Page 49 of The Snag List
After lunch (they’d both written down McDonald’s), they walked down the pretty, wide streets of white Georgian villas back to the Bray seafront. They were on a vague hunt for an ice cream when Adam stopped and took his notebook out of his back pocket.
‘I have one: What do we think are the best things about each other?’
‘Ugh, no.’ Lindy scoffed. ‘Too saccharine.’ Also, she was definitely afraid they’d struggle too much to come up with stuff.
‘Nope, I’m insisting, Linds. It’ll be good for morale!’
She laughed and retrieved her notebook from the large pocket of her navy rain jacket. ‘OK, fine. Are we doing one thing?’
‘How could you possibly narrow yours for me down? Let’s do our top three.’
They walked in silence, thinking, and when they came to the promenade in front of the grey pebble beach, they sat at opposite ends of a bench to write. Adam was finished well before her, and Lindy twisted away from him slightly, scanning the horizon, willing something to come. It wasn’t that there was nothing. It was more like there was too much: her head was like a washing machine.You’re hot, you’re fun, you’re energetic, you’re lying to me, you’re spending our money like it’s your money, you’re looking at another woman.
God, get on track, she ordered herself, consciously pushing the clamouring thoughts out of the way.
She wrote:
Arrogance/confidence.
Funny (sometimes).
Smell.
She turned to show him and he rocked with laughter. ‘Well, that has put me in my place.’ He turned his to her:
I love your humour and your intelligence.
I love the freckles on your eyelids.
I love the way you smell.
‘Mine’s like a love letter and yours is a shopping list.’ He slid along the bench to her and put an arm around her. ‘We are two good-smelling bastards.’
She settled back against him and watched the seagulls circling and swooping, crying and fighting over the occasional scrap of food.
Adam nudged her. ‘Look,’ he jerked his head over to the row of shops behind them, ‘a tattoo place. No ragrets?’
She laughed. They’d actually tried to get matching tattoos once in Melbourne. ‘Remember they said to come back when we weren’t so shitfaced?’ She giggled.
‘Do you remember what we were going to get?’ Adam frowned, trying to think.
‘It could have been anything. It was, like, 2011 so it deffo would’ve been horrific.’
‘Well,’ he waved the notebook, ‘will Adam and Lindy get their first tattoos?’
Lindy didn’t immediately have an answer to this one. She didn’t strictly not want a tattoo, but a permanent thing like a tattoo done during a date she’d proposed, in part, to find out if her marriage had any shot at permanence? It was either … poetically fitting or completely tragic.
She wrote:OK.
He’d written:Whatever Lindy says!
She smiled and stood. She reached for his hand. ‘OK, ice cream before or after tattoos?’
They got home at ten that night to find Fionnuala on her phone on the couch in the kitchen with Max lying against her, dozing.
‘It is so nice when he sleeps on you, isn’t it?’ Lindy swooped down to kiss her son’s ear.
‘I’ll bring him up.’ Adam slipped his arms under Max, lifted him gently and carried him out.
