Will and I were pretty solid. Maybe even permanent. Wrong!
‘Look, Rosie,’ he put down his can, ‘I just mean …’
He was probably trying to be conciliatory. I wasn’t.
‘Forget it,’ I snapped.
‘Coffee?’ said Caz, very brightly. Just like the perfect hostess, only she staggered a bit and fell onto Jamie’s lap, which spoiled the effect.
‘No, no, I don’t want coffee,’ I said, angry and flustered and utterly wrong-bloody-footed, ‘I think I want to go home.’ I marched out into the hall, wriggled my feet into my boots and left.
Will came after me, and I didn’t know if I was pleased or not. I could hear his footsteps but he said nothing. His long legs meant he soon caught me up. He walked alongside me, matching his steps to mine, looking straight ahead. And we walked like that, side by side in silence all the way to the flat. My flat.
As soon as we got in, I turned to him. ‘Are you really going to Dubai?’
‘Who knows?’ he shrugged. ‘It’s just a thought, an option, a possibility.’
‘But what about me?’
‘Well you can come too, if you like.’ He hunched his hands into his pockets.
‘If I like? If I like? You make me sound like an optional extra! I thought we had a future together.’
‘Did you? Did you really?’ Those big brown eyes flashed and I didn’t like it.
‘And if you think we have a future together,’ he said, ‘why is it that all I ever hear is what you want? You want to work in London. You want the bigger flat. You bought the bigger sofa, without even mentioning it to me. You pay the bills and just tell me how much to cough up. Fine, fine it’s your flat after all, as you keep reminding me.’
I was stunned. ‘I don’t feel like that. I thought …’
‘What did you think? Come on, tell me, I really want to know.’
‘I was frightened,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to be dependent on you.’
‘Why not? Don’t you trust me?’
‘It’s not like that. No. It’s nothing to do with trust. It’s just that … Well, I don’t know. We’ve never talked about the future, not really.’
And we hadn’t. We’ve planned holidays and weekends away but no more than that, not what you would call a proper, grown-up, till death us do part future. Maybe it was too frightening to contemplate.
‘Well let’s talk about it now. Come on, Rosie, what do you want? What do you want from me? From us?’
‘I don’t know.’ And that was honest. I had sometimes daydreamed of marrying Will. Not the big white wedding, but just being married to him, having him there all the time. He was the only person I’ve ever daydreamed like that about. The only one.
But I had never told him. Because there were times that the same dream could terrify me. The thought of being with just one person for ever. Well, it’s seriously scary, isn’t it?
And Will … well, he wasn’t exactly husband material. I mean, he was nearly thirty and he still acted like a big kid. Away from work all he and Jamie cared about was football and drinking and playing computer games and the bloody grand prix and flash tellies.
‘You don’t know?’ he repeated, still waiting for my answer.
I looked up at him. ‘Will, I love my job and I’m just beginning to get somewhere. I want to see how far I can go.’
‘Fair enough. You’ll go far, Rosie. We both know that.’ Full of angry energy, he was pacing up and down the tiny sitting room. ‘But I don’t know if I’m part of your plan. Frankly, Rosie, I haven’t a clue where I am with you. You want everything your own way.’
‘But it’s not like that …’ I was stunned, struggling to find ways of saying what I thought. And then he nearly floored me with his next question.
‘Tell me, do you see yourself having children?’
‘Hey!’ I tried to joke. ‘You can’t ask questions like that at interviews. Not allowed.’
Will wasn’t laughing. ‘I want to know.’
‘Well yes, since you ask, one day, probably,’ I said. I’d daydreamed about that too. A boy and a girl, with Will’s blond hair and big brown eyes. But not yet. Maybe I’d have them at some vague point in the future.
It was time for me to go on the attack. ‘And what about you? Do you want children?’
‘Maybe, one day. Depends.’
‘Depends on what?’ I asked. And the Devil got into me, because I snapped, ‘On whether you can fit it in between the PlayStation and the plasma TV? Or another new car? You’ve got to be a grown-up to be a parent, Will, not an overgrown bloody kid yourself.’
Of course it all went downhill from there. We’d both had too much to drink and said too many things that shouldn’t have been said and that I’m not even sure we meant.
I called him spoilt, immature and childish, among other things. He called me a selfish, unthinking control freak, among other things. It didn’t get us anywhere. In the end I went off to bed and I could hear Will still crashing around the sitting room, impatiently flicking through the TV channels, until he finally went to sleep on the sofa. My new sofa.
And me? I lay in bed and tried to re-run the row. Did I really want to be married? Yes of course. Maybe. But now? Frankly, the thought frightened me. What if Will went to Dubai? What if I went to London?
What if?
My head was thumping. I hardly slept, and in the morning my head was worse … which is why when we got to The News on Monday morning – in Will’s car, in silence – I’d been hoping to crawl quietly to my desk and just plod through the day – but the editor, Jan Fox, known to all as the Vixen, spotted me.
‘Rosie! A word please!’
The Vixen was standing at her office door, eyes glinting, coppery highlights shining. In one hand she held a large sheet of paper, on which the perfect scarlet nails of the other hand were lightly drumming. It was not a happy drumming.
I realised that the piece of paper she was so obviously hacked off about was a proof copy of the next day’s feature page. A feature on childcare, one I’d written. My heart sank even further. Happy Monday.
‘Do you realise,’ she said, shooting me one of her fierce looks, ‘how incredibly young and silly this makes you sound? It’s written as though everybody in the world has a responsibility to look after children with the sole exception of their bloody parents.’
‘But I was just quoting from the reports and the government spokesman …’
‘Yes, I know you were,’ she sighed. ‘I just wonder about your generation
