How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  About the Book

  When Eva and Adam fall into bed one Friday night, tired and happy after an evening with friends, they have their whole lives ahead of them. But their story ends on page twelve.

  That’s no reason to stop reading though, because How I Lose You is a love story told backwards – and it’s all the more warm, tender and moving because we know it is going to be interrupted. It’s a story Eva thought she knew – but as you and she will discover, it’s not just the ending that she got wrong.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  How I Lose You

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  How I Lose You

  KATE McNAUGHTON

  For Sam

  THEY WERE BOTH quite drunk.

  Well – they were both quite drunk, but he was more drunk.

  Or rather – she was quite drunk, and he was quite drunk but more so, and also ever so slightly buzzing from the line of coke he had taken to persuade himself that he could still be young and wild.

  All of this information would be taken down later, of course, noted and logged and filed and drawn up into medical and legal and tearful explanatory reports, but really, all it was was a detail, a scene-setting perhaps, a mild drunkenness and coked-upness that gave events some context but were hardly the point of them, and certainly – certainly – did not explain anything.

  This is how she remembers it.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Whoa there.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Chr— Whoops, sorry.’

  ‘Adam, put that down.’

  ‘But I haven’t finished it yet!’

  Adam hugged the glass to his chest and eyed her warily. It was a bit rude of him to have walked away like that with one of their host’s wine glasses – they should take it back, really, but they were already at the other end of Liverpool Road, and also if they didn’t get to Highbury within the next ten minutes they’d miss their train.

  She reached towards the glass.

  ‘I can’t just leave litter on the side of the street.’

  ‘It doesn’t count as litter, some tramp is bound to come and pick it up.’

  She moved closer slowly, as though approaching a wild animal. Adam doubled up on himself, the glass pitted into the crook of his stomach. When she took hold of it, he let go gently, slipped an arm around her waist, nuzzled her neck. She kissed him, holding the glass and its stain-red wine away.

  ‘Right. OK. So.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘How about we get to the station before we miss our train?’

  Adam was heavy in her arms now – he would crumple to the ground if it weren’t for her.

  ‘Ugh. OK.’

  They set off again. The street was empty, brightly lit: London on a school night. Adam held her close, pulling her into the unsteady sway of his hips. She worried about the time. An old lady crossed the street ahead of them. They should be OK, as long they kept walking at this pace.

  She felt Adam slow, stop against her.

  ‘Ad, seriously, we really are going to miss that train …’

  ‘We can’t just leave her like that.’

  Adam was steady now, suddenly sober, and looking at the old lady with clinical attention. She was in a dressing gown and slippers, Eva realized.

  ‘Oh.’

  She was carrying a bundle of something pressed into her belly, and had stopped above a basement flat, clutching the railings with trembling fingers, peering down into the darkness. They walked up to her. She turned towards them amiably.

  ‘What are you two doing out here?’

  ‘Um. Hello. We were just on our way home.’

  ‘You ought to get into the shelter, is where you ought to get to.’

  She returned her attention to the basement flat. Adam crouched so he was closer to her level.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’

  ‘I’m looking for Willum, of course.’

  ‘What’s your name, Madam?’

  ‘Ivy. What’s your name, Sir?’

  ‘I’m called Adam. Where do you live, Ivy?’

  ‘I used to live in London, but they moved us out here when the raids started. I miss Willum.’

  Adam was gentle, reassuring – he had this way with people. Bedside manners.

  ‘Where in London, Ivy? Can you tell me the name of your street?’

  Ivy was staring at Eva now.

  ‘You really ought to get into the shelter, you know. Especially in your condition.’

  Eva looked down at her stomach: flat and, she was fairly sure, not concealing any surprises.

  ‘Ivy? Where in London?’

  ‘Fifteen, Bewdley Street. We’ve always lived there.’

  ‘Can you check where Bewdley Street is?’

  Eva took out her iPhone. She caught sight of the time as she unlocked it: they’d missed the train now.

  ‘You haven’t seen Willum, have you? He can’t have got very far.’

  ‘Are we close to where you live now, Ivy? Are you cold at all?’

  ‘Oh no. I’ve never suffered from the cold.’

  ‘OK, so, Bewdley Street is just up there …’

  ‘Right, let’s check it out. Ivy, we’re going to take you home, all right? Have you got your keys with you?’

  ‘Mother gave me my own set!’

  ‘Ad, she can’t still be living at the same address as when she was a kid, can she?’

  ‘That might not be her address from when she was a kid – she’s probably just confused. Besides, it’s that or take her to the police station.’

  They walked on either side of Ivy, at her arthritic pace, Adam carrying her bundle for her. Her hands clenched their arms in an old, bony grip. And yet, there was something childlike about her, which made Eva want to swing her in the air like a two-year-old. Eva looked at the clear sky above the immaculate rooftops of Liverpool Road, and wondered if Ivy could see trails of Messerschmitts and V Rockets, smoke gushing out of wounded houses.

  When they came to the turn on to Bewdley Street, a dishevelled man burst out in front of them.

  ‘Oh, thank goodness!’

  ‘Hello, dear.’

  ‘Where did you find her? I only just realized she’d gone off.’

  ‘This is …?’

  ‘My mother. Thank you.’

  Ivy was still holding on to them, and smiling uncertainly at the man.

  Adam looked down at her, up at the man again. Eva felt Ivy’s grip grow a little tighter. Adam and the man gave each other a tumbleweed stare.

  Eva saw how the man inflated, preparing to take offence, but then something about Adam – an air of authority – made him reconsider. He started to pull things out of his pockets:

  ‘Um – here: Alzheimer’s Society membership card. My driver’s licence. I doubt Mother has anything on her, but if you like you can come up and—’

  The licence had the 15 Bewdley Street address on it.

  ‘No, don’t worry, that’s fine. We’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘She’s worried about Willum.’

  ‘Her cat. When she was a child. Poor thing died in the Blitz.’

  ‘Willum?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. Remember, when you were a little girl …’

  ‘Well. We’ll be getting on.’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Good night.’

  ‘Good night. Good night, Ivy.’

  ‘Good night, dear.’

  For a while, they watched the man walk his mother home, and then they turned and went on their way; but Eva could still feel them behind her, going at that frail pace, with Ivy’s grip tight on her son’s arm.

&n
bsp; ‘Well.’

  ‘Yes. Poor thing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘So we’ve definitely missed our train now.’

  ‘Shall we get a cab? I don’t think I can cope with a night bus right now.’

  They sat in silence, looking out of separate windows at the mesmerizing spectacle of shop lights scrolling through the London night. Eva wondered what kind of a life Ivy had led. What kind of life she led now. What was it like, to walk along the quiet streets of Islington, and for your mind to fill them with the sirens and whistle of falling bombs, with burning buildings, and people huddling in thick tweed coats? Eva wished they had asked her what it was that she could see. She wished they had gone into Ivy’s world, not pulled her back into theirs: a London of dinner parties and interesting conversations, of money and professional pursuits – the Blitz as far away and unreal as China. Ivy could remember the Blitz.

  Eva measured out her life in anecdotes, word counts, soundbites. She was a successful journalist. She had even won prizes for her lengthy, discursive articles, the sort of well-researched stuff that is consumed at a leisurely pace over Sunday-morning coffee, opening up unknown and titillatingly shocking worlds to readers stretching their toes under duck-down duvets or summoning up the courage to start the washing-up from last night. Sometimes, over dinner and wine or a pint in the pub, someone would mention to her that they had read something really interesting the other day and would regurgitate her own words at her in varying degrees of distortion, and sometimes she might mention that she had written the article. But sometimes she would just say nothing, and listen to how her work was being Chinese-whispered into the world.

  There was a smudge on the taxi window which blotted out the darker forms outside and turned the lighter ones into abstract, pixellated shapes. Flying by in ever-changing geometries, they reminded her of the printing press she had visited on that school trip, reams of paper hurtling through air, letters and typesets and photos so fast you couldn’t see them any more, and yet you could identify them, caught in a state between the blur and the defined object. Newspapers surfing the swell between events and their forgetting, clutching at bits of fact and fixing them on the contents of tomorrow’s recycling bin. She was the smudge on the window, blurring the world outside into approximate glimpses of itself.

  ‘I’m tired of my job.’

  Adam was staring through his window with clenched teeth. He darted a quick look at her before returning his eyes to the road ahead with the grim focus of the terminally car-sick.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m tired of my job.’

  She looked at him, even though she knew she shouldn’t, because this always made him feel pressured to take his eyes off the outside world and look back at her, thus making the nausea worse.

  ‘Where has this come from, all of a sudden?’

  ‘I don’t know. Well. Maybe I do know – I think I’ve been thinking about it for a while, in a sort of subconscious way. But I suppose I didn’t want to—’

  ‘Look, can we talk about this when we get home? I really need to focus on not regurgitating all of that Jack guy’s fine wines right now.’

  ‘…’

  ‘And stop looking at me, please.’ For a moment longer, she kept on looking at him: her man, his face alternately bathed in warm street lamps that brought out the golden highlights in his hair, and in blue-green neons that made him look ill. The chiaroscuro flattered his jawline, still ruggedly sharp after all these years, but also revealed the thinning of his crown. This was a source of some concern: baldness was one of the few things she found physically repellent in a man, along with slender fingers, and nails grown long on the right hand and clipped short on the left for the purpose of playing the guitar. Adam’s face was still handsome, though, growing more handsome in fact with the years, more manly – he had features that would age well, even twenty, thirty years from now. Eva anticipated a future of focusing on his clear blue eyes, diverting her gaze from the receding hairline.

  Adam tore his eyes off the road to face her, which backlit his nascent tonsure even more.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She turned obediently to look out of the window once more, as the cab glided to a pause at a red light. Two teenagers were wrapped around each other under the awning of a souvenir shop, their hips pressed up against a windowful of Cutty Sark mugs and masks of famous Englishmen: Tony Blair, Winston Churchill, Prince Charles. The familiar faces gaped at her with dark sockets where their eyes should have been – or rather, where Italian, Japanese, German, Brazilian eyes would one day come to give life to their big noses and plastic grins. She had interviewed Tony Blair once, at the height of the Iraq War, for a feature that had later been greatly praised for its rigour and foresight: she had challenged him relentlessly, accurately predicted much of what the conflict would lead to, had backed him into a corner from whence he would yield the finest, hairline crack of a suggestion that he wasn’t quite sure it had been the right decision after all. The truth was, though, that she had been absolutely charmed by him, disarmed by a charisma she had not expected to fall for, and getting a good interview had involved more of a struggle with herself than with the man in front of her. He had written her a brief but friendly note after the feature had come out, and had always acknowledged her when their paths had happened to cross since then, his wry nods in her direction sending an embarrassing tingle through various erogenous zones. She felt it even now, as she stared at his sightless caricature, and shuddered it off.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine – just a bit cold.’

  Next to Tony, the teenagers’ tongues barrelled with the gawky enthusiasm of first love. The cab pulled away, leaving them to their hormonal delights.

  When they got home, she was hit with the full force of her drunkenness; she stumbled, weak-kneed, into their bedroom, and flopped on to the bed, hanging her feet over the edge so that her shoes did not dirty the duvet. The bed didn’t feel quite like it was moving – more as though it had the potential to move, like a boat anchored in placid waters which you know could swell at any minute.

  A shadow fell across her face: Adam standing in the doorway. She couldn’t see him, but she could feel that he was laughing at her.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I haven’t said anything.’

  ‘I know you’re laughing at me.’

  Adam laughed.

  ‘I’m not laughing at you.’

  ‘Yes, you are. You always laugh at me when I get a bit tipsy, which frankly—’

  ‘Sorry, what was that? You’re slurring your words a bit, I can’t quite make out what you’re saying.’

  ‘Liar.’

  Adam sat on the edge of the bed and cradled one of her feet in his lap. He undid the lace, manoeuvred the shoe off, kissed her besocked toes. He had always had something of a fondness for feet, which was a fetish she absolutely could not understand, especially since she hated her own wide, flat, knobbly ones. But with socks on, hiding the knobbles and hard skin and weird tiny nails, she didn’t mind. She poked her big toe towards his crotch, but only succeeded in grazing his belly button.

  ‘Easy, tiger.’

  Adam heaved her other foot on to his lap and undid its laces too. He didn’t loosen them enough, though, and yanked her shoe too hard as he tried to get it off.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sorry.’ He gave the offended foot a tentative rub. It tickled.

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Adam gently drew himself out alongside her, one forearm heavy on her belly, his breath hot against her ear.

  ‘What was it you wanted to talk about in the cab?’

  She thought about sharing it with him, this feeling of vague dissatisfaction that had been forming in the pit of her belly recently, but she was too tired, too drunk, and the words for whatever it was were too hard to find. I
nstead, she dragged him into a languid kiss.

  Adam pulled softly away, leaving her lips puckered into thin air.

  ‘Hang on a sec.’

  He pecked daintily at her cheek, and then was no longer there. The ceiling glowered at her. She grabbed a handful of duvet for comfort; the cover felt reassuringly crisp and clean to the touch. This was one of Adam’s most handy quirks: he was one of those people who saw the weekly washing and – this was the real bonus – ironing of his bed sheets as a basic necessity, like eating or breathing or going to the toilet. To him, these Sisyphean chores could therefore not be thought of in terms of effort or inconvenience: he would carry them out with brisk efficiency every Saturday, whistling as he did so, as though he actually enjoyed the whole process. Eva had quickly become aware of the chasm that lay between them in the early days of their relationship – even as a student, Adam had been a stranger to squalor – when, on the rare nights they spent in her room rather than his, she had observed his confusion as he lifted a dusty book off a shelf or retrieved tea mugs from forgotten corners. Sometimes she secretly missed the cluttered, messy rooms she had kept as her own; but right now, this fresh duvet cover was her only anchor against the threatening chaos.

  She heard the splashing of urine in the bathroom. Flush. A tap turned on. Then, predictably, the slip of jeans, T-shirt, boxer shorts sliding off flesh. The tap continued to splutter, the tenor of its splashes changing subtly as the sink began to fill up. Eventually it was cranked off, to be replaced by the more subdued watery sounds of Adam washing his nether regions. She couldn’t remember when exactly this habit had started, or, more precisely, when it had become a habit and not a funny quirk that she could tease him about. She also couldn’t remember when the last time was that they had fallen into bed together unprepared, unwashed, grubby. Maybe they needed to talk about this.

  And in the fug of this late, boozy night, lying in their marital bed, Eva was transported back to an evening years ago, soon after they had moved into the flat. She’d been lying like this back then, exhausted after a day of unpacking, breathing in the fresh smell of their brand-new linen. Adam and Henry had helped the removal men manoeuvre the bed into the room earlier in the day, a task that had proved far more difficult than they had foreseen, because the thing was so solid and heavy and large.