I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  ‘Louise!’ Annabelle’s voice, loud enough to carry down the hallway. ‘Are you and your . . . friend coming?’

  ‘Hold on, Mum!’ Lou called back. ‘I’m getting changed.’ Josh looked down at her trackpants and Lou pulled a face at him.

  ‘Then send him down here for a drink, darling.’ Annabelle appeared in the doorway at the end of the hall. ‘Now he’s here, we don’t want to be rude.’ She disappeared again.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ Lou repeated.

  Josh knew that this moment was the one he had to get right. Not a man familiar with the grand gesture, he considered that it was time to do justice to whatever had pushed him to hunt down Gretchen’s email address, beg her to tell him where Lou’s parents lived, get his sisters’ advice, and stand here in an almost-stranger’s house filled with actual strangers that he would now, likely, have to make small talk with.

  ‘I screwed up yesterday,’ he said. ‘When I said that about Sin– . . . my ex.’

  ‘When you said you’d just started seeing her again?’ Lou’s eyes were on his, and they were not friendly. Not friendly at all.

  ‘Um. Yes.’ Josh wiped his palms on the front of his jeans. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Which bit?’ Lou asked. ‘Which bit didn’t you mean?’

  ‘The bit when I made it sound serious. Like we were back together.’ He flinched a little at that phrase. ‘I was trying to be honest with you about what’s been happening while you’ve been gone, and I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘If I was going to care about that?’

  ‘Well, yes, I guess.’

  ‘We had just finished’ – Lou looked over her shoulder down the hall – ‘having sex. You made me eggs. It shouldn’t have been difficult to guess that I might care.’ She crossed her arms over the banana. ‘And if you’re surprised that I did, your emotional intelligence is not very high.’

  Emotional intelligence? That was what his mother always said about his dad. ‘The emotional intelligence of a slug,’ was her favourite way to put it.

  ‘I misread things,’ Josh admitted. ‘Not my best day.’ Say what you mean – his mum’s voice again. ‘Although, to be honest, right up until then, it had been one of my very best days. Really, pretty up there.’

  ‘Louise!’ Annabelle’s voice was coming closer again.

  ‘COMING, Mum!’ Lou yelled, and then turned back to him. ‘So you’ve come here to apologise and . . . what?’

  The what was the hard part, Josh knew. Being wrong was the easy bit. But then what? Again: Say what you mean.

  ‘I’d like to see you while you’re here,’ he said. ‘As much as you want to.’

  ‘I’m here for nine days,’ Lou said.

  ‘And I wasted one.’ Josh stepped towards her. ‘Can I kiss you? And can we rewind?’

  ‘No,’ Lou said. But she was smiling. ‘You can go down there and chit-chat with my evil parents and my brother and his boyfriend while I get changed.’

  Josh felt dizzy. Actually dizzy. She was saying yes. ‘I don’t think your brother is allowed to have a boyfriend,’ he said softly. ‘Just a vibe I’m getting from your mum.’

  ‘I told you,’ Lou said. ‘They’re the worst. And you have to go and talk to them, explain why you’re here, and who you are, and where you live . . . I’ll probably be ages.’

  He laughed. She laughed. Then she spun him around and pushed him gently down the hall. ‘Go,’ she said.

  And he went.

  Brian, Lou’s dad, offered him a beer as soon as he walked out to the backyard. ‘Come and help me with the barbecue, son,’ he said after Annabelle had introduced him, eyebrows still raised, as a friend of Lou’s. ‘My son’s a doctor, you know; he’s not good with the practical stuff.’

  So Josh turned steak and Brian poked around with coals while Rob and Peter sat at the patio table with Annabelle, who told them about what was happening at the dentist’s surgery where she worked part-time. ‘They’re getting younger and younger with the fillings,’ Josh heard her say. ‘I think their mothers are putting Coca-Cola in their sippy cups.’

  When the steaks were done, and Lou came out from the house wearing a loose black dress, with her hair down and her trainers on, they all sat down together and Josh had to tell them about how he was doing a bit of carpentry, but only until the whole music thing took off, and then that would be his focus. He saw Annabelle and Brian exchange a look about that.

  Then Rob complimented the steak and said to his dad, ‘I could have helped you with these, you know. Peter and I cook steaks all the time. The way to test if they’re done is to push them with the heel of your hand and –’

  Brian interrupted. ‘Not your strength, son. Leave the barbecue to the non-doctors, I think, don’t you?’ And this time Lou and Josh exchanged a look, while Rob sighed and took a swig of his beer.

  Lou’s parents weren’t that bad, he decided. They were just trying to stick to a script that had been torn up long ago, and they weren’t at all sure that they liked where the rewrites were going.

  *

  That night Josh and Lou lay on the futon, under the skylight. The skylight was the reason he’d liked the attic in the first place.

  Josh could feel Lou’s breath on his neck. His arm was around her and her body was pressed into his side. Her head was on his shoulder, tilted up just a little. When he looked at the skylight he knew that somewhere, in his subconscious maybe, this was what he’d imagined when he’d seen it. It felt more right than he could ever explain in words. Even in a letter. Even in a song.

  Josh heard his phone ring. He looked across to his mobile on the bedside table. Sinead’s name was flashing on the screen.

  Lou stirred under his arm. She opened her eyes, just a little, and closed them again.

  The phone kept buzzing.

  Josh pulled his arm out from under Lou’s head; she moaned and opened her eyes again. ‘Hold on,’ he said to her.

  He reached for the phone. Lay back down. Answered the call.

  He felt Lou stiffen beside him as he said, ‘Sinead.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sinead was somewhere loud.

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Can I come over?’ Sinead asked, her voice a little drowsy, close to the receiver.

  ‘No,’ Josh said immediately. ‘You can’t. I’m sorry. But you can’t anymore.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Josh said. And he looked at Lou, who had rolled over to face him, her cheek resting on her hand, watching. ‘I’m with someone.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Sinead sounded more curious than upset. ‘It’s not serious, is it?’

  Josh took a breath. He was still looking at Lou, and she was smiling at him now. He wanted her to smile at him for a long time. ‘Actually,’ he said into the phone, ‘I think it is serious.’

  The noise of wherever Sinead was, a party or a bar, swelled as if she was holding the phone away from her ear, and then her voice came back close to the receiver and she said, ‘But destiny, Josh. Destiny.’

  ‘Goodbye, Sinead. Take care of yourself.’

  And he ended the call.

  Lou

  I give my marriage 11 months, Lou tapped into her phone.

  She was sitting in her year one classroom, in one of the kids’ chairs, her knees up near her chest. For the last week, it had been Ryan Harcourt’s seat, but he was already proving a frenetic handful who needed to be closer to her and further from the other kids who cast around the room looking for an excuse to lose focus.

  So Lou was meant to be rearranging the name tags on the desks. She should have known she had sticky-taped them down too soon.

  Assessment of success of sex contract experiment: undecided, she typed.

  She looked around the classroom. She’d spent the final days of the holidays in here getting it ready for her new class. She’d folded triangular paper flags of the world over rustic brown string to loop around the walls. Found a beautifully illustrated giant worl
d map on Etsy back when she was doing the Christmas shopping, and now it was tacked to a big felt board in the corner. This year, she wanted to open her suburban kids’ minds to the scale of what lay beyond their little lives. Be kind, she’d written in giant letters, then googled the same phrase in twenty languages and spent a night in front of the TV copying it and copying it. Be kind, Etre gentil, Budi ljubazan, Dayaalu hon, Sei freundlich . . .

  She’d tried to enlist Stella’s help drawing some Chinese characters, but her elder daughter had rolled her eyes. ‘They’re year one, Mum,’ she’d said, with all the wisdom of someone in year three. ‘You’re going over the top. They don’t care.’

  Lou had let Stella off the hook but she knew her daughter was wrong. They do care, Lou thought. You do. You might not know that you do, but you do. Every year it got harder to summon the enthusiasm to throw everything into a fresh start for a new class, but Lou knew the difference between when she did and when she didn’t. Lately there had been a few years when she didn’t.

  She certainly hoped that Rita’s kindy teacher had put this kind of attention into her first few days of classroom life. Stella and Rita didn’t go to the school Lou taught at, which was by design. The moment Stella was born and she held her, she knew that despite all the love she’d felt over the years for the kids who’d passed through her classes, whose problems she’d taken on as her own, whose parents she’d reassured and cajoled, whose messes she’d cleaned up and whose tears she’d wiped away, she could never pretend that this little peachy bundle was just another one of them. And she’d suddenly understood the intensity in some of the parents who’d stood in front of her over the years, their eyes full of fear.

  So Stella, and now Rita, went to the local public school, while Lou was in her fourth year teaching at a smaller school two suburbs over. The travel was a bugger but the separation was worth it.

  ‘It’s nice of you though, Mummy,’ Stella had said. ‘You’re kind.’

  ‘Thank you, honey,’ she’d said. But she knew that wasn’t true, either.

  Target exceeded, she tapped into her phone at Ryan Harcourt’s old desk.

  Gap not closed.

  I give my marriage 11 months.

  *

  That morning, Lou had set the alarm on her phone fifteen minutes earlier than usual to roll over in bed and stir Josh. She knew she’d be late home after tonight’s teachers’ meeting, and she’d be tired and he’d be hiding in his guitar room. So she’d reached for him this morning, and he’d enthusiastically reached back.

  ‘This is February sex, so strictly it’s out of contract,’ she’d told him afterwards, when she was lying back on the edge of Josh’s shoulder, looking at the green-gold leaves of the tree outside the window as the morning brightened.

  ‘Well, that doesn’t have to mean anything, does it?’ Josh had said. ‘I mean, the contract wasn’t real, Lou.’

  At first she hadn’t said anything, because she knew that it was, that it had been a test. A connection test, a chemistry test.

  ‘I’m getting up,’ she said instead. ‘The girls need to eat a proper breakfast this morning.’

  Josh hadn’t tried to stop her. ‘I’m going to cut the tree back this weekend,’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘Sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to it. The chainsaw’s been at the workshop and I keep forgetting to bring it home.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Lou, halfway to the door, a towel wrapped around her. ‘I love that tree.’

  ‘One decent storm, and that tree is going to come crashing through the window. Or the girls’ window.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Lou said. ‘We’ve lived here for seven years and it hasn’t happened yet.’

  ‘Trees grow, Lou,’ Josh said, his tone impatient. ‘Seven years ago it wasn’t a threat.’

  Threat was a big word, Lou thought as she walked out of the bedroom and headed towards the girls’ room.

  There had been days, in the Month of Sex, when Lou had felt that maybe everything really could come back. Maybe this was all we needed, she thought, this daily session of skin and sweat, to bind us back together somehow. Some days she’d felt, in her husband’s arms, a lightening, a gurgle of joy, something worth crying out about. Other days, she’d felt nothing much at all, found her mind wandering as she moved through familiar motions. Running through the list of things that must be done – I’ve got to find Stella’s library bag; that chicken needs to come out of the freezer; it’s Gretchen’s birthday next week; I need some brown paper bags for the sandwiches since the bloody plastic ban – and feigned a whimper of satisfaction at a moment that seemed appropriate to wrap things up. Fourteen years and you’d hope my husband can tell when I’m faking it, she thought, although she was relieved that he didn’t seem to.

  What was the difference between the days when it worked and the days when it didn’t? Sometimes, she knew, it was entirely down to her state of mind. How harried she felt about the lesson plans that hadn’t yet been written. How infuriating the kids had been at bedtime. What time she’d made it home from work. What time Josh had.

  Sometimes it was how long her other list was – the one she and plenty of her married friends kept in their heads: the list of disappointments she could pin on Josh. Frustrations about who he was and who he wasn’t. Things he hadn’t done lately. How freshly she could conjure up the things she’d said to him and he to her on New Year’s Eve. On days when those memories were sharply in focus, the sex was something to seethe through. I’m doing this, she’d think, because I’m a good person, trying to save my family.

  And other times, the difference was her phone. Everything was in there. It was constantly buzzing at her, nudging her with its whispers of dissatisfaction and promises of simple solutions. And, of course, its potholes of risk.

  Like the time when Lou was lying on the couch with a sick Rita on her chest. It was a blisteringly hot day and everything Lou had tried to bring her daughter’s temperature down was failing, so they’d given in to TV and icy poles under the fan and Lou being a bed for her sick daughter.

  Lou’s phone was still resting in her free hand when a message popped onto the screen while her daughter’s sweaty little head rested on her breasts. It said, Up for a fuck?

  Lou had immediately jolted and Rita, disturbed by the sudden movement, had started to cry.

  Lou threw the phone across the room with as much force as a woman pinned under a sick child could muster.

  ‘Mummy,’ Rita whimpered. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Nothing, baby,’ Lou said, stroking Rita’s hair. ‘Mummy’s phone was making her hot. You go to sleep. Just let me get you comfy.’ Lou had eased herself out from under her daughter as gently as she could, stroking Rita’s head until she nuzzled back into a cushion.

  By the time Lou had crossed the room to pick up the phone from the floor the message had been joined by three more. There was a googly-eyed emoji, presumably to add levity to the first.

  Then: I miss you.

  And: I’m horny.

  Lou madly scrolled through her phone’s settings until she found Block Number, and tapped it with force.

  ‘Mum, I think I’m going to be sick again,’ Rita moaned from the couch.

  ‘I’ll be there in a second, baby,’ Lou said, moving towards the kitchen for another plastic bowl, and typing with the other hand. You’d better come home soon, she wrote to Josh. Enzo’s doors can wait, I need you here. After a pause she added, Rita’s really sick.

  Her hand holding the phone dropped to her side, and she held on to the kitchen doorframe, feeling unsteady on her feet, her head almost bursting with heat. What the hell was she doing?

  And she heard Rita behind her, quietly vomiting onto the couch.

  *

  In the classroom, perched on her tiny chair, Lou scrolled back through her notes app.

  I’m going to try everything I can to save it, she read.

  And if it doesn’t work I’m going to let it go.

&nb
sp; The next project should be something that lifted them out of the grind of school pick-ups and sick kids, she knew. Something that would make them laugh together again, rather than just communicate via exchanged to-do lists.

  2. Fun, she wrote. We need to remember how to have some. Find a joint purpose or project that’s not at all practical.

  What the hell was that going to be?

  ‘Excuse me, miss?’

  Lou looked up to see Theo, the school’s deputy head, filling the doorway. He was smiling at her, like he always did, his arms full of colour-coded files.

  ‘Oh, hi, Theo.’ Lou jumped up from the low seat. ‘I was just . . .’

  ‘Wondering what to do with Ryan Harcourt?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Lou looked at the phone in her hand. ‘And, you know, daydreaming it’s still the holidays.’

  ‘Oh, the holidays are long gone,’ Theo said, still smiling. He looked down at the files. ‘You all revved up for the staff meeting, first of many?’

  ‘Of course. I’m coming.’ Lou looked around for her bag, threw her phone in it. ‘Wouldn’t miss it. They’re always so fun.’

  They exchanged a look. Even for the deputy head, staff meetings were not fun. Not even for the head, Gabbie Scott, most likely, since she had to be the one to convince a mob of cynical, underpaid and tired teachers that the year’s new strategies were worth trying. That the structures they had to implement this year were going to somehow fix the stresses of having too many kids in too few classrooms with a whole mountain of standardised tests bearing down on them.

  ‘So, how was January?’ Theo asked, as Lou looked around the classroom to decide where to stick Ryan’s name down before they left. ‘There,’ he added, pointing to the spare seat next to the tag for Andrea Frick, the best-behaved girl in the class.

  ‘Oh, yes, great idea – thanks.’ Lou pushed the tag down onto the desk, even though she knew Ryan would make Andrea cry by nine fifteen tomorrow morning and there was no way that was where he was going to sit. ‘Look, January was . . . an interesting time. You?’