by Rebecca Done
I am laughing now. ‘Shut up, Graeme. All that was years ago. I’m much more refined these days.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ he says. ‘I bet there’s part of you inside that’s screaming for a doner with extra chilli sauce.’
I feel my smile fade slightly. ‘You know, last night Sarah offered me my old job back. At the agency.’
‘In London?’
‘Yep.’ I nod, take another sip of latte.
Graeme hesitates. ‘Right … so how would that work?’
‘It wouldn’t,’ I say. ‘Which is why I turned her down.’
‘Right … but how was she thinking it would work? Does she want you to leave Alex?’
I stare at him, the misunderstanding making my pulse race in alarm. ‘Leave him?’
‘Yeah,’ Graeme says. ‘I mean, if you’re here, and he’s in Norfolk –’
‘Of course not,’ I say quickly. ‘Phoebe just had a bit of a powwow with my mum and dad. They came up with this idea of building an annexe in Mum and Dad’s back garden. They have this crazy plan that they could keep an eye on Alex while I go out to work …’
‘An annexe?’ Graeme repeats. ‘Like, a granny flat?’
‘Mmm,’ I say, into my coffee.
‘Assisted living,’ he says, and at this point I’m not sure what he’s thinking.
I set down my cup. ‘I told them no.’
‘Molly, Alex would hate that. Aside from the fact he’d never want to move back to London …’
‘Graeme, are you listening? I said no.’
‘Right.’ He gives a small shake of the head. ‘You know, I’m still … available to move back to Norfolk for a while. To help. If you need me to. We’ve barely talked about it since I offered.’
‘Graeme, don’t worry,’ I assure him. ‘I’m not going to move to London.’
‘That’s not why I’m bringing it up, Moll. I just wanted to say … if you change your mind …’
I shake my head apologetically. ‘I meant what I said. I don’t think it would necessarily be the best thing for Alex.’
‘Okay,’ he says, looking past me for a moment into the vast cavern of the station’s roof space. ‘Still, it worries me. That your mum and dad and all your friends are on a crusade to bring you back here.’
I smile, an attempt to reassure him. ‘Graeme, it’s really not a crusade. It was just … you know what my mum and dad are like. They’re desperate for me and Alex to …’ I trail off.
‘To what?’
Have a family. Live the life they always dreamed of for us. Experience all the traditional joys of married life.
But I don’t say any of that. Whether or not Alex confided in Graeme in the months before his accident that we were trying to get pregnant, I don’t know. We’ve never really spoken about kids. Maybe he assumes I no longer want them. ‘… just be happy,’ I conclude.
We regard one another for a moment, then look away. Beyond the coffee shop, platform announcements reverberate, the echo of them familiar and strangely comforting. A reminder, if I needed it, that life will always carry on – no matter what. It’s up to you if you go with it or not.
‘So have you heard any more from Nicola?’ Graeme asks me then, her name leaving his mouth like the name of a contagious disease.
I frown. ‘How do you mean?’
He meets my eye over the rim of his cup. ‘I don’t know … has she been in contact?’
‘Not as far as I know. God, don’t, Graeme – you’ll make me paranoid.’
‘You could check his phone if you really wanted to be sure.’
I set my cup down in surprise. ‘It sounds as if you want to be sure.’
He hesitates. ‘Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. Forget I mentioned it.’
‘What is it with you and her anyway? Why do you hate her so much?’ I mean, I know why I hate her, but Graeme’s feelings towards her seem almost as strong.
‘I don’t … hate her. I just don’t trust her.’
I wait.
‘You know – she cheated on him, dumped him, then decided she’d made a huge mistake.’
‘How do you know? That she thought it was a mistake?’
He hesitates again. ‘I could tell. She’s easy to read, Nicola. Plus – you hear things, living in a village. She used to tell her clients that finishing with Alex was the worst thing she ever did. I think she hoped it might get back to him somehow, that he’d take her back.’
Alex always told me he and Nicola had very little contact after they split. And then the thought returns to me – the one that frightens and haunts me most of all. But I can’t articulate it, bring it to life.
‘Jesus,’ Graeme mutters. ‘You don’t need to hear this.’ And then he puts his right hand over my left one, covering my wedding ring. ‘I’m sorry, Molly. I should never have said anything. Hungover, foot in mouth. Forget it, honestly.’
‘Look, I know Alex has changed, but he hasn’t changed like that. He never once gave me reason not to trust him. He was never …’ I trail off.
A look of faint amusement crosses Graeme’s face and he removes his hand from mine. ‘Never what?’
‘Never mind.’
‘You were about to say, like you, weren’t you?’
My face reddens slightly. ‘No, I wasn’t. I was going to say, a ladies’ man, and then I thought you might think I was having a dig.’
‘So, in other words – like me. Well, I don’t blame you. For having that view of me.’
‘I don’t have “that view” of you. You’re just you.’
‘Mmm,’ he says. ‘A right old Romeo.’ He leans forward. ‘Look, Moll, I only mention Nicola because I’d hate to think she’s taking advantage of him. That’s all. She winds me up.’
I look down at my wedding and engagement rings then, and am unexpectedly taken back to the night Alex proposed. He was so nervous he slid the ring on to my right hand instead of my left. I said nothing of course, not wanting to embarrass him, and nor did anyone else (Mum and Dad were there – he proposed in their back garden). But the next morning when I woke, he’d swapped the ring over to my left hand while I slept.
It was always the little things he did that meant the most to me.
I have to ask myself as I’m recalling yet another fond memory – why would Nicola even be interested in Alex? She has a good life: money, a career she loves, the perfect physique and no shortage of male attention (that hopefully doesn’t include my husband’s). What would she find so appealing about the new Alex, the man with a quick temper, patchy memory, inability to hold down a job or even leave the house most days? What on earth would she find attractive about that?
9
Alex – 5 November 2011
It’s been almost a year since I met Molly, and the intensity of my feelings for her is at once sublime and terrifying. She is perfect – perfect – and already I struggle to remember exactly how life fitted together before she came into it. It’s only now, at the age of twenty-seven, that I have finally understood what everyone meant when they talked about love. This is true love – exhilarating, intense, absorbing. I daydream about her at work, I rush home to find her each night, I can’t take my eyes off her when we’re out in the evening, whether we’re with her friends or mine. I can’t understand how I’ve been so lucky when others are so unlucky, how we can be so happy when others are so sodding miserable (case in point – my friend Chris and his girlfriend Diana can’t make it through a single day without arguing. They’ve been together a mere eight months, and already there have been belongings projected from their top-floor flat on to the pavement below, locks changed, phones switched off for days at a time. Chris, I want to say to him. Why do it, mate? Why don’t you go out and look for your Molly? But I don’t, of course, because that would make me just about the smuggest git on the planet).
But I feel smug. I feel fortunate, and blessed – in fact, I am a walking, talking, clichéd emoticon. But with that smugness, the constant conviction of my own good fortune, co
mes uneasiness too. I start to worry – obsess, even – about what would have happened if I hadn’t talked to Molly outside the toilets in the bar that night. Or what might have happened if Rhiannon hadn’t dialled Graeme at that precise moment when he was chatting to her. Nothing might ever have happened between us, and then Molly – incredible Molly – would have been lost to me for ever, and I might never have known what true love feels like.
Because I can’t imagine anyone measuring up to Molly. She’s funny and gorgeous and kind-hearted and hard-working. She’s the sort of girl guys are drawn to in bars, at work, on the bus or on the street – she illuminates the world around her, the ground beneath her feet.
And then one night it comes to me: my dad’s drinking, the depression, the sadness – it was all because this is exactly how he felt about Mum. I mean, obviously Dad was devastated when she died, and he drank to dampen that feeling, blunt the pain. But I’ve never really known before now what true love felt like. It’s a strange revelation to be having a whole twenty years after those tragic events, but at the same time I feel fortunate to finally be making sense of who my dad really is. Because I barely remember him before the accident, before the weeping and the swigging and the strange howling sounds we’d wake to in the middle of the night.
I start becoming a little fixated on the idea of keeping Molly safe – of making sure she doesn’t go out alone too late at night, that she gets a taxi whenever she can, that any aspect of her life isn’t exposed to unnecessary risk. For the most part I try to keep this behaviour under wraps, because the last thing I want to do is smother her, or drive her away. But the idea of losing her completely terrifies me. If I did, I worry I’d become just like my father – sitting in a bedroom with the curtains shut, watching the racing and drinking cider by the litre.
My best buddy, Charlie, tells me one night that Molly and I are slightly sickening – but he says it fondly, like a joke, like being sickening is a good thing. And with Molly, it really is. Yes, we feed each other morsels of food in restaurants, I cook her pancakes for breakfast at the weekends, we leave each other love notes around the flat and we skip to the gym together on a Saturday morning, but I get giddy from all that stuff. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Looking back, I’ve realized that Nicola wasn’t really romantic – she had a very practical approach to relationships, involving shared bank accounts, getting on the property ladder, five-year-plans and (whisper it) starting a wedding fund. She had very rigid ideas about how she wanted her life to be, and it was pretty much up to me to fit into that. Control freak, Dad said sometimes, which was true – and that extended to every facet of her life. She was paranoid about her body–fat ratio, germs in the flat (I often woke at two in the morning to find her scrubbing surfaces) and achieving exactly the right daily balance of vitamins and minerals.
Molly and I, on the other hand, don’t share a bank account, clean the flat when we feel like it and occasionally swap the pancakes for cold pizza on a Sunday morning. Our one concession to discipline is going to the gym, which makes us feel good, but other than that, we’ve got a pretty relaxed, easy-going approach to life. Moll doesn’t worry about me seeing her shaving her legs, or slobbing around the flat in her tracksuit bottoms and hoodie. Where Nicola was militant about food, Molly loves experimenting with new cuisine, and one of our favourite things is to head out into town to discover new restaurants (this month’s winner: Cuban).
And just as Nicola was a bit militant about sex too – she had specific days she liked to do it on, and specific things she liked to do, struggling to adapt to any variation in either – I can’t imagine Molly and I having a better sex life. We do it whenever and wherever the mood grabs us – which luckily for both of us, is frequently and everywhere. We do it before work, when we get in at the end of the day before we’ve even removed our coats, in the park, in the toilets at a restaurant, at Graeme’s flat, at Molly’s mum and dad’s house (a risk, and not one I’d necessarily repeat).
‘Well, don’t ever get married then,’ Graeme warns me one night over beers, when he asks me what our sex life is like and I tell him brilliant and nothing else.
I snort. ‘That’s a myth. You don’t just go off sex because you’re married.’
‘Don’t be naive, Alex,’ he tells me, like he’s taking my sexual wellbeing really seriously.
But anyway, Graeme’s advice is misplaced, because yes – I do want to marry Molly. I first started thinking about it only weeks after meeting her.
I know what Graeme would say, the man who careers from girl to girl – not to mention job to job, flat to flat. I’m worried he’ll spend the rest of his life aimlessly drifting, that he’ll never know true love, commitment. And I know what Molly’s parents and friends would say, what my friends would say. They’d tell me there’s no rush, that marriage is a huge decision, that we’re still so young. But I want to rush everything, because I don’t want to let her slip through my fingers. I can’t imagine any deeper thrill than tripping down to the register office hand in hand in our jeans and trainers, declaring our love for one another before heading to the pub for bottles of bubbly, fish and chips. The whole thing would be relaxed, easy – none of the stiff formality that Nicola fantasized about when she talked about our (inevitable, it seemed) wedding. With Molly, I want to jump in feet first, without really thinking too deeply about any of it, because that’s exactly the point – my love for her isn’t about weighing up pros and cons, or thinking with my head. It’s complete and utter instinct.
‘Clear a space, then,’ Dad instructs. He’s in bed again, the curtains shut, but thankfully today the television’s off. I’ve made us both a cup of tea, brought up a packet of digestives.
I move a stack of old railway magazines to one side and perch on the empty side of the bed. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Like death,’ Dad tells me, his eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘How about you?’
‘You don’t feel like death,’ I reprimand him softly.
‘No Molly today?’
‘She’s with friends.’
‘Ah.’
Molly’s met Dad several times and has declared herself to love him, which is generous of her, since even I can see that my father as he is today is not someone you might instantly describe as loveable. He is miserable and beaten down by life, pessimistic, with skin tinged yellow, his outlook gloomy.
The first time Molly met him, he was having a particularly rough day. I have to say, it was kind of humiliating after being introduced to Molly’s mum and dad over three courses with wine at their Clapham townhouse to take her to Dad’s ramshackle cottage, step over all the detritus littering the stairs and landing, and introduce them while he was watching the racing with the curtains shut. The bedroom smelt of cigarettes and onions. He was welcoming – of course he was – but the whole experience was enough to make me question myself. Was I just dreaming, that I really had enough to offer this well-to-do girl from Clapham?
‘I kind of got the impression he’d prefer you to be living in Norfolk,’ Molly said to me afterwards.
Kind of got the impression was a tactful way of putting it: Dad had basically sat her down, told her cities were dirty and that she’d be much better off with country air in her lungs. He informed her cities were too busy, and – get this – you didn’t have to queue for anything in Norfolk. (Molly and I had queued at the village coffee shop only that morning for nearly fifteen minutes while they faffed about finding their latte frother.)
‘Actually, Dad,’ I say now, ‘I’ve got a few things I wanted to talk to you about.’
Dad shifts uncomfortably. His side of the mattress sags considerably, compared to the side I’m sitting on, bouncy and unused. I told him once he should swap sides, but he looked at me like I’d suggested he try online dating. ‘That was your mother’s side,’ was all he said.
‘Well, first off,’ I say, ‘I wanted to let you know that …’ I hesitate. I’ve planned everything out in my head, but now the moment has arriv
ed, I feel unexpectedly awkward, convinced Dad is going to tell me off for being soppy and suggest I help him sort through the post instead.
‘Let me know what, son?’ Dad says, and the word son, the implicit fondness, spurs me on.
‘I wanted to let you know that I understand why the past few years have been so hard for you.’
‘You mean the past two decades,’ he corrects me softly.
‘Yes. I mean, I’d never really understood before why … you know, you felt like you needed to drink, but now, I do.’
Dad eyes me with faint amusement. ‘You do?’
‘I do.’
‘And why is that, Alex?’
‘Because of Mum,’ I say, and even the word is brave, spoken out loud like this, because we rarely talk about her. Dad has never known how to do it. ‘Because of everything you felt for her.’
‘Aha,’ Dad says. He’s not gripping my hand in his or welling up like I imagined he would. ‘You’ve fallen in love.’
I nod. ‘So anyway – Dad … I just wanted to say, I don’t blame you for anything.’
He smiles softly, like I’m missing the point of my own conversation. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to. I did the best I could for you boys.’
There it is again – the way he says boys, like he resents our being twins, that there’s two of us, that we come as a package. But I don’t want to talk about Graeme today. That’s not why I’m here.
‘Anyway, Dad – look. I wanted to talk to you about Molly too.’
‘Okay,’ he nods, his face lifting suddenly in anticipation.
‘I’m going to ask her to marry me.’
Finally his eyes well up. ‘Marvellous news. Congratulations. I always knew you’d find yourself a nice girl.’ He reaches out, grasps my hand. It feels frailer than it looks, the strength of his grip virtually non-existent.
I smile. ‘Thanks, Dad. I love her to bits.’
But he doesn’t pause to savour the moment. ‘So where will you be living? Here with me?’
I hesitate. ‘What?’
‘Well, you’ll be looking to start a family, won’t you? Move back to your roots?’