Chapter Text
A clock ticked slowly.
Nora slumped on the sofa. Somewhere in the background, the TV was lit up and the sitcom she was watching blared out from the speakers.
She loved this show, Nora told herself sternly; she loved the married couple, both of them beautiful and perfect and young. The wife was nothing like Nora. She wore kitten heels and little pinafore dresses, and when her husband spoke, she giggled at every word in her pretty, high-pitched voice. “Hello honey,” she trilled whenever he stepped through the door, “how was work?”
Nora watched them religiously. Their gentle sitcom adventures were like a bad parody of her own life. Something viewed through the warping mirrors they had at carnivals. In the show, the wife had a few too many glasses of prosecco at her husband’s work dinner and had to be taken home, her charming face flushed red and giggling; in real life Nora hid wine under the bed and drank it first thing in the morning, and her husband looked at her with cold eyes when he came home to find her sprawled, once again, face first on the kitchen table. In the show, the husband got passed on a promotion and hatched a scheme to prove his worth; in real life Nate's career was on a downwards trajectory, and he took out his anger at home, shouting at Nora until he looked fit to burst, his big shoulders hard and tense. In the show, the wife made innuendo-laden comments with a cheeky wink to the audience; in real life Nora and Nate hadn't had sex since Shaun's conception, which was itself a short and somewhat rough affair, not enjoyable for anyone. Wasn’t it hilarious, living as a parody of yourself? Nora screwed her eyes shut. The TV continued to drone on and on. Fucking hilarious.
It was all her own fault. There had been a time when she’d wanted this, fought tooth and nail to snare Nate (at the time, an up-and-coming young soldier) and marry him in a big white dress, and do all the things that everyone else seemed fulfilled by. She really did try. For years she cleaned the house and cooked and planted pretty flowers in the garden and gossiped with the other housewives in their suburb. She laid back and made appreciative noises as Nate fucked her, and turned a blind eye to his failing career. She put on a thick cake of makeup each morning and made tea on demand. She tried .
But the years dragged into a blur. The occasional glass of wine became a glass every evening, became two, became a bottle. Nora stopped bothering with the chores and the house became filthy. She stopped wearing makeup. Some days, even dragging herself out of bed became impossible. The other housewives started to whisper behind her back.
What was wrong? Where was the wrongness? She wasn’t a stupid woman. In fact she’d done well in school, very well, too well - she had to tone herself down once she was mature enough to realise that people didn’t like a know-it-all, and men didn’t like to feel nagged at, and it was easier to smile and shut up. It seemed that she wasn’t smart enough to solve this puzzle, though, and the wrongness lingered and festered and grew into something impenetrable.
Ironically, Shaun was supposed to make it all better.
Wasn’t that what married couples did? Wasn’t that what Nora was missing, the source of all this sickness? Nora was only following expectations. Or more accurately, Nate was following expectations - he was the one insisting they needed a baby, that his colleagues were beginning to find him odd, that his parents were pestering him for grandchildren. “Can’t you be normal, for once in your life?” He’d asked Nora, anger rising in his voice while she tried to explain that she didn’t want a baby. Not just anger, though. There was desperation there, and in his eyes. "Of course you want a child. It's instinctual. You're a woman, for God's sake, aren't you? You're literally designed for it. Lay back and stop arguing with me."
Nora did love Shaun, of course.
In a way.
No, she did love him, more than she knew it was possible to love another person; but he didn’t fix her. Far from it. Every day as the swell of her own belly grew Nora felt herself sinking deeper and deeper, despondent and hysterical. It was a relief when he was born and she could finally drink again. She was useless. She was half-comatose throughout the day.
They had to buy a butler. The robot was out of their budget, but - as Nate screamed at her one evening when he came home to find her drunk out of her mind and Shaun left wailing in an overflowing diaper - if they left the baby alone with Nora, it was only a matter of time until something bad happened.
So that was her life. Alcoholic, trapped in an awful marriage, saddled with a baby and not even thirty years old.
And then the bombs fell.