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  ‘No, how much?’ I asked in a tiny guilt-ridden voice.

  ‘Enough for any right-minded judge to grant us a divorce in seconds,’ he snapped, unable to lay his hands on any figures. ‘You’ll thank me in the long run. A new perspective will do you good.’

  I dropped down into an armchair and saw a world of safety and comfort roll tipsily away from me as I realised that he had been waiting for months to say this. ‘But what will I do?’ I asked hopelessly, ashamed by my own lack of strength.

  ‘You should have thought of that earlier.’ He scooped his car keys out of the mallard and headed toward the door.

  No more credit. I felt like Samson after he’d had his hair cut off, even though I couldn’t see Samson desiring French heels.

  So I went to see Lou across the road.

  Lou had given up on her marriage long ago, and only the dream of finding new ways to spite her husband and son kept her from cutting her own throat. She disliked her family in the same way that some people avoid feral cats; she put food down for them occasionally but generally stayed out of their way.

  She also had a bad habit, but it was fitness, not shopping. Yoga, spinning, aerobics, rowing, weight-training, she had to be the best at everything and she fought all the way. Once her husband had tried to throttle her in a restaurant, and she actually fractured his wrist. I was amazed they were still together. Lou used to work at a feminist bookshop in Bloomsbury, and discovered the limits of female solidarity when she got pregnant and they changed her job description to fire her. She was my only friend, and the last person in the world you would ever go to for advice.

  I went to see her because there was no-one else who would understand.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lou

  APART FROM BEING a little attention-deficit, I’m not very modern. Lou says I’m a ‘Housewives’ Choice’ throwback, whatever that means. She’s older than me, so she would know. She says I’m a living cliché, the kind of wife all those go-ahead London career girls love to sneer at. Well, now they can all laugh and say they were right; I should have stuck to what I know, then I wouldn’t be in this mess.

  Lou lives across the street. She smokes because it annoys her family, and has to empty out her handbag looking for her Tesco Club card at the checkout, and when other women in the queue start sighing and fidgeting she tells them to fuck off and die. Lou has a son she named Hadrian because it was the only way she could take revenge for getting pregnant and having to leave London. Everyone agrees that her husband Darren is an absolute sweetheart who dotes on her, but the gentler and kinder he is, the more she detests him. He sells office partitions and keeps showing Lou Excel spreadsheets to explain his job, not that she’s remotely interested. His company motto is ‘Dividing The World’, and he doesn’t even see that it’s funny.

  It’s surprising Lou remains so fit, what with the chain-smoking indoors and the way she starts drinking at around eight in the morning. She leaves cigarette butts in egg yolks, toilets and beds, and was once thrown out of her local spa’s flotation tank for smoking in it. She sunbathes naked in the garden because it annoys the neighbours, takes ages at tills because it annoys the staff and lights up in restaurants just to watch the look of horror on diners’ faces. These days non-smokers react to cigarette smoke as if they’ve just been involved in a Sarin gas attack.

  Lou’s husband has a number of gastric disorders that require him to pick at small amounts of food all day, so she never needs to prepare food for him at night, which is just as well because the only thing she can do is scrambled eggs. She likes them because they’re a food source you actually have to destroy to cook.

  Her son Hadrian was expelled from school for selling grass on his mobile during lessons, and not being bright enough to come up with coded text. He’s supposed to take tuition at home. He’s spent the last two years locked in his bedroom online-gaming and running some incomprehensible and potentially illegal business on the internet because he finds it less embarrassing than talking to real people, so Lou is able to spend the day alone nurturing her bitterness.

  She treats the fitness centre like church, repenting with leg-weights for several hours every morning, but then she comes home and sins again, hitting the drinks cabinet so hard that she’s usually crocked before the evening news. She drinks with a level of vengeful chastisement that you usually only find among nuns.

  Lou doesn’t usually bother with people she feels sorry for, but I’m a special case. She once told me that she’d seen me through the window of her house months before we ever spoke, and wondered what the hell I was doing, because sometimes I stood frozen in the middle of our cluttered lounge staring at each of the walls in turn. Lou assumed I was watching television and had some kind of slipped disc that required me to stand upright all the time.

  One day she came across the road armed with recruitment leaflets for her gym. As I answered the door and stumbled about for replies, caught off-guard, Lou realised how rarely I had spoken to strangers, and at that point made it her mission to act as my lifeline.

  She told me that when she first entered the house and saw that it was cocooned with quilts, cushions, festoons, bows and tie-backs, all covered in tiny patterns intended to provide pleasure for someone much older, it was obvious to her that nothing really bad had ever happened to me in my life. There was she, carrying out acts of petty terrorism on the neighbourhood, and here was I, talking about people on television as if they were my friends. I admit it; I believe magazine articles about stranded housewives who are empowered by makeovers. I talk about cleaning products, and once crossed the road to show Lou a new fabric conditioner. I might have surrendered to my soft furnishings but the unsettling of my hands and the nervous flicker of my eyes clearly suggested a life waiting to be lived, because Lou felt she should rock the boat a little to give me a fighting chance.

  ‘A woman at the gym told me about this game where you devise your porno movie name by taking the name of your childhood pet and joining it to the street you grew up in,’ she said.

  ‘That makes mine Tiffany York,’ I said.

  ‘Mine is Wobbles Albania – what kind of a porno name is that, for fuck’s sake?’ Lou sucked hard at her fag and blew smoke everywhere. She practised being a messy smoker. ‘Nothing ever works for me. I should have left this shithole while I still had a chance. There’s nothing to stay here for. When Darren’s home he follows me around like a dog, leaving little gifts with cute messages attached. I bury them in the garden. I want a man, not a fucking spaniel. Hadrian doesn’t leave his room unless I leave a message on his website saying that I’m going to disconnect the broadband. It’s like having a government official in the house. He threw out all my books because he told me he wanted to live in a paper-free environment. I got my own back; I put superglue on his ethernet port and stuck a gonk over it.’

  ‘Cicero said a house without books is like a body without a soul.’

  ‘Yeah, but what did she know? Fucking Italians. You’re too clever to be living here. You need to get out before you get permanent brain damage. I mean it. It’s too late for me – save yourself.’

  ‘I stayed because of Gordon.’

  ‘You should try living with a man who smiles at you all the time. At least your husband behaves like any normal totally disgusting fanny-chasing creep.’

  ‘He’s having an affair with Hilary next door.’

  Lou sat at her breakfast bar stirring a cocktail with the end of an apostle spoon. ‘You mean Hilary ‘Boarding From The Rear’ Cooper?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘My God. I always wondered what kind of man she went for. Now I know; someone who’s wetter than a whale’s willy. Have you spoken to her about it?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘You should tell her she’s welcome to him. It’s a fatherhood issue. He wants to impregnate something before he dies. He thinks he’s a king who needs an heir.’

  ‘We once discussed adoption, but he hated the idea.’
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  ‘Of course. He wants to grow something with his face on it. The few remaining single women around here are just as bad; they’d kidnap a homeless man, fuck him and burn his body in the bathtub if they thought he had good genes. What do you want?’

  ‘I don’t know. I used to think I did, but now… Gordon talks about his job so much, and he obviously wants freedom, otherwise he wouldn’t be seeing someone else.’

  ‘Listen, June, you can’t save your marriage once a husband starts fucking around. If you let him make up with you, he’ll begin seeing her on the side and you’ll be stuck at home while he’s working through his second adolescence. He’ll ignore you except for clean socks.’ She shifted forward. ‘I’m going to tell you an ugly truth. Men don’t bother talking to ladies they don’t want to fuck. That’s why so many middle-aged women have gay friends. If you get divorced he’ll declare himself bankrupt rather than pay years of maintenance. You’ll have to duke it out in court.’

  I’m inclined to think that Lou’s drinking makes her cynical, and she’d been on Rum Sours since breakfast. The last time she did this she attempted to cut her own hair, but made such a mess of it that I was called over to repair the damage, and she ended up looking like Bette Davis in The Anniversary.

  ‘There’s someone coming to see the house tonight. Gordon told the estate agent that it’s fully furnished and ready for occupancy.’

  ‘Can he do that?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. He owns everything. Do you think I should go next door and talk to Hilary?’

  ‘It’s not like she stole him away from you. He’s the one who wandered off. She just took what was being offered. Why do wives always blame the other woman? See if there’s any ice cream in the freezer, would you?’

  ‘I still can’t believe that Gordon would –’

  ‘He would and he did, and she wasn’t the first, either.’ She studied me pitilessly. ‘Can’t you tell? Didn’t you ever notice?’

  ‘No,’ I lied, rooting in the freezer and passing her a Ben & Jerry’s Very Halle Berry. She tore off the lid, prised out a lump with the end of a meat thermometer and dropped it into her drink.

  ‘I don’t suppose you did. Love is not just blind, it’s very, very sick. I could see unfaithfulness in his eyes the day I met him. You’ve made his day, bringing it out in the open. He’s one of those men who divides all women into two groups: your allies and possible shags. You married too young and he’s taken the best years of your life, your good body-gravity years. Nobody with a brain gets married at nineteen, and you do have a brain, even if you seem to have stuffed it inside a needlepoint cushion. I’m making another Rum Sour, do you want one?’

  ‘Can I have a beer?’

  ‘Spirits would be better for you at this point. They always worked for me, even when I was pregnant. I was still chain-smoking and drinking Rum Sours when my water broke. It was great. Hadrian was born so underweight I didn’t get any stretchmarks.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re right about Gordon. He had some good qualities.’

  ‘You’re already talking about him as if he’s dead. That’s a good sign. Budweiser, Heineken, Tiger, Stella or Special Brew? Have the Special Brew, it must be good if tramps drink it. Name three qualities, then.’

  ‘All right.’ I thought for a moment. ‘He’s good with money.’

  ‘Look where that’s got you. I’m talking about physical qualities.’

  ‘I liked the way his arms suddenly stopped being hairy just above the elbows. The way his stomach touched my back when we did spoons.’ I unfocussed my eyes and thought hard. ‘I’m sure there’s a third thing. We’ve been married a long time.’

  ‘Fantastic sex?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was always over very quickly. I mean I’ve never had –’

  ‘Orgasms, it’s okay, they say it on morning TV.’

  ‘–much chance to make comparisons.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I assume all women are sexually experienced. There was a year when I slept with every man under twenty-five in Nottingham who asked me. Darren’s idea of warming me up in bed is to rub his hand on my crotch so hard you’d think he was sanding a door.’ Lou pulled a face, opened two cans of Special Brew, chucked me one and disconsolately necked the other before returning to her rum.

  ‘Gordon started wearing his underpants to bed once he realised that I didn’t stare at his groin in awe,’ I told her.

  ‘I suppose my parents avoided killing each other for the sake of the kids,’ Lou sighed. She and her brother Nick had been a disappointment to her folks. Lou had undergone an abortion at fifteen. Nick had spent his twenties in prison for manslaughter. It sounded more glamorous than it was; there had been a drunken fight in a pub over the throwing of beermats. ‘The best thing you can do is to hit him where it hurts. Give in to your wildest urges and do some serious damage to his plastic.’

  ‘He’s taken away all my credit cards.’

  ‘What about your Connect?’

  ‘There’s hardly anything left in my account. I’ve still got my World Of Wood discount card. I’m overdrawn by eleven thousand pounds.’

  ‘Holy shit. Well, that does it.’ She drained her glass and made a face as the nutmeg hit her. ‘You’re on your own. Burn the house down and we’ll do a Thelma & Louise.’

  ‘The awful thing is, I’d probably take him back.’

  ‘You’re going to make me violent if you talk like that. Haven’t you got anything you can sell?’

  ‘Everything’s in his name – everything.’

  ‘How did that happen? Did you learn nothing from Guy Ritchie and Madonna?’

  ‘I’m his wife,’ I explained, ‘love, honour –’

  ‘–and get everything you can lay your hands on. Expecting cashback isn’t much to ask for ten years of terrible sex. Actually, you told me about the sex on the night of my thirtieth birthday.’

  ‘I remember. We drank two bottles of Slivovitz in the garden and you were sick into our fishpond. I wish I’d never found that earring.’

  ‘It’s better than having to pretend you still love him.’

  ‘But I do still love him.’

  ‘Darling, he was draining his dick into the flying waitress before slipping home and pressing it into the small of your back. We can take him down.’

  Lou was happy to take revenge for all the wives in the world if necessary. She cracked the cap from another beer, slid it across the counter and patted my arm comfortingly. The radio DJ began to play Love Is In The Air. ‘God, this song’s such shit. Love songs are all lies. There’s only suffering and death in the air once a woman stops looking like she’s fun. That’s why you spend all your waking hours cruising malls, because you let shop-smiles replace the respect of a husband. If he ever showed you any.’

  ‘He did. It’s just... he’s busy and angry all the time. I’m at home, so I don’t have the kind of problems he deals with.’

  ‘Of course you do, you just don’t see them, sitting over there in your frilly little house full of frilly little things, burying yourself in books and TV shows. I’m not being rude, darling, but you’ve got absolutely no fucking idea about what’s really going on in the world. It’s changed a lot since you were locked up in the marital penitentiary.’

  ‘I’ve wasted my life. Seneca said that there’s nothing so ruinous to good character than idling away time at spectacles.’ I always remember things I’ve read when I start to get drunk. ‘Although I imagine he was talking about gladiatorial games rather than shopping.’

  Lou started mixing a fresh cocktail. ‘If you’d spent as much time on a StairMaster as you have reading, you’d be able to split walnuts in your butt-crack by now instead of quoting somebody who’s been dead for fifty years. I really don’t get it. You’re the smartest person I ever met, you know shitloads of really long words, you could have been anything you wanted. I’ve seen you get a couple of drinks in you and go all lyrical and passionate, quoting Byron and shit, it’s like a cloud that comes over you
. You could have done something special. You could have got out. Yet you settled for this. I just don’t understand.’

  I stopped listening to Lou. Her words wavered past me like moths. I knew that once Gordon had made a decision there would be no negotiation with him, and that without money I would have to find a job. But I had no skills to fall back on. I didn’t dare go and see my mother, because she was waiting for affirmation that I had failed to keep my marriage together. When she heard that I had lost my baby boy, she called me and said: ‘If you can’t give him children, you can’t expect him to stay with you.’ Besides, Ruth was becoming lost inside her head. She tried using the phone to change TV channels, and put catfood in the washing machine. Her mother had been a cold Englishwoman of the old school. Ruth had confused distance with privacy and would let no-one, especially me, help her.

  ‘I don’t even want to go back to the house,’ I told Lou.

  ‘Well, darling, you can’t stay here. Mr. Charisma will be home in an hour, and I’ve got a fight booked with him.’

  ‘I don’t have the talent to hold down a real job. I’ll have to work in McDonalds or something.’

  ‘You’d be the oldest person there. They only employ easily duped children.’

  ‘Then I’ll do something part time. Something from home.’

  Lou tipped the remains of the blender into her glass. ‘This isn’t the Victorian era, you can’t sew dolls for sixpences. Besides, you haven’t got a home any more, you haven’t got any money and you haven’t got a marriage. He’s got it all, including a new sex life. What are you going to do, go back and stand in the middle of the room again?’

  Alarmed, I looked at the tiny gold watch Gordon had given me as a wedding gift. ‘I have to go home and cook his dinner. Just in case he comes back.’ I climbed down from my stool and made my way unsteadily across the road.

  ‘I want you to know you’re being pathetic,’ Lou stood in the middle of her front lawn shouting after me. ‘Stand up for yourself. Give him the divorce he wants, then get yourself a good lawyer. Have a massage and a joint an hour before the hearing, lie your tits off in court, I’ll coach you through it and we’ll split whatever we make. If you don’t, you’ll just stay here with a wandering husband and no money until you end up like one of those old dears who creep around Sainsbury’s with a fucking tartan wheelie-basket complaining about the price of fish, except that most of those are still happily married because they snapped up the last decent men in the sixties. I’m serious, June. You’re thirty next week. It’s a sign from God. This could be your last chance to get out alive. Don’t fuck it up!’