by Mike Gayle
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that a stout couple were watching us as though we were some sort of avant-garde amateur dramatic society. This was my idea of hell. I hated rows in public. I hated them more than anything in the world. “Of course it’s not too much to ask,” I apologized. “You’re right. I’m wrong. Let’s leave it at that, okay?”
Mel’s face contorted in outrage. “You’re not listening to me!” she screamed. Angry tears streamed down her face. “You haven’t listened to a single word I’ve said, have you?” Out of the corner of my eye I noted that the stout couple had been joined by a matching jumpered couple and a short couple with their baby. I was now the recipient of an increasing number of sympathetic glances from the men and condemnatory glares from the women, as if Mel and I were the sex war writ large. I tried to remind myself I was twenty-eight and not ten. That I was a man not an errant schoolboy. But I couldn’t help feeling small. And wrong.
I tuned back to my dressing-down, ignoring the flourishing crowds of people no longer struggling to hear what Mel was saying because she was now “talking” with such volume that eavesdroppers could’ve easily swapped their position in the eaves for somewhere more comfortable, like Sweden, and still have heard every word. “Look, Mel. I understand that you’re upset, but do you have to be so loud? Can’t you just . . .” I made the mistake of issuing a small shushing noise.
“Are you shushing me?” she retorted.
“No.”
“You are, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Don’t you shush me!”
“He is shushing,” spat the woman from the stout couple menacingly. “I know a shush when I hear one!”
“I’m not shushing!” I exclaimed in her direction.
Mel sighed heavily, and the exhaled air seemed to take her volume with it. “You’re not being fair, Duffy. It’s time you grew up and realized you’re not a kid anymore. You can’t keep on acting like you’re a teenager.”
“Listen, Mel, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry.”
“It’s too late, Duffy. It’s over.”
Suddenly the world and everything in it seemed to slow down, as if we’d all been submerged under water. “What?” I said, rubbing the back of my neck nervously. “What are you talking about?”
“This isn’t working, is it?” she said quietly. She refused to look at me. “You don’t really want to get married, Duff. I know you don’t. You want your life to carry on just the same.” She began crying, her teardrops exploding on the glass tabletop like miniature water bombs. “It’s not your fault, it’s just the way you are—it’s part of the reason I love you. I love you because you are so carefree. I love you because you take things as they come. But I need more. I deserve more and you can’t give it to me.”
I could barely believe what I was hearing. It was like Mel was having a conversation with me without my uttering a single word. The world had gone all wrong. Wrong and weird. I have to make everything all right again. “What’s going on here, babe? What’s brought this on? Everything’s fine.” I reached out and held her hand. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Duffy, I know everything about you,” she said accusingly.
“What are you talking about?” I protested. “Things are getting out of hand. Let’s just calm down and everything will be all right.”
She looked up at me at last. “Look me in the eyes and answer this question: do you really, well and truly with your whole heart, want to get married?”
I met her gaze briefly and looked away.
“There’s my answer,” she said, sniffing back her tears. “I’d guessed there was something wrong but I wasn’t sure until now.”
I wanted desperately to be able to lie. To say, “Yes, I do want to get married,” but I couldn’t. My newly installed conscience wouldn’t let me. I loved her. I wanted to be with her. But I did not want to be married. At least not now. Not yet.
“We’ll be all right, Mel,” I said, still holding her hand. “We’re going to be okay.” She didn’t speak. We sat in silence while her unspoken reply made its way to my brain. It didn’t quite get there. “We’re going to be all right, Mel. We can get over this.”
Silence.
“We don’t need to split up,” I said desperately. “We don’t. I can learn.” I was grasping at straws now. “I’ll buy you the wardrobe.”
Still crying, she gently rotated her engagement ring off her finger and pressed it into the palm of my hand and closed my fingers over it. “It was a nice try, Duffy”—she leaned across the table and kissed me softly—“but it wasn’t enough.”
“I want to do the right thing,” I said, fighting back the tears. She didn’t hear me, though—she’d already stood up and walked away. I tried to follow her but she was too far ahead for me to catch up with her, so I watched as she maneuvered her way through Bathrooms, Rugs and Flooring toward the checkout where finally she was swallowed up into the crowds of happy couples.
I can change
It was early Sunday morning, the day after the Ikea episode and I was on my way round to Mel’s, determined to sort out this whole sorry mess. As far as I was concerned, all that had happened was that we’d had a stupid row which had blown up out of all proportion. All we needed to do was sit down and sort everything out and we’d be back to normal. The ten-minute walk from the Clapham Common tube to Mel’s flat flew by as I imagined us realizing that our row was nothing more than a silly quarrel brought on by pre-wedding jitters. The important thing was that we loved each other. That was all that mattered.
I pressed the buzzer for Mel’s flat. After the fourth or fifth ring I heard footsteps on the stairs and seconds later a blurry Mel-shaped figure appeared through the frosted stained glass and opened the door.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not even giving her the chance to open her mouth to say hello. “Yesterday was all my fault. I was being stupid. I’m sorry.”
Mel said nothing.
While I hadn’t exactly expected a round of applause and a standing ovation, neither had I anticipated the short uncomfortable smile she gave me or the silence that accompanied it. I followed her up the stairs to her flat wondering what was going on.
Her living room was abnormally tidy. As a rule Mel was tidy but not obsessive—today, however, the entire room looked as if it had been cleaned from top to bottom by my mum, a woman for whom a thrice-weekly removal of dust had taken on an almost religious significance. The flat’s pristine condition didn’t surprise me too much. It was Mel’s way when she was unhappy to clean—to make sense of her environment by completing tasks that were completable. The room seemed to echo her thoughts: “If only life were cleanable. If only it was a question of time and effort before life took on some semblance of peace and order.”
“I’m just going to make a cup of tea,” called out Mel from the kitchen. “Do you want an orange juice?”
“Yeah,” I said, watching her movements through the open kitchen door. “That would be great.”
I sat down in the armchair that Mel’s gran had given her when she’d moved into a nursing home. Under normal circumstances it was my favorite seat in the flat but as soon as I sat there I knew I should’ve sat on the sofa so that Mel could sit next to me. Now there was this huge physical distance between us as well as the emotional gap we were trying to bridge. Just as I was about to swap seats, however, she entered the room with the drinks and sat on the sofa opposite. The coffee table lay between us like a latter-day Berlin Wall. We sat sipping and not speaking, listening carefully to the sort of sounds we normally never heard: the ticking of the clock on the wall; the sound of Cliff Richard on Radio 2 emanating from the house across the road; the sound of two people sipping in silence.
I knew I had to say something but I didn’t want to mention anything more about our row. I felt that if we didn’t talk about the problem directly then it didn’t exist. It was ridiculously optimistic of me, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that if I could just drum
up enough normal conversation with her, through some miracle of amnesia she’d completely forget that less than twenty-four hours earlier she’d broken off our engagement. But what do you talk about when there really is only one thing to talk about? I looked out of the window for inspiration.
“Looks like it might rain later,” I lied. The sky was perfectly blue and cloudless. Clutching at straws? I was grasping at fresh air.
“Does it?” said Mel, gazing out of the window to join me in my meteorological studies.
Silence.
I looked inside the room for inspiration. “The flat’s really tidy.”
Mel took a sip of her tea. “Thanks.”
Silence.
“This afternoon’s EastEnders omnibus looks good.”
More silence.
So much for the weather.
So much for tidy flat observations.
So much for soap operas.
So much for sticking my head in the sand hoping it would all go away.
If I don’t say something soon we’ll still be here on the sofa having monosyllabic I-spy-with-my-little-eye conversations this time tomorrow, I thought nervously. Taking a deep breath to steel my nerves I decided to come out into the open. “Are you okay?” I asked tentatively. “I was worried about you.”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said lifelessly.
“I’m sorry. About yesterday. I’m really sorry. I was stupid and selfish and I’m sorry. But that stuff you said about us being . . .” I didn’t want to spell it out, but the impassive look on Mel’s face was scaring me into it. “It wasn’t true, was it? It was just you getting angry with me, wasn’t it?” I smiled. I didn’t want it to be an accusation—I wanted it to be light and airy.
Mel shook her head. “We are over—you must know that, Duff, after yesterday.”
I opened my mouth to say something in my defense but she held her hand up to stop me.
“I know that you’re going to tell me that you do love me and that you do want to get married after all, and that’s really sweet but it’s only half true. You don’t want to get married, do you, Duff?” The saucer in her left hand was shaking ever so slightly. “When I asked you yesterday if you really, truly wanted to get married, you didn’t answer me. You confirmed what I knew already but was too scared to admit to myself: you love me but you don’t want to get married.”
She put the cup and saucer down on the table and looked out of the window. “I think I knew you felt that way even on the day that you finally said yes. But I was so happy . . . so relieved, that I put it to the back of my mind. I threw myself into making wedding plans, trying to sort things out, celebrating us being together. Looking back at it now, I can see that all I was doing was trying to block out the thought that you might not feel the same way about us being together as I do. I was hoping that somehow you’d catch me up, that this would excite you as much as it did me.” She hesitated slightly and looked right into my eyes. “Then yesterday as we argued it struck me, just as if someone had slapped me across the face, that your heart wasn’t in it—that you were marrying me because it was what I wanted, not because it was what you wanted. All you wanted to do was the right thing. The thing is, Duffy, I don’t want you to think of us spending the rest of our lives together as some sort of sacrifice you’ve got to make. I don’t want you to turn round to me one day and tell me I forced you into it. I’d hate it. Absolutely hate it.”
“That’s not true,” I said quietly.
“It is, and you know it. If you want proof I’ll give you proof.”
I raised my eyebrows sharply, as if she was about to spring a surprise expert witness on me. Who would it be? My mum? My sister? My conscience?
“It’s just the small things really,” she continued. “Like the last time we went to Mark and Julie’s—all night you were miserable and I could see it was because they were talking about the wedding. Or when we chose the engagement ring. The look on your face when the jeweler handed it to you—it was only fleeting but I saw it all the same—it was a look of doubt, a look that said: ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ But the real evidence is us. Four years together and the longest we’ve spent living under the same roof was three weeks in Goa last summer.”
She paused. “It isn’t right that you’ve made me wait this long. It’s not fair that I’ve not held back anything from you, and this one thing . . . this one thing you can’t give me. Well, I can’t wait any longer. I have a life too and I can’t afford to waste any more of it on you.”
She was right of course. Right about everything. That was the thing about Mel. She had this uncanny sense of seeing things the way they were instead of the way you’d want them to be, of knowing me better than I knew myself. She could sniff out the truth even if it hurt.
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would stop what was happening, so instead we sat in silence digesting the magnitude of our conversation. Mel was crushing her thumb into her fist agitatedly, something she only ever did when nervous or angry.
I stared out of the window hoping that one of us would say something that would make this all go away, and while I waited for this miracle to occur I tried to list all the couples we knew in my head. Beth and Mikey, Chris and Jane, Rekah and Veejay, Richard and Liz, Lara and Irvine, Kathy and Alex, Bella and Ian, Jess and Stuart, Mark and Nga, Fran and Eric . . . Mark and Julie.
It wasn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but it did the job. These couples were exhibit A: the evidence that had slowly but surely condemned Mel and me to a permanent parting. Because compared to them, with their perfect his-’n’-hers lifestyles and complete togetherness Mel and I looked, well, sort of crap really. Within ten minutes of meeting up with them for lunch or a drink we’d experience the irrational feeling of envy and ineptitude that comes over insecure couples like me and Mel when they feel as if they’re being left behind by their contemporaries. The solution to this problem was of course to try and befriend couples more dysfunctional and less secure than ourselves. But then again maybe that was why we were so popular on the dinner-party circuit.
The thought leaked out into the real world.
“It’s because we’re not Mark and Julie, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s because we’re not perfect like them. You know, perfect.” I made the word sound hard and unpleasant. “You know, stripping floorboards, installing Victorian fireplaces and all that. I thought we were above all that. You and me against the world type of thing. We were a cool uncouply sort of couple. We could do our own things separately as well as doing our thing together. We had our own space. I don’t want us to be Mark and Julie.”
“Mark and Julie love each other, which is why they live together and why they’re getting married,” replied Mel. “It isn’t unnatural. People fall in love and move in together all the time.”
“But it never stops there, does it? People move in together and just end up on the couple treadmill. Trying to keep up with the Joneses—or in this case the Mark and Julies.”
Mel shook her head in disagreement. “You know we wouldn’t have done that.”
“Yes we would,” I countered. “Because everybody else does. Name me a single couple you know who own their own flat or house who haven’t got a Victorian fireplace.”
Mel thought hard. “Rachel and Paul.”
“Not good enough,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re right, Rachel and Paul haven’t got a Victorian fireplace. That’s because, if you remember, their interior decorator friend told them that Italian marble fireplaces were going to be all the rage.”
Mel shrugged her shoulders as if to say “So what?”
“Can’t you see what I’m saying? All these couples are going round trying desperately to improve everything in their lives because they want to be perfect. They want to have a perfect house, go to perfect restaurants and have the perfect relationship. But nothing’s perfect, so they’ll never be happy because they’re not focusing on what they’ve
got, only on what comes next. I love you, Mel. We’ll be all right. We will. I know we’re not perfect but we’re so much better together than the alternative.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one,” said Mel coolly. “But nothing you’ve said changes the fact that you don’t want to live with me. I could wait around forever hoping that you’ll change your mind but I’m not going to. Four years is more than enough. So I need you to go, Duffy. I need you to go right now. It’s for the best. Please, please don’t try and call me. At least not for a while.”
On the doorstep we kissed briefly. “It’s the saddest thing in the world, Duff,” she said, as tears welled up in her eyes. “The saddest thing ever, because I know without question that you love me. And that we’d be so good together. But you’re terrified of commitment, and whatever it is holding you back, this is something you’ve got to sort out on your own.”
Anyone see that Lassie
film last night?
Outside W.H. Smith, half an hour after I’d left Mel’s, I walked all the way to Clapham Junction in the rain and caught the train to Waterloo station. I had a copy of What Hi-Fi? in one hand (the pages of which I was trying desperately to escape into) and in the other a maxi-pack of Revels (from which I’d already frantically located and eaten all of the orange ones). Refusing to think about, confront or admit to myself what had just happened, I made my way to the tube and jumped on the Northern Line. I sat flicking through the pages of my magazine, poring over any picture or technical specifications that caught my eye. My plan was simple. I was going to go to one of the many hi-fi shops on Tottenham Court Road, hand over my credit card, point at a picture in What Hi-Fi? and say, “Give me that.” For approximately twenty-six minutes—roughly how long it took me to get to my destination—I was happy again.
Even though it was a rain-sodden Sunday afternoon, Tottenham Court Road was busy with shoppers and tourists. I made my way through the crowds and the drizzle to the doors of the first hi-fi shop I saw, called Now Electronics. Walking into the shop, leaving the rain behind, I immediately felt at home. Dotted around the shop floor were young men like me, exhilarated to be in a secure environment like this where we could stand and admire the latest and the best, and spend money we knew we couldn’t afford because we’d managed to provide ourselves with perfectly structured arguments as to why this purchase was, more so than food, light or shelter, not only necessary but essential to our quality of life.