Address Book by Neil Bartlett

Author:Neil Bartlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkandescent
Published: 2021-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

203 Camden Road

I’m not sure if time always does go forwards.

For instance, you’d think I’d be used to being married by now—but I’m so completely not. When I see the little slip of paper with Mr and Mrs L. Lennard written on it, under our bell, I still wonder who that is. And when I hear Len whistling and making a mess in the bathroom in the morning, I still really can’t quite believe that it’s him that’s going to come out through the half-glass door and let me catch him walking around in just his vest and pajama-bottoms while I do his egg. And then, when on a Sunday morning he stubs his cigarette out and says, Right then Mrs Lennard, let’s get you back into that bed of ours, well he still makes me feel like it’s our first time.

Oh god—that stupid cold hotel room on our honeymoon. With the gas fire that ate all our shillings, and then still wouldn’t work. Honestly, I couldn’t stop shivering.

I don’t mean it’s bad between Len and me, because it’s not, it’s wonderful. In fact, it’s better than anybody ever told me. But—every time—every time we do it, I mean—I go back. Sometimes it’s even like I’m back right at the very beginning, staring at my dress spread out on the bed on the actual morning of our wedding, with those stupid big duchess-satin sleeves that I’d chosen, and me still not believing it was finally going to happen. With Mummy tapping on the door and asking, Are you alright in there darling, and me wondering whose arms and legs are these anyway?

When does it stop feeling like that, I wonder?

Last night, after we’d finished, Len was stroking my belly. He was saying, Where’s my little fish then? I know you’re in there little fish, because your mum says you are—and then all of a sudden he looks up at me with those great big eyes of his, and he says in his kidding posh-voice, Well you do realise Mrs Lennard that when this child of yours goes to the big school, the year is going to be nineteen seventy-something. Imagine that, he says, stroking me again. Nineteen seventy-one, nineteen seventy-two, nineteen seventy-three—and I had to close my eyes when he got to that one, because I can’t imagine that far ahead at all.

Before you get pregnant, you see, the future’s just an idea; then, when you do, it turns all very solid and slippery at the same time.

It’s like there’s this number, on a door somewhere, and you know what the number on the door is—because that’s your actual due date, you see—and also what street it’s on—because that’s your month—and also you can picture the door itself quite exactly, even the colour, and handle, and everything—but you still can’t for the life of you imagine what everything’s going to be like on the other side. Inside the actual room.

When I asked my nurse about it—about the specific day and

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