‘I’d been starting to think that if you took the pill I would have to take it too, if you and I were going to have any kind of future. But I’m not sure I could ever bring myself to do it. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m just not the sort of person who could swallow it and hope for the best. The idea of it being irreversible scares me. And you can’t change who you are, can you?’
‘No,’ I admit. But the truth is, I wouldn’t want to change a single thing about the person Rachel is.
She turns her head to mine. The tenderness in her brown eyes feels strangely sharp. ‘I’mhappy, Josh. I love our life. Or I did. I was so excited for our future.’
I shut my eyes against her use of the past tense. Against everything it might mean. The forks and branches of what I have done are starting to streak through my mind now, like cracks across ice.
‘I spent my childhood feeling like the odd one out. Like there was something wrong with me. And I can’t inflict that on my own children, if I’m lucky enough to have them. I want to be a completely normal mother. The mostboringmother that ever was. I don’t want to still be twenty-nine when they’re ninety. Can you imagine?’
I swallow and say nothing. Because – ridiculous as this may seem, given what I did last night – I can’t, actually. Aside from anything else, the thought is oddly creepy, on a similar plane somehow to those old guys in Hollywood with girlfriends young enough to be their granddaughters.
It is not the family picture we’d always imagined. Not by a long shot.
‘I want to experiencelife, Josh. I want to grow old with my friends. I want to go through adulthood the way everyone else goes through it. I want to bitch about my stretch marks and worry about my pension contributions and tut when I see kids riding pushbikes on the pavement. I’ve got zero interest in staying this age forever. Do you know why?’
I just wait, still soundless.
Her eyes are brimming with tears now. ‘Because all I’ve ever wanted is the entirely normal experience of growing old with the man I love.’
And, at this, I know – although I think, if I’m honest, I always knew – that it’s not going to be as simple as asking her to takethe pill too. I was naïve to believe, even for a moment, that it might be.
‘I just know that if I took it... I might struggle to ever be happy again.’
Her voice is soft, but her words still sting. Snow falling on skin.
I realise, now, that by taking that pill I have stolen Rachel’s peace of mind. The person who deserves it the most out of anyone I’ve ever met.
‘Taking it will never be an option, for me,’ she says, but sadly, as though she wishes the opposite were true.
17.
Josh
July 1991
On the night Rachel and I moved into our flat in Bedford, after nearly three years together, we lay down side by side on the living-room floor and stared up at the ceiling.
We were surrounded by piles and piles of my books, our clothes, and not a lot else. Because we didn’t have a lot else; we were only twenty-one years old. We didn’t even have a sofa.
Our friends had just left. We’d supplied the fish and chips, and corner-shop cava, as a thank-you for helping us save on a removals company.
‘Do you think they all hated it?’ I said, after we’d lain together in silence for a while, adjusting to the sensation of being somewhere new, the syncopation of an unfamiliar neighbourhood. The tap and creak of the overgrown pear tree next door. The sweep of passing cars on the road. Music thumping faintly from different open windows, a disparate, clashing melody.
Rachel smiled. ‘Yep. But they don’t see what we see.’
‘Are you still thinking about that new build? The two-up, two-down?’ During our search, Rachel had gravitated towards the many other, more sensible properties out there.
‘Nope,’ she said firmly, but I was worried she already felt wistful about those smooth walls and pristine carpets, sparkling bathrooms and double-glazing so new it still had the stickers on it.
But my mum had insisted property should be bought with your heart, not your head. Her first house with Dad had beena wreck, she said, and hadn’t that worked out all right in the end? (Of course, she skipped over the bit where the place nearly bankrupted them.)
‘This flat has character,’ Rachel murmured now. ‘That two-up, two-down was a beige little box with no soul.’
I smiled, trying not to focus too hard on the water marks streaking like tear stains down the length of the living-room wall. ‘Yeah, you can’t put a price on soul.’
‘We’ll make it beautiful,’ Rachel said, though admittedly it was hard to know how, given how recklessly we’d ended up stretching ourselves on the mortgage.
Rachel was working by then too, in human resources for a bank. It was an entry-level position, only marginally better paid than I was, when you worked out the equivalent hourly rate.
