Page 87 of Things We Never Said
Maggie shakes her head.
‘Coffee? Beer? Wine ...?’
‘Really,’ Maggie says, ‘nothing. So is it all OK, the loan and everything? Have you made an offer?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Sean says. ‘Once they confirm their agreement in principle. This was sort of in principle, in principle, today. He has to check it with his boss tomorrow morning.’
‘And it’s one of the C.R. units, right?’
‘Cantabrigian Rise? It is.’
‘The one with the “For Sale” sign we saw?’
‘No, that was a two-bedroom unit. I couldn’t run to that one. No, this is another one. A one-bedroom unit on the fourth floor.’
‘That’s brilliant, Sean. I could hardly believe it when April told me. They’re gorgeous. We were all so proud of those. And I always look at them when I go past.’
‘I know. Pricey, though.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘The one bed costs almost the same as this place.’
‘But it’ll do you so much good to move.’
‘You approve, then?’ Sean asks. He feels strangely as if, without Catherine to consult, his decisions are somehow illegitimate.
‘Oh, how could I not?’ Maggie says. ‘You don’t want to be rattling around in this big place, do you?’
‘No,’ Sean says, trying to stop his mind straying to the obvious loss that has caused this new status of rattling around. He opens the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of beer. ‘Are you sure?’ he asks.
Maggie rolls her eyes. ‘Oh, go on, then,’ she says. ‘Just one. Honestly, you’re like a little devil on my shoulder.’
Snapshot #27
Printed digital photo, colour. A man stands beside a shiny, racing-green sports car. He is smiling but looking vaguely embarrassed at the same time.
Sean studies the printed page and remembers the day he swapped the Renault for the Mazda. He had taken the Mégane in for its yearly service and there, on the forecourt, freshly washed and polished, had been the little green sports car. It was priced at £5,900, which Sean knew was also just about the value of the Mégane (he had looked it up just a few weeks before).
He had handed in the keys at the service desk and then, instead of jumping in a taxi back to work, as planned, had walked twice around the MX-5 before trying the door and lowering himself into the driver’s seat. He had caressed the steering wheel – it was made of polished mahogany. A salesman had quickly appeared and, less than an hour later, he had driven it off the forecourt, imagining how Catherine would laugh, her hair whipping in the wind, when he picked her up that evening. April was long gone from the family nest and it was just the two of them now, ready for a fresh round of adventures. The car seemed, to Sean, to be a symbol of that. Catherine would be thrilled, he thought.
But from the very beginning she had appeared to hold back her joy. It was as if the car was symbolic not of fighting against ageing, but perhaps of ageing itself. Whatever was going on in her head, even before her back pain made the whole thing impossible, there had been something reticent, something determinedly joyless about her reception of the car.
She had teased him about it endlessly, too, to the point where it had started to annoy him. She had nicknamed the car his ‘Mid Life Crisis’ and later refused to call it an MX-5 at all, referring to it endlessly as the ‘MLC’ instead. As in, ‘Can you meet me in town with the MLC so I can bring the shopping home?’ or, ‘Do you want to go to April’s on the train, or are we taking the MLC?’
It was undoubtedly true that the carwasa symptom of Sean’s midlife crisis. And the fact that a consequential chunk of that crisis was his desire to seduce his wife anew, to show her they weren’t too old to have fun, to demonstrate that he could still surprise her, only seemed to make the bite of her mockery even harder to bear.
Cassette #27
Hi Sean.
I don’t think I’m going to be able to talk for long today. I’ve just started another round of my trial chemo and it definitely isn’t a placebo. This time around, it has knocked me for six, in fact. It has left me so utterly, utterly exhausted that I barely managed to sit up and talk to you this afternoon. I’m so sorry.
The oncologist came around just after you left and said they were having a case meeting tomorrow to review my progress, and though I’m hoping, for your sake, that it will show it’s working – I know that you’re desperately clinging to that idea – I can’t help but think what a relief it will be if they tell me that it isn’t and that I can stop taking this poison, because poison it is. From the second they hook me up to the IV I can feel it burning my veins. And the tiredness it induces is truly sapping my will to live. How ironic is that?
Anyway, it’s time to get on with these tapes. I’m approaching the end of the photos I chose, and though we’re all still pretending that I’m going to live forever, it’s probably just as well that these are nearly finished.
It’s time to talk about that bloody car.
