Everything and Nothing Read Online Free Page A

spectacularly set apart from men. And this feeling lasts, often for months.
    But like every drug, it had its come down, a come down which took Ruth by surprise. She could remember the moment exactly. She had been cutting carrots in the kitchen, thinking about how she could save a bit of supper for Betty’s lunch the next day, when her brain shifted. She physically felt it, like a jolt in her skull. One minute she was in the moment and the next her hands were disconnected from her body. She watched them performing the mundane task of cutting and couldn’t feel them. She tried a different job, filling the pan with water, but it was the same. She thought she might faint and went running in to Christian, who was watching football on the telly and couldn’t understand what she was going on about. Why don’t you go to bed, he’d said, you must be knackered, what with all that getting up all night. I’ll do supper, bring it up to you on a tray.
    But sleeping did nothing for her. She woke the next morning covered in sweat, her heart racing. When she sat up in bed her head spun and the room tilted when she went to the bathroom. She begged Christian to stay at home because she must be ill, but he looked at her as if she was mad and asked if she remembered that his new show was going out that night.
    Ruth pulled herself together because babies hold all illnesses apart from their own in contempt, but the world remained distorted. From then on everything she had jumped and skipped to only twenty-four small hours before became as hard as leaving a new lover in a warm bed on a cold winter’s day. She started to feed Betty from jars, Christian’s supper was often absent, the cleaning went undone for weeks on end. She began to hate the park in the same way that she had once hated flying, something she couldn’t ever imagine doing again. Even the women whom she was starting to make friends with now seemed foreign, the language they spoke disconcerting and meaningless. She was never going to be as competent as they were, days were never again going to wash over her, fear was beginning to limit her every moment.
    Ruth had felt as though she was disappearing. Her bones felt slushy in her body so that sometimes she was sure she was going to faint in the park or fall down the stairs while holding Betty. She worried constantly about what would happen to her precious daughter, who she loved as ferociously as a mother lion. She calculated that if she died just after Christian left for work that would be twelve hours Betty would have to spend alone. Certainly she’d be scarred for life if not seriously injured or killed. And when he spent the night away on a programme she couldn’t sleep for anxiety, feeling as if she was falling through the bed and into oblivion when in truth she was simply exhausted.
    Things came to a head when going to the supermarket became terrifying. She recognised the irony. Here she was, a woman who had backpacked round Asia, spent a year at an American university, moved to London after meeting Christian only once and worked her way up a very greasy career ladder, now paralysed by the thought of a few aisles of food.
    Ruth tried to grab onto the person she had been but couldn’t find herself however hard she looked. She remembered a confident woman, but it was like watching a film, the idea that she would ever climb back into that skin impossible. After nine months at home she realised that it was only going to get worse. She looked at all the women in the park and marvelled at their self-lessness. There was an army of women out there, she realised, who had made the ultimate sacrifi ce, themselves for others, and she had nothing but respect for them.
    The Monday that Aggie started should have been insignificant for Christian. He prayed she’d work out because he couldn’t bear the eruption of stress from Ruth if she didn’t. They’d have to go through all those tedious conversations again about her staying at