Page 2 of Not Moving Out
‘I mean that eventually we’re going to date other people, and it’s something we need to discuss,’ said Freya, casually. She had obviously already thought about this. Perhaps she had a date in mind or was already dating someone else. ‘And before you say anything, no, I’m not dating anyone, Joe, and I don’t have any intentions of dating anyone soon, but eventually it might happen.’
‘Eventually, yes, I suppose it might.’
‘But more pressing, Joe, is our living situation and money. You know we can’t afford for either of us to move out, and I love our house. I don’t want to end up living in a shit one-bed flat just because our marriage doesn’t work any more.’
‘Okay, I wondered when this would come up,’ I said, feeling a flash of heat around the back of my neck. The burst of anger and frustration that got to me when the chips were down – and the chips were really fucking down. Of course, this came back to me and my inability to contribute financially to our marriage. The slow death of my writing career had contributed to the slow death of our marriage, and we both knew it. If there was a graph, and you could pinpoint when my career tanked on the y-axis, and how that correlated to the decline in my relationship with Freya on the x-axis, I think it would be quite illuminating. Especially if you were into graphs.
‘What?’ said Freya, taking a quick sip of her coffee.
‘Money, and the fact I don’t make any.’
‘This isn’t about that. I have never given you a hard time about how much money you make.’
‘Or don’t make, right?’
For the first time, I saw a flash of frustration on her face. ‘For fuck’s sake, can this please not be about you and your career for once.’
‘I’m just saying, Freya, my career is a part of the problem.’
‘Fine, obviously you want me to say it. Yes, your career is one of the reasons our marriage has failed, and yes, the fact you make barely any money has put a large financial strain on us that has contributed to the breakdown, but knowing that and acknowledging it doesn’t actually change it. We need to deal with facts, and the facts are—’
‘We can’t afford to move out because of me, and so we’re stuck together in the house?’
She looked at me, closed her eyes for a second, took a deep breath in and then slowly released it before she opened them again. ‘All I’m saying, Joe, is at the moment because of our financial situation, neither of us can afford to move out.’
‘Which is my fault.’
‘For fuck’s sake, really?’
We each took a moment. A pause to take a breath. A lady with a dog opposite gave us a look, and then stood up to leave. Even the dog looked a little uncomfortable. We had created an atmosphere.
‘Fine, sorry, go on,’ I said after a minute.
‘I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I have a workable solution.’
I nodded, but I was already frustrated, and increasingly angry at this whole thing. This was all my fault. This was what Freya was trying to say in the politest way possible. We were trapped under the same roof because my career had imploded, and I hadn’t made enough money in the last decade. Despite the lack of love in our relationship, we both loved the house we lived in, couldn’t afford to leave it, and selling it wouldn’t help because we had remortgaged it to pay off debts, and so now even if we sold it, it wouldn’t be enough for either of us to restart our lives properly – not in Brighton or London, anyway. We were officially stuck in a marriage that didn’t work any more but at least we had a gorgeous roof over our heads.
Freya worked at a solicitors’ as a paralegal, and I couldn’t help but think that the legal environment had rubbed off on her. She was being remarkably professional about all of this, when all I wanted to do was make snide remarks, and increasingly petty jokes about our fraught relationship. Freya, on the other hand, was revelling in her role of secretary, researcher and general all-round legal problem solver. She had already used the phrase ‘workable solution’. How long before we were ‘blue-sky thinking it’, ‘circling back’ and ‘putting a pin in it’?
‘What’s this “workable solution”?’ I asked.
‘Dolly will be off to university at the end of September, and I don’t want to unsettle her during this important time with her exams coming up.’
‘Neither do I,’ I added quickly.
‘So, for the next six months, we will keep living together—’
‘You want to keep sharing a bed with me for the next six months?’
‘No, Joe. One of us will move into the spare room, obviously.’
‘By one of us, I assume you mean me?’
‘We can toss a coin for it if you like?’
‘No, it’s fine, I’ll go. It’s already my office, so it’s easier.’
‘Right, thanks.’
