Forever Is Over

by Wade, Calvin

  Despite my uncertainties, in my positive moments, I was still convinced my future was with Richie Billingham. I decided the best way of re-establishing contact would be to send Richie a letter. I procrastinated. By the time I posted the letter, I had been back in London for five weeks. I had even managed to find myself a job, in Dillons bookstore in Gower Street, right in the heart of Bloomsbury. As a result of having a job, I was able to sign a tenancy agreement on a flat, albeit a modest flat, it was cramped, had one bedroom and was above a bookmakers, but it became home and it was convenient as it was only one hundred metres from Ealing Broadway tube station. Every morning, I would jump on the tube to Holborn on the Central line and then take the Piccadilly line, one stop north to Russell Square. I loved living in London, everything seemed to be done at Roadrunner pace, it reminded me so much of Hong Kong. Everyone seemed to live in their own private bubble, rudeness was the norm, particularly on the tube, when everyone seemed to go about their robotic personal routines like worker ants, but at least everyone that came into Dillons tended to remove their mask of isolation and wanted to befriend me. I adored working there, but understood it was just a stop gap until I returned to Richie.

  I had no idea where Richie was living, so once I had finished my letter, I posted it to his parents house. My theory was that they were unlikely to have moved and I was certain Dot would pass a letter addressed to Richie straight on to him. In fact, I could picture her peering over his shoulder as he read it! The letter I sent was a relatively short, simple letter. The main reason for this was because I had spent weeks trying to write it and on that final night, I had thrown at least a dozen previous attempts in the bin and was down to my last piece of writing paper! I was determined to complete the task that night though and post it the following day, so despite it being two in the morning, I made a final attempt. Previous aborted letters had been lengthy, explaining in the finest details where I had been, who I had been with and why I had come back, but on that final note, minimalism was the key. The letter read as follows,

  Dear Richie,

  I expect you will recognise my handwriting straight away. If you can get through this whole letter without tearing it into a million tiny pieces, it will mean everything to me. This is about my thirtieth attempt at writing, the previous twenty nine all ended up in the bin, as I wanted to write you the perfect letter, but I think I am beginning to realise, no matter how many times I write this, I will never get it right. It is impossible to justify a six year absence from someone you love. I hope sending this to your Mum and Dad’s was the right thing to do and that it has arrived with you safely.

  So how are you? It’s been so long since we saw each other, it’s difficult to know what to say. Over the last six years, I have seen more of the world than I ever dreamed I would. I appreciate more than I ever have before what a wonderful planet we live in, but places don’t make lives special Richie, people do. I came back hoping for a miracle. Hoping you are in a position to give me another chance. Do you remember the promise we made each other on the ‘Sunny Road’? I desperately hope you can. We said we would meet, every year, on the 4th July, at midday, as long as the sun was shining. I am hoping it has been wet and miserable on the 4th July for the last six years, but I know now, this year on 4thJuly, the sun will be bursting out over the hills.

  I am sure by now you have realised I am single! I’ve never been married nor have I had the children we always talked about having together. Truthfully, no-one has ever matched up to you, so every romance has been fleeting. I have loved too many, probably because deep down I loved one person too much. You are the person I loved too much, Richie. I just worry that my chance has gone though. I want to be with you and for it to be like heaven on earth, but perhaps after everything that has happened, that is more than I deserve.

  I know you may have a girlfriend these days or even a wife, but if you haven’t Richie, please take a chance, meet me back on the ‘Sunny Road’.

  Well Richie, I haven’t got much paper left, so I will have to leave it there. I cannot tell you how much I hope to see you on the 4th July. Our recent past has been apart, but I very much hope that our future is together.

  Love

  Kelly. xxx

  The following day, I popped the letter in the post and then on 4th July, I headed up to Ormskirk, hoping, after six years, to meet Richie again, on the ‘Sunny Road’.

  Richie

  At this stage in our relationship, Jemma and I had become very poor at finding the positives in our relationship but excellent at pinpointing each other’s flaws. One day, a disagreement about unwashed dishes had become an argument, once again, about sex. I felt harshly treated sexually, so as soon as an argument began, I would use it as an opportunity to highlight my frustrations. Admittedly, I did labour the point. Jemma’s counter argument was that we were normal sexually but I was irritating her by constantly absconding from household chores, despite promising change. I remember one particular argument took place on a Saturday afternoon in our kitchen. I was suited and booted, as I was having to work one in every two Saturday mornings in the branch, so had not long returned from my morning shift. Jemma was still in her dressing gown, Melissa was having an afternoon nap and Jamie was in his high chair, smearing rusks everywhere he could possibly get to. Blood pressure and speaking volumes had already been raised.

  “That’s bollocks, Jemma! Count myself lucky?”

  “Ask him then!”

  “I am not asking my brother when he last had sex!”

  “Why not? You said Jim used to tell you all the time when he was having sex, why not just ask him if he’s getting much these days?”

  “I’m not asking him.”

  “Because you know he’ll say he’s not getting any! Amy told me that they have not had sex for ages!”

  “How does that make me lucky?”

  “You get more than your brother!”

  “So what! Just because you have managed to find one couple who have had sex less than us, that does not mean I do alright! If I ran the London Marathon against 30 000 other people and I came second last, would you say I’d done alright?”

  Jemma gave me a look that indicated all frying pans needed to be hidden.

  “So, Richie, what you are telling me is that you have conducted a sexual survey amongst 30 000 women, each with two pre-school kids, each with a husband who does bugger all to help around the house and you are telling me 29 998 of them said they had sex more than once a month?”

  “Of course I haven’t, but I bet they do! Dogger was saying him and Sandra are at it like rabbits!”

  Jemma sighed.

  Well, why does that not surprise me? Have you ever thought there is a correlation between dull women and active sex lives?”

  I was tempted to remind Jemma of her hypocrisy. When Jemma and I were regular partners in nocturnal dips, I doubt she would have found herself dull.

  “Sandra probably uses sex to make up for her personality, looks and intellectual deficiencies.” Jemma continued, “Would you rather I was as dull as dishwater and attached to you like a leech, like Sandra is with Dogger?”

  “No!”

  “And now answer this honestly! Would you rather have sex with me once a month or sex with Sandra every day? Don’t just think about how you would feel during the sex, think about how you would feel the second after you finished when you had to cuddle up to Sandra with an empty sack!”

  “Sex with you once a month!”

  I answered immediately and emphatically.

  “See!”

  Give Jemma her due she was smart. If she had not tagged on the final sentence, my answer would have been debatable. The most common sexual phrase I had heard from friends whilst I was growing up, normally from friends justifying a dalliance with a less than beautiful woman, was,

  ‘You do not look at the mantelpiece when you are poking the fire’.

  If I had sex with Sandra every night, I could close my eyes and pretend it was Jemma or Nastass
ja Kinski or Anna Friel or whoever I wanted it to be. At least the fire would be on. Once the fire has burnt out though, you want someone you love to keep you warm. I loved Jemma, I never stopped loving her, but I wanted the physical side of our relationship to be an important aspect of our bond and these constant digs about housework were annoying me.

  “Anyway, I do help around the house, Jemma! We’ve talked this through before and I promised I would help more and I have!”

  “Richie, you haven’t! You went out this morning and I came down with the kids and I thought you had thrown a party whilst we slept. There were breadcrumbs everywhere, cereal packets out, a half empty bowl of cereal, a banana skin, a plate with a crust on!”

  “I was rushing!”

  “Clear up as you go then! Anyway, it’s not just that. When did you last clean anything in this house?”

  “I wash the car and mow the lawn.”

  “Not exactly ‘in’ the house, Richie. I do appreciate you doing those jobs, but when you think about it, it isn’t all that much, is it? The garden’s tiny and it’s your car! Even if you washed your own dishes, it would be a help.”

  “I’ll do it!”

  “Seeing is believing. You could play a bit less golf as well.”

  This was pissing me off now!

  “Hang on a minute, Jemma, when did you turn into my mother?”

  Jemma gave me a look.

  “I hope the frustrations you have with your mother are a little different to the ones you have with me, otherwise Sigmund Freud was right!”

  “You know what I mean, Jemma. Clean up after yourself! Stop playing golf. You’ll be telling me to tidy my room in a minute!”

  Jemma smiled.

  “Well, you could tidy your side of the bed and your wardrobe!”

  “Are we not on an equal footing in this marriage any more?”

  “To be honest, Richie, I don’t think we are. Only one of us has grown up.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  Jemma started pottering around the kitchen doing insignificant jobs as she spoke.

  “Show me you’re a grown up then. Sacrifice something for this family.”

  “Like what? A chicken!”

  “Like golf.”

  “I need to play golf, Jemma, it’s good for business.”

  “What? Playing golf on a Sunday morning with Jim and Dogger helps business, how?”

  “It improves my golf, so when I play with business contacts I can get round without making a fool of myself.”

  I had only taken up golf since Jemma and I had married. Jemma hated me playing. Before the children, I had tried to involve Jemma, but she said she could not see the point in a game where you just hit the ball as far away from you as you possibly can and then spend the next few minutes walking after it.

  “OK. Give up watching Everton then! How does your Everton season ticket help business?”

  “It improves my social interaction skills!”

  “Bull! One of the two needs to go. We need a family day every weekend.”

  “Everton are only at home every other weekend, Jemma!”

  “Yes and you work alternate Saturday mornings. You work the weekends that you don’t go to Everton! Richie, I love you but seriously, you are not pulling your weight for our family at the moment.”

  “Two words spring to mind!”

  “I hope they don’t start and end in ‘F’” Jemma said feistily.

  “Conjugal rights.”

  Jemma stopped pottering and turned to face me. She looked pale, tired and the first few signs of wrinkles were appearing around her beautiful eyes.

  “Richie, just help me out a little, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “Jemma, help me out a little. I’m a man. I have needs.”

  “Richie, I’m a woman, I have needs too. I need someone to help me run this family. Melissa and Jamie need you to be a better father.”

  That hurt. Being described as a bad husband is hard enough to take, being described as a bad father was a low blow. I was emotionally wounded.

  “Jemma, I’m scared we’re drifting apart.”

  “Then turn your boat around, Richie and paddle towards me.”

  “I’m trying to. I just feel the undercurrent is taking you away.”

  All our previous arguments had never gone beyond the sex and the housework debate, this was covering new ground. Jemma opened up too.

  “Do you know what I think sometimes, Richie?”

  “What?”

  “That our relationship, in the early days was based too much around sex. It set expectation levels that were never going to be sustainable once we had children, but because we used to have sex every day, you think we should still be having sex every day.”

  “I don’t want sex every day. Just more than one night in thirty.”

  “How often did you have sex with Kelly?”

  It was not untypical of Jemma to go off at a tangent. It was her style.

  “Do you really want me to be answering that?”

  “Yes. More or less than once a month?”

  “I don’t know. Probably more.”

  “Much more?”

  “No. Probably not, but I wasn’t married to Kelly.”

  “So what! You used to see her all the time though. The opportunity was there. You didn’t expect to have sex all the time because that’s not what fuelled your relationship. Maybe your relationship with Kelly was built on love, whilst the foundations of our relationship were built on lust.”

  “Jemma, that is one of the craziest things you have ever come up with!”

  “Is it though? Compare the two of us, Kelly is classically pretty, whilst I’m more old fashioned sexy. Kelly’s confidently timid, I’m ballsy. I can understand why you were attracted to Kelly, but sometimes I think maybe you were just attracted to me by desire. Now the passion has been stripped out of our relationship, I wonder whether there is enough left here to sustain your interest and sustain your love.”

  I kissed Jemma on the lips. It wasn’t a passionate kiss. It was the type of kiss you give each other when you say goodnight and you both know there will be no sex on the way. A peck.

  “You’re wrong, Jemma”, I said, “you are so wrong!”

  I continued to argue that Jemma had totally misread things,

  but deep down, at that point in our relationship, I thought she had it just about right.

  Roddy

  “Do you not have a mirror in your house, Kelly?”

  I was on a lunch break with Kelly Watkinson, the most beautiful woman in the world bar none and I could not believe what I was hearing. Four years she had worked at Dillons and in that time, I had just discovered, she had not had a serious boyfriend, not once. I knew she hadn’t in the six months I had been there, but I had presumed she had been getting over a serious break up, but I was wrong. Not one steady bloke in four years. I wanted to find out why. No, I needed to find out why!

  “What do you mean?” Kelly asked.

  Some girls play on being coy and dumb, but that was not Kelly’s style, she was just genuinely pleasant. If she said she did not understand what I was getting at, she did not understand. There were no hidden agendas. Kelly Watkinson was, in effect, my boss. I was a “Sales Assistant” at Dillons and Kelly was “Assistant Manager”, she ran the store one day a week and for an hour every day, when Nicholas, the manager, was having his break. I had debated whether ‘going out with my boss’ was something I could cope with. It was a short debate. The answer was an emphatic ‘yes’. If they wanted to relocate me to a Dillons igloo, selling books to Eskimos in the North Pole, I would do it if it meant I had a chance to be with Kelly. Every glimpse of her just took my breath away. I could handle insignificant complications.

  “I just meant ‘Look at yourself. Kelly!’”

  I said this with a cheeky smile.

  “This is not a come on in any way, shape or form,” I continued, “but you must know you are stunning. No other word would be
fit to describe you, other than stunning. Why are men not just queuing up?”

  It was a come on! Kelly was not just out of my league, she was 20 000 Leagues above me. If there ever came a time where my feelings were reciprocated, I did not want Kelly to be in any doubt about how I saw her. She certainly wouldn’t be now!

  Following my flattering, but entirely truthful comments, Kelly smiled at me, not coquettishly more an amused smile, as though my comments were incomprehensible to her. I did not care too much about the nature of Kelly’s smile, all I knew was that when she smiled back, it induced feelings in me that should have solely been reserved for thirteen year old girls, upon receipt of a smile from their favourite boy band member. My God I had it bad!

  “Thank you, Roddy! Believe it or not, before the last four years, I had a lot of boyfriends!”

  Why would that be hard to believe?

  “So what changed?” I asked.

  They say opposites attract. I was hoping that saying was true. I was sat opposite Kelly who was beautiful, smart, thin, fairly shy and Northern and there was me, Roddy Baker, rough and ready, pretty thick, not great looking, sturdy and more Cockney than the Bow Bells themselves.

  “My outlook changed,” Kelly said as she crossed her legs. I was so infatuated with her, every single move she made just drove me crazy.

  “In what way?”

  “I fell in love again.”

  “Who with?” thinking whoever he was, he was a muppet. If Kelly Watkinson fell in love with you, why on earth would you not just grab the opportunity with both hands? I decided on the spot this guy was a moron.