Page 107 of People In Love
I know you got so excited about an all-singing, all-dancing wedding day, she says. But I also know this proposal … this whole …decision, to spend our lives together, wasn’t ever a decision, for me. It just happened. Which is something that scared me, before, but now I think that’s the way it should be. Life happens, and you don’t wait for it. And we haven’t been waiting. We’ve been doing it, haven’t we? And I want tokeepdoing it, just the same. I want to hang art on our walls and cook great meals and come home to you, every night, so we can go to bed early and stay up late talking and then complain we’re tired because we stayed up late talking, and do it all again, and again, until we’re old. I want this to be about me andyou, Robin, not a big fussy day that gets away from us.
Her words are pouring out of her, and she’ll keep going if she has to, but Robin steps towards her, presses his thumb to her mouth.
I know what you’re going to say, he murmurs, and his pupils are huge, Nora thinks, dark and dilated. You’re going to say we don’t need to get married, after all, aren’t you? That you can wear this dress, on a Friday night, or at birthdayparties, and we can just go on being us, as we are. That we don’t need to get married, to do that.
Nora tilts her head, so she can speak round his thumb.
No, she says. The opposite, actually. I think we should do it tomorrow. Just us.
Silence, again. Sunlight. Silk of the spiderwebs on the ceiling.
I never cancelled the registry office, Nora tells him. The legal bit we had to do, before the twenty-second? It’s still happening. Our slot’s at half past ten. And we’ll need two witnesses, but I figured we could ask Goose and Shay, maybe, or just pull strangers off the street, like they do in the movies.
Robin steps back, looking stupefied, and it is funny, it is adorable, he is funny and adorable and too tall for this shed and too perfectly hers like he always has been, in his unbuttoned shirt with his uncombed hair, as if she’d woken him in the middle of the night.
You’re asking me if I’ll marry you?
I’m asking you if you’ll marry me, Robin.
And there it is, finally. That big Robin smile. As he says well, he’ll have to think about it. And she laughs, and throws her arms round his neck and he holds her close with her wedding dress beside them on its hanger, black thread and ivory lining and words and poems and the stuff of real love stories darned into this one picture-perfect moment that she has pulled off, in spite of everything, a moment that leaves no room for doubt, or stalling, or anyone else: for anything that’s not in their arms, right now.
TWENTY-TWO
And it should end there, your story. In an ideal, animated movie-style ending, with an inciting incident, stated moral and arc, a feeling of satisfied contentment, credits rolling.
But it is the things you don’t actually think about,the things you don’t see coming, when you are worrying about deadlines or overexposure or the wrong shade of paint in the hall or the clogged gutters you never clean or the way she won’t look you in the eye or how a stranger tells you, historically, he does not do the right thing – thewrongthings – the actual, real-time, threatening things, are what take you down.
On your wedding day, of all days.
Crazy, that; how heartbreaking, how tragic, is what they’ll say.
Because that low-level, long-term pain in your head? Turns orchestral, overnight.
You tried to tell Nora about it. Tried to call her as you stumbled back home but your phone was dead and then you were on your laptop searching for answers before sleep and then she was there,proposing.In the most glorious pressure point of your entire luck-filled life, of all the moments that do not flash before you like they say they will, but play out as a film that nobody else will see, flickering and then falling away.
Falling, still, as you get up and dress in your favourite shirt. Find your best shoes – are they your shoes – kiss your soon-to-be-wife on the forehead and tell her you’ll see her at half ten and she stirs out of sleep, says good luck, because you’d promised to corral witnesses, most likely Goose and his flatmate whose name you forget. The flatmate who forced you to leave because he was playing his music so loud and you couldn’t sleep for the pain and the drum and the bass but first, on this day, out your door, you’ll make a stop. See a pharmacist or a doctor or one of the two you tell yourself as you leave her alone and the paint is rolling off the walls and you’re on the bus into town to find your brother or the doctor and what is the difference what day is it where are you as the trees slip by and the buses drive on and the houses blur, early morning, tricks of the light, you were thinking about Peru and you both loved Paris, walls of pointillist paintings made out of needle-tipped pressure and pinpricks and pain, so much pain.
Something wrong even as things are, finally, right.
Your last memory of the bus, not of Nora now or back then, but a tear in the film reel, a sentence, when you getto the counter – you say it, and someone is saying things back, and you try to say more
but find that
you can’t
TWENTY-THREE
Bren calls Nora, and she does not pick up. It is eight in the morning on a Tuesday, and he’d assumed she’d be on the train to work.
He looks out the window at the birds. Two wood pigeons. Starlings in the gutter, he can hear them, the scrape of clawed feet and kicked moss as it rings out.
He tries three times, then gives up. Turns to look at his rucksack, packed and bulging once more. Socks washed and ironed by his mother. Who irons socks, he said to her, last night. I do, pet, she said. It’s my love language. Leave me be.
He’d wanted to speak to Nora this time. Not leave a message that might never get shared, or, now she has her own phone, send a hollow, impassive text. But he has to go. His flight is at one, he wants to be at the airport for half ten, he can hear his mother in the bedroom below, preparing to say goodbye. A drawer rolling open. Fresh tissue folded beneath her sleeve.
He’ll try again once he’s through security.Call me, he texts her. And then he’s downstairs, his rucksack lugged behind him, and his mother is offering him breakfast like it is an ordinary day even though she knows that it isn’t, because he had told her last night about his plan and his ticket and how he didn’t want a fuss made, and he saw her glaze over as heshowed her the adventure centre he was returning to, saw her mouth say lovely, even though it wasn’t, to her.
So, Josie asks, after he’s eaten a slice of toast to keep her happy, after he’s checked he has his passport, one last time. Is this it, then?
