And now you’re leaving,’ I said,
forever the lawyer.
The couple next to us fell silent,
watched you struggle into your blazer
then kissed one another
quite openly,
gloatingly,
before blowing into bowls of miso soup.
I pretended to read.
One page.
Another.
Then I ordered some salmon nigiri
with no wasabi.
The waiter rolled his eyes; he wanted the table.
I pretended to read.
One page.
Another.
But for the next hour I thought only about what you’d said –
you and me:
Something Special.
‘Make him leave,’ she pleads.
This woman is Tanya’s client
but mentioned changing her will
when she called,
so I am sitting in.
‘If he’s dangerous, you could get a court order
to have him removed,’ Tanya says.
The woman is leaning in,
hands clutching the edge of Tanya’s desk.
I am entranced by her crimped pearl roots,
confused.
Why hasn’t she taken the trouble to dye them
when the rest of her is so perfectly put together?
‘He doesn’t hit me,’ she says.
I want to listen, but her lazy grey hair is distracting
and I wonder how much longer my feet
can go without a pedicure – I can’t show
the world my toes,
though I suppose
had you been alive
I’d have painted them weeks ago.
You liked my toes,
used to put your tongue between them.
‘He hides,
jumps out,’ the woman is saying.
‘BOO! he shouts.
He thinks it’s hilarious.
We live on a quiet lane.
I worry about killers anyway.
Once he lay on the kitchen floor
pretending to be dead.
I dialled 999. My son was at home.
When I came back into the room,
they were chopping almonds.’
‘What for?’
‘What?’
‘What did the almonds have to do with it?’
Tanya is hiding a smirk. I can tell.
But the woman is lucid.
‘Nothing. Nothing.
For God’s sake, I need him to leave.
My first husband bought the house,
so it’s mine,
not his.
He’s my second,
you see,
and I don’t want him any more.’
‘That isn’t how it works,’ Tanya explains.
‘If he won’t agree to go, it’s a challenge.’
‘How many people need to agree
for this sort of thing to come to an end?’
She is earnest.
It is a real question.
‘One,’ I say. ‘It takes just one person to end a marriage.’
Tanya chinks her rings against her coffee mug.
She expected this to be more fun.
It usually is when we see clients together.
‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ I say.
‘My next appointment is due.
But of course
we’ll help you.’
In bed you kissed my arm and I said,
‘I’ve never telephoned your home.
But I have the number
and if I wanted to
I could call
Rebecca
and I could
destroy her.
Do you ever
think about
that?’
You kissed me again and said,
‘No. No, I never think about that.’
I burn a roll in the toaster.
The smoke detector sounds at midnight.
Shaking a dish towel doesn’t work,
but rather than try anything else
I stand beneath the alarm
just hoping.
Paul scampers in,
steps on to a chair and removes the battery.
‘What the hell,’ he mutters.
‘I was hungry,’ I explain.
I am still in my suit.
Paul is wearing only his underpants.
‘Are you hungry?’ I ask.
The butter from the fridge is too hard to spread.
I’ll have to use margarine.
When I look around he is gone.
The smoke detector is exposed.
Two years ago I gave your messages their own ringtone,
so I am
never
lured into imagining
you have contacted me from your coffin.
It is only my mother encouraging me to
Eat Something.
We watched Stranger Things in tandem on Netflix,
one episode per week,
dissected the retro paranormal
while we walked hand-in-hand across Parliament Hill,
far enough from home not to feel too nervous.
But at week four,
it was evident you’d gone ahead,
watched
to the end
without me.
‘When did you finish it?’ I asked,
inviting humiliation.
Because we had agreed.
I mean,
we had agreed to follow
along together.
For fun.
‘Rebecca was in the sitting room,’ you said.
‘I couldn’t very well ask her to get out.
Anyway, she checks her phone
through the whole thing.’
You did this a lot:
ensured I understood
that whatever you shared with Rebecca
was spoiled by who she was
and what she wasn’t.
It was a gift – slim compensation.
‘So she finished it before I did?’ I asked stupidly,
speaking into a paper cup.
And with you.
Sitting on a sofa.
The same sofa?
Of course.
Of course you sat on
the same
sofa.
With mugs of tea, bare feet,
low lighting,
drawn curtains.
Whose job was it to draw them?
Whose to shut out the lamps before bed?
Week one Paul had asked what I was watching.
‘Nothing,’ I’d said, shutting him out,
switching off the TV as he sat down.
It was our show. One for us alone.
The rain came
and we gambolled down to Gospel Oak,
sheltering in a pub.
On the walls were vintage tennis rackets,snowshoes, a rowing oar.
I reached up,
touched the blade of an old ice skate.
You downed half a pint within seconds.
‘What’s going on between us?’ I asked.
You reached for my free hand.
‘Well, we’re best pals mostly.
And the rest too. Which is incredible.’
The rest?
Did you mean the way you folded my clothes
after we made love,
while I was in the bathroom,
laying everything across the back of a chair
so I didn’t have to scramble about on the floor
like a whore,
looking for my lost, damp knickers?
With Rebecca you had easy domesticity,
bedsocks and dishwashers,
something that would have seemed
like a very strange thing
for us.
Graham comes in without knocking.
I am alone
in the office.
Sometimes I think we should install panic buttons.
‘Stop telling Helen she can slack off.
She left at four. She’s paid until five thirty
and she isn’t your secretary. We share her.’
‘It’s seven,’ I say.
‘But she left. At four.’
I open a private window on my browser –
Graham probably searches for porn this way but that is not my sin.
I Google ‘Mark Dahl’ and click on images.
Mostly they are his illustrations:
magazine covers, adverts.
On his headshots I zoom in.
He has too much beard.
In some photos he is overweight.
All I have of us is one password-protected photo,
proof that once we pressed our faces together and smiled.
Other than that,
Mark is our witness.
‘Ana, are you even listening?’
Graham’s lunch lingers on his lapel.
He has propositioned me twice.
He has propositioned Tanya only once.
I look up.
‘Why did you wait three hours to sound off?’
I search for pictures of Rebecca too.
Her chin is pointy,
her expression severe.
You chose this woman over me.
Every day you made that choice.
‘She isn’t the sort of woman you leave,’
Mark said.
‘You need a holiday,’ Graham says.
He is wearing his glasses on his head
to hide the almost baldness.
His ears could do with a shave.
‘You’re not my boss. You’re not my dad.
Stop creeping me out.’
He clears his throat.
‘Oh please. The shine came off you years ago, darling.
That isn’t what this is about.
Your work is suffering.
And when that happens, we all suffer.
Take a break.
That’s what I’m saying.’
He doesn’t wait for a reply,
is gone.
I Google images of myself.
My LinkedIn photo is ten years old.
I am adorned in a cheap necklace.
I seem so happy in it.
Maybe I was.
It’s hard to remember.
You decided to
end it.
You wanted a chance to try with Rebecca,
who’d noticed a change.
‘Try what?’ I asked.
‘Try to try,’ you replied.
‘I have to think about the boys.’
It was a telephone conversation.
You couldn’t see that I was doodling
words in the margins of a letter to the taxman:
Alone
Alone
Alone
I didn’t argue.
I agreed it had to end eventually,
felt a bit relieved we’d escaped uncaught.
The consequences were a couple of burnt hearts, nothing more.
That night I invited Paul to see a film.
We shared a popcorn.
Our hands touched in the bucket.
He smelled good. I’d forgotten how good he could smell.
At university he was the only boy I knew who showered daily.
The morning after, I was checking my phone every few minutes,
wondering how your doctor’s appointment had gone,
imagining you and Rebecca trying to try –
at dinner, in bed.
By day five I was weeping, angry –
you had never loved me.
And now all I had was Paul.
Two weeks into the misery you were beaten:
Hey. You OK?
Sort of. You?
Not really. I missed out on
Britney Spears tickets.
Britney was a running joke –
everything naughty
eliciting an ‘Oops, we did it again.’
Not funny now I think back on it.
We agreed it was unthinkable to cold-turkey it,
that we were adults and friendship was possible.
‘You’re my best friend,’ you said.
One week later we were in bed.
I wore tangerine-coloured underwear
for our back-together meet-up.
You lifted my skirt slowly to reveal the gift,
and sighed as we made love,
kissing me with so much of your mouth
mine was sore from stretching afterwards.
I said, ‘So what’s the plan?’
You shifted away no more than an inch.
‘The plan?’
You’d written a three-page apology.
You’d said,
I’ll never not want you.
You’re my every thought.
I’d have walked the earth for you.
Yet no plans
to make me more than your tangerine queen.
After sex we saw
The Taming of the Shrew,
barely making it to the end of another fine RSC performance
before bolting back to the hotel.
We fucked for so many hours I couldn’t stay wet,
fell asleep on my side with you in me.
In the night, mice scratched somewhere.
I made you get up to check twice.
The third time I left you in peace but
panic pounded me
and I obsessively checked Google maps for traffic.
I could have been home from Stratford-upon-Avon in two hours.
I set the alarm for six.
Next day, by the bridge,
take-away cups of tea and coffee
on the bench beside us,
we ate cream-filled doughnuts.
You claimed to hate cakes and pastries
but devoured that sweet breakfast
and licked your fingertips clean.
I saw myself reflected in your sunglasses,
did everything not to seem sad and
it worked,
I think,
until we were standing in the road twenty minutes later
hugging out a goodbye.
My dress rose up at the back.
I worried someone would see my knickers.
‘Have a good weekend, honey,’ you said,
which meant:
Let’s not make contact until
office hours.
Did you really believe joy was possible without you?
That being left like that on the side of a road
was a thing any person could simply accept?
All I ever wanted was for you to stay.
And sitting in the driver’s seat,
I watched in the rear-view mirror
until you turned a corner,
disappeared,
and I tried
so hard
to ignore my sugar-sore teeth.
That was the first time:
trying to try.
I can’t do this any more.
We have to be realistic.
What if they found out?
We could call it a break –
give ourselves six months –
see where we are.
Who knows the future?
Promises are pointless.
You know how I feel.
But it happened,
again and again
and
again and again and again.
Together
apart.
In love
in aching.
Tangled
unravelling.
The pain.
The shame.
The knots
and sleepless nights.
Again and again and again.
All the clichés.
The night bus jerked to a stop and I made roo
m for
a woman with a pram, an array of
bulging carrier bags.
She scowled at my hand
holding the rail
too close to the face of her child.
A child who should have been in bed.
A man nearby ate a hot Cornish pasty from a box.
The smell was sickening.
You messaged around nine,
unsympathetic to my headache
or office politics with the partners.
I’ve a residents’ meeting, you texted.
I’m gonna have to hear about everyone’s drains.
I sat on the patio with a Romanian Pinot Noir
the colour of cranberry juice,
looking through case notes.
I’d lost an important one that morning –
a woman written out of her father’s will
when he was in sheltered care,
her brother getting everything.
She had a sick child.
She could have done with a few quid.
Two yellow roses bloomed
at the bottom of the garden,
poking their jolly
blonde heads out from behind the hydrangea –
a flower never quite sure of its colour,
lilting lavender when blue,
and purple when pink.
You messaged once the sun had well and truly set.
They won’t leave.
We’re on to recycling bins.
Actually, I’m peeing.
Thinking of you and peeing.
What are you doing?
Still whinging about work?
I poured a second glass of wine,
thought of you and Rebecca
hosting your residents’ meeting.
You hadn’t mentioned earlier
that it was being held in your house.
A sort of party, really.
Soirée.
I was meant to reply to that message,
be pleasant,
make jokes,
which you would read once the booze was gone,
the guests departed,
Rebecca safely removing her make-up,
eyesight too blurry to see what you were up to.
It is curious,
the things you told me
and thought I would enjoy.
It is a mystery
I never chastised you for it.
Acceptance: it was my bounteous gift to you.
For a while.
A parcel was couriered to my office
the day after your residents’ meeting.
Inside, a sparkling bottle of Ballygowan
and a packet of fast-acting Nurofen.
You wrote a note –
wished me a less stressful day than the one before
and promised to kiss my temples better.
And you did.
You kissed my face
on a bench in Coldfall Wood
and told me you were sorry
about the woman and her sick child,
and sorry I never had time to stop
and sorry you couldn’t take care of me
and sorry you were married
Here is the Beehive Page 5
