has been bothered by the man in the tree – another thing to add to her sense that the country, nay the world, is going to the dogs. Bothered that Teddy got so close to seeing the hanging man. Bothered that Korea has fired another test missile. Bothered that her bin collection has gone fortnightly and that the streets around her home are rubbish-strewn. Funding shortfalls everywhere she looks. Detectives transfer or retire and don’t get replaced. Police inspectorate warning of grave dangers to the service – poor response times, suspects not being apprehended, calls being downgraded. Calling 999? Yes madam, someone should be with you in the next couple of days.
Everything is so much worse than she ever imagined it could get. And middle age keeps on landing the blows.
‘When I get out of bed in the morning,’ Mark says, ‘my whole body hurts for a moment or two.’
‘Oh I know,’ she says. ‘Especially the feet.’
They are pale, with protruding bellies. Saggy-bottomed. In sharp contrast to their children, who amaze them with their shining, taut skin. Lovely legs. When she holds Ted’s face next to hers and looks in the mirror, it’s like an age-related horror show. Like satin next to Viking-era hessian.
At forty-six, Manon has entered an age of crippling anxiety, a period of her life freighted with dread. Her furrowed brow, never un-furrowed, is a bother to Mark Talbot, she can tell (although he’s no ray of sunshine); her joie de vivre abandoned at the coalface of worst-case-scenario planning. What if Teddy drowns or develops a tumour? What if the people she leaves him with are cruel to him? How will she know? Why won’t he sit quietly with a book for an hour or two? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera as the doomy King of Siam said in The King and I.
And marriage. Trying to keep that shit-show on the road. Not bothering to have the same old arguments because they are boring, but fearful of screwing it up because who else would have her, and also: The Children. Frowning at Mark Talbot while she heaves the bins out in the rain. Because if you miss the bins, they’ll stink to high heaven, they’ll stink as bad as your rotting marriage.
In fact, they are not married, she and Mark, but might as well be (all the tedium, none of the tax breaks); slogging through it like most couples. He is her constant companion, which is no small thing; conjoined in the forge of parenthood, which is 70 per cent delight at the emerging personalities of their children and 30 per cent resentful trudge. Meal preparation, dishwasher emptying, overflowing laundry baskets, Lego underfoot. Underneath, she wonders if there might be something darker brewing – how can one tell? Mark might have someone else. His online life might harbour appalling secrets. But these questions she asks only fleetingly because he is her constant companion and life without him would be a dismantling of unconscionable proportions. He is the conversation, the jokes, the affection, the loyalty, all her warmth. She cannot ask the darker questions because she loves him too much. It is better not to know, to settle down to another box set in a state of blissful and un-disruptive not-knowing. Human beings cannot bear too much reality.
The last couple of Januarys have seen a welter of break-ups among friends, Christmas being the straw that breaks the marital back. Mark Talbot secretly harbouring his midlife crisis, the extent of which she cannot fully ascertain. He looks malnourished, despite his pot belly, and unfit. He’s developed a worrying Rennie habit. She watches him pee and worries about his prostate.
‘You get to a point,’ she explained to her oldest friend Bryony, ‘where you realise his shit is never going to get better. His shit will always be your shit.’
‘Yup. You should come on my school run. They’re dropping like flies. Everyone in couples counselling, not all of it good.’
‘I’m in couples counselling,’ Manon replied. ‘On my own.’
‘Result,’ said Bri.
‘I know. I don’t even have to listen to his side.’
‘Isn’t couples counselling on your own just … therapy?’
‘Don’t be absurd. I don’t need therapy. All my problems are because of Mark.’
‘Course they are. Why won’t he go?’
‘Says it would just be me, wanging on,’ Manon said.
It’s not just the same old row about mental load, about who should be doing the utterly tedious bedtime routine while simultaneously preparing a nutritious dinner brimming with fresh veg, but also the deep chasm over The Anxiety of It All. Who is carrying The Anxiety of It All? Is it the person who is prone to anxiety? Or is it that person because one of you refuses to carry the anxiety and cunningly off-loads it onto the other one? She has her suspicions, which she keeps not very close to her (now shelf-like) chest. They barely touch each other these days, her and Mark. The bed is an icy canyon they cannot cross. Kissing is a thing of the past, unless it’s with Ted. It’s as if the physicality of looking after children, the lovely cheek-to-cheek of the bedtime story, the wrap of chubby little legs about the waist, has usurped the physicality of marriage.
Why does the mental load descend with such force? Is it late middle age? The anxiety has smothered her libido, once as bounding as a Labrador pup. It has smothered lightness. No more What the Fuck, Give it a Go, Devil May Care, C’mon Let’s Have a Laugh et cetera, et cetera.
Where were all the full-blown feelings of her youth? Interrailing around Europe at seventeen, having regular epiphanies in Italian churches. Reading Where Angels Fear to Tread as she pulled into San Gimignano station, Tears for Fears through her headphones. The smell of Vidal Sassoon’s Wash & Go, its green bottle perched in plastic soap dishes of campervan showers. God, everything was miraculous then. Music! Literature! Frescoes! She fancied everyone at seventeen, as opposed to no one at forty-six.
It was the absence of weariness. She could sit on a pew in some preposterously gold-leafed church and think seriously about Lucy Honeychurch, and Isabel Archer, and Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda, so fully engaged with them that they might have been interrailing together in some unwieldy, crinoline-wearing troupe. Why couldn’t she live like that for ever? Why did one have to switch energy providers and set a mobile phone alert for bin day, only to find out you cannot set an alert because your phone storage is full, so you decide to pay for more storage (until you die), only to find you don’t know your password. By the time you retrieve your password, you are sixty-five and howling into the abyss.
It’s the children, she thinks. You can’t jack in your marriage because of the children. You can’t stick two fingers up to your job to go and tend orangutans in Borneo. You can’t forget to go food shopping for, like, three weeks. You can’t think fuck this, I fancy doing an MA in Classical Greek. You have to keep the sodding show on the sodding road. Weetabix at 6 a.m. whether you like it or not. Behind every meal is another meal. And can you imagine sitting across the table from some loathsome Internet date (who hasn’t half the charms of Mark Talbot, even on bin day) with your epic brow furrowed to the max, the Über-Furrow, and then looking at your watch and saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t get pissed and come to your place for a shag because I have to put the bins out tonight, otherwise the council won’t come back for a fortnight.’ Politicians so incompetent she can hardly bear to look.
No one replaces the lightbulbs, so they live in an ever-descending gloom.
It’s either the children or it is Death. It might well be Death: that shadow of a notion that you might be more than halfway through and this is all you’ve got, this is all the powder in your keg. New experiences? You’ve had ’em. Except cancer, and that might well be the one remaining new experience left to try. Each holiday a repeat
