Army of Me: Fifth chapter

386 days ago

The key rattled in the lock of the front door. Joanna awoke on the sofa with a start, and looked around in that special state of bewilderment reserved for the suddenly woken. Why was she on the sofa? What time is it? Where the bloody hell was Alex? What is that abominable shite on the TV? She glanced at her watch and was greeted with the revelation that it was just before 6am, which meant that the gaudy celebnews vomiting from the screen was Breakfast TV on BBC1. She was on the sofa, she remembered, because she had waited up for Alex to come home from what he had promised was going to be “a quiet one with some of the lads from work.” And that key in the lock was, presumably, Alex attempting to make a stealthy return from his sedate evening’s fun.

She heard the front door slowly open. A few moments later, it closed quietly. She waited until she heard the creak on the stairs and shouted “Alex? Is that you?” Judging the immediacy of the creaking’s cessation, it was. A croaking voice confirmed it; “You’re up early. Are you okay?”

The fug of her awakening was blasted clear by burning fury. She leapt up from the sofa and stormed through into the entry hall to see a dishevelled, bleary eyed, and unmistakably guilty looking husband half way up the stairs. “Oh I’m fine Alex, just fine. I thought I’d wait up for my husband to return. And here I am. Alex, just what fucking time do you call this?”

Alex winced at his wife’s raised voice. He walked back down the stairs to come and face her. “Jesus…look, Joanna I’m really sorry. I’m sorry, I just…look I was going to come home I really was. It’s…well…” he sighed as his thoughts tailed off, and as he reached her he tried to cover for the non-existence of his answer by enveloping her small frame in a hug. “I’m so sorry Joanna; it won’t happen again I promise.”

Joanna put up with the embrace for a few moments before shoving Alex back. He gave her the look of a freshly kicked puppy as she did so. “WHAT won’t happen again Alex? Where exactly the fuck have you BEEN? You didn’t even call, I’ve been worried sick!” And true enough, she had been. When he hadn’t returned by midnight, she’d assumed he’d gone onto a club to continue his quiet and refined evening out. When the clock struck one and he hadn’t returned, she had begun to fret for him. She hadn’t dozed off until well after 4, which was a testament to just how hard she’d been working over the previous few weeks, because by that point she’d convinced herself that he might be lying dead in a gutter or awake in some other woman (in which case, the former would very soon become true).

Alex, eyes cast downward in a gesture of supplication, offered no immediate answer. Indeed, he seemed to be lost for words. Joanne felt a sliver of ice cold fear stab through her stomach and into her heart. She thought that she recognised the guilt of a man caught cheating in his face, and she fought to control the renewed surge of anger before asking in a voice strained with tension “Were you with someone last night?”

His head snapped up at this, and his eyes blazed through the misty beginnings of teardrops. “No. Joanna, Jo no I’ve not…shit is that what you think?” He searched her drawn face for confirmation, and took her continued glare as such. “Jo, I swear to you on my life that I wasn’t with another woman last night. It’s not like that.” He paused, then added with a curl of his lip “It’s a long way from being like that.”
Joanna looked hard at her husband for a few moments more until she was convinced that his face contained no semblance of a lie. In fact, she realised, it contained more than a few clues to self loathing. Newly concerned, she drew closer to him. “Alex…baby, what happened?” she softly asked him.

Something in the gentleness of her tone connected directly with the hot shame that Alex had been trying to banish from his mind since waking up in a cold, dark cell in a police station. He felt his body crumple, and for just a moment he gave in to the despair and disgrace he felt as tears began to streak down his face.

“Oh baby…” and Joanne moved forward to embrace her husband. At this, Alex stiffened a little and controlled himself, putting an end to he always thought of as shameful mewling. Collecting his thoughts, he returned Joanna’s embrace.

“Jo, I’m sorry. I was stupid. Can we go and sit down please?” Without waiting for an answer, he took her by the hand and led her back through to the living room. He sat on the brown leather sofa and Joanna sat beside him. Alex took a deep breath. “I got arrested last night.” He tried to keep hold of Joanna’s hand, but she withdrew it sharply.

“You got arrested?” She was genuinely shocked. She knew Alex had a dangerous habit of letting his mouth say whatever it felt was funny without reference to his brain when he was drunk, but he also had enough sense to know when to shut the hell up if he was pushing someone too far. “What did you do? Did you get into a fight or…what?”

“I got caught in the men’s toilets with a gram of charlie.” Alex risked a glance at his wife. She was struck dumb in what would otherwise have been an amusingly “mouth hanging open” sort of a way before looking away from him. “It wasn’t even mine. Steve brought it, and I’d bought a line off of him so…look baby, I’m really sorry. I was pissed and I was stupid.” In a somewhat quieter yet unmistakably regretful tone, he unwisely added “I didn’t even get the line.”

(It would probably have been some consolation to Alex to know that Steve was not, in fact, in possession of “top class gear” but rather of some bastardised combination of a tiny amount of speed and a rather larger amount of baby laxative).

Fortunately for him, his wife was lost in her own world of astonishment. She was shaking her head, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly. Alex sat quietly next to her, waiting to see just how this was going to play out. He hoped it would proceed with the minimum of recriminations followed by an extended visit to bed for make-up sex and sleep (not necessarily in that order). His head was pounding and his brain had that “dipped in liquid nitrogen” feeling that accompanied the Tequila hangover. He understood that his wife was going to be upset by his night’s absence and the reason behind it. He just hoped that it would be the kind of sadness that would be expressed gently and with a minimum of shouting.

His hopes were then dashed at about 80 decibels.

“WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING YOU STUPID SHIT?!” The colour had drained from Joanna’s face as she yelled into Alex’s. “Arrested for taking drugs? Alex, you could lose your job. Your job Alex!” Alex resumed his downcast stance on the sofa and began muttering platitudes of an “I know, I’m stupid and you’re right” tenor. Alas for his aching head, these were as much use as a Noct Immigration Request. “What were you thinking? Were you even thinking? Alex, what if your company find out about this? If you have a criminal record you’ll get sacked, you know that.”

“Jo, please calm down. Please. Look, I got a caution and that’s it. They only kept me in for the night because I was so drunk. I think they thought they were doing me a favour; I was a bit of a state truth be told. I’m not going to get sacked over a caution. Christ, Andrea will probably be laughing about it when I go in tomorrow.” The seeds of his attempt at levity fell on predictably stony ground.

“Yeah, but it’s not as simple as that is it Alex? Anything could’ve happened because you wanted to get high. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid! I know you hate your job but are you trying to get sacked?”

“What? No! Jesus, I don’t want to lose my job. I’m not that stupid Jo, I know we’ve got a mortgage to pay. I know we’ve got J-Accounts payments to keep up. I know I need to keep working and anyway, work has been getting better recently. I told you about the Vault-Tec stuff I’m working on?”

Joanna recognised the attempt at distraction. “What’s that got to do with anything?” Alex continued to try and throw her off this particular scent and onto the one labelled “Bedtime and a shag. Okay, maybe not a shag but definitely bed. And some paracetamol.”

“Well for one thing it’s about doing something I feel good about myself for doing. I’ve spent my working life pushing back nocts to whatever godforsaken hellhole they’re trying to escape from. Vault-Tec wants to start employing a lot of noct workers and I’m heading up the team working with them for that. I’m going to be doing something good Jo, and for the first time in my life I’m enjoying my job.”

Joanna remained resolutely unimpressed. “So that’s why you went out and did something stupid was it? You’re having such a good time at work that you decided to jeopardise your happiness there? Well done Alex, smooth move. I know I’ve been complaining about you working late so much but I don’t think I wanted you to make sure you’d be stuck at home permanently.”

And with that, Joanna uncorked the argument genie that had attending pretty much every one of their spats over the last month. Alex’s justification that his long hours meant more money toward a J-Account and the greater likelihood that they would both enjoy a much longer and happier life together which would more than make up for this lost time…well, it had grown very thin very quickly to Joanna. Curiously, despite the fact that such quarrelling was clearly borne from Joanna’s increasing sense of isolation from her husband and her desperation to keep alive their love for one another, Alex usually managed to completely fail to see things from Joanna’s point of view.

As a matter of fact, these disagreements of theirs were currently few and far between, but every single one of them eventually wound it’s way to Alex and the hours he insisted he had to work “to make things better for us.”. It frustrated Joanna to the point of wanting to scream. She had tried explaining that she didn’t care about a brighter, cloned future. That she wanted to have a husband in the here and now. And, unspoken by her thus far, that she didn’t want to watch the love she had for him whither and die in a succession of lonely nights whilst he toiled away slamming doors shut in the desperate faces of noct immigrants. They had only been married for a few years, but over the last 8 months she had begun to worry immensely for her husband and his mental health. He spoke less and less about his job; she knew he hated it and knew that every day destroyed him a little more. She thought that maybe the sensitive and caring man that she knew Alex to be was more haunted by the implications of his work than he ever let on to anyone, including her. But he steadfastly insisted that he could handle whatever his firm threw at him, and took on extra projects happily, almost hungrily. It was as if he wanted to prove to someone that he could master any task he was set. And if that meant taking on the Government contracts for Immigration work, so be it. If he had to fill his J-Account with noct blood, he would do so. And that, she thought sadly, was crushing the life out of this vibrant and compassionate man. It was as if he was dying slowly before her very eyes and it was becoming unbearable for her because whenever she tried to help, he shut her out.

She had tried to say all of this, but truth be told she rarely pursued these disputes to their logical conclusion because Alex…well, he frightened her when they clashed over work. It wasn’t that he was violent, or that he turned his sharp tongue on her. It was, she thought, silly to be scared of him when he was in what he later always referred to as his “big gay sulks”. And if she hadn’t been in his presence whilst they were happening, she would probably have laughed at herself for feeling any fear of the smiling eyed man that she married. He just seemed to slam shut emotionally whenever the subject of the hours he was working came up. And whether she harangued or cajoled, he wouldn’t respond. He just sat there, seemingly at the centre of a gathering storm cloud that he could will into exploding at her if the mood took him. Unlike the battering sarcasm he usually mustered when angry, he became silent and sullen. The features of his face were as those of a fresh corpse somehow given life and looking mightily pissed off to be in that situation, and the only sign of even listening that he gave came in the form of a few clipped words. Alex had protested when she first brought up her disquiet at his bouts of solemn fury, hugging and pleading with her to understand that, no matter what, he would never raise his hands to her. And she knew that to be true, felt horrified at herself for suggesting it and hating herself for the pain she caused her love by doing so. But she couldn’t entirely shake off the sense of danger that he emanated at times like that. And not the good “all the girls love a man with a dark side” kind of danger either. More the “husband and wife found dead in murder-suicide” brand of menace, and she braced herself for it’s creeping arrival.

But it did not materialise. Maybe it was because Alex was tired. Maybe it was that he admitted defeat in the face of Joanna’s undeniably valid point that he was idiotic to jeopardise the chance to actually do some work that he believed in. Had she asked, he would have told her that it was because the tequila hangover really was that unbearable and he would’ve gladly suffered any indignity in exchange for being allowed to stumble into bed, and to hell with the shagging. Once she had finished yelling at him for that, he might have let slip that he had also looked over a terrible precipice of guilt as he realised just how distraught his wife, his wonderful wife, must’ve been last night and just how much of an arsehole he thought himself for scaring her. And to Alex, this was the first time that he knew he really had scared her. He was aware that she had hinted at a fear of him previously, but had quickly dismissed this entirely. He would have been surprised at the depth of that fear, because to Alex’s mind, things between them were as they always had been.

Instead, he looked up and at Joanna. In that moment all thoughts of fearfulness left Joanna’s mind, chased away by the heartbreaking sight of her husband looking tired, broken, and more vulnerable than she could ever remember seeing him. He tried to tell her “I love you”, but the words stuck in a throat cracked with emotion, and his words formed noiselessly in his mouth like the silent miaow of a cat. A cat that stank of piss.

“Oh baby…” she took Alex in her arms and he sagged forward, breathing the heavy breath of a man determined not to cry. “Baby baby shhhh come on…it’s okay. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you it’s…I was worried about you Alex. I thought you were hurt or something had happened or…”

“No…no, it’s okay.” He sat up from her embrace and attempted a sheepish smile. “You’ve got nothing to apologise for Jo. You never have to apologise to me, not about anything. It’s me, it’s…I was stupid. You’re right, I was an idiot and I just…I just want to try and forget it.”

“I understand baby, I understand.” Joanna paused, some words clearly just having been bitten back. Alex recognised that something had gone unsaid. Being Alex, he wanted it cleared up to avoid any ambiguity.

“What?”

“It’s nothing, don’t worry.”

“No, come on Jo. You can tell me. What is it?”

“Well…will you promise me something?”

“Baby, of course I will. Anything.”

“I want you to promise you’ll never take drugs again.”

There was an moment which lasted exactly enough time to become an awkward pause.

“What, any of them?”

“Yes!”

“Oh, come on Joanna! Look, I work hard and I need…”

Joanna decided to cut it off there. She was happy about their earlier escape from the choppy waters of dispute and had no wish to see her husband navigate them both back into a tidal wave. “Well, okay not weed.” Alex visibly untensed. “But no more class A stuff. No one gets arrested for weed any more but the other stuff…it frightens me Alex. It frightens me that we could lose everything over some fucking…powder.”

Alex was already nodding before she’d even finished. “Of course baby, anything you want. I promise. No more pills and powders.” He took her hands in his as he said this, and tried to smile a reassuring smile, kidding himself that his lip wasn’t wobbling as he did so.

Joanna embraced him once more and held him tightly. Alex hugged back and they sat like that for a few minutes. Joanne was just beginning to think to herself “This could be the watershed; this could be the point where 8 months of deepening gloom stop and I’ll get my laughing, charming husband back!” When she heard Alex snoring gently into her ear.