Lisa Owens - Not Working

Hi, Dad. How are you both? Any news re: work? Hope all OK. C xxx

No.

No = no news? Everything OK? xxxxx

Fine claire just in town having a muffin witH MUM X

Lovely. Enjoy. Say hi to Mum. x

OK WILL DO TAKE CARE DAD

“What are you watching?” Luke asks, taking off his coat.

“It’s amazing,” I say. “You’re just in time. Look.” On the screen, a man in white coveralls makes careful incisions in the belly of a beached sperm-whale carcass. “Wait. It gets really good.”

“Where is this?” Luke asks.

“Not important! Faroe Islands, I think. Okay, watch this — are you watching?”

“I’m watching!”

The whale explodes, guts and blood flying into the air, zipping many meters along the decking before slamming to a stop against a wall. The jumpsuit guy, nearly knocked off his feet by the force of the gush, scuttles quickly, comically out of shot.

“Did you hear the sound?” I say. “The way it pops! The gush! Let’s watch it again.” I hit “replay.” The clip is prefaced by an advert for a honeymoon cruise package — an algorithmic joke? — and I recite with the voice-over in perfect sync, “Sail off into your happily ever after with Sunset Voyages—”

“How many times have you watched this?” interrupts Luke. He moves around the kitchen, opening cabinet doors.

“Not nearly enough. Here we go: are you ready?”

From the fridge he takes the milk and fills a glass by the sink.

I press “pause.” “You don’t want to watch it again?”

He lifts his eyebrows as he drinks, and the glass clinks quietly against his teeth. When he’s finished, he ducks his head, slightly out of breath. “I’ve been dealing with blood all day. How has yours been? Did you not even get dressed ?” A frill of milk runs along his top lip.

I return to the screen and click “play”: pop, gush, scuttle.

“Imagine the pressure in there!”

“So what do you want to do tonight? DVD? If your appetite for quality film hasn’t been sated already…” Luke tips his head toward the screen.

“Why are you making me feel bad?”

“How am I making you feel bad?”

“Never mind,” I say quickly; but his hackles are up.

“No, go on — what did I do?”

“Don’t be so defensive. God!” I say. He strides to the fridge and slings the milk back inside. “Maybe you should cool off while you’re there. Long day, was it?” The door thunks shut and the fridge judders.

“You’re going to have to help me out here.”

I enumerate, pointing a thumb at him. “Try: you making snide, unhelpful remarks about me not ‘even’ getting dressed on a Saturday, when I’ve been working all week.” Next comes a forefinger. “And hassling me for taking a two-minute break from my — really quite stressful — job hunt to watch a natural spectacle, which you seem bizarrely intent on pretending not to find interesting even though fourteen million”—I check the views count—“Okay, but still, one point four million hits would beg to differ.”

“As if two minutes,” he mutters.

“What was that? Another snide remark? Ten minutes, then. Fine, fifteen minutes. Happy?”

Luke steps behind me and massages my shoulders. “I’m really happy with you,” he says in the joke-sappy voice we sometimes deploy when things are getting too heated; on this occasion, however, he couldn’t have made a worse call.

“Ow!” I say, shucking him off.

For a long time neither of us says anything.

“You have no idea,” I say finally. “You get to wake up every morning and go and do something you love, which also, conveniently, happens to be one of the most worthwhile things you could do in the world. How can I possibly compete?”

“You don’t need to compete! This is a relationship .” He pulls out the chair next to me, sits and takes my hand like the doctor he is. “We’re a team.”

“Right, and I’m the dead weight dragging you down.”

“I don’t like hearing you talk like this.” He grazes my knuckles with his lips.

“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry if you don’t like it. Sorry if I upset you.”

Luke drops my hand and palms his kneecaps. “Whatever. I’m going to take a shower. I don’t know why you’re being such a—” He stops.

“Such a what?” I say. “Say it. Such a what?”

“It’s not worth it. I’ll let you get back to your precious sperm whale.” He stands up. At the door, he places his hands either side of the doorframe. “I’ve been nothing but supportive of whatever this thing you’re going through even is.”

“Yeah, and it’s so annoying ! Stop being so nice all the time! You can’t bring yourself to call me a bitch when I’m being a horrible bitch to you! It’s really so fucking boring!”

“I’m taking a shower.”

“You already said .” The door slams. “And you’ve got a milk mustache!” The shower powers on.

“What are you looking at?” I say to my unhappy face, glowering in the sleeping laptop screen.

I take a walk to get some air and some perspective (and maybe, if I’m being totally honest, so Luke might worry, thus dissipating the storm of ill will I’ve gone and stirred up in the flat). But all I can think is, Why don’t they make these concrete slabs stride-sized? Really, how hard can it be?

I skulk past our flat a few times, hoping to see Luke keeping an anxious lookout, but the front-room windows are empty and dark: blank as when we moved in five years ago. Buying the place had felt impulsive and exciting, the first truly proper grown-up thing we’d done together; but the process quickly declined into a bitter slog, with the seller growing increasingly belligerent for reasons that were never really made clear.

On the day we got the keys, it was pouring with rain, and after heaving all our boxes up two flights of stairs we finally closed the door behind us. I flicked on the light switch, only to discover that in a final act of malice, the seller had taken every last fixture and fitting not specifically itemized in the contract: doorknobs, cabinet and drawer handles, picture hooks, towel rings, toilet-paper holder and — crucially in that moment — lightbulbs. Worse still was the bleak detritus left behind: a ceramic teddy bear holding a heart emblazoned with “I LOVE YOU,” filthy rags and twisted bedsheets, broken wind chimes and a single, fetid tennis shoe.

“Oh shit.” Luke sank onto a box. “What have we done?”

“It isn’t so bad,” I said. “We just need to clean and unpack. Once our stuff’s in, it’ll begin to feel like ours.”

“I thought it would look bigger with nothing in it. What were we thinking?” He went through to the kitchen. “We spent our life savings on this. I spent my grandparents’ life savings on this.” He walked out, shaking his head, and wandered up to the bathroom and the bedroom, taking a call from his parents.

“Yeah, we’re in…No, it’s…fine…It’s great…” His voice echoed through the naked rooms, nothing at all to absorb his disappointment.

I wanted to cry: not because it was a shithole, but because he didn’t seem to get that it was our shithole. Instead, I opened a box marked ESSENTIALS and — deciding against the bottle of warm, cheap-looking Chardonnay the real estate agent had shoved ungraciously into my hand along with the keys that morning — retrieved mugs, kettle, teabags, cookies and some non-dairy creamers I’d pocketed from the McDonald’s a few doors down. When I went to find Luke, he was staring at the black street, where a succession of flashing police cars screamed past.