Page 18 of The Therapist

ELEVEN

Mike

The minute he has touched the woman, Mike regrets it.

As the thunder booms across the sky and the hailstones hit his house, he and Lana stand in silence.

He can read naked fear on her face. He should not have grabbed her but he only wanted her in and out of the weather.

An urge to smack his own head rises up inside him. Why does he do things like this?

‘I don’t…’ she starts to say, clutching her black handbag tightly against her body as though it might be able to protect her.

‘Daddy, Daddy,’ shouts Lila, running towards him but stopping abruptly as soon as she sees Lana, her thumb automatically going into her mouth. She is carrying her teddy.

‘Who are you?’ she asks, removing her thumb from her mouth to ask the question.

‘I’m a friend of your mother’s,’ says Lana, and Mike can hear, in her voice, that seeing Lila has disarmed her a little.

She smiles and Mike knows that she’s relieved a child is here because surely a man won’t hurt her with a child here.

The world is filled with messed-up people, Mike wants to tell her.

‘Mummy’s having a day off and me and Felix is not allowed to go because she needs a rest,’ says Lila, parroting what he told them when he picked them up.

Lana looks from Lila to Mike, scepticism on her face. Yeah, I can’t believe it either , he would like to say.

Only hours ago, his whole world imploded.

At ten this morning, what was left of the company he worked for was given the news that it was over. Paul, his boss and someone he considered a friend, hadn’t given them any warning. He just called a staff meeting with everyone, including the factory staff, and told them that it was done.

‘I’ve been trying to renegotiate the bank loan for a couple of weeks now,’ he said, rubbing his eyes under his black-rimmed glasses so he didn’t have to look at his staff, ‘but they’ve told me that they can’t let it go on.

They want their money and they’re calling in the auditors.

I’m very sorry and I will use what I have left to pay all of you as much of your entitlements as I can.

You can leave for the rest of the day, start getting your résumés in order.

I will, of course, be giving you all excellent references.

The factory will stop production immediately but the office staff need to stay for when the auditors come in.

’ He had nodded his head as he spoke and Mike had felt his grief but beneath that he knew there was something else.

It was relief. Paul was tired of trying to hold his company together in a dying market.

Rising interest rates, rising grocery prices, a world in chaos – it was amazing that they managed to hang in as long as they did against cheaper, quicker competition.

Once, the mattresses the company made had been in high demand from all the best stores.

But for the past six months, Mike knows that people have been avoiding his calls – the mattresses are not worth buying because their retail price has to be so high.

When he was finished speaking, Paul looked around at all of them and then shrugged and turned and walked away.

There was a moment of silence as the staff digested the news and then Paul’s office door closed and they all began speaking at once.

Jeremy, who was in charge of everything IT, immediately pulled up as many jobseeker apps as he could and began applying.

The factory staff left quickly to go to the pub and Mike went to Paul’s office and tried knocking on the door, wanting to offer some comfort, but Paul didn’t answer.

Mike could imagine him sitting behind his large desk asking himself exactly what it was all for.

He had sacrificed family time for decades, worked as many hours as he could to build up a business and just like that – it was gone.

Mike had known it was coming, but he had hoped, really hoped, that it wouldn’t happen.

And his first thought had been about Sandy.

She was going to be angry. He knew others in the office would be on their phones, speaking to their partners, gathering support and comfort, but he wouldn’t dare phone Sandy.

He would get no comfort from her. He would get anger and aggression, blame and hysteria. And he couldn’t deal with it.

He had stared out of his small office window at the heavy grey sky and thought about when things were different, about meeting his wife for the first time.

Eight and a half years ago, he met Sandy at a sales seminar Paul sent him to.

Sandy had just begun working in a department store and she was there with a few other young salespeople.

Mike arrived late and took the first seat he could find, next to Sandy, only looking at her when the guy giving the talk told them to turn to the person sitting next to them and sum up their jobs in a few words that didn’t include ‘sales’.

‘Making women beautiful,’ said Sandy to him, and he grinned, suppressing the urge to tell the petite woman that she was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. His whole body wanted to touch her immediately.

‘The best night’s sleep,’ he replied and she smiled, her perfect teeth and soft bronze lips making his heart flip.

‘Can I take you for a drink?’ he asked as the talk resumed.

Sandy smiled again and touched him lightly on his leg.

It was that fast, that instant, for him at least. They got married six months later when they found out she was pregnant, and had Felix eight months after that.

They should have dated longer, should have seen each other through good and bad, but they didn’t and now they are here, where most discussions, regardless of how simple they are, degenerate into vicious arguments.

He wanted a baby and she didn’t. But it didn’t take much to convince her that they would be amazing parents and that they would have an amazing life.

Mike wanted a family where violence wasn’t the way of life, and creating his own family seemed like a way to do that.

At the time he told her that working in the mattress factory was a stepping stone, that he had ambitions to own the company one day and that Paul was likely to sell to him sooner rather than later.

Things were good then and the world was a different place.

Mike is a salesman and he used to be good at selling himself.

All the things he promised Sandy, like a big house and an expensive car and trips overseas, have not eventuated.

He knows she has buyer’s remorse in the worst way but somehow, they are still together.

Things between them have been so tense since the appointment with the therapist. Although tense is probably an understatement. Something shimmers in the air between him and Sandy now, something…dangerous.

This morning, looking at his résumé, Mike knew that it was going to be difficult to get another job that paid him what he needed.

He’s only worked in two companies and both of them have gone bankrupt – both due to circumstances beyond Mike’s control but any employer would have to question his sales ability.

He had assumed that there was no way his day or, indeed, his life could get any worse.

Looking at the woman standing in his hallway, the whole debacle of an appointment comes rushing back to him.

He thought that the appointment would be a neutral chat, just the three of them figuring out a plan to help Sandy feel better and to help the two of them do better at being married.

Sandy had called them dysfunctional and he knew they were, but he also knew that a lot of their dysfunction came from her disappointment at how her life had turned out.

He wasn’t blameless but mostly, he only wanted a quiet life.

In his mind, once he agreed to go despite really hating the idea, he hoped that he could find a way to address this in front of the therapist. He could never have imagined that Sandy would talk about the violence between them, about what happens when they argue and things get out of control.

That was supposed to be a secret they both kept from the world.

But after Sandy’s accusations, his whole life feels like a lie because she lied.

He’s not the one who hurts her.

The night after the appointment, he remembers getting as drunk as he possibly could and falling asleep on the sofa. And then, some time after midnight, he woke up and dragged himself to the bedroom, standing next to the bed and staring down at his wife.

‘What do you want?’ she asked him.

He doesn’t remember much after that. Only that he woke up feeling like shit the next day. And things have only gotten worse from there.

They have barely spoken over the last week. It’s been easier to avoid her so that an argument can’t even begin. Two nights ago, he had walked into the bathroom, not knowing she was getting out of the shower, and she had been startled, jumping and wrapping the towel tightly around herself.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘You’re not sorry; you did that on purpose,’ she snapped, grasping the peach-coloured towel closer to her body.

‘I didn’t– I was looking for…’ Words failed him as he actually forgot why he had come into the bathroom.

They have been married for close to eight years but he can still remember when him walking into the bathroom when she was showering was a prelude to sex, when she couldn’t stop touching him and he thought about her all day.

‘You’re pathetic,’ she spat at him, disgust on her face, and he felt his fists clench. ‘Go on, hit me,’ she taunted and he had raised his hand but then deliberately lowered it.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ he said, turning and leaving.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she shouted after him. She hates him. It’s obvious she hates him. Does he hate her? Maybe.