All at Sea by Decca Aitkenhead

Author:Decca Aitkenhead [Decca Aitkenhead]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-02-29T05:00:00+00:00

6

The overwhelming sensation of being home is one of homelessness. That breath of relief as you flop onto your own sofa, whose familiarity I’d always taken for granted, has vanished; I cannot find it anywhere. Even in my own bed there is no sanctuary.

Actually, my bed is the last place to look for it. While we were in Jamaica the builders have transformed the first floor, and our bedroom is barely recognisable from the one Tony and I last slept in. I pace the floorboards, staring up at the beams, absorbing the cold truth that it will never be our bedroom again; it is mine now, ‘my bedroom’, a phrase so bleakly alien that when I try to say it out loud the words choke me. I haven’t slept in ‘my’ bedroom since my mid-twenties. It feels unnatural, an infantilising regression, like wearing my old school uniform. The boys will never pad along the passage in the morning and climb into their mum and dad’s bed again.

Everything has become a metaphor. During supper on our first evening home, Shakira motions to Tom that he has lettuce stuck in his teeth, my father gestures to a breadcrumb on Sarah’s cheek, and these two inconsequential moments send me reeling from the room. The world is designed for couples; I no longer fit. Even the most mundane household objects have been stripped of banality and invested with a significance that threatens to capsize me at any moment. Because of the building work, the whole house has been rearranged while we were away, and now I can’t find anything, but what should be a series of mild inconveniences – a missing tin opener, central heating I can’t operate – become crises, symbolic of a loss of all control.

Being at home is exhausting, but leaving the house is so exposing that I become mildly agoraphobic. Tony’s face is on the front page of our local newspaper; his death is announced on billboards along the village high street. ‘Local Man Drowns Saving Son’. I find myself cast in a new role I can neither stand nor escape – the public widow – and worry about getting it right.

In the village I sense that people are staring. It is a picturesque and uneventful collection of white weatherboard houses and independent stores, but we moved here so recently that I don’t yet know any of the shopkeepers. I begin to feel paranoid, trying to work out who does and doesn’t know. The teller in the bank seems to be especially gentle, so I think she must know, but then maybe she has always been this lovely? I can’t remember. I’m not even sure if I want everyone to know or not. I feel like a liability in public, for at any moment I am in danger of bursting into tears, so a part of me hopes they do. I rather envy the Victorians, because if I were dressed in mourning clothes this problem would be solved, and allowances would presumably be made for any bizarre behaviour.

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