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

by Fiona Perrin

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Wragley,’ I said into the darkness. ‘Lars, I’m ringing you a taxi.’

  ‘She don’t want you, mate,’ said the footballer again.

  ‘I’m going to get you, you arsehole. You put my children in danger,’ said Lars, struggling to his feet and then promptly falling into the bushes, exhaling more Swedish swear words as he did it.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I said out loud as I charged down the stairs towards the front door, wrenching it open to see Lars’ legs sticking out from the garden onto the path.

  By this time, a few more of my neighbours had thrown up their sashes to join in. I could hear their murmuring through the trees that lined the street. Gritting my teeth with humiliation, I stepped out barefoot onto the steps, shivering on the cold concrete, and made my way down until I stood over a white-faced, semi-comatose version of my husband.

  ‘For God’s sake.’ I kicked him, not especially gently. ‘Come on. Get up.’ I reached down and tried to haul him up.

  ‘I’m going to prove it to you, älskling. I’m going to be the husband you always wanted me to be.’

  ‘Do you need a hand, love?’ called Mrs Wragley. She wasn’t going to be much cop when it came to raising men from the near-dead.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I called.

  ‘I’d call the police if I was you,’ shouted Guy.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I said as I managed to heave a limp Lars into a sitting position.

  ‘And fuck you back, darlin’,’ shouted the footballer.

  I got Lars to his feet – he seemed to have regained some control of his limbs. A slow smile of pleasure crossed his face as he looked at me. ‘You see,’ he slurred. ‘I’m back.’

  ‘It’s just not like him, is it?’ said Mrs Wragley. ‘I’ll pop round with a tonic tomorrow.’

  ‘Better make it a vodka tonic,’ I said to myself as I started to hobble with him up the steps to the door, his arm around my neck.

  ‘You gunna get him up those steps?’ called Guy.

  ‘Take your testosterone back to bed, you tosser,’ I shouted back. I pulled harder and, ultimately, managed to slam the door of the house.

  When I finally got Lars into the sitting room, he lay like a great beast of uselessness on the sofa, shut his eyes and started snoring loudly almost immediately. I pulled a blanket out from under a cushion and threw it over the man I’d loved for so long. His face was the colour of ancient ash apart from the bruised purple of his closed eyes.

  *

  The next morning, Lars got up from the sofa at about 10 a.m. The children had woken much earlier but I’d told them that Daddy had been in the area when he’d felt ill and decided to come to the house to rest. I hated confusing them any further.

  Tess and Finn hushed each other in the hallway and smiled when Lars finally stumbled into the kitchen; I was drinking coffee and we were making Easter cards.

  With a sanctimonious air, I got up and thrust a packet of Nurofen and a mug of black coffee at him. He said, ‘Thank you,’ and sat down with a thud at the table, grey and grubby in his work clothes. I picked up my pencils again and set about colouring a carrot orange.

  ‘Are you back to live in our house?’ Finn asked.

  Lars said nothing so – knowing how much the children needed clarity – I said, ‘No, Daddy was just not very well so it was easier to sleep here. We’re going to carry on exactly as I explained.’

  ‘We’d like it if you’d stayed married,’ said Finn almost conversationally.

  I could sense Lars trying to meet my eyes but didn’t look at him. How much hurt and guilt could there be in a small boy’s remark?

  Tess said into the silence, ‘Is it the sort of time when we’re allowed to watch a DVD?’

  Lars gave a hollow cackle; it was the brilliant, grim insight of children who could absorb their parents’ mood within seconds. ‘Yes, it’s exactly that sort of time. Come on. How about The Wizard of Oz?’

  ‘It’s for babies. The first bit’s not even in colour,’ Tessa said, but she and her brother stood up and went out into the hallway and Lars followed.

  I started to empty the dishwasher, thrusting bowls into the cupboard. A few minutes later, Lars came back into the kitchen and stood behind me.

  Without turning around, I said, ‘Please, I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry for the names I called you and for whatever I did last night.’

  ‘For causing more pain to our kids? For turning up on the doorstep three sheets to the wind? For being abusive to the neighbours? For waking up the whole street in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Well, for the kids, yes, very sorry. I can’t remember much about the rest. But mostly I know that everything that’s happened is my fault. I know that you did what you did because of me. Revenge.’

  He was talking about me shagging Peter. ‘I said I don’t want to talk about it.’ I pulled three coffee mugs out and put them in a high cupboard. ‘But it wasn’t like that.’

  ‘It keeps coming back to me – what we’ve got and what we’re throwing away.’

  I spun on my heel. ‘Bit late now, don’t you think?’

  He looked down at his feet in yesterday’s socks. ‘Can’t we just postpone the divorce while we do some thinking?’

  ‘There’s nothing holding it up now except you.’ I stuck out my chin. ‘I won the Campury account. I know where I stand.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said with a wan smile. ‘Could you just sit down with me and talk for a bit?’

  I closed my eyes. ‘I don’t have the strength.’

  ‘Please.’ He sat down at the table and picked up his coffee cup.

  I sat down wearily. ‘No shouting or name-calling.’

  ‘I promise,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry about last night – it sounds like I was an arsehole. If it helps, I feel like shit.’

  ‘Good. And you were a complete arsehole.’

  He smiled a little. ‘And, well, just sorry. It’s the children we should think about now, though. What kind of long-term damage are we doing to them?’

  ‘You chose to make it this way.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Lars reached out for my hand but I shook him off. ‘What harm can it do to hold off the divorce for a couple of months? I need to show you that I can change. Dammit, Ami, this has been a real wake-up call to me, you know – all I can think about is the children.’ He put his head in his hands.

  ‘I’m not going to talk about it.’ It was as if he wanted to rip my heart out of my body again, play with it like a toy and then give it to me back, its beat all broken. ‘It’s done. Done.’

  Lars shook his head. ‘I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you. Sorry that you had to go to another man to feel loved. But I know it’s all my fault. I didn’t listen to you.’

  The untidiness of our future; the kids shuttling between houses. ‘We made this mess. And it’s too late.’

  ‘Just don’t file the divorce. Please let me show you. Just give it a few months for the sake of the children. For the sake of us. It can’t do any harm.’

  ‘I don’t trust you not to hurt me again.’ It was more than true.

  It was also true that it was nothing that I’d said that had made him change his mind: it was what happened to the children that had made him see that we needed him around. However, what I’d done – slept with someone else, looked as if I no longer wanted him – had got to him too.

  But I was just about pulling my life together. ‘I’m at the point of no return,’ I told him.

  Lars jumped up. ‘I’ll show you. I’ll help you with the children and show you that I can be here. I was so wrong, Amelia. I thought it would be so much easier to be on my own than arguing all the time… but… now all I can think about is all of us being apart. You know I’ve always loved you – that never stopped.’

  Finn’s plaintive voice came back into my head: We’d like it if you’d stay married. I tried to shake it off. Then the image of him at the bottom
of a pile of cushions, which was ever-present.

  ‘Let’s see if we can be friends again? Nothing more than that,’ Lars pushed on. ‘If we can get on and be good parents and then, if that works then maybe more. But, please, keep our fam together.’

  He sounded like me a few months back, before everything that had happened.

  ‘You can’t stay here.’ Christ, did I just say that?

  ‘No, I’ll stay at my mother’s. But just put the divorce off.’ His face seemed almost translucent. ‘Think of the children. If we go through with this there’ll be no going back. You have to think about this for their sake.’

  I shook my head with misery. There was a pause; a very long pause. I struggled with my conscience and then struggled again. Eventually I gave a small, almost imperceptible nod, although I still couldn’t quite believe I had.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, very quietly.

  ‘You need to go and buy flowers for Mrs Wragley and apologise for waking her up,’ I said. ‘But if you see that footballer from down the road, punch him instead.’

  *

  ‘You’ve done what?’ said Liv later that day.

  ‘It’s for a couple of months. Just to see. If there’s anything I can do to save my marriage I have to, for the sake of the children…’

  ‘What about the sake of you?’

  I pushed the phone away from my ear. ‘I’m not sure there is a “for the sake of me”.’

  All I knew was that there were three people in our family who seemed to want to make it work and just me standing in the way. And two of them were children with their futures in my hands. If there was even a small chance we could stick together, wouldn’t I be crazy not to try to take it?

  I went to Cathy’s office on a Friday evening to explain that we were putting the divorce on hold. I still felt very uncertain about what I’d decided to do.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Not a Type D after all.’ She was more sombre today; her bubbliness had been pricked and I wondered why.

  ‘I still might be. I’ve got to think of the children.’ My eyes went involuntarily to the photos on her side table; there were only her and Jeremy, no kids as part of a family holiday snap; none graduating in a mortarboard.

  Cathy had followed my gaze. ‘It wasn’t meant to be for us.’

  ‘Was that… OK?’

  ‘Not really.’ Cathy leaned forward and her vast chest overran the edge of the desk. She looked as if she was settling in for a girlie chat; she indicated the timer clock and hit the big button on the top. Then she pointed to what was probably a drinks cabinet: ‘Friday night snifter?’

  ‘Umm, thanks, yes.’

  Cathy pulled open the cabinet and made swift work of knocking up a couple of whiskies, two ice cubes each in crystal glasses.

  She handed me one and sat down again on the other side of the desk. ‘No, Jeremy couldn’t…’ Her little finger cocked and then uncocked very slightly as she held her glass so that I had to think about whether I’d actually seen her do it – perhaps I hadn’t. ‘Well, it wasn’t meant to be. That’s what we always say, but I would have liked them.’

  She was married to someone who couldn’t get it up. There was sharing and there was over-sharing. I wanted to ask her why she hadn’t just clicked on one of the spam emails she must have had advertising Viagra, stuffed the pills down his neck one dinner time and then jumped a surprised-looking Jeremy. I tried to find something to say. ‘But you and Jeremy, it’s all OK apart from that? Sorry, don’t mean to be nosy.’

  Cathy looked as if she was going to say something positive, but then she shook her head. ‘It’s what people would call “rubbing along”,’ she said. ‘Married forever. Don’t know anything different. Not like your generation – all you Type Ds that keep walking through the door, saying it’s just not enough.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you…?’ I started but then changed my mind. ‘I mean, perhaps it is enough.’

  ‘It’s the way we were brought up. When we got married we really did think that once you had said, “I do,” you should size up to it, realise you’d make a catastrophic mistake and get on with it.’

  I could only splutter. ‘Catastrophic?’

  Cathy swirled the honey-coloured liquid in her glass. ‘I was being silly. My marriage isn’t catastrophic; in this job, you see the real disasters.’

  Ah, the drunk who pissed on his child in the night. The poor woman she’d mentioned at our first meeting whose ex was about to be sectioned. That kind of ‘real disaster’.

  ‘Must be lovely having him at home now – you said he was retired?’

  Cathy looked at me as if I’d said the moon was made of Stilton. ‘Well, I suppose it is nice knowing that someone’s there and he’s a very kind man. But all I want to do is be left in peace to read Vogue’s shoe pages and, instead, I can hear him watching terrible sitcoms from his sitting room.’

  His sitting room? I didn’t know what it was like to be from a different generation; when ‘rubbing along’ was what you did. ‘Jeremy must have some redeeming features?’

  ‘He’s kind, patient, sensible.’ Cathy laughed ruefully as if she thought these characteristics really meant boring. ‘I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I’ve been doing quite a lot of that for myself lately. Jeremy keeps hinting that he thinks it’s the change but I had that a while back. He bought me an air-conditioning unit, which was sweet.’

  ‘Does it work – the air-con unit?’

  ‘It deals with the hot flushes but not my temper,’ Cathy said.

  ‘Wouldn’t a night out help?’ I felt as if I was quoting Liv.

  ‘Perhaps it might. We could go to L’Auberge in Bromley High Street,’ Cathy said. ‘We haven’t been in years.’

  ‘Sounds lovely,’ I said, imagining fancy-schmancy food with far too much sauce. I started to gather up my bag, wondering if I should mention also getting some magic medicine for erectile dysfunction.

  ‘I’ll suggest it to him tonight and we’ll book for tomorrow,’ Cathy said, sounding a lot more cheerful. Maybe if my advertising career went down the tubes I could become a marriage guidance counsellor. I got up and didn’t know whether to shake hands professionally with her or give her a girlfriend-style kiss on the cheek.

  Cathy solved it by giving me a big hug and saying, ‘I do love our little chats, don’t you?’

  31

  Was I doing the right thing or the wrong thing? I simply didn’t know.

  After the night when he’d turned up drunk, Lars was in the kitchen most nights when I got home at six.

  He interrogated Jenny about children’s nutrition and the eradication of nits from long hair. He listened to Finn’s list of spellings and set out to make sure his son achieved ten out of ten in his test on Friday; when it was the next weekend for him to have the children, he washed and ironed their clothes – Ulrika told me that she’d watched painfully but not taken over. At our house, he played hide and seek for hours and pretended not to notice the very obvious lump behind the curtains that was Tessa until she couldn’t hold in the giggles any more. He did it all as he did everything: with a commitment to succeed.

  I waited for it to inevitably wear off. He would give up at the first work crisis. When a call from his office came as he was bathing the children during the first few days after his promise, I hovered outside the door ready to dash in and make sure no one drowned.

  ‘Bill?’ he said instead. ‘I’m going to have to call you back – the kids are in the bath.’

  ‘Take the call,’ I said, striding into the steam.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, clicking the off button. ‘Now, who wants to tell me which one of these shampoos you use and how bubbly it is?’

  Of course, they loved it.

  At the school display of that term’s handiwork, Lars amazed Mr Carter first by attending, and secondly seeming to know everything about Tessa’s curriculum for the term.

  ‘I’m so glad you could attend as a family on this occasion,’ Mr Carter
said. Julia overheard and rolled her eyes. Nadine was standing with some of the other Smugums in the corner, though, and nodded approvingly.

  ‘Bastard,’ I muttered as I drove home, angrily tailgating anyone who was driving at an appropriate pace in the residential area. ‘Comes in and pretends to be Dad after all this time. Brainwashes my children. Takes them away from me for whole weekends. Turns up every night at six o’clock, when he couldn’t get home at all before… bastard, bastard, bastard. And soon he’ll bugger off again and we’ll be back to normal except the kids will miss him even more than ever. Bastard.’ Would he? There was a huge part of me that wanted to believe him and an equally large part that couldn’t.

  ‘Look, this has got to stop, all this temporary parenting,’ I told him the following evening when the children were asleep and he was ready to go back to Ulrika’s. ‘It’s all very well, but think of what you are doing to them. Overcompensating. Changing their routines. Making them dependent on you when you’ll just go back to not being around.’

  ‘No. I’ve changed my behaviour for good,’ Lars said. ‘I’ve taken on a new manager to look after most of the international travel. I mean all this, Ami. People do change and I’m going to be one of them.’ I looked at the floor. ‘I think about you in someone else’s arms and…’

  ‘I told you I’m not going to talk about it.’ Within a few days of Peter, it had felt like something that had happened to someone else altogether.

  ‘It’s not just that,’ he went on. ‘Suddenly I could see sense – was I going to lose my family because of a little more business growth? Was I really going to be so stupid as to lose all this’ – he gestured around him – ‘because I couldn’t see how important it was to me? Look at me. I was a mess.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I whispered. ‘You got drunk because you felt sorry for yourself. Because you couldn’t have exactly what you wanted whenever you wanted it.’

  ‘No.’ He tried to take my hands but I backed away. ‘Look, I know there’s nothing I can say. I just have to take the time to prove it to you. It’s not just about the kids, either…’