From Something Old by Alexander Nick

Author:Alexander, Nick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2021-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Seven

Heather

Because the majority of food items left in the cupboards were vegan, I struggled a bit to make lunch. Amy had brought tofu, egg replacer and ‘seitan strips’, whatever those might be, from England. There were cartons of hemp milk and packs of lentils and chickpeas. I thought Joe would be able to help, but it transpired he wasn’t much of a cook. ‘Amy makes a quiche with it, I think,’ he said, when I asked him about the squidgy block of tofu. But he had absolutely no idea how she did this and in the absence of a recipe book and without Internet, I was pretty sure that was a mystery that would never be resolved – or not on my watch, anyway.

In the end, I made us a pasta salad and mixed in chunks of the harder tofu as a replacement for cheese. As everyone pushed these rubbery cubes to one side, that was clearly not one of my better ideas.

Joe was sullen during lunch, which was understandable but challenging, and though I did my best to put on a brave face for the kids, my turmoil must have been visible too, because afterwards Lucy and Sarah were unusually clingy, even insisting to the point of tears on sleeping in my bed at siesta time.

When I woke up just after four, it was a second or so before I could work out why I felt so strange – before I could remember what had actually happened.

I got up quietly and crept outside. Joe and Ben were still sleeping, so it was just me, the chirping cicadas and the gentle thrum of the pool pump.

I was glad. I needed this time to think. I needed time to try to feel something.

I sat beneath the olive tree and did my best to consciously reflect on it all, but it was like trying to grasp a handful of that toy slime we used to buy for the kids. The whole subject was an amorphous lump with no hard edges I could grasp it by.

I ran my conversation with Ant through my mind.

It had not been the angry screaming match I’d feared – in fact, it had been quite shockingly calm. Ant had made a series of statements and I’d listened almost entirely without intervening. He’d said that things had not been right for ages and that he’d been feeling, for a while, for years even, that something needed to change. He hadn’t been happy and he didn’t know why that was, but he felt that what had happened, no matter how unwelcome, had created an opportunity to rethink things.

I’d sat and listened and nodded, and during the silences, which were long, I’d simply waited. I hadn’t said anything, partly because, as was typical, Ant hadn’t asked me for my opinion anyway. But everything he’d said had struck me, for once, as true. It was rare that he spoke so honestly. Things had never been right between us. He wasn’t really happy, anyone could see that.

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