The Story After Us: A heartwarming tale of life and love for modern women everywhere

by Fiona Perrin

  There was no real debate about whose prospect Lars was. He was blond and it’d always been the case that I liked blonds and Liv liked everyone else, and that division generally met the needs of my more promiscuous friend because there were plenty more everything elses.

  ‘He’s bloody gorgeous,’ I said as we watched him come out of the door upstairs, one February Saturday, and march off into the distance. From our basement window, as we looked up at him through the railings, his legs seemed to take strides that were twice as long as anyone else’s.

  ‘I’ll knock on his door later for you and ask him to come round for a drink,’ said Liv.

  ‘We don’t have any drink and we can’t afford any.’ I was still trying to work out how the salary from my account manager job in an ad agency was supposed to feed and clothe me, let alone supplement Liv, with her series of flibbertigibbet occupations.

  I groaned; my back ached from my latest sexual wrestling match with Archie and the flat was freezing. We ran out of money to top up the gas at least a week before payday every month and this was that week. Liv was wearing her outdoor coat inside and leggings under her floaty skirt. I planned to spend the afternoon in the bath to escape the cold and the urge to go round to Archie’s warmer house, which would only mean bruises and aches in places that I didn’t even know could be bruised and achy. The hot water came from the electricity, which wasn’t yet on a pay-as-you-go meter; the heat didn’t. I spent a lot of time in the bath that winter.

  ‘I promised Nicholas I’d drop by for a shag,’ Liv said, wrapping a scarf round her neck. ‘He’s staying at his mum’s while she’s away so I’ll get some lunch too.’

  I got in the bath. I took Jilly Cooper’s Riders – always one of my favourite books, since at the age of fourteen it taught me much more than sex-education lessons ever had. I topped up the water with my toe every time it became lukewarm without looking up from the pages.

  When there was a rather persistent knock on the door a couple of hours later, just as my bones were cooking nicely, I groaned. Liv had forgotten her keys again and she was going to want the bath to get rid of the smell of sex with Nicholas before she went out with someone called Kevin later that evening. Grumbling, I shivered out of the water and wrapped myself quickly in a threadbare towel that had once been the colour of a tangerine but was now a washed-out yellow. As I dashed across the sitting room and towards the door, the steam from my body met the frozen air and created a cartoon rainstorm behind me.

  ‘Aaaaarrrggggghhh,’ I said, pulling open the door and making to dash back to the bath.

  ‘Hello,’ said the blond from upstairs with a smile.

  ‘Omigod.’ I tried to push the door back into the space between him and me. ‘I thought you were my flatmate.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said but he didn’t sound sorry at all. His voice from the gap between the door and the wall was sing-song and guttural. ‘I am living upstairs.’

  I jumped up and down to keep warm.

  ‘Do you want me to wait till you get clothes on?’ he went on.

  ‘What do you want? The thing is, even if I get dressed I won’t be warm.’

  ‘I came to ask you. Who do we call to get heating to work? I’ve tried the agent but they’re not open but closed. It is not so much cold as freezing cold.’ He sounded out the words as if they were new to him and chuckled slightly again.

  ‘You’re foreign, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m from Sweden,’ he said with slow enunciation. ‘Do you know who we phone?’

  ‘No one,’ I said through the small slice of open door between us. ‘There’s no one to phone. And even if you do ask the agency on Monday, they don’t do anything.’

  ‘But that’s outrageous,’ he said, again sounding as if he’d never said this long word before.

  ‘Yes. Look, I really have to get back in the bath.’ I might turn into an ice sculpture if I stood around any longer, dripping.

  ‘Can please I come back later? I really need to ask someone some questions about these apartments – none of my cupboards open and my socks are cold like ice in the mornings.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, agreeing. I kept mine on my feet all night and hoped that no one would ever find out that I hadn’t changed them for days.

  I meant yes about the socks, but he seemed to take that as meaning he could return and went off saying he would ‘be getting some food’ and we could ‘eat and drink lunch’. Despite his confused English, he said it as if there were absolutely no reason for me to say no and, of course, all I wanted to do was say yes. ‘I will return in half an hour.’

  5

  2017

  Seeing Lars knock on the door of our house was too much to bear. Usually when he got back from one of his business trips, we could hear his key being thrust in the lock before he strode in, shouting, ‘I’m back. Ami, kids, I’m back.’ By knocking on the door, he was clearly demonstrating that he no longer considered it home.

  I pulled it open, but looked down, trying to avoid his eyes, and shouted to Finn and Tessa, who emerged from the playroom. Lars didn’t move to kiss me hello.

  ‘Daddy,’ Finn cried into the embarrassed silence that followed. I stood back and let him fly by. The kids are all that is left of us, I thought.

  ‘Käresta, happy birthday,’ Lars said, hugging him and then Tess.

  She pushed him away and glowered at her dad. ‘At least you’re not dead,’ she said to her father.

  ‘Tess,’ I said. ‘I told you we don’t have to talk about being dead all the time.’

  ‘I’m just staying with Grandie for a while.’ Lars knelt down and faced Tessa. His face was long and drawn. He was wearing the pale jeans and blue T-shirt he always wore to work at weekends. Still our eyes hadn’t met.

  Finn ran off down the hall to the playroom. ‘Come and see my Power Rangers. The black one’s head has got all blown off. We might need batteries or Sellotape.’

  I watched as Lars went after him. In just a few days his presence felt alien, as if he was not supposed to be near me now. The smell of the lemon soap he always used lingered behind and I noticed it in a way I never had before he left. The first prick of tears was behind my eyeballs.

  Quickly, I picked up Tess and, blinking, placed her on the shelf of my hipbone. I carried her towards the playroom door. Tess sniffed my chin. ‘Daddy went to live with Grandie instead of living with us.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He went to stay with Grandie and now he’s here to see you and play with you and put you to bed.’ It was as if by saying it was temporary I might make it so.

  I put her down inside the playroom door where Lars was sitting on the floor, talking in the mix of Swedish and English he always used with them and which now, from years of Lars, Ulrika and Thor, I could mostly understand too.

  He was a little like a Power Ranger who had lost his power himself.

  *

  ‘He promised me he’d make it to this party but then blamed me when he screwed it up,’ I whispered to Liv as I let her out of the front door extra quietly so that she didn’t have to bump into Lars. Seeing him made me newly angry. ‘He turns up now when it’s all over and done with.’

  ‘At least he showed up on the kid’s birthday,’ Liv said. ‘Let me know when the paramedics have been.’ She kissed me on both cheeks.

  ‘Liv?’ I called after her as she was getting on her bike.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  *

  I shakingly poured myself another glass of champagne in the kitchen, wiped up more jelly and listened to the giggles and fake banging noises coming through the wall. Then I went and looked in on the Animal Man, who was still snoring on the rug in the sitting room. I prodded him with my foot but he just turned over with a loud sigh. He didn’t appear to be dying – just in a very deep sleep. I went back into the kitchen and did more wiping.

  ‘I’m so angry with you and so furious with myself for not being able to change this,’ I told the kitchen wall
, trying to stop the heat of my angry eyes turning into water.

  ‘Talking to yourself is the first sign,’ said Lars, coming into the kitchen.

  ‘Of not having a husband around to answer you?’ God, I’d turned into a complete cow.

  ‘Just don’t start,’ he said, as if a loud voice was not far from the surface. Then he took a visible deep breath. ‘We’ll talk once the kids are in bed. I’ll have a glass of that,’ he told me, gesturing at the bottle.

  ‘Oh, will you?’ I poured it anyway, thinking how inappropriate champagne was right now.

  ‘Tessa says she’s allowed ice cream instead of milk to help her tummy ache, but she’s talking rubbish, isn’t she?’

  ‘Complete rubbish,’ I said, pouring two cups of milk, putting them in the microwave and pressing buttons as I spoke. There was a silence while we both watched the microwave plate go round and round – it seemed as if forty seconds were forever. ‘Here.’ I thrust the milk at him. ‘Tell them I’ll come and say goodnight when they’re in bed.’

  *

  ‘All right, so you’ve seen a lawyer?’

  Did he just say that? I gasped audibly.

  Lars had various bits of paperwork laid out on the kitchen table along with his open laptop. I sat paralysed at his attitude.

  The kids had refused to go to sleep and bounced around until I went upstairs. I let them play for five minutes longer and fussed about cleaning their teeth so that I could avoid the administrative detail that was the end of my family.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen a lawyer,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘I’ve been at work and looking after the kids and…’ I wanted to say that I was hoping that we weren’t there yet; I could feel all the hurt of the previous weekend as if it were new pain. ‘Is it now going to be about who gets what?’

  ‘What did you expect it to be about?’ said Lars. ‘Who said what to who and who shouted and who threw what and who was a—’

  ‘Nagging machine?’ I said under my breath. That was one of the kinder things he’d called me during our row on the day he’d left.

  ‘We’re way past all of that stuff now, Amelia.’ He shuffled papers, moved the mouse a little bit and I put more tissues under my nose. ‘We’re done with talking.’

  How could he sit there so intransigent, so unwilling to see any other vista than his own, like a man who buys a house in Tuscany for the view and then refuses to believe that anywhere else in the world is beautiful any more?

  ‘Now, if we can sort out the finances and how we’re going to care for the children between us, we’ll save a fortune. The lawyers will just need to fill in the paperwork,’ he continued, scoring a line across the title of one of the pages as if to underline how adamant he was to save money.

  ‘And that’s what’s most important now, is it?’

  ‘Yes. It is. We’ve decided to get a divorce.’

  ‘You’ve decided. And thanks for telling your mother and Thor. People on entirely different continents now know I’m dumped.’

  Lars ignored me. ‘So, we should try very hard to make sure there is as much money left as possible to ensure that we both have as good a standard of living as possible.’

  ‘My business is really in trouble,’ I told him. ‘Because of my client, Land. They owe us fifty grand.’

  Lars looked up sharply. ‘Well, you’ll have to persuade Marti to give you your old job back if the agency goes under. You need to be earning money, Amelia; the cashflows of my business aren’t secure enough yet. There’s my colleagues to think about.’

  ‘Always your bloody colleagues,’ I said. ‘What about your family?’ I thought about the evenings when he’d come home for dinner, jumping up at the sound of his phone ringing and then pacing the hallway as he had long conversations with his workmates while I sat and ate my food alone.

  ‘I’m not going to argue with you any more,’ Lars said wearily. ‘It’s not good for the kids to be in this environment.’

  ‘I know,’ I said in a tiny bleak voice. I’d always said – after growing up with a father with terrible mood swings – that my children would feel safe in a happy, stable home. Despite all the rowing, I’d been hoping all week that, instead of this cold conversation, he’d walk into the kitchen and say it’d all been a terrible mistake; that he wanted to come back; that he’d change and change for good and the children and I would be OK.

  When had Lars become this efficient machine that could put his marriage aside, as if I were last year’s fashion? I’d spent hours in the middle of so many restless nights, trying to find the point, the exact time, when his workaholic tendencies had turned into an obsession, leaving me never in vogue again.

  Of course, I’d always known he was ambitious – it was something we’d shared right from the start. Then he would tell me that he wanted a brilliant career just like his dead father, a successful engineer. It was his way of honouring his dad and trying to provide some recompense for Ulrika in her grief. Now, when I’d even tried to persuade him to talk about that at marriage guidance counselling, he called it ‘cod psychology’ and said he was simply trying to do the best he could for our family, and why couldn’t I see that?

  ‘Money is going to be really tight,’ Lars pressed on. ‘We’d always planned to reinvest in my company…’

  It was what we’d agreed in the early years, but I’d spent a lot of time in the last couple begging him to slow down on trying to expand his company and instead spend some more time with us. Now his bloody business was going to leave us broke too.

  ‘But it’s really important that the kids stay in this house,’ I said. I looked around at the custard-yellow walls of the kitchen. When we’d finally moved here, we’d danced around this room, which was the same size as a whole floor in our old flat, and shouted, ‘We’ve always dreamed about this.’

  And Lars had taken a little while out of fitting window locks and bleeding the central heating to laugh at me and give me a hug. The kids – and Finn was just six months old at the time – had been packed off to Ulrika’s for the night so that we could get on with moving. I’d dug around in a box until I’d found some sheets and pillowcases, made our double bed and we’d collapsed into it, exhausted but joyous, and celebrated in a housewarming party for two.

  ‘I agree that it’s really important to make sure the kids are as stable as possible but it’s going to be tough,’ Lars said and handed over a typed list of figures. Down one side were listed ‘capital assets’, down the other ‘operational expenditure’. He pointed at various lines entitled ‘council tax’ and ‘buildings and contents insurance’.

  He really wanted to get rid of me. And as far as I could see from the spreadsheet, I needed to be earning quite a lot of money at exactly the same time as it looked as if my business was going down the drain.

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘You’re going to have to get some money back out of your company.’

  ‘We’ll have to try everything,’ he said, ‘but get a lawyer first. Here’s the details of mine.’ He handed me another piece of paper with a scan of a business card on it and stood up. I took it, feeling completely numb. Then he said, ‘I assume you want to be the one who files the divorce, not me?’

  ‘You want me to divorce you?’ I blinked.

  ‘We have to write down all the reasons why we can’t live together. I could write down why you’re impossible to live with if you like,’ Lars said, and just for a second he smiled sadly.

  ‘Oh, God.’ I spluttered a huge ironic laugh that turned very quickly to a sob.

  ‘I thought it would give you more control,’ he said and turned away.

  ‘Did you think that it would make it hurt less?’ I whispered. Ouch. A million ouches.

  There was a silence during which he clicked the laptop shut and stuffed it into his briefcase. He got up, looked at me briefly and then went off down the hall. He didn’t say goodbye.

  It was as I laid my head to rest in my hot, heavy hands that I heard Lars shriek, ‘Helvetes jävlar! För
guds skull!’ and there was a lot of banging.

  I sprang to my feet as I heard the furious sound of wings flapping and got to the hallway just in time to see the Animal Man, his moustache askew and his face a picture of confusion, what looked like owl shit on his head, stagger out from the sitting room and straight into Lars.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I cried. ‘You seemed to faint. Have you got any idea what’s happened to you? Was it that rollie you were smoking?’

  Lars stood back against the wall as if he were in the presence of a rancid ghost. The Animal Man looked pallid and deranged.

  ‘Bastard owl,’ I said to the bird as it once again circled the ceiling.

  Just then the pah-pah of a car ambulance screeched down the road and pulled up outside with a noisy fluster.

  ‘Amelia, what’s going on?’ Lars recovered some of his voice.

  ‘Lars, I’d like you to meet the Animal Man.’ I drew myself to my full height. ‘In fact, now you can be useful… You can help in what may or may not be a minor medical emergency.’ Lars looked stunned and was very quiet as I talked to the paramedics, established that the Animal Man would live and helped stack the animals back in his van. Then he climbed into his own car and followed the Animal Man as he drove off down the road.

  6

  2007

  As the door closed I could hear the gorgeous foreigner’s feet thumping up the stairs above me. Was he really going to come back? This was turning into a much better winter Saturday than I’d hoped.

  I put on my dressing gown and ran around pushing the debris of my and Liv’s lives under cushions. Then I hauled my still-damp body into my tightest jeans and managed to get them to do up by lying on the floor and pulling the zip up with the hook end of a wire coat hanger. I could hardly move when I’d added Liv’s new black polo neck that she’d just got for her birthday and my own black boots into which I crammed my feet in two pairs of my cleanest socks. I raked through every CD we owned and tried to find something that he might possibly think was cool, settling for an ambient collection that one of Liv’s DJ boyfriends had left behind. Next, I sliced open a plastic tube of old foundation with a pair of scissors so that I could get to the tiny residue that was left in the bottom and pulled it over my red face to try and tone down the effects of the bath. My hands were shrivelled like a prune. He probably won’t come back, I thought as I put the copies of Heat to the bottom of the pile on the ring-stained coffee table and pulled one of Archie’s issues of NME to the top.