The Last Wave by Gillian Best

Author:Gillian Best
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freight Books

The Tide Turned

There were good days and bad days, but it was impossible to predict when they would arrive. All we could do was muddle through as best we could. It was our shared life that we navigated together and I don’t know if it was the one John had imagined for us, if it had changed in ways he hadn’t anticipated or if – when we were young and first married – he had considered our future at all beyond the perfunctory basics: marriage, home, children. A short checklist that would grow into a life.

No, that’s unkind. In truth, I didn’t know what he wanted and hoped for, what the contents of his dreams for us were because I had never asked. I hadn’t thought he would need to be asked, but like many things with my husband the truth was not all what I had imagined.

I heard him creaking down the stairs as I rested my head on the gloriously cold bathroom tiles and I wondered which John would be joining me that morning: the lucid one or the more recent version of himself, a man who had recently proven himself rather adept at time travel, skipping backwards and forwards through the years at uneven speeds.

Webb had been guarding either the door or me, it was hard to tell, all night and he roused himself when he heard John’s footsteps. The pair of them shuffling with uneven gaits as they crossed the kitchen, angling towards one another and meeting at the counter where the dog would be hoping for the crusts, which he saw as payment for a hard night’s work.

The kitchen tap ran and a few moments later I heard him put what I knew to be the empty glass on the counter. I counted to five and when he cleared his throat I smiled and took comfort in knowing so deeply someone else’s habits.

I tested the waters and slowly lifted my head off the tiles, the aches in my body seeking out recesses in my joints that I had never known existed. When my head was level with my shoulders I paused, waiting to see if the nausea would strike again. I thought of all the times I’d been in the boat, speeding back across the chop for three hours from Cap Gris Nez and how I had never once been seasick. I thought of this new development darkly as a way of making up for lost time, my days and nights spent here next to the toilet, holding on for dear life as my stomach convulsed and my insides burned.

There was a gentle knock on the door. ‘Martha?’ he asked.

I managed a feeble reply. ‘Yes.’

I could imagine my daughter and her wife seeing this sort of behaviour as antithetical to a marriage. I would not have been surprised if they left the bathroom door open at all times and believed privacy was a barrier to be overcome.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked.

Questions that were once banal became imperative overnight.

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