by Anna Maxted
Well, I don’t like Chinese food, but I prefer it to marriage. Not marriage in general – some of my best friends are married – just marriage for me. Jason knew this. I feel, therefore, I had a right to be annoyed.
Jason stumbled away, out of the bathroom. I followed, my heart at boot level. Jason has the body of a young god and – in theory – should have been able to protect me in a fight. I’m not saying that’s what most women look for, but in these mean times it’s a bonus, whether you care to admit it or not. I had no doubt that if ever I was attacked in Jason’s presence, he’d leap to my aid and faint on the spot, leaving my aggressor to stamp on my head. (I’d hope to defend myself, but I suspect that if I tried to throw a punch I’d break my knuckles. I never drank enough milk.)
My point is, there has always been a softness to Jason, which I liked. I saw where I was needed. I could protect him. He trusted people and I thought that was admirable, if foolish. I could take care of him, in that sense.
The second time we met he took me back to his dad’s place. It was 5 January. Jason, who likes order, had thrown away the previous year’s contents of his Filofax. There it was, in his bin, the entire diary. I didn’t expect Jason to possess a two-way shredder. (We’ve pieced together a document shredded one way before, but that’s rare; it’s just that at Hound Dog, time is someone else’s money.) Still, most crooks are lazy – at least invest in a one-way shredder. He hadn’t even torn each page in half!
‘Jason,’ I said, ‘what are you going to do with that?’
‘Throw it in the rubbish.’ He laughed. ‘I was going to recycle it, but … I didn’t want it cluttering up the corner of my room for a week.’
I looked severe.
‘What?’ said Jason.
‘I burn my rubbish,’ I said. ‘All of it.’
‘You do? Why?’
‘I’m not paranoid,’ I said – he was doing a bad job of looking unalarmed – ‘I know how people work. And you’re leaving a data trail behind you that can be abused. They can go through your bins, take your name, proof of address, your credit card details, your bank details, steal your whole identity. They can take out loans in your name. All they need are two, three items with your home address on them, and they can walk into PC World. Before you know it, you’ve bought five computers at two grand each. Worst-case scenario, the bailiffs come knocking, your credit rating is destroyed, you’ve got years of aggro trying to clean it up.’
‘Gosh,’ said Jason. He marched over to the bin, fished out his Filofax papers and placed them at the back of his sock drawer.
I smiled. I could keep this man from being hurt.
Now, five years later, I was doing the hurting. It made me want to get away. I couldn’t stand to be around him when he was in this delicate state. It repelled me – not a noble feeling to admit to but, I’m hoping, a human one. It’s instinct to remove yourself from the person most likely to get eaten (primitively speaking). That didn’t stop me from feeling ashamed. I’d always presumed that my desire to protect Jason from harm was because I loved him. Now I wondered if it was because I couldn’t stand a man to exhibit weakness.
‘Jason,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry. I do … you know … feel the same way. But …’ I didn’t want to sound piqued but it was hard not to. ‘I … was surprised you asked. Knowing how I feel about marriage.’
Jason’s face turned a pinchy red and white with rage. ‘You say that like it’s a bloody computer program!’ he shouted. ‘Marriage is only as bad or good as the people in it, you, you fool!’
‘I—’
‘Five years,’ he said. ‘Five years. What, did you think we’d just meander on like this for ever? I’m twenty-nine and you’ve wasted my time. What is so scary about getting married, having kids? I don’t get it; what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with doing what normal people do?’
I felt my eyeballs swell. I always find something to say, even if it’s irrelevant. Half the time you can’t shut me up. But at that moment, I hadn’t a word. Some people plod on for years pleasing everyone but themselves, only revealing their discontent when they run amok with a machine gun. Jason didn’t quite make this category but it felt like a close thing. He’d seemed happy enough. And then, after all this time, I find that not only has the man secretly been buying Brides magazine and stashing it under his mattress, he’s desperate for me to make him a father. For all I knew he’d been pricking holes in condoms for years.
‘Twenty-nine isn’t that old,’ I said. ‘Some men don’t have kids till they’re fifty.’
Jason was holding a Biro and when I said this he made a face like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and snapped it in half.
‘I’m just saying,’ I said.
Jason clutched at his hair. ‘Do you,’ he screeched, ‘even live on this planet? Because you don’t seem to have any EM-PA-THEEE!’
The person next door banged on the wall. ‘
Then,’ I replied, ‘why do you want to marry me?’
Jason marched to the door and yanked it open, and stamped out.
Perhaps he wanted me to chase him, but as I wasn’t doing a great job of sensing his needs just then, I decided to stay put.
I sat on the floor and closed my eyes. My head felt like it might go pop. I’m not that different from most people: I hate confrontation. The worst element of my job – there are a few contenders – is process serving. There was a time when, if I had to do a serve, I’d take Maisie – Greg’s old, fat black Labrador – as protection. As a good idea it ranked with giving lone female drivers a life-size man doll to prop in their passenger seat and frighten off attackers.
My Turner and Hooch act came to a sorry end when I served the owner of two young, lean Alsatians, and found myself running down three flights of stairs with Maisie over my shoulder. It wasn’t funny. I had to have physio three times a week for a month. Greg called me a berk and refused to pay for it. Unpleasant, the entire episode, but compared to the slow death of my relationship, I reassessed it as not that bad.
I sighed. The room was hot and smelt of baked potatoes. I glanced at the table. Our dinner had shrivelled. My stomach growled. I did my best to ignore it. It growled louder. I shot another look at the table. That wrinkly potato was the mermaid to my sailor. What harm would it do? Maybe if I ate quickly …
Naturally, Jason reappeared when my mouth was full. I stopped chewing, but I knew it looked bad. Callous, even.
He gave me a look of disgust, dragged his suitcase from under the bed, and turned his back.
I swallowed. The sight of his big, sad back – sad in posture, for those pedants among you – just hit me. All my strength left me as I got what this meant. No Jason any more. A life bereft of his warmth and his goodness.
For him – for anyone, I suppose – proposing was an ultimatum. I’d called his bluff, or he’d called mine. I was used to having him around. He was my appreciative audience. I’m aware that this description falls a little short of romantic, but we had been together for five years. If you can stand each other after being whapped over the head with the saucepan of reality, I call that real love. Any idiot can fall in love – that’s the fun bit. It’s the ability to stay there that counts.
It annoyed me that when Jason read a book, he licked his finger to turn the page. It annoyed me that when he stayed over at my flat he snored (causing me to ask him once, ‘Can you stop breathing?’ And it wasn’t a Freudian slip). It annoyed me that, no matter how often I told him it was a scam, if Jason opened the door to a kid selling dishcloths, he’d buy a stack of them. There was a whole pile of unwanted household items under his sink – dusters, washing-up gloves, wrapping paper – all purchased at vast expense from some little villain with an honest face and a smart mouth. All these characteristics drove me nuts but I still loved him.
Likewise, it enraged Jason that I left my dental floss on the side of the sink. One time he spun a spiderweb of floss around the hot tap to demonstrate the error of my ways. (I unwound it, amused.) Nor was
he overawed with my line of work, but he had the good grace to keep quiet on the matter. I think he assumed I’d grow out of it. It pained him that I never paid a bill unless I got a phone call. He hated it that I’d write Christmas cards and not send them because I couldn’t locate my friends’ addresses. He loathed it that I wrote my friends’ addresses on random scraps of paper instead of in my address book. He couldn’t stand that I’d use my entire bodyweight to crush down my kitchen refuse to squeeze in another egg carton, preferring to empty the bin only when its contents acquired the density of mercury. (At which stage, Jason would feel obliged to step in, as the bag was so firmly wedged against the bin’s sides that only a bodybuilder could shift it. Then it would split, spilling a week’s worth of rotting food over the floor tiles. I know that, momentarily, this made him hate me.)
And yet. He adored me.
Which made it all the more surprising that, four weeks after his proposal to me, he got engaged to someone else.
Chapter 4
Her name was Lucy and she was his next-door neighbour.
‘Well!’ I said to my boggle-eyed parents. ‘If that’s all it took, lucky he doesn’t live next door to an old tramp. Then again … So. I find out a bit about her. I discover she bakes for him.’
My father sat forward in his cream leather armchair, and tried not to look impressed.
‘Treacle sponge, jam roly-poly, if you can believe that. I only ever baked for Jason once.’
My mother, hovering behind the cream leather armchair like a parlour maid, tried not to look shocked.
‘I made him a cake for his twenty-sixth birthday. Took me a day, looked and tasted like I’d dug it out of Pompeii. By the time I’d shaved off all the black bits, it was the size of a scone.
‘Oh,’ I added, ‘according to Martine, Lucy is also a “proficient seamstress”. I presume I’ve misheard. I’m thinking she’s said “dominatrix”. “Worse,” says Martine, “she’s good at sewing.” I say, “What?” And Martine shouts, ‘She’s a homemaker!”’
‘And what makes Martine the expert?’ snapped my father. He was red in the face with annoyance.
Martine was an old friend who, for political reasons, had remained in touch with Jason. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Martine likes to talk.’
I made a joke of the seamstress stuff, but it had shaken me. Sewing. When I was fourteen, I was forced to make a skirt at school. The pattern was unnecessarily complicated, so I just cut out two squares of material and sewed them together. I felt threatened by the idea of a grown woman who sewed for fun.
I’d also realised that if Jason and Lucy were official, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I would have to update my parents. I hadn’t even told them we’d split. So here I was, fighting a sofa like quicksand, trying to make it sound as if nothing was my fault. I’d called my father on his private line to check he was home, then driven round. My mother had answered the door.
‘Hi,’ I’d said. ‘Is Daddy there?’
Even Jason teased me about that, calling my father ‘Daddy’ – ‘What a baby!’ Just about everyone I know has some issue with it. I refer them to their therapists. Though even Daddy prefers me to call him ‘Roger’ (his name).
‘Hello, love, are you all right?’ My mother always wanted to talk.
‘I’m fine. Is he upstairs?’
‘I’ll call him down for you, shall I?’ She sounded thrilled at the chance to be of service.
‘Could you?’
It’s obvious, but I’ll say it. I was a lot closer to my father than my mother. I didn’t respect my mother. She had no life of her own. She just clung to his. He was patient with her. Because, in MTV-speak, my mother brought nothing to the party. She was like a winter garden in that she maintained herself to the exact level required to survive her environment. Nothing more. She had no dangerous opinions. Whatever made you happy made her happy. For goodness’ sake. Women like that set the rest of us back fifty years. She didn’t work, although she was a qualified accountant. Considering we were the one family in our road with a mortgage (I checked with the land registry), I thought it rather louche of her.
When I broke it that Jason was engaged to someone who wasn’t me, my mother paused. She shot a nervous glance at my father. Then she said to me, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Terrible,’ I said, testing her.
‘It is terrible,’ she replied. Had I told her I felt ‘wonderful’ she would have replied, ‘It is wonderful.’ She added, ‘But you’ll be OK about it, won’t you?’
‘I’ll live,’ I said.
My father was more direct. ‘What! The bastard! What a prick! How dare he treat my daughter like this? I won’t allow it! My God, you waited five years for that little schnip! He’ll come back! Don’t you worry! This tart next door is a rebound relationship, it won’t last! I’ll go and have a word, if you like.’
I did my best to put him off. This wasn’t idle talk. My father would go and have a word. Next thing I’d know, I’d be married to Jason. Jason was petrified of my father. Jason’s own father was a bully, and I don’t think Jason could shake off the idea that all fathers were bullies. Also, I suspect he was a little jealous of our relationship. My father was my great friend. I know that Jason felt threatened by this. Perhaps, having lost one woman, he was forever in anticipation of losing another.
I reassured my father that, while I was distraught over Jason’s defection, I would slowly piece together the shards of my life. You might think it strange, my father ignoring the fact that I was the one who had first rejected Jason.
Actually it wasn’t strange, because I hadn’t told him. My father was a true son of the Suburb, in that one of his ambitions was inform the neighbours that his daughter was a Mrs. I’m a lazy girl who likes an easy life and I saw no benefit to me or my father in telling him the truth. Honesty is an overrated virtue.
Which might explain why my father was also under the misapprehension that I’d been waiting five years for Jason to propose. My father has a reputation as a maverick – which, in the Suburb, can mean anything from mowing your own lawn to buying a German car – but which in his case means that he refuses to be shocked by what I do. However, he’s not that much of a maverick that he’s content for me to remain single my entire life. I know this, because he is not very good at keeping his opinions to himself.
As I walked down the garden path of my family home, head hanging, my father banged on the window and – when I looked – pulled a sad face.
I felt unaccountably teary.
Soon after this, it became apparent that the brilliance of the rejected lover act I was staging for my parents’ benefit wasn’t entirely down to my acting abilities. This had a lot to do with everyone I know presuming I must be utterly distraught. It hit me that I was more of a loser than I’d thought, because it was insultingly obvious that all my friends believed I’d blown my one fluky chance of hooking a man. I’d never been a ‘Someone likes me! Oh hooray!’ kind of girl, but from the way they were behaving, perhaps I should have been. Jason and I had never warmed to each other’s pals. I’d always thought that, if ever we were to split, this would be a bonus. Now I discovered it made no difference. They all took his side.
At this point, I was forced into introspection. Which I hate. My problem with self-analysis is that – as far as I can tell from listening to other people drone on – you never discover anything good.
Since Jason left, I had reverted to instinct. Instinct is important in a job like mine. At least, that’s what Greg said when he employed me. I agreed with him. I’ve since found that he was talking about hunches. How very Chandleresque! To me, a hunch is a lucky guess. I was talking about taking the easiest, quickest route in any given situation. Apparently, laziness is actually instinct. This is why women’s magazines moan about men trying to skip foreplay. I felt guilty when I read that because if I’ve ever had the opportunity I’ll try to skip foreplay. It’s like doing a crossword puzzle. Ultimately, it’s unnecessary.
This
, I supposed, could be why my friends were pessimistic about my chances of mating ever again. As I said, I’d reverted to instinct. Drinking little or no water, beyond what happened to be contained in my food. Staying up till one in the morning for no reason, flicking from channel to channel in the futile search for the elusive, brilliant programme that was worth being tired for. Buying those plastic individual coffee filters that are such a foul reckless waste of the earth’s resources. Not phoning people who’d phoned me unless I was pretty much certain they were out.
Jason had been such a civilising influence. At first, I hadn’t missed him. Perhaps because – as with a bereavement – I couldn’t really believe he was gone. I enjoyed pleasing myself. It was nice not to wake to a reproachful roar from the bathroom because I hadn’t bothered to place a new toilet roll in the toilet-roll holder. To Jason, this mattered profoundly. He set a lot of store by order, that boy. Everything had its place.
But as the weeks rolled on, I began to feel like a child whose stern parent had finally disclaimed responsibility. I needed an opposing force to push against. With Jason gone, life was one dreary constant; there were no happy little zigzags of dispute. I could eat bolognese I’d warmed straight from the freezer and no one would say, ‘Hannah, if you want to live, you might want to stick that in the microwave for three more minutes on high.’
I bet Lucy never ate from the microwave. She was probably dining on Jason’s vegetable lasagne at that very moment. (That, by the way, is not some filthy innuendo. Jason could cook only three dishes, but over the last sixteen years, he’d perfected them. His lasagne was my favourite.) One evening the thought of Lucy eating my lasagne so enraged me that I threw my chicken vindaloo, still in its plastic container, in the bin. Then, come 1 a.m., of course I was starving and there was nothing to eat. I got up to stare inside the empty fridge regardless, knocked the remote control off the sofa, and it fell hard on my toe. A further consequence of Jason’s desertion was the discovery that a sulk is meaningless in isolation.