Not Moving Out

Chapter One

Joe

Freya and I agreed to meet at Pelicano Coffee Co in The Lanes, which we had been to before during happier times and it was one of our favourites. We could have held the meeting in the comfortable surroundings of home, but we thought a neutral venue like the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War was probably better. Paris seemed a little far, and so we decided on one of the best coffee spots in Brighton instead. We were meeting to discuss the terms of our separation, write a manifesto of a way forward, while sipping coffees and nibbling on pastries on a damp morning in late March. It was a thoroughly depressing occasion, but at least the coffee would be on point.

‘I see a table back there,’ said Freya tentatively, looking towards the rear of the coffee shop.

‘Right, I’ll get the coffees. The usual?’

‘The usual,’ said Freya, with a nostalgic glance towards me that sated both of our needs for something meaningful in a morning that had, until that point, felt unwaveringly practical and devoid of the emotion it deserved. It was like watching one of the royal family lay a wreath on Remembrance Day. You knew there were emotions beneath the surface, but they were so focused on doing a good job, and not falling over in front of the nation, it always came across as a bit robotic. I ordered Freya her usual oat milk latte, and my flat white, plus a couple of pastries, and waited for those before I walked across and sat opposite my wife. It felt like a strange term considering she hadn’t felt like my wife or done anything a bit ‘wifey’ for quite a while, but until all of this played out, she was still my other half. Better half? Probably.

Freya Jane Wallace was forty-five, and still beautiful in the same way she had always been beautiful to me. Strawberry-blonde hair, cornflower-blue eyes and pale skin she usually applied make-up to, to render her darker than she actually was, and to cover up the freckles she didn’t like but that I adored. On family holidays in years gone by, she would go the entire week make-up free, and I would get to see that gorgeous face in its natural state, and it was always my favourite version of her. Today she had on a layer of make-up and her hair was pulled into a high ponytail exposing her ears with the two small earrings in each. She was also wearing her tortoiseshell framed glasses, which I preferred over her contact lenses. In essence, Freya, the woman I was about to discuss breaking up from after almost nineteen years of marriage, looked fucking gorgeous, and I knew that whatever happened going forward, it was highly unlikely I would find a partner I would find physically more attractive. This fact cast a shadow over the whole affair and had me questioning why we were even there. I also knew the answer to that very question like the easiest question on University Challenge that literally everyone got right. Our marriage that had once upon a time felt perfect, destined to last a lifetime and perhaps beyond if you believed in that sort of thing, had come to a grinding fucking halt.

‘Thanks for the coffee,’ said Freya with a tentative, uneven smile.

I hated the awkwardness and the stilted small talk. It was like an uncomfortable first date but without any of the sexual tension.

‘Right, well, I suppose we should, you know, crack on,’ I replied, stumbling over my words in an effort to get the ball rolling so we could get this over and done with as quickly as possible.

‘Right,’ said Freya, reaching down and grabbing a small handful of the Danish she had wanted, breaking it off and popping it delicately into her mouth. I noticed she had dark nail varnish like the sort you might wear at a funeral or on Halloween, which reflected something of the mood: sad and scary. ‘It was me who wanted this meeting, so I guess I should start.’

I took a sip of my flat white, and then I crossed my legs.

‘Joe, you and I are broken. Our marriage hasn’t felt like a marriage for probably eighteen months if we’re honest.’

‘It hasn’t been that long, Freya.’

‘It has, Joe. It’s been gradually getting worse and worse, and I can’t take it any more. It feels like we’re just going through the motions, but we aren’t happy, are we?’

I looked at Freya, and at the small crease between her eyes that always appeared when she asked a serious question, the way her forehead wrinkled, and her eyes looked at me longingly – not that sort of longing because she was fucking right about that – but more with a need for me to get on board with the separation idea.

‘No, I suppose we’re not particularly happy,’ I replied.

‘It’s time we ripped the plaster off, get it over with so we can both move on with our lives or at least try something different because just blindly staying together feels like it’s hurting us more than helping us, and we have to think about Dolly. I can’t keep living in limbo, Joe. It’s fucking killing me. Something has to change.’

Talk about a dagger to the heart. She wasn’t pulling any punches, although I couldn’t disagree with her. We both knew why we were there. We had seen the trailer multiple times, read the reviews and knew exactly what was going to happen when we sat down with our popcorn.

‘Understood.’

‘You agree we need to officially separate?’

The words, although expected, said out loud felt like a swift punch to the gut. Almost nineteen years of marriage, and it all came down to two fucking words, and they weren’t ‘I do’.

‘I mean, yes, I suppose. I’m just not sure how we officially separate. What’s the protocol?’

‘It means we have to tell people. Dolly first, obviously, but then family and friends.’

‘So, saying it out loud makes it official? Perhaps something in the newspaper, too? The Telegraph has a lovely announcements section,’ I said, realising I was being a facetious knob, but the whole fucking thing was making me feel like a bit of a prick. It was easier for me to resort to childish banter than actually dealing with it like a proper grown-up.

The truth was, I hated that my marriage was dead, that I had to somehow move on, make new arrangements, and I had to tell people about it. It all sounded like a bunch of work I didn’t want to do, and I already had enough work with actual work, and now I was adding to it by officially separating from my wife. I had a sudden pang of nostalgia for days gone by when couples stuck together through thick or thin, no matter how thin it got. You married for life whether you were happy about it or not, because there wasn’t another fucking choice. You signed the contract and it definitely said ‘till death do you part’, so from a legal standpoint there was no getting out of it until you drew your last breath. What was so wrong with that?

‘I suppose saying it out loud does make it official,’ said Freya, coolly. She wasn’t falling for my usual prickly self when it came to discussing us, or anything vaguely serious or important. She also knew sarcasm and humour were my first line of defence.

‘So, we tell Dolly, and then what?’

‘That’s what today is about, Joe. It’s about sorting out the practical stuff, like where we are going to live, what our day-to-day lives will look like, finances, and how we deal with other things like potentially dating going forward?’

‘Woah, what? Dating?’ I asked incredulously, shocked how she had just casually dropped that in there, like tossing a grenade into a library, and wondering how long until anyone noticed. Fuck, what’s that small metal object that looks suspiciously like a grenade doing in the reference section? ‘What do you mean, dating?’

‘I mean that eventually we’re going to date other people, and it’s something we need to discuss,’ said Freya, casually. She had obviously already thought about this. Perhaps she had a date in mind or was already dating someone else. ‘And before you say anything, no, I’m not dating anyone, Joe, and I don’t have any intentions of dating anyone soon, but eventually it might happen.’

‘Eventually, yes, I suppose it might.’

‘But more pressing, Joe, is our living situation and money. You know we can’t afford for either of us to move out, and I love our house. I don’t want to end up living in a shit one-bed flat just because our marriage doesn’t work any more.’

‘Okay, I wondered when this would come up,’ I said, feeling a flash of heat around the back of my neck. The burst of anger and frustration that got to me when the chips were down – and the chips were really fucking down. Of course, this came back to me and my inability to contribute financially to our marriage. The slow death of my writing career had contributed to the slow death of our marriage, and we both knew it. If there was a graph, and you could pinpoint when my career tanked on the y-axis, and how that correlated to the decline in my relationship with Freya on the x-axis, I think it would be quite illuminating. Especially if you were into graphs.

‘What?’ said Freya, taking a quick sip of her coffee.

‘Money, and the fact I don’t make any.’

‘This isn’t about that. I have never given you a hard time about how much money you make.’

‘Or don’t make, right?’

For the first time, I saw a flash of frustration on her face. ‘For fuck’s sake, can this please not be about you and your career for once.’

‘I’m just saying, Freya, my career is a part of the problem.’

‘Fine, obviously you want me to say it. Yes, your career is one of the reasons our marriage has failed, and yes, the fact you make barely any money has put a large financial strain on us that has contributed to the breakdown, but knowing that and acknowledging it doesn’t actually change it. We need to deal with facts, and the facts are—’

‘We can’t afford to move out because of me, and so we’re stuck together in the house?’

She looked at me, closed her eyes for a second, took a deep breath in and then slowly released it before she opened them again. ‘All I’m saying, Joe, is at the moment because of our financial situation, neither of us can afford to move out.’

‘Which is my fault.’

‘For fuck’s sake, really?’

We each took a moment. A pause to take a breath. A lady with a dog opposite gave us a look, and then stood up to leave. Even the dog looked a little uncomfortable. We had created an atmosphere.

‘Fine, sorry, go on,’ I said after a minute.

‘I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I have a workable solution.’

I nodded, but I was already frustrated, and increasingly angry at this whole thing. This was all my fault. This was what Freya was trying to say in the politest way possible. We were trapped under the same roof because my career had imploded, and I hadn’t made enough money in the last decade. Despite the lack of love in our relationship, we both loved the house we lived in, couldn’t afford to leave it, and selling it wouldn’t help because we had remortgaged it to pay off debts, and so now even if we sold it, it wouldn’t be enough for either of us to restart our lives properly – not in Brighton or London, anyway. We were officially stuck in a marriage that didn’t work any more but at least we had a gorgeous roof over our heads.

Freya worked at a solicitors’ as a paralegal, and I couldn’t help but think that the legal environment had rubbed off on her. She was being remarkably professional about all of this, when all I wanted to do was make snide remarks, and increasingly petty jokes about our fraught relationship. Freya, on the other hand, was revelling in her role of secretary, researcher and general all-round legal problem solver. She had already used the phrase ‘workable solution’. How long before we were ‘blue-sky thinking it’, ‘circling back’ and ‘putting a pin in it’?

‘What’s this “workable solution”?’ I asked.

‘Dolly will be off to university at the end of September, and I don’t want to unsettle her during this important time with her exams coming up.’

‘Neither do I,’ I added quickly.

‘So, for the next six months, we will keep living together—’

‘You want to keep sharing a bed with me for the next six months?’

‘No, Joe. One of us will move into the spare room, obviously.’

‘By one of us, I assume you mean me?’

‘We can toss a coin for it if you like?’

‘No, it’s fine, I’ll go. It’s already my office, so it’s easier.’

‘Right, thanks.’

‘So, we keep living together for the next six months until Dolly leaves, and then what? You want to keep sharing like we’re back at university? A couple of housemates, and I’ll put a sock on my bedroom door when I get lucky? If you see a Marks and Spencer striped crew on the doorknob, don’t come a-knocking!’

I looked across at Freya, and she looked back at me with an expression she had worn countless times before. It said something like: Why do you always have to act like a total prick when it comes to anything vaguely uncomfortable, you ridiculous child?

‘It’s six months, Joe. I think we can manage it.’

‘But then what? Just because Dolly leaves for university, it won’t change our financial situation. We still can’t afford to sell the house, and living together but broken up will just be fucking weird and depressing like a sitcom but with literally zero laughs.’

I was waiting for her to say something about my last failed sitcom, but she wasn’t that petty.

‘We’ll deal with that when Dolly is gone, but can we, for the next six months at least, try and get along?’ said Freya, and then she added, ‘For Dolly.’

She was right, of course, as she generally was. We had to make the next six months work for Dolly’s sake, and then once she was gone, we would somehow try to sort out the rest of our lives, untangle the complicated web of our marriage, like unbuilding IKEA furniture without the instructions. It was only six months. How bad could it possibly be?

‘For Dolly,’ I replied, feeling a lump of sadness slide down my throat and into my chest, heading for the knot in my stomach because, despite my need to defend myself with immature retorts, I couldn’t help but feel the agony of grief at the break-up of my marriage.