networks for weeks on end, I fell gradually in love with the possibilities of the place, its sad past receding like a wave.
We spent three days sleeping on the living room floor. The bed was going to be late, and we’d no sofa at this point either, so we sat cross-legged like squatters in the middle of the living room, eating Chinese takeaway and drinking champagne out of mugs. The glasses were who knew where, so tightly packed in newspaper and bubble wrap that the thought of locating and unpeeling them gave me a headache.
We had plans and a child-like giddiness, born out of a shared purpose, that we’d not felt before. For a couple of days we just wandered from room to room, dabbing tentative dots of tester-pot paint on walls, playing at being homeowners. It didn’t seem real, more as though we were idling with a child’s toy that we’d be giving back before long. I liked it when friends visited and I could repeat this tour, pausing here and there to give excited voice to our vision: ‘this will be the kitchen … bi-fold doors into the garden … yes, these floors will be sanded and waxed.’
But all too soon, the play gave way to serious work and we found ourselves surrounded by seemingly interminable mess, noise and dust. Plaster dust, dust from the crumbling underlay we uncovered beneath the ancient carpets, dust that whirled and settled in corners and on windowsills and lingered in our hair and our lungs even weeks later.
Marriage, home, harmony. Even the patter of tiny feet – or paws, at least. Our shared love of dogs was one of the first (‘amazing’) things we’d uncovered about each other five years ago. And so as soon as we had a home-life we deemed stable enough, and solid wooden floors that could withstand muddy prints, we found a seven-week-old bundle of fur, eyes and paws and christened her Bella.
Neither of us wanted children; at least, that’s what he said, then. It would change, later, but I couldn’t have known that.
I definitely didn’t want children and I was just grateful that he didn’t press me too hard for my reasons. Of course, I realise now that this was probably because he assumed I would one day change my mind.
Funny how we can fall in love, claim to love everything about someone, and then set about trying to change them into someone else.
So this is what you do. You take the chaos of love and you weave it into a pattern. You make an Axminster of it. Put a ring around it. Sign for it. And I must be happy now, because I have someone to protect me from the catalogue of mini disappointments that has been my life so far.
But somehow in my dreams it is always that musty first room in Nice, and jumping on the bed swatting flies with the rolled up porn magazine we found in the drawer, and leaning over that balcony perilously close to falling, and rubbing aftersun on his shoulders, and making tipsy love all night in the glow of that (blink, blink) shaving light.
On Thursday I go to see Mari. Mari lives in a flat above a music shop, not far from the estate where we grew up, and is my only friend from that place.
My friends are compartmentalised and the compartments never mix: school friends; university friends; work friends; friends of Dave’s; friends from the estate – or technically, friend from the estate, since, as I said, this particular compartment consists only of Mari.
We met when she saved me from getting beaten up, when I was thirteen.
The houses we grew up in were grey, and pebble dashed. There was one park on the estate, but even that was more grey than green, its slides delivering children onto unforgiving concrete. There were horror stories: the girl who went so high on the swings that she went all the way over, fell out onto the ground and split her head open. Everyone said you could see her brains, right there, spilling out. Years later they would install a pit of wood shavings at the foot of the swings, but no one ever knew if the brain story was true, and
We spent three days sleeping on the living room floor. The bed was going to be late, and we’d no sofa at this point either, so we sat cross-legged like squatters in the middle of the living room, eating Chinese takeaway and drinking champagne out of mugs. The glasses were who knew where, so tightly packed in newspaper and bubble wrap that the thought of locating and unpeeling them gave me a headache.
We had plans and a child-like giddiness, born out of a shared purpose, that we’d not felt before. For a couple of days we just wandered from room to room, dabbing tentative dots of tester-pot paint on walls, playing at being homeowners. It didn’t seem real, more as though we were idling with a child’s toy that we’d be giving back before long. I liked it when friends visited and I could repeat this tour, pausing here and there to give excited voice to our vision: ‘this will be the kitchen … bi-fold doors into the garden … yes, these floors will be sanded and waxed.’
But all too soon, the play gave way to serious work and we found ourselves surrounded by seemingly interminable mess, noise and dust. Plaster dust, dust from the crumbling underlay we uncovered beneath the ancient carpets, dust that whirled and settled in corners and on windowsills and lingered in our hair and our lungs even weeks later.
Marriage, home, harmony. Even the patter of tiny feet – or paws, at least. Our shared love of dogs was one of the first (‘amazing’) things we’d uncovered about each other five years ago. And so as soon as we had a home-life we deemed stable enough, and solid wooden floors that could withstand muddy prints, we found a seven-week-old bundle of fur, eyes and paws and christened her Bella.
Neither of us wanted children; at least, that’s what he said, then. It would change, later, but I couldn’t have known that.
I definitely didn’t want children and I was just grateful that he didn’t press me too hard for my reasons. Of course, I realise now that this was probably because he assumed I would one day change my mind.
Funny how we can fall in love, claim to love everything about someone, and then set about trying to change them into someone else.
So this is what you do. You take the chaos of love and you weave it into a pattern. You make an Axminster of it. Put a ring around it. Sign for it. And I must be happy now, because I have someone to protect me from the catalogue of mini disappointments that has been my life so far.
But somehow in my dreams it is always that musty first room in Nice, and jumping on the bed swatting flies with the rolled up porn magazine we found in the drawer, and leaning over that balcony perilously close to falling, and rubbing aftersun on his shoulders, and making tipsy love all night in the glow of that (blink, blink) shaving light.
On Thursday I go to see Mari. Mari lives in a flat above a music shop, not far from the estate where we grew up, and is my only friend from that place.
My friends are compartmentalised and the compartments never mix: school friends; university friends; work friends; friends of Dave’s; friends from the estate – or technically, friend from the estate, since, as I said, this particular compartment consists only of Mari.
We met when she saved me from getting beaten up, when I was thirteen.
The houses we grew up in were grey, and pebble dashed. There was one park on the estate, but even that was more grey than green, its slides delivering children onto unforgiving concrete. There were horror stories: the girl who went so high on the swings that she went all the way over, fell out onto the ground and split her head open. Everyone said you could see her brains, right there, spilling out. Years later they would install a pit of wood shavings at the foot of the swings, but no one ever knew if the brain story was true, and
Similar Books
Underworld Lover (A Guardian Angel Romance #2)
haron Hamilton
The Folly
M. C. Beaton
Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 04
Quanah Parker
The Prospects
Daniel Halayko
Knockout
John Jodzio
The Case of Lisandra P.
Hélène Grémillon
Clash of Eagles
Alan Smale
Delicate Chaos
Jeff Buick