by Fiona Neill
As I reached the top of the stairs I bit my lip so hard to quell the desire rising through my body that it started bleeding. I haven’t always been a bad father. I read my children every book in the Narnia series without skipping any pages; I never missed a school play or parents’ meeting; I cooked wholesome meals, which included ingredients from the five main food groups; I did my share of the dirty work – the nappy changing, the night shifts – and the endless mopping up of spilt drinks, tears and mud. I accepted my responsibilities like a foot soldier taking orders from The Good Parents’ Handbook. But discovering that I am sleeping with the same girl as my son pretty much negates anything positive I have ever done. People have rotted in hell for less.
She turned towards me as we reached the landing. I pointed at Max’s bedroom. We went inside. I couldn’t decide whether to shut the door behind me or not. In the end I left it ajar. We stood in breathless panic for a moment, unable to speak. The pollen from the lilies sitting on the chest of drawers hit my lungs and I hoped I might suffocate.
‘I didn’t realize,’ she said.
‘How could we?’
‘I need to leave right away.’
‘You can’t. It will attract the wrong kind of attention.’ I put out my hand to rest it on her cheek.
She pushed it away. ‘You’re fucked up, Nick.’
I nodded in agreement, but she had already dropped her bag on the bed and gone back downstairs to find Max. And after that she didn’t leave his side.
I remind myself I’m in the middle of getting married. At least a sacred shell service doesn’t require much interaction. It’s all about Gregorio. The wind is getting up and I worry that Lisa might get cold. I glance across at the arc of people watching us make our vows and realize that, with the exception of Rowena and Hamish, there isn’t one of them who I haven’t let down. I turn to Gregorio, grateful for the distraction, as he holds our wedding rings towards the sun and tells the guests how their circular shape represents the perpetual love between Lisa and me. ‘It has no beginning and no end. It is round like the sun and the moon.’
Gregorio slides on the rings. ‘I now declare you man and wife,’ he says.
I kiss the bride chastely, eyes closed, trying not to think about Connie. She’s standing so close to me that, if I wanted to, I could reach her with my hand. I wonder how I will sleep through the night knowing she’s in the room next door.
Confetti unexpectedly flutters around our heads, landing on our hair and shoulders. I look up at the blue sky and close my eyes against the sun. I’m touched that someone thought to buy some. My mood is so fragile that the tiniest gestures have huge impact. For an instant I feel euphoric with life’s infinite possibilities, once I have got this day out of my way. Lisa laughs and shakes her head to get rid of the confetti but it doesn’t come out. When I pull away from her to gently brush it from the sleeve of her wedding dress I realize that it’s not confetti at all. It’s dead ladybirds. I frantically try to get rid of them, but their dried feet hook on to us like burrs, and friction makes the wings stick to Lisa’s satin dress. I catch Connie’s eye for a split second. She steps backwards, taking care not to disturb the shells. Max opens another Tupperware container and uses both hands to throw more fistfuls of ladybirds at us. Bumbling Hamish assumes it is some lucky tradition connected to Gregorio and joins in. I open my mouth to shout at Max to call a halt to this weirdness but a ladybird sticks to my tongue. I spit it on to the sand and wipe my lips. They feel dry and shrivelled. Gregorio jumps around waving his conch, desperate because everyone’s attention has moved away from him.
‘Stop it, stop it,’ shouts Lisa as the ladybirds rain down on us.
I keep trying to sweep them away.
‘Stop it!’
I assume her anger is directed at Max, who now stands in front of us to pour the last remnants over our heads. Daisy tries to remonstrate with him, pulling the containers out of his hands. But Lisa is shouting at me.
It’s not an original approach. I start drinking almost as soon as we get back to the house. Some wit has turned on ‘Hotel California’. The Eagles got it wrong. You can’t actually drink to remember because alcohol interferes with the ability to form long-term memories. The more you consume the more you forget. So I drink with the specific aim of disrupting activity in my hippocampus.
The mood has soured. After a short-lived détente, Lisa and Ava are bickering again. I hear Lisa telling her to go steady on the drink and Ava countering that it’s a bit late for boundaries when she checked out of parenting eight years ago. Lisa warns her that she doesn’t want to end up like Barney.
‘Don’t worry, Mum. There’s nothing I would do the way you and Dad have done it.’
Instead of being pathetically pleased to have been invited to our wedding, Hamish and Rowena now look like they would rather be anywhere else instead. They lean into each other for support, like a couple of ancient buttresses, as it dawns on them that when it comes to the hierarchy of dysfunction, we reign supreme. Shortly after this I catch Hamish breathing into his brown paper bag. When I try to put my arm around him, he jumps away warily like a dog that thinks it’s about to be kicked.
I can’t help thinking about my last wedding day in all its utter lack of complication. The biggest dispute was over whether we should offer a vegetarian option at dinner or use the spare cash to buy more alcohol. But that brings into relief the problem with my relationship with Rosie: it was too anaemic. If I had stayed married to her I would have turned into the pillbox on the beach, slowly being entombed in sand. Boredom is a slow form of death, isn’t it?
Everything with Lisa has taken place in glorious unpredictable Technicolor. It has all been hard fought and you would have thought for that reason, I might have defended it better. She comes towards me. Her face is serene and lustrous, as if it has been lacquered, and the long satin dress makes it look as though she’s floating.
I raise my glass to her. ‘To my beautiful angel.’
Lisa takes the drink from my hand and places it on the top of the fridge, well out of reach, smiling ethereally. We embrace like two soldiers who have managed to escape a battlefield without any obvious flesh wounds whilst the rest of our unit has perished. I pluck a ladybird wing from the sleeve of her dress and long to make love with her one last time.
None of this casts me in a good light. There is no justification for what I’ve done. Contrary to the popular folklore perpetuated by people like Gregorio, the worst of situations doesn’t always bring out the best in people. I have been under a certain amount of pressure with Lisa’s diagnosis and refusal to accept treatment. It’s fair to say that I haven’t been thinking straight. It doesn’t take an accomplished psychologist to point out that sleeping with a woman twenty years younger is an unsophisticated attempt to dodge death. It’s like time travel. It’s like mainlining serotonin.
I’m aware suddenly that Ava is taking a photo of us that she plans to tag ‘The Big Day’. She shows me the picture on her phone and I stare at my face. I see a man with crêpey skin around his eyes, cheeks mottled with age spots, and thinning hair (but not so you’d notice if you hadn’t met him before). Someone who used to be ambushed by desire at inappropriate moments, during lunchtime meetings with postgrad researchers and schoolteachers, but who is now pathetically grateful when he wakes up with an erection in the morning. I see someone who is an efficient machine when it comes to producing academic papers on memory function in prestigious journals including Nature and The American Psychologist but who has failed to deliver on his early promise and has had to settle for circling the edge of his dreams without completely fulfilling them. And that’s the weakest kind of man: the man on the eternal hunt for small crumbs of comfort amidst the wreckage of middle age.
It’s an unlucky twist of fate, meeting Connie, but I don’t believe in coincidence. Extremely improbable events are surprisingly commonplace. It’s just bad luck that all the different elements of my life fused together at the same time.
We all like to find patterns as a way of trying to understand our world, to give us the illusion that we control it. We spend hours every day trying to make sense of it all, and most of us recast our experiences into a reasonable life story that can be told down through the generations. Life’s biggest struggle isn’t for food and drink, it’s the struggle for narrative harmony.
I feel in my pocket for the speech I have prepared but I don’t trust myself to read it in front of Connie and Max. I scan the room, looking for them, but they’ve disappeared. Any relief is fleeting as I panic that Connie might bend under the pressure and tell Max what has happened.
I have to speak to her. I can bear anything but this.
19
Rosie
I have waited all week to hear back from Lisa, relentlessly checking inboxes, phone messages and junk mail in case I have missed something. She’s getting married this afternoon and is meant to be leaving for Mexico in the next couple of days. I’m not entirely surprised by her radio silence. Lisa always takes things to the wire. But I’m under pressure from work to confirm the final list of participants in the trial and my colleague in the States has a queue of other women willing to sign up right away. Time is running out.
I know from previous experience that the longer a patient takes to come to a decision about treatment the less likely the answer will be positive. Sometimes it’s a difficult call: it’s not obvious whether the outcome of one regime is any better than another, or the side effects are so cruel the patient will have no quality of life. But for Lisa, it’s a no-brainer. It’s the choice between doing something and nothing. Possible life or certain death. In fact, the juicing regime could kill her before the cancer does because of the risk of sodium deficiency. I went to Norfolk armed with the facts, to convince her of this, but I didn’t need to bother because she knew most of it already. After some crazy healing retreat, Lisa had done her own due diligence and had reluctantly conceded Gregorio was at best deluded and at worst a quack. She told me she was planning to dump him after the wedding. She had spent so much of her life looking after herself that I should have realized she wouldn’t fail at this point.
Either way, Lisa didn’t need much convincing of the superiority of the treatment I was offering. I explained it was a Phase III trial, which means problems with dosage and toxicity have been ironed out. She sounded really interested when I told her that even some of the Phase I patients were still alive, because these were the sickest recruits who chose to embark on a risky, unproven experiment when they had nothing to lose. She was so enthusiastic that I thought she was going to sign up then and there, and I was the one who insisted she should sleep on it.
‘I’m so pleased for you, Rosie,’ she said. ‘How amazing to do something so positive with your life. To leave something behind.’
I can’t badger her. It’s never right to hassle or heckle patients into a decision, even if you believe it to be the right one. I can give my considered opinion, based on the options available, and if someone asks what I would do in their shoes I can tell them. But my job isn’t to force treatment on patients, it’s to support them through the process and respect their decision. And despite our long history, Lisa is no different.
I sit at the kitchen table and draft an email on my phone, just a couple of lines asking how she is feeling, in the hope it might trigger a response to the bigger question, but in the end I press ‘delete’ because it’s her wedding day and maybe she wants to forget she’s ill. I know how awful it is to feel your life has come to be defined by a single catastrophic event, and the relief when you’re distracted from it for a few hours.
I haven’t told anyone what I have done. It’s slightly murky ethics, offering a place on a trial to a friend, even though Lisa fulfils all the criteria. But it’s more that I don’t want any narrative to develop that casts me in the role of heroine coming to the rescue of the woman who has wronged her. I don’t want to spark some apocalyptic debate on the nature of darkness and light, good and evil, wrong and right. I want to help her because almost everyone deserves a chance.
Let me be clear here: I’m not offering Lisa a lifeline because I care. The memories of the good times we shared were recast many years ago in light of what happened between us. So if I suddenly remember a hilarious moment, like the competitions we used to have on the beach – to see who could replace her underwear with a bikini top and bottoms the fastest without removing any other clothes – I now see Lisa’s comic gyrations and flashes of breast and buttocks as partly a performance for Nick. Everything has been tainted.
When she told me Nick was up to his old tricks she wasn’t looking for sympathy or advice, she was trying to tell me that the way he had treated her was no different from the way he had treated me, which allowed me to reach peak indifference about them getting married just in time for their wedding day. I’m doing this for Lisa because I don’t care any more. And that feels liberating.
It’s Barney’s idea to spend the day of the wedding together. Just in case, his cryptic message reads. Just in case of what? I wonder. Just in case one of us gets the urge to go to Norfolk to make a scene when Gregorio asks if any man knows any reason why Nick and Lisa shouldn’t be lawfully joined together? Or Barney is tempted to hit the bottle for the first time in seven years? Or I take to my bed and never get up again?
‘Just in case you’re tempted to go on Tinder,’ he says when he arrives with a case of non-alcoholic beer, a DVD of Blue Valentine and a playlist of songs that he promises will make us relieved not to be married, which I correctly guess includes a lot of The Smiths and Joy Division. Barney was always good at turning an unpromising day into a memorable one.
‘You know, if we were young we’d just get drunk and stoned,’ he says, following me into the sitting room.
‘If we were young we wouldn’t be in this situation,’ I point out.
He commends me on my ability to be rational.
I tell him it was probably one of the reasons my marriage failed.
He thinks I’m joking – but I’m not – and then he pulls an already-made joint out of his pocket, saying, ‘Here’s one I prepared earlier,’ like a Blue Peter presenter. We smoke it together and I choke and tell him that it makes me feel old, not young. But actually it makes me feel nothing, and sometimes that is the best feeling of all.
I had forgotten how easy it is to while away time with Barney. Because he can’t sit in a room without music playing, and I don’t want to get into a state of existential gloom by listening to his playlist, I pretend the speaker is broken and we put on old records and sing loudly and out of tune to every single David Bowie album in chronological order, using hairbrushes as microphones. And we agree that it is the soundtrack to our lives. I ask him if Nick was unfaithful to me and he mutters something about what happens on tour stays on tour. He makes me dance for hours and we take selfies and I have to wrestle his phone out of his hand because he really means to send them to Nick and Lisa.
Once we have exhausted ourselves we put on Morning Phase by Beck and wrap ourselves around each other, heads resting on the other’s shoulder, and sway in time to the beat for the whole album without speaking a word. It’s easy to create sweet notes on a bum day, especially when it involves old friends. I feel his hand drift inside the back of my T-shirt and his cock growing hard through his jeans and we end up having sex on the sofa. It’s strange sleeping with someone I know so well. There’s none of the risk that I’ll call him by the wrong name, discover he voted for UKIP or lives with his mother. Sleeping with Barney is like coming home to a house with a warm fire after a long cold walk.
Afterwards I offer to cook a late lunch from leftover chicken and rice that I have in the fridge, and Barney suggests we have a piece of toast instead.
‘It’s because you think I’m a crap cook, isn’t it?’ I ask him.
I don’t want to tell him there’s no bread. I’m lying on my side on the sofa, head resting on his chest, eyes closed, my fingers traci
ng patterns on his stomach, and he warns that if I go any lower we’ll have to have sex again.
‘I don’t think. I know,’ he counters. ‘The idea is we get through the day without killing ourselves. I’m not eating that chicken unless you get your infection control team to vet it first.’
I think we fuck again and then fall asleep, but it might be the other way round.
‘Why didn’t we do this years ago?’ Barney asks sleepily at one point. ‘We’re so good at it.’
When I wake up I go into the kitchen, dressed in Barney’s T-shirt. I pull up the top, so the collar covers my nose, and inhale his scent, wondering at its familiarity. I don’t think about anything apart from the good time we have shared together. I don’t presume that we will meet again, although I would like it if we do. I look around for my phone to check my notifications because I feel like seeing Ed Gilmour later. There’s nothing like dating apps for forcing you to live in the present.
It’s still dark outside and I glance at the kitchen clock and am astonished to discover it’s almost six in the morning. Barney had a mad plan that we should each make a speech at midnight and toast our future happiness apart, but we must have slept through the night like the middle-aged people we are.
I feel strangely flustered by this loss of time, as if I’ve missed the clock strike twelve at New Year or have fallen asleep in the first hour of a long-haul flight and woken up as the plane lands ten hours later. I want Barney to leave as soon as possible, because Kit is coming to fetch his stuff from Daisy’s room. And besides, I generally don’t like spending the day with someone I’ve spent the night with.
I’ve left my phone in the sitting room and don’t want Barney to know I’m checking Tinder so I decide to log in as guest user on Daisy’s computer. I find it under a pile of papers on the kitchen table. The essay she has been writing for the past four weeks is still unfinished. I lift up the screen and wait for the computer to come on. I notice she has covered up some of the letters on the keyboard with pieces of sticky paper that I attempt to peel off. She’s an expert in procrastination but even by Daisy’s standards this is original.
