Chapter 57
Josh
Darren summons me to his place. I try to pretend I’m busy, but then Giles turns up at my flat and practically headlocks me over there.
In Darren’s kitchen, I attempt to avoid the discussion I know they want to have by engaging Darren’s youngest, Blake, in a long and involved conversation about his Xbox.
Unsurprisingly, though, sixteen-year-olds have better things to do with their weekends than explain gaming to Luddites, so he escapes at the earliest opportunity.
Darren’s phone buzzes with a message. He glances at it, smiles softly. ‘Last exam for Raffy yesterday. Three years down, two to go.’
His oldest boy is at uni in London, studying to be a cosmetic dentist. This kind of blows my mind, given that I first met his parents two years before he was born, and I’m pretty sure his first word was bum.
‘Just wish that one would sort himself out.’ Darren tips his head in the direction of Blake’s bedroom. ‘I keep trying to tell him, playing Xbox isn’t a career plan.’
‘Is for some people,’ Giles mumbles, through a mouthful of Monster Munch. ‘They have tournaments now.’
I feel a flex of guilt for chatting to Blake just now – and, let’s be honest, for much of the past sixteen years – about exactly that.
Still, I continue to find myself weirdly rapt by these vicissitudes of parenting.
Even the stuff my friends tell me is hard, boring, challenging. I envy, oddly, everything.
You always want what you can’t have, I guess.
‘So, that’s it?’ Darren says to me, after tapping out a quick message to Raffy. ‘You’re officially divorced?’
I nod. ‘Solicitor sent through the decree absolute last week.’
In a nice little fuck-you from the universe, my divorce certificate came through a decade to the day that Rachel walked out. Ten whole years without her. Ten years of living a life that, sometimes, I struggle to recognise.
‘Sorry, mate,’ Darren says, putting his phone away. ‘But maybe this is what you’ve needed. Closure. Absolutely zero chance of you ever reuniting.’
‘Great, cheers,’ I say, offering him a slightly piqued thumbs-up.
Darren and Giles exchange a silent glance.
‘What?’ I say, a little more bluntly than I intended.
‘You should try to see this as a fresh start.’
‘Yep. Look to the future, pull yourself together and stop pining after Rachel,’ Giles chips in.
I wish it were that easy. Last month, walking past Pizza Hut, I happened to look up and see Rachel, Oliver and seven-year-old Emma at a table in the window.
They were the perfect picture of a happy, messy family, all crayons and sticky fingers, half-finished refills of Coke, plates piled with abandoned crusts.
Emma was giggling at something Oliver was saying, her whole body tilted sideways in the breeze of his quick wit.
I just stood next to a bin graffitied with expletives and watched them all for a few seconds, my heart racing and aching.
‘Define pine,’ I demand, by way of deflection.
Giles clutches his chest, starts to speak in a pitched-up voice.
I smile despite myself, hold up a hand. ‘Forget I asked.’
I haven’t ever told them what Oliver said to me, the first time we met. It would only get back to Rachel, and make me look bitter.
I think about Wilf. I wonder if he’s started to slowly lose himself over the years too.
If he sometimes looks around and can’t believe he ended up living in Spain, playing poker to make ends meet.
How he feels about time passing, seeing an unchanging face staring back at him in the mirror.
If he ever fears the future, or gets the sense he’s being left behind.
If he stalks his old friends online, marvelling at the fact that their kids are doing things like learning how to veneer teeth, while he’s stuck in the early noughties, attempting to style it out.
I’ve tried calling him a few times since my visit to Spain. But the only number I’ve got for him always comes up as out of service.
It still troubles me deeply that Darren and Giles have long-assumed Wilf simply upped and left us all, too selfish to provide so much as a functioning phone number. They’ve stopped discussing how they think he’s doing these days, so I can only conclude they no longer care.
‘You should try to see this divorce as a positive,’ Darren says. ‘The start of a new chapter. You need to look forward. You’re not still considering that antidote idea, are you?’
I shake my head.
‘Good,’ says Giles. ‘I mean, reversing it could put you right back to where you started, no?’
I don’t respond. I hadn’t actually thought of that.
Eventually, I decided against taking things any further with Wilf’s ex-colleague Hester. Rachel has made it clear she will never want the second pill. But for some reason I know I’d still find it impossible to hand it over to a third party, no matter how trusted.
That’s not to say I haven’t spent a fair amount of time trawling the internet, to see if I might be able to track down a cure for what I did to myself.
But, predictably, it’s thrown up nothing useful.
Just clickbait news pieces about the opposite of what I’m looking for, like collagen and retinol, and the occasional dubious-looking article about ‘promising tests on mice’.
‘I’d make the most of eternal youth if I were you. I mean, take me, for example. I’m probably going to have a heart attack if I don’t join a gym, stop eating butter, cut back on—’ Giles breaks off to up-end his bag of Monster Munch, shaking the remnants into his mouth.
Across the table, I meet Darren’s eye and we share a smile.
‘I’ve started creaking when I stand up,’ Giles continues, through his mouthful. ‘I need more time to recover between shags. And, last night, I needed to piss twice. Twice.’
‘You’re forty-three.’
‘Exactly. Clock’s ticking. The girls are going to be teenagers in a month. Next thing I know, they’ll be off to uni. And then . . .’ He trails off and wipes his mouth, seeming dangerously close to becoming emotional.
‘You could still have kids,’ Darren says to me. ‘You could still meet someone. You always wanted a family.’
Giles nods sagely. ‘The point is, you’ve got time. Infinite time. You never have to worry about your sperm going stale, or being too old. That’s a gift, mate. Make the most of it.’
I walk home alone, trying not to dwell too hard on the concept of stale sperm.
My route takes me past the takeaway that used to be Sorelli’s.
Its neon sign glows red and blue in the dark, the smell of grease and deep-fried chicken wafting through the humid air.
The night sky has blown pale, skimmed now with creamy clouds.
I think back to all the times I sat inside those walls with Rachel, spilling spaghetti sauce on my T-shirt and talking nonsense and trying, always, to make her laugh.
For a while I stand on the opposite pavement, watching teenagers mill around the shop, buckets of chicken in hand. Our laughter, I realise, has been replaced. New kids are here now, carefree and on the cusp of their futures.
And it is this most unlikely of tableaux that makes me think, yes – why keep living in the past? Because I can never take back what I did.
The world has moved on, and Rachel has too. So maybe my friends are right. Maybe, finally, it’s time I did the same.