Marvin Gaye
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
David turned the book over to read the back cover, huffed, and put it down on the table.
He’d ruined the poor seller’s display. When my brute of a husband was looking elsewhere, I shuffled the book back into its original place on the table and then caught up with him.
It had become something of a tradition, me going to the local flea market, every other month when it popped up in the big old market hall just outside of town; David coming with me, huffing periodically, and then asking where I wanted to stop for dinner on the way home.
I’d never invited him, incidentally, though I didn’t mind him coming.
What I did mind was the puffing and the guffawing and the–
‘Patti, I think I’ve got a book in me.’
I had been midway through swallowing a mouthful of tea and my beige life flashed before my eyes in the same second as my throat forgetting how to work. I wiped my mouth clean before I answered and vowed not to take another sip until this spiel was done.
‘Do you think you might have sat on it, or swallowed it in your sleep?’
David froze. ‘Are you taking the piss out of me?’
‘Yes.’ I thumbed a porcelain bowl with a chip on its rim. ‘Yes, I am a little.’
‘Patti, why wouldn’t I have a book in me?
Do you see some of the tosh people write about?
’ He picked up a book at random – whatever happened to be nearby on the next stall across and within snatching distance.
It didn’t help his cause that when he turned the cover towards me, I saw that it was Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
‘See,’ he started, though he sounded less sure of himself now, ‘a young girl falls in love with her employer and they have an affair.’ He threw the book down where he’d found it. ‘Tosh!’
‘Three pounds,’ the stallholder said, clearly having heard nothing of the conversation.
‘Oh, we’ve already got a copy, thanks,’ David answered with a smile I recognised from the hours he spent perfecting it in his full-length mirror. ‘Patti, I mean it. I think I’ve got a brilliant story in me somewhere.’
‘So you want to write fiction?’
I was only half in the conversation. David had picked up and put down an awful lot of things since he’d left journalism seven years ago.
He’d taken his life savings and invested in a string of online men’s magazines – which I’d joked, at the time, must be the sign of a quarter-life crisis – but the decision had actually paid off, leaving him all the time in the world to become an “expert” in many other things.
To begin with he’d said there was a book, then there was a film, then there was the gym, then there was crochet– Good God, the crochet.
I held back a moan at the memory of arriving home one evening to find bowls of yarn spun out across the living room and David worrying at his fingers, asking how quickly arthritis might set in.
Then there was the book club, and the audio drama club, and the swinger’s club – an idea I had very quickly vetoed.
I didn’t doubt my husband’s ability to do anything he set his mind to; I’d known him for long enough to know that was very much an area he excelled at.
It was the actual setting his mind to it in the first instance that seemed to be a problem for him…
‘No, no, I think I’d write an autobiography.’
‘Of your life?’ I snapped before I could censor the question.
‘Yes, Patti’ – he nudged me softly – ‘that’s how they usually work.’
‘A tell-all from a late-in-the-day Lothario?’ I said wistfully.
‘A tell-all from my time in journalism?’
‘I think you’d do better with the Lothario angle myself.’
We wandered between another row of stalls, and I was painfully aware of how many old and broken and beautiful things I was missing. Meanwhile, David was planning the next leg of his life as a bestselling bloody author.
‘It would give me something to do,’ he admitted at last, and I felt a twinge of sadness.
‘Well, that’s a good enough reason to do it.’
David elected not to work, but I’d never understood why.
He tired of journalism and that, of course, was reason enough to leave.
But to down tools entirely had been beyond my understanding at the time.
I often wondered what he did all day, while I was out making my pennies – and I mean that very literally because the shop was hardly lucrative, it only kept my hands busy.
That said, I never would have questioned what David did, lest we turn into a hideous role reversal of our parents.
I had grim images of opening my mouth and my father’s voice coming out: ‘What do you even do all sodding day?’ His hands bloodied from the butchery work he’d been practising; my mother’s bloodied from the meat she’d prepared for his dinner.
I had cut-glass clear memories of them looking as though they’d done ten rounds with each other when Dad had only been through the door three minutes.
In many ways, I couldn’t blame him for having left us both when he did – for a woman who worked, much to my mother’s dismay.
I think that had offended her more than the extramarital relations, if I’m honest. But David and I weren’t those people.
It didn’t matter to me what he did when I was out of the house; only that he enjoyed his time doing it.
‘Is it a waste of time, though?’
‘My darling, isn’t everything?’ I pinched the petal of a silk flower between finger and thumb just to enjoy its softness on our way past another stall. I thought we were making a line for the exit but David soon yanked me back.
‘How much for the bouquet?’ he asked, digging his wallet free of his front pocket.
‘Oh, they’re individual flowers.’ The stallholder smiled. ‘It’s not a bunch.’
‘Can I take the lot, then?’
‘Oh, ah…’
‘David–’
‘Patti, don’t ruin the moment,’ he spoke to me from the side of his mouth.
‘The lot, please?’ he said again to the young woman behind the counter.
I heard David ask her to wrap them in paper, if she had any, and I heard her mumble a sum as she handed the flowers to him.
‘Thanks ever so much,’ he said, collecting his change. ‘Sweets for my sweet.’
David passed the flowers to me and despite myself I felt my cheeks warm.
‘You’re a charmer, you are, David.’
He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and kissed my temple.
‘Patti, you’re the best woman in the world for putting up with my nonsense and I think you deserve–’ He gasped in a way that I can only describe as being uncharacteristically camp when we walked past a record stall that was blasting Marvin Gaye loud enough to make my shoulders bunch. ‘Patti, this is it!’
‘This is… what?’
‘The title of my memoir.’
I realised then that he was referring to the song – ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ – and my face stretched into a smile.
‘This is what you’ll call it?’
‘Good man, would you mind?’
Before I knew what my mad-brained husband was doing he’d eased the flowers out of my hand and passed them over to the man behind the counter of the record stall.
‘David, I’m not–’
‘Oh, live a little, woman!’
David grabbed at my hands and started to dance in front of me, a slow shift from side to side as though feeling his way into the rhythm of the song.
‘Come on, Patricia, I’ve seen those hips do better than that.’
‘David, you’re being an arse.’
‘Your arse.’
Quite unexpectedly, he let go of my one hand, lifted his arm over my head, and encouraged me into a twirl that folded my body up against his.
‘Ready?’ he asked, eyebrows raised with a grin that belonged to a child.
‘Go on then, you idiot.’
David span me out with a sharp enthusiasm until we were an arm’s length away from each other.
I wanted to resist, I truly, deeply did, but I found that I was dancing my back towards him as the backing singers crooned.
I didn’t mind a jot that people were watching by then – and I think David might have continued because people were watching.
Whatever our reasoning, the pair of us carried on like drunk teenagers from a bygone era until the song wound down, and there was even a shameful echo of applause from those who’d stayed to watch our improv. David bowed; I reddened.
‘No requests?’ the stallholder asked as he handed David back the flowers.
My husband laughed. ‘Oh, that’s our energy burst for the day, my friend. We’re going for dinner and an early night now.’
‘You know how to show a girl a good time,’ the gentleman joked back. ‘You looked great together, you two.’
I felt the red of my cheeks deepen. I thought by then I must have been that horrible gothic red that the likes of Charlotte Bronte probably used in her novels. It felt like a fine detail worth remembering. Something for David to write down, I thought with a smirk.
My husband pulled me to him before he answered. ‘She brings me up, this one.’
Though the truth of it was that at one time or another we’d each brought the other up a notch during our years together.
And for all my piss-taking, I thought this life of ours that we’d built from twenty-odd years’ worth of failed relationships and an eventual best-friend pact, probably was something worth writing down one day.