by Parks, Adele
‘A shopping list? Well, we need pretty much everything. Eggs, juice, bacon …’
‘No, a bucket list. Things I have to do before I die.’
Dean looks surprised, but grins. ‘Good idea.’ He reaches over me (briefly kissing me en route) and delves around in the bedside cabinet. In among the loose coins, odd cufflink and the Durex box, he eventually finds a pen. ‘I need something we can scribble on.’ It’s obvious that he doesn’t want to get out of bed to find paper. I’m glad; I like to feel him folded around me and I like it that he wants it too. ‘I’ll write on the Durex instruction leaflet,’ he suggests.
‘Is there room?’
‘I’ll write small, there’s a border.’ We lie on our sides facing each other, the instruction leaflet between us. Dean holds the pen poised. Our feet are still entwined. ‘OK, fire.’ He stares at me with eager expectancy.
I don’t want to disappoint him, although I probably will as my mind is blank. What do I enjoy? What do I want to do with myself for the next forty-odd years? I look at Dean, hoping he’ll help. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Would you like to learn to ski?’ I shake my head. ‘Or go wakeboarding or zorbing? Now that’s hysterical,’ he suggests.
‘Do they have to be so active?’ I surprise myself by not wasting time pretending to like his hobbies.
‘No, no, I suppose not. Not if you don’t want them to be,’ says Dean.
I rack my brains and then almost yell, ‘I know, I’d like to stay in bed all day and eat junk food. An entire day.’
Dean looks sceptical. ‘That’s not exactly a to-do, is it? It’s more of an avoid-doing.’ However, he writes Jo’s To-Do List in the margin of the leaflet, alongside the warning to check the expiry date on the condom wrapper before you use it, and adds: 1. Lie in bed all day and eat junk food.
‘I’d like to try jellied eels. Well, I wouldn’t actually like to, but I sort of think I should,’ I offer. ‘People are always saying they’re an East End delicacy, aren’t they? And I’m a Londoner, so I feel almost obliged …’
‘Go on, then, you can have that.’
‘I’d like to drink cherry milkshake.’
‘Are all your ambitions going to be about food?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Then you should be specific. How about you go to the award-laden Fosselman’s, in the LA suburb of Alhambra? They serve amazing milkshakes.’
‘How do you even know that?’
‘I know stuff. I make it my business to know stuff. The double-chocolate malt is one of my favourite treats ever, up there with eating macaroons at Ladurée in Paris.’
‘What? Where?’
‘This guy, Monsieur Ladurée, opened his bakery on the rue Royale in 1862; later his grandson invented the double-decker macaroon. Two shells of meringue-like pastry held together by creamy ganache filling. Superb.’ Dean smacks his lips together to suggest how delicious these cakes are.
‘I’d like to try those. Add that to my list.’
‘Nope.’
‘What?’
‘No. You have to think of your own, Jo. You’re just saying what you think I want you to say.’ I scowl but accept he has a point. I must have my own ambitions, my own desires. Ones that are not to do with food. I just must have.
After what seems to be about two and a half years I excitedly pronounce, ‘I know. I’d like to be an extra in a film. A proper film. Something directed by Scorsese or Spielberg or someone.’
‘Good one.’ Dean scribbles it down.
‘I’d like to plant a tree.’
‘What sort?’
‘Cherry blossom.’
‘Where?’
‘In my garden.’
‘So you’d like a garden?’
‘Yes, yes, I would. I’d like a home of my own.’
More scribbling. ‘Now you are getting it,’ encourages Dean. I take his comment to mean that he thinks I’m getting the hang of writing a bucket list, rather than that I’m getting more sex, although that would be lovely. ‘Where?’
‘Where what?’
‘Where would you like your home to be?’ Dean keeps his eyes on the leaflet, and although I’m really trying not to be too like my old self, the self that projects as far as the birth of our second child even before we’ve shared a packet of cereal, I can’t help thinking that his question is a little loaded.
‘I’m not sure. In a city. I like London, but I could go further afield, I suppose. Sydney, New York, maybe here,’ I add, elated at the thought of the trains that criss-cross the city, endlessly taking busy and useful people to exciting and important places. Thinking about the stunning skyline that I can see – even now – from Dean’s bed because his room benefits from an enormous window, I can imagine making Chicago my home. So far my experience has been that this city is awash with sparkly lights and dazzling smiles.
‘What do you like about Chicago particularly?’ asks Dean with a cough.
Him. And, ‘It strikes me as an energetic, electrifying and ambitious city. I like the look of Lake Michigan; it must be great to be somewhere urban that also benefits from miles of beach. Besides, everyone speaks English. Hey, don’t worry, I’m not suggesting I move in. Well not straight away. Joke. I’m just talking about what might work for me. It’s a coincidence that it works for you too.’ I glance shyly at Dean to see if he looks totally and utterly horrified. He doesn’t. He doesn’t even look fazed. ‘I’d like to milk a cow,’ I add. Dean nods and jots that down too. ‘I’d like to stay in the Ice Hotel in Sweden. It’s made entirely of ice, can you believe that? The walls, the beds, the plates, the loos! Have you heard of it?’ Dean nods. ‘Have you stayed there?’ Dean hesitates but decides not to lie to me; he nods again. I can see he’s worried that he’s stealing my thunder, but he’s not. I’m impressed. ‘Wow, you really have packed a lot in.’
‘I told you, I had a slow start, but I’ve been catching up ever since.’
‘I’d like to gallop a horse along a beach. That’s a stretch, because I can’t ride a horse and I’m not that confident around water.’
Dean laughs. ‘In which case, that one is perfect.’
‘Maybe I should think about travel journalism. I need a break from tiered cakes and posies.’
It takes nearly two hours but the list has forty-one entries by the time we are scribbling around the small print that explains how each batch of latex is tested and certified at the plantation. Dean says he’d have liked a neat fifty points because he likes round numbers, and he really doubts whether peel an apple keeping the skin in one long string is worthy of the list, but all in all he seems satisfied with my ambitions and I’m thrilled by them. Just the process of writing them down is exciting. I can’t wait to get cracking. Although one of the reasons why compiling the list might have seemed such fun was that Dean kept kissing me and playing with my breasts as he wrote.
‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘Do you have a list?’
‘I don’t need one.’ He folds the paper and hands it to me.
‘Well, you can’t have done everything,’ I protest, although I do remember him saying he liked snowboarding, mountain biking, grass sledging, water skiing, sky-diving, bungee jumping, rafting and swimming with sharks, which does sound pretty comprehensive.
‘No, of course I haven’t done everything. There are one or two things that I might put on a list, but when opportunities come along I never hesitate in taking them; in fact I actively hunt them out on a regular basis, so I don’t need a physical list. Right now, you see, I have the opportunity of having more amazing sex with a very beautiful woman and I think we should stop talking and seize that opportunity.’ He grins, pulls the duvet over his head and starts to make his way down my body, leaving a trail of searing kisses as he goes. I find it impossible to disagree with him, and that has nothing to do with the fact that I’m in the habit of fitting around other people’s plans and falling in line with their suggestions; it’s just that it is a genuinely brilliant idea.
42
Dean
Dean was staggered to comprehend how he had spent the day in a montage from a romantic chick flick, a genre he was very familiar with because those sorts of movies were often the preferred choice of various women he passed time with.
They’d agreed to start working through Jo’s list immediately. Jo had expressed an interest in ‘doing something with boats’. Dean had imagined her gaining her RYA Coastal Skipper qualification, chartering a boat and eventually sailing around the Indian Ocean, but it turned out that all she wanted to do was stand on the bow of a ship, spread her arms wide and be held from behind while she sang ‘My Heart Will Go On’, so they’d set off to Navy Pier. There, they spent an hour on the Tall Ship Windy, a 148-foot schooner modelled after a traditional trading ship. The tour guide was obliging and let her sing as many verses as she could remember, as well as encouraging the other passengers to join in the chorus. They also enjoyed the spectacular views of the Chicago skyline from the water, helped raise sail and relayed traditional sailing commands, although Dean wasn’t sure how much of the boating history and tales of courage from the golden age of sail Jo actually absorbed; it seemed that she was most intent on running back through their brief relationship, minute by minute, and piecing him together.
‘At first I was puzzled as to how and why you reconciled being an obvious womaniser and a strong belief in fidelity. It’s because of your father, isn’t it? You might have a rotating bedroom door, but it’s always one at a time. Right? Fidelity isn’t the issue, commitment is,’ she said, just as the long-suffering tour guide was trying to scare the tourists with ludicrous stories about spirit ships and haunted harbours. Dean was pretty sure most of the other passengers were more interested in Jo’s conversation too.
‘I guess.’ If she’d wanted him to update his thoughts on the rotating bedroom door, she didn’t say so, and therefore it didn’t occur to him to elaborate, which was probably a good thing, because he wasn’t yet sure what he could say. Twenty-nine years of distrust don’t dissolve overnight; Dean was uncertain as to whether he could be a different man. He pushed the difficult thoughts away and stayed in the moment.
As they rode the Ferris wheel, dangling their legs and nibbling candy floss, Jo gasped, ‘The movie. On the plane. You were touched by the begging scene not because you were thinking about the lengths fathers should go to for their kids but—’
‘Having the electricity turned off. Yes.’ She had candy floss in her hair; he picked it out, careful not to pull.
When he did a victory dance after securing five consecutive holes-in-one on the crazy golf course, she smiled indulgently. He knew she understood why he needed to win. At everything. He was a survivor, a fighter, a victor. He had feared that after confiding in Jo she would harp on about his childhood in a pitying way, but during the day, it became clear that was not going to be the case. It was obvious that she was rapt, but what she felt for him was far from pity. Her eyes shone in admiration; she understood his strength and determination, she accepted, perhaps even forgave, his cynicism. Her intense interest in him was not at all irritating; it made him feel fascinating, wanted. Of course women had tried to work him out before; they had scratched and scratched at his impenetrable exterior and broken their nails and hearts in the process, but none had ever got close. He hadn’t allowed them the chance to do so; he hadn’t given anyone else the key to the puzzle. The miserable childhood had been a secret between him and Zoe – until yesterday. He’d let Jo get past the shiny, affluent, sexy man and closer to the murkier depths, and she didn’t seem put off.
The surprise for Dean was that not only had he found himself in the romantic montage cliché of sailing boats, Ferris wheels, candy floss and crazy golf, but he also discovered that he liked it there. There with Jo.
She was fun; her naivety had melted and they were left with a less irritating childlike enthusiasm, which he had to admit he found appealing. She saw the world in such a sparkly light, it was impossible not to be dazzled and brightened in her presence. He was forced to question his long-held belief that the world was entirely populated by selfish bastards, that it was foolhardy to trust anyone. She was scrupulously and refreshingly honest; when they inevitably talked about their sexual histories, she frankly relayed endless stories that made her appear desperate and deluded, but she did so in a way that was hilariously self-deprecating and comedic. Almost adorable. Besides, she was clever; much cleverer than she allowed people to believe. She had clearly benefited from a broad and classical education and so was not only well read but also curious. He’d always thought that polished and effervescent privately educated girls were, frankly, silly; capable of a strong serve in a game of mixed doubles and identifying several soft cheeses but not much else. Jo, however, knew a lot of stuff about the American War of Independence, and when she talked of Tissot, she meant the nineteenth-century artist, not a brand of watches. Dean thought that she was the sort of woman who might make gallery visiting interesting, and gallery visiting was not normally his thing. The bit he liked most was that she did not waste time and energy on games. She seemed physically incapable of playing hard to get; she could not keep her hands off him and she made it clear. He had feared in the IMAX theatre that she might actually follow him into the loo; instead she had to be satisfied with hovering outside and she practically leapt into his arms when he emerged.
‘Let’s go home and have more sex,’ she suggested. How was it that this woman had been single so long? mused Dean.
‘You know, we really should do some of the ordinary stuff at some point.’
‘Like?’
‘Like I need to unpack, put on the laundry, buy groceries.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. I like your idea better.’ He was only flesh and blood.
Dean thought sex with Jo was great. Really particularly good. True, maybe he’d had more athletic sex in the past, enjoyed better-toned bodies and done dirtier stuff with various other women, but then he’d also had less energetic sex, bedded women with flabbier bodies and had very straightforward, not too exciting sex as well. The point being, he had had lots of sex with lots of women and he had been pretty confident that he knew the range of experiences available, but the sex he had with Jo was surprising. It was (and it killed him to admit this, even to himself) different. It was more. More than sex. It was possible, he wasn’t certain, but there was a chance that for the first time ever, Dean had allowed himself to make love. He’d always thought the expression was, ultimately, a euphemism – the preserve of married couples who wanted to believe that what they had was special, or middle-aged spinsters who were too prudish to call a shag a shag – but now he understood. What he and Jo had created was affectionate. It was loving.
Dean was not saying that he was in love. No, he would not say that, because whilst he was unconcerned about leaping out of small aircraft from a height of five thousand feet with only a thin circular sheet of nylon for security, or diving over a waterfall with rapids gushing beneath him and only an elastic rope tied around his feet to save him from certain death, those leaps and falls were child’s play in comparison to making the leap from loner to partner, a piece of cake in comparison to falling in love.
And yet.
He was finding it impossible to think of anything other than Jo’s lips. Until she slipped out of her clothes; then he thought about her body. She had a good body: full, inviting tits, as he’d imagined back on the aeroplane, slightly rounded stomach and thighs, but he’d known that about her before she’d taken her clothes off. He liked her shape; it was extremely feminine. She also had just a bit of cellulite. He knew the moment he spotted it that he would never admit as much to her. Even if she asked him, he would say she was as smooth as a peach. Who would have known that ribs and elbows could be so attractive?
After the lovemaking, he found himself telling her even more. Now he’d taken his finger out of the dam, he couldn’t stop the flood; he didn’t even want to try. For the first
time he understood, rather than simply remotely admiring, Zoe’s intimacy with her husband. It was a relief for someone who had not experienced the heartache to hear about it. He had spent a lifetime denying the horrors; now he wanted to let the monsters climb out from the shadows. He took a perverse but definite pleasure in seeing her shocked face. He felt vindicated. It had been awful and wrong. Jo agreed. He hadn’t exaggerated or indulged. He also liked listening to her stories, her glittering ones, and even though it was obvious that with her retellings she was now questioning her memories, re-examining everything in light of her parents’ revelations, she still valued her golden childhood and, most importantly, recognised it as such, no matter how confusing things were right now. He knew he’d helped her preserve that and he was proud to have done so.
‘So tell me about visiting your father. How did it go?’ she asked. She was lying on her side, curled towards him. Dean could practically hear the cogs in her mind whirring. He sighed and turned towards her.
‘Badly. I thought the reason he’d got in touch was that he might be able to explain things, even – and I know this is mental – justify them, but he couldn’t. In fact it turned out he hadn’t actually wanted me there, not even at the end.’ His hand slipped below the duvet again and homed in on her bum cheek. It was soft and warm; he was addicted to stroking it. He found confessing to his father’s unrelenting indifference tough, even confessing it to Jo. It was still shaming, incredibly painful, relentlessly damning. He sighed so deeply he wondered whether there was any air left in his body. ‘The angry spiky man was not how I’d imagined a dying man should be. I’d expected more calm, more resignation. Some answers. I wanted to yell at him, “I’m the one entitled to be angry.” You know, I offered to get a photo printed off of Zoe’s kids, for his bedside. His grandchildren. He said no.’ Dean turned to Jo, outrage plastered across his face.
