Novel About My Wife by Perkins Emily

Author:Perkins, Emily
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

We all needed to get away. I finished the draft of the vampire script and forwarded it to Rosemary. The last push of the rewrite left me gasping for a break, some seaside air. Things were very bad between Tonia and Andy. I knew this through no conversation with Andy, but from Ann. To use that horrible phrase, the emotional housework was done almost exclusively by the women in our friendship. Andy’ who was, I knew, under great pressure at work – and I had met up with some of his old college friends to play football. It was a way to get the tension out; Ann and I couldn’t have bruising hot sex every night. Once upon a time of course I could have, he says with a spluttering cough, but the pregnancy was a convenient excuse. As Andy and I thudded over the hard winter ground of some South London sports field, our throats burning, our women were busy cleaning out the Augean stables behind us. We men were free – to mask our wine addictions behind pretending to be connoisseurs, to try to keep up with new music, to banter about foreign, not domestic, policy, and to kick a ball around. Except all of the old college friends had families now, and Andy didn’t want to socialise afterwards while they proudly knocked a few casual kicks back and forth with their kids. We’d be the ones sloping off first, past their mixed-message wives (pressed blouses: pray with me; jeans tucked into boots: pray for me) as they bliddle-ipped the remote control locking function on the four-wheel drives. Even football didn’t improve Andy’s mood.

From the start that trip was different. In the old days we’d bag some cheap flights to Pisa or Barcelona or Malmo, hire a car, zip along empty continental motorways towards our rented villa with pool, if it was summer, or boutique hotel if it was not. This long, pregnant winter we rented a cottage in Cornwall. The girls were in charge and Ann had decided that fat as she was, she wasn’t up for the cud-chewing shame of economy travel. We arrived late on Friday night, in our separate cars. Poor Andy had some meeting with the head teacher that he couldn’t get out of so they were late leaving London. It fell to Ann and I to warm up the old stone house, light candles, light the fire, open wine, all of these things she loved to do and was so good at. As she switched the kitchen light on it burst with a second of brightness then went out, dead. By the steady circle of her torch light Ann found a spare bulb, found the master power switch, cut the current, steadied the rocky kitchen chair with a square of newspaper, climbed up on it, swapped the tinkling darkened bulb for the new one, and gave us light. I was not such a fuckwit as to have been standing there watching while

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