Behaving Like Adults by Anna Maxted Page B

With myself too. I’d run away! Why didn’t I stand up for myself? What could they have done to me in a carriage of people? Stabbed me and jumped on my head, apparently, but I was spitting that I hadn’t fought back, not so much as a squeak. Truth was, I physically couldn’t. And I don’t mean in the sense that theywere bigger than me. I mean that my body plain wouldn’t let me. Its every message service was yelling, insistent,
get out of here now
. I’d obeyed like a robot.
    Not this time. I thought I was being sensible. No woman wants to be thought of as hysterical. I knew I didn’t want Stuart alone with me in my house but I forced myself to be mature, rational. My system jangled warning signals but I blocked my ears. You know why? I was too damn polite. It reminds me of an advert, warning against cancer of the bottom or something, it says, Don’t Die of Embarrassment. Obviously the medical establishment is aware that a good half of the population think, ‘What! Let a doctor poke around down there? No way! What if it smelt of pooh? Of
course
I choose to die of embarrassment!’
    I didn’t want to offend Stuart.
    He was practically a friend. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by not trusting him. I
like
being decent, it’s not very butch but it makes me feel good inside. If you want to live with yourself, you have to uphold at least a few of your own principles. When I bought Rachel a priceless bottle of Decléor face oil for her birthday I was twitching, I so badly wanted to keep the free tube of Anti-Fatigue Eye Contour Gel that came with it, but it felt shoddy, swindling her out of her bonus gift. I hummed and ha’d, nearly gave it to her, and then I kept it. Good grief! Every time I saw it lying unused on the kitchen table, I felt like Judas. The guilt killed me, I had to buy her the Aromatic Essential Balm to restore my faith in myself.
    Nick slammed into the house halfway through. Stuart kicked the kitchen door shut. I was too frightened to scream. There were a million thoughts going through my head and nothing at all. It was as if I wasn’t even there. I was aware of being jolted, of my arms being held above my head, but mostly I was out of myself. When I’m on a plane waiting for it to crash, I dream of elsewhere. I imagine Emily, a warm little black dot, curled up in a ball on ourbed, I imagine my mother pottering in the garden, her knees clicking as she bends down, I imagine my father whistling as he polishes his shoes on a newspaper in the kitchen, and it keeps the plane in the air because as long as they’re with me nothing bad can happen.
    And so I imagined my parents, asleep in their pyjamas under their bobbly old eiderdown. I just went to them, slipped out of my body like a ghost, they were so real I could have been hovering over their heads. I thought of Emily, sprawled in the sunshine,
hot
, God but that cat loves to bake herself like a potato. I thought of me in my tent house when I was small, draping a sheet over a chair and crouching beneath it, all my toys gathered about me like courtiers before a queen. Who’d have thought that little girl would come to
this
? ‘I want to be as close to you as I can,’ whispered Stuart to someone. Then he turned the stereo up. U2. In a way I was glad it was U2. I can’t stand their music. It would have been a real bastard had it been Air, or Zero Seven or any band I really like.
    I didn’t wish that Nick would come in to the kitchen; it was too late to wish for anything. I heard the front door slam again, anyway. And then Stuart got off me and said, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’ I didn’t reply. It sounded wrong. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he added. ‘You should get dressed, you’ll get cold on the floor.’ I shook my head and nodded but I couldn’t look up from the level I was at, which was cat level. You’d think