Globes & Maps

“I wanna be Superman!”

By the time 7pm rolled around I was up to my elbows in glitter glue and the boys had given me ‘kitty face-paint’, and by this I mean that they had drawn whiskers on me in Sharpie pen and then gotten bored and went into the garden to play badminton.

It was as I was scrubbing pasta sauce out of the living room carpet that I heard somebody clear their throat behind me, and I slowly straightened myself up and turned my head around (still kneeling on the carpet with a damp cloth in hand) to face Gerard Way.

He had this smug look of mild amusement playing across his perfect features, and a playful glimmer in his eyes. I raised an eyebrow and tried not to smile as I rose back onto my feet.

“Normal people knock on the door,” I said coolly, blowing stray tendrils of my blonde hair away from my eyes.

Gerard flashed me a coy smile that made my heart race. “Well I guess I’m not like normal people,” he replied, licking his lips. I couldn’t stop staring at them and he knew it and I knew he knew it but I didn’t mind.

Indeed he was right, it would seem, because this was the precise moment that I came to realise that something big was going to happen between Gerard and I. Something spectacular and important and amazing. Because we had chemistry or - what is it Polly always says? Frisson. We had frisson. I had never really experienced frisson before but finally it all made sense. It’s that moment, that spark of electricity where you feel a shudder all the way down your spine and your heart feels like it’s going to explode within your chest. That wonderful tension that lingers between two people who know that one day they are going to change each other’s lives. That tingly feeling you get in your stomach as you stare into the most beautiful hazel eyes you have ever seen. That is frisson. This was definitely frisson.

But right now, this was a game, so I had to play it thusly.

I narrowed my eyes and tilted my head to one side, still letting a hint of a playful smile rest on my lips. “Is that so?” I said.

Gerard’s grin widened. “Absolutely.”

There were a million thoughts racing through my mind. Mostly about how I wanted to wrestle Gerard to the ground and do unspeakably dirty things to him, and the occasional muse about how exactly he managed to creep into the house unheard to begin with. Also the general concerns regarding my hair or if I was showing too much cleavage, or not enough cleavage, and don’t think I had forgotten about the whiskers on my face because I was all too aware of them, believe me.

But not once did I think about my husband. It never even crossed my mind that he could walk through the door at any moment. How awful is that? It’s terrible. It’s cruel and evil and I am a horrible person but here is the god honest truth: I didn’t care about Jake. And the more I think about it now, the more I think he probably didn’t care about me, either.

The thing is that Jake and I rarely spoke anymore. We hardly ever kissed. We never said we loved each other. We were too busy. We were just married and we had a child so we carried on regardless. We put on fake smiles at parents’ evenings and we ate our meals in silence and we went our separate ways on the weekends. It was hardly a marriage anymore. We were strangers who shared a bed.

With all of this in mind, I highly doubt Jake would have batted an eyelash had he come home to find me suddenly standing very close to a perfect stranger in the living room with probably too much cleavage on show and kitty face-paint. He would have just placed his briefcase down on the table and headed upstairs to watch sports or have a bath. But that is just what life is like.

I took a deep breath and a step closer to Gerard. I could hear the boys shrieking and giggling from outside. I could also hear the radio in the kitchen playing an old song by The Eagles. Other than that I could only hear breathing and heartbeats and I wasn’t sure which one belonged to whom, but I also didn’t give a shit.

Gerard’s eyes were locked on mine and we were both still smiling because of all the frisson. “You know,” he said lowly as I tilted my head curiously to one side. “I still don’t even know your name, Mrs Lambert.”

I gave a small laugh and pushed my hair away from my face. “It’s Tessa,” I told him.

He nodded. Our bodies were almost touching. Almost. I could have extended a fingertip and we’d have been touching. It felt like if I did, we would have melted into one. It was suddenly hot in the room and everything else was spinning and I felt sick but in a good way. A wonderful way.

“Well, Tessa,” he whispered, “I dare say you look rather lovely with whiskers.”

It was at this point that I was sort of expecting him to kiss me. But, alas, he did not. Instead he chuckled a little, took a step back and yelled, “Jason, time to go!”

It took me a couple of seconds to recover from our little moment, during which time the boys had run into the living room like a muddy whirlwind around our knees.

When my breath finally caught up with me, I glanced up at Gerard to see him grinning slyly at me as he bundled Jason up into his arms, throwing him casually over one shoulder. I smiled faintly. “Say goodbye to Mrs Lambert, Jase,” he said to his nephew, who retaliated with a muffled ‘thanks!’ and a giggle. Gerard then turned his eyes back to mine and winked. “It was very nice to meet you,” he purred, initiating a soft handshake that almost made my knees buckle. “Thanks again for looking after the boy.”

“Anytime,” I replied softly, as my own boy hugged my legs. “See you.”

Gerard gave a small wave and turned to leave, with Jason still slung over his shoulder, waving frantically at Flynn and chuckling like a little lunatic. In the moment I had forgotten my manners but they seemed to find their own way out sufficiently. Unsurprising when you consider how audaciously Gerard Way had found his own way in.

I was rendered rather catatonic after this encounter, and for an undetermined period of time I just stood in the middle of my living room, blinking blankly in front of me and making an attempt to process everything that had happened in that five minutes. So rarely does such a short period of time determine one’s future so significantly that I was finding the implications of the experience quite exhausting to interpret.

In fact I’m not sure I actually moved until I heard Jake’s car pull up onto the driveway, which snapped me out of my trance quite rapidly. I came around to find myself staring at the mirror above the mantelpiece, still with a cloth in my hand and whiskers on my cheeks and an expression of pure bewilderment in my eyes. Somewhere behind me, Flynn was giggling at something or another.

Shaking my head, I dumped the cloth on the coffee table and headed into the hallway towards the bathroom, with the optimistic intention of scrubbing the permanent marker pen off of my face.

As I passed the phone table, something caught my eye. Something looked different. It was not the phone itself, as that appeared to be in place. And it was not the fresh flower arrangement beside the phone, as that was still very neat and orderly. But something was amiss.

When you spend 23 hours a day inside a house, you become very familiar with the order of things. Being a housewife makes you almost obsessive compulsive, as you have otherwise very little to do. Every day you are cleaning the same surfaces and vacuuming the same carpets and dusting the same tables. So you become preoccupied with consistency. Everything has its place, and it only moves when you move it. So you notice when something has changed.

In this case it was the pen. The phone pen that we keep next to the phone for when we need to jot something down like a number or a name. The phone pen lives next to the phone pad, you see. Makes perfect sense. The pen remains vertically parallel to the notepad at all times because when you’re on the phone and you need to jot down a number or a name, you have very little time to waste searching for the pen. It is easiest to keep it in one continuous position, in this case to the left of the pad because I am left handed so it is very simple for me to just pick up the pen and write.

But the pen was on the right of the pad and it was not parallel. And there was a note on the pad in a scrawl I did not recognise. But I didn’t have time to read it before I heard the door handle rattle, so I swiftly pulled away the top sheet of paper from the pad, closing my fist around it as I made my way further down the hall towards the bathroom.

Jake walked in as I had my hand on the bathroom door. The other hand remained tightly clenched with the mysterious note inside. I glanced up at my husband and he glanced down at me. That’s the way it always has been.

“Oh,” he said, as if he were surprised to find me here, inside my own house. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I replied shortly, stepping inside the small downstairs bathroom and closing and then locking the door behind me. That was probably the most I was going to talk to my husband for another couple of days.

Sighing heavily, I sat on the closed toilet lid and put my head in my hands and thought for a little while.

It’s not as if I resented Jake. In fact, as pathetic as it sounds, I still loved him. He was still my husband. We still had a child and a house and a life together, even if we were having communication troubles at the minute, and even if he was too busy to show me affection or be a part of his son’s childhood. It’s not like he was always out getting drunk and hitting on women. He was at work. Working so that he could support his family and keep us comfortable. Of course there would be sacrifices but at the end of the day, as strange as it is, I knew that Jake made those sacrifices because he loved us.

The problem was that I got bored when he wasn’t around. I forgot that I even had a husband. For so much of the time I felt like a single mother and it was hard and it was lonely. Most days all I wanted was to climb into bed and be greeted with a cuddle and a kiss on the lips and for my husband to tell me that he loved me and to fall asleep in each other’s arms. But all I got was silence and then before I even knew it, it was morning and it was time to do it all over again.

When we were first married I could never have imagined any of that, even though it was only 6 years ago. We were different people, back then. We were fun people. We were passionate and we were young and we were sure that everything would work out for us. We lived in a crappy one-bedroom apartment above a butcher’s shop and we shared a 1989 Honda Accord and we couldn’t even afford a TV but we were the happiest we had ever been because we were in love and we had each other.

When Jake was promoted we celebrated with cheap champagne and lots of kissing. That was the night Flynn was conceived. I laughed a little as I sat on the toilet seat thinking about it. That was the last night we were ever truly happy, I think. That was the night before the day everything changed. Almost every day since then had been the same for me.

Somehow I found myself crying, so I wiped at my cheeks and sniffed. When I looked at the back of my hand there was black marker all over it, mingled in with my tears. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

Taking a deep breath, I unfurled my left fist and folded out the little yellow post-it, chewing my lip anxiously as I did so. It could only be from one person, couldn’t it?

Ready for a change? 1pm tomorrow, Tyler’s. G xx

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. I was ready for a change. I was ready for an adventure. I was ready for my world to be shaken up by this beautiful handsome stranger. That’s what I wanted. I wanted some passion. I wanted some frisson. I wanted Gerard. And he knew how much I wanted him and I think he must have wanted me too.

But I was also scared. Scared that I was going to royally fuck up my life. Scared that I was going to hurt people by being selfish and going after what I really really wanted. Scared that I was going to make a huge mistake and ruin everything.

I stood up and looked in the tiny mirror above the basin, still fingering the note in my hands. I looked at the woman in front of me. She was small and her eyes were tired and there were thick black smears of ink all over her cheeks. She looked sad, like she was trapped in a web with no way out.

But I did have a way out, didn’t I? I had an opportunity to give her everything she deserved. I had the opportunity to change her life; both of our lives.

Would meeting up with Gerard really be so terrible an idea? Would it really be so wrong?

Of course you know the answer to that one. Of course it would be wrong. But was that really ever going to stop me, do you think?

I’m sure you probably know the answer to that one, too.