How to Find Your (First) Husband

by Rosie Blake

  ‘Iz, IZ…Earth to Iz, come back to us, Iz.’

  I was roused from my daydream by Mel and Dex standing over me holding out a beer. Dex was now wearing the tiara.

  ‘You were like totally zoned out. Where were you?’ asked Dex his nose wrinkling, having never seen this trance before.

  Mel, an old hand, had seen it plenty of times. ‘England,’ she said to him, cuffing me on the arm. ‘She’s got this thing with this guy from her past in her head in England. It’s weird but she’s weird.’

  ‘Er and sitting right here,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, babe, you know you’re a little wacko.’

  ‘A guy in England,’ Dex said, leaning forward as he sat down.

  ‘Not just any guy,’ I said to Dex. ‘My husband,’ I added in reverential tones.

  ‘Hardly,’ Mel scoffed.

  I rolled my eyes at her.

  ‘Jeez, there’s no need to go abroad for your guys, we’re all right here,’ Dex said, arms flung wide.

  Mel pushed his shoulder. ‘You wouldn’t leave the state, let alone the country.’

  ‘Well it’s lucky I don’t have a wife living in foreign climes,’ Dex said solemnly.

  ‘Do you even have a passport, Dex?’ I laughed. Dex was a proper homeboy; he had a real Southern drawl, Johnny Cash style, and wore cowboy boots. Actual cowboy boots that looked strangely cool on him.

  ‘Yeah, but I only got it so I could be served alcohol in bars.’

  ‘Dex still looked about twelve when he was twenty-one,’ Mel explained.

  I nodded as Dex nudged Mel. ‘But the sexiest twelve-year-old ever, am I right? Am I right?’

  ‘No, you are disgusting.’

  ‘Oh.’ Dex hung his head as I started giggling, watching as Mel launched herself across him, his face smothered in kisses and her flame-red hair.

  Dex winked at me. ‘Still got it,’ he said, drawing Mel into the crook of his arm.

  Mel settled there, her hand idly stroking his leg. Then she seemed to wake up, springing to her feet. ‘Right, we’re heading out on the town to shoot the breeze and down some shots. Get your gladdest gladrags on.’

  Dex jumped up too, scooping her up into a bad waltz. ‘It’s going to be a gooooooood night,’ he said, leaning her backwards and kissing her gently.

  ‘Oh man, I am going to have to get good and drunk if you two are going to do that all night.’

  And they did, so I did.

  Dear diary,

  Andrew and I climbed up the highest in the tree today and I was quite scared but I didn’t say anything to him. I didn’t walk out on the branch like he did, but I did hang upside down from the branch at the bottom of the tree and all my hair flew down and I looked funny. Andrew said I looked like a wombat who sleeps like that and I was worried I would fall off because I was laughing but I didn’t.

  I x

  Chapter 4

  Bleary-eyed and with an Unidentified Flesh Wound – a purpling bruise on my left thigh – to contend with, Sunday dawned way too bright. The curtains hadn’t been closed and a strip of LA sunshine was cutting across my face forcing me to squint. I was facing the wrong way up, feet resting on my pillow, my face a dribbling wreck pressed against my grey sequinned throw. A sent text message told me that I had been up at 4.07 a.m.:

  There was no way that I could now do sex. Sitting seemed an impossible dream right now.

  When I got up, I felt tiny bumps where the sequins had pressed into my cheek. Glancing in the mirror at the marks it looked like a mini-tractor had been driving up and down my face in the night.

  ‘Gahhhhhhhhhhhhh,’ I called down the answerphone to Mel. It responded with an aggressive ‘beep’.

  Most of the day was spent moving gingerly through my house, cake crumbs still sprayed over the table from our high tea (and possible 4 a.m.) feast and the pot still had the remnants of yesterday’s stone-cold English Breakfast in it. Stewie arrived mid-afternoon and let himself in after I threw the keys out of the window to him in the street.

  ‘Can’t. Dying,’ I said as he pushed me up against the cor­ridor wall before crawling back under my duvet on the sofa.

  He moved past me to the kitchen, calling over his shoulder, ‘I’m flying out late tonight so we will need to make love at some point,’ which only made me pull the duvet round me tighter. He smelled of burned toast and strong aftershave.

  ‘Great, looking forward to it.’

  He was riffling through cupboards now, clattering about in search of food. I didn’t know my cupboards could make that much noise: it was like he was ripping them out of the wall. What was he like, the American Hulk? Is the Hulk always American? RIP. BANG. Gah. ‘God, you never have any food,’ he shouted through.

  Why did I invite him over?

  He returned with a mug of coffee in the shape of a Dalmatian’s head and a bag of pretzels. Moving my feet off the sofa, he sat down, opening the bag with a loud tear. Changing the channel to an American football game and ignoring my, ‘But I was watching that’ with a dismissive, ‘It was animals falling off shelves’ (I love those videos), he sat there spitting out pretzels and slurping on his coffee, like his tongue was too big for his mouth. I tried not to sit there hating him but as I watched another crumb land on my gorgeous cream shag pile carpet, I couldn’t help but hope he might be killed by the next pretzel in a terrible and unlikely pretzel-related death. Realising that if he did start choking I might actually have to move, I dismissed this thought as quickly as it came and just willed for the ceiling to collapse only on him.

  It was hours later, I was horizontal and Stewie had managed to sneak behind me and was doing the lovely tummy rubbing thing I liked. I stretched out like a cat, boobs thrust upwards so that Stewie was given his signal that Sofa Sex was a go-go and he had whipped off my tracksuit bottoms before I could say, ‘Not on the pretzels.’

  Zipping himself back up and smiling smugly over me, he sauntered through to the bathroom leaving me a sweaty heap under my duvet, hair stuck to my face and my tracksuit bottoms still looped round an ankle. The postcard was just within reach on the carpet and I picked it up, staring at the foreign scene, with me feeling like I was moving further and further away from that idyllic life.

  This was it, I thought as I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. Deal with it, Stewie is here and you haven’t met anyone else, you haven’t even tried. Groaning with those thoughts, I pushed myself up and headed to the bathroom to shower. As I dried myself off, I caught sight of the clock and realised that I would miss the news in England if I didn’t turn on the TV now.

  ‘It’s on, it’s on, I need to watch the laptop! Dad!’ I panted, flying back to the living room, leaving wet footsteps and switching my laptop on. Clicking on the ITV West webpage, I tuned into the news being streamed. I’d missed the headlines as the story was something local from a chocolate factory in Somerset. Everyone was wearing blue shower caps and stirring giant vessels of dark chocolate around. Then it changed to the newsroom and the new feature.

  ‘There he is,’ I said, wiggling to an upright sitting position, the laptop wobbling on top of the cushion on my lap.

  My dad was standing to the right, being interviewed off camera. His mild-mannered voice, short responses and slightly frightened look made me grin. The village green was perfectly, impeccably English – a triangle of lush grass surrounded by cottages, a pub one side and people meandering past in Barbour jackets.

  My dad’s overgrown eyebrows, streaked with grey, moved up and down as he spoke about the sky-blue convertible Coupé behind him, parked up on the side of the road.

  ‘Oh doesn’t he look good,’ I said. He had combed his grey hair back from his face and taken off his glasses. The lines around his eyes creased when he was listening to the question. Villagers were watching the piece behind him and moving across the green looking at the car.

 
And then, suddenly, in the crowd behind him saw a face I instantly recognised. My jaw dropped open and I didn’t take a breath. Stewie’s voice melted into background noise as I frantically clicked the arrow to wind the frames back. No longer honing in on my dad’s face, I scanned the crowd again, saw a back turned, a brown jacket made of some kind of tweed, dirty-blond hair, a profile. And then I paused as the man turned and I felt the room go completely still as I stared. Stared at a face I hadn’t seen in over twenty years, a face I’d thought about for over twenty years. The whole flat seemed to be waiting, my head was shouting thoughts, filling every crevice of my brain. I moved towards the screen so that the images started to blur. I rewound again, paused, forwarded, paused, rewound. I was certain. It was him.

  I had found Andrew Parker.

  Dear diary,

  Dad came home early for my birthday party and Mum had made the house look all nice with lots of balloons that had big 9s written on them. One of them floated up to the ceiling without its string and is still there now but it is all floppy and bent. It looks sad and you can’t read the ‘9’ on it any more. We had party games and played pass the parcel and also sleeping lions which I am really bad at. I always lose, because I laugh when Dad comes over and calls me Munchkin and does a funny growling lion roar and it is so funny because Dad isn’t normally like a lion.

  The second-best game was the one where we all became statues and had to hold it still or be out and I made it to the last two again with Andrew and we had to dance and then freeze and he froze a second after me and I won and then he smiled a really massive smile that split his face in half and hugged me. It was the best birthday. I think he froze after me deliberately and that was why he smiled.

  Also, there were party bags with fizzy cola bottles in and Andrew said it was the best party bag he had ever got and Mum danced to the ‘Superman’ song because she had wine in her hand. It was fun.

  I x

  Chapter 5

  ‘Can you zip me up, Iz?’ asked Mel stepping into her carrot costume. ‘Let me just put my feet through the body bit. Jeez.’

  ‘Oh god, Mel, I can’t do this today,’ I wailed, my outfit in a red pool on the ground beside me, hands frozen by my side.

  Mel, one foot in her costume, one out, twisted round. ‘Don’t be silly. We’re going to be peas in a pod on this one; lettuce not get depressed about it. We’ll have the best time. You can’t beet it! You’ll see.’

  I groaned, ‘Not today with your puns, woman,’ and walked over to her, helping her squeeze into the long orange outfit. Finding the zip I drew it up and then stood back. She was a carrot, the stalk waving around in the breeze above her head. A cut-out hole for her face. She was smiling, her white straight teeth sparkling in the sunshine.

  ‘God, why are you always so bloody happy,’ I grumbled.

  The carrot shrugged. ‘Dex thinks it’s an illness. Path­ological happiness.’

  ‘I could do with that,’ I said, wearily turning around to pick up my outfit for the day.

  Nearby, a tinkly, high, annoying laugh carried on the wind. ‘You joker.’

  I turned and spotted Celine chatting to a guy with shoulder-length blond hair, a skateboard under one arm and a hat on backwards. She was wearing a really cute farm-girl-type outfit: fringed cowboy boots, Daisy Duke denim hot pants, gingham shirt tied in a knot over her bronzed flat stomach. My eyes narrowed as I kept watching them and placed two feet into the two holes at the bottom of my large, round bright-red tomato costume. Heaving it up and putting my hands through a sort of leotard thing inside it, I then had the dilemma of bending down again, the tomato squeezing disgustingly into rolls around my middle, as I scooped up the hat. I had to wear the green stalk bit on top of my head; it looped under my chin on elastic and bits of it flopped over my face shading my eyes.

  My voice was croaky as I turned to a woman walking past me, handbag looped over one shoulder, set hair. ‘Good morning, madam, there’s a promotion today on Christie’s Canned Vegetables…’

  Working in a daze, I had plenty of time to mull over the previous night’s sighting. I’d woken wondering whether it had really happened – whether in my hungover state, Stewie clambering over me, the heat of the flat, my recent thoughts about England and home, whether my poor addled imagination had just conjured him up in a pathetic attempt to cheer me up. Fabricated my hero. But I’d watched the piece again this morning and there he had been, clearer than I remembered. He would look like that now. He still had the slight wave in his hair at the front.

  It was that hair that I had last seen ducking into his mum’s car after the Christmas term ended. I’d been walking out holding my collage of a winter scene made entirely of macaroni (pr-e-tty awesome) when he left. We hadn’t really spoken since the day of the cursing and the rain and, as I watched him leave, I wished I’d said goodbye. He’d been an excellent bringer of myrrh in the nativity play earlier that week and I should have said something nice about the crown he’d made from tin foil. He never came back in the New Year and I always wondered what had happened to him. His neat pulled-up grey socks, straight nose and wavy hair. Where had he got to? Why had he left? And, most importantly, were we still married in the eyes of God? For weeks I wondered, looking out for him at school, as if he might appear at milk time, a stab as I realised he might never reappear.

  Mel found some shade on a bench underneath an awning. We had pilfered one of the cans and were eating fresh peaches out of it as we tried to stop steaming up in our outfits. Juice dribbled down my chin as I sat perched on the edge of the bench, my massive tomato bottom not letting me lean too far back. Reaching a hand up, I moved my head down to wipe a line of sweat from my brow.

  ‘God I am actually melting,’ I announced.

  Mel had her eyes closed and was leaning back, her circle of face tilted to the sun, her long green stalk flopped back like hair. She didn’t appear to hear me.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You alright?’ I asked, concerned that I had been a bit too gloomy recently, that I needed to be a better friend to her. ‘There’s not,’ I paused briefly before ploughing on, ‘there’s not BEAN something wrong? ApPEAse me.’ I nudged her.

  ‘That’s the spirit, Iz,’ she said, giggling and opening one eye to view me in my little tomato hat. ‘Sorry, just…’ She yawned as if to emphasise her next point. ‘Late night,’ she explained. ‘Dex and I tried out this new move called “The Spider”; it’s totally AMAZING.’

  Oh noooooooo. I hated it when Mel did this, she couldn’t resist. It was some kind of bizarre American thing that she felt the need to share EVERYTHING with her friends like we were permanently on some kind of X-rated Oprah sofa. Or maybe it was a Mel thing; I wasn’t sure. It was certainly not a Me thing. I felt myself turning as red as my tomato outfit as she described in detail just what her and Dex decided to do together last night with a pot of yoghurt and a camera. I shivered even though the sun was still a quivering circle of flame high in the sky and there wasn’t a whisper of a cloud, or a breeze.

  ‘Just exhausted now: he is so energetic and sometimes I…’

  I pictured Stewie just before leaving last night, pinging hopelessly at the back of the bra and then making me twizzle it around to my front so he could undo it. Then his routine breast/butt grab combo that went: left breast, squeeze, butt grab one hand, right breast squeeze, squeeze, butt grab both hands, clamber on top of me, pant a little, insert little Stewie. At no point would I ever suggest introducing yoghurt into the mix but, at the same time, I admired a little creativity.

  ‘And you see then he wanted to add sugar, or something with texture you know, to make it more…’

  Just block her out, Iz, there’s a good girl. She will finish soon and you can return to other conversations about fully clothed people and…

  ‘So then he licked it off there and I thought it was over but, oh god, he just…’

  I thought back
to my exes with a sinking realisation that I appeared to have been missing out all along. Adventurous sex had never really featured. Unless you call adventurous someone trying to finger me in the boat of the Bubbleworks at Chessington? After school there’d been Patrick who used to cry after every time, Al who used to high-five me and Will who had to look up ‘foreplay’ in the dictionary because he genuinely thought it was the name of a band. How had I attracted these sexual no-hopers? Was I always doomed to have a sex life this predictable? Was it me? Was I the one lacking in imagination?

  Mel was still describing in graphic detail the complex manoeuvring of her bedroom romp last night so I fell into my daydream of choice. It was the same scene. It was the same man, the same house, the same life that I had built up over the years in pain-staking, loving detail.

  He had brought me the second G&T and had started massaging my feet, rubbing his thumbs into the middle so that I purred like a contented kitten. The evening sun was sinking, leaving trails of pinks and purples and the shadows fell across his features giving him a broody tint. He started stroking the inside of my legs, slowly and tantalisingly edging upwards – his touch and the evening breeze causing my skin to break out into goosebumps. I was tugging on his bow tie that he wore loose on either side of his shirt collar; he was in black tie again, like James Bond after a successful assassination. He was leaning over me now, his fingers expertly lingering over the fabric of my knickers, tantalising and so close. I had unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt, was running my hands over the smoothness of his ches…

  ‘Earth to Iz, come in, Iz.’

  ‘Hmm…what…WHAT?’ I half-shouted, my floppy green hat falling right over my face. ‘Gah.’

  ‘You were having the fantasy again, weren’t you?’