Meltdown

‘Pull over!’

It takes all my effort not to grab the steering wheel and force us into the verge, but I figure I’d end up killing us both, and much as fifty percent of that outcome appeals to me, the image of me lying in a car wreck beside him does not. We’d probably end up buried in the same plot – the thought of it! – no escape, even in death. The prospect of still being with him at my dying day pushes me on.

‘Now,’ I scream. ‘Pull over now.’

My friend warned me. ‘Someday you’ll blow,’ she said. I remember her words clearly because I didn’t believe her. ‘You can’t keep things in the way you do. Not forever. Mark my words, someday you’ll have a meltdown.’

I hated that word, ‘meltdown’. I told her it was what nuclear reactors did, not mature, controlled adults. I told her with certainty I would never melt down. She told me I needed to be more emotionally leaky. Eugh. Made me think about women who pee a little when they run for a bus, or people who cry at Richard Curtis films. ‘I will never be leaky, emotionally or otherwise,’ I told her, then I asked her what emotionally leaky meant, and she said it was about showing my feelings more, ditching the ice-queen, pushing back. ‘I mean, everyone fights with their husband from time to time,’ she said, ‘even the happiest of marriages. It’s perfectly normal to constructively disagree.’ I wanted to tell her that for me, it would be like Pringles – once you start you just can’t stop – that I could find nothing right with him, only defects. Twenty years of letting things go, of put downs, patronising tones, condescending digs, year after year of chipping away had sent me into shutdown. And when a nuclear reactor is in shutdown, then there’s no chance of a meltdown, right? Turns out I was wrong, and she was right. It also turns out that a meltdown that’s twenty years in the making is spectacular.

Of course, he has never heard me yell before, not at him, not at anyone, and so, to my giddy amazement, he does as he’s told and pulls in. For a man who always has an answer, his expression is blank. He is trying to understand what is happening. He is looking at me like I’m a stranger who has stopped him in the street to ask directions. He is finding his inner bearings, his words. But I must speak before he finds them. I need to ride the momentum of this rage before it subsides. No sign of that, it is taking me over like an itch, a rash that I must scrape and tear, to destroy then renew.

I lean into the back seat and gather my coat and handbag. ‘This is where I get out,’ I say.

‘Bathroom?’ He says. ‘A bit dramatic for the want of toilet, aren’t we?’

‘We?’ My voice – disdainful – is one I do not recognise. ‘There is no we. I am talking about me. I’m talking forme, so you can shove your supercilious ‘we’ down your nauseating gullet. I hope it sticks there and that you choke on it because I have no idea how to do the Heimlich manoeuvre, which means that when you asphyxiate and keel over, I shall be blameless.’

With this, I swear to you, he really does begin to choke, and I wonder if I’ve put a hex on him. I laugh. I cackle. I tip my head back and roar. Something has taken me over, possessed me – call it strength, freedom, witchcraft – I don’t know what it is, but it is potent, and I want more of it. This is what skydiving must feel like. I hold out my hand because I am sure I must be shaking, but I am as steady as a rock.

‘You,’ I point my index finger at him, then retract it into an immobile, clenched fist. He shrinks in his seat, he is cowering. How did I not know it would be this easy? How did I not know I was this powerful? ‘You are a tyrant, a browbeater, a tormentor. Or at least that is what I let myself believe. But look at you!’

I am coursing with power. I am invincible. Faced with this version of me, his façade crumbles and I see a craven, contemptible thing who gets his kicks from controlling others.

‘Call this love? This is torture. This is like living on the banks of a polluted lake, and you are the stinking water, you are the stench of effluent.’

It’s cruel, I know it is cruel, but all those smells come to me, they fill the car and I heave with disgust. I am afraid I might vomit there and then if I don’t open the door. He keeps a roll of emergency cash in the glove commitment. £100 in rolled up twenties. It’s another means of control, kept there to test me. I’m not allowed to touch it, and if I get caught short, dip into it, I must sneak it back before he finds out. I pull the lever of the glove compartment, holding his eye the whole time. I want him to know I feel no fear. I raise my chin. Yes, I am doing this, my look says. I place the roll of notes into my handbag, and slowly I zip it closed. The only movement, his eyes. The rest of his body is still. Have I turned him to stone? I rub my fingertips together. Is there magic in these hands?

I can feel my laughter rising again, the joy of this escape. And it is so easy. How did I not know it would be so easy? Why has this taken me so long? I slam the door behind me and raise my arms above my head and I scream. The sound I make is long and loud and undulating. It is petrifying and triumphant. I am amazed it is coming from me.

All around me is moor: a rolling, treeless landscape. I spin around and take it all in. A buzzing sound takes me back to the car; it is the sound of the car window being lowered.

‘We’re in the middle of nowhere,’ he says. ‘You’ll get stuck.

‘I’ve never been less stuck in my life,’ I tell him.

He blinks. Is it a tear he is blinking away? Or was it fear. I begin to walk. I hear him stall the car before he drives off.

Never has the bare, stricken moor with all its spent heather and wizened hawthorn looked so beautiful. I walk for ten minutes before I flag down a passing car and tell them that where they are going is exactly where I want to go.