Excerpt
The Marriage Rule
Chapter One
Day zero, Saturday morningToday, I’m starting a boozer’s log. The odd thing, well, a few too many things, like barely remembering getting in last night or going to bed the Friday night before it, have made me think it’s probably time I kept a record of my alcohol intake and those bits of my life I suspect are making me drink: disturbed nights with the baby, my waking life with my so-called manager, my dreadful mother-in-law. But it’s not like any of these things are particularly new, so why start logging them today? I suppose I’m getting bored of thinking the same thing over and over, things like:
I wish I hadn’t drunk so much and
I wish I remembered more. I’ve also recognized recently how not everyone jumps in, two-footed, at any opportunity to drink until they’re over their head in wine, drowning in regret and their own stomach acid the next day. It’s making me feel not completely normal. It’s making me wonder whether if I get to understand this, then maybe I can figure out some other things too.
This morning wasn’t anything particularly exceptional in that I didn’t immediately feel the dreaded weight of hangxiety on my chest. But my throat was a bit sore. That got me worrying. Was it because of alcohol-induced acid reflux or me bleating on to Sal about all Anton had put me through this particular working week? Again. Since he was promoted over me, that man has made the charity I work for no longer somewhere I can score the minor joys of being a competent copywriter or the more significant victories when I can see the impact of my work, but a warzone where the weapons of choice are Teams, Outlook and Word Tracked Changes. But Sal has heard it all before and my continued moaning must be deeply boring to her by now; frustrating too because it’s not like it ever changes a thing.
If I hadn’t been bitching about Anton, then I had, perhaps, exhausted my vocal cords unloading about Dom’s mother, Patience, for whom I can do nothing right and whom Sal hates because of this. But she’s my husband’s mother, so most of the time I make sure I keep these things to myself. That leaves me with another option. Worse than the possibility of being awful about Patience, had I been spewing mean, wholly uncalled-for things about my lovely, caring, forgiving husband; feelings I’ve no business having, let alone sharing with Sal? This is who I think I am when I drink, and it doesn’t feel like the person I want to be, especially because my recall of last night only really kicked in when the baby was gearing up for her second night feed, sometime between three- and four-thirty.
“It’s OK, you relax,” Dom told me. He’d already retrieved the bottle and was feeding the baby, shushing her gently as she guzzled, just as he always does. I watched, quietly astonished, as I still am after three eventful years together, at the scale of him, and also of her in comparison. Dom’s older brother Ol calls his “little” brother “The Norseman” and it feels appropriate. All six and a half foot of my husband looks as though it arrived at these shores via a long lineage of Nordic ancestry, genetically fine-tuned for rowing across oceans. His lean frame is heavy with fatless stretches and mounds of muscle; his eyes are sea-blue, his hair a salty dark blond. How overwhelmed by him I was when I first met him and he bombarded me with the kind of romance I’d only ever read about happening to the stunning and the alpha Amal Clooney sort of women, not accessibly average women like me. I’m so normal I had no idea, and still really don’t know, why someone as impressive as Dom, physically and, OK, financially, would see anything in ordinary me. And yet he did; he does. In me, my husband seems to see something exceptional; everything he apparently wants in a woman.
The baby was, in that moment, immune to Dom’s charms. She kept stopping her feed to cry. I assumed she could be teething, or perhaps some small part of her wanted to be held by her mum, as I’d not seen her since I’d left for work after eight the previous morning.
“I could try,” I said, craving the sweet warmth of her next to me.
“It’s OK, you go back to sleep,” Dom said, turning his frame and the baby away from me, as though shielding me from her noise. He’s probably the stuff of most women’s fantasies: the ultimate “doesband” who shoulders the lion’s share of the childcare, cooking and any and all domestic tasks. Before I knew him, Ol tells me, Dom did as much caring for my late sister-in-law, his poor wife Flic, when she became gravely ill. Taking care of everything and everyone, it’s what Dom does. I am, I realize, a very lucky woman.
But watching the baby’s tiny body stiffen with an escalated rage she could only articulate through even louder wailing, I didn’t feel nearly fortunate enough. In fact, I found myself hearing a far-from-grateful voice needling me:
It’s Saturday. You deserve a drink. Yes, the Drinking Devil Elle prodded her pitchfork into my mind right there and then, my first drink trigger of the day, spiking its way through the burgeoning headache, bittersweet mouth, scratchy throat and the sound of my baby needing to be soothed. Devil Elle wanted to tell me a crying baby plus the weekend equated to a reason to drink. She wanted to make my blameless baby my enabler. Angel Elle wanted to swear blind she’d drink only water and eat clean throughout the day ahead, but the rest of me said I deserved, no
needed the promise of hair of the dog to look forward to, to sustain me through baby swim that afternoon, and even more drink to get me through the birthday lunch for our niece Cora at Patience’s house tomorrow. But it’s not what I, real Elle, the person at the core of me wants. Is it? Because, I asked myself, there’s no reason that person needs to be so afraid of her life if there isn’t drink in it, is there? Once Dom had quietened the baby, I could hear a better me, the one who decided to start my drinking log.
Dom put the baby back in her cot and went to use our en suite bathroom. I positioned myself on my pillows so I could watch her through the darkness, the smudged rise and doubtful fall of her chest as she settled back into sleep. My drink-shriveled brain started to torment me with the idea that if I didn’t see her next breath, it might not happen, the faint shame and regret of a hangover already staining my softer thoughts. When I could hear Dom switch off the bathroom light, I turned over and closed my eyes.
“Hopefully that’s that,” he whispered as he climbed back into bed. “She should be out until sevenish.”
“Hopefully.” I brought my pillows deep into the crook of my neck, indicating my own readiness for rest. I didn’t particularly want Dom to get the idea I was in the mood for anything else but sleep. Because my husband needs very little in the way of encouragement, something else I know I should probably be much more grateful for than I ever am these days.
Dom ran a hand over my hip, the same palm then slipping over my belly, a part of me he seems all but obsessed by, though I hate my postpartum stomach. Next, he reached for my still-enormous boobs. Truthfully, whenever I feel pieces of my flesh drooping off my core or creasing into each other, like when I’m in bed, I feel a total state. But when Dom looks at me, touches me, it’s as though he interprets my lumps and bumps as precious gifts. I knew him touching those messy pieces of me would have left him wanting more; an intimacy I equally realized he’d pretty much earned through all his efforts with the baby. But what he wanted from me I was too tired, too hungover and too full of self-loathing to give. Dom deserves so much more of me than he generally gets.
“You must be exhausted,” I told him, doing everything I could to sound like sex wasn’t the absolute last thing I wanted to do in that moment, but that I cared for him deeply anyway. Dom shuffled in closer to me, his leg coming over my squashy thighs, his lips on my neck, his hand roaming over me to reach between my legs. “I’d love to,” I whispered, guiltily trying to keep my body from clenching, from outwardly resisting his touch. “But do you think we could try to get back to sleep? She’ll be awake again before we know it.” I hoped he could hear only exhaustion in my voice, not the buzzing of every other emotion inside my mind. I was desperate not to have to ask him to out-and-out leave me alone. Not giving Dom what he continues to want from me really feels like not keeping up my end of the bargain of our marriage. That sounds dreadfully transactional, now I’ve written it down. That doesn’t mean to say it isn’t true.
“You’re just too beautiful,” Dom said into my ear before delivering a soft kiss to my neck and then the cheek nearest to him. After a beat, though, he withdrew and moved to lie on his back. “Too beautiful for me.” He said it half laughing at the ceiling. “Sorry.”
