Ignorance

Ellen wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan, using the dry part near her elbow because the cuff is already damp. She wishes she had done it before coming into the bedroom. There is something humiliating about having to attend to tears in front of the people responsible for them, as though she is clearing up a mess she has made. The air is thick with stale perfume. Heavy curtains turn the weak streetlight into pale streaks of gold and grey, and the old floorboards complain whenever she shifts her weight. She has spent nearly two years learning which boards creak and which drawer needs lifting before it will open. None of that knowledge is going to be useful after tonight.

Her shift at the bar ended an hour ago. She came home with aching feet and the smell of spilled beer in her clothes, expecting to take off her shoes, find something to eat and sleep. Home is probably no longer the word for this place, although she cannot think of another one quickly enough. The flat, perhaps. Tod’s flat. She concentrates on packing because the alternatives are standing still or asking questions, and neither seems likely to get her through the next few minutes.

A holdall, a suitcase and a backpack lie open on the bed. There is nowhere else to put them in a room this small. She pulls clothes from drawers and forces them into whatever bag has space, abandoning the distinctions she would ordinarily make between clean and worn, things she needs now and things she can store. Nothing is folded. A bra catches around the handle of the drawer and she jerks it free hard enough to feel the elastic give. She stuffs it into the holdall without looking. Every second spent here feels like a second she has failed to leave.

Tod and Amy sit beneath the duvet, bare shoulders exposed, watching her move around the room. The suitcase rests partly on somebody’s legs and tilts whenever they shift. Ellen pushes it flat again. She is not going to apologise for the inconvenience. The arrangement is so grotesque that her mind keeps trying to make it ordinary: two people sitting up in bed, a woman packing for a trip. If she leaves out a few details, there is almost nothing wrong with the picture.

“Ellen,” Tod says, and she recognises the softness he has put into her name. Pity. She could bear anger more easily. “It hasn’t really been working for a long time. I think we both know that.” He waits as though she ought to acknowledge the reasonable foundation on which he intends to build the rest of the conversation. Ellen opens another drawer. Behind her, the bedding rustles. “I never see you. You work, you study, you sleep. Then you do it all again. When was the last time we actually did anything together?”

She pushes a handful of clothes into the holdall. “You’re fucking her.” The words come out steadily, which surprises her. Tod glances at Amy before looking back, and Ellen notices that glance with a clarity she wishes she could apply to everything else.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“No. It’s what I’m saying.” She reaches into the drawer again, feeling along the back for anything left behind.

“I’m trying to explain,” Tod says. When she tells him she knows what he is trying to do, he sits forward, the duvet sliding lower on his chest. “What am I trying to do?”

Ellen stops packing. Looking at him requires more effort than she expected; her eyes keep wanting to move towards Amy, towards the sheet gathered around her waist, towards all the evidence she does not need. “You’re trying to make this a conversation about our relationship so you don’t have to have one about why you’re naked.” She holds his gaze until Amy pulls the duvet higher across her chest and says, “You don’t have to be horrible.”

For a moment Ellen can only look at her. There had been room in her imagination for an apology, perhaps even an excuse. She had not made room for this. “I’m being horrible?” she asks.

“I didn’t say you don’t have a right to be angry.”

“Thank you.”

“I just mean he’s trying to talk to you.” Amy’s voice has acquired a careful patience that Ellen finds almost unbearable. Tod closes his eyes briefly and says her name, but Amy turns towards him. “What? She is being horrible to you.”

Ellen returns to the holdall. Something about Amy defending him hurts almost as much as finding her in the bed. It comes too easily, with no apparent uncertainty about whether Tod needs defending or what he needs defending from. Ellen can imagine the conversations without wanting to: her name said with a sigh, her hours at work, the nights she fell asleep while Tod was still talking. Amy listening. Amy understanding. The possibility opens beneath her, and she presses another bundle of clothes into the bag to give her hands somewhere to go.

“Fine,” Tod says. His face has tightened. “You want me to say I fucked up? I fucked up. But don’t stand there and pretend everything was fine before this.”

“I didn’t.”

“You haven’t wanted to be here for months.”

“I’ve been working.” Ellen pulls a sleeve out of the drawer runners and checks that it has not torn.

“You’re always working,” he says, as though she keeps going to the bar because she cannot bear to miss another evening of carrying drinks to people who think clicking their fingers is a form of speech.

It had started with the better money. Night shifts paid more, and she needed her half of the rent. They also left most of the day free. Tod was at work then, and there had seemed little point in spending those hours in the flat waiting for him to come home. The community college was nearby. She looked through the courses, found the Patient Care Technician programme and thought, with a degree of optimism she could still remember but no longer reproduce, why not? It was an ordinary little decision. She had not understood that a life could begin changing through something as unremarkable as reading a course description.

A couple of classes became a full programme. The days she had thought of as free acquired lectures, assignments and deadlines. In the final months there was clinical placement at the local hospital, where the work stopped being something she could put away when she closed a textbook. Patients needed things whether she felt prepared or not. There were observations to take, equipment to learn, practical tasks that became awkward when the person relying on her was frightened, embarrassed or in pain. She learned that competence could mean doing something accurately while making it seem less frightening than it felt. She learned how much attention even simple care required.

Sleep went into the spaces left over. A few hours after the bar, another few before the next shift. Sometimes she woke with no immediate idea whether it was morning or evening, checked her phone and started calculating how long she had to wash, eat and get out of the door. By the time Tod came home she was usually asleep, getting ready to leave or too tired to do much beyond sitting beside him. She had never made a decision to choose work or college over their relationship. Each step had made sense when she took it. She thought he understood that the arrangement had an end.

A job at the hospital would mean better money. More than that, it would mean leaving the bar and the night shifts behind. There could be evenings together again, weekends, meals eaten at a table instead of standing at the kitchen counter while she searched for her keys. She had carried that prospect through the worst of the exhaustion, imagining it as something they were both waiting for. Almost two years later she had completed the programme, a fact that still occasionally astonished her. People had trusted her with real patients. She had learned enough to justify that trust. Bar work had never been the destination, but until the course she was not certain she had possessed a destination at all. Now there was the hospital, the first step towards a life she had spent two years trying to reach. She wanted to help people. Until a few minutes ago, she had been able to think of that ambition without feeling foolish.

“I was paying my half of the rent,” she says. It is a small statement for everything she wants it to contain, but at least it is one he cannot reasonably dispute.

Tod shakes his head. “This isn’t about rent.”

“No. Apparently it’s about Amy.”

“Jesus Christ, Ellen.” He exhales sharply when she asks what. “You do this. Every time.”

She looks at him, waiting. “Do what?”

“You just shut off. You won’t argue. You won’t tell me what you’re thinking. You just stand there looking at me like I’m somebody you’ve already decided you don’t need.” Something tightens behind her ribs. She turns back to the suitcase because she cannot trust her face with that accusation, and Tod gestures towards her as though she has obligingly demonstrated his point. “See? That. That’s exactly what I mean.”

There are things she could say. Too many of them, crowding together until none comes readily to her mouth. She could tell him that silence is sometimes the only way she knows to remain in a room. That having a thought and being able to hand it to somebody are different things. That she has been trying to pack while he explains the unhappiness that apparently entitles him to sit naked beside Amy. Instead she moves a pair of jeans from the suitcase to the holdall, where they might fit better. Tod watches her do it.

Amy’s hand emerges from beneath the duvet and settles against his arm. It is a small movement, almost nothing. Her thumb passes once across his skin. Tod does not turn towards her or seem surprised by the touch, and then her hand disappears again. Ellen keeps her eyes on the jeans until she can breathe properly.

“You turned up here after four dates with a bag of clothes,” Tod says. “Four dates, Ellen. You didn’t move in because you loved me. You moved in because you had nowhere else to go. I know you were trying to get away from your dad—” She flinches before she can stop herself. The movement is barely visible, but he sees it, and his expression changes at once. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No,” Ellen says. “You shouldn’t.” She has both hands inside the holdall. For a moment she leaves them there, gripping clothes she cannot identify by touch.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?” She turns towards him slowly.

“I know things were bad. I know why you needed to leave. I’m just saying sometimes I honestly don’t know whether you chose me or whether I was just there.” His voice has become gentler again, which makes the words harder to bear. He is using something she told him when she believed telling him made her safer. He may not understand that this is what he has done. Ellen cannot decide whether that makes it worse.

For the first time since she entered the bedroom, Tod seems unable to hold her gaze. She looks at the face she had once been relieved to see at the end of a day, at his mouth and the small crease between his eyebrows. “I loved you,” she says.

He looks back at her. “Then why did I never know?” The question lands somewhere she has no protection left. It is not enough that she loved him; apparently she has failed at having loved him in a way he can recognise. She stands with the open bag between them, trying to remember what evidence she would offer if this were something she had to prove.

Beside him Amy shifts. Ellen catches a change in her expression before it disappears. Nothing as crude as a smile. Relief, perhaps, accompanied by the uncomfortable satisfaction of hearing something confirmed. Ellen wonders how long Amy has believed that Tod was unloved, and how often she has assured him that he deserved better. The thought makes her feel suddenly exposed, as though private parts of her life have been left lying around for somebody else to examine.

She closes the suitcase. The zip travels halfway around before catching on a sleeve trapped beneath the lid. Ellen pulls at it, stops, pushes the fabric back inside and tries again. Behind her, Tod lets out a long breath. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t think either of us has been happy for a long time.” She keeps working at the zip. He waits, then adds, “And Amy didn’t—”

“Don’t.” Ellen looks up. He stops speaking, and she makes herself continue before the little store of strength behind the word is gone. “Don’t make her the thing that happened because I tried too hard. Because I tried to get a better job. A real job, in a hospital, where I could leave the night shifts and drunks behind. You knew it wasn’t forever. Don’t you dare make it the reason.”

“I wasn’t going to—”

“You were.” She hears the anger now and is grateful for it, although it leaves her hands trembling.

“He wasn’t,” Amy says. Ellen turns towards her, and whatever Amy reads in her face makes her hesitate. Only briefly. “He hasn’t been happy for a long time.”

There it is again, the confidence of somebody speaking from knowledge. Not a suspicion, not a conclusion reached during this dreadful evening. Amy knows how long he has been unhappy. She has been told. Ellen gives a small nod, feeling something settle into place that she would rather have left uncertain. “I’m glad he had someone to talk to.”

“That’s not fair,” Amy says. Her face has changed.

“No?”

“No. You weren’t here.” Tod turns towards her and tells her to leave it, but she looks back at him with sudden irritation. “Why? It’s true.”

Ellen looks from one to the other. “How long?” Neither answers. The silence is so complete that she becomes aware of the floorboard settling beneath her foot. She waits until Tod rubs a hand over his face.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.” He says her name, and she asks again. “How long?”

Amy looks at Tod. That is enough. Ellen has no number, no date to place beside a shift she worked or an evening she spent at the college, but she has the glance. Amy has waited for him to decide what they are going to admit. Ellen suddenly knows that even if he answers, she will have no way of knowing whether the answer is true.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Tod tells her. He sounds tired now, as though the conversation has become an unreasonable demand on a difficult night.

“I don’t want you to say anything.”

“Ellen—”

“You had two years to tell me you weren’t happy.” She finishes closing the suitcase. Tod says nothing. Amy bites her lip, holding back something Ellen is grateful not to hear.

She puts on the backpack and drags the holdall strap over her shoulder. The combined weight pulls her sideways, and she stumbles half a step before catching herself. For one horrible instant all her effort is visible: the bags, the shaking legs, the small body expected to carry everything away in a single journey. She straightens and adjusts the strap without looking at either of them. If necessary she will take the stairs one agonising step at a time. She cannot bear the thought of Tod getting out of bed to help her.

“Just don’t go yet,” he says. “Not like this. Stay until you’ve found somewhere. Wait until pay-day. One of us can sleep on the sofa.” Amy turns sharply towards him and catches his ribs with her elbow. He jerks away. “Ow. What?”

“Nothing,” she says, although her expression makes a different reply. She adjusts the duvet. “I just moved.”

Ellen nearly smiles. The impulse surprises her and passes before it can become anything visible. “You’re offering me the sofa?” she asks. “So I can fall asleep to the sound of you two fucking in our bed? No thanks.”

“No—no, I’d sleep on the sofa. You can take the bed.” Amy looks at him again, and this time Tod notices. “For a few days, Amy.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.” The irritation in his voice is familiar enough to hurt in a fresh, absurd way. Ellen has heard it directed at herself over dishes left in the sink, a light she forgot to turn off, some small misunderstanding neither of them would remember the following morning.

Now she stands in the doorway with everything she can carry while they have their first domestic disagreement in the bed behind her. Until a few minutes ago this was her bedroom. She knows where the ceiling stain begins above the curtain rail and which side of the mattress dips. Amy is already concerned about the sleeping arrangements. The absurdity comes so close to laughter that Ellen has to press her lips together, because she is afraid that if she starts making any sound she will be unable to stop.

“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I already have somewhere else to stay.” It is an outright lie. There is no room waiting for her, no sofa promised, nobody expecting her arrival. She has not yet allowed herself to think beyond getting out of the flat. But she says it firmly enough that for a moment the statement feels like something she might be able to make true.

She lifts her chin and looks at Tod one last time. “Goodbye, Tod.” Then she turns to the woman beside him. “Goodbye, Amy.”

Amy holds her gaze. There is something different in her face now, and Ellen cannot decide whether it is guilt or relief. Perhaps Amy cannot decide either. Whatever happens after the door closes, she will no longer have to wait for Ellen to leave a life she has apparently been entering for some time.

Ellen turns away before that thought can develop further. The hallway is narrow, and the bags make it narrower. The suitcase catches against a doorframe; the holdall knocks the wall when she twists to free it. She moves carefully, step by step, trying to preserve the appearance of somebody leaving by choice. At the front door she has to put down the suitcase to work the handle. The holdall strap is already digging into her shoulder. Beyond the threshold lies the dimly lit iron staircase, shining with rain.

Of course it is raining. For a moment this seems the most personally offensive part of the evening: the weather refusing to grant her even a dry place in which to work out what she is going to do. Cold air reaches through her cardigan as she steps outside. She picks up the suitcase again and tests the first stair with her foot. The iron rings beneath her weight, loud in the night.

“I’m sorry, Ellen.” Amy’s voice comes along the hallway before the door has shut. Ellen stops with one foot on the stair below. She does not turn around. The bags pull at her, and water touches the back of her hand. “Really,” Amy says, quieter now. “I am.”

Ellen closes her eyes. She does not know what she is supposed to do with the apology. Accepting it would require something from her that she does not possess, and refusing it would mean speaking. She waits, hoping Amy has finished.

“I love him,” Amy says.

For a moment Ellen cannot take another step. The words weigh more than the bags because they ask her to understand, and the terrible thing is that she does. She understands the relief she saw on Amy’s face, the familiar touch on Tod’s arm, the impatience at the suggestion that Ellen might remain for a few more days. Amy has been waiting for this door to close. She may be sorry for the hurt. She still wants Ellen on the other side of it.

The latch clicks behind her. A tear slips down her cheek, warm until the night air reaches it. Ellen lets out a slow breath and opens her eyes, looking at the wet stair beneath her foot. “I know,” she says, quietly enough that there is nobody left to hear. Then she lowers the suitcase to the next step, shifts the weight of the holdall and begins the careful descent, carrying her three bags down the iron staircase and into the rain.