Harriet Evans - Love Always

‘Al the time,’ Oli says. ‘You just don’t want to tel me.’

‘Who are you?’ I say. I push his hands away and stand there, looking at him. ‘I don’t know you any more.’

‘I don’t think you do.’ Oli looks up at me, and his smile is ugly, his teeth gritted. ‘Because you saw what you wanted to in me, and you took it,’ he hisses. ‘You never saw the real me. You were looking for someone, I don’t know, a daddy replacement? Someone your mum could fancy too?

Someone you could live out your little sophisticated London I’m-not-like-my-mother fantasy with. You’re so fucking hard , Natasha! You won’t let anyone in!’

‘That’s not . . . true.’ I am speaking in a whisper. ‘It is true! I feel like a fucking Italian, you’re so un emotional! Why do you think I asked you for a divorce? To get a reaction out of you, let you know how serious I am about this! You keep everything to yourself, you put this appearance on al the fucking time that it’s al OK! And it’s not! You have to be in control, this goddess no one can touch.’

‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘Shut up, Oli, it’s not true.’ I want to put my hands over my ears.

‘You treat me like a little boy, Nat, like a stupid little boy with a sil y job. And I’m not.’ I am shaking my head, and he breathes in, his nostrils flaring. ‘I’m not, not any more. Most people don’t look at me that way. OK?’

‘Most people like Chloe?’ I say, picking up my coffee. I walk out into Brick Lane. He runs after me.

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I mean you’re my wife, and you look at me like I’m a piece of shit.’

‘You are a piece of shit, that’s why.’ I keep on walking, my bag swinging over my arm. ‘Go off to your meeting. Go away. I don’t – I don’t want to see you ever again.’

Oli says practical y, ‘Nat, you have to give them the mug back. You can’t just walk off with it.’

I realise I have stolen Arthur’s coffee mug, but I try to brazen it out. ‘I don’t fucking care.’ He raises his eyebrows; Oli knows as wel as I do that I am the most bourgeois person in the world and I would no more go off with a mug than I would walk down the street naked.

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Fine.’

Some men driving a white van are coming towards us as I stride down the middle of the road. ‘Natasha, move onto the pavement.’

‘No.’ I carry on, hating myself. ‘Natasha, move!’ Oli says. The men are beeping their horn. One of them raises his fist at me, like a thwarted cartoon vil ain. Oli runs across and pul s me off the road onto the pavement, grabbing my arm, and the mug flies out of my hand, bouncing and then smashing into thick pieces on the kerb with a crunching sound.

‘For God’s sake,’ Oli says. ‘Nat, what are you doing?’

I’m sick of this.

I’m sick of hating him, of feeling like this, of the way our world has col apsed around us so quickly, when we should be building things together, not pul ing them apart. He is gripping my elbows, glaring furiously at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I mean it. ‘I do put you down, I know I do. I don’t know when it started.’ I shake my head, and I can feel my whole body shaking as I do. ‘I don’t know how that makes you feel, it’s like I don’t care.’

‘How it makes me feel?’ he says. ‘Knowing that you despise me? That you think you love me but you don’t? You real y want to know?’

‘Yes,’ I say, taking a deep breath. ‘I want to know.’

He says quietly, ‘I don’t feel anything.’

There’s a silence, just the soft tread of pedestrians walking past us on either side and the wind whistling through the grey streets. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I nod.

‘Yep,’ Oli says. ‘I don’t feel anything at al .’ He looks at me, raising his eyebrows with a sad look of triumph. ‘And I don’t think that’s good.’

He turns and walks away and I fol ow him, like a dog at his heels, along the street. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I think I’m going to go to work now,’ he says. ‘Oh – OK,’ I say. I’m terrified. ‘Are you coming back?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says, but he looks at me, and his eyes are blank. I want to run to him, hug him, but I don’t know him any more. That’s when I realise.

‘I just don’t think you want to be happy, Natasha,’ he says. ‘And I can’t help you.’

I think back over the years, how I’ve known him for over ten years now, together for five of those. I think of my twenty-fifth birthday, at Jay’s flat, where we got together, how he walked me back home, al the way to West Norwood, on a warm May Sunday morning. Of our wedding night, how we were so drunk we passed out and couldn’t stop laughing about our hangovers the next day. How wel I thought I knew him, and how I look at him now and I – I think we’re completely different.

‘We used to be a good fit,’ he says, putting his wal et in his back pocket. ‘I don’t think we’re a good fit any more. Do you?’

‘Yes,’ I say, but I’m lying, and he nods sadly. ‘I think I’d better go now,’ he says, and he walks away down the street.

I watch him until he disappears around a corner. I don’t know what to do next. What happens next. I turn and walk towards the flat, leaving the broken pieces of china in the gutter.

Chapter Twenty-Six

When I get back to the flat, something is wrong. Oli has left the door open, and the skylight outside is also open. The wind has knocked over the coat stand, which has fal en against the hal table, shattering a glass. There are papers everywhere, takeaway menus, minicab cards, fluttering around, scattered on the floor. I bend down to pick the coats up, and I right the stand again, patting it as if it’s a person, and I look around me at the mess left behind.

I have screwed everything up. I think about Granny’s coffin being inexpertly loaded into the ground. About Oli’s face when he first said, ‘I think I need some space.’ (What a cliché, what a fucking pathetic cliché.) Clare Lomax yesterday morning, tel ing me that she was extremely concerned about my ‘ability to sustain a viable business’ . . . Cecily’s diary, Arvind’s face, Oli’s face, Ben being nice to me, my bedroom in our flat at Bryant Court, al of it is going round and round in my mind as I stare at our huge, empty apartment and I can’t break the circle of thinking about it. I’m so tired of feeling like this, of wanting not to feel like this, of tel ing myself I’m being stupid – because I am stupid.

I keep trying to feel better, but these things keep punching me in the face. The col apse of our marriage: he’s probably right, it was col apsing long before Oli’s infidelity. The business going under. And Granny’s death, and what it has started to uncover. Now, it feels as though something fundamental has shifted, as if al my efforts to make everything nice in my life are coming to nothing. My marriage is a sham, it’s over. I can’t make a living doing the only thing I’m any good at. And Granny is gone, the person whose approval I most wanted, whose presence I most often missed, she is gone.

Shutting the door, I start picking up papers, but then I stop and lean on the table and start to cry. I realise I can’t stop myself. I turn around and sink to the ground, staring helplessly at nothing. The tears pour out of me, dripping like little streams onto the floor as I rock against the wal , hugging my knees. Everything is open, nothing can be concealed any more, and it is terrifying. I cry and cry, for Oli and me, for the end of our marriage, for how happy I wanted us to be; how wrong I was, the life I’ve got ahead of me now – I can’t see it, don’t know what I’m here for, what I should do, in my self-pity can’t remember anything worth working for. I cry for Granny and Arvind, for their lost daughter, for our weird, fucked-up family, for my difficult and strange mother, the father I don’t know. The wooden floor is covered with dark circles, my tears.