Page 6 of The Late Bloomer’s Playlist

‘Patti, don’t ruin the moment,’ he spoke to me from the side of his mouth. ‘The lot, please?’ he said again to the young woman behind the counter. I heard David ask her to wrap them in paper, if she had any, and I heard her mumble a sum as she handed the flowers to him. ‘Thanks ever so much,’ he said, collecting his change. ‘Sweets for my sweet.’

David passed the flowers to me and despite myself I felt my cheeks warm.

‘You’re a charmer, you are, David.’

He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and kissed my temple. ‘Patti, you’re the best woman in the world for putting up with my nonsense and I think you deserve–’ He gasped in a way that I can only describe as being uncharacteristically camp when we walked past a record stall that was blasting Marvin Gaye loud enough to make my shoulders bunch. ‘Patti, this is it!’

‘This is… what?’

‘The title of my memoir.’

I realised then that he was referring to the song – ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ – and my face stretched into a smile.

‘This is what you’ll call it?’

‘Good man, would you mind?’

Before I knew what my mad-brained husband was doing he’d eased the flowers out of my hand and passed them over to the man behind the counter of the record stall.

‘David, I’m not–’

‘Oh, live a little, woman!’

David grabbed at my hands and started to dance in front of me, a slow shift from side to side as though feeling his way into the rhythm of the song.

‘Come on, Patricia, I’ve seen those hips do better than that.’

‘David, you’re being an arse.’

‘Your arse.’

Quite unexpectedly, he let go of my one hand, lifted his arm over my head, and encouraged me into a twirl that folded my body up against his.

‘Ready?’ he asked, eyebrows raised with a grin that belonged to a child.

‘Go on then, you idiot.’

David span me out with a sharp enthusiasm until we were an arm’s length away from each other. I wanted to resist, I truly, deeply did, but I found that I was dancing my back towards him as the backing singers crooned. I didn’t mind a jot that people were watching by then – and I think David might have continued because people were watching. Whatever our reasoning, the pair of us carried on like drunk teenagers from a bygone era until the song wound down, and there was even a shameful echo of applause from those who’d stayed to watch our improv. David bowed; I reddened.

‘No requests?’ the stallholder asked as he handed David back the flowers.

My husband laughed. ‘Oh, that’s our energy burst for the day, my friend. We’re going for dinner and an early night now.’

‘You know how to show a girl a good time,’ the gentleman joked back. ‘You looked great together, you two.’

I felt the red of my cheeks deepen. I thought by then I must have been that horrible gothic red that the likes of Charlotte Brontë probably used in her novels. It felt like a fine detail worth remembering. Something for David to write down, I thought with a smirk.

My husband pulled me to him before he answered. ‘She brings me up, this one.’

Though the truth of it was that at one time or another we’d each brought the other up a notch during our years together. And for all my piss-taking, I thought this life of ours that we’d built from twenty-odd years’ worth of failed relationships and an eventual best-friend pact, probably was something worth writing down one day.