The Starter Home

by Bryony Fraser

I ended up washing my hair and watching four hours of American sitcoms until my eyes were itching and my mouth was dry.

  Another magnificent evening, Zoe. Really well played.

  * * *

  When I got into school the next morning, Benni was hovering around my desk.

  ‘Hello, darling. I was just scribbling you a note – it’s that fun time of year, updating all our details for the council’s records!’

  ‘Oh no, and I didn’t even get you a card.’

  ‘All you need to do is log in with your work email and make sure everything’s up to date. Yay! Thanks, darling. And … pub after work? Gina’s taking the boys to the theatre. Or—’

  ‘Don’t.’ I narrowed my eyes at her.

  ‘I was going to say have you got too much on here, but clearly there’s something else going on. Pub it is,’ she announced before hurrying off.

  I decided to get Benni’s request out of the way before I got sucked into the school day. It was simple enough: just as Benni had said, I just had to make sure all my personal and health details were up to date. Name – yes, goddammit, Zoe Lewis – date of birth, National Insurance number, blah blah blah. Oh. ‘Cohabiting’ now needed to become ‘Married’, so I unchecked the cohabiting box, and ticked the married box. Suddenly, half the options on screen were greyed out, and other options popped up below them. What the hell? The whole section on hobbies and interests had become unclickable, but another section had popped up asking how many dependants lived with me. Had I somehow slipped back to 1954? I unclicked ‘Married’ and the boxes ungreyed. Click again, greyed. Married life: children, dinner parties full of painful pointed subtext, the closing in on your inevitable death. Unmarried? You’re probably just into scuba diving, mountain climbing and retaining your will to live. I clicked, unclicked. Clicked. Unclicked. Clicked. Unclicked. All the while watching my options fade in and out.

  After a while I realised Benni had come back and was watching over my shoulder.

  ‘Is someone having an existential crisis?’ I raised a horror-filled face to her as she shook her head in sympathy. ‘You should try telling these things that you’re a female and so is your wife.’

  I laughed a little. ‘It isn’t just me, is it?’

  She bent forwards and looked closer at the screen, clicking and unclicking as I had. She laughed too. ‘Bloody hell, that is a bit on the nose, isn’t it? I reckon some bitter programmer’s having a small dig. It’ll probably be all over social media in the next half hour. Now, in the meantime, just tell them you’re not dead yet and we’ll leave it at that, ok?’

  She watched me send off my details – including a checked ‘Married’ box – and led me into her office for some actual curriculum talk. We had a new exam board and a whole range of different topics to cover in our upcoming parents’ evenings. For the next forty-five minutes, I managed to focus on what she was saying, making notes, and asking questions. But in another part of my brain, I was still simmering, perhaps more than I would have done if I’d not found out the night before that I hadn’t been invited to someone’s weekend away in Ibiza because they’d assumed I wouldn’t go as a newlywed. Sorry!!! she’d texted, I thought you’d want to be with new hubby at the mo ;).

  I just … I didn’t understand. It was a choice, wasn’t it? I might know a few people who’d changed their names to match their husband’s when they’d got married, but I didn’t know a single person who’d become a full-blown housebound Stepford Wife. I still dressed the same, I still did the same job. I even had the same friends – or so I thought. It seemed that assumptions would just be made no matter what I said or did, all because I’d signed that piece of paper agreeing to marry Jack.

  After the meeting with Benni, I tried to focus for the rest of the day, working through lunch to get my head around the curriculum I’d be explaining to some of our more difficult parents, and to keep myself distracted. By seven thirty, I was starving, and very, very ready to leave.

  ‘Right!’ said Benni, as I stood in her office doorway. She slammed her laptop shut. ‘Let’s all go and right some wrongs.’

  I didn’t stay long – Benni and I only managed to right three wrongs each (if you count ‘wrongs’ as ‘delicious and very strong cocktails’) – and left her, along with Miks, his girlfriend from the English department, and a large bottle of wine, so I could get back to have dinner with Jack, having not seen him much for a few days due to our criss-crossing work schedules.

  At just after eight, I had my head, slightly dizzily, in the fridge when Jack came out of the shower.

  ‘What do you fancy?’ I called through to him.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m out tonight, remember?’

  I didn’t remember. ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. Just out with friends.’ Immediately, my hackles were up.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I knew I shouldn’t pick a fight, but I needed a way to vent my disappointment at an evening spent apart yet again.

  ‘I did. Last week. I didn’t realise I needed written permission. I’m just out with Iffy and people.’

  ‘People? And Iffy who you saw yesterday?’

  ‘Yeah, people. And yeah, Iffy. I know I saw him yesterday, but it’s a group of us and we’ve had tonight in the diary for ages.’

  Hearing myself, I couldn’t help but think of what Jack might be saying about us when they did hang out.

  ‘So do these people have names?’ I realised I was slurring slightly.

  ‘Well, this is a delightful conversation.’ Jack cocked his eyebrow. ‘What’s up with you, Zo?’

  I crossed my arms. ‘I just didn’t know you were going out, and suddenly there are these people that you absolutely have to see. I left my departmental drinks early to see you.’ The alcohol in my system was making me sound much angrier than I’d ever have felt sober.

  ‘I’m happy to cancel, although given the way this conversation is going, I can’t begin to imagine why we’d want to spend the evening together instead.’

  I thought of all the things I could do tonight if Jack wasn’t about: have a long bath, watch a trashy film, call Ava for a chat, take an early night with Jilly Cooper flopping open at all the right pages. Lie really still and wait for the room to stop spinning. In all honesty, I didn’t care that he was going out. And yet, something – utterly unreasonably – still rankled.

  ‘Fine. Go. Have a nice time.’ I gave him a brief kiss on the cheek and a tight smile, and before I knew it he was gone.

  I was shaking. I was so angry at myself. I didn’t care – I’d never cared – if he was seeing friends.

  But I was also angry at his tone, and the creeping realisation that if I’d asked him to stay with me, he’d have had to tell his friends a lie, and they wouldn’t believe the lie, and how they’d tease him for months about his wife being in charge now. Then, if I insisted on him staying with me again, they’d eventually stop teasing, and stop calling. Ugh. I didn’t want to star as the worst kind of clichéd spouse. I couldn’t stop seeing it from his angle too: his partner, suddenly turning the flame-throwers on him. But then I flipped back again: if I was feeling this bad, why was he going out? And yet, why was I feeling this bad if he hadn’t done anything wrong? Then back again: I felt bad because I’d been a weasel to him. This was my problem, not his.

  Back and forth, back and forth I went, the whole evening, sitting in front of unsatisfying TV, not doing anything I’d planned, losing my evening, losing my mind, feeling my pub-buzz sour. I scuttled to bed when I heard his key in the main door, throwing my clothes off and hunkering under the duvet as he opened our front door. I pretended to be asleep when he came in, wrapped up in fleecy pyjamas, not up to facing what I, or he, or we, had done, with one tiny, toxic argument.

  FOUR

  Seven years earlier

  There was only so much refusing they could do before someone got offended, so within half an hour, Zoe and Jack – minus Jack’s face mask (‘The air round here is so polluting, d
on’t you find?’ asked Jack’s mother, Linda; slim, groomed, tortoiseshell glasses pushed into her shiny chestnut hair) – were in a taxi with Jack’s parents. Linda had taken Zoe’s arm from the moment Jack had introduced her and hadn’t let go since. Graham, his father, said very little, pale and quiet in a pale, quiet shirt and corduroy trousers, merely smiling at her and giving her a muttered hello. Once they’d been seated at the restaurant Zoe realised that was probably the highlight of his interactions for today. Linda chose his food for him, reminding him that tomato soup never agrees with you this time of night, does it, Graham? and Maybe you should just stick to the garlic bread, Graham, and, Graham, I think you’d best have the lamb, after your trouble with the chicken last time. Zoe, on a student budget, skipped the starters and chose the cheapest thing from the mains, a three-bean salad. Jack chose the same.

  ‘So then,’ said Linda, settling her glasses on her face and tilting her head to one side. ‘When were you going to tell us about your new girlfriend, Jack?’

  ‘Oh, I’m—’

  ‘It’s quite—’

  ‘Do you go to the same college as Jack, dear?’

  ‘No, I’m way over the other side of town – I’m doing Chemistry.’

  ‘Ooh! A scientist! Well, that is posh. Isn’t that posh, Graham? Zoe’s going to be a scientist!’

  ‘Well, I hope I will. It’s a long way to go yet. If I do my Masters I’ve got another couple of years left.’

  ‘So Jack will have left before you’ve even finished?’

  ‘Mum, we’ve only just—’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I suppose he will. I hadn’t thought about that. We really only met just—’

  ‘My cousin’s son is a scientist.’

  ‘Mum, Stuart works in Boots.’

  ‘No, well, he started in Science, but decided he wanted to be more hands-on.’

  ‘He didn’t “start in Science”, Mum. He did a Science GCSE, which he failed.’

  ‘Oh, so now you know all your second cousins’ academic careers, do you? You can’t ever remember to send your Auntie Chrissie a Christmas card, and yet you can remember all her children’s grades?’

  ‘Mum, I’m sure he’s a really great … retail guy. But that’s not the same as what Zoe’s doing.’ He looked at Zoe, who was smiling at him with something like sympathy in her eyes.

  ‘Well, you know best, Jack, obviously.’

  The starters arrived – garlic bread for Graham, crab terrine for Linda – and Zoe and Jack worked their way in silence through the complimentary bread basket while his parents ate, Graham in small mouthfuls, Linda spreading a single piece of toast with the crab terrine before sniffing it, wrinkling up her nose and putting it back on the plate.

  ‘Is it alright, Mum?’

  She wrinkled her nose again, her mouth a disgusted moue. ‘I don’t think that crab’s any good, you know.’

  ‘Well, do you want to tell the waiter?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s fine.’

  ‘It’s not fine – if your crab’s off we should tell them. Get you another one.’

  ‘No no, if that one’s spoiled, they’re probably all off.’

  ‘Let’s get you something else then. Do you want me to tell the waiter?’

  ‘Jack, just leave it, I’m fine. I don’t need a starter. Once they bring me something else your mains will be arriving anyway.’

  Jack took in a huge breath, slowly breathing out through his nose while Zoe squeezed his thigh under the table. He put his hand on hers and squeezed it too, his breathing becoming easier.

  The waiter came over, went to take the plates away, but saw Linda’s was still full.

  ‘Are you – is this still going?’

  ‘No no! It’s fine, I just don’t want to spoil my appetite for my main course!’

  The waiter looked baffled. ‘Was everything alright?’

  ‘Yes! Lovely! Thank you!’

  Jack dropped his head down, closing his eyes. When the waiter had taken the two plates away, he said, ‘Could you not have told him, Mum?’

  ‘Well. I don’t know. Maybe the crab wasn’t spoiled. It just smelled a bit—’

  ‘Don’t say fishy.’

  ‘Well it did!’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘You didn’t have to eat it, Jack. You wouldn’t have been the one with food poisoning.’

  ‘I didn’t eat it because you didn’t offer it to me. If I’d thought you were basing your rejection of your seafood dish on it “smelling fishy” I would have made more of an effort to try it myself.’ Zoe squeezed his thigh again and Jack took a quick drink. ‘Sorry, Mum. It was your food.’

  Linda blinked at him. ‘Thank you, Jack,’ she said, surprised. ‘I’m sure I’ll say something if there’s anything wrong with the main.’

  Zoe gave Jack a tiny nudge, and he snorted into his glass of water. She smiled at Graham, who smiled absently back at her then returned to rearranging his napkin on his lap.

  After a few moments, Zoe dabbed at her mouth with her own napkin, and said, ‘So do you get to see Jack much then?’ Under the bright restaurant lights, she was beginning to feel sweaty, as the aftereffects of the drinks she and Jack had shared with the pizza last night finally kicked in. She was also sweating with the realisation that she barely knew Jack from a broom in the corner, and she was wondering just how deep they were digging by sitting here and letting his parents think they was something stable and long term, when he was still listed in her phone as ‘Hot Barman’.

  ‘Well, you know how it is, Zoe, it’s a long way to travel when we’re all the way out east—’

  ‘In … Asia?’

  Linda looked baffled. ‘No, dear, in Norwich. It’s quite a way for us to come to visit Jack here at university, and Graham doesn’t really like the journey. Do you, Graham?’ She looked over at her husband, who was staring into his glass, rattling the ice cubes. She gave a tiny sigh. ‘And whereabouts are your parents? Are they … Do they live in this country?’ Despite having spoken with her for the last hour, Linda’s voice suddenly became fractionally louder and over-pronounced for this final part of the question.

  Zoe beamed at her. ‘Yes, they’re up in Leytonstone. North-east London.’

  ‘Right. Right.’ Linda looked confused again, unsure how to navigate a question which surely had been misunderstood. ‘Well, speaking of your Auntie Chrissie, her dentist told her that his sister has just been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia.’ She looked at Zoe, questioningly. ‘Not like … your … people—’

  ‘Mum, look, the mains are here!’

  Zoe met Graham’s eye and wondered if he’d heard a word, he looked so disengaged; when his lamb was put in front of him he just gave the waiter a grateful smile and tucked in, eyes down.

  Zoe looked at the bowl in front of her – brown beans mixed in with some green unknowables and some sad lettuce leaves – looked at Jack’s identical portion, then up at Jack. They both laughed.

  ‘Anything wrong, you two?’ Linda asked, a forkful of salmon en croute halfway to her mouth.

  ‘No, Mum,’ Jack said, scooping up some mystery salad. ‘Everything’s just fine.’ He nudged Zoe’s knee with his own under the table, and Zoe felt his body relax a little beside hers.

  ‘I suppose it’s nice to have a degree where you know what you’ll do with it afterwards,’ Linda said.

  ‘I should hope so – I’ll have spent long enough on it. Although sometimes people do change their minds and go into engineering, manufacture, even completely different subjects.’ Zoe nudged her three-bean salad around the dish. ‘I suppose sometimes you need to try things before you know if they’re right for you or not.’

  ‘I know, I know, I say this to Jack all the time! I mean his friend Iffy’s doing medicine, so he’ll be fine, but Jack! He can do this little art course, though God knows what it’s costing us—’

  ‘Mum, I pay for the course myself.’

  ‘But eventually the time will come when he has to decide how he’s going to make his livi
ng. If he wants to settle down and have a wife and a family, he needs to think about how he’s going to support them all, and stop lying around living this student lifestyle, waiting for hand-outs from the state—’

  ‘What are you talking about, Mum? I don’t get any state benefits.’

  ‘Not for want of trying, I’ll bet,’ she chuckled ruefully.

  ‘I … don’t …’ Jack looked at Zoe, wide eyed. She tried not to laugh.

  ‘I mean it though, Jack, you have to think about life after college. Don’t you think, Graham?’ Jack’s father was pushing his vegetables around his plate with great concentration.

  ‘I literally think about it every day, Mum. My whole course is geared around making us skilled and employable in our chosen fields.’

  ‘No, I mean, this is a nice hobby, maybe something you can take up again when you’re retired. But really now – shoe-making? Everything’s made in China, now, isn’t it? What are you going to do, ship some of their little elves over for your workshop?’

  Her laughter was interrupted by Graham abruptly getting up and mumbling something about finding the toilets. Linda was obviously put out by having what felt like one of her favourite jokes interrupted.

  Zoe sat a little closer to the table. ‘Do you get to go away much? On holiday, I mean? I think I quite fancy visiting China one day.’

  ‘Oh no, love, Graham couldn’t stomach somewhere like China. The food would just go straight through him. No, when we go away we tend to stick to what we like – a narrow boat around the Broads in April and a Greek island in September.’

  Zoe could just picture them: Graham shadowing Linda silently as she, with bumbag and sunglasses on a neck strap, spoke loudly about pickpockets and Proper Cups of Tea as she crushed millennia-old religious sites under her comfortable walking sandals.

  ‘That sounds lovely. I’ve always wanted to go to Greece. What’s it like?’

  ‘Well …’ She thought for a moment. ‘The key is finding the right places to eat, I think. Once we’ve found a nice café with English owners, I can relax and enjoy my holiday. No offence, but I’m not sure I’d trust those Greeks to wash the dishes properly, if you know what I mean.’ She looked at Zoe meaningfully.