by Rebecca Done
‘Two years ago what?’
‘My last girlfriend.’
She smiles back, apparently embarrassed. ‘Right. I’m not very subtle, am I?’
I shake my head like, You’re perfect, all the while wondering if there’s an elegant way to reassure her that it hasn’t, in fact, been two whole years since I’ve last had sex, but because I’m not Graeme I decide against it.
‘You?’ I ask her.
‘Ah … about six months ago. He had a big bust-up with my dad about religion.’
‘Religion?’
‘Mum and Dad go to church,’ she explains, from which I can assume that her ex did not.
‘Oh. That sounds awkward.’
‘Are your parents?’ she asks me, almost hopefully. ‘Churchgoers, I mean.’ It’s a logical enough question, church being something of a generational thing.
I manage not to spit out my drink. ‘Not exactly.’
‘It’s okay,’ she says quickly, putting a hand to her chest. ‘I mean, I’m not religious myself.’
I smile at her perfectly reasonable assumption that I might be able to sum up my parents using straightforward descriptions like occupation, whereabouts, religious beliefs. But I can’t think of anything to say, so I go with the truth. ‘Actually, my dad’s … well, he’s … a bit ill.’
Her forehead furrows with concern. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Nothing serious I hope?’
Funny you ask, he’s actually an alcoholic with end-stage liver disease. I hesitate – if I enter into the whole story now, there’s a good chance it could finish things off before they’ve even started.
Plus, it’s always a particularly excruciating conversation to have when you’ve got a drink in your hand. I’ve tried to offset the inevitable raised eyebrow before now by assuring whomever I’m with that I carefully monitor my own alcohol consumption – which I do. The only snag to this is the inherent implication that I do have an underlying drinking problem, albeit one that’s under control. So I tend these days to say nothing at all.
‘No – nothing serious,’ I say, brushing it off.
Unfortunately, like most people, Molly thinks switching the focus to my mum might be a good next move. ‘How about your mum?’
I meet her eye and try to smile. ‘Actually, my mum died when we were seven.’ I elaborate quickly so she doesn’t have to ask me to. ‘She got run over walking on the verge through our village.’
To her credit, Molly holds my gaze. But her eyes glass over slightly, perhaps because mine have. It’s something I’ve always struggled to control, and I really wish I could.
‘Sorry,’ I manage. ‘My parental situation is a bit … unique.’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she says eventually. ‘I have this really incredible talent for putting my foot in it. You might have noticed.’
I see her swallow back her tears, and almost involuntarily I reach out, grab her free hand and give it a squeeze. ‘You definitely don’t,’ I tell her.
She squeezes me back and we share a look unlike any I’ve shared with a girl before, and my heart contracts with pleasure.
‘Right – another drink?’
I don’t know what makes me hesitate before I head back to the bar. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t go slipping out of any fire exits, okay?’
It must have come out like a plea, because she smiles the most reassuring smile I’ve ever seen. ‘I definitely won’t.’
Much later we wander through the streets of London, our shoulders occasionally bumping together, talking about our lives, our dreams, our hopes. The sky is crisp, black and popping with stars. My breath freezes in the frigid air, unfurling in front of me like fog as we walk. Molly’s almost as tall as me in heels, and she’s striding quickly, keeping pace. I’m trying not to fixate on her figure, which is challenging, because she has just about the most perfect body I’ve ever seen.
Eventually, I say to her, ‘So, Molly. What now?’
‘Sorry. I’ve been waffling on again, haven’t I?’ Her breath makes a delicate little fog in front of her face.
She hasn’t, actually – she’s been telling me all about her job and her friends and her parents, and I’ve been enjoying every minute. I’ve discovered she’s going on holiday to South Africa in January (one of my bucket-list destinations), is a fan of greedy portions in restaurants (big tick) and is in vehement disagreement with the general consensus in advertising at the moment that the headline is dead (thank you). Which, given she’s a junior in a major agency that more or less sets all the trends, is really quite impressive. I can’t stop sneaking glances at her profile. She’s stunning.
‘Not at all,’ I assure her. I’m also liking the way she doesn’t seem to have noticed how far we’ve walked, despite the fact it’s freezing, her legs are bare and she’s wearing high heels. Not that I particularly want to compare her with my ex Nicola (though for the record – streaks ahead), but if Molly had been Nicola we would doubtless still be standing outside the bar, waiting for a taxi, and she’d be crying about her feet and blaming me for the fact they ached.
Molly seems to be made of tough stuff, although it still occurs to me that I want to offer her my jacket, so I do.
She looks across at me, surprised. ‘You’ll freeze.’
‘No, I’ll be fine.’
‘Don’t worry. I can’t feel the cold any more,’ she says. ‘Must be all those Long Island Iced Teas. God, I drank more than you. So unladylike.’
‘Yeah,’ I reply. ‘That – or you’re already hypothermic.’ So despite her protests I take off my jacket and wrap it round her shoulders. It swamps her, but I want her to be warm at least.
‘Thank you,’ she murmurs. ‘You’re very sweet.’
‘You’re welcome,’ I say, without telling her I’d quite happily strip down to my boxers if it meant she wasn’t going to freeze to death en route home to Clapham.
‘So, do you think your brother had a good night? Gary.’
‘Graeme,’ I say with a smile, imagining Graeme’s snort of derision at such an error, before adding with a pang of guilt, ‘I hope so.’
‘He’ll forgive you, won’t he? If you’re twins. You must be very close.’
I swallow, then mumble doubtfully, ‘I’ll make it up to him.’
Just as I’m saying this, Molly’s hand slips from mine. I look down and in an instant she’s fallen in a heap on to the freezing cold pavement.
‘Molly?’ I squat down, set a hand against her back. It’s quivering uncontrollably, and it takes me a moment or two to realize she’s shaking with laughter.
‘Oh my God! I’m not drunk, I promise! It’s these heels.’
I laugh. ‘Are you okay?’
She lifts her face to meet mine. ‘I think I’ve embarrassed myself in every way possible tonight.’ And then we pause, faces nearly touching. I exhale against her skin, my heart thumping, and feel her lips brush mine. ‘Am I about to do it again?’ she breathes.
‘No,’ I whisper firmly, then lean in to kiss her.
A bitter little breeze is blistering around our noses and ears as her lips find mine. And now we are kissing – a deep, explosive kiss, both of us down on our knees on the icy street.
I have no idea how long it lasts but it’s by far the best kiss of my life. How did I stumble across you in a bar, for God’s sake? Already, I don’t want to be parted from her, but it’s not long before she starts to shiver again and we draw reluctantly back from one another.
‘You’re cold,’ I whisper as I help her to her feet. ‘I’m going to order you a taxi, then call you tomorrow. Once you’ve warmed up a bit.’
She shivers a little, tucks her chin down into my jacket. ‘Okay,’ she whispers back. ‘Thank you.’
A short while later, as she’s climbing into her cab, she says, ‘This is deliberate, by the way.’
‘What is?’
She shoots me a slightly nervous smile. ‘Thieving your jacket.’
I smile back down at her.
‘Because
at least this way … you kind of have to see me again. Don’t you?’
And that’s really it. The story of how I lose my jacket, but find the most incredible girl.
4
Molly – present day
It’s a beautiful Saturday morning – the sky is cornflower blue, the air hot and dry. Graeme, who arrived last night, has gone off to play golf, having failed to persuade Alex to join him. Which is a shame, because golf is pretty much the only physical activity Alex has been interested in since his accident, despite him having abhorred it before.
And conversely the gym, once his greatest passion, no longer appeals – he tells me the machines overwhelm him, and he hates the loud music, the staring and strutting. I get that: the gym can be a pretty macho place, and Alex’s lack of pace and strength is humiliating for him. Of course it is – all it does is remind him of who he was before – the guy who could use the machines with his eyes shut, who didn’t get confused about which pin goes where, who could lift a certain amount, who didn’t get into a fight with someone over the water fountain or forgetting to wipe his sweat off the machine.
So his body is no longer firm from weight training, or lean from cardio. He has filled out and softened, now perhaps the picture of a man who cares about himself less than he did. It’s not true really – it’s just harder for him to care, when some days it takes all the effort he possesses to dress himself, make his own breakfast, take a shower.
Not that I can talk – I can’t afford to be a gym member these days, so my tone too has softened, and I’m squidgy now in places I never was before. The accident has robbed not only Alex of his health and wellbeing. It was once our dream to take on a challenge like a triathlon or a marathon together, but that’s well and truly buried now.
Golf is supposed to help Alex improve his planning and concentration, so Graeme gets him to work out the handicaps in his head, remember the route they have to walk, keep score. (Amusingly, Alex has also been advised to visualize himself on the golf course when he feels himself getting angry, but the odds of him pausing to do that when he sees red are about as likely as him stopping to whip me up a champagne supper.)
But at least golf is doing something, and he always feels better afterwards, like someone has reached inside his mind to apply some sort of soothing balm. It centres him, balances him, brings back a little equilibrium.
But today he said he was too tired for golf, drained by Graeme showing up last night, taking control of the house and scrubbing down our milk-stained kitchen, all the while talking at Alex about how he was and what he’d done that week and how he was feeling and what he wanted to do tomorrow. By the time I got home from Eve’s, fat with lasagne, Alex’s face looked sunken and he seemed almost drunk with exhaustion. His eyes were virtually rolling.
Graeme always pushes Alex harder than I do, and sometimes it can be difficult to persuade him that less is more, that accepting Alex’s limitations is not the same as giving up on him. It can be a tough balance to strike.
So this morning Alex has been pretty much motionless in front of the television, flicking through the sports channels, worn out before the day has even really begun. He slept in longer than usual, so I used the opportunity to catch up on chores – putting on washing, clearing the ironing pile, dusting. I noticed when I got in last night how much tidying up and cleaning Graeme had done in addition to sorting out the milk problem, but we were all fast asleep before I got a chance to thank him properly.
‘What do you want to do today?’ I ask my husband.
He fails to answer, though I do see him shrug.
‘We should go out with Graeme,’ I say after a beat. ‘He’s come all this way.’
‘I’m tired,’ Alex replies, talking at the television. ‘I told you I would be, Molly, but you never listen.’
‘Well, you can rest this morning and then maybe we could go out somewhere this afternoon. We should go to the beach, Alex, it’s gorgeous weather. We could pack a picnic.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, leaning on the word slightly to let me know exactly how crap he thinks that idea is. But I can’t say I blame him – what’s the point of a picnic when you can no longer take pleasure in food?
‘What did you talk about last night?’
‘Who?’
‘You and Graeme.’
He fills the pause with another shrug. ‘Dunno.’
‘Boy stuff?’
A lengthy sigh lets me know my questions are starting to piss him off, but I can’t help myself. Trying to connect with Alex, make him talk to me like he used to, is basically a compulsion. My brain simply won’t accept that he’s not in there somewhere, even after all this time. And if I can achieve it, as I sometimes do – compel him to turn round, make eye contact with me, laugh at something I’ve said – it’s a tiny achievement that will see me through the rest of the weekend.
‘Or we could do some gardening. Clear the weeds, make it look a bit nicer.’
Another suggestion for Alex’s rehab activity programme was gardening, so he could feel the soil between his fingers, and because he had a mild interest in it before the accident. But mild interest has now translated into zero interest, and it’s much the same with the cottage renovation. I do very occasionally arrive home to a pile of tools arranged on the carpet, or an attempt made at stripping wallpaper, but on these odd times he feels motivated enough to start a job, he rarely sees it through.
The activity programme is intended to draw the two versions of Alex together – the old Alex and the new Alex. To provide a reference point for himself, to be something of a port in the storm. But I have to say, so far the results have been patchy at best.
‘I’m busy,’ he says, finally starting to lose his temper. ‘Stop nagging me.’
Still he doesn’t look at me. His eyes remain trained on the bright green turf of a football pitch far away, a team he doesn’t know, doesn’t care about, doesn’t follow, had probably never heard of before today. And all the while I’m standing right here behind him, asking as I do every day for him to let me back in. It’s exhausting for me too, but in a different way.
So I head outside into the meadow-like garden and sit on the edge of the patio. The mass of long grass is peppered with poppies and cornflowers, so overgrown I have taken to telling people I am cultivating a wild-flower pasture. It’s littered too with the remnants of DIY – the trench we dug to sort out our damp problem, the logs of felled trees whose roots were causing structural damage, the semi-permanent skip filled with everything we stripped out that I’ve yet to get taken away.
Alex inherited this ancient cottage from his father, Kevin, after his death from liver cancer four years ago, and our plan was to renovate it, after which I would quit my job and (hopefully) bring up our family. The perfect plan.
Most of Kevin’s stuff is still in storage. We sent some of it to charity and some of it to Mum and Dad’s church so they could sell it to raise some money, but Alex was so emotionally attached to much of the clutter that had amassed here over the years that it felt easier to simply rent a unit and tell ourselves we’d sort it out once the cottage was complete. Now, I don’t even know if that time will ever come; meanwhile, the storage fees are eating money. And all our style-conscious belongings from our London flat look so awkward and strange in this ancient building that bows and creaks with history, like the removal men got the wrong address on moving day. Slowly they are amassing dust and cobwebs, like they died along with the old Alex on the day of his accident.
When we moved in the cottage virtually needed gutting, since Kevin had barely touched it for twenty-plus years, but the accident came before we could complete the renovation. Fortunately we’d already finished the plumbing and the roof, which largely sorted out our massive damp problem, but there’s still so much lingering on unfinished. Electrics, replastering, bricklaying, flooring, carpentry, fittings … the list is endless. And we simply don’t have the cash or mental grit to finish it off.
I shut my eyes, draw
some long breaths, try to hold on to the last time I felt my husband had returned to me.
We were walking through the village together a few weeks ago. It was a good day – Alex had majored on sleep that week, achieved a few odd jobs around the house, seen the lads. We’d avoided arguments. It was one of those weeks where I’d been lulled into thinking that perhaps we’d turned a corner – that he was on the up, would defy all the stats, start making huge strides in his recovery. He’d been laughing more than usual, seeing the funny side of things that might usually make him swear. I remember calling my mum and telling her excitedly, Something’s different, Mum. I can feel it. I need to write down everything we’ve done this week in case we’ve changed something without realizing. Another little daily form of torture – the thought that one innocuous thing, like the food we eat or the water we don’t filter or the positive ions we leave to float around the house, might be the key to Alex making a miraculous, science-defying recovery. It’s illogical, of course, but there is nothing logical about my life any more.
It was early evening, and we bumped into a neighbour Alex has known since he was a kid. The neighbour was walking his new puppy – a golden retriever he’d named Buddy. We stopped to chat, and Alex squatted down to fondle the puppy’s head.
It took me squarely aback. It was as if he’d completely dropped his guard – as if all the warmth he’d lost since the accident had suddenly returned. For so long I’d been questioning his capacity to ever be affectionate again, and now here he was, going all gooey over a puppy the way most girls go gooey over a newborn baby.
‘Hey, Buddy,’ he kept whispering as he fondled the puppy’s ears and got plentifully licked in return. ‘Hey.’
I simply stood and watched, trying not to let myself well up as our kindly neighbour smiled and looked on. Eventually I had to gently prise Alex away from them both, though not before Alex had quizzed him fully on where he got the puppy, why, how he decided on a name, how often he walked him and what he did with him at night, as if he was going to be sitting some sort of puppy ownership exam the following morning and wanted to pass with flying colours.