all the longing faded away, and sex never crossed my mind unless it was happening. It was like the jam in a doughnut – the sticky, messy bit that came wrapped in lovely sweet dough. A typical post-coital scene looked something like this:
‘Chief, where did you put my knickers?’
‘Huh?’
‘You know, sex is like violin practice: I have a hard time getting started. I can’t be bothered, and then afterwards I feel like it was worth the effort, and I’m, like, “Hmm. I should really do that more often …” So I’m sorry … Jack?’
He’d already be asleep. This kind of activity took a lot out of him, and a twenty-four-hour post-coital depression would inevitably descend.
And so, things pootled pleasantly along until he went mad. When he stopped being mad we ended up in London, like everybody else, living first in a vicarage, then on a council estate and, finally, in our own flat in a mansion block infested with homeless drug addicts. We got easy, silly jobs writing nonsense, and hung out with my friends after work. About five years on, everything was trundling along nicely, but there wasn’t much magic in the air. I was a freelance recruitment copywriter, stuck in the armpit of the advertising industry. I used my wits for the powers of evil, luring people into unappealing jobs. And, for some reason, I felt sad as soon as I had any free time. Our flat was infested with mould, insects scurried through the gaps, the electrician said we’d die if we used the shower, but the sports centre had only one hot one and that was marked ‘disabled’. The day a disabled person banged on the door, I realized I’d had it with London. I walked back through the frost, marched into the bedroom and shoved Jack’s toe.
‘Chief,’ I said, ‘wake up. I want to get married.’
I had a plan: we’d go to San Francisco and ride the dot-com boom with our friends Tim and Tina (T&T). My friend Ben handled fish-fingers and sanitary towels at a fancy product agency in Soho: if I wanted a sexy job like that, I knew I had to move to where the economy was exploding. The Great Move would also salve my travel complex. The Brontës had done OK stuck in Yorkshire; my grandparents would never have left Scotland even if they’d had the chance; my parents thought going to France was an adventure. But expectations had changed, and my lack of international experience had become a source of embarrassment. By the time my thirtieth birthday was just visible with the naked eye, if you squinted hard at the horizon, it seemed I’d missed the boat, the bus and the plane. I was surrounded by well-travelled friends with great photo collections, and all I’d notched up were several trips to Europe, mostly gloom-laden, including a waterlogged French hitch-hiking trip that tor salesman – had taken to waking me up by stroking my forearm. He followed me to Boston airport and sent love-letters for months, culmintriggered my worst cold sores ever. I’d also spent three weeks with a youth orchestra in New England, where my host – a forty-seven-year-old refrigeraating in an offer to leave his wife. ‘Abroad’ seemed a dangerous place. I didn’t want to go anywhere, I just wished I’d already been.
But if I lived abroad, it wouldn’t be ‘abroad’ any more. What I needed was a Significant Change of Address.
Jack agreed to my proposal. I would now be officially, legally secure. ‘Chief,’ I said, ‘I really like belonging to someone, don’t you? Chief?’
‘Mmmm.’
I was surprised that the M-word tasted so delicious. We were being very pragmatic about it, but we did love each other, and … well, I glowed when I thought about it. It would have been nice if Jack had asked me, but I felt honoured to be licensed to reproduce with a man of such noble bearing: with his perfect skin, vision and teeth, and no allergies, he was in the fast lane of the gene pool.
We visited my parents to break the good news. They were delighted by the M-word. ‘Marriage is a promotion for any woman!’ beamed Dad, who wrote a cheque for a thousand pounds on the spot.
Mum was equally unequivocal: ‘Congratulations!’
I was glad that she wasn’t upset – but why the hell wasn’t she upset? Her only daughter, her closest friend and confidante, the only person she could argue with properly, was moving to the other side of the world. ‘Congratulations’?
The next day, I found her weeping in the downstairs loo. I put my arm round her shoulders. ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’
‘Nothing, darling.’ She sniffed. ‘Mother’s all right.’
‘Are you upset about me going away?’
‘Oh, my darling, I didn’t want you to see me like this. I’m going to miss you, of course, but this is a marvellous opportunity for you both and Mother wants the very best for you. You go for it, my darling!’ Sniff.
‘I don’t want you to be sad, Mum.’ I knew she would be, though. I was about to embark upon a grand, transatlantic guilt trip.
Sadly, Jack wasn’t so keen on the sentimentality. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, one day, ‘this wedding, it’s sort of lying.’
‘S’pose so,’ I muttered.
‘Isn’t it, Lins?’
I staunched the hurt with practicalities. ‘Do you want to return all the cheques, then?’
Two months later, Jack and I flew out to see if we liked San Francisco. We stayed with T&T, my dot-com friends. The sun was shining, and there was an English grocery opposite, so we gave it the thumbs-up and booked a wedding for Friday afternoon. Though Mum had initially been upset about me getting married overseas, threatening to book flights for the whole family, 5,500 miles proved an effective deterrent. I couldn’t see myself playing the princess in a family drama: I didn’t look the part, and we hated being together, so what was the point of all that razzmatazz and expense? My dad wasn’t arguing. So, the day after I turned twenty-seven, Jack and I tied the knot in a sweet and minimal way, witnessed by T&T, plus a party of Japanese schoolchildren on a guided tour about seismic retro-fitting. You don’t get City Hall to yourself for nineteen dollars.
We dressed up for the occasion: I wore Miss New Zealand’s dress from the finals of Miss Universe 19895 and Jack teamed a suit with a partridge tie. And the glamour didn’t end there: our wedding night was spent in the luxury suite of the Santa Cruz Econolodge (eighty-three dollars, plus tax), with our two friends. After dinner, we smuggled three bottles of champagne into the hotel pool, splashing ourselves silly then weaving back to the suite, where Jack fell headlong into the master bedroom. I climbed on to the couch with T&T, who had switched on the Shopping Channel. ‘What are you doing, Lins?’ Tim grinned. ‘You should be getting in there!’
‘He was talking about consummation,’ I muttered, and Tina passed me a cushion. Soon the peaceful snores of my new/old husband were wafting through the plasterboard partition and I left my friends to their fat-busting machines and limited-edition hand-painted porcelain dolls.
‘Goodnight.’
A couple of days later Jack and I flew back to London and started the visa-application process. After nine months of tedium, the US Embassy told us that, while our massive stack of paperwork was in order, I couldn’t have a Green Card unless Jack had a US address and a job that paid more than $22,000 a year. While he sorted that out, I had to stay in the UK.
Separation was a daunting prospect, but I was determined not to give up. I told Jack when to resign from his London
