Seeing Other People Read Free

the parties and playdates – she occasionally forgot us as a couple. And while I understood everything, from her missing specially prepared meals because of late-running meetings through to the evenings I spent alone on the sofa while she caught up with paperwork at the kitchen table, it was hard not to feel just a little bit neglected. I couldn’t say anything though because it wasn’t her fault. She was working really hard for all of us and I was a big boy, I could handle it, besides which I had a plan. A month earlier I’d applied for the editorship of Sunday , the Correspondent on Sunday ’s magazine supplement, and in terms of pay and prestige it was about as good it could possibly get for someone like me. If I got the job it would be the answer to all my and Penny’s problems: I’d get a rise and we could afford for her to go part-time or even give up work altogether.
     
    Penny stood up and kissed me goodnight and was about to leave the room when the phone rang. We exchanged wary glances. Good news never comes via a late-night phone call.
    ‘It’s your mum,’ said Penny, handing me the receiver.
    ‘Hey Mum, everything OK?’
    ‘I’ve got some bad news,’ she replied. ‘I’ve just had a call from the uncle of that girl you used to go out with when you were young, you know the one, Fiona Briggs. Well, she died apparently, some sort of accident while playing tennis.’
    ‘Tennis? What kind of accident can you have playing tennis that can kill you?’
    According to my mother Fiona had been playing tennis at her local club and was struck on her temple by a ball which briefly knocked her unconscious. She insisted that she was all right and determined to play on and eventually won the game but fainted an hour later in the tennis club showers hitting her head on the corner of a tiled bench. She was in a coma for a week but never regained consciousness. They couldn’t make any funeral arrangements until after the coroner’s verdict but that came in yesterday – death by misadventure – and the funeral was at St Thomas’s next Tuesday. According to Fiona’s uncle my name was down on a list of people she wanted to be there. My mother paused. ‘Is that something people do these days? Make lists of who they want at their funeral like it’s a birthday party?’
    ‘No, Mum,’ I replied, ‘but it is a very Fiona thing to do. She was a control freak of the highest order.’
    My mum sighed, as though I was speaking gibberish. ‘Well, I don’t know about that but he said that if you wanted to pay your respects you’d be more than welcome.’
     
    Fiona Briggs.
    Dead.
    By tennis ball.
    There should be a name for it when the first person you ever slept with dies. There should be a word that communicates the fact that a little part of your history is gone forever. That she was a complete and utter nightmare of a girlfriend and that my buttocks clenched at the very thought of her was neither here nor there. She might have been one of the most obnoxious and controlling human beings I had ever had the misfortune to encounter but she was my first, and I was hers, and as such we would always be inextricably linked.
    I was never quite sure how I started going out with Fiona. Looking back it was almost as if one moment I was a carefree sixteen year old enjoying a lazy summer of messing around in the park with my mates and then out of nowhere Fiona appeared with her big hair and fashionable clothes reeking of the designer perfume Poison by Dior. In no time at all I was coupled with Fiona with no means of escape. Nothing I did was good enough for her, she hated my friends and wasn’t all that keen on my family either. During the eighteen months we were together – in which time I endured daily bullying, belittling and deriding at her hands – I attempted to split up with her on at least a dozen separate occasions but it never seemed to stick. Every time I raised the topic of ending the relationship Fiona would