They didn't often fight
An extract from I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There
Last week I was part of the first of Emma Firth’s Rejection is Romantic events at the South Parade Gallery. Emma, along with writers Amy Key, Ella Frears, Cecile Pin and Rhik Samadder and myself, read on the theme of rejection. I chose the following extract from my novel, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There.
The section comes towards the beginning of the book, when Áine and Elliott have just moved into their first home together. They’re not getting along. Áine feels observed and trapped and is convinced there’s something wrong with the flat, something sinister. Elliott isn’t convinced. It’s the beginning of their relationship fracturing under the weight of that forced domesticity.
I’m republishing it here. If you like it the book is released 20 March 2025, and you can pre-order a copy here.
They didn’t often fight. They both avoided conflict like this, in fact.
And when they did argue, she came away feeling humiliated and totally at fault, as though she’d goaded him against his better, sweeter, kinder nature to fight with her, as though something in her was rotten and ugly and could turn calm people into angry people like this. She wished in these instances that he would do something extreme. That he would shout instead of whisper or hold his hand over her mouth, and sometimes she wished he would hit her because then she could be upset afterwards, unequivocally. She could say: ‘Llook, look, it’s not my fault this time.’.
When she thought things like this, Áine found herself overcome with guilt and thought wondered about whether Laura would say wanting someone to abuse you disbarred you from being a feminist. Elliott had never, would never, be physical like that. He had gone through a period of choking her when they had sex, but only at the start, and while she’d never specifically said she was into this type of thing, she didn’t blame him for doing it anyway. It was the era when the general ethos around sex was that everyone liked to be choked or spanked or slapped, and he did do this once, he did draw back and slap her across the face, and she said nothing about it because she imagined he thought it would be sexy and she didn’t want to embarrass him, and anyway, being hit like that didn’t count. Laura believed that expecting women to be into this kind of thing sexually was also bad feminism. It wasn’t empowering, Laura said, to beg someone to hurt you and then pretend you enjoyed it. But when she said this, Áine told her that it was vanilla to believe so. She didn’t really think that either, but it was something Cian had once said and she’d absorbed it like a malignant tumour.
She went into the bedroom and closed the door and lay on the nightmarish wrought- iron bed and faced the wall because she thought she might cry and she didn’t want Elliott to see her crying. The wind from this morning had not abated. It scratched clattered the windows. Even covered in her film of cold sweat, she could feel that the room was freezing. Áine crawled under the duvet in her outside clothes and shivered, squeezing her eyes tight shut like a child, listening to the house groan and creak around her, breathing through her mouth but refusing to look to see if it became mist in front of her face, proving it really was as cold as it felt. The branches scratched at the glass. The duvet was thin and bobbly. She didn’t cry, in the end. He didn’t come to bed.
The harmony left then. It was replaced by a vague sense of unease. Constant unease. During the day she lay on top of their bed, feeling uneasy, pretending to work on the laptop. At night she lay under the covers in the exact same position, and thrashed. The nightmares had been there for years. Coming and going. Áine hadn’t had them since the early days of uni, when she would wake up in a cold sweat, finding herself out of the bed and holding a mug in the shared kitchen, all of the lights switched off, terrified for a second and wondering where she was. Or once when she slept with a boy after a night out and endured the humiliation of him shoving her awake in the early hours of the morning, telling her she was whimpering in her sleep and panting and he had to get up very early for work, actually, so could she stop that? And before that when she was a child, waking up in the little grey box room with her hands over her face, her fists inside her own mouth, dreaming of little white coffins and her locked inside them, scratching frantically to get out. And once after uni, too, the time she stayed at a boy’s house and woke up to find that he’d gone to work and that she’d ripped down all the posters on his wall while asleep, and she had to leave quickly and block his number and tell herself to never think about it.
She sank into the mattress, literally sank, her limbs melting into the springs of the duvet and twisting themselves around the slats underneath, her blood like warm milk. She floated from the bedroom to the kitchen, feeling lucid and calm and totally devoid of the usual anxiety she felt when she went anywhere near the mould and the dark and the beneath of the basement door. Her dream arms were splayed out and her nails scratched the flaky paint of the wall and it felt good under her skin. She turned on the taps and the water flowed warm and thick on her hands. She tapped out a rhythm on a sauce-covered plate with a kitchen knife and hummed and she heard the hum in her waking, small, sleep-voice, still safe in the bed. She twirled at the sink, holding the kitchen knife like a wand, and then floated back to the room, and she could see herself in the bed and could see another self, a third Áine, standing at the edge of the bed and dripping wet and holding the kitchen knife out in front of her and humming, and Elliott sat up in the bed and she opened her eyes and she was the third Áine and she was holding the kitchen knife and he was breathing hard and he was scared, she could see that, really scared, and she couldn’t remember when she’d woken up and when she’d got out of the bed and someone said: ‘I think I’m inside a nightmare. I’m sorry.’