This Is How It Ends (6 page)

She knows it’s a silly way to spend your time, but it gives her pleasure and it doesn’t do anyone any harm. Harmless pleasures, that’s what she tells herself. I’m finally discovering the joy of harmless pleasures.

Sometimes Della wonders, is Addie just a little bit autistic? Mild end of the spectrum, something that was never diagnosed. The way she lines her mugs up on the shelf, upside down, their handles all turned the same way. The way she laughs when the kids mess up her pencils, you just know she’s going to spend the evening rearranging them.

“I love the way you use the word mild,” says Hugh with a snort.

Della teases her about it. “Monica,” she says, “you’re being Monica again.” And Addie will laugh and pretend to be offended. But actually Addie doesn’t mind being Monica. She’s a tidy person, she always has been. Now it’s verging on a pathology. Harmless pleasures, she tells herself, as she tucks shoehorns into all her shoes and lines them up on a rack at the bottom of her wardrobe.

Sometimes she feels like she’s putting her affairs in order for some kind of a departure. She imagines her life is winding down. She’s just filling time.

YOU KNOW WHEN YOU’RE
at a wedding, or a dinner dance, and you’re longing for it to be over so you can go home?

The champagne reception was enjoyable, the food was good. But now the meal is over and the tables have been cleared back to make space for the dancing. You’re still nursing that last glass of wine. You were talking to someone during the meal but now they’ve gone outside to smoke and you’ve been left alone. It’s too early to leave, it would be rude to leave now. But once the band gets started, once people are up on the dance floor, you’ll be able to slip away. You can whisper good-bye to the hosts. Or maybe you’ll just get up to go to the bathroom and then keep on going, sure nobody will notice anyway.

The band is playing a Beach Boys medley and the men are throwing their jackets away, the women kicking off their shoes so they can dance in their stocking feet.

You’re standing at the door, your coat draped over your arm, and you’re scanning the room to check if there’s anyone you need to say good-bye to. But nobody seems to have even noticed you’re leaving.

You’re just about to slip off. But just at that moment, the band starts playing your favorite song. Not just a song you’re fond of but your favorite song ever, the one that always makes you feel like dancing. The one that makes you forget all your troubles and makes you want to live. You stand there in the door and you don’t know what to do. Do you stay or do you go?

That’s where Addie was when she met Bruno.

S
HE WAS WOKEN
by an almighty racket, a ferocious banging on the door. It was more like a pummeling, an irregular drumming. She had a fair idea who it was.

She looked over at Bruno but he’d already pulled the duvet up and over his head and he was burrowing down under it. It was dark in the bedroom, with the curtains drawn. Impossible to tell what time it was. Addie laid her head back down on the pillow, closed her eyes, and hoped they’d go away. But of course they didn’t.

More banging. Little fists thumping, the hollow sound of a small pudgy palm slapping the door. She rolled over the edge of the bed and sat there for a minute trying to get her bearings before she grabbed her dressing gown and staggered out through the living room to the front hall. She opened the door just a chink, keeping her body behind it as she placed her face in the open crack.

“How did I guess it was you lot?”

They were all jumping up and down. They made a dizzying sight this early in the morning, all blinding pink and frenetic activity.

“We got a fish, we got a fish.”

Stella was the one holding the bowl. She was squealing at the others. “
Stop
, you’re going to spill it. If you spill it, I’ll kill you.

“He wants to meet Lola,” she said. “Can we introduce him to Lola?”

“Lola will eat him,” said Elsa drily, her little voice husky.

“We’re going to call him Lola.”

“No, we are
not
!” cried Stella. “He’s my fish and I’m going to name him.”

“We don’t even know if he’s a boy or a girl.”

“Guys. Your fish is lovely, but you can’t come in,” said Addie. “It’s too early. I’m not dressed.”

They just stood there looking at her with their small bewildered faces. When they heard their mother coming up behind them, they all turned round.

“Hi, Ad,” said Della, sweeping down the steps, car keys still in her hand, her coattails trailing after her.

“Hi, Dell,” said Addie.

“What’s up?”

Addie answered in a slow whisper, spitting the words out carefully so she wouldn’t have to repeat them. “I had a sleepover last night.”

O. Della’s mouth made a perfect circle and she responded in the same stilted tone. “OK, girls. Auntie Addie had a sleepover last night.”

“That’s right,” said Addie, echoing her words and nodding. “A sleepover.”

“O-K,” said Della. “What we’re going to do, ladies, is we’re going to take the fish upstairs and we’ll introduce him to your grandfather. Lola can meet the fish another time.”

Addie watched through the crack in the door as Imelda herded them all back up the steps. When she got to the top she turned round and did a little mime act, sweeping her fingers under her eyes.

As soon as they were out of sight Addie shut the door softly and padded into the bathroom. Sure enough she had panda eyes, dry riverbeds of mascara streaking her face as far down as her cheekbones. As quietly as she could, she opened the tap up to a trickle of water. With a wet cotton pad, she swept the sludge away. Brushed her teeth and swished some mouthwash around her gums. She straightened her eyebrows with her wet toothbrush.

When she came back into the bedroom, she had the strangest feeling that she was seeing it for the first time. She took in the grubby paintwork on the walls and the flimsy old green curtains on the high basement window. Unlined curtains, they’d been hand-hemmed at the bottom, a loose tacking stitch that broke through to the other side, dimpling the fabric all the way along. Those curtains had been up in Della’s bedroom once upon a time. But they’d ended up down here, along with everything else that wasn’t wanted.

The armchair in the corner, the battered ottoman against the wall, the wooden floor lamp that somebody had tried to paint over with white emulsion: they were all sorry-looking things, the kind of things you’d expect to find in a holiday home. Even the sheets on the bed, the duvet cover and the pillowcases, nothing matched. The fitted sheet was navy blue and the duvet cover was blue-and-white gingham and the pillowcases were all bottle green. A faint smell of dry dust off them, the smell of a neglected hot press.

This is all he knows of me, she thought as she slid back into the bed. This tatty basement. The little dog. The injured father lurking upstairs. She went through it like a list. And as she did so, she felt a weight lift off her. I don’t ever have to tell him anything else about myself if I don’t want to. We can stop right here.

When she turned towards him, she found him lying with his back to her, curled up towards the wall. The harsh winter light coming down through the window highlighted a wide expanse of freckly skin, a few dark hairs sprouting from his shoulders. She threaded her hand through the gap between his arm and his waist, resting her face against his back. She breathed in the smell of him, so familiar already.

She was asleep again within seconds.

IT WAS NEARLY
lunchtime by the time he left.

Poor Lola was dying to get out. Addie had to struggle to clip the lead onto her collar. She was skittering around in circles, trembling with the force of her desire to get going.

“OK, love, OK. We’re going, I swear.”

The tide was in, so they went all the way down as far as the park. She let Lola off the lead as soon as they got inside the gates. She had her iPod with her but she didn’t even take it out of her pocket. She wanted to go over the memories of last night. She wanted to replay it all in her head. Already, it seemed like a dream. If it hadn’t been for that delicious bruised feeling she had inside her, she might not have believed it had happened at all.

She spooled back and played it all out in her head like a movie sequence.

The awkward moment when they had closed the door behind them. Both of them afraid to make the first move in case they’d been reading the signals wrong.

Addie was so nervous she had started babbling. She didn’t know what she was going to say until it was coming out of her mouth.

“Look,” she had said, holding her hands up in front of her to say stop. “Before we go any further, I want to say something.”

The madness of it, she was cringing now as she remembered it.

“I have an announcement to make,” she’d said, her breath all raspy with nerves. “I haven’t been naked in front of a stranger for a while. I’m thirty-eight years old. I have a mark on my left breast where I had a lump removed last year. I have an appendix scar from when I was twelve. I’m not as skinny as I’d like to be. I’m riddled with cellulite and my pubic hair is going gray.”

Remembering it now, she was dying.

Already she could hear Della’s voice booming in her ears. You said WHAT?

Fair play to him, he hadn’t even appeared shocked. You’d think he would have been shocked, but the look on his face, he was amused if anything.

He had smiled, that knowing smile that she was starting to find quite attractive. He had smiled and started to walk steadily towards her. And as he walked he had started to sing, in that low tuneful voice of his. It was his lack of embarrassment that she found the most astonishing.

He was so very uncool.

She couldn’t help but laugh. It had been a long time since anyone had surprised her.

She walked round the park three times, rewinding that conversation and rewinding it again in her head. One minute she was smiling, the next minute she was wincing with shame. If anyone had been watching her, they would have thought her a madwoman.

WHY THE HEALTH WARNING?

Was this a normal thing for her to do? A lovely thirty-eight-year-old woman with half her life ahead of her. A girl with all her faculties and more besides. A talented person with a moral compass as sure as the stars in the sky. Why would she feel the need to issue a health warning before she offered herself up to a man? Why in God’s name would she feel that way?

Because Addie, at this stage, feels like damaged goods. She feels old and jaded. She feels like she’s been battered by life. She doesn’t see herself as thirty-eight, she sees herself as nearly forty.

When she looks in the mirror these days she’s shocked by what she sees. The pale face, she looks so dreadfully serious. Even when she makes herself smile, it’s as if her eyes won’t do what they’re told. Those serious gray eyes, they just keep boring a hole in her, as if they’re trying to tell her something.

She studies herself in the mirror and she notices new stray hairs appearing below her eyebrows. Now that she looks, there are dozens of them, stretching right down to the crease of her eyelid. She should pluck them but she can’t be bothered. It seems so pointless, to pluck them. They’ll only grow back again. It’s a full-time job, keeping it all at bay. It makes her sad, this determination of the body to go on sprouting new growth, long after you’ve lost the energy to fight it off.

Addie remembers a French exchange Della had once upon a time. She was meant to be Della’s exchange but of course Della would have nothing to do with her so Addie had to hang out with her instead. A beautiful golden creature, she used to stretch herself out on the couch in the breakfast room, wearing just a string top and these impossibly short shorts, and she would pluck at the hairs on her legs with her tweezers. She would spend hours on end just plucking and plucking and after she finally dragged herself off the couch there would be a layer of fine little hairs all over the upholstery.

“It’s disgusting,” Addie would say. “It’s absolutely disgusting, the way she does that.” And she would start brushing the hairs off the couch, slapping the fabric with the flat of her hand to make them jump.

Della would look up from her book. “Nothing human disgusts me,” she would drawl, misquoting Tennessee Williams.

Sandrine the girl’s name was, but she was always known as Madame Mao. A nickname Hugh had given her. Something about how Mao wanted to pluck all the blades of grass in China.

Addie wonders whatever happened to her, Madame Mao. Was she living in an apartment in some French city now, standing at the stove stirring hot chocolate for some caramel-skinned French children, waiting for a floppy-haired philandering French husband to come in the door? What would she think if Addie reminded her about that summer she spent lounging around on their couch, plucking at her legs with her tweezers? Would she even remember?

Nowadays Addie wouldn’t mind spending her days plucking at her legs with tweezers. Now that she thinks about it, it seems like a grand way to spend your time. She just wishes she had the energy for it.

She has a tricky head, she knows that. She has a tendency to melancholy. That’s why she has herself on a regime. The swimming, the walking, it works for her. She needs to give her head a workout. She needs to flush it out. It can be a full-time job, dealing with all the things that come bubbling up in her head. Sometimes she gets so tired of it all, she wonders if she can be bothered.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Addie has been told that, but she doesn’t believe it. Maybe that works for some people, but not for her. Everything that has ever happened to her has made her weaker, like someone has been kicking away at the scaffolding that was holding her up. So that now she’s all rickety.

In her own mind, she’s a fire sale of a person. She’s a battered relic of all the things that have ever happened to her.

And now here she is, sailing forth for another battering.

BRUNO WALKED BACK
to the B&B with a spring in his step. For the first time in weeks, he was wide-awake.

All of a sudden the blood was racing through his veins. He felt limber and fit. He felt like he’d woken up from a bad dream and suddenly everything was OK in the world.

Forty-nine, he said to himself, forty-nine! He felt like punching the air. And as usual when he was feeling like this, as usual when he was feeling good about himself, he had Bruce Springsteen running through his head.