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25
March 2017
Rachel waited three days before finally messaging Michael. Three days of going to sleep alone, waking up alone, checking her phone six times a minute. Three days of pretending that everything was fine whenever she saw someone she knew. Three days of ‘Yes! The honeymoon wasamazing.Yes, married life isbliss. Yes, we will definitely have you over for dinner soon!’ Three days of feeling as if Michael had ripped her heart out of her chest in the Seychelles and still hadn’t given it back.
M,began her message.I don’t know what’s going on. I miss you. Please please can we talk?
Within seconds a reply appeared:
Hey beautiful. Miss you too. It’s been a crazy busy week. Dinner tonight? I’ll cook.
Rachel gasped as she read it. After three days of existential hell, that was how he came back to her?A crazy busy week?While she was slowly dying inside? She rolled her engagement ring around her finger a few times, trying to decide how she felt, how to reply. And then she breathed in deeply and typed:
Sure. I’ll be there at seven.
She didn’t mark the message with a kiss or a love-themed emoji. She hoped he would notice and feel appropriately concerned about her.
That night she packed a few things into her shoulder bag; she didn’t want to arrive with an overnight bag and give Michael the impression that she was prepared to move back in so easily after what he’d put her through.
She felt nervous as she put her key into the lock of his apartment at seven o’clock, so pulled it out again and knocked on the door instead. Her heart raced at the sound of his footsteps coming down the hallway. She had spent so many hours consumed with thoughts of Michael, picturing Michael in various states and various scenarios – with his ex-wife, with other women, on a flight back to the USA – that the idea of seeing him in real life, of him standing before her in human form, seemed almost impossible to assimilate. And yet the door opened and suddenly there he was; tanned, loose-limbed, jolly, in a pale blue shirt and navy suit trousers, bare feet, a glass of wine in his hand and a smile wreathing his handsome face.
‘Baby.’
Baby.
Just that. What? What did it mean? What did any of it mean? Did it mean he was sorry? Did it mean she should forgive him? Or that he had forgiven her? Who was right? Who was wrong?
Suddenly she was in his arms, a light embrace. Not the embrace she felt the need for, not the desperate embrace of newlyweds not long back from their honeymoon reunited after their first postnuptial row. But just a normal, perfectly average embrace between a husband and a wife.
Then just as quickly he was walking away from her and towards the kitchen where Rachel could smell good things cooking and he was saying something to her that sounded like ‘I have a really nice Sicilian white. Or a chilled vodka? But I’m all out of tonics, so it would have to be orange juice’ but she couldn’t be sure because she wasn’t really listening.
‘Rach?’
‘What? Oh, er, sorry. White. Please. Thank you.’
In the kitchen she took a stool and then the wine he offered her, and she stared and stared at him, this man she’d married two and half weeks ago on one of the most romantic and remarkable days of her life, this man who’d called her afucking strangeron their honeymoon and then stopped touching her, this man who was acting as if they hadn’t just spent three days apart from each other with no communication. For minutes and minutes, Rachel felt a kind of numb muteness.
‘How’s your week been?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you know, it’s been …the worst week of my life.’
She watched his reaction. His wrist stopped turning the wooden spoon in the pot he was tending on the hob. He looked up at her and said, ‘Oh, baby. What’s been happening?’
And then the muteness passed, and rage arrived.
‘What’s been happening?’ she asked in a voice reeded with disbelief. ‘Are you serious?’
He narrowed his eyes at her and made a face of confusion.
‘Fucking hell, Michael. We got back from ourfucking honeymoonon Saturday. I went home on Sunday and it is now Wednesday and this is the first time I’ve seen you or spoken to you. We didn’t have sex for the last ten days of our holiday, you said you thought you’d married a fucking stranger, and now you’re acting like none of that ever happened. You’re … you’re … offering me wine and … andstirring things. I just don’t understand. I don’t understand what’s happening?’
She paused and looked up at him. He put down the wooden spoon on a rest and used the heels of his hands to lean against the counter. She saw him sigh. ‘You’, he said, ‘have got this all the wrong way round.’
‘Excuse me?’
He sighed again. ‘Why do you think we didn’t have sex for the rest of the honeymoon?’
‘Because I had disgusted you with my distasteful suggestions.’
