Page 11 of Fling

‘No, Emily, it’s a thing where couples lose their romantic spark after seven years of marriage. It’s when most affairs happen, apparently.’

‘You should join Fling then,’ Emily suggested.

‘Oh sweet Jesus. Me? Have an affair? You must be joking,’ Tara said, going from puce to scarlet.

‘Oh come on. Men are like shoes. You look silly with just one,’ Emily said, trying to egg her on.

‘That’s all well and good, Emily, but what exactly would I do if my husband found out?’

‘It’s all anonymous so nobody would know. You can be a saint in the streets and a sinner in the sheets.’

‘Absolutely not, I’d be found stone dead of shame,’ Tara said, putting her foot down.

‘OK, Mary,’ Emily laughed as she left the room.

‘I’M NOT A MARY!’ Tara shouted after her.

Chapter 4

Colin arrived to work at 9.27 a.m., just as he did every day. His workday began at 9.30 and he had a knack for navigating the side streets of Dublin perfectly so that he was always on time. Like Tara, Colin spent his commute thinking about the world and his role within it. Now, at thirty-eight years old, he found himself trying to rediscover a sense of meaning within the meaningless chaos of existence.

There was no doubt about it.

Colin was having a mid-life crisis.

The past six months had felt like a perpetual purgatory. His marriage was falling apart and Tara didn’t seem to have much interest in saving it. She seemed so apathetic, so numb to it all. They weren’t in a fight but they also weren’t not in a fight. He was tired of living his life in limbo. Colin would have preferred if they just addressed the elephant in the room that seemed to be getting bigger and bigger each day. He used to love their fights, the lovers’ quarrels that always led to the best sex. But this insidious animosity was torture. It was death by a thousand cuts. At least a fight would clear the air. But Tara refused to have the very important conversation that loomed over their marriage.

She had given up on the idea of starting a family, and whenever he tried to have a reasonable discussion about it, she’d either change the subject, leave the room or stonewall him with a lecture about how it was her body, not his. She was searching for a new dream, she would say. But what Colin loved about his dream of having children was that it was an adventure to share with Tara. It was their next chapter. The way she talked about her destiny, it seemed as if he wasn’t a part of it. Why was she so against the idea of asking Celine to call her fertility specialist friend? It could only help.

All he wanted was to be a dad. Not just a father but a proper loving, nurturing, compassionate, cringey, embarrassing dad. He wanted to wear socks and sandals. He wanted to say no to getting a dog but then eventually become the dog’s best friend. He wanted to drag his family to the airport hours before the flight was even due to board. He even had a stockpile of dad jokes ready for the role he was destined to play. Most of all, he wanted to give a child the feeling of belonging that he never felt within his own family.

Colin had a father growing up, but he never had a dad. William O’Hara was a wealthy but withholding man who believed tough love built character. His mother Patricia, though slightly more affectionate, shared this belief. They were the type of stiff-upper-lip parents who said things like, ‘When I was your age I had to walk ten miles to school barefoot in the lashing rain every morning.’ Somehow, Colin always had difficulty believing such stories. It was as if they always wanted to see him struggle. He had vowed from a very early age that he would one day make a family of his own. He would raise his kids the very opposite to the way he had been raised. He had spent so many years saving money so that his children would want for nothing. Amazing Christmas presents, trips to Disneyland and, of course, the unconditional love he’d never experienced. He was willing to do anything for his dream of fatherhood to come true.

When he tried to explain this to Tara, however, she completely blanked him. It was like his feelings didn’t appear to have any bearing on their marriage any more. He felt constantly unheard. It was hard enough as a man to speak about his emotions, but when he finally found the courage to speak up, he was immediately shot down. She had even made some remark about his dream of fatherhood being an ‘old-fashioned conservative ideal’. Old-fashioned? Was it really so terrible for him to dream of starting the family he’d always longed for as a child? And conservative? At heart, Colin was an anarchist. He used to be a rebel, raised on punk rock. He used to be a rolling stone that gathered no moss. He used to be a lone wolf howling at the moon. He even rode a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle back in the day as a youthful act of defiance against his parents.

On the night he first met Tara, he had waited for her on that very bike, smoking a cigarette outside O’Malley’s. She said there was no way in hell she was getting on the back. But she had. She couldn’t resist a walk on the wild side. Yet on the day they got married, the motorcycle had to go into the shed. ‘I refuse to become a widow,’ she had said. The same went for him smoking even an occasional cigarette. ‘I won’t let you pay a tobacco company to kill you,’ she had said. So the lone wolf was tamed, the rebel was repressed and the rolling stone had become overgrown with moss.

Somewhere along the line he had adopted the mantra, you can be right or you can be happy. There were a million little things that he disagreed with Tara on, but he knew trying to prove her wrong was hopeless. And even if he ever did win an argument, victory was always only temporary. She would say ‘That’s fine,’ and then revive the fight later with her favourite line ‘I just think it’s funny how . . .’ So Colin had learned to bite his tongue, and for the sake of being happy he would let her be right. He convinced himself that the best way to win an argument was to choose not to have it in the first place.

But now, that mantra had failed him. Allowing Tara to be right in this instance made it impossible for him to be happy. After years of biting his tongue, he was at his wits’ end. And yet, he couldn’t blame Tara entirely. He had allowed himself to become too malleable, able to be hammered into any shape at the price of his own identity. He let Tara round off the very edges that made him a man. Now, he was an agreeable people-pleaser, putting the happiness of others before his own.

He had set himself on fire to keep others warm.

It would have been bearable if Tara showed some affection once in a while. Colin was a good-looking man and he saw the way other women looked at him. People often complimented his deep blue eyes and cheeky smile. He somehow still had zero grey hairs and, thanks to genetics from his maternal grandfather, his hairline wasn’t going to recede anytime soon. He wasn’t the most well-endowed man in the world but he was packing a full inch more than the global average, a fact he was secretly very proud of. Plenty of girls in UCD had made it abundantly clear they wanted to sleep with him back in the day. But he was always devoted to Tara. It was easy at the time because Tara was devoted to him too. They were unable to keep their hands off each other.

But how could he be expected to stay committed to one person sexually for the rest of his life if that person no longer had any interest in sex? For years, their lovemaking was reduced to its reproductive function, but since Tara’s decision, their sex life had become extinct, preserved only in the amber of memory. Was that just the natural course of every marriage? To go from passionate lovers to sexually sedated companions? He found it ironic that less than a century ago, people got married so they could start having sex but now they got married so they could stop. Colin didn’t want a companion.

He wanted his wife back.

Colin couldn’t cook so Tara was always the one who prepared the food when he did the weekly grocery shopping. But since their rift, those home-cooked dinners had become lukewarm microwavable meals. He had taken out a pair of steaks that morning as a way of breaking the cycle that had become all too symbolic of their marriage. He would open a bottle of wine, set the table and maybe, just maybe, they could re-connect. Still, he wasn’t holding his breath. After all, Tara expressed no interest in reigniting their spark that had once burned so bright.

She had become some version of herself that Colin barely recognized. She was always dyeing her hair blonde and hiding the natural red he fell in love with. It was like she was constantly trying to hide the things he found beautiful about her. Even her gorgeous green eyes had gradually lost their seductive sparkle. The doppelganger that lay beside him in bed each night was not his wife.

She was a stranger.

He married a woman who was passionate, adventurous, optimistic and beaming with confidence. Where had these magnetic qualities disappeared to? Where was the joie de vivre that used to light up any room she was in? He missed the fiery redhead he had fallen in love with. He missed the Tara who had got on the back of his motorcycle. He missed the Tara who used to melt in his arms.

He wondered if he would ever find her again.

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