AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I might have zoned out. She’d already sent me an email of the annotated shopping list anyhow; this was merely my extra,extratalk-through. Faced with a shelf of pasta varieties in Waitrose, it seemed I couldn’t be trusted to make a sensible decision, despite the NHS regularly trusting me with ten intensive care patients for entire night shifts.
My wife’s controlling tendencies had always lurked, so I don’t know why I allowed phone calls like this one to affect my mood as negatively as they did. Four years ago, I’d been so flattered that this vivacious, smart woman had selected me, and so dazzled by the magnificent future she mapped out for us both, that I’d chosen not to see it.
Traffic grew heavier the farther south I drove. As a rule, I enjoyed long car journeys, especially solo ones, but Samantha’s shopping list took the edge off my pleasure. I wasn’t even picking up these groceries until the return journey tomorrow.
“Three-ply, not two-ply. Sometimes it isn’t that clear on the packet.”
Uh? I’d missed an important chunk. Was this ravioli, or had we moved onto bog roll? I played it safe.
“Mmm. Yes.”
“Alex! For goodness sake! Are you even listening?”
“Yes.”
“Can you join in a bit, then? Could you say something other than ‘Mmm, yes,’?”
“Yes. Sorry. Mmm, I mean…no. Yes. Bloody hell, I don’t know, Samantha. I’m trying not to crash the car through three lanes of motorway traffic. You want me to arrive in one piece, don’t you?”
“I hope your repartee will be a little more sparkling at the interview, that’s all.” She harrumphed, and I pictured her thin-lipped contempt. “Okay. I’ll let you drive. Phone me when you get there.”
Peace at last. Irritably, I flicked on the radio. REM, in a whiny fashion, informed me that ‘Everybody Hurts’.Yep, they do. I flicked it off again, unable to tolerate another rendition of the chorus. My head had to be in the right space for that particular nostalgic stroll through the 1990s, and the contraflow merging onto the M3, combined with Sam’s nagging, wasn’t conducive to finding it. Neither was the prospect of tomorrow’s job interview.
Following a bumpy start, my ten years in Nottingham had settled into something vaguely approaching contentment. After gathering up the shards of my shattered heart and piecing them back into an ersatz version of the first, I’d immersed myself in my medical studies and sweated out my pain on the muddy fields of the university rugby club.
My original gang of sophisticated hedonists had drifted away, to be replaced by nerdy boys, suiting the new, melancholic me much better. My free time at med school revolved around anatomy textbooks, working out in the gym, and the occasional pint of real ale. I even joined the chess club.
Time did its thing, and the bitter, all-consuming intensity of teenage heartbreak faded. Though a compulsion to scour every group of pub-goers and young men waiting on station platforms hung around much longer. Part of me never stopped praying my eyes would land on a slender, raven-haired young man. They didn’t, of course, and by the time I’d qualified as a doctor, I’d almost grown out of the habit.
To this day, I have no idea why a social butterfly like Samantha had landed on me. Sure, having the title doctor before my name didn’t hurt, but Samantha wasn’t one to hang from someone else’s coattails, or bask in borrowed glory. Armed with a first-class pharmacy degree herself, and combined with endless confidence and charm, she’d been snapped up by a major pharmaceutical brand, and climbed the corporate ladder. She could have chosen anyone, yet bizarrely, she chose me. Maybe she viewed me as a stable, predictable hook on which to hang her smart suit jacket after a hard week spent schmoozing clients. Maybe I could be relied upon to never steal her spotlight.
The M3 merged onto the narrower M27. I’d driven this route down from Nottingham to Bournemouth plenty of times—Samantha’s parents lived in a leafy village just outside town. As I drove, I mentally rehearsed my answers to the questions likely to come up at tomorrow’s interview for the anaesthesia registrar post I didn’t want.
So then why was I here, driving past theWelcome to Dorsetsign, with an itchy suit and my best dress shoes that pinched my toes laid out across the back seats?
Because Samantha wanted it, of course. My wife wanted to live closer to her parents. My compromise suggestion of looking for jobs halfway between both our families had fallen on stony ground. After warning my own parents we were considering moving a three-hour journey away from them, my sister had given me the type of hard stare only siblings can get away with. One that spoke volumes without her ever opening her mouth. My parents had smiled brightly at the news, then declared they’d enjoy exploring the south coast, even if my mum’s eyes glittered and she’d busied herself stripping beds and folding laundry for an hour afterwards.
I was lucky the interview fell on the date it did, otherwise Samantha would have been delivering her pasta tutorial from the front passenger seat. And instead of dinner for one and a few drinks at a pub, followed by a quiet night on my own in a budget hotel just off the seafront, I’d be badgered into having sex. At least twice this evening and maybe twice in the morning, too, if she could coax my exhausted dick into another round. Which, on the face of it, didn’t sound too terrible at all, except it had nothing to do with being madly, passionately in lust with her husband. Oh no. This was all about persuading one of my sperm to penetrate one of her shy eggs. A precious union triggering a cascade of hormonal surges, which itself would prompt a nanoscopic cell to divide into two then four then eight then sixteen, and so on, until ultimately a little blue line appeared on a plastic strip, indicating that finally,finally, my wife was up the duff.
Samantha’s biological clock ticked in much the same way cartoon bombs ticked—very, very loudly and in a menacing fashion. My own biological clock, in stark contrast, had not yet had the batteries inserted. I liked kids, I supposed, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I needed one in my life any time soon. Nonetheless, eighteen months ago we’d beguntryingfor a baby, and latterly, it had become very trying indeed. After a year of false expectations and dashed hopes, sex was not only an activity I viewed with antipathy and dread but also a chore I failed to perform well.
Which didn’t sound normal for a twenty-eight-year-old man.
Never the most rampant of guys, I’d gone from once-a-week, maybe twice on holiday, to plotting ovulation times on squared graph paper, taking temperatures, and sharing our intimate bedroom details with a friendly fertility expert, at vast expense. Frankly, it was a wonder I ever got it up at all.
To top everything, we discovered my sperm had the capability to form its own gold medal-winning Olympic swim team. Those boys were alarmingly efficient, even if providing a sample of them, in a little cubicle tucked into the back of the outpatients department, had been touch-and-go. The well-thumbed copies ofFiestawere of a similar vintage to the women displaying their wares across the centrefold, and my dick had point-blank refused to cooperate. If it hadn’t been for Samantha’s incipient wrath and an incongruous, ancient copy ofCountry Life,featuring an interview with a dashingly youthful Hugh Grant, chances were I’d still be there now.
Knowing my sperm sample contained squillions of the little buggers, their long swishy tails and big fat heads swimming in perfect synchrony, kind of made matters worse. Whereas I appeared fertile enough to double the population of the entire northern hemisphere singlehandedly, Samantha’s sporadic eggs were deemed to be of below-average quality. And, oh my God, did she endeavour to make me feel all kinds of bad about that. Nothing about my wife could ever be below-average.
All in all, having a night off in Bournemouth on my own, even if accompanied by an unwanted job interview the following morning, was a blessed relief.
INTERNATIONAL BRIGHT YOUNG THING
(JESUS JONES)
MATT 2005
“From the shit coming out of the radio, I thought I must have died and been thrown straight down to hell.”
