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thanks). She would threaten to report me to the authorities for being an unfit mother. Kate, she told me, would be put in a foster home.
So I would have a bath every day or so.
Grudgingly.
But perhaps I wasn't a pig. I honestly couldn't remember the last time I had eaten anything. I was never hungry. The thought of eating something scared the life out of me. I knew that I wouldn't be able to. I felt frozen. As if my throat was blocked up and I wouldn't ever be able to swallow any- thing.
I couldn't believe that this was happening to me--I'd always had a very robust appetite. When I was pregnant, it was better than robust, more like steel-reinforced. I spent my teenage years praying desperately to be anor- exic. I never lost my appetite, no matter what the occasion. Exam nerves, job interviews, wedding day jitters, food poisoning--nothing short of death made the slightest difference to my ability to eat like a racehorse. Whenever I met a thin person who would trill, "Oh, silly old me, I simply forget to eat," I would stare with ill-concealed bafflement and bitterness, feeling unglamorous and lumpy and bovine. The lucky bitches, I would think. How could anyone forget to eat? I had an appetite--what an untrendy and shameful thing to have.
Because when the world ends and we have shuffled off our mortal coils and we're all in Heaven and time ceases to exist and we are pure of spirit and have eternal life, which we will spend contemplating the Almighty, I will still need a Kit Kat every morning at eleven o'clock.
But I would console myself with the thought that these skinny people were probably lying through their teeth. They were really raging bulimics or taking amphetamines or having liposuction every weekend.
The days dragged on. Sometimes I would get out of bed and take Kate downstairs to watch a soap opera with Mum. I would have a cup of tea with her and then I would go back to my room.
Helen continued to plague me. Three days after the baby intercom was installed she tiptoed very elaborately into the room. "Is that on?" she mouthed, pointing at the intercom.
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"What?" I asked crossly, looking up from my copy of a magazine. "No, of course it's not on. Why the hell would it be? Kate is here and so am I."
"Fine," she said, "fine, fine." With that she doubled over with mirth. She sat on the bed, shaking with laughter; tears ran down her face. I sat and stared at her with ill-concealed distaste.
"Sorry," she said, wiping her eyes and trying to assemble herself. "Ahem, right, sorry, sorry."
"What's going on?" I asked as Helen sat up straight.
"I'll show you now," she promised. "But you're not to make any noise."
She went over to the intercom and switched it on and started to say things into it in a croony, singsongy type of voice. "Anna," she crooned, "oooooohhhhhh, Aaaaaaannnaaaaaa."
I stared in fascination. "What on earth are you doing?" I asked.
"Shut up," she hissed as she turned the intercom off. "I'm giving Anna a psychic experience, d'you see?"
Still the rain bucketed down. The canal burst its banks. Roads were impass- able. Cars were abandoned in flooded lanes. I heard about all these things from other people, as I never left the house.
I thought about James all the time. I would dream about him. Lovely dreams where we were still together. And when I woke up I would forget, for a few minutes, where I was and what had happened. I would be bathed in a gorgeous warm fuzzy happy feeling. And then I would remember. It was like being kicked in the stomach.
I had heard nothing from him. Absolutely nothing. I really had thought that after a week or so he would contact me. Just to see how I was or at least how Kate was. I couldn't believe that he had no interest at all in Kate, regardless of me.
The saddest thing of all was that he didn't even know her name was Kate.
I rang Judy when I'd been back in Dublin about five days. I asked her if James knew where I was and held my breath. Hoping and hoping that she would say that, no, he didn't
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know. That would at least explain why he hadn't contacted me. But she said, sadly, that James did know. Then, though it tore me apart to do so, I asked her if James was still with Denise. Once again, she said yes.
I felt, not that I was crying inside, but that I was bleeding inside. Bleeding to death.
I thanked Judy, and hung up the phone. My hands shook, my forehead sweated, I felt sick at heart.
There were times when I felt that James really would come back, sooner or later. That he had loved me so much that he just couldn't stop loving me overnight. That it was just a matter of time before he appeared on the doorstep, distraught with remorse, beside himself with guilt, wondering if it was too late to reclaim his wife and child. And, in that case, that it might be an idea to get out of bed and wash my hair and put on some makeup and wear some decent clothes in honor of his imminent arrival. But then I remembered what a contrary bastard Fate is. The more hideous I looked, the higher were the chances that James would arrive out of the blue.
So I stayed in the nightgown, the golfing sweater and the hiking socks. I wouldn't have known what lipstick was if it jumped up and bit me.
I often felt like calling him. But it always happened in the middle of the night. I would be gripped by terrible panic at the enormity of my loss. But I had no idea how to contact him. I hadn't been able to humble myself sufficiently to ask Judy for the phone number of the apartment he was sharing with Denise. I could have called him at work during the day, but the anxiety and the desire to talk to him never really came upon me in the daytime. I was really very glad about this. What good would calling him do? What could I say to him?
"Do you still not love me? Do you still love Denise?" To which he would reply, "No to the first question, yes to the second. Thank you for asking. Goodbye."
Time passed. Slowly, very slowly, my feelings started to change. The landscape of the desert changes very gradually as little breezes lift grains of sand and move them, sometimes a few feet, sometimes miles and miles, so that at the end of the day, when the sun sets, the face of the desert is completely
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different from the landscape it had in the morning when the sun rose on it. In the same way, tiny little changes happened in me.
But they were nearly too small for me to notice them as they were hap- pening.
It wasn't so much that the lead weight of hopelessness had left. But something else had arrived. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and give a warm welcome to Humiliation.