The ABCs of Love (11 page)

property

I know exactly what road John and I will live on.

I walk down there regularly checking out our new neighbors. I’ve worked out which ones John and I will be friends with. I even plan the little dinner parties we will hold.

Once the front door of a house in the street was left open, so I looked inside. All I could see was the hall, but that was painted a cheerful yellow color, which seemed a good sign.

I stood there and tried to imagine just what my life could be like, if I lived there. I could hear the low murmurs of us talking in bed at night, smell the food I would cook for John, taste his lips when I kissed him good morning, feel his suit jacket brush against my skin when he left each morning for work. In the background, I could even make out other voices, children’s voices, like shadows in the wind.

After a while, a woman came out of the house, stared at me, and slammed the door shut. I felt bereft but couldn’t move. A bit later, I saw her face in the bedroom window. I knew she was wondering whether to call the police. I wanted to tell her,
Don’t.

That we would be friends soon.

It was like the sun going out. Seeing that navy blue door shut out the bright yellow of mine and John’s future. There was something so final about it.

See also Omens; Stalking; Utopia; Yellow

Q

the queen

The Queen thinks the world smells of fresh paint because everywhere she goes is freshened up especially for her.

John thinks I wear black lace underwear every day. He says it’s such a change from Kate, who makes no effort.

“It’s important,” I tell him, “not to take anything for granted.”

See also Breasts; Underwear; Zest

the queen II

When I was sixteen, I went to Ireland with my parents on the ferry. We had just sat down to our fish-and-chips when a loudspeaker announcement said that the Queen was on a boat nearby and that the captain would be obliged if all passengers could go up on deck to wave to her. We ran upstairs, but when we got there, it was just the
Britannia
with all the sailors in white saluting at us. My mother said she could see the Queen, but neither I nor my father believed her.

We had just got back to our meal when there was another loudspeaker announcement. The Queen was really there this time, it said. We made our way up more slowly. The Queen was on a motorboat, being taken back to the
Britannia
at high speed. She was wearing a green coat and dress with a matching hat, and she was standing up straight in the boat, but because it was going so fast and the sea was choppy, she waved to us so oddly that she looked like a mechanical puppet.

Later, my father said it was not her but a cutout doll, but my mother told him not to be so stupid. Nevertheless, it was, my father said, a lesson in not taking things at face value.

When I asked him what he meant, he said that the Queen probably thought that our waving to her from the ferry was an outbreak of spontaneous applause because we loved her so much.

I’ve thought about this since. Surely no one could be that stupid.

Or could they?

See also Friends; Sex; Ultimatum; Zest

questions

What would you do?

John keeps asking me this. He’s talking about his children. What should he do about them? I know what he wants. He wants me to make his mind up for him. But John is a Libra. If I tell him what I think, he will immediately start to see the other side. I will be in the wrong whatever I say.

I told him to divide a piece of paper into two and write down the pros and cons of leaving on each side. He came through hours later and said that the trouble was that the children mean everything to him. I felt he’d hit me.

“So do I mean nothing to you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “You mean everything to me too.”

And then he started to cry.

See also Horoscopes; Objects; Old; Tornadoes; Utopia;
Vacuuming

quick

John has no sense of time. In this he is just like my mother. A strange thing I have noticed is that people who have no sense of time are always talking about it. They say things like “in a minute,” “quickly,” or “I’ll get it to you soon,” but the lengths of their minutes, quicklys, and soons are very different from those in the rest of the world.

I can’t help thinking it is deliberate. Leaving only five minutes to catch a train or bus gives the same adrenaline rush to some people as bungee jumping or walking along a high wall does to others. Whereas for most normal people being late is an inconvenience, for those like my mother and John it seems to give them a sense of power, in the same way as spending too much money or leaving a lover’s letter out where it can be read allows people to live dangerously but within the controlled limits they have set for themselves. This way, they are the architects of their own disasters.

Once I realized this, I felt better about John. I tried to forgive my mother, too, for all the times she’d left me waiting at parties when all the other children had been picked up, but I don’t think that was the same thing. I think she really did forget about me when I wasn’t there.

See also Illness; Utopia

R

railway stations

When you are in our position, you have to be careful in public in case anyone sees you. John and I meet in the next-door town, and afterward, I get the train home. He always walks me to the station, and we shake hands. It’s hard to explain, but when I get on my train after that, I feel a holy glow emanating from me. I walk to my seat as if I’m some kind of prim secretary who dreams of one day letting her hands touch her boss’s hair as she hands him the beautifully typed notes.

But then I sit down and think of John going back home to Kate, and I curse.

The other day, a couple got on just when the train doors were shutting. He was about fifty, close-cut gray hair, a business suit, the sort of boxer’s face you get on men who have made it to the top the hard way. She was beautiful. In her early twenties, with honey skin and lots of long dark curls. They sat back at first, puffed out from running and giggling, but then they started to kiss. After a while, I watched his hand delve into her lap. His breath became all catchy, his eyes blurry, but then just as the whole carriage started to watch, they pulled apart. Both looked out of separate windows for a bit, but then they were drawn together again. She stood up, and he guided her by the hips to sit on his lap. All us other passengers looked at one another and smiled. It was like being in the Blitz, with their lust careering round the carriage, hitting us like rifle-shot.

Eventually, though, they went out into the corridor, and we lost sight of them. The only way you could tell they had been there was by the briefcase and newspaper left in the luggage rack above their seats. When the train came to my station, I left by their corridor because I wanted to catch sight of them. They were pinned up against the train door, wrapped in their coats, and moving so slowly and gently that it seemed they were in a dream. I thought about it all night.

The next day at the station, just as John went to shake my hand, I pulled him to me and kissed him properly.

When I got on my train and took my seat, I hoped everyone in the carriage had been watching.

See also Marathons; Toys

reasons
...

. . . why Kate and John got married:

She was pregnant.

They’d known each other for years and years.

Their parents were good friends.

They liked the same food, the same books, films, music. It was easy.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The usual.

(Imagine that—Princess Kate pregnant before they got married!! I tried not to look shocked for John’s sake. Just a bit prim, so he’d know that this was something I’d never do. But then I got to thinking. What is the usual? What
is
the usual? Why do people get married? Especially two people who have never really loved each other.)

See also True Romance

relatives

John has twenty-seven first cousins. It is difficult to imagine what it must be like to come from such a large family. I have two cousins. That is enough. Even when my mother and father were alive, we didn’t see much of them. My mother made sure of that. It’s not surprising that we don’t keep in contact now. I often think that we might meet up one day and not know one another. Blood is a funny thing.

In my magazine the other day, there was an article about odd relationships. There was one woman who first met her future husband when he was eight years old and a guest at her son’s birthday party. They didn’t marry then, of course, but it’s freaky to think she must have had her eye on him all that time. Another family consisted of two sets of identical twins who got married. Their children, therefore, were genetically brother and sister even though they were really cousins.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? I know, for instance, that your cells renew themselves after seven years, so would it be possible for your seventeen-year-old clone to marry your twenty-four-year-old self? They would be completely different people. I try to talk about all this with John, but he only starts making silly jokes. He says he has had enough of reproducing himself forever, particularly at four o’clock in the morning when his children sometimes wake him up.

I’ve never really wanted to have children. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for my mother to have me squirming away inside her stomach. Like an alien.

See also Only Children; Stepmothers; Thomas the Tank Engine;
Underwear

revenge

The chairman has been bringing his dog into the office every day now. It sits underneath his desk, and Monica has even seen it sitting in the passenger seat of the chairman’s car when he goes home at night.

It turns out that the chairman’s wife tried to poison it using some doctored bacon. She was jealous because the chairman spent all of his time with the dog, feeding it tidbits, calling it beautiful, and whispering secrets to it while fondling its ears.

We know this because the chairman’s wife left a message at the reception desk one day saying she would have felt better if the chairman had been as besotted with their bloody au pair. Brian says he bets the bloody au pair is probably a little bit more careful about what she eats in that house these days.

See also Dogs; Tornadoes; Vacuuming; Wobbling

rochester

Sally and I often talk about books.

We are searching for role models, but so far we have not found a second wife in literature who manages to keep her husband whole and healthy. We make lists of what physical deformities we would be prepared to accept—a burned Max de Winter versus a blind Mr. Rochester. Sally says she’ll take ingrown toenails as long as he isn’t wallet-less, but I’m secretly coming to terms with the idea of a limbless, sightless, and depressed John.

See also Endings; True Romance; Utopia

routines

Only six months passed between my mother dying and my father getting ill. It wasn’t a coincidence. He always had a strong will. The way he got through my mother’s death was by developing a rigid pattern that held him up, even when he collapsed.

He ate the same things each day, wore particular clothes on particular days, and he devised this amazing chart that contained lots and lots of boxes he had to tick off every half hour. In fact, he became so busy with the chart that it was difficult for him to find the time to speak to me toward the end.

John came to see me the other day when I wasn’t expecting him. I was pleased, of course, but I kept watching the television over his shoulder because my favorite program is on on Wednesdays, and it had got to an exciting part.

“I thought you’d be happy to see me,” he said eventually, “but you don’t want me here.”

He was right. The funny thing was that it was only when he was getting ready to go that I realized what was happening. I asked him when he was coming next. I begged him to stay. Once he was going, I’d have done anything to get him to stay.

See also Money; Utopia; Zeitgeist

rude

Farting is rude. Passing wind is something that just happens.

Stealing another woman’s husband is unforgivable. Falling in love is something that just happens.

Until you’re old enough to start doing it, just even talking about sex is so rude, it makes you giggle.

Sometimes I think John has never had sex before. He gets so excited just because I tell him we can be completely free and honest with each other. He says he thanks God for the modern woman. One night he asked me to tell him my deepest fantasy.

“I’ll have to think about that,” I said. I wanted to tell him one that would make me seem daring and sexy but not too dirty.

But then he told me his.

He said he wanted to walk down a street late at night. A few houses would still have their lights on, but there was one that wouldn’t have the curtains drawn. He’d be able to see right in. As he walked by, he would hear the cry of
Take me!
coming from the open window. There would be an attractive couple standing there, he said, making love. The woman would see John, watch him over the man’s shifting shoulder, but then the man would notice too. He’d pull out of the woman, turn, and move aside. Then the woman would move over to the window and gesture for John to come inside the house. She’d not even pull her skirt down. She’d stand there, staring at John as he opened the front gate, as the man watched too. Then John would step over the threshold, unzipping himself as he did so.