Jack
We take a taxi back to the house in icy silence.
The driver probably thinks we’re two nervous singles who met in a bar and decided to make a night of it.
That would explain the feeling of expectation hanging in the air.
But it’s not actually sexual tension.
It’s just horrible tension, like a headache pressing at the inside of my skull.
I notice Jess pulling down her dress and can’t help but sneer.
I can’t believe that she was spending the evening with Clay, probably having a great time bitching about how useless I am and being told she’d be better off without me.
But they’re not sleeping together.
Obviously they’re not sleeping together.
Fuck, what am I going to do if it turns out that they’re sleeping together?
It’s a stupid question because I trust Jess.
I love her, I know her, and I’d stake my life on the fact that neither of us have ever seriously considered for a moment that we might be with someone else.
Our lives are too tightly bound, and we were too happy.
Even while we’ve not been so happy, sleeping with someone else has never felt like it would help.
Sure, I notice women.
Occasionally I notice their bodies or their faces.
But I’ve never had any meaningful desire to take one to a hotel room and ruin my marriage for a clumsy fuck.
And I know Jess is the same.
She likes a flirt at a party, but that’s it.
Which surely means that she was with Clay for something else.
But is that actually any better? If she’s off with him because she wants someone to talk to about what a shit I am – or worse, because he’s the only person she thinks she can talk to about work stuff – then honestly, I think maybe I’d rather she was shagging him.
Sex is one thing, it’s just sex.
But as I watch the lights of London on a Saturday night pass through the cab window, I think there’s a very real prospect that it might be the big life shit that she’s sharing with him and by rights I’m fairly sure that stuff is supposed to be mine.
We arrive back at the house, and I pay for the cab, giving him a ludicrously large tip in the hope that at least he has a nice night, and then follow Jess into the house.
She stops to take off her coat but I don’t bother and just stride through the house, into the kitchen, to pour myself a glass of wine.
Jess follows me and then stands in the doorway, silhouetted with her hands on her hips.
‘Are you going to say something?’ she asks, infuriatingly just as I was about to.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were going to have dinner with him?’ I ask. I go to the fridge and take out a bottle of wine. I don’t want a glass of wine, but I do want something to do with my hands while we talk about this, because at the moment I feel like I’m playing the role of Wronged Husband in a school play.
‘I told you, I was going to have dinner with Grace then she had a PTA emergency so I hung out with Clay,’ she explains, slowly and clearly as if I’m one of the E-number-addled kids in Raffy’s primary school class.
‘And you didn’t think you should have mentioned it to me?’ I ask.
‘Honestly? No. I didn’t. I thought you’d be vibrating with stress because you were with your parents, and I thought telling you would make things worse. You’re weird about Clay. You always have been.’
She’s not totally wrong, but I can’t accept this. ‘I’m not “weird” about him, I think he’s an arsehole, and I don’t really like that you spend personal time with someone who has ignored every suggestion I’ve ever made and clearly only values you as a source of income.’
‘You know most men would be angry in this situation because they were jealous. Because they were worried that their wife was going to be unfaithful or at least enjoy getting pissed with a good-looking male friend. But you’re too selfish to even be jealous. You don’t like me spending time with Clay because you don’t like him.’
This isn’t entirely true but there’s way too much nuance to explain, and I don’t think I’d express it well enough. ‘Does it matter why I’m angry?’ I ask. ‘You lied about seeing him because you knew I’d tell you I didn’t want you to—’
‘I understand that you don’t like Clay, but in any relationship, you have to retain the right to have your own friends, our networks don’t have to be—’
‘Stop it.’ I sigh.
‘Stop what?’
‘You’re talking like you’re writing another book,’ I tell her.
‘I’m not going to get to write another book, thanks to you.’
‘How many times do you want me to say that I’m sorry?’
‘But you’re not sorry, are you? You’re sorry that I’m upset, you’re sorry that it got in the papers. You’re not sorry that you destroyed my career because now you might get to write your tragic Martin Amis fan fiction.’
She has never, not in the entire time we’ve been together, said anything that mean to me.
‘Jesus, Jess,’ I say. ‘It’s nice to know what you really think. It’s just a shame that all that honesty stuff at the retreat was clearly bollocks. A band-aid for a bullet hole.’
‘Okay, let’s have some real honesty, then. Let’s stop this stupid “trying” thing, and tell the cold, hard, fucking truth.’ She raises her voice.
‘All right, if that’s what you want.’ I take a breath and look at her. My veins are twitching with the adrenaline of the fight. It’s been a long time since we really lost it with each other. I’m scared to hear what she has to say, but I can’t back down, and in some gruesome way I want to hear it.
‘I miss you,’ I say. ‘I miss the version of you who would stay up till four a.m. drinking and talking shit. I miss how light and fun and mad you were. I miss you being creative and having ideas. All you talk about, think about, write about, is our bloody relationship. You turned our entire life upside down so that you could get what you want, so that you didn’t have to be the girl with the job she hates in marketing. And you never once stopped to ask how I felt about it, about having to give up a job that was important to me and that I really fucking loved, all because it was a conflict of interest with your career, which consists mostly of posting photos of yourself on the internet all day.’
‘You’re right.’ She doesn’t seem to have heard anything I’ve said. ‘I wasn’t honest before. Because I knew if I was honest, I’d probably destroy our relationship and I didn’t want that, because despite your very obvious disdain for me, I was trying desperately to make us happy. But I’ll be honest with you, if that’s really what you want. You’re lazy and spoiled and entitled. You complain about a job that you hardly have to lift a finger for. I spent years working in shit jobs where people talked down to me for fuck-all money, and I did it with good grace. You’ve done eighteen months of this, so that we could buy a house, put some savings in the bank and maybe, sue me, buy a few nice things, and you’ve done it with the worst attitude possible because it doesn’t meet your exacting standards. You’re an intellectual snob who still needs his parents to think he’s brilliant, and you’ve never got over not getting into some up-its-own-arse university when you were eighteen. You decided who I am, fourteen years ago, based on the fact that I had a topless tan, and not for a single fucking second since then have you considered that I might not be quite as carefree and childish as you want me to be.’
I’m not sure what hurts more: the fact that she clearly wants to upset me, or the fact that so much of what she’s saying is – at least in part – right.
‘That’s not fair, and you know that it’s not fair. You’ve changed.’
‘People are supposed to change!’ she shouts.
‘Not this much – you were a joy, you were spontaneous, and free. Now you won’t go anywhere unless you’ve packed the right vitamins. You came to our final English exam without a bloody pen—’
‘Of course I had a fucking pen, Jack.’
There’s silence in the kitchen now. ‘What?’ I ask.
‘I had a pen. I’m not an idiot. I wouldn’t have turned up to an exam without a pen. I just wanted an excuse to speak to you.’
‘What?’ I say, dazed.
‘That’s a good thing. It’s a compliment. It’s because I liked you, because I fancied you—’
‘Sure,’ I say, feeling a bit shell-shocked as I run my hands through my hair. It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, really. But that was our whole thing. It was in my wedding speech, it’s the story we tell when someone asks how we met, it’s our backstory, our, I don’t know, lore . It was the first impression I ever had of Jessica and, she’s right, the foundation stone for how I’ve read her over all these years. But apparently it wasn’t real. ‘I’m just slightly processing that you’ve been lying to me for the last fourteen years,’ I say. It’s supposed to sound dry, sarky but affectionate. It doesn’t come out that way.
‘Can you see how mad it is that you’re mourning a story from over a decade ago, and not any of the stuff we’re actually living through right now?’ she snaps.
She looks at me for a moment with pure, white-hot anger, and then she draws a breath. And I know what’s about to come is going to hurt.
‘Can you see how “mad” it is that you tanked our entire career because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut? Or that I’ve spent the last eighteen months trying to get pregnant with hormones and supplements and needles and all you’ve ever said on the topic is “it’s going to happen”? Or that I finally found something I love doing as a career and you take every single opportunity you can find to make sure everyone knows that you think social media is beneath you?’
I sit down on one of the kitchen stools and decide that I actually really do want the glass of wine I poured and then left on the side. I take a big sip. It’s not very cold and not very nice.
‘Are you done?’ I ask.
‘No, I’m not done,’ she says, her voice calm. ‘When I told you I was on a press trip to Bath, I wasn’t. I was with Clay.’
Jessica
The tension that crackled in the air when we were screaming at each other has dissipated. The air is thick and heavy now. I want to put the words back in my mouth, to unsay them. Everything feels brown and bitter.
‘Why were you with Clay?’
I lean on the counter of the kitchen island, the marble cold under my forearms. It’s a sort of barrier between us, me standing on one side, him sitting at the other. Like a boxing ring. Appropriate, I suppose.
‘He took me to hospital.’
He looks surprised. ‘Hospital? Why?’
I’m not deliberately eking out this information; I don’t think this situation needs any more drama than it already has. I just can’t work out how far back to go, or what to tell him. I take a long breath. I should have told him at the time. I know that. But every time I’ve ever tried to talk to him about fertility, he’s told me that it’s going to be fine, without a single word about how, or why, or when.
‘I had a D we were happy before. Happy and kind and a team. Weren’t we?
I think back to Jessica’s Sunday night blues, coming out of the shower with an expression of condemned misery, hardly able to talk while we watched TV, insisting on another episode because going to bed meant going to sleep, and going to sleep meant waking up to another week of work. The emails she’d send me in the middle of the afternoon when she’d been talked down to and told off all day, no matter how hard she’d tried. It was years of that. And it got progressively worse with every year she stayed. I remember it would take her weeks to amp herself up to apply for other jobs, and then when she got rejected, because she didn’t have the right experience or there were too many people trying to get into social media and content creation, she’d pretend not to care but it would tear her up. And every rejection meant weeks before she could bring herself to try again. After months of it, she just stopped trying, and my cajoling only made things worse. But everything making us miserable now stems from this account.
While I’m hovering my mouse over the ‘delete’ button, dithering, the little message icon in the corner flashes red. Without thinking about it, I click. It’s a message, in a long thread.
Thanks. It’s a really good point. I think it’s just the stigma of being the first of my friends to split, y’know? Like everyone is going to be saying I’ve failed .
I read the conversation, and see that it goes back several weeks, in dribs and drabs. It’s with a young woman in Kent who is thinking of leaving her husband, who has a gambling addiction. She’s exchanged maybe thirty messages with Jessica, during which Jess has sent charity resources, offered advice, and reassured this girl that leaving her husband is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And now I can’t stop myself – I open the inbox and I scroll down. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations.
Young women, older women, young men, middle-aged men, people in same-sex relationships, people with kids, people with fertility issues. Every one of them is asking Jessica’s advice and she has replied to literally every single one. It can’t have been easy, carrying all that emotional baggage for other people, listening to them talking about their horrors when she was having her own private ones. But her responses are brilliant and well considered. The advice is thoughtful, and reasoned and kind; it’s even funny in places. Where there are suggestions of abuse, she’s firmly directed people to the police, and in some cases it looks like she’s even helped a couple of people to extricate themselves from horrible relationships. Time after time they apologise for not buying the book, or not being able to afford the book, and either she gives them advice anyway or she offers to post them a copy. She solves spats, advises on rifts, even sometimes helps out with things which have no bearing on marriage. I don’t know how long I’m reading for; my back is aching by the time I look up from the bright white screen, into the darkness of the room around me, realising that I have catastrophically misjudged my wife.
The box room, the one I occasionally allow myself to fantasise about wallpapering with dinosaur paper, is home to all the free stuff we get sent, which Jessica clears out once a month by dropping a load of boxes at the refuge and the food bank. She hasn’t done it for a while, so the products are piling up, and I know that somewhere in here I’ll find what I need. Eventually I find a nice-looking notepad with a pale blue cover. I grab a Sharpie and I write ‘RULES’ on the front. Then I take a picture. Jessica makes this look easy, taking nice pictures. It’s surprisingly difficult. But once I’ve got something passable, I open a draft post. Then I take a deep breath and start to type.
Jessica
I wake up, head on a crisp white pillow, to the feeling of a small child’s soft hand stroking my cheek.
‘Do you think she’s dead?’ Ada whispers.
‘Probably,’ Raffy says. I rush to sit up and open my eyes because I have a feeling I know how he’s going to check whether I’m alive or not, but it’s too late, and Raffy flings his entire body weight, which is quite a lot even though he’s an average-sized five-year-old, at my sternum.
‘Woah!’ I yelp, sitting up.
‘Yay!’ Ada shouts. ‘Not dead!’
After we throw some pillows around for a bit, and I’ve dodged Raffy’s question about what death really means (because I can’t remember what Tom and Grace decided about their kids and the topic of mortality), we go downstairs. Grace is standing at the kitchen counter in her leggings and a jumper which says HOT MAMA on the front.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I would have stopped them coming into your room, but when they’re harassing you, they leave me alone, so ...’ This is the most candid thing she’s ever said to me, and I assume I’ve earned it by turning up tear-stained on her doorstep after the row with Jack last night.
‘Not a problem,’ I say. ‘We had fun.’
Grace makes me a cup of coffee and we sit at her huge kitchen table. Some of the records, which were mounted in brackets on the walls, displaying their sleeves, have gone. The paint is a little darker in the squares they used to occupy, where the sun hasn’t bleached it. I assume Tom has taken them to his new place. I feel a pull in my chest at the idea of him unpacking and putting things he loves on new walls. Another for Grace, who has to look at those empty squares every day.
‘So what happened?’ she asks. And it’s a fair question. When I turned up last night, I was too sad to talk, and I knew she’d give me a bit of space, but she’s a lawyer, she wants answers, and she’ll get them out of me whether I like it or not.
After I left the house last night, I walked to the end of the street, once again hoping that Jack was going to follow me. He didn’t, and so I opened my phone and started to call a taxi before realising that I didn’t know where I’d be calling it to. Last time I went to Clay’s, and I could have done that again. But it felt like if I did that, if I went to see the person we'd – in part – been arguing about, I’d be picking a side. And I didn’t want that. I considered my dad’s place, and yes, I could totally have gone there. It’s not like he’d turn me away. But I reasoned that he’d want to know what was going on, and as he’s been looking for a reason to dislike Jack since we met, this would provide exactly that. Maybe, I tell myself with a little twinge of hope, it’s a good sign that I don’t want to tell my dad about all this, that I want him to still approve of Jack. That I don’t want this to be the end of us. I started to look for a hotel on the basis that paying for somewhere to stay would unquestionably be the best and most sensible thing to do, but the thought of it made me feel so achingly alone. So, I swallowed the pride which I had let get in the way of my friendships, and I dialled Grace’s number.
‘Get in a taxi,’ she said, before I’d even finished my sentence.
And now we’re sitting in her kitchen, drinking massive oat milk cappuccinos while her kids destroy the playroom, and I notice the rude nakedness of her left hand, from which her massive diamond wedding band, and even more massive diamond engagement ring, are conspicuously missing.
I tell her everything. About the fertility stuff, the Clay stuff, the American deal, the whole horrible, sticky mess. And eventually, once I’ve finished projectile talking at her, she considers me for a moment, and then asks, ‘Do you think he’s being unreasonable?’
I sigh. ‘I don’t know. It would be easier if I could say which one of us was capital W wrong. I know this isn’t exactly what he wants to be doing, but it’s setting us up for life. Once we’ve got a decent dent in the mortgage and some savings, and all our debt is paid off, he can write clever books all day long.’
‘Have you told him that?’ Grace asks. I shake my head.
‘Out of interest,’ she asks, ‘why are you so averse to letting him do his own thing? To doing this influencer thing on your own?’
I don‘t like the question, but we’re having a go at this honesty thing, so I tell her the truth. ‘We’re a brand. A team. A package deal.’
‘Do you have to be?’ she asks, cocking her head to one side.
‘I tried to make a success of things on my own for years. Literally years. I applied for more jobs than he’ll ever know. I tried blogging, I wrote short stories, I went to evening classes to learn how to write for TV, I even tried stand-up.’ Grace laughs at this. ‘And the only time I managed to succeed at anything,’ I go on, ‘was when he was doing it with me.’
Grace gives me a look, which I think is supposed to tell me that I am being insane. ‘Look,’ she tells me, getting up to wash the cups, which we’ve barely finished drinking from. Tom used to laugh about what a neat freak she is. I wonder how much of a journey it is from laughing to sneering. ‘I don’t know shit about fuck when it comes to being an influencer. But the market is predominantly women, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And most of your audience is women?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re doing most of the work for this joint account?’
‘I don’t know if “most” is fair ...’ I trail off as she waves a hand at me.
‘So you’re smart, and funny, and attractive. You’ve got good clothes and good ideas. Have you never stopped to think that this huge, mostly female following is actually there because they like you? Like, specifically you?’ she says, hands on hips.
I lay my head down on her dining table and moan dramatically. ‘But if that’s true then Jack and I have been having the worst fights of our life for no bloody reason.’
Grace laughs. ‘Look, I know you guys have had a rough time, but I really don’t think it’s terminal. A decent therapist and a couple of rounds of IVF and you’re golden.’
I know it’s not that simple. It’s the kind of flippant throwaway comment which means Grace gets sent to HR intermittently for being mean to the Gen-Zs at work. But I like it. She makes it sound so straightforward; I almost believe her.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’m going to call him and say that.’
Only I can’t find my phone. I had it last night, but when I woke up this morning, I was so distracted by the kids that I didn’t look for it. And now it’s totally disappeared. We hunt high and low, tipping out my handbag, my overnight bag, looking down the sides of the bed, and then suddenly Grace realises what might have happened. Flushed, we go back downstairs, and Grace summons the children into the kitchen.
‘Did one of you take Jessica’s phone?’
They both shake their heads.
‘Are you sure?’
They both nod.
‘If you can find Jessica’s phone, I’ll let you watch Peppa on the iPad.’
It transpires that Ada and Raffy do know where my phone is, and it appears within seconds. They’re then given the iPad, which is a bit like a winning lottery ticket as far as they’re concerned.
I take my phone off airplane mode and notifications start rolling in. Just like before when the Verity story came out.
‘Fuck,’ I say, opening it. ‘Something’s happened.’
Grace leaps into crisis management mode. ‘What? Another article? Where are you seeing it?’ She opens her phone and her work laptop and starts frantically googling. ‘I can’t see anything on any of the tabloids? Just the same article from before.’
‘It’s not that,’ I say quietly, looking up from my phone. ‘Jack has posted something. On our account.’
Grace takes a sharp intake of breath. ‘Oh God. What now?’
Slowly, trying to keep myself composed, I open our profile. And there, in the top left-hand square, is a photograph. It’s a different resolution from the ones I take, and it’s not in the colour story my grid is currently adhering to. Have we been hacked?
It’s a picture of a notebook, and in his handwriting, writing I’ve been looking at for nearly half my life, he’s written: ‘RULES’.
‘I can’t do it,’ I say, looking away from my phone. ‘You read it.’
‘You’ll have to read it at some point, you might as well rip the plaster off,’ Grace says.
‘At some point, sure, but not yet. Please. You just read it and tell me what it says.’
‘Grow up.’ Grace sighs.
I hold her gaze.
‘Fine.’ She sighs again. ‘I’ll read it to you.’
Anyone who follows us will know that I fucked up this week. And what you’ve read – the things I said – were partially true. But they were also only part of the story. We did write a list of rules for our perfect marriage, and we wrote them by living our lives. And for a long time, they worked. But we got older, and life did things to us: we struggled with infertility, money, career turbulence – all the normal, horrible stuff that makes a life a life. I told someone last week that our rules weren’t working, and I was wrong to say that. They did work. They just aren’t working for us right now. The truth is, there are no set rules for a marriage because a marriage isn’t a set thing. It’s a living, breathing organism and you’ve got to keep changing to keep up with it. It doesn’t matter what your rules are, it matters that you’re both still trying to make them.
I haven’t been a great partner over the last few months. I broke Jess’s trust, I hid the fact that I was struggling, and I wasn’t there for her in moments when she needed me. And because of that, I damaged our marriage, and I damaged something she’d worked hard on: this community. She’s had her flaws, too. Neither of us has been perfect. But some people now claim that because she and I are having trouble, our rules don’t work. But those people are wrong. We know those rules work because they got us here, and they made us into a couple who want to keep trying to be happy together, whatever it takes.
There’s no one set of rules which will last forever, and now it’s time to make some new ones. And I’m very much hoping that Jess will make them with me.
Grace stops and looks at me. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think I need you to drive me somewhere.’
In films, when there’s a mad chase to the airport, the protagonist usually runs towards a waiting taxi, or speeds her sports car down the road. She doesn’t usually have to wait for her best friend to find two children each a pair of matching Zara trainers, and then strap them into their uber-safe rear-facing car seats. It takes nearly half an hour before we can slowly reverse out of the drive, with the Moana soundtrack vibrating through Grace’s Chelsea tractor of a car.
‘Hurry up!’ I say. ‘I need to tell him I’ve seen it and I love him.’
‘You know that thing in your hand makes phone calls as well as posts photographs, right?’ Grace says, driving directly over a mini roundabout.
‘I don’t want to call him, I want to turn up on the doorstep. It’s romantic.’
Grace rolls her eyes, then indicates.
‘Nope,’ I say, reaching over and cancelling the indicator. ‘I need to make a stop before we go home.’
‘Where now?’ Grace asks.
‘WHSmith’s.’ She takes corners worryingly quickly. ‘I’d forgotten what a horrible driver you are,’ I say, gripping on to the handle and understanding why they shelled out for the ￡500 car seats.
‘You don’t even have a licence!’ Grace retorts, cutting someone else up and giving them the finger. My satnav takes us to the nearest branch of WHSmith’s, where I buy every single pack of biros that I can find while Grace waits outside, double-parked in the enormous four-by-four, ignoring anyone who beeps at her. Then I run back to the car, arms full of packs of ballpoints.
‘Now you can take me home, please,’ I say.
Jack has rung me twice – presumably he’s at home wondering whether I’ve seen his post and if I’m okay – but I’m tired of hiding behind my phone and want to talk to him in person.
Grace screeches to a halt outside our house, waves me good luck and then she’s gone because the kids have a spin class or something. I ring the doorbell despite the fact that I’ve got keys, and stand, waiting for him. He takes a while, and eventually when he comes to the door, he’s wearing pyjamas and the dressing gown he’s had since uni.
‘You came back,’ he says, a big smile appearing on his face.
‘I did.’
‘You saw what I wrote?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you think?’
I hold up my WHSmith’s bag. ‘I agree. I think we need some new rules. This time I brought a pen.’
Some hours later we are lying on the softly carpeted floor of our living room, surrounded by pens. I roll over and realise that one has been digging into my back. Jack laughs and takes out his phone. He takes a picture and shows me the perfect outline of a Bic in my skin. ‘You should post that,’ he laughs.
‘Nope,’ I say. ‘This one’s just for us.’