The Two of Us Read Free Page B

other one,’ says my beloved.
    ‘Mick or Keef?’ I persist.
    ‘Didn’t we do twenty questions last night?’
    ‘Yes, we did. Well, you lot did; I was cooking. Thing is, it made me realize how much we still don’t know about each other. That’s all.’
    Ivy pulls into the outside lane to overtake a convoy of cars that are doing around three miles an hour under the speed limit. It’s hard going on the Fiat, and it rattles as we creep past
several cars and vans slowly enough that I could reach through my window and shake hands with every one of the drivers. We pull back into the middle lane and I start breathing again.
    ‘Sorry about last night,’ I say, abandoning my policy of dumb ignorance.
    ‘It’s fine. They’re lovely.’
    ‘I meant me . . . I’m sorry about me.’
    ‘It’s fine.’
    And I wait for thirty seconds, but Ivy doesn’t say I’m lovely too.
    And of course I’m in no hurry to know Ivy’s favourite Take That song; and I don’t
really
care what GCSEs she sat, or what her first cat was called. But there are other
details – trivial, too, in their own way – that it feels almost negligent not to know.
    ‘I don’t even know when your birthday is.’
    ‘October twenty-ninth,’ she says.
    There’s a beat of silence. Ivy glances sideways, holds my gaze for a second, cocks an eyebrow incrementally. Something resembling a smile tugs the corner of her mouth. ‘I’ll be
forty-one,’ she says, turning her attention back to the road.
    Eight cars, two vans and two wagons pass us before I formulate a response.
    ‘Cool,’ I say. As if, instead of her age, Ivy has just nonchalantly disclosed some impressive talent or skill:
I used to play guitar in a heavy metal band, I ran the marathon in
2:58, I can assemble an AK47 blindfolded.
‘Cool.’
    But this information has thrown me (not that it would take a great deal to upset my precarious equilibrium this morning) and neither of us says another word for the next thirty miles or so.
    Ivy will be forty-one on her next birthday, making her over nine years older than me. When she was my age, I was twenty-two. When she was twenty-two, I was thirteen. And, moving in the opposite
direction, when I’m the age she is now, Ivy will be fifty – and cut that cake any way you like, that’s old. I don’t want to think about how old Ivy will be when I turn fifty
– fifty is a good age for men: a time of distinguished grey highlights, and not so much wrinkles as lines of hard-won wisdom. How old Ivy will be when I hit my half-century gives me the
heebie-crawling-jeebies. She doesn’t look old; her body is firm and her skin, where it’s not crisscrossed with scars, is smooth. I am fighting a strong urge, now, to turn and inspect
the corners of her eyes for nascent crow’s-feet. Things will even out, I imagine, when I turn eighty. Also, women tend to live longer than men, so Ivy being almost a decade older than me
improves the chances of us dying together, holding hands on the sofa in front of a slowly fading log fire in our retirement cottage on the coast. So there’s that.
    We stop at the services for a pee, and Ivy takes so long to pay her visit that I begin to worry she has either been abducted or simply taken a lift from a handsome stranger. When she does get
back to the car she looks, if anything, more dejected than she has all morning. I’ve bought her a massive bag of Skittles, which I now present with a chimp-like grin, but Ivy says she’s
feeling lousy and asks will I drive. She makes an improvised pillow from a folded jumper, reclines her seat as far as it will go – which isn’t far – and closes her eyes. And so we
put more miles behind us, cars and motorbikes and vans honking their horns and pulling goon faces from the windows as they tear past.
    Where did it all go wrong?
is the question I keep coming back to. Surely our little spat last night, if it even qualifies as a spat, can’t be responsible for Ivy’s sudden