I arranged the fish fingers, chips, some carefully sliced carrot and a spoonful of hummus on to one of those plastic platters designed for fussy kids who don’t like their food groups to touch. I had bought a set thinking they might inspire me to serve up interesting antipasto-style meals for Thomas, with morsels of healthy treats for him to select from. Pinterest mums always provided a selection of examples to follow. But the pressure of having to come up with something for each of the spots was intense. Once I had found myself adding a few cornflakes, just so he wouldn’t have an empty platter segment.
The landline phone jingled and startled me; I’d almost forgotten we still had one.
‘Is this Murchison Contracting?’ The man’s voice was gruff. Stephen must have his work phone off. I pushed an image of him in bed with Alexa out of my mind, dabbing at an unidentified splotch on my shirt.
‘Oh sorry.’ I tried to hit the pitch and tone of a cheery receptionist. ‘Stephen Murchison’s gone out of business. Terrible thing.’
There was a pause. ‘Are you sure? Stephen?’
‘Quite. Allegations of poor workmanship. Awful situation. I’m just taking the calls. Should I take a message?’
The man coughed. ‘Never mind. I’ll try someone else.’
Thomas wailed from the lounge. My iPad had run out of battery. I ushered him in to the dinner table, helping him use my bump as a kind of step stool on to his seat. ‘What you eating?’ He looked at me.
I could not respond. My stomach was still doing an impression of the kitchen blender but if I threw our routine off track, I might never get him into bed. It was only the promise of a bath on my own once he was asleep that was getting me through the evening. I half-heartedly picked a limp fish finger from the oven tray and put it on a bread plate. I slid into the chair next to him and gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.
He frowned. ‘You sad, Mumma? Daddy home?’
I had to turn my face away and pinch my thigh to stop a surge of tears. ‘I’m fine, darling, don’t worry. I’m not sure what Daddy’s up to, but you’ve got me tonight, okay?’
I clenched his hand, probably a little too tightly. With three of us around the dinner table, the six-person setting had seemed appropriate. With just us two, it seemed empty. Of course, it would not be long before we would have another person with us in her high chair, throwing her own fish fingers on the ground. Somehow the thought did not make me any happier.
It turns out you can share a house with someone for more than a decade and still not really know them.
I met Stephen as I was finishing high school. It had been what one of my teachers described as a ‘social year’ for me, in which I spent more time getting acquainted with the coffee machine in the common room set aside for seniors than I did in the classroom. We were allowed to come and go as we liked and I duly did, erasing any classes before 10 a.m. from my timetable. Despite that, I had learnt to write an essay florid enough that no one noticed its lack of substance and I was able to squeeze out enough marks to get into a communications degree.
I would like to claim to have been following a lifelong dream, but that would be a lie. I was not good enough at maths to be a doctor, not confident enough for marketing and although I harboured daydreams about being a youth worker, who helped troubled young people find their way, I had finally accepted that it probably wouldn’t all be like Dangerous Minds. I could never pull off a leather jacket in the same way Michelle Pfeiffer did, anyway. Kids would take one look at me and roll their eyes.
Stephen crashed his way into my world at a friend’s party – the kind where for the first time one of your inner circle is finally of legal drinking age. We all felt very grown up that one of us had ventured to the off-licence and stocked up on sugary ready-mixed vodka pops.
Stephen had ended up there by accident because the friend who was meant to be taking him and his mates to the football had drunk too much and could no longer drive. He’d sidled over to me with the confidence of someone on their third beer. Helena, who had been my friend since we were in kindergarten, gave me a knowing look. We had spent ages agonising over my outfit and settled on a pair of bootleg jeans, an off-the-shoulder sparkly black top and an impossibly high pair of stiletto heels that I was not able to walk in without looking like a particularly hesitant fawn but which we decided looked incredibly sophisticated.
Stephen looked me straight in the eye. ‘I snore, sometimes pee in the shower and have been known to turn my underwear inside out to get another day’s wear out of them.’
‘Pardon?’ I wasn’t sure if he had mistaken me for someone else.
He shot me an ear-to-ear grin. ‘I figure if I tell you all the bad stuff about me now, there’s less chance you’ll be disappointed when you get to know me.’
He settled down on to the sofa beside me and put his arm along its back. I could smell his supermarket cologne. He had shaved his head, but you could see the shadow where the hair was growing back, so I knew he was not actually bald. He was sporting the small, under-the-lip tuft of hair that was inexplicably the fashion at the time, particularly among those who needed to prove they had hair to grow.
‘How do you know I’m going to want to get to know you?’ I was impressed by his arrogance.
His eyes were mischievous. ‘Oh, I don’t. But it’s not like you were talking to anyone else.’ He gestured to the boys my age, who were all still milling around on the other side of the room, too nervous to try their own opening lines. Helena looked as though she might be about to rescue one of them.
That was fifteen years ago, and although I found out pretty quickly that his list of negative things was by no means comprehensive, he was correct in his prediction that I was rarely disappointed – in the early years, at least.
Through university, while my friends were ranking the various schools according to the sexual prowess of their male students, I was going home to Stephen. I would still add my cash to the fund we built up each week for jugs of second-rate beer in the campus bar, before they headed off into the night with the latest guy to get their hopes up. Whereas I knew exactly what I was getting with Stephen – and it would come with an early alarm clock the next day as he got ready for work.
He even willingly attended a mock appointment with a friend who was training to be a naturopath and put us through a process in which we were asked to describe the consistency of our faeces. I had felt sick with mortification but he had chuckled at the flowchart of photographs and brought it up when he wanted to make me blush, for weeks afterwards.
There was a period when my friends and I became a bit too invested in Sex and the City, and I decided I needed some time as a single girl to carve my identity, preferably from the comfort of something that resembled an upmarket New York loft apartment. It took about twelve hours before I realised that my rundown flat didn’t have quite the same vibe. The heel of my imitation Manolo Blahniks kept getting stuck in the cracked concrete of the front steps, for one.
Wanting to punish me, he went for drinks with his workmates at the bar I worked at, and gave my colleague a tip that was about three times her nightly wage. I found out later he’d taken out a loan from his father to pay the rent that week.
I responded by going on a blind date offered by one of my flatmates. The standoff lasted about three weeks before I called him, manufacturing a leaking tap that needed his attention. He turned up within ten minutes, not even mentioning that he was a builder, not a plumber.
Our relationship had become so familiar I sometimes had to think twice to remember that he had not always been around. We had become so comfortable that it was not unusual