Her eyes were on me, huge with pleading. “That’s exactly what I would have thought,” I said. “But that’s not what happened?”
“Things got worse. Pat still didn’t see anything, but instead of just giving up, he decided the animal knew the monitor was there. I was like, ‘OK, hello, how?’ He was like, ‘Whatever it is, it’s not stupid. It’s very far from stupid.’ He said he kept hearing the scratching in the sitting room, when he was watching telly, so he figured the animal had got scared by the camera and worked its way into the walls. He was like, ‘That hatch is way too exposed. I don’t have a clue what I was thinking; no wild animal’s going to come out into the open like that. Of course it’s moved into the walls. What I really need to do is get a camera pointed inside the sitting-room wall.’
“I went, ‘No. No way,’ but Pat went, ‘Ah, come on, Jen, we’re only talking about a tiny little hole. I’ll put it out of sight, in by the sofa; you won’t even know it’s there. Just for a few days, maybe a week tops; just till we get a look at this thing. If we don’t sort it now, the animal could get stuck inside the walls and die there, and then I’d have to rip up half the place to get it out. You don’t want that, do you?’”
Jenny’s fingers tugged at the hem of the bedsheet, pleating it into little folds. “To be honest, I wasn’t all that worried about that. Maybe you’re right: maybe deep down I thought there was nothing there. But just in case… And it meant so much to him. So I said OK.” Her fingers were moving faster. “Maybe that was my mistake; that was where I went wrong. Maybe if I’d put my foot down right then, he’d have forgotten about it. Do you think?”
It felt like something scalding into my skin, that desperate plea, like something I would never be able to scrape off. I said, “I doubt he would have forgotten about it.”
“You think? You don’t think if I’d just said no, everything would have been OK?”
I couldn’t bear her eyes. I said, “So Pat made a hole in the wall?”
“Yeah. Our lovely house, that we’d worked like crazy to buy and keep nice, that we used to love, and now he was smashing it to pieces. I wanted to cry. Pat saw my face and he went, really grim, ‘What’s it matter? A couple more months and it’ll be the bank’s anyway.’ He’d never said anything like that before. Before, we’d both always been all, ‘We’ll find a way, it’ll be OK…’ And the look on his face… There was nothing I could say. I just turned around and walked out and left him there, hammering the wall. It fell apart like it was made out of nothing.”
I checked my watch again, out of the corner of my eye. For all I knew Fiona already had her ear pressed to the door, trying to work out whether to burst in. I shifted my chair even closer to Jenny—it made the hair at the top of my head lift—so she wouldn’t raise her voice.
She said, “And then the new camera didn’t catch anything, either. And a week later the kids and I got back from the shops and there was another hole, in the hall. I went, ‘What’s this?’ and Pat was like, ‘Give me the car keys. I need another monitor, quick. It’s moving back and forth between the sitting room and the hall—I swear it’s deliberately screwing with me. One more monitor and I’ve got the bastard!’ Maybe I could have put my foot down then, maybe that was when I should’ve done it, but Emma was all, ‘What? What? What’s moving, Daddy?’ and Jack was yelling, ‘Bastard bastard bastard!’ and I just wanted to get Pat out of there so I could sort them. I gave him the keys, and he practically ran out the door.”
A bitter little smile, one-sided. “More excited than he’d been in months. I told the kids, ‘Your daddy thinks we might have a mouse, don’t worry about it.’ And when Pat got back—with three video monitors, just in case, when Jack’s wearing secondhand jeans—I said to him, ‘You need to not talk about this around the kids, or they’ll get nightmares. I’m serious.’ He was all, ‘Yeah, course, you’re right as usual, no problem.’ That lasted, what, two hours? That same evening I was in the playroom, reading to the kids, and Pat came running in with one of those bloody monitors, going, ‘Jen, listen, it’s making this mad hissing noise in there, listen!’ I gave him the daggers but he didn’t even notice, not till I said, ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ and then he actually looked pissed off.”
Her voice was rising. I could have kicked myself for not bringing someone, anyone, even Richie, to stand guard outside the door. “And the next afternoon he’s on the computer and the kids are right there, I’m making their snack, and Pat goes, ‘Wow, Jen, listen to this! Some guy in Slovenia, he’s bred this giant mink, like the size of a dog, I wonder if one could’ve escaped and—’ And ’cause the kids were there I had to go, ‘That’s really interesting, why don’t you tell me about it later on,’ when inside I was just like, I don’t care! I don’t give a fuck! All I want is for you to shut up around the kids!”
Jenny tried to take a deep breath, but her muscles were too tense to let her. “So of course the kids figured it out—Emma did, anyway. A couple of days later we were in the car, her and me and Jack, and she was like, ‘Mum, what’s a mink?’ I went, ‘It’s an animal,’ and she went, ‘Is there one inside our wall?’
“I went, all casual, ‘Oh, I don’t think so. If there is, though, your daddy’s going to get rid of it.’ The kids seemed OK with that, but I could’ve hit Pat. I got home and told him—I was yelling, I’d sent the kids out to the garden so they wouldn’t hear—and Pat just went, ‘Oops, shit, sorry. Tell you what, though: now they know, maybe they could help. I can’t keep an eye on all these monitors at once, I keep worrying that I’m missing something. Maybe the kids could hang on to one each?’ Which was just so wrong I could hardly talk. I just went, ‘No. No. No bloody way. Don’t you ever suggest that again,’ and he didn’t, but still. And of course even though he said he had too many monitors he got nothing out of the hallway wall so he made more holes, he set up more monitors, every time I looked around there was another hole in our home!”
I made some meaningless reassuring noise. Jenny didn’t notice. “And that was all he did: watch those monitors. He got this trap—not just a mousetrap, but this massive horrible thing with teeth that he put in the attic—I mean, I guess you’ve seen it. He acted like it was some big mystery, he was all, ‘Don’t worry about it, babe, what you don’t know won’t hurt you,’ but he was totally over the moon with it, like this was a brand-new Porsche or some magic wand that was going to fix all our problems forever. He would’ve watched that trap twenty-four-seven if he could’ve. He wouldn’t play with the kids any more—I couldn’t even leave Jack with him while I took Emma to school, or I’d come home and find Jack, like, painting the kitchen floor with tomato sauce while Pat sat there, three feet away, staring at these little screens with his mouth open. I tried to get him to turn them off in front of the kids, and mostly he would, but that just meant the second the kids were in bed Pat had to sit in front of those things all evening long. A couple of times I tried making a fancy dinner, with candles and flowers and the nice silver, and dressing up—like a date night, you know?—but he just lined up the monitors in front of his plate and stared at them the whole time we were eating. He said it was important: the thing got hyper when it smelled food, he had to be ready. I mean, I thought we were important too, but no, apparently not.”
I thought of the frantic message-board posts, She doesn’t understand, she doesn’t get it… I asked, “Did you try telling Pat how you felt?”
Jenny’s hands flew up and out, the IV line swinging from that great purple bruise. “How? He literally wouldn’t have a conversation, in case he missed something on those fucking monitors. When I tried to say anything to him, even just asking him to get something off a shelf, he’d shush me. He’d never done that before. I couldn’t tell if I should give out, or if that would make Pat blow up at me, or pull away from me even more. And I couldn’t tell why I couldn’t tell—whether it was because I was so stressed out I wasn’t thinking straight, or whether there just wasn’t a right answer—”
I
said soothingly, “I understand. I wasn’t implying—” Jenny didn’t stop.
“And anyway, we practically didn’t even see each other any more. Pat said the thing was ‘more active’ at night, so he was staying up late and sleeping half the day. We always used to go to bed together, always, but the kids get up early, so I couldn’t stay up with him. He wanted me to—he kept being like, ‘Come on, I know tonight’s the night we get a look at it, I can feel it’—he was always having some idea that was definitely going to catch the thing, like some new bait, or some tent-type thing over the hole and the camera so the animal would feel safe. And he’d be like, ‘Please, Jenny, please, I’m begging you—all it’ll take is one look and you’ll be so much happier, you won’t be worrying about me any more. I know you don’t believe me, but just stay up this one night and you’ll see…’”
“And did you?” I kept my voice low and hoped Jenny would take the hint, but hers looped higher and higher.
“I tried! I hated even looking at those holes, I hated them so much, but I thought if Pat was right then I owed it to him, and if he was wrong then I might as well be sure, you know? And either way, at least we’d be doing something together, even if it wasn’t exactly a romantic dinner. But I was getting so exhausted, a couple of times I thought I was going to fall asleep when I was driving; I couldn’t do it any more. So I’d go to bed at midnight, and Pat would come up whenever he got too tired to keep his eyes open. At first it was like two o’clock, but then it was three, four, five, sometimes not even then—in the morning I’d find him crashed out on the sofa, with all the monitors lined up on the coffee table. Or in the chair by the computer, because he’d spent the whole night online reading up on animals.”
I said, “‘If he was right.’ By this point, you had doubts.”
Jenny caught a breath and for a second I thought she was going to snap at me again, but then her spine sagged and she slumped back against the pillows.
She said quietly, “No. By then I knew. I knew there was nothing there. If there had been, how come I never heard anything? All those cameras, how come we never once saw anything? I tried to tell myself it could still maybe be real, but I knew. But by then it was too late. Our house bashed to bits, me and Pat hardly talking any more; I couldn’t remember the last time we’d even kissed, like properly kissed. The kids keyed up all the time, hyper, even if they didn’t understand why.”
Her head moved from side to side, blindly. “I knew I should do something, stop the whole thing—I’m not thick, I’m not insane; I did know that, by that stage. But I didn’t know what to do. There’s no self-help book for this; there’s no internet group. They didn’t tell us what to do about this on our marriage guidance course.”
I said, “You didn’t consider talking to anyone?”
That flash of steel. “No. No way. Are you joking?”
“It was a difficult situation. A lot of people might have felt that talking to someone would help.”
“Talking to who?”
“Your sister, maybe.”
“Fiona…” A wry twist of Jenny’s mouth. “Um, I don’t think so. I love Fi, but like I said before, there’s stuff she just doesn’t get. And anyway, she was always… I mean, sisters get jealous. Fi always felt like I had things easy; like stuff just fell into my lap, while she was working her arse off for everything. If I’d said something to her, part of her would’ve had to be like, Ha-ha, now you know how it feels. She wouldn’t’ve said it, but I’d’ve known. How would that have helped anything?”
“What about friends?”
“I don’t have those kind of friends, not any more. And, like, what would I say? Hi, Pat’s hallucinating some animal that lives in our walls, I think he’s going loop-the-loop? Yeah, right. I’m not stupid. Once you tell one person, it gets out. I told you, no way was I going to have people laughing at us—or, even worse, feeling sorry for us.” The thought had her chin out, ready for a fight. “I kept thinking about this girl Shona, we used to hang out when we were kids—she’s turned into a total bitch now. We’re not in touch any more, but if she’d heard about this, she’d have been on the phone to me like a shot. Whenever I got tempted to say something to Fi or whoever, that’s what I’d hear: Shona. Jenny! Hi! Oh my God, I heard Pat’s totally lost it, like he’s seeing pink elephants on the ceiling? Everyone’s just like, wow, who would’ve guessed? I remember we all thought you guys were the perfect couple, Mr. and Mrs. Boring, happy ever after… Like, how wrong were we? Gotta go, time for my hot stone massage, just had to say sooo sorry it all went tits-up for you! Byeee!”
Jenny was rigid in the bed, palms pressed down on the blanket, fingers digging in. “That was the one thing we still had going for us: nobody knew. I kept on telling myself over and over, At least we’ve got that. As long as people thought we were doing great, we had a chance of getting back up and doing great again. If people think you’re some kind of lunatic losers, they start treating you like lunatic losers, and then you’re screwed. Totally screwed.”
If that’s how everyone treats you, I had said to Richie, then that’s how you feel. How is that different? I said, “There are professionals. Counselors, therapists. Anything you said to someone like that would have been confidential.”
“And have him say Pat was nuts, and cart him off to some loony bin where he actually would have gone crazy? No. Pat didn’t need a therapist. All Pat needed was a job, so he wouldn’t have all this time to freak out about nothing, so he’d have to go to bed at a decent hour instead of…” Jenny shoved the drawing away, so violently that it fluttered off the bed, glided to rest by my foot with an ugly rasping sound. “I just had to hold things together till he could get a job again. That was all. And I couldn’t do that if everyone knew. When I’d pick up Emma from school, and her teacher would smile at me and be like, ‘Oh, isn’t Emma’s reading getting so much better,’ or whatever, just like I was a normal mummy going home to a normal house—that was the only time I felt normal. I needed that. That was the only thing getting me through. If she’d given me some awful sympathetic smile and a pat on the arm, because she’d found out that Emma’s daddy was in a nuthouse, I’d have curled up and died, right there on the classroom floor.”
The air felt solid with heat. For a stab of a second I saw me and Dina, maybe fourteen and five, me jerking her arm behind her back at the school gates: Shut up, you shut up, you don’t ever talk about Mum outside the house or I’ll break your arm— The high steam-whistle shriek out of her, and the stomach-turning free-fall pleasure of yanking her wrist higher. I leaned down to pick up the drawing, so I could hide my face.
Jenny said, “I never wanted all that much. I wasn’t one of those ambitious types who want to be a pop star or a CEO or an It girl. All I wanted was to be normal.”
All the force had ebbed out of her voice, leaving it drained and wan. I laid the drawing back on the bed; she didn’t seem to notice. “That’s why you didn’t send Jack back to preschool, isn’t it?” I said. “Not because of the money. Because he was saying he’d heard the animal, and you were afraid he’d say it there.”
Jenny flinched like I had raised a hand to her. “He kept on and on saying it! Back at the beginning of summer it was just once in a while, and it was only because Pat was encouraging him—they’d come downstairs and Pat would be all, ‘See, Jen, I’m not going loopy. Jack heard it just now, didn’t you, Jack the lad?’ And of course Jack would be like, ‘Yeah, Mummy, I heard the aminal in the ceiling!’ If you tell a three-year-old he’s heard something, and if he knows you want him to have heard it, then yeah, of course he’ll end up convinced that he did. Back then I didn’t even think it was a big deal. I just went, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s only a bird, it’ll go out again in a minute.’ But then…”
Something jerked her body, so hard that I thought she was going to be sick. It took me a second to realize it had been a shudder. “Then he started saying it more and more. ‘Mum, the aminal went scratch scratch scratch in my wall! Mum
, the aminal jumped up and down like this! Mum, the aminal, the aminal, the…’ And then this one afternoon in I guess August, towards the end of August, I took him over to play at his friend Karl’s house, and when I got back to pick him up, the two of them were in the garden, yelling and pretending to whack something with sticks. Aisling—that’s Karl’s mum—she said to me, ‘Jack was talking about a big animal that growls, and Karl said they should kill it, so that’s what they’ve been doing. Is that OK? You don’t mind?’”
That racking shudder again. “Oh, God. I thought I was going to faint. Thank God, Aisling took it for granted it was just something Jack had made up—she was just worried in case I thought she was encouraging them to be cruel to animals, or something. I don’t know how I got out of there. I took Jack home and I sat down on the sofa with him on my lap—that’s what we do for serious talks. I went, ‘Jack, look at me. Remember how we talked about the Big Bad Wolf not being real? This animal you told Karl about, it’s the same kind as the Big Bad Wolf: it’s makey-up. You know there’s no real animal, don’t you? You know it’s only pretend. Don’t you?’
“He wouldn’t look at me. He kept wiggling, trying to get down—Jack always hated staying still, but it wasn’t just that. I held onto his arms harder—I was terrified I was actually hurting him, but I had to hear him say yes. I had to. Finally he yelled, ‘No! It makes growls inside the wall! I hate you!’ And he kicked me in the stomach and pulled away, and ran.”
Jenny smoothed the blanket carefully over her knees. “So,” she said, “I rang the preschool and told them Jack wasn’t coming back. I could tell they thought it was the money—I wasn’t happy about that, but I couldn’t think of anything better. When Aisling rang after that, I didn’t answer the phone. She left messages, but I just deleted them. After a while she stopped ringing.”
“And Jack,” I said. “Did he keep talking about the animal?”