by Joy Richards
“I’m taking a couple of years out, to travel the world.”
“What the fuck.” It wasn’t a question, more of a statement. She was leaving? When? And crucially, what had the last month been about then?
What followed was an argument the likes of which he had never even had with Alice. Come to think, him and Alice had never properly fought, not even once. But there he was, arguing. Raising his voice, even. Holly looked so angry, blood drained from her lips that were almost blue, matching her hair.
Travelling had always been the plan. She’d not had the luxury of a proper gap year, like all of her posh friends. She’d spent her year between college and university working as a Dunelm’s floor assistant, and delivering pizzas after hours to save some money. Once she’d got to Oxford, she spent every day that wasn’t during term time working, re-stocking shelves at the local Sainsbury’s. During term, she worked the maximum allowed twenty hours a week, cleaning offices at night. She would go out with her friends, and while everyone hit the kebab van on the way home she put on her grey overalls and go to work. Getting a job in publishing had been a miracle achieved through hard work, dedication and an iron will. She was doing all right now, but she had never got to go travelling. It was the idea that had got her through all those gruelling years.
Paul was angry, because there was nothing he could say. He couldn’t even conceive of anyone going through so much. His parents had expected him to go to university, he’d gone to Warwick having never worked a day in his life. His first job was, embarrassingly, his first job out of university. He’d never taken a year out, because seeing the world wasn’t much of an interest of his. Both of his brothers had: George had done the ski season in the Alps, Jim had taken buses and hiked through the Andes from Southern Chile to Venezuela. “Going travelling” had never appealed to Paul; it seemed to him like a distraction from real life. He was in a hurry to get to grown-up hood, and couldn’t stand to hang around a minute longer.
What’s more, Paul was angry because he felt betrayed. Even though he knew it was far too early, he had pictured things in his head. He was so happy, so light around Holly, he imagined it would last forever. And she’d looked so thrilled to see him every morning, so vulnerable with him, he’d imagined she felt the same way.
“But I do feel the same way!” she yelled.
“If you did, you wouldn’t want to leave!”
“Are you out of your mind?” she screamed even louder. Her dream, the goal she had been pushing towards for years. She was meant to give that up, for him? After less than a month?
“And you know what makes me even more mad?” she asked, her voice cracking, her eyes filling with tears. “What makes me mad is that I love you!”
They stood in front of each other, silent. They felt the shockwaves of her words.
Paul felt a red mist come over him. He’d never quite understood what people meant by that, but he could barely see as his face filled with rage. She didn’t love him. He loved her, but she didn’t love him. He was certain of that. If she did, he told her, she would be thinking the same way he was thinking. They could do up the cottage, and it could be an absolutely magical home. A real home for the two of them, with room for a growing family. Floral wallpaper on the walls, a nursery in the spare room at the back. Instead, she wanted to sell it. Put the money in the bank and run away. He knew she wanted children someday. She had said so herself, on one of their drunken nights in the pub when they were still friends. She had even said she would like to get married, to the right person. So why not him?
She looked so wounded, he was afraid she might actually collapse. She was standing on the dusty floor, one foot still in the untied boot, the other clad in her bright yellow tights. There was a hole in the tights, right above her ankle. Paul had never noticed it before, it must be new.
“Not everyone loves the same way, Paul,” she whispered in a monotone sad voice. She stuffed her bare foot back into her other boot. “I’m going for a walk. I think it would be better if by the time I came back you were gone.”
She grabbed him in a desperate hug, like she was trying to melt her body into his. They stood, their faces millimetres from each other. He could feel her damp lashes on his cheek. Suddenly, his anger voided, like it had been flushed away. He held her tight. She stood back and wiped his cheek with the rough sleeve of her brown tweed coat. It had been her granny’s, she’d told him.
Without a word, she turned round and left, through the door she had never managed to close properly on her way in. He looked around him, slowly coming to grips with what had just happened. The cottage didn’t look squalid anymore, it was cosy. The small rooms were warm, and the furniture looked like a set of old friends. On the table, the cold dinner. The congealed Stroganoff, the cabbage salad browning with oxidation. The sweet potatoes had wilted, soggy in their own oil. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and he noticed his hand was shaking. He had to get out. Go home.
He had barely made it to Kent, catching the last train out of Charing Cross hauling his hastily packed suitcase. His mother had known better than to ask any questions. She held him in a long hug, while she sent his father to make up the bed in his room. She made Paul a hot chocolate, which he could barely touch. They sat at the kitchen table and talked for over an hour. He crawled back to his childhood room, feeling as though he was regressing into the womb. Over the following week, he felt like he was regressing into an even deeper, larval state. Not even Alice leaving had been that difficult for him. His family struggled to understand. So did he.
14
John
This was, to put it mildly, a fucking disaster. John tried to angle his body differently next to his desk, on the thin strip of carpet in between the window and the wall. The sleeping bag he’d found in the cupboard smelled like tyres, and using a rolled-up jumper as a pillow seemed to not work as well as he’d imagined. He sat up and checked his phone. It was five-past three in the morning. God. Everyone should be asleep. He glanced over, out of the window. He had what many may consider an impressive view. He could see the Gherkin, almost completely clad in darkness. The lights of London had mostly gone out, even though a surprising number of cars were still driving around. Mostly taxis. What was he doing here? By now, he was meant to rest in a super-king size bed in a well-appointed en suite master bedroom in Surrey.
Except, he thought, that was probably always a fiction. He and Florence had not shared a bed for almost a year, what made him think they would start again after they moved? He had come to realise, after the past few weeks, that he had projected a lot onto the move. Like they were moving away from their current, terrible marriage and moving into a lovely new one. The sort of marriage people in that type of house had. Florence had told him, during their final argument, how she’d gone back to look at the house. The demented old man was apparently not demented after all, or maybe he was but he still had enough marbles in him to be very sweet to his wife.
“He planted lilac bushes under her window for her,” she’d said. “I can’t even imagine a world where you would do something like that for me.”
He’d sensed this was about more than lilac bushes, but he did not know how to ask her what she had meant. John had never really known how to talk to women. He had gone to an all-boys school and only really had male friends at university and then at work. The only woman with whom he’d had a non-sexual relationship of any length was his mother. He felt trapped, like they were lovers who woke up to find they could now only speak different languages. He was stuck on Farsi, she could only understand Cantonese. At any rate, he thought as he resigned himself to try lying on his other side, even if they had stayed together he still would not have been sleeping with his wife in their bedroom tonight. She would be in there with Tim. He would be somewhere else. Still, the somewhere else was bound to be more comfortable than the floor in front of a floor-to-ceiling window.
The other option, of course, was Corinne’s bed. That had been his first choice, where he’d
retreated after he’d left home. She’d seemed happy to see him, and sympathetic to his story. They’d sat up all night, and she’d poured him glasses of red wine as he cried and talked and told her his side of the story. She comforted him. The next day, after work, he’d gone back to her place and they had spent quite a few days going back and forth from work to her house. It was a comfortable routine. They ate Chinese takeaway straight from the boxes and got drunk every night. They didn’t have much sex, he was not feeling up to it. He felt so grateful he had somewhere to go, someone to talk to who already knew all the sordid details and did not need him to explain. Someone who would not judge him, he told her. He imagined she would probably want him out of the way sooner or later, so he tried to be a good houseguest. He cleaned up the common spaces, he brought her breakfast in the morning.
And then, it had all gone to shit. His parents had come to visit, to check up on him and have a big summit on the situation as a whole. He had an inkling his mother thought Florence may be open to reconciliation. She sure as hell wasn’t. At any rate, the plan was that they would come to Corinne’s house to collect him and they would be off to a nice Spanish place his father had been to before. They would sit, eat small dishes of fried potatoes and delicious ham, drink a lot of red wine and talk it all out.
“We’ll come back here for a nightcap, if that’s okay,” he’d asked Corinne.
“Of course,” she’d replied, and smiled.
Hopefully she would be in bed by the time they got back, he thought, and his mother would not have to actually meet her in person and be faced with Corinne’s exuberant youth. God, she was young. So much younger than him. How old? It had been her birthday a few months prior and while John had happily contributed a rose-gold bracelet and an expensive dinner, he was not actually sure of how old she was. Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Twenty? Who knows.
At any rate, there he was. He’d come back from work, showered hurriedly, stuffed himself in a clean shirt he’d forgotten to iron and was just looking for his wallet and keys when he saw her come out of her room. He felt like someone had hit him in the stomach. She had also changed from her work clothes, into something nicer. She thought she was coming to dinner. She was wearing a cream chiffon blouse with a small floral pattern, with pear buttons and a little dusty-pink velvet bow at the neck. It was unlike any of her other clothes, that were all decidedly sexy and mostly black. It occurred to him she might have borrowed it from one of her housemates. He looked down. She was wearing flats. She never, ever wore flats. All of her shoes had either a six-inch heel or were trainers. She was wearing a good-girl costume, something tasteful she thought his parents would like. She was trying to make a Good Impression. She was Meeting The Parents.
Once again, he could hear the words come out of his mouth and immediately knew he was not handling this correctly. For a lawyer, he was not really in control of how he spoke. He knew what to do. Treat her gently, and kindly. Make it sound like it was his intention to have her meet them, but it was too early. Sadly, his mouth did not catch up to his brain. So instead, he said the first thing that popped into his mind. “What are you doing? And for God’s sakes, what on Earth are you wearing?”
As he did, he stepped into the kitchen. He was still looking for his wallet. And there it was, on the kitchen table. A bottle of dessert wine, brand new, and four small glasses. A blue dish with clementines. On the stovetop, arranged on a metal tray and ready to go under the grill, four little crème brûlée pots. They were the posh ones, the ones that came in cardboard boxes from the fridge section at the supermarket. She had removed all packaging, in an attempt to make them look home-made. When he’d said nightcap, he’d meant he would have his parents come up, sit in the kitchen and have a quick bourbon from the bottle he had been steadily working on all week. She thought they were entertaining.
Her eyes were suddenly very red, and full of tears. Right on cue, the doorbell rang; they were here and he was standing there like an idiot, with a crying girl and no wallet. Ah, no, there it was. On the kitchen table. She had put it next to his keys, like she had done ever since he’d moved in. He realised, at that very moment, that that was a small act of caring. For a moment, he felt his heart soften. The doorbell buzzed again. He could not be late for his parents. He grabbed his wallet, awkwardly patted her on the shoulder and left.
Upon his return, he had the good sense to cancel the nightcap. It had been an unpleasant dinner anyways, and he did not want it to last any longer than it already had. His parents were embarrassed at the state of his marriage, and ashamed of him. They wanted him to fix it. He’d tried to explain he also wanted to fix it, but that Florence had made it clear she didn’t want to be part of that particular experiment. He’d tried to explain how empty and alone he felt. He knew he had ruined his life, he did not need his mother to condescendingly explain that his daughter would now be born in a broken home. The people who had raised him did not seem to much care about his feelings, which hurt him in a whole new way. He felt like a child again. At any rate, he avoided a full-blown argument and made it back to Corinne’s flat. He was so preoccupied by his own pain and in his own anger at his parents, he had momentarily forgotten about her.
And yet there she was, sitting on her bed. She had eaten the four crème brûlée pots, and she had drunk the whole bottle of dessert wine by herself. She smelled like sweet alcohol, and vomit. Her hair was matted on the side of her head, her fringe wet and clumping on her forehead. She had stained that ridiculous blouse. Her eyes were covered in thick running black make-up, melted in her tears. For the second time in one week, John had a big blowout argument. He felt his own ability to emotionally connect shrink with every word. He felt betrayed, let down by yet another woman.
He thought what they had was special. He thought it was pure lust, on top of a deep friendship. He thought she understood him, his desire for a happy family life, his hurt at his wife’s blatant disinterest in him. He thought she cared for him like a friend, and wanted him like an insatiable lover. Turns out, she was on a different page, in a different chapter of a different book. Different genre altogether. She thought theirs was a love story. She thought he loved her. When he told her he could not wait to see her, he had meant he could not wait to take her clothes off. She thought he’d meant it. In fact, she thought he’d meant all the passionate things he’d said in the heat of the moment, about how she was his match, the missing piece of his puzzle, the only person who could make him happy just with a smile.
While he was sharing his hurts, late at night, in his texts or talking to her in bed, she thought they were falling in love. Maddeningly, she thought he had finally left his wife for her. She thought he had moved in not as a temporary place to stay while he found his feet, but as the next step in their relationship. Apparently, she’d spoken with her housemates about him moving in permanently and contributing to the rent. In all objectivity, she probably had more of a right to feel betrayed than he did.
And yet, he was furious. In a way, this hurt more than his separation from Florence. Corinne had made him feel as though he was not alone. He’d thought he had found a connection, someone who understood him. That had given him faith, that while he was a terrible husband and probably an average father, there was hope for him to be happy again, someday. In fact, he hadn’t found a connection. She had misunderstood him as badly as Florence had. He felt crushed. For the second time in two weeks, he shoved his stuff in his duffel bag and left in a hurry. He ran into one of Corinne’s housemates on the landing, and she gave him a look that could have frozen him to death. From her perspective, he thought, I am a real piece of shit. From most people’s perspective, to be frank.
He made it to the office, which was only a short walk away. He found his desk, and lay underneath it. He did not sleep a wink all night.
The following day, he had the afternoon off to go talk with his lawyer, make a plan to do with separation, child support, that kind of thing. He could not bear the thought. It seemed like an impos
sible weight to lift. As he sat at his desk, staring blindly into space, he realised he physically could not go through with it all. The intolerable burden of organising his new life. He felt his hand reach for the first drawer in his desk, which he kept locked. Inside, hidden under a stack of papers, was a small orange bottle. It was from the US, he had brought it back from one of his most recent business trips. It was easy to get prescription pills over there, if you knew who to ask. In it were about eighty pills of Adderall. ADHD medication, something he did not need and could never get prescribed on the NHS but that helped him focus and pulled him through when he could not muster the strength to get on with his life.
He had started taking pills to concentrate in sixth form. He was expected to get straight As, because he went to an unbelievably expensive school where anything but perfection was considered a failure. His parents had sent him there to guarantee his academic success, which meant he really had to do well. The problem was, he did not care very much, and this made it difficult for him to concentrate.
After school was university. He had started partying pretty hard after his first year, and needed help to catch up on his work. He would go out all night, drinking and dancing and making out with girls he barely knew. He would hit the library in the morning, still stinking of booze, and take a couple of pills to help him get straight into the books. He would take a quick nap in the afternoon and do it all over again. He had tried cocaine a few times, but that made him feel dirty. Cocaine was a drug, and drugs were for addicts and people who couldn’t get a grip. Adderall was a medication. Sure, it had not been prescribed to him specifically, but it was a legitimate thing legitimate people took for legitimate purposes.
Once he’d started work he had eased back on the pills for a while. Once Tim was born, however, there was nothing he could do to stop himself. Life at a law firm was tough enough, without the added pressure of living a double life. He had to get everything done in time to leave, spend time with Corinne and then make it home before Florence went to bed. He needed the help. And the help came, every time, in the form of those little white pills. Could be allergy medication from the looks of it.
