AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Who knows? Who knows what anything means?
Who knows what we are saying to each other anymore?
After dinner, which I eat and Matt doesn’t, he tells me to go and sit down while he cleans up the kitchen. Encouraged by my practice this afternoon, I take out the sheet music for Beethoven’sPathétiqueand prop it against the piano. Deciding the first movement is too dramatic, I opt instead for theAdagio. A mistake. I don’t make it past the first three bars before I can no longer see.
The doorbell rings. It will be Neil.
I wipe my eyes with my sleeves, try to compose myself. That’s the trouble with beautiful music, beautiful anything: it makes you cry.
The doorbell rings again.
Fred is asleep in his Moses basket by my feet. I don’t want to face Neil – things are too awkward between us – but Matt must be upstairs and I don’t want the doorbell to go again in case it wakes the baby.
I haul myself off the piano stool and hurry down the hallway. ‘Coming.’
Faced with Neil’s bulky outline in the frosted glass, I stop, take a breath.
Another moment. I open the front door.
Shock flashes across Neil’s face. He blushes, actually blushes, as he says hello.
‘Hi,’ I reply, trying to keep it light.
He looks at the ground. The silence between us lasts a beat too long.
‘How’s things?’ He looks up, meets my eye for the briefest second before returning his gaze to his trainers, kicking at a seam of moss between the flagstones. He looks like he’s put on weight. His face is redder than I remember, a little puffy.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You know. Keeping on.’
Behind me comes the flush of the upstairs loo.
‘We’re going to the Lovegoods’ thing together, I think,’ he says. ‘Next Saturday.’
‘Oh. Is that what Matt said?’
He twitches. ‘Well, no, I mean, he said we might. I can’t remember, to be honest. Bella said she might do your hair on Friday?’
‘Oh. OK. Yes, I’ll text her.’
He shrugs. ‘Don’t have to decide now, do we? I’m sure Johnnie Fartpants will manage without us.’
Neither of us laughs. I will Matt to return downstairs, but there is no sound.
Neil opens his mouth to speak. ‘I—’
‘You guys could come here first,’ I say at the same time. ‘We could have a drink, see where that takes us.’
‘Yeah. Yeah. We’ll definitely do that.’ He nods. The tips of his ears glow deep pink; I hear a short breath of air escape his nostrils. How quiet this street is, especially at night. Really, you could hear a pin drop. It’s as if no one lives here at all.
Matt’s quick footsteps thunder on the stairs.
‘Mate,’ he calls. ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear the door.’
Thank God. He eases past, his hands warm on my shoulders. He smells of fresh laundry, a trace of sweat. He will put both kits in the machine to wash when he gets in, hang them out before he goes to bed. Quite how he keeps powering forward I have no idea.
A brief kiss on my cheek. ‘See you in an hour.’
And they’re off. I stand on the threshold of my house and watch them jog towards Thameside Lane. What they find to talk about, I cannot fathom. The party, obviously, which it appears we are going to whether I want to or not. Perhaps all Matt’s conversations with Neil are like the ones he has with me, like everyone except Jen has with me: the conscious act of not talking aboutthat.That second-by-second, beat-by-beat morning, when my life’s rhythm collapsed, that yesterday last year today, when time slowed and quickened and warped in a million different ways and I left my body, never really to return. This is why I can see myself so clearly that day, as someone separate, some poor cow I am floating above, in space. Barbara calls it disassociation. A defence mechanism. Like watching a supernatural film from between your fingers – to lessen the fright.
