Page 85 of Things We Never Said
35mm format, colour. A group of adults, perhaps fifteen people, are frozen in motion by the flash of the camera. Their faces are animated and joyous. A young woman to the right, behind the sofa, is throwing streamers.
So are we really doing this?Sean wonders.Am I really going to continue listening to these, one a week, as prescribed?
He feels like a stooge; he feels as if he has been conned into something by Catherine against his will. He should be stronger, he thinks. He should just say no, surely? But the truth of the matter is that he likes these tapes. He enjoys them. He needs them.
Even after the pain of discovering Catherine’s infidelity, he needs them, perhaps even more than before. Because something has been broken, and who else has the power to fix it if it isn’t Catherine?
Today’s photo is of Sean’s fiftieth birthday party.
He had wanted to invite a few friends to the local pub but Catherine had pretended to be ill.
‘Please,’ she had said. ‘Can we do it in a week or so, once I’ve shaken this horrible flu thing?’ Sean had acquiesced. He hadn’t been feeling particularly enthusiastic about being fifty anyway.
But when he had returned home from work on the Friday night to a dark, apparently empty house, he had regretted the decision. Because nothing, it seemed, could be more depressing than not celebrating his fiftieth birthday at all.
When he had turned on the light, they had screamed. April had released party poppers, which had thrown streamers into the air.
He studies the faces. They had all been there: Catherine (who had taken the photo) and April, Maggie, Steve and Cheryl, Jim and Pete ... There’s only one face in the image that he can’t put a name to. A serious blonde woman, a German temp who had replaced their usual receptionist at Nicholson-Wallace.Petra, perhaps?Sean thinks.
There had been food and drink and Jim had brought a PA system and a pile of disco CDs. It was a brilliant party, perhaps the best one ever.
The only negative, in fact, had been Maggie. For Maggie, still smarting no doubt from her separation from Craig, had bent his ear for almost an hour, beneath a streetlight, at the end of the road. She had been drunk and maudlin and uncharacteristically sombre about her future. ‘I’m going to get a cat,’ Sean remembers her telling him with drunken insistence. ‘I’m going to get ten cats. I’m going to become a cat lady.’ By the time she finished, he had felt quite miserable.
Cassette #26
Hello munchkin,
Here’s another memory for you: September 2012. Your fiftieth.
Maggie, who was single and out of work at the time, offered to do all of the organising. And because it was so much easier for her to do it than it was for me to sneak around behind your back, I gave in. She made quiches and sandwiches and nibbles on sticks. She drove out to some cheap booze place in Luton and came back with enough alcohol to open a nightclub.
April was upset because Ronan, who she had just met, couldn’t make it, but she soon got over that when I gave her all the party poppers to pop. Even pushing thirty, she could never resist a party popper. She actually let one off by accident just minutes before you arrived, and we had to scramble around to clean all the streamers up so that they wouldn’t be a giveaway when you walked in.
Jim supplied the music, and it was wonderful to dance again. I hadn’t really danced like that since Wolverhampton. In fact, even at college parties, I was always far too busy concentrating on looking cool to let myself go. But at that party, the music was brilliant and I was drunk, and yet not a smidgen more drunk than required, and I danced, I think, from about eight until it ended.
April did a real John Travolta act too, and I was glad about that. Because she’d been an amazing little dancer until she hit twelve, but then had stopped completely. It was good to see that, as so often, her confidence was returning with age.
Anyway, I danced with April and I danced with you and I danced with Pete. He was forever grabbing my hand and trying to get me to jive, which, as you know, I was never very good at. But it was great fun.
At one point I was doing a very silly rock-and-roll number with Pete and he spun me around and I somehow, through the blur, noticed that you were missing, so at the end of the song I broke away and set out to find you. But you weren’t in the kitchen and you weren’t in the bathroom, and you weren’t upstairs having a lie-down either.
As I came back downstairs, Jim asked me if I was looking for you. ‘He’s out the front having a crafty cigarette,’ he told me. And so I opened the door and stepped outside.
It took me a few seconds to spot you. You were at the end of the street sitting on a wall smoking. And opposite you, talking seriously, was Maggie.
I watched you for a moment. I was trying to work out whether you were having another affair, or whether it had never ended, or whether you were thinking about having one, or perhaps angrily discussing the one that was over.
I started to walk towards you to have it all out. The drink had made me feel courageous and reckless. But as I passed beneath number 21, the top front window opened and a man’s head stuck out. ‘Hey! I know it’s a party and everything,’ he said reasonably, ‘and I know you don’t do it often, but I’m up at six for work, so if you could at least keep the bloody front door closed then that would be great. I like the Bee Gees, don’t get me wrong, but I can hear them up here with me earplugs in, darlin’.’
I checked my watch – it was almost two in the morning – and then I apologised and returned to close the front door, which stupidly I had left open. By the time I got there, you and Mags were striding back to join me.
‘Everything all right?’ you asked. ‘That idiot giving you hassle?’
‘No, he was nice,’ I said, glancing up in case the poor guy was still there listening. ‘And he’s right. I suppose we should turn it down a bit. People have to work.’
‘All good things must come to an end,’ Maggie said, and I thought I detected an acerbic tone to the remark. I felt it was directed at you.
We went back inside, and Mags went off to get the music turned down, but I held you back in the hallway. ‘Has it?’ I asked.
