People LIke Her(4)

Then someone said that was all the time there was for questions.

I did try to talk to you, afterward, but everyone else was trying to talk to you as well. So I just stood around, holding the same glass of lukewarm white wine I had been nursing all evening, and tried to catch your eye—but didn’t.

There was no reason for you to recognize me, of course. There was no reason why my face ought to have stood out from the crowd. Even if we had talked, even if I had introduced myself, there is no reason for my name—or hers—to have rung any bells at all.

And seeing you there, seeing you going about your life as normal, seeing you surrounded by all those people, seeing you laughing and smiling and happy, that was when I knew. When I knew that I had been lying to myself. That I had not moved on, had not come to terms with anything. That I had not forgiven you, could never forgive you.

That was when I knew what I was going to do.

All I had to work out was how and where and when.





Chapter Two


Dan

People often remark that it must be lovely for me, being a writer, getting to spend so much time at home and see so much of Emmy and the kids. I suppose one thing this illustrates is how little work most people think being a writer involves.

Six in the morning—that was when I used to get up. By six fifteen I’d be at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee and my laptop, looking over the last paragraph or two from the day before. By seven thirty, I would aim to have done at least five hundred words. By eight thirty, I’d be ready for my second pot of coffee. By lunchtime, ideally, I would be getting near my word-count target for the day, meaning I could devote the afternoon to plotting out the next bit and answering emails and chasing payment for the bits of literary journalism I used to knock out with a glass of wine in the evenings or over the weekends.

That was then.

A few minutes after six o’clock this morning, I was creeping downstairs in the dark to try to avoid waking anyone up in the hope that I might get a little work done before the rest of the household woke (and in about 66 percent of cases immediately started yowling or screaming or demanding things). On the very lowest step, I stumbled on some kind of talking unicorn, which skittered across the floorboards and started singing a song about rainbows. In the darkness, ears pricked, I held my breath and waited. I didn’t have to wait very long. For such a small creature, he has quite the pair of lungs on him, my son. “Sorry,” I said to Emmy, as she handed him over. “You might want to check his nappy,” she told me. As I was passing Coco’s room, a little voice asked sleepily through the door what time it was. “Time to go back to sleep,” I said.

Bear, on the other hand, was up for good. I took him down to the kitchen and changed his nappy and stuck him in a new outfit and deposited the old one in a bag on top of the washing machine, which I noted would need emptying later, and then we sat on the couch in the corner by the fridge. For the next half an hour, he screamed as I jiggled him on my knee and tried to get him to drink from his bottle. Then I burped him and put him in a carrier and walked him up and down the garden for another half an hour while he screamed some more. Then it was seven o’clock and time to hand him back to Emmy and wake Coco up for her breakfast.

“My God, was that an hour?” Emmy asked me.

To the minute.

Christ, it takes a lot of energy, having two kids. I don’t know how people whose children don’t sleep as well as ours manage it. We were extremely lucky, Emmy and I, in that right from early on, three or four months old, Coco was sleeping a solid twelve hours a night. Down, out, sparko. If we took her to a party in a car seat, we could just put her down in a corner or in the room next door, and she would snooze the whole evening away—and from the looks of things, Bear is going to be the same. Not that you’d know any of this from Emmy’s Instagram account, of course, with all its talk of twitching eyelids and dark bags and frayed, knackered nerves. It was obvious from the start that as brands went, “the mum whose baby sleeps like a dream” was a nonstarter. No content there. To be honest, we don’t make a big thing of it with other parents of young children either.

A little after eight—8:07, to be precise—with Bear down for his first nap, with Coco and Emmy upstairs discussing my daughter’s outfit for the day, with two hours of solid parenting behind me, it’s time to microwave the cold cup of coffee I made myself ninety minutes ago, fire up the laptop, and attempt to will myself into an appropriate state of mind to begin the day’s creative labors.

By eight forty-five I have reread what I wrote yesterday and tweaked it, and I am ready to begin getting some new words down on the page.

At nine thirty the front doorbell goes.

“Should I get that?” I call up the stairs.

In the past three-quarters of an hour I’ve written a grand total of twenty-six new words and am currently debating whether or not I should delete twenty-four of them.

I am in no mood for interruptions.

“I’ll get it, shall I?”

There is no answer from upstairs.

The doorbell rings again.

I let out a pointed sigh for the benefit of the empty room and push my chair back from the table.

It’s at the back of the house, on the ground floor, our kitchen. When I first bought this place back in 2008, with some money that came to me when my father died, it was for me and a bunch of mates to live in and we hardly used this room at all, except to hang up the washing. It had a threadbare couch in it, a clock that didn’t work, a sticky linoleum floor, and a washing machine that leaked every time you used it. The back window looked out onto a little concrete area with a corrugated plastic roof. One of the very first things Emmy suggested when she moved in was that we get rid of all that and extend into the garden and turn this into a proper living-cooking-dining area. Which is exactly what we did.