to go back to the way it was before. And it simply wasn’t within my power to make that happen.
Finally, as I put him to bed that night, I told him to try it for a week, and if he really hated it, I’d call a meeting with his mother to see what could be done.
‘But I will hate it,’ he told me.
‘Then we’ll have that meeting and talk it all through together,’ I said. ‘We’ll come up with a different solution, but you have to try it for a week. Deal?’
‘You promise?’ he asked.
‘I promise,’ I told him solemnly.
In the end, not only did Ben not mind staying there, but I think he rather liked it. He never would have admitted that, though.
Ant and Amy spoiled him rotten, letting him buy pretty much anything he wanted for his room, and by the end of October this had become nothing more than routine: weekends with Dad and week nights with Mum and Ant. It never ceases to amaze me how resilient kids are about change – perhaps it’s because their brains are still growing.
My own brain had long since lost all flexibility. I hated the
