Turning Forty

by Mike Gayle

  Mum seems to accept my apology in the spirit that it was given but this doesn’t stop her reminding me twice more to put my dad’s ham in the fridge before I end the call.

  Returning the phone to my pocket I look over at Ginny in her car and she waves. I wave back and as I walk over to her I think to myself that even if she is married, I’m still grateful to have her back in my life.

  14

  We reach her house without me having to say much. Ginny seems happy to chat away and the only response required from me is those ‘Mmm, mmm,’ I’m-a-really-good-listener-noises at the appropriate junctures in the conversation. Of course it’s not like I don’t want to talk to Ginny, I think I’m actually desperate to, but not right now when I know so little about her situation. And although I learn about changes to the high street (there’s a fancy new French café on Poplar Road) and how she spent Christmas (with friends in Nottingham) the one thing I don’t glean any information about is her husband, so I let my imagination go to town. I imagine he’s called Hugo, works at an art college and specialises in multimedia disciplines (whatever that is). At the weekend he plays football and squash and is currently in training for the London marathon. In addition to this he plays the saxophone, is younger than me, and permanently smells of cinnamon. Make no mistake, Hugo is a right tosser.

  I help Ginny unload the shopping from the back of the car and walk up the front path towards her house. It’s strange being back here after all these years because during my last extended stay in Birmingham I had actually lived here with Ginny, first as her lodger and then as substantially more than that. We had had a lot of fun times in this house, watching TV, eating takeaway, playing daft games, making each other laugh. Those days now felt like a lifetime ago. The pasts of two altogether different people.

  ‘You’ve decorated?’ I say as we enter the house. The walls in the hallway used to be a pale cream but are now a sophisticated shade of grey.

  ‘You sound surprised.’

  ‘No . . . well yes . . . you know what I mean. It’s just that, you know, it’s weird when you expect one thing and get another.’

  Ginny laughs. ‘You’ve never been good with change, have you?’

  We head along the hallway and even though I haven’t heard anything to warrant this thought I’m convinced that Ginny’s Mr Perfect will be in the kitchen. I brace myself for the impact but the only thing that comes my way when I open the door is an overweight tabby cat.

  ‘Is that Larry or Sanders?’ Although I’d never been much of a cat man I’d always had a soft spot for Ginny’s when I’d lived here.

  ‘Neither,’ she replies, kneeling down to fuss the cat. ‘Larry got sick about five years ago and I had to have him put down. Then a month later the same thing happened with Sanders. This one’s name is Hank. I got him as a kitten from a rescue centre.’ She kisses the top of his head, ‘You’re my boy, aren’t you, Hank?’ and right on cue Hank purrs loudly.

  Still unsure which moment she will choose to unleash ‘Hugo’ I enter the kitchen, which has changed too. It’s all swanky-looking white gloss units in a not altogether dissimilar style to my own back in London, set against a dark-grey porcelain tiled floor. I set down the shopping on the pale wood counter and she begins to pack it away. For the first time I look at her hand and notice the absence of a wedding ring.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I ask, even though I haven’t the faintest clue about how her kitchen is arranged.

  ‘That would be lovely,’ she replies, laughing. ‘Be my guest.’

  It’s clearly a challenge, but one that I feel I am up for and even though I have to open every cupboard to find the mugs and tea bags and every drawer to find the teaspoons, the tea gets made and although it’s a small victory it makes me feel great.

  ‘It really is good to see you,’ I tell her, as we sip our tea.

  ‘You too. It’s been too long. When was the last time?’

  ‘My wedding.’

  ‘Wow. A lot of water under the bridge since then, eh?’

  ‘At least an ocean’s worth.’

  I decide to ask the question I’d been dying to all evening.

  ‘I heard on the grapevine that you’ve finally taken the plunge.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know, got married. It’s just, I didn’t like to ask because – like me – you’re not wearing a ring.’

  Ginny stands up and pours herself another cup of tea. ‘Well I don’t know who you’re getting your information from, Matt, but they’re wrong. I’m not married.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, trying not to sound too pleased. ‘I must have got the wrong end of the stick. No one on the scene at all then?’

  Ginny laughs. ‘Not unless you count Hank.’ She fetches a pouch of cat food from a cupboard and forks some into Hank’s bowl. I sense that she’s not particularly comfortable with the conversation and so I change the subject quickly and tell her about my parents and their plan to move to the country.

  ‘Do you think they’re serious?’

  ‘Leave the house where they raised four kids, the site of all our family Christmasses and countless birthdays? No way. That place holds way too many memories.’

  ‘Maybe they want to make some new ones. Not everyone wants to live in the past.’

  As a kid it had just been Ginny and her mum and apart from a brief stint living with her nan the house in which we were now sitting had been the only home she had known up to the age of nineteen when she left to go to university in Brighton. Eight years on, having established a career as an art teacher, Ginny returned to Birmingham to look after her mum who was seriously ill. Her mum died within six months of her return, making Ginny at the age of twenty-seven the owner of her own home, and having lived there ever since it now looked like she too was thinking about moving on.

  ‘You’re really considering moving?’

  ‘To tell you the truth I think anywhere would be fine if it meant I was making a change and moving on. No one knows more than I do about the importance of keeping hold of memories but it’s like I said earlier, you can’t always live in the past because if you do you might just find yourself stuck there for ever.’

  Before I can get to work considering the deeper implications of her statement she asks if I’m hungry and I tell her that I could eat a horse.

  ‘What sort of thing do you like?’

  ‘I’ll take whatever’s going.’

  ‘Prawn curry it is then,’ she says, ‘I got the recipe from a friend of Mum’s a few years back. Apparently when she was younger it was what she always asked for when she went to see her so I like to cook it whenever people come over.’ She flicks on the radio and the air fills with a song that ‘the kids’ no doubt think is cool but which makes me think: ‘This is how Magic FM listeners are made,’ and then she starts grabbing pots and pans and opening cupboards and begins cooking in earnest.

  Instructed by Ginny I open a bottle of wine and pour two glasses, leaving hers at the side of the chaos happening at the cooker. It’s nice watching her cook and it reminds me of all the amazing meals Lauren used to make. Lauren loves cooking and one of her favourite things is to spend Saturday mornings hunting out ingredients for a recipe from whichever cookbook is in vogue and her Saturday evenings putting the meal together for friends. Not for the first time since moving out of the house I find myself missing Lauren.

  ‘Are you OK?’ calls Ginny over the sound of sizzling prawns. ‘You seem a bit quiet all of a sudden.’

  ‘I’m fine. I was just a little lost in thought, that’s all.’ I make a lunge for the first topic that springs to mind. ‘Have you heard much from any of the old gang recently? Gershwin seems to have been as bad as me when it comes to keeping up with them.’

  ‘So you’ve seen Gershwin?’

  ‘Yeah, of course, I saw him the other night for a couple of beers in Pat Kav’s. Have you seen much of him?’

  ‘Not lately. How did he seem?’

  ‘Honestly? A bit off.
I think something must be going on with him and Zoe. You know how he is normally the life and soul and all that.’

  ‘And you think it’s down to Zoe?’

  ‘Well, I’m guessing. He wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the details. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in making plans for his fortieth.’

  ‘Maybe it’s for the best if he’s not feeling up to it.’

  Her comment seems a touch pragmatic but I can see her point and I consider texting him on the spot to suggest that we do a joint birthday get-together for the two of us at some point, but then Ginny asks me a question.

  ‘So come on,’ she says, ‘given your well documented tendency to freak out around big birthdays how are you feeling now the big-four-oh’s coming your way? You’re not going to lose it this time, are you?’

  ‘Me?’ I grin. ‘Never. It’ll be fine. A walk in the park. How was it for you?’

  ‘Well, the music in the restaurant we went to was too loud, the waiters were too snooty for my liking and I had the worst cold I’ve had in years but I would have had to be dead not to have had a good time while surrounded by my friends and hopped up to the eyeballs on Benylin and apple mojitos.’

  ‘And how’s forty for you now?’

  ‘If you’re looking for a positive “Thirty is the new forty” type spin on it you’ve come to the wrong person,’ says Ginny. ‘I hate it. I really hate it. I’m tired all the time. I wake up shattered. I go to bed shattered and in between sometimes it’s all I can do to resist the temptation to curl up next to the radiator behind my desk when I’m lecturing and take a nap. The worst of it all is that I haven’t even got the excuse of having young kids keeping me awake. I’m just tired.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve got some kind of vitamin deficiency,’ I suggest.

  Ginny isn’t convinced. ‘Then again maybe it’s because I’ve said goodbye to my thirties once and for all. I don’t feel like I should be forty yet. I don’t think it’s fair.’

  ‘I know what you mean. Last summer Lauren and I were sitting on the terrace of some bar on the South Bank and the wine was flowing and I looked around the table at all of these great friends of ours and I thought to myself, maybe turning forty won’t be so bad . . . the next morning I started to get out of bed to take a shower and my back went. And when I say it went, it wasn’t an “I’ve just pulled a muscle” kind of pain, it was a proper full-on sitcom moment, frozen to the spot, completely terrified that I’d done some kind of permanent damage to myself. It took me three months and eight visits to a chiropractor to recover properly.’

  ‘We’re all literally falling apart, aren’t we?’ says Ginny.

  ‘Just a bit.’

  ‘We need something to keep us together.’

  Right on cue the radio that’s been on in the background throughout our meal plays ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’. Ginny looks over at me, wide-eyed and grinning with excitement. This song was our anthem during our sixth-form years, and the soundtrack to not only every great party but needless to say to the one film that we agreed was the best film ever made and the only film that we knew all the words to: The Breakfast Club.

  Ginny grabs my hands and drags me into the middle of the kitchen and then we turn up the volume and start dancing and singing along. As we move around the kitchen, yelling our ‘la, la, la, las’ into the air and laughing like idiots all I can think about is how good it feels to be in the presence of someone who has known me for a lifetime.

  Like we haven’t missed a beat.

  Like we’re picking up right where we left off.

  Like we’ve been dancing to the same song since for ever.

  15

  Twenty-three years! How is it even possible that the familiar rhythm of conversation Ginny and I have shared all evening and which had kept the two of us going through the years as underage drinkers, university students, fresh-faced graduates and beyond . . . had been going on for more than twenty-three years? Whether it was the biggest cliché in the book or not it really did seem like it was five minutes since we were seventeen with the world at our feet. Now we were back together and (from what I could gather) neither of us was in possession of the kinds of lives that we’d guessed we’d end up with, we were still as unsure and unsteady about the future as we’d ever been. Wasn’t life supposed to get easier as time went on? Wasn’t there supposed to be a point set in the future where you would finally understand how this whole ‘life’ thing worked? How is it that people who can still remember what it was like to have nothing to do and have all day to do it can suddenly find themselves turning forty?

  ‘So,’ Ginny says, opening our second bottle of wine of the evening, pouring two glasses and returning to her position on the sofa next to me. ‘We haven’t done more than skirt around it all evening, but how are you doing, Matt? Divorce is a huge thing and you’re acting like it’s no big deal but I know you, everything’s a big deal, so why don’t you tell me how you’re really feeling?’

  I consider for a millisecond fobbing her off with a glib response, something along the lines of ‘Am I being charged for this session, Dr Pascoe?’ but I know she’ll only accuse me of deflecting, which is annoying because she would be right. The only option here is to man up and tell the truth.

  ‘I feel battered. Bruised if you like. With parents like mine you don’t get married thinking that it won’t last for ever.’

  ‘So it was Lauren’s decision to end things?’

  ‘Well she was the one to bring it up, but I know for a fact that I played my part in that passive-aggressive way I do so well. May I refer you to my two-week relationship with Ruth Morrell when I was nineteen and my month-long fling with Nicky Rowlands when I was twenty-one.’

  Ginny laughs. ‘I remember them well. You forced both of those poor women to break up with you by being a total and utter git. You’re like the very definition of the toxic male.’

  ‘I was doing them a favour. You know as well as I do that the dumper always feels better than the dumpee. I should be thanked, not vilified. It’s like those cautionary tales parents tell their children about the bogeyman to keep them safe. In the annals of crap boyfriendom there’s a whole chapter about me and my kind. Be warned.’

  ‘But that’s not who you are, Matt, and you know it.’

  ‘Maybe it would be easier if I was. The worst thing is that I knew exactly what was happening – we were growing apart – but I just couldn’t seem to pull us back together again. Nothing, not the holidays we took, the restaurants we ate in or the money we spent on the house made any difference. What we needed was love like we had at the start, but that kind of love just wasn’t there.’

  Ginny looks at me intently. ‘You still miss her, don’t you?’

  I nod even though I’ve barely admitted this to myself. ‘Is that wrong?’

  Ginny shakes her head. ‘It’s not wrong but it is hard.’

  We talk more about the break-up and I don’t know whether it’s the wine or the fact we’re so at ease with each other but I tell her things I haven’t told anyone else. Stuff about how I thought Lauren might be having an affair (she wasn’t) and how I nearly had an affair (with a woman I met while on a work trip in Munich and although I liked her a lot just couldn’t follow through with it) and stuff about my fear of facing forty divorced and alone. It feels like therapy.

  I pick up my wine and take a long gulp in an effort to subdue my self-consciousness. ‘Anyway, enough about me, what about you? OK, so you’re not hitched, but is there anyone else on the scene? Don’t tell me you’ve been married to your job for the last six years.’

  ‘Oh, Matt, where to begin? It’s tough out there.’

  ‘Great! Way to cheer up the about-to-be-divorced guy!’

  Ginny laughs. ‘Oh, you know what I mean. Funnily enough, I actually met a guy at your wedding who I saw for a little while.’

  ‘That’s the first I’ve heard about it. Who was it?’

  ‘Don’t worry, no one of your acquaintance.’

&
nbsp; This is getting weird. ‘You mean someone from Lauren’s side?’

  ‘Look, if you must know it was the DJ.’

  ‘You got off with our wedding DJ?’

  ‘It was a whole thing. I went up to ask for “Dancing Queen” and the next thing I know he’s put on the twelve-inch of ‘‘Fool’s Gold’’ and we’re snogging behind the amplifier for the next nine minutes and fifty-three seconds.’

  ‘Classy.’

  ‘I know. We saw each other for a couple of months but I ended it when for the third weekend in a row he’d got me lugging his decks and lights in and out of numerous function rooms up and down the country. I realised that I’d become a sort of poor man’s roadie. He needed an apprentice, not a girlfriend.’

  I can’t help laughing. ‘You know how to pick them, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s the understatement of the decade. After him there was Mr Serious Artist who borrowed six hundred quid off me and used it to part-fund his research trip to Goa and never came back, then there was Mr Sweet But Too Young, an NQT who bought me flowers, wrote me poetry and cried when I told him it was over; and after him there was Mr Safe Pair of Hands who was attracted to me because he thought I was arty and edgy but got bored the moment he discovered that I buy my pants from M&S just like everyone else.’

  Ginny has me laughing so hard by the end of this sorry tale that I can barely breathe. I attempt to take a sip of wine but it goes down the wrong way and I have a coughing fit so severe that Ginny is forced to come to my aid.

  ‘But seriously,’ I say, pausing to take a sip of wine now that I’ve got my breath back, ‘It’s criminal that someone like you should still be single. Haven’t there been any real contenders in the last six years?’

  ‘There was one.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We wanted different things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘How long were you together?’

  ‘About a year.’

  ‘So it was serious?’