Page 79 of Forever, Maybe
To his right, a woman about his age sat absorbed in a paperback, her glasses perched precariously at the tip of her nose. She wore a lacy black top that hinted at defiance against the monotony of train travel. When she glanced up, their eyes met briefly. He looked away hastily, cheeks flushing, but not before catching the small, sardonic curve of her lips. Great. She probably thought he’d been ogling her when, in truth, he’d been squinting to read the title of her book.
If he’d had his phone, he could have filled the void with solitaire, music, scrolling through the day’s headlines, or…
Aye, right. If you had your phone, you’d be knee-deep in emails, checking Stuffed!’s Instagram, and firing off messages about supermarket pitches.
He sighed, leaning back into his seat, the hum of the train and the rhythm of the tracks his only company.
At Birmingham, a young couple boarded, their voices loud enough to suggest they’d already paid several visits to the bar. They dropped into the seats opposite him, plunking down cans of garishly coloured ready-made cocktails on the table.
“Want one?” the woman asked, jangling a blue plastic carrier bag. She was squeezed into a purple dress so tight it looked like it had been vacuum-sealed on, threatening to cut off circulation at multiple pressure points, with flesh bulging out at the top, bottom and mid-bicep like a badly packed sausage.
He shook his head politely.
“We’re celebrating our engagement!” she declared, beaming. “In London! In a fancy-pants hotel!”
“Me too,” Daniel replied with a faint smile. “Though I’m married already.”
“How long?”
“Twenty years.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet!” she gushed, fanning her scarlet, silver-tipped false nails. They reminded him of the claws Nell’s friend Stephanie often sported. He always wondered how women managed anything with inch-long spikes glued to their fingers. His scepticism was confirmed moments later when, as she yanked the ring-pull on her can, one popped off and clattered to the floor.
She collapsed into hysterical laughter, while her boyfriend—so thin he made Daniel think of that old nursery rhyme about Jack Spratt and his wife—muttered a resigned, “For fuck’s sake,” and bent to retrieve it.
She stuck the nail back on with surprising efficiency, revealing bitten, stubby nails beneath. “Tell us your secret, then! How do you stay married that long?”
How indeed?
“Dunno if I’m an expert,” he replied.
From the corner of his eye, he noticed the woman with the book listening in, her smirk still firmly in place. It was as if she didn’t buy for a second that a man like him had the answers to anything.
“Youmustbe!” the false-nail woman declared, throwing her hands up. “Me and Mitchell have only been together eight months, and I’ve already wanted to kill him at least ten times!”
Mitchell rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, I wanted to killyouten times last week.”
His dry response only made her laugh harder. “Ha! That was until I told you what I was gonna do to you in that hotel room, oral, anal, the lot. Then you decided we might as well get engaged!”
The older woman across the aisle pursed her lips in disapproval, while her husband ducked his chin, doubtless suppressing a smile. Daniel, not much of a train traveller, wondered if this kind of oversharing was par for the course on British public transport.
Suddenly, the woman glanced at her phone and swore. “Shit, Mitch! We’re in the wrong friggin’ carriage! This is first class. We’re supposed to be in the next one.” She stood, scooping up her cans. “Nice talkin’ to you! Maybe we’ll see you in London!”
And with that, they were gone, heading off in search of their reserved seats.
“Thank goodness,” the older woman muttered under her breath as the door slid shut behind them.
Tell us your secret—how do you stay married for that long…
Daniel had never regretted marrying Nell, his first proper girlfriend and sexual partner, nor had he regretted marrying so young. But the expectations of a twenty-two-year-old stepping into marriage hadn’t exactly matched the reality that played out over the years.
If someone were to map their timeline from 1994 to 2016, it wouldn’t be a smooth, straight line. Of course not. There would be dips—some big, some small—but would his dips align neatly with Nell’s?
He suspected they didn’t.
Dip number one loomed large in his mind: Nell’s pregnancy scare not long after they moved into their first home. How excited he had been when her period was late. She hadn’t told him, but he knew, keeping schtum because a daft part of him thought if neither of them mentioned it, somehow, she would come around to the idea.
Then there was that time, a few years later, when he suggested trying again. Her response had been unwavering: what she’d told him before they got married—about not wanting children—hadn’t changed. “If you don’t like it now, Daniel, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
