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An L-shaped pile of lavish squishiness that takes up most of two walls, indulgently big for two, far too big for one.
He remembers their housewarming: friends piled on there, laughing and talking.
And the occasional evening when Marius was home, hands warm on his ankles, the evening drawing in around them.
That night was rain-struck, uncountable heartbeats thudding all around me. And I flooded the next morning. I came downstairs, and there was water creeping under my door, soaking into the carpet and lapping at the skirting boards, bringing with it the clinging stench of wet and dirt.
My front door was swollen and sticky. It made a sound like a sob as I pulled it open. Coat over my pyjamas and Adam’s wellies on my feet, I stepped over my hunched and sodden sandbags, and into the drowned street.
It took Mrs. P a little longer than usual to come to the door, but she was in rubber boots too, eating Crunchy Nut Cornflakes direct from the packet, and seemed to be in good spirits. In all honesty, she was probably better off than I was. I had talked to Marius about flood prevention measures, but he had always seemed distracted.I don’t think either of us, at the time, had realised what it meant, but I probably should have known something was deeply wrong when the man I loved and lived with was reluctant to discuss the protection of our recently purchased home. But Mrs. P had stone floors and a sump with a submersible electric pump in the kitchen. She’d wanted the house, and Mr. P had said, “Well, if this is the one, we’ll make it work.” So the floods had come and gone, and they’d moved the furniture, and mopped the floors, and stayed.
Forever had been the plan.
“The thing is,” Mrs. P told me once, “you never really believe you’re going to die. Even when you’re as old as I am. I don’t believe in God and heaven and all that malarkey—it’s the sort of thing that gets lost when you’ve lived through a war—so I don’t think I’ll ever be with him again, but it’ll be nice, in a way, when it’s all over, not to miss him anymore.”50
I had missed Marius at first. But what were ten years to fifty? The violence of loss had become an ache which had faded into something else entirely: simply an awareness of absence, not even necessarily of a person, but of a life I thought I’d had.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, hovering uselessly on Mrs. P’s doorstep. “Do you need anything?”
She helped herself to another handful of cereal. “Get along with you, Edwin. Everything’s fine. I don’t need you fussing over me.”
“I’m not fussing. I’m after your cornflakes.”
She held out the packet. “How’s your place doing?”
“Not…not as well as I’d like. I f-feel the water should be on the outside.”
“You need to get those carpets up.”
“I know.” I just hadn’t quite managed to…face doing it. I didn’t want my house—my things—to be damaged, but what was I protecting themfor? When it mattered only to me?
I said good-bye to Mrs. P, extracting a promise that she would call me or, at the very least, bang on the wall if anything happened, and sploshed back.
So far it was only the hallway. I toed at the edges of the carpet, half-heartedly trying to ease it up, uncertain whether I was trying to understand what I was feeling or keep it at bay. After a moment or two, I wandered into the living room and stared at the sofa.
I realised how long it had been since I’d spent any time here.
My own house, and I’d quarantined myself from part of it. There was dust on the top of the television and on the mantelpiece. Spaces on the walls and on the DVD shelves. All that was left of Marius: the places he used to be.51
The sofa was modular. It was our…my—it’d always beenmy, even when I’d believed otherwise—most extravagant purchase, and I had no intention of letting an investment of that magnitude get wrecked in a flood. I began to pull the cushions off, carrying them upstairs and out of harm’s way one by one. Then I detached the various pieces and stood looking at the unwieldy jigsaw that was left. When I’d bought the damn thing, I’d assumed there would be two people to do this.
That I wouldn’t be alone. With my life in unmanageable pieces.
I was sweating by the time I pushed and rolled and heaved and bullied and coaxed part of my sofa into the hall. And then I wascrying, and I didn’t really know why. Despair and frustration and longing and churned-up grief. Things that should have long grown stale but came upon me now as fresh as the first days of spring. Too bright, too cold, this possibility of hope when my instinct was to be glancing over my shoulder at shadows I knew of old. Oh, why was it so easy to believe Marius didn’t want me, and so impossible to accept that Adam might?
I was sitting on the floor, weeping with undignified abandon, when I caught the telltale glare of yellow through the panels on the front door.
A knock.
And fuck. Fuck. I was sure I was visible from the other side, so while I could have pretended I wasn’t in, or I hadn’t heard, it would have been unbearably obvious that I was, and I had. I scrubbed the moisture from my eyes with the heels of my hands and scrambled to answer.
It was Adam, a little tousled—not in any of the ways I might have, at a better moment, imagined—and a little haggard. I hated to think how I must have looked to him: sweaty and tear-sticky, red-eyed, dressed in pyjama bottoms and Wellington boots, and my rumpled Oxford dodo T-shirt.52
Pitiful.
What a lucky escape, he must have been thinking. And he’d been right. Of what possible use could I be to man like Adam? When I couldn’t even say yes.
“I’m just checking in.” It was the first time he hadn’t met my eyes. Hadn’t come searching for me in my silence. And he was tootall for my doorway, his shoulders hunching awkwardly as he tried not to fill up the whole space. “Look, I know it’s not the time, but I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know what I was thinking. Or probably I wasn’t, because I’d like to believe if my brain had been involved at any point I wouldn’t have answered ‘I recently broke up with my boyfriend’ with ‘Hey, what about going out with me?’”
