don’t think the sausages are still okay,’ I said.
‘I’ll check when I get in,’ he replied.
There were a lot of conversations about freezing and defrosting these days. I wondered if all couples were the same.
Yet I knew I was lucky to have Pete. He made delicious food. He still took pride in his appearance and hadn’t lost his teeth and hair. He did more on the domestic front than many other men – in fact some weekend mornings, it was a race to see who could get the washing in the machine first. There was sometimes a tinge of passive-aggressiveness to it. We had sex every two months but there were also long periods where we didn’t do it all and watched TV. Yes I needed to practice more gratitude. The problem was it was hard work, this long-term relationship stuff. The practicalities of life took over and you were left with two people exchanging functional information on how to get from A to B. A bit like when you ask someone directions and then don’t listen and walk the way you originally intended anyway.
An image of Pete popped into my mind. The night we’d first met in a bar in Ladbroke Grove. It had been back in the days before mobiles, before screens, when people looked at each other a lot more (I’d heard from younger colleagues at work that this rarely happened much anymore). I’d had quite a lot of beer to drink (back when beer was trendy for girls to drink), and a friend had introduced me. He was tall, had a mop of dark hair, and an Irish accent.
‘He’s bad news,’ my friend had said. ‘He just goes from one girl to the next.’
I was a woman that loved a challenge and I treated getting Pete like a project.
We’d spent that first night kissing in the corner. We kissed a lot. I tried not to think about it now because it felt like two different people. It had been. Two people without a kid, without the stress of paying a mortgage and bills each month, without all the domestic hum drum that took over, without acres of TV to get through each day.
Just two people that really liked one other.
In the beginning our relationship had been exciting. Like all couples, who fancy each other, we’d taken every opportunity to have sex. We’d had sex in a park, in a toilet, in my old bedroom when I took him to meet my parents (my parents weren’t there for the sex part). Pete had never been a massive talker and had grown up in a family where his mum talked enough for the entire family – the rest of the family nodded or shook their heads. Nevertheless we had that initial phase of getting to know each other, sharing key childhood experiences, music we loved – all that stuff.
Then, like many couples who have been together a long time, we stopped asking those questions. Pete often said things like ‘You told me that story already,’ or ‘I know how this one ends.’ And it was true, there wasn’t much original content. And he hated my work chat. Initially I’d come back full of venom and stories about my day, I’d download them the split-second I came through the door. I had that need to get it all off my chest. Pete was oftentimes looking to provide a basic solution to these problems, so he’d say things like, tell him to bugger off, or just don’t do that project if it isn’t in your job description. This was fine, but what he didn’t understand was that I didn’t want a solution. I JUST WANTED HIM TO LISTEN. And sympathise. Like a friend would.
‘You can’t have conversations with your partner like you do with your mates,’ Kath said.
But this left me wondering what you could do with your partner if conversations and sex were often off the agenda.
What did that leave?
And so I stopped telling him these work stories. I stopped telling him the old stories (he’d heard them all). I stopped telling him. It made me sad but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about it. It didn’t feel like something that dinner in a nice restaurant would fix.
On top of this we’d been through three miscarriages after Bella. Miscarriages can bring you closer together but they’d seemed to push us further apart instead. We wanted to stay together.
But life was tiring and we didn’t have energy to put into it anymore.
After lunch, I went back to the silent, air-conditioned tomb. The air con had been turned up so high that several of my colleagues were wearing thick blankets wrapped around their shoulders. It made the whole place feel a bit desperate – like we were in some sort of disaster zone, just trying to hold our shit together until somebody rescued us. I shoved my headphones on, and spent twenty minutes trying to construct a Spotify playlist that would encourage me to run more often.
Phoebe came back into my field of vision. She mouthed the words, WHERE’S THAT BRIEF? at me and I made a sort of shrugged shoulder, not sure where, gesture and she was off again. It was obvious that there was a need for more briefs today. We were very busy but not busy enough.
I whacked some KRS-One on. An old P. Diddy track. The minute those beats started I felt more energetic. Hip-hop made me feel like I could conquer the world. Hip-hop artists never struggled with their careers or worried that they’d spent too much on a bobble hat and would need to return it. I love hip-hop (classics from the 90s). This stemmed back to my childhood growing up in Beckenham – basically you either liked hip-hop or dance music and I tended to be more of a hip-hop gal. It seemed as if those lyrics were written for a white, middle-class girl dealing with boys who thought I was too tall and boyish for them and friendship dynamics which changed every two minutes. Now if you clocked me in my Boden skirt, grey roots just starting to show through, you’d think I was listening to Coldplay or some such dross but I retained my tiny sliver of youthful abandon through listening to LL Cool J, DMX, Dr Dre and Wu-Tang Clan.
There was something about hip-hop that was remarkably confidence boosting.
Like many females, I didn’t over-index on confidence and was drawn to people who did. LL Cool J never woke in the morning with imposter syndrome. He didn’t have to read positive affirmations to know what he stood for or what he wanted to accomplish that day. It’s was awe-inspiring. One day I would launch a magazine and it would give advice from rappers to middle aged women. It would be called Dope Housewives, and would blow Good Housekeeping out of the water. Who wanted to look at Judith Chalmers in a floral jumpsuit or read articles about body brushing when you could read ‘Snoop Dog’s 10 Tips for a Hot Damn Sex Life?’. It was accepted that your tastes became more conservative, the older you became but why did this have to be so?
Eventually, I came back to the slides I needed to finish off. Some of the presentation seemed to be rather repetitive, but I could always hide those slides, or delete them once I’d finished.
I couldn’t help myself and checked Instagram first, scrolling through another fifty images of women who were apparently ‘killing it’, ‘nailing it’, ‘embracing the day,’ and the like. I wrote another slide. Then went back on social media. I kept this not-very-virtuous-circle going for the rest of the afternoon.
‘The synergy between cleaning and sleeping doesn’t feel optimum for a bum product offering.’
‘Today’s the first day of the rest of your life.’
‘A core barrier is the fear of toxicity next to baby’s private parts.’
‘The only thing to fear is fear itself.’
