his drawing board sitting unused beside him. He’d decided to ‘work from home’ that day—i.e. sit about obsessing about jokes. He was staring at a piece of paper and muttering to himself. I recognised a fellow comedy casualty. ‘Struggling?’
‘Is it just me, or is nothing funny any more? Literally nothing?’
‘I doubt I would even laugh at a video of a cat running into a wall right now. That’s how bad things are.’
‘Why are we doing this, Rachel?’
I spooned Darjeeling into the tea infuser. ‘Because if you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’
He seemed to find this cheering. ‘That’s good. And I can’t go back, can I? Neither can you. But do we actually have to go so far forward? I mean, we’ll be on stage. The last time I did that I was nineteen and rocking out with my band, The Corduroy Underground, at my university summer ball. We were awful.’
‘What did you play?’
‘Bass. I sang too. It was sort of my band.’
‘Do you play now?’
‘Oh, no. Michelle made me put the guitars in the attic. They were cluttering up the place, she said, and Alex might fall over them.’
I thought about this as my tea brewed—I believe that was why it was invented, in fact. To let your thoughts infuse slowly as the leaves did. ‘Patrick? Have you thought any more about doing your own list? They say divorce is the time to do things—you know, experiment. Take back all the parts of yourself you put away for the person you were with.’ As I said it, I imagined bits of him locked in an attic—music, a sense of fun maybe, his laugh, which I hadn’t heard since I moved in. ‘So what would be on yours? You said extreme sports before.’
‘Oh, I don’t have time for a list.’
‘You’ve got time to watch all five series of Breaking Bad,’ I pointed out.
‘Hmm. You have a point.’
‘Go on, write it down. It’ll free you for comedy at least. Get the brain moving, that sort of thing. Tell me one thing you wish you’d done in the past five years.’
‘Get drunk,’ he said right away. ‘That sounds bad, I know. I just used to really enjoy going to the pub, chatting about nothing, getting into stupid rows about who was the best Batman, that sort of thing. Since Alex I’ve been too scared, in case he needs me.’
‘Couldn’t someone babysit?’
‘I don’t know who I’d trust.’ I wondered why he was so reluctant to leave Alex with anyone—had he and Michelle just been really overprotective? ‘I’ll think of a way, I promise. No divorced person should have to do it without the aid of alcohol.’
‘Glad to have you in my corner.’
‘What else?’
‘Skydiving is a definite. I’ve always wanted to try it.’
‘OK. We have getting drunk and skydiving. Maybe not at the same time. More?’
He was on a roll now. ‘I’d like to go to a festival. Michelle never would—she hates camping, and she’s not much of a music fan.’
‘A festival is on my list, so you can’t have it, but you could certainly go. Alex could go to that,’ I said, scribbling it down.
‘Hmm, yes, he probably could. Max too.’ I was getting another mental image—the little dog at Glastonbury, watching a field full of posh hippies dance about with no clothes on.
Patrick’s suggestions were coming fast now. He also wanted to buy a really nice car, take Alex overseas for the first time, learn to fillet fish—I know, of all the things you can do in the world he wanted to handle fish innards; I guess the gut wants what the gut wants—take up climbing and enter Max in a dog show. These were getting more outlandish now. I could more easily imagine Max skydiving than obeying dog commands.
‘You should put that you want to play in a band again,’ I said. ‘That was the first thing you mentioned, remember?’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve sort of lost touch with most of my mates. Been so busy with work and Alex, you know.’
‘True friends don’t mind if you don’t see them for a while.’
‘I’d be rubbish now. I haven’t played in years.’
‘You think I was any good at dancing? The idea is to be slightly terrified at all times.’ I rapped the list with my knuckles. ‘If I can offer my opinion as a professional listmaker, these are too safe.’
‘Skydiving? Climbing?’
‘Yeah, but you’re not scared of those, are you? I mean, no more than a normal person who isn’t mad. You don’t mind heights?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then it’s too safe. So what’s your idea of hell? Like the most terrifying thing you could do of an evening? Nothing with sharks though, please,’ I said quickly.
‘Why not?’
‘I am really, really afraid of sharks.’
‘You know they only cause about ten deaths worldwide per year? More people die from bee stings. Are you afraid of bees?’
‘Bees don’t come up from underneath you and bite you in half.’
‘Or lightning, that’s pretty dangerous. Are you scared of that?’
‘Again, not likely to chomp me.’
‘Tigers? They can be pretty chompy.’
‘I’d see them in time to run away.’
‘I see. So it’s the element of surprise that frightens you?’
‘A bit. Mostly though, it’s the chomping. Now, pick something scary, that isn’t about sharks.’
‘I suppose … go on a date sometime.’ He said this last very suddenly. Almost shyly. ‘I mean, I don’t want … you know. Your number five.’
He was referring to ‘sleep with a stranger’. ‘Er, neither do I.’
‘OK. Dating does scare me, so it definitely counts, but I’d just like a bit of female company. Someone who didn’t want to talk about Thomas the Tank Engine, or whose turn it was to clean the loo, or—’
‘—whether you need to go to the garden centre to buy some trellising, or who was going to call the chimney sweep—’
‘—or the kid, when he sleeps, when he poops, whether his nursery is “pushing” him enough, or—’
‘—if it’s time to change the car and whether you should upgrade to the new Ford Focus this winter.’
He smiled. ‘I
