When Life Gives You Lemons

by Fiona Gibson

  So, that’s what we are about; hardly artisanal, nothing fresh or even resembling anything you’d actually want to eat. It’s basically enormous vats of stuff being pumped about. Meanwhile, Rose travels the world, negotiating eye-watering deals with some of the most ruthless individuals in food manufacturing – yet she falls apart at the sight of a pube on a loo seat.

  ‘Could you get onto someone please?’ she asks now.

  ‘Yes, of course. Leave it with me and I’ll get straight back to you.’

  ‘Thanks so much.’ When I manage to sort it, Rose calls me a ‘lifesaver’, which is perhaps overshooting it a bit, but at least she is appreciative of my efforts.

  I tell Andy about all of this as we get ready for bed that night – thinking, well, it’s funny, isn’t it, the pube-in-China emergency? ‘So,’ I rattle on, ‘from a distance of 5,000 miles I finally managed to speak to a human being on the phone – they speak English, of course they do, Tianjin’s an international city of something like thirteen million people. Can you believe that? That there are these enormous cities, way bigger than London, some of them, that most people in Britain have never even heard of?’

  I clamber into bed. Andy is sitting on the edge of it, seemingly engrossed in the task of peeling off a sock.

  ‘Andy?’

  He flinches as if he’s only just remembered I’m here. ‘Huh?’

  ‘I was just saying, most people haven’t even heard of it.’

  ‘Haven’t heard of what?’

  ‘Tianjin.’

  He gives me a baffled stare. ‘Tian … jin?’

  ‘It’s where Rose is right now.’ I think you’ll find it’s in China.

  ‘Oh, is it? Right …’

  As he climbs into bed, I wonder if this is how it feels to do stand-up and be faced with row upon row of unsmiling faces as your routine bombs. Maybe it’s my material, you’d think, desperately. I need to change direction – find something fresh and new.

  The problem is, this is my life. It’s the only material I have.

  Chapter Three

  Thursday, February 14

  No Valentine’s present – not even a card – but then I didn’t get anything for Andy either. This year, we decided ‘not to honour Valentine’s Day’. As it was by mutual agreement (at least, he suggested it and I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to disagree without seeming needy or simply wanting a gift), I can hardly be huffy about it. In fact, I don’t even mention it. I just get ready for work as normal, and chivvy Izzy along, pretending it’s just an ordinary day.

  Until last year, we exchanged cards at least. The fact that even this ritual has dropped off the radar gives me an uneasy feeling deep in my gut, but I try to ignore it as I drive to work.

  At the office, a bouquet of red roses arrives for one of the other PAs from her newish boyfriend. That’s what newish boyfriends do, I reassure myself as everyone gathers around and makes a big fuss of it. They make these grand gestures; it’s almost expected. And an image flashes into my mind of a Valentine’s Day many years ago, when I still worked in theatre. I’d just gone back after having Spencer and was working on a production that was proving incredibly tricky to pull together. In the middle of a rehearsal, an enormous, showy concoction of pink lilies and white baby’s breath arrived for me from Andy. The entire cast and crew gathered around and cheered, and my face blazed with delight.

  To my gorgeous superwoman, the card said.

  Another time, Andy had a request played for me on the radio, when people still did that. Further back, when we were still pretty new as a couple, having recently met at an otherwise terrible party, he’d make mix tapes for me and turn up at my door at 2 a.m., a bit drunk and proclaiming love, which I’d pretend to be mad about for about three seconds before pulling him in and hauling him off to my bed.

  Back then, we didn’t need it to be Valentine’s Day to make thoughtful, affectionate gestures. Andy and I sent cards and letters to each other in the post all the time. If he’d stayed over at my flat, and left before I’d got up, I’d often find a sweet or funny note from him, sitting by the kettle. I’d draw silly cartoons to make him smile when he found them in his fridge. It occurs to me now that Valentine’s Day is more useful to long-term couples like us, acting as it does as a reminder to make an effort, to consider the other person and make them feel special. But too late for that now, at least for this year. As we are Not Honouring It, there’s no night out planned, no treaty dinner, just for the two of us.

  Back home after work, I tell myself that this is a good thing as restaurants are always packed on February 14th, and they have those special Valentine’s menus, which are actually just their normal ones with ‘seduction cocktails’ and pink champagne jellies tacked on, as if that constitutes romance. I have almost convinced myself that going out with one’s beloved on Valentine’s Day is corny and faintly embarrassing (who wants to eat out just because the date on the calendar says we should? All that pressure, jeez!) when Andy announces he is going out – with other people!

  ‘Just a couple of drinks,’ Andy says, kissing me fleetingly on his way out. ‘Won’t be a late one. Sorry, I totally forgot what day it is. You don’t mind, do you?’ He pulls a pained expression.

  ‘Of course not.’ What else am I going to say? Since V-Day is Non-Honoured it would seem ridiculous to kick up a fuss. I mean, what would we be doing anyway? Watching TV?

  An hour or so later, still irritated and listless, I text my friend Shelley to vent that my husband has chosen tonight to meet up with a couple of old mates, but never-bloody-mind. I hadn’t realised her partner, Laurence, is away with work. We decide she must come over right away (Izzy is already tucked up in bed, and Shelley doesn’t have kids).

  It’s my full intention to be perky and cheerful tonight. Shelley is a social worker with a barely manageable caseload, and the last thing she wants is for me to be blethering on about how Andy seems to have developed an aversion towards me. But after a large glass of wine, it all tumbles out: how mild disdain seems to be his default setting; how unaffectionate he is generally, and how I suspect he could quite happily never have sex with me again. How there’s always some excuse not to do it, and how shitty and rejected I’ve felt, night after night, to the point at which I have now stopped trying to initiate anything at all.

  How I stand there naked sometimes, looking at my middle-aged body with the saggy boobs and wobbly stomach in our full-length mirror and think: Christ, no wonder he doesn’t want to do it with me. I mean, who would?

  ‘Could it be that simple?’ I ask Shelley. ‘That, basically, he no longer likes what he sees?’

  ‘Of course it’s not that,’ she retorts. ‘You’re gorgeous, Viv. Don’t be crazy. If he doesn’t realise how lucky he is, he’s an idiot.’ She pauses. ‘It’s probably nothing to do with you at all. It’ll be his job, I bet. He’s probably just tired and stressed, or he’s become complacent—’

  ‘Or maybe I had all my quota in our early years,’ I cut in, topping up her glass.

  ‘Of sex, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t think it quite works like that,’ she says with a wry smile. She tucks her stockinged feet under her on the sofa and smooths down her fine auburn hair.

  ‘It might. You can overdo things, can’t you? Like when you eat too much of the same thing and suddenly you can’t stand it.’

  ‘Oh, God, yeah. Like hummus.’ She shudders. ‘The smell of it makes me want to vomit now.’

  ‘Mine’s strawberry fromage frais. Izzy used to love it and I was always scoffing a pot whenever she had one. But once I’d reached that tipping point, that was that.’

  ‘You’d over-fromaged yourself?’ she suggests.

  ‘Yep. I could hardly bear to look at it. So maybe that’s what’s happened, and these days I have a sort of fromage frais effect on Andy.’

  ‘’Course you don’t,’ she splutters.

  ‘Or are my sprouting face hairs putting him off?’

/>   ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘But maybe they are,’ I say firmly. ‘There was a new one this morning – a thick, long wire – like you might find if you took a vintage radio to bits …’

  ‘Before they were wireless?’

  I nod. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I had one of those too, sticking out of my chin. I couldn’t believe my own body had made it.’

  ‘And then there are the softer ones,’ I add. ‘The ones that sneak out, barely visible but definitely there, like little bits of fur. No wonder he doesn’t want to have sex when I’m halfway to being a goat.’

  ‘Some people would pay good money for that,’ she guffaws.

  She does cheer me up, because when you talk about how someone won’t do it with you, it seems jokey and ridiculous and easily fixable with ‘a chat’.

  ‘You are going to talk to him, aren’t you?’ Shelley asks as she leaves. ‘I mean, to find out what’s actually going on?’

  And I agree that I am.

  We’re in bed now, and he is engrossed in a weighty psychological thriller. I clear my throat. ‘Andy?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm?’ His eyes remain fixed upon the book.

  ‘You know all this sweating and stuff I’ve got going on?’ I begin, alluringly.

  ‘Er, yeah?’

  ‘Well …’ I pause. ‘Does it kind of … put you off, you know … us doing stuff?’

  He turns and blinks at me. ‘Doing stuff? What d’you mean?’

  What does he think I mean? Having day trips at the seaside? ‘Doing it,’ I mutter. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’

  Oh God, I am rapidly losing confidence here. This is ridiculous! We’ve been together for twenty-five years. He held back my hair while I threw up from a bad oyster at his youngest brother’s wedding. He has seen me push out two babies. He didn’t seem to enjoy it especially, and with Izzy I caught him poking at his phone – but still, it’s mad that I should feel shy with him.

  ‘Doing it?’ he says carefully. ‘D’you mean, uh—’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, my cheeks burning now.

  He frowns at me. ‘No, I’m not put off. Why d’you say that?’

  Because you’re always in too much pain with your raging sciatica, although not so much that you can’t bound off to the pub …

  ‘I just wondered,’ I say flatly.

  He turns back to his book, and I pretend to read mine, skimming the same paragraph over and over. Perhaps I’d get along better with Fantastic Mr Fox, which I am currently reading to Izzy.

  I decide to try another angle. ‘Andy, d’you think I should try HRT?’

  He gives me a confused look, which I might expect, were he not an endocrinologist: i.e. a doctor who specialises in hormones and therefore knows every sodding thing about them. And not any old endocrinologist either, but an eminent one, who travels the country to deliver lectures on the subject – although not to his wife, obviously. That would be far too troublesome. All this world-renowned oestrogen expert will say on the matter is: ‘Oh, I dunno, love. It’s up to you really.’

  I fall into silence, unable to dredge up a response to that. Am I being unreasonable? I wonder. Is it crazy behaviour to ask one’s husband for advice when the subject happens to relate to his profession? Jules doesn’t seem to think so. Erol is a roofer and any trouble they have with their guttering, he has it sorted no problem. When their garage fell into a state of disrepair, he had it demolished and replaced with a spanking new one he built with his own hands.

  My eyes are prickling now and I’m aware that I am dangerously close to crying. Get a grip, I chastise myself silently. Like Shelley suggested, he’s probably just tired and stressed. I should leave it until he’s more amenable.

  ‘I’d just like to know what you think,’ I bark at him. ‘I’m wondering if I should do something about it instead of just accepting all these horrible symptoms, you know? It feels like I’m losing my mind sometimes—’

  ‘Well, yeah. Perhaps you should see the doctor?’ he concedes, which has the effect of accelerating my heart rate to the point at which my entire chest seems to be juddering. I am seeing the doctor, I want to snap. He’s lying here a foot away from me in his stripy pyjamas and he doesn’t give a flying fuck.

  Andy turns the page of his book, and I glare at him. Why won’t he help me? Does he want me to dissolve in a pool of anxiety and stress?

  As he yawns and places his book on the bedside table, I tell myself to calm down and stop making such a drama of everything. Instead, I read recently, I should focus on the positive aspects of the menopause, like being able to enjoy sex (pah!) without fear of pregnancy, and being a wise, mature woman, who is graceful and elegant – as if we are all sodding Helen Mirren with sculpted cheekbones, still slipping easily into our size ten jeans.

  As Andy clicks off his bedside light, and we exchange terse goodnights, I try to reassure myself that he is behaving like any normal man. After all, he works hard at that hospital and the last thing he wants is to be harangued into giving medical diagnoses at home. If he were a chef, I wouldn’t expect him to whip me up a fabulous carbonara the minute he’d walked in through the door.

  So, our marriage is probably fine. Isn’t it?

  Chapter Four

  Saturday, February 16

  But it’s not. As it turns out, it’s not fine at all.

  It’s because of the stars. That’s how I find out. In the city you don’t often see them shining so brightly, but tonight you can. They are sparkling entrancingly. It’s magical.

  It’s around 10 p.m. and I’m standing in our back garden, looking up at them, still gripping the bucket from emptying our recycling into the wheelie bin. Remembering the app that Andy installed on his phone, I head back into the house to ask him if I can have a go with it. He was telling me how it can identify constellations when it’s pointed at the sky, and tonight is the perfect night for it.

  ‘Andy!’ I call out from the hallway.

  ‘In the bath,’ comes his voice from upstairs. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, nothing …’ I’d forgotten he’d gone up for a soak. Izzy is over at Maeve’s on a sleepover, so it’s just the two of us in tonight. Spencer moved out four years ago, when he was eighteen. He dropped out of university in first year – it just wasn’t for him, he insisted, and there was no arguing with him – and we were thrown into panic about his future, but he got a job pretty quickly for a company that installs sound systems for gigs. He lives in Newcastle now, in a shared flat with two friends and a varied selection of fungi sprouting from the bathroom carpet. Whenever I ask him what his job entails he just laughs and says, ‘Lifting things, Mum,’ and ruffles my hair as if I’m a little kid.

  I spot Andy’s phone sitting on the hall table, take it out to the garden and tap in his passcode. That’s weird; it’s been his date of birth for as long as I can remember, but now it doesn’t seem to work. He must have changed it. I try tapping in the full year – still no luck. Shrugging off a twinge of unease (why has he changed it?) I try reversing the six digits of his date of birth. Bingo, that was easy! I’m now in the inner sanctum of my husband’s telephonic device.

  Having found the app, I hold up the phone, marvelling at the way it names Betelgeuse, Venatici, Perseus; what beautiful decorative names they have. Ooh, there’s Mars! This is brilliant. I must get this app. It’s a lot more fun than my fitness one that reminds me – scathingly – that I have only done 397 steps out of the recommended daily 10,000.

  Ping! That’s a text from ‘Estelle’, which I know means something celestial (I find out later that it’s Latin for star) so I assume it’s to do with the app. I open it, expecting it to say something like, Look out for incredible shooting stars tonight!

  Darling baby, it reads, missing your sweet kisses so much xxx.

  I frown at it. How very weird. Perhaps the app is malfunctioning? Or has someone messaged my husband by mistake? A moment later, there’s another:

  Aching for you sweeth
eart xxx

  Something clenches inside me as I see that it’s one of a string of messages. I scroll up and read the conversation:

  Andy: Soon I hope xxx

  Estelle: When can I see you darling? xxx

  Andy: It really was baby xxx

  Estelle: Last time was so special xxx

  The fact that I am reading it from the bottom up makes me wonder again – momentarily – if my brain has tipped upside down and I am misinterpreting the situation. Could this be another menopausal symptom? I’m aware that I can be a little oversensitive, even verging on paranoid. I read on: I love you baby (from Andy). Is this some kind of joke? Or – I realise I’m clutching at straws here – could someone have hacked into his phone?

  Sweetie, reads another of her messages, that was the best ever!!! What was the best? It can only mean sex, can’t it? Which means he’s done it with someone who isn’t me. My heart is pounding hard and I feel dizzy and quite sick. I try, desperately, to think of other things that might be described in that way but can’t come up with anything except, perhaps, ‘cake’. And I don’t think she was referring to cake.

  ‘Evening, Viv!’ The voice makes me jump. I swing around to see Tim, our next-door neighbour, beaming at me.

  ‘Hi, Tim.’ Please go away and let me quietly freak out.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Tim – a short, tubby quantity surveyor who’s as bald as an egg in his late thirties – gives me a concerned look.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ I say, forcing a smile.

  He looks up at the sky. ‘Aren’t the stars amazing tonight?’