The Two of Us (36 page)

Phil is forty-five today and we are having a quiet barbecue in his back garden. It’s just the six of us: me, Ivy and T; Phil, Craig and El. Two families of three; two babbling dependants;
two sets of circumstances that have thrown joy against sadness.

‘I wish the sun would come out,’ says Phil, shivering.

I turn to Ivy, waiting for her to scold Phil for making a ‘shit wish’, but she says nothing. She just looks up into the cloudless sky, smiling resignedly. ‘Me, too,’ she
says.

Craig and Phil are no longer concealing their affection for each other – nothing bold or insensitive, but a candid touching hands, a hug, a simple kiss. El mocks, of course, but his
pleasure shines through from behind the façade.

Despite it being Phil’s birthday, our celebrations are restrained. Because this square on the calendar holds a significance beyond another candle on Phil’s cake. Between today and
El’s birthday, Phil will take my best friend and the love of his life to Switzerland. They will visit Dignitas (or ‘Diggitass’, as El insists on calling it), and on the return
flight Phil will sit on his own – getting smashed on gin and tonic, I hope – while El travels in the cargo hold inside a sealed box. El doesn’t want anyone but Phil to know
exactly when it’s going to happen, but it will be before the end of November.

‘H. . . have tr. . . f. . . treat me g. . . n. . . nice now. Treat me l. . . like a p. . . f. . . princess. Ha ha!’

‘The things you’ll do for attention,’ I tell him.

‘D. . . d. . . dyin’ f ’ttention! Ha ha ha!’

El doesn’t know about baby Daniel, but Phil does and he winces at El’s outburst, glancing in our direction to check we’re not offended by this gleeful raspberry in
death’s face.

El stamps his feet. ‘Dy. . . dy. . . dyin’ f ’rit!’

‘El!’ says Phil. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

El turns to look at Ivy and Baby T. ‘C. . . can I h. . . hold her?’ says El, extending his thin, spasming arms.

‘It’s a he,’ says Phil.

‘L. . . looks like a sh. . . she.’

‘El!’

‘M. . . maybe h. . . he’s a p. . . puff.’

‘Not on my watch,’ I say reflexively, and earn a thump on the arm from Phil.

‘H. . . hold her . . . hold her.’

‘El, I don’t th—’

‘Here,’ says Ivy, carrying Baby T across to where El is sitting in his wheelchair. ‘You have to be very careful, okay?’

El nods and a calm settles over him. Ivy places T in his hands, but stays crouched at El’s feet like a wicket keeper ready to spring into action.

‘Th. . . that’s nice,’ says El, holding Baby T gently to his chest.

‘Wh. . . what’s her n. . . name?’

‘It’s a boy,’ says Ivy. ‘He doesn’t have a name yet.’

‘How long has it been?’ asks Craig.

‘Thirty-seven days,’ Ivy and I say in unison.

Legally we have forty-two days from T’s birthday to pick a name and register his arrival. I don’t know what the punishment is for failing to do so, but if we don’t choose a
name in the next five days, we’ll find out shortly after.

‘N. . . no n. . . name!’

Ivy shakes her head. ‘Can’t find a good one.’

‘E. . . El’s a good n. . . name. S. . . speshly if she’s a p. . . puff.’

‘I’ll put it on the shortlist,’ Ivy tells him.

El frowns as if something is troubling him. He turns to Phil. ‘D. . . din you s. . . say they’re h. . . havin t. . . t. . .’

We hold our collective breaths.

‘Twins!’ El says. ‘T. . . twins.’

We have alluded to our tragedy today, and talked about it in fragments and oblique references that sail over and around El’s head. But this has caught us all with our guards down. I can
feel Craig and Phil trying to bore holes into us with their eyes.

Ivy shakes her head. ‘Just the one, El,’ she says. ‘It was just the one.’

‘So,’ I say to El, ‘you got bored of the beard?’

‘If I g. . . go Swissland with a b. . . beard,’ he says. ‘I’ll have it f. . . f ’rever, won’ I? M. . . m. . . might go out fashion!’

‘Maybe you’re right, Ivy,’ says Craig.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Maybe he,’ Craig nods at the baby in El’s lap, ‘maybe he was only ever meant to be one baby.’

Phil stares at Craig but his expression is impassive.

‘I mean . . . that’s how they start out, isn’t it?’ He glances at El who is distracting himself by poking his tongue at Baby T. Craig mouths the words
Twins
. He
says, ‘When they’re identical . . . they start out as just the one, don’t they? I. . . I’m sorry, I don’t really know what . . .’

Ivy gathers Baby T up from El, she holds him above her head, smiling up into his face. The sun turns Baby T’s thin spiky hair into a fuzzy halo of light. ‘Is Uncle Craig
right?’ she says in a sing-song baby voice.

Baby T smiles. Then burps.

‘Yes. I like that idea, too,’ Ivy says. ‘Yes I do.
Yes I do
. I like it very much.’

On Thursday we complete the edit on
Pollock,
although it’s now called
The View from Here
(Ivy’s idea), which I prefer
.
The film is good;
whether it’s good enough, time will tell, but after we watch the twelve-minute and forty-eight-second cut, even without the grade and sound dub, I have a smile on my face and tears in my
eyes. But I do tend to cry easily these days.

When I get back to the flat, Ivy is lying on the floor playing with Baby T.

‘Hey,’ she says, regarding me with a strange expression – a composite of guilt and amusement, it looks like.

‘You okay?’

Ivy nods. ‘Been out.’

‘Where?’

‘Oh, you know, just the Town Hall.’

‘You . . .’ I point at Baby T, who is trying to suck the paint off a wooden rattle. ‘You gave him a . . .’

Ivy nods. ‘A name, yes.’

‘But we haven’t picked . . . I thought we were going to go tomorrow. Together.’

Ivy shrugs.
Tough luck, Buster.

‘Well?’

Ivy picks up our baby and carries him over to me.

‘Say hello to Daniel,’ she says.

And there’s nothing I would like to do more, but I’m crying so hard I can’t get the words out. Ivy puts her arms around me and Daniel, and we stand that way, hugging and crying
in the middle of the living room, for a long time.

The small brass plaque reads:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF ARTHUR. THIS WAS HIS FAVOURITE PLACE IN THE WORLD
. I don’t know who Arthur was but he had great
taste in park benches, and I’ve spent many hours here over the last handful of weeks. Rain, shine or howling wind, we walk on the Common most days now (we have even taken the occasional
late-night ramble, braving the dark, the foxes and the local teenagers), and I’ve come to think of this bench – set back a pebble’s throw from the duck pond – as our bench.
We seldom talk on our bench; we simply sit, rock Daniel’s pram and let the open space wash over us.

On Sunday, Dan will be fourteen weeks old and we are celebrating by driving to North Wales and introducing him to his aunty and uncle and his frenzied cousins. Four weeks ago, Steve and Carrie,
the couple we met at our antenatal group, brought a baby girl, Daisy, into the world. We met them for coffee yesterday and passed two happy hours catching up and passing on parenting advice like
the seasoned pros we are. I’d worried that seeing them and their baby might set us back, but if anything it’s helped us move on. We have invited them to our flat for supper next week
and Ivy is already fussing over what to cook. In a lot of ways it’s like dating; discovering and revealing, making plans, hoping they like you as much as you like them. Who knows, maybe Dan
and Daisy will get together one day, maybe they’ll get drunk on cider in this very Common and get up to things it’s best not to think about. I check my watch, stretch my arms overhead
and roll the stiffness out of my neck – a signal that it’s time to head home. Ivy stands, and while she checks on Daniel, I use my sleeve to polish the fingerprints and dust off
Arthur’s plaque. Maybe one day there will be a bench here with my name on it.

‘What are you grinning at?’ says Ivy.

‘Oh, nothing. Just thinking how much I like it here.’

Summer started last week and the sweat is rolling down my back as I push our new single buggy across the rough terrain of Wimbledon Common. I’m going into town next week to meet Joe and
talk about a couple of pitches. Ivy doesn’t know it yet (I haven’t told her) but the pressure to start earning again is on – in a big way. But no more shit, that’s for sure
– no toilet roll, no low-cost loans, no cures for constipation. You only live once, after all. And I’m already talking with Suzi about what next. Ivy is undecided as to when – or
if – she will return to work, but my bet is she won’t. Not for a while, anyway.

We reach the edge of the Common and I steer the buggy off the grass and onto the pavement.

‘God, I wish there was just a hint of a breeze, you know.’

Ivy looks at me with an indulgent smile, but says nothing. It’s become a little in-joke between us: me baiting Ivy with shit wishes, and Ivy swimming away. It’s amusing enough, but I
make a silent promise to myself to let it go now. We both know the Wish Fairy doesn’t exist, and I sense that the joke is wearing thin.

‘Let’s go this way,’ I say, pointing the buggy at a wide street lined with trees and imposing, double-fronted houses.

‘I need to get home,’ Ivy says. ‘I’m semi-bloody-incontinent since that little monkey popped out of my whatsit.’

I push on down the road all the same. ‘It’s only a couple of minutes out of our way. We’ll walk quickly.’

‘If I pee myself it’s your fault.’

Maybe twenty yards down the road, we draw level with a house that has a ‘For Sale’ sign attached to one of the tall stone gateposts. I stop the buggy.

‘Come on!’ says Ivy, doing a little cha-cha on the spot. ‘I honestly can’t hold it much longer.’

I point at the ‘For Sale’ sign. ‘Maybe they’ll let you use the loo.’

‘Stop messing about.’

‘We’ll pretend we’re house-hunting.’

Ivy is still shuffling from foot to foot like a toddler desperate for the bathroom. ‘Fisher! Do you know how much these places cost?’

Thank you!

‘Oh, I dunno, a few grand more than yours.’

‘Try a few hundred thousand more. Try five or
six
hundred thousand.’

‘We could always sell mine.’

Ivy stops dancing; her face relaxes. ‘Would you want to?’ she says. ‘Sell your flat?’

I shrug.

‘Well . . . what’s it worth, do you think?’

So I tell her.

Ivy’s eyebrows creep towards each other as she stares at me. ‘That sounds like a very precise number.’

‘It includes the furniture, fridge and the washing machine.’

‘Are you telling me you put your flat on the market?’

‘Yup. Although . . . well, it’s not
actually
my flat anymore.’

‘You . . . you
sold it
?’

I nod.

Ivy’s stare grows cold, turns sour. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘I . . . I just . . . I thought . . .’

‘No!’ Ivy shouts. ‘No. You didn’t. You didn’t think. Because if you had, you might have thought to ask me if
I
wanted to move out of
my
flat.’

‘I . . .’

All the anger melts off Ivy’s face. ‘Honestly,’ she says. ‘It’s just too easy.’

‘You . . .?’

Ivy nods, licks her index finger and paints an invisible number 1 in the air. ‘Too easy.’

‘I hate you,’ I say.

Ivy puts her arms around my neck and kisses me hard on the lips. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

‘Nice day for it,’ a male voice says behind us.

I turn around to see a man locking a car emblazoned with an estate agent’s livery. He walks towards us, hand extended for the shake.

‘Mr and Mrs Fisher?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say, taking his hand. ‘Something like that.’

‘Ben,’ says the estate agent. ‘And who’s this little fella?’ he asks, crouching down in front of the buggy.

‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ says Ivy, ‘but if I don’t get to a toilet in thirty seconds, I’m going to pee my pants.’

‘Not a problem,’ says the estate agent. ‘You’ve got four to choose from.’

And we follow him into the house: me, Ivy and baby Daniel.

It’s the last week in August and we still have a lot of unpacking to do. The essentials are in place: a cot in Daniel’s room; Ivy’s books on the shelves; my
leather armchair, 42-inch HD TV and Xbox installed in the living room. Ivy’s flat sold within a week of going on the market, and after that things moved frighteningly fast. We have lived here
for three weeks now, and I still haven’t adjusted to our new home (or the scale of our new mortgage). Of all the changes, one of the most trivial is giving me the most pleasure.

Ever since I have lived in London I have never had my own letterbox, I have always shared one in the communal door outside of my own private living space. And the sound of mail dropping through
my own front door, onto my own mat in my own hallway . . . even if the mail is predominantly junk . . . it’s like a small sonic sting, reminding me how far we’ve come and how lucky I
am.

It’s eight thirty in the morning when the melodic clatter wakes me from a shallow drowse. I creep out of bed, leaving Ivy and Daniel –
five months old now
– curled up
and sleeping.

On the mat are a few flyers, a bill, a letter from the bank and a local paper. When I scoop them up I almost miss the postcard.

The front shows a log cabin sitting beside a stream in a glade of lush grass dotted with yellow flowers. In the background, snow-capped mountains thrust into perfect white clouds (all the way to
heaven, perhaps). There is a single word artlessly printed on the front: ‘Switzerland’.

My breath catches and my eyes are already damp as I turn the card over in my hands. The message on the back is written in scratchy, uneven letters.

And I find myself laughing and crying at the same time.
The last laugh
, I think, the tears coming harder now. I take the card through to the kitchen, attach it to the fridge with a
magnetized cow and put the kettle on for coffee.