Angela Readman - Don't Try This at Home

I cut my boyfriend in half; it was what we both wanted. I said we could double our time together. He said he could be twice as productive. I don’t think it would have worked with just anyone at any time. It had to be now.

Daniel got a spade off his mother that had belonged to his father, and to his father — both men who were never really all there. He lay on the bench in the concrete back garden, knees bent to squeeze in. The yard was carpeted with silver slug trails. I suppose we could have used the kitchen floor, but I didn’t want to scratch the tiles.

‘Are you sure?’ I said.

‘Yup.’

I stood over Daniel with a spade in my hand. He didn’t look at me. He looked up, waiting to see the sky divide. I thought about saying ‘I love you’ or something in case it all went wrong, but I didn’t want to admit it crossed my mind.

‘One, two…’ I brought the spade down on three with my eyes shut. There was a second when I wanted to stop, but mid-air the spade hurtled towards my original intention, with or without all of me on board. The metal sliced through bone, chimed on the concrete like a bell. I opened my eyes. My boyfriend was staring at me with the spade in my hand. And my boyfriend lay looking up at the sky. He turned to look at himself, sitting at the opposite end of the bench.

‘How do you feel?’ I asked.

‘Fine.’

‘Weird, fine.’

He stood up and put his arms round me. And he just sat there watching himself. Both Daniels looked exactly the same, though the one hugging me had slightly rounded shoulders, a bit of a stoop. He wrapped me in his arms as if reminding himself how, rubbing his fingers up and down my back to remember how it felt.

Neither the huggy boyfriend nor the one on the bench asked me how I felt about the whole thing. It’s ok; I suppose some things just seem so much bigger for one person than another. But I sort of wished he had asked me what it was like, cutting him in half. I couldn’t explain it. It reminded me of when I was five and watching a worm I spliced wriggle away from itself. I remember there was a twang of guilt when I saw the damp patch on the spade, yet I felt a bit like God.

I sliced my fiancé into quarters; it seemed the thing to do. We didn’t do it right away. After the first time we went out to celebrate. The bartender glanced at my boyfriend with his arm around me. Then he looked at the other him, eyeing up the slot machine; I wondered if he thought I was going out with twins. Daniel’s phone beeped, he texted, and sat holding my hand, looking at me as if we’d just met and I was all interesting, unpredictable, again. It cost more to buy drinks than usual, but it didn’t matter at the time.

‘Have a nice day,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

Daniel lay in bed beside me and watched himself leave for work. There was no conflict. I imagined he’d argue with himself to decide which part of him got to stay home with me, but it didn’t happen that way. On weekdays the split came in handy. I wasn’t working. All day I did housework, sent out CVs, painted rooms and alphabetised books to show him I was earning my keep. Sometimes I made love with the Daniel that stayed home. It was better than it had been in a while. Afterwards, he helped me paint the kitchen. He yawned when he got back from the office, eating meatballs with printer ink on his fingers. And he stretched where his back ached from reaching the ceiling, white paint in his hair. The white streaks sort of suited him, I could almost imagine him when he was old.

Once, I asked Daniel about how he proposed. Was he nervous? Scared?

Part of him was, he said. The other didn’t know he was going to do it till the words popped out of his mouth. He was joining the lottery syndicate at work, and he was smearing the glass counters of jewellery shops. He stared at rows of engagement rings, trying to interpret what each one said.

‘I’m tired,’ he said.

‘I’ve booked a table for us at Vincenzo’s,’ he said, putting on a clean shirt.

‘Do you mind if I just stay in and crash?’

Daniel ordered the house white, putting his hand in his pocket every few minutes to check everything was where it should be. And he twirled in his desk chair in front of the computer, yawning and clicking links just to see what they were. I don’t know exactly what he was looking at when he looked into my eyes and went down on one knee.

It was the wedding, I think, that made us do it again. Things to save for, dreams to buy. We went to buy paint for the hall during the week and carried ladders home on the bus.

‘We could do with another car,’ I said.

He sighed. He sighed, from both sides of the room like a draft blowing through a slightly open door.

‘I could get a job,’ he said. Standing straight, his stoop was hardly noticeable. He looked like he was manning up to the idea.

‘You don’t have to,’ I said.

I covered the bridal magazines with my elbows. I didn’t want a big do, not really. Common sense told me it was mad, but a bit of me couldn’t imagine missing out on the opportunity for people to congratulate me for the first time in my life. What if it was the last?

They took Daniel’s ‘brother’ on at the engineering firm where he already worked. The night before he started he laid his clothes on the chair like a kid before a new term at school. When he’d been working for a while, I asked him, ‘Do you have lunch with yourself? I mean, at work?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m my superior, it’s not done.’

When he got home from work again — later because he walked home while his superior took the car — I asked, ‘Why don’t you have lunch with yourself at work?’

‘We don’t have anything to talk about,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. Forget I said anything.’

He was too tired to talk. It was easier not to. Lately, when he came home he talked about work, and he also talked about work. He didn’t notice my new spaghetti recipe, and was too wired to have an early night. I missed him. Our bank balance was fatter, but our evenings were so skinny I could see bone. The solution was clear.

I stood with the spade in the yard, tarp on the ground. Daniel lay down, ready as he’d ever be.

‘Shall I just do half of you?’ I asked. He turned his head to one side and looked himself in the eye.

‘It wouldn’t be right somehow,’ he said.

‘It wouldn’t be fair on part of me or something,’ he said.

‘How would we know which bit of me to split?’

I’d no idea. In the interests of symmetry, I brought the spade down. I aimed for the waist both times, but on the second strike the spade hit at an angle in the middle of his belly button. Daniel noticed a crisp packet that had strayed into the yard and got up to get it. He looked at his phone. He said he fancied a beer. And, again, he hugged me tight like someone trying to get that little bit more out of a tube of toothpaste, squeeze out that little extra bit of love. I noticed one of the new Daniels was a teensy bit shorter than before. He was listing to one side, one leg was longer than the other. I tilted, looking over his shoulder at the rest of him, barely noticing himself in my arms.

I diced my husband into pieces eventually. I never thought it would come to that; he was always too much. Daniel stood at the altar, and he… I’m not sure what else he did, I didn’t ask. It made sense not to have all of him there. Our big day was bigger than us. What if that childish bit of him that still sniggered at words like ‘moist’ or ‘flange’ slipped out in front of my mum? That bit of him, and me, that would rather have worn cowboy hats in a five-minute ceremony during Happy Hour in Las Vegas had no place here.