Jon McGregor - So Many Ways to Begin

The doctor told me I should find a new hobby, he said to her once, coming back from an appointment. They caught each other's eye in sudden recognition, and laughed for the first time in weeks.

She would almost always open her eyes after a few moments, propping herself up on her elbows and looking at him expectantly, or sitting forward and drawing him towards her, kissing and stroking and taking him into her mouth until he was ready to join with her on the bed. Sometimes it took him longer to be ready than it once had. It seemed to be one of the things that happened, with the cracking knees, the thinning hair, the fatter waist; a slower response of the body to the prompting of the excited mind, or the mind simply slipping for a moment to something else altogether; to whose car alarm that was going off outside, to how Kate was getting on at school, to whether tomorrow was the day for putting out the bins.

Sometimes the phone would ring, and they would ignore it, letting its shrill little grab for attention go unanswered while they moved closer together in the familiar way. Sometimes the phone would ring and one or other of them would say sorry, hold on, but it might be, I was expecting, and leave the other one waiting, impatiently or patiently or finding their place in the book they were halfway through.

They tried to use the lounge again after Kate left home, when they had the house to themselves once more. They tried — after a slow stunned month of feeling lost in their own home, of not knowing quite what shape their days should take now that they didn't have a daughter to feed or provide for or watch growing up — to undress each other on the rug in front of the new sofa, and to kiss, and to relearn what it meant to be just the two of them in their world. But they would hear voices somewhere, footsteps, and turn to the door suddenly, or check for the third time that the curtains really were closed, or be distracted by the draught coming under the kitchen door, and they would almost always move back up the stairs to their bed.

Sometimes he would shape a hand around her breast, and hold it there, still, feeling its weight as they moved.

Sometimes he would reach behind her and trace his fingers up and down her spine until she shivered.

His sister's children had left home two years before Kate did, rushing off to university in London and in Leeds, and she'd warned them what it would be like. You spend so long fitting your life around theirs, she said, you forget what you used to do before they were born. You look forward to having all that time to yourself, and then you want to phone them every night to see how they're getting on. She came to visit them a lot after she and John were divorced, staying with Dorothy or, later, in Kate's old room. He was a very good man, she said to them once after a bottle of wine, a very good father, but I was just so bored. We had nothing to say to each other, she said.

They waited a moment, settling together on the bed, and she tilted his head up with one finger so that she could kiss his throat. He shifted her arm so that it stretched out across the pillow, and held it there with his fingers curled into her hand, and they began to move. The bed was smaller than theirs, and softer, and for a moment it felt strange. But the bath had woken them up a little, and they were both full of nervous energy from the way the afternoon had unfolded, and it felt good to be doing this thing that was almost but never quite the same. It was the first time they'd been away for the night together since before Kate had been born, and there was an excitement to being in an unfamiliar bed, and a comfort to being in each other's familiar arms. She reached around to the back of his legs, tracing a line from his thighs to the back of his neck.

Their bags were on the chest of drawers by the door, the envelope of reprinted photos Mary had given them as they left spread out to one side. His trousers, shirt and jumper were folded across the back of the dressing-table chair. Her skirt was heaped halfway between the bed and the en suite bathroom. The fan in the bathroom was still whirring, shakily. They could hear the voices of the kitchen staff echoing up from the courtyard below.

He shifted his weight a little, and slid one hand beneath the small of her back. She kissed him, hard, pulling his mouth down to hers with both hands on the back of his head. He caught his breath and hesitated. She tipped back her head, pushing her shoulders into the bed and lifting her back into a shallow arch. He kissed her throat, her cheeks, her eyes, her ears, quickly, holding her face between his hands. She lifted her legs a little higher, the rough soles of her feet scratching against the backs of his knees.

He dipped his head, awkwardly, and kissed each of her breasts. They heard the fan in the bathroom stop, and were suddenly more aware of each other's sounds: their breathing, their small concentrated gasps, the soft percussion of lips against skin. She circled her fingers across his back, scratching a sharp line from his shoulder to his waist, until suddenly, as always, there it was. She watched him, holding his face in her hands, catching her breath even as he was gasping for his. And the look in his eyes, as it almost always was, was a look of wonder and surprise, as if even after all that time it was something he hadn't quite been expecting, something he didn't quite believe he deserved.

He lay back on to the bed and pulled the covers up across them both. The light was fading outside, the noise from the bar getting louder as more people arrived for the night. She spread her fingers out across his chest as his breathing slowed and tugged gently on his ear, leaning towards him to whisper, hey, don't fall asleep. He turned his head on the pillow to look at her. She smiled.

What do you want to do now? she asked. He smiled and closed his eyes for a moment more. David? she said, nudging him again. He opened his eyes and looked at her.

I want to go home, he said.

My family, Alice, Kim and Mark, Jane and Cormac, Rose Gaete, Randal and Jennifer Faulkner, John and Chris Consella, Pamela Wood, Maggie and David Jones, Derek and Becky Porter, Beatrice von Rezzori

and all at the Santa Maddalena Foundation, Rosemary Davidson, and Tracy Bohan.

Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, and winner of the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. He was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham. This is his second novel.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book is set in Berling roman. A modern face designed by K. E. Forsberg between 1951-58. In spite of its youth it does carry the characteristics of an old face. The serifs are inclined and blunt, and the g has a straight ear.