Something I'm Not by Lucy Beresford Read Free Book Online

his bed, devouring the essays, digesting their often bitter relevance. Here was someone making sense of his world, answering questions he wasn’t aware he’d longed to ask. Hungrily, he turned to others: to Laing, Klein, Winnicott, who shone their torches into the crevices of the human mind and soul. In reading these writers and their case studies, Matt felt somehow closer to himself, the mother he lost, and to the sister he never knew.
    Matt was a junior house officer when, on a visit back to the farm, he saw the number of pills his mother took at each meal, and made discreet enquiries about therapy groups in the area. The nearest was thirty kilometres away in Nelspruit. Matt met the facilitator, and sat in on a group. He told his parents it was a book club; something neither of them had attended, and therefore a fact neither of them could dispute.
    And once a week his mother drives to Nelspruit, and sits in a circle, and talks and listens, without realising she’s taking part in therapy at all.
    *
    After we make love, Matt dozes, I get up, slip on a T-shirt and head downstairs. In the kitchen, I light a rare cigarette from an old packet of Dylan’s and, taking a ramekin for the ash, sit on the step of the French windows, channelling smoke into the garden. The flagstones beneath my feet are already warm; it’s going to be another hot one.
    I hardly ever smoke and, when I do, it’s only after sex. I giggle at the cliché – I don’t even own a lighter. Since talk of either activity earned my mother’s reproach, it seemed only fitting that the night I felt brave enough to cadge my first cigarette (from Angus, fellow Saturday worker at the local Marks and Spencer) was the same night I lost my virginity (good old Angus), these twin totems of so- called maturity for ever commissioned together in my memory, conspirators in a long-standing war of attrition.
    I take a drag, swirl the dryness around my mouth, and slowly exhale, watching the smoke evaporate, leaving behind only a bitter taste.
I’ll call you at the weekend
. I grind the stub into the ramekin.
    I am reminded of an article I read recently which said that death in a family is often followed by a birth. I scrabble for another cigarette. With the muscle memory of Matt inside me, what if I’m pregnant? And for one brief moment the flutter of panic in my chest seems so unbridled, so engulfing, so hard to swallow down, that I reckon this must be what it feels like to be one of Matt’s patients, my rivals for Matt’s attention.
    Before I’ve had a chance to light a new ciggie, Matt’s voice reaches me from across the kitchen. ‘Heyyy!’ he says in that way he has of greeting me which makes this one syllable sound as though with my presence all his prayers have been answered.
    â€˜Ach, man! Smoke,’ he complains, on kissing me, before sitting between my legs.
    A cat (
get lost, rodent)
sprints with a rustle from the foliage to rub itself against my darling husband’s shins.
    â€˜Hello, boy,’ Matt enthuses, vigorously scratching its underbelly.
    â€˜How do you know it’s the boy one?’ I say, trying to steady my voice and sound normal and curious, not fraught and jealous.
    â€˜Tim? Because it looks like Tim.’ Just occasionally, Matt’s springbok lilt will hint at a subtext of
Yes, my wife is daft as a brush
. I bet he doesn’t use that tone at work.
    â€˜But how can you tell them apart?’ Briefly my curiosity outweighs my anxiety.
    Matt cranes his neck to look back up at me. ‘Well, wife. Could it be, as my patients tell me, that I’m a genius? Or that the cats look different? Now, let’s examine the evidence. Tim has white patches on his face—’ Matt turns back to the cat and buries his face in the fur. ‘Yes, you do! And Tallulah is—’ here Matt pauses, ‘—totally ginger. But, you’re right. It’s