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“S’okay,” I said, turning to face her fully. “Are you getting those blouses?”
“No,” she replied, the edge remaining in her voice. “I actually want to look more than fine.”
Chapter Seven
Perhaps we were both hangry, I mused about an hour later. We’d had some cookie dough – Petra’s a huge dollop in a waffle cone, slathered with melted peanut butter, and mine a white chocolate and raspberry scoop in a tub – and the frosty atmosphere between us had melted away as we sat in the window of the café and commented on passers-by. As we left, Petra even raised her shoulder at me, in a sign I’d come to understand meant that she wanted me to take her arm.
We made our way to the next in Petra’s list of go-to shops, and I parked myself on a bench outside, alongside a couple of resigned-looking husbands, to wait for her. They both gave me sidelong glances, as if wondering who I was to permeate their masculine environment. I immediately felt my brighter mood retreating, my shoulders caving in and my head bobbing as I fished out my phone and scrolled through Instagram.
A hiss of “Jean! Jean!” brought me back to reality a few minutes later. Petra was waving frantically at me through the open doors of the shop, so I pocketed my phone and went to her.
“Can you hold my bag?” she said. “I want to try these trousers on.”
Obligingly, I held out my hand for her bag, and ended up also holding a dress that she’d already decided to buy. When we arrived at the changing room, the shop assistant on the door squinted at me, as if wondering why I was holding a dress. Then her expression cleared and – looking almost embarrassed – she waved me through. I hadn’t intended to go in with Petra, but to save face I followed her down the corridor.
“Oh, hello,” she said, clearly having not expected me to be there. Her mouth twitched. “Are you planning on trying that on too?”
The thought of donning the figure-hugging frock brought a rush of adrenaline to my body. Not the good kind, not the dizzy-from-too-many-rollercoasters kind. The oh-Christ-I-think-I’m-about-to-die kind. Quite an extreme reaction to a dress, but I swallowed it down and laughed dryly instead, perching on the little stool while Petra sorted herself out. My mind wandered, and I covered my mouth with my free hand to hide a genuine smile, remembering what we had gotten up to in a deserted fitting room in Truro early on in our relationship. (It had been late at night, just before they closed for Christmas, and in our defence, we didn’t go all the way…)
Nothing similar seemed to be on the cards here, however, as I ended up with Petra’s discarded jeans on my lap while she tried on the new trousers. It immediately became clear that they were too big for her. “I think both of us could fit in here,” she said, flapping a hand in the space between her waist and the hem of the trousers. “And half the choir.”
“You must have lost weight,” I said. “You’ve had trousers in this size from here before, and they’ve been fine.”
“Not through actively trying,” she immediately said, somewhat tersely. I frowned, wondering what I’d said to warrant such a response, but she was already undoing the button of the trousers and reaching for her jeans.
“Do you want me to go and get you a size down?”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Would you mind?”
“No, provided I can get up from underneath this mound of stuff you’ve loaded me with.” I smiled to show I was joking, and she immediately relieved me of the burden, gathering both dress and jeans back into her arms. “Okay, back in a second, Malinky.”
“Please don’t call me that,” she muttered. I froze.
“You don’t like being called Malinky?” It had been a light-hearted nickname that I used to use with regards to her slim frame, after the children’s song ‘Skinny Malinky Long Legs’, and she’d never minded before.
“No, I don’t. I never did. It was just something I put up with because I loved you.”
Without my mind having any conscious input, my feet took me away from her until I was outside the fitting rooms, heading blindly for the trousers. I doubted she’d even realised what she’d said, and doubted even more that she meant it that way. But she’d said ‘loved’. Loved as in… past tense.
Oh dear God, I thought as I stared at a rack of trousers without seeing them. What’s gone wrong?
Chapter Eight
But the day didn’t end there! It got worse.
Petra found me back outside the shop, sitting with the other resigned partners, who might have been the same or different ones, I didn’t know. I’d completely forgotten about getting her the trousers until I saw her quizzical face peering out of the shop window at me. I pretended not to see her and focused on my phone – Twitter, this time. Truth be told, I wasn’t even seeing the tweets as they slid across the screen, for my mind was racing, working overtime.
It was really my fault, the whole situation, I knew. Communication sat at the forefront of any relationship: it was crucial to know if something you were doing was hurting or negatively affecting your significant other, and likewise it was important for you to tell them if they were affecting you. What Petra had just said was simply her telling me that something I had said had had a negative impact on her, and I had no right to feel this way. It was now my responsibility to adjust my words and actions accordingly. The whole past-tense-of-love shite was, again, just me dwelling on it in my mind and making a mountain out of a molehill. The word ‘loved’ fit best in the sentence. That was it. I was being ridiculous.
A few minutes later, Petra appeared with one of her reusable bags in her hand, within which I could see the dress, but not the trousers. A part of me felt bad for probably putting her off the trousers, just like I had done with the other blouses earlier this morning – the part of me that didn’t already feel bad for the whole situation, that was.
“One item of clothing acquired,” she said with a little smile. “Thank you for doing this. I know it’s not your favourite thing, shopping. Reckon you can hold out for another couple of shops? We still need to get your PJs, and I need a blouse or two, ideally.”
“If I have to,” I said with an embarrassed smile of my own. “Provided we can find a toilet at some point soon.”
“Menopausal wee alert?” she chuckled.
“You could say that,” I tried to chuckle back.
