Tonight, things feel a little more urgent because I am In the Middle of My Cycle. Nothing makes you want to have sex less than describing your cervical mucus– one of about fifty-four variations, as it turns out– with a nice fertility clinic nurse. And yet, the flashing smiley face on the ovulation kit has basically told us to crack on, Godspeed, have at it. Something happens during Middle of My Cycle sex. Johnny tries not to look too hopeful, or too earnest.
‘Am I gonna get you pregnant now? Huh? Are we gonna make a baby here?’ he says in between thrusts, with a mid-Atlantic accent. I make a mental note to take him to task about whatever pumpkin spice latte porn he’s been watching, or whatever it is that’s inspired this kind of banter.
As he gently flips me over into one of his three preferred (or only) positions– some lazy, sideways action– I start wondering idly about how the hell we even got here. Johnny was thirty-five when we met, and he had a pleasing abundance of his own hair, no pesky family baggage and a relatively boyish physique, which seemed both surprisingly rare and more than enough for me at the time. Back then, his eyes would light up with a sort of lovely gratitude at the very mention of sex. He wasn’t like other guys, whose eyes seemed to darken, get meaner and lose focus right after the first kiss.
But since we married, we have slid into an easy, complacent dynamic. He is earnest and sweet and a bit hapless and blows his nose an unsettling number of times in a day and loves nothing more than the uncomfortable look on someone else’s face after he emits a classically dreadful dad joke. I have loved all this about him. But still, I’ve noticed there has been a shift of late. We are pals whose toes occasionally touch in bed. The making tea for each other stopped a long time ago. Johnny is more likely to wonder aloud to me if that thing on his bum is a spot, or maybe closer to a boil.
If familiarity breeds contempt, where exactly does this zit-or-boil banter leave us?
I’m not without sin, granted. I fart with neither ceremony nor apology, and he jokingly yells at me to go see a vet. Sorry now, but I’m not holding it in for another sixty years.
Or however long it might be.
If Johnny were to appear onMastermind, his five specialist categories would be:
Home counties indie from the years 1992 to 1999
The locations of the areas of the Shipping Forecast and their respective co-ordinates
Craft beer production that happens in other people’s filthy garages
The acquisition of merino wool jumpers that still go bobbly
How to avoid arguments
Every so often during sex, he closes his eyes for a while and turns his face from mine, burying his neck into my armpit. I briefly wonder if he’s thinking about sex with someone else.
Tonight is nice and all, the same way the gym is after you resist going for weeks. But I am absolutely determined not to fake it. I don’t want to be the woman who fakes it all the time with her own husband. I cannot be that woman. Never wanted to be that woman. But after a few minutes, I realize the only way to finish up in time forNewsnightis to let Johnny think he’s done the proverbial business. This isn’t about me, this isn’t about our marriage. Just a few minor issues with the, well… service provider. I give a few practiced shudders, squalls and sighs, clenching and then releasing theatrically, mindful to not give it the full YouPorn or else he’ll know. Seconds later, he comes quietly and politely (see? A gent to the last) looking softly into my eyes as he does so, a man gently pushing a fragile paper boat out on to a pond. Much as I appreciate the politesse, I do miss a good old-fashioned, noisy slamming. I thought I would never tire of it, but I guess life can be funny like that sometimes. Baby-making sex does not equal the Slam. Headboard driving would not be respectful, given the circumstances.
Johnny withdraws slowly and deliberately, careful not to lose a drop. I hug my knees to my chest, hoping to tip and guide stuff wherever it needs to go.
‘Teamwork makes the dream work,’ Johnny says amid his light panting. I think of the Brazil nuts he has to eat every day, and the alcohol I have cut way down on to make this happen. I notice that Johnny has stopped asking afterwards if I thinkthismight beit. Because it hasn’t been it for a while now. The question feels like too much to say out loud these days.
You’re as young as you’ll ever be in this moment,I think. The weird thing is that it’s true of every moment in your life.
2
Leaving for work every morning usually elicits one of two emotions. On a good day, the routine is a comfort. There’s the knowing that I don’t have to exert a single shred of excess brainpower, because today will be the same as yesterday, and the day before and the day before that. On the bad days, a tiny voice suggests that maybe I shouldn’t be sleepwalking so willingly through this one precious life. The voice reminds me that I used to watch the Oscars every year and hope to be there in the auditorium someday, celebrated and adored for my God-anointed acting talents. That I would run to the bathroom as a child and practise my own winning speech in the mirror, holding the toilet brush.
‘What do you put your success down to?’ a reporter would ask me on the red carpet.
‘Well, I won’t be putting it down to anyone else,’ I’ll reply. ‘Those who got me to where I am know who they are.’ Much appreciative murmuring. ‘And those who stood in my way, they know who they are too.’
London is cooler in ways that Dublin never could be, I think to myself as I survey everyone on the Overground. People in London know how to manage an effortless sort of style. Last time I was in Dublin, I watched as a guy walked down the street in a Breton top and chinos while someoneshouted ‘Ooh la la, wanker’ across the street at him. I have seen grown men in actual lederhosen in Hackney, and no one so much as squeaks.
I watch as everyone around me stands, holding a pole or reading the newspaper, each of them calmly resigned, sleepwalking towards their own executions and not really knowing it yet. Many of them then bolt out of the carriage with needless purpose and into the moving centipede of people in Liverpool Street station. Like them, I have fallen victim to an intricate coffee order habit.
From the coffee with nine details, it’s on to a desk in a brown-walled basement, where I input financial codes into a computer until it feels like my fingers are bleeding. I still don’t know what the actual point of any of this is; I was told on my first day during orientation, but the information has refused to glom on to my brain– what the codes mean or what they do in the overall scheme of things, although I manage to talk up a good game about my Role in Financial Services whenever I need to. I could be dealing with nuclear codes. I could be inputting the team’s lunch orders. I did once ask Francesca, who is on the desk across from me, what it is we actually do. She laughed so hard that I worried that the clump of cells in her womb that would eventually become the person that is baby Barnaby would fly out of her nostrils.
We are technically In the City!– 64-point font, bold, italics, underlined– but we are as far from the sexy stockbroking action as it’s possible to get. We might as well be pulling the heads from free-range chickens down here.
On the very first day in the job, I sat down to my first batch of codes, glad of the opportunity to not think too much about anything for the day. Forty-five minutes later,my brain was beginning to cramp. By lunchtime, part of my soul had departed my body, never to be seen or heard from again.
A dog farted on the Overground this morning, a genuine napalm assault on the lungs for all present, which at least means I have something to talk about with Francesca.
One thing you need to know about Francesca: you could be talking about Armageddon, orgies or the price of tampons, and she will always, always bring the conversation back round to Her Two. And so it goes with the dog fart.
‘I tell you, he’d have nothing on My Two. They can fart for days on end! Usually while jumping on your head! Absolute carnage round ours!’
