‘We’ll take it to the sticker hospital, remember?’ I say soothingly as I wrap her in a towel. ‘And I’ll kiss your thumb better.’
‘Can I h-h-h-have an ice lolly?’ Her eyes slide up to me, spotting an opportunity.
You have to admire her chutzpah. I turn away to hide a giggle and say over my shoulder, ‘Not right now. Maybe tomorrow.’
While Dan takes over story duty, I go to change out of my wet clothes. I dry myself off, then find myself moving over to our mirror and staring at my naked body.
Sixty-eight years. What will I look like in sixty-eight years’ time?
Cautiously I press the skin together on my thigh until it’s all wrinkled up. Oh God. Those wrinkles are my future. Except they’ll be all over my body. I’ll have wrinkly thighs and wrinkly boobs and … I don’t know … a wrinkly scalp. I release my wrinkles and survey myself again. Should I start more of a beauty regimen? Like exfoliation, maybe. But then, how’s my skin going to last me till the age of 102? Shouldn’t I be building up layers, not scrubbing them away?
How do you keep your looks for a hundred years, anyway? Why aren’t they telling us this in the magazines?
‘OK, they’re settled. I’m going for a run.’ As Dan comes in, he’s already peeling off his shirt, but he stops when he sees me standing naked in front of the mirror.
‘Mmm,’ he says, his eyes gleaming. He throws his shirt on the bed, comes over and puts his hands around my waist.
There he is in the mirror. My handsome, youthful husband. But what’s he going to look like in sixty-eight years’ time? I have a sudden, dismaying image of Dan all elderly and wizened, batting at me with a stick and yelling, ‘Humbug, woman, humbug!’
Which is ridiculous. He’ll be old. Not Ebenezer Scrooge.
I shake my head sharply, to dispel the image. God, why did that doctor ever have to mention the future in the first place?
‘I was just thinking …’ I trail off.
‘How many more times we’re going to have sex?’ Dan nods. ‘I already worked it out.’
‘What?’ I swivel to face him. ‘I wasn’t thinking that! I was thinking—’ I stop, intrigued. ‘How many times is it?’
‘Eleven thousand. Give or take.’
‘Eleven thousand?’
I feel my legs sag in shock. How is that even physically possible? I mean, if I thought exfoliation was going to wear out my skin, then surely …
‘I know.’ He takes off his suit trousers and hangs them up. ‘I thought it’d be more.’
‘More?’
How could he think it would be more? Just the thought of it makes me feel a bit dizzy. Eleven thousand more shags, all with Dan. Not that – I mean, obviously I want them to be with Dan, but … eleven thousand times?
How will we even have the time? I mean, we have to eat. We have to hold down jobs. And won’t we get bored? Should I be googling new positions? Should I install a TV on the ceiling?
That figure can’t be right. He must have misplaced a zero.
‘How did you work that out?’ I demand suspiciously, but Dan ignores me. He runs his hands down my back and cups my bottom, his eyes full of that intent, single-purpose look he gets. The thing about Dan is, you can only talk about sex with him for about thirty seconds before he wants to be doing it, not talking about it. In fact, he views talking about sex, generally, as a total waste of time. (I rather love talking about it, but I’ve learned to do that afterwards. I lie in his arms and tell him everything I think about … well, everything, and he says, ‘Mmm, mmm,’ until I realize he’s fallen asleep.)
‘Maybe I’ll put off my run,’ he says, kissing my neck firmly. ‘It is our anniversary …’
And it is. And the sex is great – we’re pretty psychic at that too, by now – and we lie in bed afterwards and say things like ‘That was amazing’, and ‘I love you’, and everything that happy couples say.
And it was amazing.
And I do love him.
But – totally, absolutely honestly – there’s also another tiny voice in my head. Saying: One down. Only another 10,999 times to go.
THREE
I wake up early to find that Dan is ahead of me. He’s already got out of bed and is sitting in the little wicker chair in our bay window, staring morosely out of the window.
‘Morning.’ He turns a smidgen towards me.
‘Morning!’ I sit up, already alert, thoughts buzzing around my head. I reckon I have this whole living-forever thing worked out. I was thinking hard about it while I was drifting off to sleep, and I have the answer!
I’m about to tell it to Dan – but he gets in first.
‘So basically, I need to work till I’m about ninety-five,’ he says in utmost gloom. ‘I’ve been doing sums.’
‘What?’ I say uncomprehendingly.
‘If we’re living forever, that means we’ve got to work forever.’ He gives me a baleful look. ‘To fund our ancient, elderly lifespans. I mean, forget retiring at sixty-five. Forget retiring altogether. Forget taking it easy.’
‘Stop being so miserable!’ I exclaim. ‘It was good news, remember?’
‘Do you want to work till ninety-five?’ he shoots back.
‘Maybe.’ I shrug. ‘I love my job. You love your job.’
Dan scowls. ‘I don’t love it that much. My dad retired at fifty-seven, do you know that?’
His attitude is really starting to piss me off.
‘Stop being negative,’ I instruct him. ‘Think of the opportunities. We have decades and decades in front of us! We can do anything! It’s amazing! We just have to plan.’
‘What do you mean?’ Dan gives me a suspicious look.
‘OK, here are some of my ideas.’ I shuffle forward in the bed and fix my gaze on his, trying to inspire him. ‘We divide our life into decades. Each decade we do something different and cool. We achieve things. We push ourselves. Like maybe for one whole decade, we speak only Italian to each other.’
‘What?’
‘We speak only Italian to each other,’ I repeat, a bit defensively. ‘Why not?’
‘Because we don’t speak Italian,’ says Dan, as though I’m totally nuts.
‘We’d learn! It would be life-enhancing. It’d be …’ I gesture vaguely.
Dan just gives me a look. ‘What are your other ideas?’
‘We try new jobs.’
‘What new jobs?’
‘I don’t know! We find amazing, fulfilling jobs that stretch us. Or we live in different places, maybe. What about one decade in Europe, one decade in South America, one decade in the States …’ I count off on my fingers. ‘We could live everywhere!’
‘We could travel,’ Dan allows. ‘We should travel. I’ve always wanted to go to Ecuador. See the Galapagos Islands.’
‘There you go, then! We go to Ecuador.’
For a moment we’re both silent. I can see Dan digesting this thought.
His eyes start to gleam and he suddenly looks up. ‘Let’s do it. Fuck it, Sylvie, you’re right. This is a wake-up call. We need to live life. We’ll book flights to Ecuador, take the girls out of school, we’ll be there by Friday … Let’s do it.’
He looks so excited, I don’t want to dampen his enthusiasm. But wasn’t he listening? I was talking about the next decade. Or possibly the one after that. Some far-off, unspecified time. Not this week.
‘I definitely want to go to Ecuador,’ I say after a pause. ‘Absolutely. But it would cost a fortune—’
‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.’ Dan bats my objection aside. ‘We’d manage. I mean, Ecuador, Sylvie.’
‘Totally!’ I try to match his level of animation. ‘Ecuador!’ I leave a pause before I add, ‘The only thing is, Mrs Kendrick doesn’t like me taking unscheduled holidays.’
‘She’ll live with it.’
‘And it’s the girls’ school play. They can’t miss it, and they need to be at rehearsals …’
Dan makes a small, exasperated sound. ‘OK, next mo
nth.’
‘It’s your mother’s birthday,’ I point out. ‘And we’ve got the Richardsons for dinner, and the girls have got sports day …’
‘All right,’ says Dan, sounding as though it’s an effort to stay calm. ‘The month after that. Or in the summer holidays.’
‘We’re going to the Lake District,’ I remind him, and wince at his expression. ‘I mean, we could cancel but we’ve paid a deposit …’ I trail off.
‘Let me get this straight.’ Dan speaks evenly, but he sounds like he wants to explode. ‘I have endless years ahead of me, but I can’t fit in one spontaneous, life-enhancing trip to Ecuador?’
There’s silence. I don’t want to say what I’m thinking, which is: Obviously we can’t fit in a spontaneous, life-enhancing trip to Ecuador because, hello, we have lives.
‘We could go and eat at an Ecuadorian restaurant,’ I suggest brightly.
Although from the look Dan shoots me, maybe I should have just kept quiet.
At breakfast I pour out muesli for myself and Dan and add some extra sunflower seeds. We’re going to need good skin if we’re going to last another sixty-eight years.
Should I start getting Botox?
‘Another twenty-five thousand breakfasts,’ Dan suddenly says, staring into his bowl. ‘Just worked it out.’
Tessa looks up from her toast and regards him with bright eyes, always ready to find the joke. ‘If you eat twenty-five breakfasts your tummy will explode!’
‘Twenty-five thousand,’ corrects Anna.
‘I said twenty-five-a-thousand,’ Tessa instantly retorts.
‘Honestly, Dan, are you still thinking about that?’ I give him a pitying look. ‘You really have to get past it.’
Twenty-five thousand breakfasts. Shit. How am I going to keep that interesting? We could start having kedgeree, maybe. Or spend a decade eating Japanese food. Tofu. Things like that.
‘Why are you wrinkling your nose?’ Dan stares at me.
‘No reason!’ I hastily brush down my pink floral skirt. I wear a lot of floral skirts to my office, because it’s that kind of place. Not that there’s an official dress code, but if I’m wearing anything spriggy or rosy or just pretty really, my boss Mrs Kendrick will exclaim, ‘How lovely! Oh, how lovely, Sylvie!’
When your boss is the owner of the business and has absolute power and has been known to fire people on the grounds that they ‘didn’t quite fit in’, you want to hear her saying ‘How lovely!’ So in the six years I’ve worked there, my wardrobe has become more and more colourful and girly.
Mrs Kendrick likes lemon yellow, periwinkle blue, Liberty print, frills, pearl buttons and pretty bow-clips decorating your shoes. (I found a website.)
She really doesn’t like black, shiny fabrics, low-cut tops, T-shirts or platform shoes. (‘Rather orthopaedic, dear, don’t you think?’) And as I say, she’s the boss. She may be an unorthodox boss … but she’s the boss. She likes things done her way.
‘Ha.’ Dan gives a snort of laughter. He’s been opening the post and is looking at an invitation.
‘What?’
‘You’ll love this.’ He gives me a sardonic look and turns the card round so I can read it. It’s a reception for some new medical charity being launched by an old friend of my father’s called David Whittall, and it’s taking place at the Sky Garden.
I know about the Sky Garden. It’s thirty-five floors above ground and it’s all glass and views over London. And just the thought of it makes me want to clutch at my chair and anchor myself safely to the ground.
‘Sounds just up my street,’ I say with an eye-roll.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Dan grins wryly, because he knows, only too well.
I’m so scared of heights, it’s not funny. I can’t go out on high balconies. I can’t go in a transparent lift. If I watch TV programmes where people skydive or venture out on wires, I get all panicky, even though I’m sitting safely on the sofa.
I wasn’t always like this. I used to ski, cross high bridges, no problem. But then I had the children and I don’t know what happened to my brain, but I started feeling dizzy even if I went up a stepladder. I thought it would pass in a few months, but it didn’t. When the girls were about eighteen months, one of Dan’s colleagues bought a new flat with a roof terrace, and when we went to the house-warming, I couldn’t go near the ledge to look at the view. My legs just froze. When we got home, Dan said, ‘What’s happened to you?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know!’
And I realize it’s something I should have sorted out by now. (Hypnosis? CBT? Exposure therapy? I do look it up on Google occasionally.) But it hasn’t exactly been a priority recently. I’ve had other, more pressing concerns to deal with. Like, for example …
Well. OK. So, a key fact about me: when my father died, two years ago, it was a bit of a thing. I ‘didn’t cope well’. That’s what people said. I heard them. They’d whisper it in the corner: ‘Sylvie’s not coping well.’ (My mum, Dan, that doctor character they brought in.) Which started to annoy me, actually. It begged the question: What’s ‘coping well’? How does anyone ‘cope well’ when their father, their hero, just suddenly dies in a car crash with no warning? I think people who ‘cope well’ are either deluding themselves or they didn’t have a father like mine, or perhaps they just don’t have feelings.
Maybe I didn’t want to cope well. Did they think of that?
Anyway, things went a bit haywire. I had to have some time off work. I did a couple of … stupid things. The doctor tried to put me on pills. (No, thanks.) And in the scheme of things, a fear of heights didn’t seem like such a major inconvenience.
I’m fine now, absolutely fine. Apart from the heights issue, obviously, which I will deal with, when I have time.
‘You should really go and see someone about your phobia,’ Dan says, reading my thoughts in that spooky way he has. ‘PS?’ he adds, when I don’t answer at once. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘PS’ is Dan’s occasional nickname for me. It stands for ‘Princess Sylvie’.
Dan’s whole riff is that when we met, I was the princess and he was the poor working guy. He called me ‘Princess Sylvie’ in his wedding speech and my father chimed in, ‘I guess that makes me the King!’ and everyone cheered, and Dan did a charming mock-bow to Daddy. The truth is, Daddy looked like a king, he was so distinguished and handsome. I can remember him now, his golden-grey hair burnished under the lights, his morning coat immaculate. Daddy was altogether the best-dressed man I’ve ever known. Then Daddy said to Dan, ‘Carry on, Prince Daniel!’ and twinkled in that charming way he had. And later on, the best man made a joke about this being a ‘royal wedding’. It was all really funny.
But as time has gone on – maybe because I’m a bit older now – I’ve got tired of being called ‘Princess Sylvie’. It rubs me up the wrong way; makes me flinch. I’m wary of saying anything to Dan though, because I have to be tactful. There’s a bit of history. A bit of awkwardness.
No, not ‘awkwardness’. That sounds too extreme. It’s just … Oh God. How do I put this, without …?
OK. Another key fact about me: I was brought up in a fairly privileged way. Not spoiled, definitely not spoiled, but … treated. I was Daddy’s girl. We had money. Daddy originally worked in the airline industry as an executive, then received some huge windfall of shares when his airline was taken over, and started his own consultancy. And it did brilliantly. Of course it did. Daddy had the kind of magnetic personality that attracted people and success. If he was travelling first class with a celebrity, by the end of that flight he’d have that celebrity’s card and an invitation to have drinks.
So we didn’t just have money, we had perks. Expensive flights. Special treatment. I have so many photos of me as a child, in the cockpit of some plane or other, wearing the captain’s hat. In my early childhood we owned a house in Los Bosques Antiguos, that gated development in Spain where famous golfers get married in Hello! We even hung out with a few of them. We had that kind of
life.
Whereas Dan … didn’t. Dan’s family are lovely, really lovely, but they’re a sensible, modest family. Dan’s father was an accountant and he’s very big on saving. Very big. He started saving for his house deposit when he was eighteen. It took him twelve hard years, but he did it. (He told me that story the very first time I met him, and then asked if I had a pension.) He would never whisk the whole family off to Barbados on a whim, like my father did once, or go shopping at Harrods.
And don’t get me wrong: I don’t want trips to Barbados or shopping trips to Harrods. I’ve told Dan that a million times. But still, Dan is a bit … what’s the word? Prickly. That’s it. He’s prickly about my background.
What’s frustrating is that he wasn’t like that when we first got together. He and Daddy really got on. We’d go out sailing, all four of us, and have a great time. I mean, Daddy was obviously far better at sailing than Dan, who’d never done it before, but it was OK, because they respected each other. Daddy would joke that he could do with Dan’s eagle eye overlooking his accounts team – and he did genuinely ask Dan’s advice a few times. We were all relaxed and easy.
But somehow Dan got pricklier as time went on. He stopped wanting to go sailing. (To be fair, it was harder once we had the girls.) Then three years ago we bought our house – using an inheritance from my granny as a deposit – and Daddy offered us a top-up but Dan wouldn’t take it. He suddenly got all weird and said we’d relied on my family quite enough. (It didn’t help that Dan’s dad arrived to see the house and said, ‘So this is what family wealth buys you,’ as though we were living in a palace, not a three-bedroomed house in Wandsworth on a mortgage.)
After Daddy died, everything was left to my mother and she offered us money again – but Dan wouldn’t touch that, either. He was even more prickly. We had a bit of a row, in fact.
I can understand that Dan is proud. (Sort of. Actually, I don’t relate to it at all, but maybe it’s a male thing.) What I do find hard, though, is the way he’s so defensive about my father. I could see their relationship becoming strained, even when Daddy was alive. Dan always said I was imagining things – but I wasn’t. I just don’t know what happened or why Dan got so tentery. (That’s when I invented the word.) It was like he began to resent Daddy, or something.
Surprise Me Page 3
