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Josh closed his eyes and then said, ‘I’m sorry, that was unnecessary. Why don’t you just work on your own list before vetoing mine?’
‘Fine,’ she said.
‘Okay, I’m going to take all these boxes to the tip. If I don’t leave now, I won’t get a parking space on the street when I get back,’ he said, reopening the laptop. ‘Just write down all the people you want to invite.’
Once Josh and their huge pile of cardboard boxes had gone, Audrey walked over to the window and called Clara.
‘Is it just me, or is planning a wedding not that fun?’
‘It’s not just you. It’s the first test of married life – can you make it through the tedium and the spreadsheets. Wait, isn’t this level of admin the kind of thing Josh lives for?’
‘He’s crazy busy with this new job and, you know, bleaching the shower grouting,’ she said in a low moan.
‘I don’t know why you say that like it’s a bad thing,’ said Clara. ‘I’d swap a domesticated clean freak for a man-child any day of the week.’
‘I know, but sometimes, being with Josh makes me feel like I’m the man-child,’ Audrey mused. ‘I thought living together would be a bit more... I don’t know... ripping each other’s clothes off at the door, staying in bed all weekend with the Sunday papers.’
‘So, you’re not having enough sex?’
‘Oh no, we are, and it’s great, it’s just we have sex and then talk about the online shopping order or “whether our wine glasses can go in the dishwasher”. I miss the part where we go on exciting mini-breaks and talk about how much we love each other.’
Clara laughed. ‘Being in love doesn’t eradicate life’s admin – it is not a panacea. Wait until you’re pregnant, it’s like being in a romcom directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Everything Jay says pisses me off at the moment. All I can think about is when I’m next going to eat or pee.’
‘I know, you’re right,’ Audrey said, her eyes finding the familiar line of Orion’s belt in the sky.
‘Speaking of which, my peanut-sized bladder calls. Chat tomorrow?’
‘Sure. Good luck.’
‘You too.’
When Josh got back from the recycling centre, he looked over Audrey’s shoulder and said with a sigh, ‘How have you only added four names? I am leaving for Sweden on Wednesday, there’s a lot of pressure on me at work. I can’t do everything for the wedding too.’
She noticed how stressed he looked, the worry lines that had appeared beside his eyes. She felt horribly selfish.
‘I’m sorry.’ She stood up and pulled him into a hug. ‘I know you’ve got a lot on your plate. Leave all the wedding stuff to me, I will sort it.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, I’ll ask my mum for help, you know how she loves a wedding.’
‘Thank you,’ said Josh, kissing her on the forehead. ‘Right, I need to iron a shirt for tomorrow.’
As he left the room, Audrey reopened the online shopping order and filled in the rest of the food they would need for the week.
Josh called from the bedroom, ‘Audrey, have you been eating in bed again?’
‘No,’ she yelled back.
‘Why are there crumbs everywhere, then? We only changed these sheets two days ago.’
Audrey made a face at the door. How did he know? That man had laser crumb vision.
As she opened her wallet to find her card to pay, her fingers stopped on the strip of photographs buried in the inside pocket. The four pictures of Fred, saying ‘I will find you’ and the two of them kissing. She had almost forgotten they were here. She should throw them away. She was living with her fiancé; it wasn’t appropriate to carry around a photo of her kissing another man.
But something made her pause on these photos, the ‘what if’s dancing through her mind. Would she have been doing online shopping orders and spreadsheets with Fred? Or would they have been backpacking around darkest Peru, perhaps living out of a van in Mexico? Was marriage really the beginning of the adventure, or was it the end? She remembered what Fred had said to her that day: ‘Sometimes life feels like a hamster wheel. Sometimes you just need to jump off the wheel.’ Audrey could hear Josh whistling a tune from Winnie-the-Pooh as he ironed in the next room. Sometimes she found his whistling habit endearing, other times she found it intensely annoying. Today, it was the latter. Her gaze lingered on the image of her twenty-two-year-old self. She looked so confident, so assured, so full of fire. What had happened to that girl? Where did she go?
Audrey didn’t need to throw the photos away. She would just take them out of her wallet and put them in a shoebox somewhere – a memento of another life, a reminder of the person she was before. As soon as Josh finished ironing in the bedroom, she would find somewhere more appropriate to put them. But then she started sorting out the next load of washing and forgot to do any such thing.
