We dont die of love, p.1
We Don't Die of Love, page 1
Praise for Stephen May
‘Stephen May manages to balance hilarity and sadness in nearly every sentence.’
Suzanne Berne, author of Orange Prize winner
A Crime in the Neighbourhood
‘Stephen May has the sharp eye of David Nicholls and the verve of Kate Atkinson.’
Suzannah Dunn, author of
The Confession of Katherine Howard
Stronger than Skin
‘Gripping from the first page, this addictive tale of toxic love gone wrong will have you cancelling your plans for the rest of the week.’
Sunday Mirror
‘Another great insight into the male psyche. I read this in a day.’
Jane Harris, author of Sugar Money
Wake Up Happy Every Day
‘A compelling read’
The Guardian
‘Acerbic and funny’
New York Times
Life! Death! Prizes!
‘A warm novel, written with a wry wit.’
Kate Saunders, The Times
‘Raw, funny, heartfelt . . . full of surprising tenderness and hope.’
AL Kennedy
Stephen May is the author of five novels including Life! Death! Prizes! which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year and is a winner of the Media Wales Reader’s Prize. He has also written plays, as well as for television and film. He lives in West Yorkshire.
By the same author
TAG
Life! Death! Prizes!
Wake Up Happy Every Day
Stronger than Skin
First published in Great Britain by
Sandstone Press Ltd
Willow House
Stoneyfield Business Park
Inverness
IV2 7PA
Scotland
www.sandstonepress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © Stephen May 2019
Editor: K.A. Farrell
The moral right of Stephen May to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.
ISBNe: 978-1-912240-75-3
Cover design by Stuart Brill
Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
To Caron
Contents
1: The Breakfast Rush
2: Yoghurt with Strawberries
3: Something Weird
4: Hang in there, Mate
5: SWD
6: Why should we be better than that?
7: Outside Catering
8: Tintin and the Last Golden Age
9: Dogs Know
10: The Bigger Person
11: A Private Word
12: Silly Money
13: Hmm
14: Pebbles and Fish
15: Public Displays of Affection
16: These Cases can be Very Complex
17: My Gratitude Journal
18: Stacking Shelves or Something
19: Might Even be Quite Nice
20: Beckham or Similar
21: Murderball
22: A Joint Approach
23: I ate Hummus as a Child
24: A word
25: London Road
26: Snaps
27: We all want to be Remembered
28: Lunch is not for Lovers
Acknowledgements
1
THE BREAKFAST RUSH
Here I am inching out of bed at 5am, careful not to disturb my sleeping wife. Selena can be fierce if woken suddenly. Here I am standing at the marble worktop while the dry heaviness of sleep lifts, while another dawn gathers itself outside the window. Here I am using the vintage coffee grinder she bought for me. This is soothing exercise first thing in the morning. Almost meditative. Quality beans rattling into the business end. Spicy Java, way better than the ones we use in Ernies.
Here I am passing the time as that good coffee chuckles on the hob, trying to do something useful. Putting away the stuff in the dishwasher. In a few minutes it’ll be late enough to risk the radio, to listen to the usual voices do their practised routine. Older man grumbling against the dying of the light. Severely flirty younger woman almost audibly eye-rolling next to him.
Somebody murdered. Some war somewhere. Time for the sport. Time for the weather.
Always different, always the same. The repetition embedded in the format always comforting even when the content is scary. This is how radio works. Reassures even as it alarms. The world will be a more frightening place when it dies, when it finally goes the way of print.
For the entire time Selena and I have been together – the whole thirty-one years – this is how I’ve got us moving into the long corridor of the day. For the first two decades the fuel injection of choice was tea, but at some point in the early twenty-first century it became coffee: two barista-style Americanos made in a proper stovetop pot. Hers white with one xylitol, mine black and unsweetened.
By six I’m back up the stairs where Selena, more or less awake now, gives me a low-voltage smile – that mouth, those lips, those teeth, the laughing beads of her eyes – and my heart twitches.
I give her a quick digest of the lead stories on the Today programme, and in return she gives me a brief run-through of the day’s movements and appointments. The things I need to remember. The things I should pick up from town when I have a minute, after the breakfast rush has faded and before the lunch rush starts. This is a joke, sort of. These so-called rushes are of the most sluggish kind. I try not to rise to it. Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry. I’m across it. Or words to that effect.
This is how it is. Every day the same. Always.
So you’d think I’d know enough to be alarmed when, the day after my fifty-eighth birthday, I woke from restless dreams to find my wife coming into the bedroom with weak Nescafé in my best mug, the vintage Batman mug, the one I hardly use myself for fear it will fade in the dishwasher. Idiot that I am, blind fool that I am, I didn’t even give it a second’s thought. I just accepted the drink and said thank you. Thank you.
People have said – at least Selena has said, our children have said – that I can be a bit thick when it comes to picking up signals about how people are feeling. I am, apparently, tone-deaf to the music made by the body, to the songs that sail beneath the spoken word, but – honestly – looking back, I’m sure that on this particular day there were no signals to pick up. Maybe she was frowning a bit and that wasn’t like her. No hints otherwise of what was to come.
After she handed me the mug, Selena studied me for a long moment.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What?’
Selena took a breath and came right out with it. Her voice quiet, dry, carefully neutral. ‘We are not happy, Luke. At least, we’re not happy enough.’
Then it was tumbling out. All the words in a rush like sparkling water over ice, all cracking and fizz.
‘We both know it . . . Neither of us are getting any younger . . . So we should, yeah, we should split up . . . Give ourselves a chance of living a different kind of life before it is too late . . .’
And so on. Her whole speech was two minutes maybe. Tops.
‘What do you think?’ She was biting her lip, there was a flush high on her cheekbones.
What did I think? I know what I did. I laughed. Actually laughed. A nervous response, I swear. I wasn’t really able to think anything. Anyway, my laughing pissed her off.
‘I’m serious,’ she said.
She was. I could see the little tells, the things I should have spotted earlier. The tension in her neck, the hard compression of her lips. The way she was dressed. Not how she was dressed, but the simple fact of her being dressed at all. On a normal day, Selena took an age to get ready but today she was all prepped for action in jeans and a grey hoodie. Pragmatic and inconspicuous clothing, she could be going on to take part in a bank robbery.
She must have got her clothes on while I was sleeping, which meant she had got things ready the night before. Stashed in the bathroom maybe, so she could rise early and put them on without disturbing me. An assassin’s thinking: do the job, get out unnoticed. Perhaps she was up here sorting out her outfit while I was downstairs reading birthday cards and standing them up on the mantelpiece.
She told me now she was sorry. Over and over. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yeah, yeah. We sat in silence. Me in bed, her on the chair by the dressing table. The dressing table itself, chosen together in an auction room in 1993 or 1994 was, I saw now, clear of many of its usual bottles and tubes, its small pots of lotion. Its brushes and its pencils. Clear space where there was usually clutter. The air growing dense and squeezed, as if the walls were moving closer.
I asked her how long she’d felt like this.
‘It’s been building for a while now. I’ve been trying to keep things together, trying to make it work but . . .’ She shrugged, suddenly helpless. But. But.
I closed my eyes. Somewhere in the distance there was a siren. Someone’s week getting off to a bad start. Maybe a worse start than mine. No comfort in that. Closer to home were pigeons and their self-satisfied cooing. The rumble of traffic, a dog barking. The radio playing to no one in the kitchen. News of an earthquake somewhere. The newsreader’s voi
Selena asked if I was going to speak at all, ever. ‘I didn’t realise it wasn’t working,’ I said.
She shrugged again. That, this shrug said, was the whole problem right there. The whole story of her and me.
‘You’ve never said anything,’ I said.
She sighed, rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve been trying to. Anyway. You think we’re okay? You think we’re still good together? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about splitting up.’
‘I haven’t thought about splitting up,’ I said. And it was true, I hadn’t, not once. In thirty-one years it hadn’t crossed my mind. Not seriously.
‘Crap,’ she said.
That was it. All it took. We were off. At each other’s throats.
You said—
Yeah, but you said—
You did—
Yeah, but you did and anyway that was because—
Well, what about when—
I stopped it all before we really got going. Held up a hand. Went to the bathroom. Closed the door. Locked it. First time I’d done that in years.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Did I look worse or better than a fifty-eight-year-old should? I didn’t know. Couldn’t tell. I did know there was twisting in my guts. I felt sick. I counted to ten. Slowly. Forced myself to breathe.
I needed to get shaved, to get myself together for work and, besides, I’d just got the idea that hot and total war was what she wanted. That she’d be relieved if I got mad, if I said hurtful, unforgiveable things. That she maybe wanted me to spit out the unsayable, the unthinkable. The things you can’t come back from. Maybe she wanted me to break my favourite mug by chucking it against the wall. Coffee all over the designer wallpaper that cost us an arm and a leg. Perhaps she felt that my anger would make it easier for her. Put her in the right somehow. So, better to do the opposite. I would be reasonable instead. Competitively reasonable. The most reasonable anyone has ever been about anything. Infuriatingly reasonable. Unreasonably reasonable.
I opened the bathroom door. Selena was just outside. Arms folded, lips pursed. Face flushed. Eyes blazing. So tense it looked like the bones of her face were straining against the skin. Beautiful. She looked beautiful.
‘I’ve got to get ready,’ I said.
Our faces were about an inch apart. I wondered what she’d do if I kissed her now.
‘You don’t think this is worth talking about,’ she said. It was a statement not a question, and unfair because I know she didn’t want to talk either, she just wanted me to want to.
‘Work. I’ve got work.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The “breakfast rush”.’ She did the quote thing in the air with her fingers. God, I hate it when people do that. Had Selena ever done it before? I didn’t think so.
‘You don’t think Zoe and Wes can cope?’ she said.
‘I don’t want them to have to cope.’
She sighed and turned away.
From back inside the bathroom, I heard her go downstairs, taking them two at a time like she always did.
2
YOGHURT WITH STRAWBERRIES
I didn’t hear the front door open and close but by the time I was downstairs, Selena had definitely gone. The radio was off. There was a letter on the kitchen table. An A4 page taken from the printer, her writing a scrawl, large but still hard to read. She had written fast with the clear intention of getting it finished and getting out of the house before I came down to the kitchen.
Dear Luke, I’m sorry . . . That word again. Sometimes it seems sorry is the easiest word. But this apology was for the way she had told me, not for what she’d said. It didn’t come out how I wanted. The timing was all wrong. I should have waited until the evening, when we could have talked properly. With wine maybe . . .
With wine. Like we would if we were discussing where to go on holiday next.
She wrote that, seeing me lying there, oblivious to what was going on in her head, well, she knew she couldn’t spend another day with this on her conscience, so she had rushed it, just blurted it out and that maybe that hadn’t been the best thing. But at least it was done now. Now we could get on with thinking about practicalities. She wrote that she knew that we would still be friends again when the dust had settled, that we shared too much to lose that. She still respected me. She still loved me. Probably as much as she ever had. She just didn’t want to be married to me.
I scrunched that vindication up and shoved it deep into the food-waste bin, got it right down among the coffee grounds, the banana peel and the onion skins.
Practicalities.
What did I do then? I washed my hands. Rinsed off the food bin cack and then did what I do every morning: lined up my phone, my keys, my glasses and my wallet on the kitchen table. I do this little roll call to make sure the essentials of life are present and correct before placing them in my briefcase. My briefcase was a vintage tan leather one, like something an Oxbridge lecturer might use rather than a cook. It was, like nearly everything half decent I owned, a present from Selena. Something she’d sourced for my fifty-third. Maybe fifty-second. Sometime around then.
I headed out to the car. The gravel snapped, crackled and popped under my shoes. There had been a light frost, cold for early September. I could see my breath in the stinging air. There were still bees and butterflies but there wouldn’t be for long. I zapped the Audi open. There was the comforting bloop, the soothing blink.
Sitting behind the wheel I felt reassured somehow. Hard to feel that the world is going completely to shit when you are cocooned by old but high-quality Vorsprung durch Technik, then, as I came out of the drive, I very nearly flattened a cyclist. My fault. I didn’t see her despite the fact she was wearing a Puffa jacket in vivid yellow.
The gesture she made was crude but justified. I had no excuse. I didn’t see her because I wasn’t looking.
I thought again about the evening before. A fish-pie from the freezer with a glass of white wine. Yoghurt with strawberries for dessert. The half-watching of some Netflix thing, the half-reading of articles embedded in links sent to us by friends, the half-listening to a couple of albums – Bowie’s Low, Kate Bush’s live album. Then, in bed, a few pages of books. Selena: Kate Atkinson. Me: Steig Larsson. The whole evening couldn’t have been more ordinary. A birthday in the lowest possible key. I had assumed we’d celebrate properly at the weekend.
I cast my mind back further: what about over the last weeks? Any warnings there? Nothing. We’d even had sex not long back.
Suddenly I regretted keeping my temper earlier, regretted just getting ready for work because, well, because, fuck work. I had a lot to say now. I should have thrown that mug against the wall. I should have watched that unforgivably under-powered Nescafé splatter across that overpriced wallpaper.
I drove towards work for a while but it was no good. My neck hurt, my eyes were sore. There was a taste in my mouth, metallic and sour. I pulled into a side street, turned the engine off and called her. The voicemail kicked in. I didn’t leave a message and was about to pull away from the kerb when my phone pinged.
You okay? A text from Selena. No kiss, I noticed. The first time ever she’d texted without a kiss? Maybe.
I called again. Voicemail again. I was being screened out. Text was clearly how we were going to do this. How very fucking modern.
There was rage building again and I welcomed it in, the heat and pressure of it. The energy of it. The way it hurt.
I pecked out: What about the kids?
Feeble. Wished I could call it back.
No reply for ages. A minute at least. Then: Kids will be fine. They’re grown-ups now. More or less. They’ll have two places to come back to instead of one.
A few seconds passed, while I tried and failed to think of a reply but then another ping. She had more to say. I know it’s a shock. I know it must be confusing. I’ve had a lot more time to get used to it. But it’s for the best, I really believe that. For both of us. And the hard part is done now.
I was thinking: is it? Is it really? Will the kids be fine? Really? Yes, so they’re twenty-three and nineteen. But kids stay toddlers where their parents are concerned. Our kids – whatever they say, however they act, however old they are – always want a cuddle or a treat. Always want their parents to be waiting exactly where they left them in case they need them. They don’t want two homes to come back to, their certainties blown apart when their backs are turned.
