by Mike Gayle
It hit a couple of weeks ago, in the supermarket of all places. It was Saturday morning and Alison and I were at Sainsbury’s in Muswell Hill. It appeared to be populated entirely by cute, trendy, cohabiting couples several years younger than us. They were everywhere I looked, with their faded jeans, logoed T-shirts, perfectly coiffed hair and obligatory air of smugness. They paraded around with their tiny shopping baskets as I piloted a hulking pushalong trolley – which held only a copy of The Independent and a large bag of watercress – and I thought to myself, Alison and I used to be like you. We used to do our shopping with tiny baskets. We used to be trendy. I used to be cool. I even used to be the lead singer of a band. Really I did.
As I stood in the fruit-and-veg aisle I spotted an incredibly beautiful girl coming through the doors. She was stunning. Absolutely beautiful in a million different ways. A goddess. She looked about twenty and had long dark brown hair. She wasn’t wearing anything special: a denim jacket, a blue V-neck jumper, jeans and workwear boots, yet somehow she transformed the whole ensemble into the most attractive clothing I’ve ever seen on a woman. I was convinced that she could wear a bin-bag and look cool. To top it all, she was with a tall, moody-looking guy, who looked like a part-time model.
They walked past without noticing me. I don’t know why but I turned my trolley and followed them. As they walked up and down the aisles she held his hand and seemed to laugh at everything he said. It was clear to me that they’d only just got together. It was also clear to me that they were in love. And I couldn’t help but feel jealous of what they’d got. This guy standing in front of me had the kind of girl that men put on a pedestal. As I followed them up the aisle lined with cereal packets I wondered if part of me missed all that. Alison wasn’t on a pedestal. She wasn’t even raised slightly off the floor. She was the same as me – imperfect, with feet of clay. I knew everything about her. There weren’t any secrets left to uncover.
I didn’t know whether this girl before me shaved her legs in the bath with her boyfriend’s razor or got them waxed in a salon. I didn’t know whether she sometimes went out in pants that didn’t match her bra. I didn’t know if she thought nothing of brushing her teeth while her boyfriend was sitting on the loo. But I did know these things about Alison. Just as she knew everything about me. We were no longer distinct from each other. Somewhere along the way we’d blended. Become less than ourselves. And all the mystery we used to hold for one another, all the questions about how our lives were going to turn out, had disappeared. Because other than the prerequisite two-point-four children Alison and I had nowhere left to go because we’d ticked nearly all the boxes in the list of things couples are supposed to do.
In a lot of ways I was proud of all the obstacles we’d overcome in the years we’d been together – the arguments, insecurities, temporary break-ups, being separated by distance, my dad’s death, the whole lot – because each one had seemed to imbue our relationship with more worth. Some of the things we’d faced might’ve stopped other people’s relationships in their tracks but not us. In fact rather than being a threat they were the reason we’d lasted so long. They helped define us. They helped us focus on our relationship. They gave us direction. But what do you do when you reach the destination you’ve been trying to get to for a whole lifetime and discover you don’t really want to be there?
Saturday, 13 March 1999
12.03 p.m.
I’m in the kitchen making a cup of tea when the doorbell rings. Taking a deep breath, I walk through the hallway and out of the front door to the communal entrance. I open the door and Jim is there. I can tell straight away that he’s not in the right frame of mind for this to be anything other than the most miserable experience of my life. Just from the way that he’s standing in the doorway, legs slightly apart as if bracing himself for a blow. He’s wearing the dark blue Levi’s I bought him for his birthday, Adidas trainers I bought him for Christmas, a T-shirt saying ‘Beatnik Revolution’ which I bought him from a shop in Endell Street last summer, and a heavy grey parka I bought for him from Selfridges for his last birthday. I strongly suspect that the only thing he’s wearing that I didn’t buy for him are his boxers as I’ve never really liked buying men’s underwear – it’s too ugly.
This is the first time he’s been here in three months. After we got back from Edinburgh I think we managed a night under the same roof. Jim slept in the spare room and when I woke up I found him packing some of his clothes into a couple of bags. When I saw what he was doing I left the flat and went for a walk. I ended up in the off-licence on the Broadway and bought a packet of cigarettes. After he left I got into a bit of a state and Jane stayed here a few nights. Fortunately my boss at work was really sympathetic and I managed to scrape together enough holiday for a week away in Madrid with Jane. The weekend after my return was the most difficult. Weekends are all about couples and suddenly I wasn’t in a couple and I became aware that I didn’t have anything to do. When you’re in a couple you don’t worry about doing nothing. In fact, you look forward to it.
Jim and I met up to talk about what was going on. He said that in the time we’d been apart he’d come to the conclusion that the best thing was to split up permanently. He said he didn’t know what he wanted from life any more but he was certain that what we had wasn’t it. He even apologised at one point for putting me through it, which I think was him trying to be nice but that just made me cry. I told him I didn’t understand what had happened to make him suddenly change his mind.
When he answered, he couldn’t even look at me. He said that for a while he’d been feeling as if we were on a conveyor-belt going through life and our plans to have a baby made his fear crystallise. He said he just couldn’t escape the feeling that he’d made some awful mistake. He said he didn’t want to wake up one day and ask, ‘Is this it? Is this how my life has turned out?’ He said he thought he still loved me but he didn’t think that love was enough any more. I asked him if there was anything I could say to change his mind and he said no. Everything he said, and especially the way he said it, made me angry. In the end we got into an argument and I called him a coward and told him to leave.
Part of me wonders if I’d managed to persuade Jim to carry on living here whether we could’ve come out the other side somehow. But with the two of us leading separate lives I think the longer we spent apart the easier it was for us to live apart. After two months, I came to realise that my world wouldn’t fall apart without Jim. The turning point was losing my fear of being alone. I just woke up one morning and it was gone. I didn’t cry when I saw the empty space beside me in the bed. I didn’t cry at the thought that there was no one to say ‘good morning’ to. I didn’t cry when I could tell that Disco was wandering around the flat looking for Jim. And once that happened everything stopped hurting quite so badly. And because Jim had moved out I felt bitter and because I felt bitter he was bitter too. And because we both felt bitter, whenever we spoke on the phone we argued and because we argued we spoke less, and because we spoke less, after three months we seem like total strangers. And now because we’re total strangers it seems logical to dismantle our lives together. Which is why he’s here now. We enter the flat in silence and he closes the door behind him.
‘Do you want a cup of tea or coffee?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Why not?’
When I return from the kitchen with the tea Jim is standing in front of the bookshelves staring intently.
‘So, you want to start with the books, do you?’ I ask.
‘It’s as good a place as any,’ says Jim. ‘Let’s just get this over with.’
12.17 p.m.
Alison takes a pile of books off the shelf and begins reading their titles: ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’
‘Yours,’ I reply, and she puts it on the floor at her feet and picks up another.
‘Less Than Zero?’ she asks, waving the book.
‘Yours.’
She places it on her pile of one.
‘Who’s that by?’
‘Paul Auster.’
‘That’ll be yours, then.’
‘Neither Here Nor There.’
‘Bill Bryson?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll be mine.’ I take the book from her and put it on the floor beside me.
Alison picks up another. ‘Get Shorty.’ She hands it to me.
I study the cover. ‘No, actually it’s yours.’
‘I’ve never read an Elmore Leonard book in my life.’
‘I know.’
‘So how can it be mine?’
‘I bought it for your birthday because it was my favourite book.’
She opens the cover and looks inside. Inside I’ve written: ‘Happy birthday, Alison, hugs and kisses, Jim.’ She hands it back to me. ‘Here, you can keep it.’
‘Why would I want to?’
‘You’ve just said it’s your favourite book.’
‘I’ve already got a copy.’
‘Well, I don’t want it, do I? I don’t like Elmore Leonard. I’m never going to read Elmore Leonard so there’s no point in my having one of his books, is there?’
‘Is it absolutely necessary that you have to be so hateful all the time?’
‘Yes. Absolutely.’ Alison sighs and picks up another book. ‘The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi.’ She looks inside. ‘It’s a signed copy.’
‘That’ll be mine, then.’
She picks up another book. ‘Star Wars: A New Hope?’
‘Mine.’
‘Actually, you’ll find it’s mine,’ says Alison.
‘You don’t like even Star Wars. You said it was the most stupid film you’d ever seen. Why would you buy the book?’
‘It is stupid, but this came free with a film magazine. Look.’ She shows me the cover. And, yes, it had indeed come free with a magazine.
‘Well, can I have it?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘As in, no, you can’t have it.’
‘But you don’t want it.’
‘I know.’
‘So what are you going to do with it?’
‘I’m going to give it to Oxfam along with the Elmore Leonard.’
That was below the belt. I am about to retort with something equally malicious but I stop. ‘Look, I haven’t come here for a row. I’ve come here to try and sort out our stuff. And it’s taken . . . ooh, all of five minutes for us to start having a go. Can’t we just be reasonable and sort this out like mature adults?’
1.08 p.m.
‘The TV’s got to be mine,’ says Jim. ‘I spent ages looking for that TV. I trawled up and down Tottenham Court Road for an entire day playing off electrical store against electrical store until I got the lowest price. Of course it should be mine. Plus you don’t watch that much TV.’
‘I don’t want the TV,’ I inform him. ‘I think it’s too big. I said so at the time and you didn’t listen to me . . . as usual. And I think it’s ugly but the fact remains that I paid for the majority of it.’
‘That’s irrelevant,’ says Jim.
‘I think it’s very relevant,’ I snap. ‘I tell you what. You can have the TV but I want the video and the washing-machine.’
‘You can have the washing-machine but I really want the video,’ replies Jim.
‘I think it’s a fair swap,’ I tell Jim. ‘The TV cost a fortune.’
‘Fine,’ he says eventually. ‘You have it. I’ll buy myself a new one.’
1.23 p.m.
‘I think I should get the sofa,’ I tell Alison. ‘It’s the most expensive thing in the flat and, as I remember, I paid for it too.’
‘The sofa’s mine,’ says Alison. ‘You might have paid for it but it was me who walked round every furniture store in central London on my own looking for it. Every time I asked you to come along you’d cry off with some excuse about having to work late or something. This sofa is the culmination of all my blood, sweat and tears. I chose the perfect colour, I chose the perfect size, I selected every last thing about it down to the last detail. It should go to me.’
‘Where’s the negotiation in that?’
‘There is none. It’s mine.’
1.45 p.m.
‘I’ve cut you out of all our holiday photos,’ I tell Jim defiantly.
‘You did what?’
‘I cut you out of our holiday photos. You’ve been erased from Crete, summer 1996, the Lake District, summer 1998, and New York, 1997. I took all the piles of mini-yous and set fire to them. It was very therapeutic. It’s a shame, actually, because I was telling a friend of mine, Lucy, in the art department at work, what I’d done and she seemed to think that she could’ve Photoshopped you out on her computer and put someone much nicer in your place – she suggested Keanu Reeves in a wetsuit like in Point Break, but I said if I was going to do it I’d sooner have a golden retriever because they’re more faithful.’
‘Do you know what’s the worst thing about that?’ says Jim angrily. ‘It’s not that you’d swap me for a dog – that doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s the fact that they weren’t your bloody photos. They were mine! Taken on my bloody camera. With my bloody film!’
‘Your photos, my photos, what does it matter?’
‘This is stupid. Stupid and pointless. We’re getting nowhere very slowly. So far all we’ve managed to do is sort out a few books and a few CDs and you’ve ruined our holiday photos. We’ve got a whole flat to do.’
3.03 p.m.
I’m on the phone to Jane.
‘How did it go?’ she asks.
‘Not well,’ I reply. ‘We didn’t manage to get much sorted at all. He just wasn’t in the right frame of mind and neither was I. Part of me even thinks that Jim’s deliberately dragging his feet over all this separating business and making it a bigger deal than it needs to be. All he has to do is claim what’s his so that I can claim what’s mine, and then we can get round to deciding the fate of what’s ours.’
‘Did you manage to sort out who’s getting Disco? I know you’re worried about that.’
‘He didn’t mention her once, but I can tell he’s been dying to. He adores her. And she thinks he’s the best thing since sliced bread.’
‘I thought men weren’t supposed to be into cats. At a push they’re allowed to like dogs or dangerous animals like snakes, venomous spiders and sharks – basically animals that will kill or maim you given the opportunity – because they’re manly. Cats aren’t manly. They’re the girliest animal in the book.’
‘I know, but Jim loves Disco. And Disco loves him right back. Given a choice of laps to sit on, she’ll take his over mine any day of the week. Not that she doesn’t love me too. But it’s like this: their love is unspoken. While I make the biggest fuss over her at any given opportunity, Jim will try his best to ignore her and she’ll do her best to ignore him, but at the end of an evening in front of the TV they always end up together. It’s like a perfect match.’
Sunday, 21 March 1999
7 p.m.
It’s the weekend again and we’ve really made some progress. Jim came back to the flat at midday and, though it took a while, we’ve sorted nearly everything, even some of the deal-breakers.
The living room no longer looks like a living room. It looks like the place that Walkers’ crisps boxes go to die. There are boxes everywhere: on the sideboard, on the coffee-table, on the two armchairs and the sofa. And they are all full of our stuff. The stuff that Jim and I have collected during our relationship. And each and every one of the items has a sticker on it that reads: ‘His’ or ‘Hers’. Originally the stickers were going to read ‘Jim’s’ and ‘Alison’s’, which was my idea, but Jim said it would be easier if we just wrote ‘J’ on his stickers and ‘A’ on mine. I wasn’t happy about that for no other reason than that he had come up with the idea. So in the spirit of compromise I suggested ‘Mine’ for me and ‘His’ for him because it made him suitably anonymous. His
counter-offer was the ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ that we have now, and although I didn’t like it I reasoned that I was too tired to argue any more over something I really didn’t care about. The stickers are on our things because some of the items are too big for Jim to take back to Nick’s, where he’s still living, so we’ve agreed that most of the stuff will be left in the spare room of the flat until we’ve sold up.
The only ‘thing’ we’ve got to decide about is currently circling the boxes that we’ve spent all afternoon labelling and sniffing the corners suspiciously.
‘So what are we going to do about her?’ I ask, as Disco rubs her body against my ankles.
‘I don’t know,’ replies Jim. ‘I’ve been sort of avoiding that one. I’d like to take her with me but she’s your cat. I mean . . . I did give her to you, after all.’
‘But she’s really our cat, isn’t she? Maybe we could have joint custody like they do with kids?’
Jim laughs, for the first time in what feels like years. ‘You know what cats from broken homes are like – they’re sneaky,’ he says. ‘She’ll play us off against each other.’
‘But what about it?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
His face falls. ‘Because it’ll mean that you’ll still be in my life and I’ll be in yours.’ He stands up. ‘I think it’s probably best if you keep her. I’ll go and say goodbye to her now.’
And as he picks her up and walks into the kitchen with her, I can’t stop the tears as I think. This is how much he doesn’t love me.
Saturday, 3 April 1999
10.57 a.m.
Jim’s and my official separation is beginning to gain momentum. Terry Mortimer from Merryweather estate agents is here because I’ve arranged to have the flat valued. As I let him into the flat it strikes me that he is approximately twelve years old. And the fact that he’s wearing a pinstripe suit and is trying to grow a goatee beard makes him seem even younger. I have tidied up in preparation for his visit and now all the boxes that Jim and I have sorted out are in the spare room, the carpet is free of fluff and I have even dusted. Terry visits all the rooms in turn and writes things down on his clipboard. He tells me he likes what I’ve done in the kitchen, the bedrooms are a great size (although the second bedroom could do with being emptied of the boxes), the bathroom is ‘pristine’ and, overall, the flat is in first-class condition.