Page 58 of Not Moving Out
‘It didn’t confuse me, exactly, but it did make me think.’
‘About?’
‘I don’t know, Freya. Perhaps it made me wonder whether we’re giving up too soon. We definitely still have something in the bedroom.’
‘But Joe,’ said Freya, her face slipping slightly into a frown. ‘Have you forgotten about the last year and a half, and how awful it’s been? The arguments? The distinct lack of sex? The conversations where we both realised that despite how great our marriage had been, it just wasn’t any more, and it was best to go our separate ways?’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘It’s just like you to romanticise things, Joe. You always have.’
‘I don’t think I do. Do I?’
Freya laughed. ‘Oh, Joe, how are you so unaware of yourself? You’ve always been a bit of a romantic. Remember the holiday to Greece?’
‘Of course. We met that couple from Essex. Oh shit, what were their names again?’
‘Kelly and Liam. They were from Basildon. He was an IT recruiter, and she was a nurse.’
‘We had a great time with them. That was the height of our sex life prior to Dolly.’
‘Yes, you’re right, but do you also remember what happened on that holiday?’
I thought back to that time and tried to think about what might have happened because, in my mind, I only had fond memories of that holiday. It was 2005, and I had just signed the deal for the first series ofThe Mornings, and to celebrate, Freya and I booked a last-minute package holiday to Greece. All I could remember was seven days of incredible food, sunshine, meeting Kelly and Liam, and having lots of sex with Freya. That wasn’t me romanticising anything, it was fact. Those things actually happened. Right?
‘We had an amazing time and nothing bad happened at all?’ I said, knowing I was clearly wrong about something. Small slivers of negativity had clearly slipped through the net.
‘You see, this is the problem with you, Joe, you only remember the good bits. You don’t remember the second night of that holiday when I got food poisoning, do you?’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ I said, as it came shooting back into my memory. That was bad. Both ends until the early hours.
‘And the day we both got badly sunburnt.’
‘I mean, would you call it badly sunburnt?’
‘We spent the entire night applying aftersun to each other in the shower, Joe. And do you remember what happened on the penultimate night?’
Admittedly, I had forgotten about the food poisoning and the sunburn, but surely nothing else awful had happened that I had completely forgotten about. I racked my brains, but nothing untoward came back to me. I remembered a day trip on a boat, lots of lying on the beach, and again, more sex, and delicious food, but nothing that could be constituted as bad. I got drunk with Liam one night, which ended with me being sick in the toilet after some shots of a local and quite potent raki.
‘Nothing is coming back to me, Freya.’
‘Kelly and Liam had that huge argument by the pool, he stormed off, and she spent the entire night crying in our apartment.’
‘Oh, right, that,’ I said, although I had literally zero memory of it. Was it possible she was making it up to prove a point? ‘But that wasn’t awful, and it didn’t ruin the holiday, did it?’
‘It did for poor Kelly. Liam vanished, and she ended up flying home alone, still mostly in tears. I kept in touch with her, and it turned out that Liam had slept with one of the local waitresses, and he was going to move out to Greece! They were due to be married the following year, and she’d already put a deposit down on the venue. Poor Kelly was bereft, and yet all you remember about that holiday is sun, sand, sea and sex! All I remember is food poisoning, sunburn and one heartbroken girl crying in our apartment. You don’t see a pattern here, Joe?’
‘That I like to remember the good times, and conveniently forget the bad? Is that such an awful quality to have? Also, and I’m not trying to be purposely argumentative, but is it possible that as much as I only remember the good, you seem fixated on only recalling the bad?’
I looked at Freya, and she seemed to squirm because I had obviously hit a nerve. For a moment her body stiffened up, before she relaxed and looked at me square in the face.
‘I just think that when you’re deliberating whether to save a marriage that was considered dead and buried, you can’t romanticise it just because we had one great night of sex.’
‘A great night of sex?’ I said with a smile. ‘Would you also say mind-blowing sex?’
‘Right now our daughter needs us, and we have to focus on her,’ said Freya, with a certain frankness that left me in no doubt that the conversation was over, the words ‘mind-blowing sex’ being left unanswered in the air between us.
It was Monday morning, and I was home alone working onHouse Shared, when the doorbell rang. Dolly was out with friends, although it was clear that whatever she was doing, Maya wasn’t involved. The telephone summit in her bedroom had resulted in them breaking up for good, and now Dolly was doing her best to move on. She had drawn a line under Maya and said she was going to try and enjoy her last summer before university. Things with Freya were still much less resolved, as far as I was concerned. She had claimed I was looking at our marriage with rose-tinted glasses, and perhaps she had a point, but I wasn’t ready to give up on our marriage yet.
