ONE

After Thomas Atherton won the UK National Lottery, it seemed finally the time was right, after years of deliberation, for him and his wife Georgia to have children. The sum of money was three million, three hundred thousand pounds, enough to do what Tom had always dreamed of doing: buy a big, comfortable house by the sea and raise a family.

Georgia was a soft-spoken, sensible, forgetful woman who Thomas found very easy to love. Things just seemed to bounce off her. On first meeting she was often regarded, wrongly, as timid and easily fooled. She didn’t care. She’d had a few heartbreaks in her past, as the too-trusting do, and they still hurt, but nothing too serious. Nothing abusive. In any case, since their big win, quibbling about anything seemed fatuous. She loved Tom, he was nice enough, his tastes were simple.

There was nothing to dislike about Tom and Georgie, and very few disliked them, though single friends were jealous of their comfy domesticity. Such unfussy contentment had been held almost a source of pride, and though both had secretly dreamed of a lifestyle change exactly like this, neither particularly wanted to ‘reinvent’ themselves. With Tom thirty-four, Georgie thirty-three, they were old enough to know who they were and had found numerous ways to fit their skins.

Tom, worrier that he was, wondered if he really knew Georgia all that well, also that she was going to leave him. They’d been together four years, married for two, and he felt much had gone unspoken. Both of them intentionally avoided arguments, worked bad hours from time to time and had friends outside of each other. He was fiercely proud of the latently independent Georgia, who was undoubtedly a good-looking girl, too good for him, better than any girl he’d had before. She’d had more of a life than him, too: more lovers, more travelling, she’d seen more sights, done more things, met more people, all undertaken with consummate common sense. She’d been settled enough then, she supposed, before Tom, as no desperately unhappy times came to mind besides the heartbreaks, but felt more settled now. Her life had come to a point.

The two of them had never hurt anyone, and never would, but nevertheless left four disappointed parents in their wake. Georgia’s had felt it most as their daughter was misused by yet another promising suitor. Tom’s fretted at his apparent inability to hold on to a lasting relationship, and his lukewarm attitude to the break-ups. None before Georgia were considered by him a serious prospect, and they had doubts about her, even after the couple went ahead and got married. Fusty old people, set in their ways, thought Tom. Why would they question my beautiful Georgia? Nothing pleases them.

The money appeared to be right on the cusp of what the two of them could realistically retire on forever. Excited at the prospects, nervous about the potential repercussions, anxious not to rush into anything, they elected to stay private about their win and to keep their jobs for the immediate future, simply so no-one suspected their new-found wealth. The press had reported the story of a mystery lottery winner, along with the area of Britain that they lived. Business as usual was the order of the day.

Each worried that the money would change the other’s person. Tom, open, friendly, trustworthy, had a sullen streak only Georgia, his parents and his ex-girlfriends had ever seen. He was best left alone in these times and she promptly did as much. Furthermore she knew he thought she’d leave him, and remained silent on the issue. She was available for comfort if he wanted it, but it was rarely offered outright. She didn’t want him thinking moodiness was a shortcut to her affections. If he wanted to believe she was too good for him, let him. Maybe when all was said and done, it was true. In physical attractiveness he’d been a slight step down from her usual and he was an underwhelming lover.

She loved him for his trustworthiness and his generosity. She never felt neglected- it wasn’t his fault other men had better satisfied her in the past, it wasn’t through lack of effort, and in any case the knowledge he’d still be there in the morning was more than enough. This sum of money, then, was the icing on the cake for Georgia; she was already happy, but now needed not sometimes dream that somewhere along the line, maybe after Tom had fallen out of love with her, a man with more ambition and altogether more wherewithal might show her a whole new unchartered area of life; that she could, in effect, live two lives with entirely separate and equally fulfilling merits. She would still be the same Georgia, only more vibrant, with different scenery, and would reminisce pleasantly of the quiet courtship she once had with the unassuming Thomas, who had himself remarried and wrote to her regularly. She would regret nothing.

As it happened, scenery was one thing they could definitely agree on. Sick of the city and their jobs, plans were made to take some holiday time and buy a house at the beach. Georgia silently hoped the money would knock Tom’s moods out of him, and began to instigate sex more often to ease such a transition along. Of course, now they were supposed to be having children too, which brought about more debate- did it really have to be quite so soon? Could they not relax, just the two of them, and bless their good fortune, for a little while? Or had they waited far too long already? Did all this indecision make them weak? And how late is too late? Georgia took for granted she could bear a child until at least age forty, six and a half years away, but six and a half years, once a life-changing timespan, was not so much anymore.

Tom worried less- he wanted kids, but he wanted Georgia more. As long as he had her, he told himself, he was fine. Even without a baby, the attention he was getting from her was already far scanter than he wanted. He’d noticed they were having more sex, and liked it, but was still agitated by a need for Georgia to say more, smile more, enthuse about things, enthuse about him. He wanted to be able to delight her, every day, in everything he did. But it was his own fault, he surmised glumly. He’d always dated quiet girls. They were his type.

‘So,’ said Tom. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s nice,’ Georgie replied truthfully. ‘I like it.’

‘So do I.’ A moment of thoughtful contemplation followed. Waves swished back and forth. She’s holding my hand, he thought. She’s holding my hand. ‘Is this the one then?’

She smiled at him. She was thinking about asking him if he wanted to make love on the beach after dark. ‘I’m happy if you’re happy.’

He smiled back, but was frustrated by the indifference of her answer. She held his hand more often these days; he told himself it was healthy he still got a kick out of it after two years of marriage, and tried not to question her motives. It was natural she would be more relaxed after a financial windfall, not that he had known Georgia to be anything other than relaxed.

He’d enjoyed immensely these few days with her, looking at beach houses. He didn’t want it to come to an end, but this one was undoubtedly the best they’d seen so far. He waited for her to say You know, why don’t we keep looking a bit longer. Another week. Our bosses won’t mind. You never know what we could find, and we can probably come back to this one if we want.

Waves lapped the shore.

She knew doing it on a beach would be a first for him. She liked giving him his firsts. It made her feel like a wife. She knew he didn’t think about his exes. From what she’d heard, there was nothing to think about. They had drifted in and out of his life like seaweed, ineffectual and plain.

She could still feel the parts inside her other men had reached, untouched for years. It was a little like a not unpleasant ache. She almost liked it.

He tried to imagine the levels of happiness he could feel in this spot, if this was indeed to be the one. Though it was not a sunny day, despite it being the very height of summertime, he tried to imagine that it was, and how the skyline and the beach would look bathed in gold. It would be glorious, he reasoned, but that was no test, not really. His experience was that nowhere, no matter how grim, was not transformed completely by a crystal blue sky. How tranquil would this little spot be? Reclining in a deckchair, beer in hand, how far removed from everything would he be able to feel? How centred?

They were about three-quarters of the way along the beach; to the far side, a pier dotted sparsely with miniscule people nudged its wooden rafters out into the sea. It would be much more populated on a nice day, Tom knew, but it seemed unlikely to bother him from all the way over there. Anyway, surely he didn’t want total peace and solitude, did he? If so, he was sure he could find far more secluded bits of beach, or a hilltop in Scotland. This area, in theory, could be crawling with kids. Could he put up with it? Yeah, probably. It was far easier to put up with anything when there was three million in the bank, and Georgia making love to him every single night.

(How long will that last?)

(Shut up.)

He squeezed her hand. She’d sensed his mental to-and-froing through his body tension and the rhythms of his breathing. She wanted to get off the beach. It was windy. ‘You know, we can keep looking, if you want.’

‘This is fine.’ He smiled at her. They kissed.

They’d been moving along the coast, from hotel to hotel, for a little under a week. She was bored. Tom was reluctant to leave the hotel at night, he just wanted to sit and read or watch TV. Nevertheless, when she pressed him he would go, as she knew he would. They would have a meal, as fancy as they could find in these little provincial towns, then move on to a bar for a quiet drink.

They discussed baby names.

‘Peter,’ she suggested.

‘Bit old-fashioned,’ he countered.

‘Kevin?’

‘Mmm. Not sure.’

They wanted their child to have a very normal name, but agreed that some were too commonplace. James, Michael and David were all out, and probably Daniel aswell.

As for girls’ names, he liked Heather, but she thought it had gone out of style. Jennifer was a contender. Sophie. Stephanie. Clare. They all seemed to go OK with his surname.

Both wished they had something more interesting to talk about.

He racked his brains.

The money wasn’t enough, in a weird way. It wasn’t as if they could now just go and do whatever they wanted, unrestrained. Tom had, for example, dreamed of owning a football team, or a nightclub, or an enormous villa on a Caribbean island. Opening a nightclub seemed fairly realistic, but he was frightened of doing something so high-risk. How quickly, in theory, could one lose three million in a venture like that? Six months? A year? Then what?

‘Do you get the feeling sometimes we should do something big with this money?’ he asked her.

‘Like what?’

‘Don’t know. Something big. Something silly.’

She laughed, tilting her head back. ‘No! Obviously not. What did you think I was going to say?’

He laughed too. ‘Exactly that.’

She reached across the table and took his hand. ‘Is a baby not big enough?’

‘Yes. Of course it is. But do you know what I mean?’

‘I suppose. But we can’t. You know that.’

He pulled a childish face. ‘So…are you pregnant yet or what?’

She waved her hands. ‘Who knows, who knows.’

‘How long am I going to have to keep plugging away? I’m tired.’

‘Yes, I bet you are.’

The barman rang for last orders and unplugged the fruit machine.

The evening was calm and mild with a mere hint of breeze, fine for what Georgia had suggested. He’d acquiesced after a brief hesitation- he didn’t want to make love al fresco, he wanted to do it in a lovely warm private double bed with fluffy pillows, and drift to sleep- but he appreciated the sentiment, the ‘naughtiness’, the ‘spiciness’ of it. He thought of all the men in Georgia’s past and how enthusiastically they had accepted this offer.

His doubts dissipated when they got going. Her hips came up to meet his with a completely unexpected vigour, her breathing heavy, her arms tight around his neck, and she appeared to have two separate, very decent orgasms. When they’d finished she giggled as she rolled back on the sand, Tom’s eyes lingering on her porcelain body.

‘OK?’ she said through jagged breaths.

‘Not bad,’ came his answer. She slapped him lightly and giggled again. His hand rested on her flat tummy.

For a short while they lay there looking at the stars. This was the Georgia he wanted, smiling and vivacious. Perhaps those were her first real orgasms recently.

‘I do worry what a baby might do to my figure,’ she ventured. Tom couldn’t imagine her shaped any other way. She suited perfectly her short stature and small breasts.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said automatically.

‘I don’t want to be a fat mummy.’

‘You won’t be.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You just won’t.’ Throughout her entire life, no weight had never stuck to Georgia. She was as waif-like now as when she was seventeen. Tom saw no reason for that to change.

‘That’s what childbirth does.’

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe.’ He was disinclined to think about it. The here and now was what was…the stars, the beach…he leaned over and kissed her passionately.

‘Oh my, Mr. Darcy!’ Locks of black hair hung bedraggled over her ears, brushing the sand.

‘I hope we’ve just conceived,’ he said. Another kiss.

She was slightly taken aback. ‘Well…me too.’

‘I love you.’

Back at work, Tom’s mind kept wandering back to that night. An inner voice told him it was the best sex Georgia had ever had, and she was sure to be pregnant. Then, he would tell himself not to get carried away- it had been a good night, yes, a very good one, the pinnacle of a pleasant trip on which everything had gone smoothly. It had cheered him up and that was enough. Anything else would be just a bonus.

Not that he could ever know if it was the best sex Georgia had ever had, unless he asked her outright, which he wasn’t going to do. If he did, would she lie? And say it was, just to please him? He thought she probably would. She would think she was doing a wife’s duty, protecting his ego like that, and wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.

Maybe he would ask after all. Maybe.

No. Bad idea. She’d be surprised, even offended, being put on the spot like that. He thought back. They’d never really talked about sex, it was just something they did from time to time, as couples do. It went without saying he wanted as much of it as possible, but that was obvious, surely, when considering how much in love he was with her. It enabled him, briefly, to make the kind of connection he craved for elsewhere, in her speech, in her mannerisms. He knew how much she liked it, despite her never actually acknowledging such a thing out loud, at least not to him.

With a twinge of excitement he wondered if that made her a ‘slag’. Was that why his parents didn’t like her? Could they smell it on her, the whiff of whoredom? It was true she had never requested any unusual sex act from him, let alone a shocking one, but that was her way. Understated. It was one of the many, many things he loved about her.

Not for the first time a dark vision of her being pleasured by another man flashed across his mind- he pushed it away. Instead he daydreamed of making love again on the beach in that very same spot. She’d been different that night. From the moment she’d made her suggestion it seemed there’d been a rare sparkle in her eyes that had increased tenfold when the lovemaking was actually under way, though he supposed it might have been starlight.

Tom found himself in reflective mood on a daily basis. He often thought about his childhood, but even looking back to as recently as three or four years before could provoke that bittersweet melancholy he seemed addicted to.

He’d spent his twenties- all of them- in a manual labour job any able-bodied person in the world could do. At the age of thirty, almost the exact time he’d met Georgia, he’d received a minor promotion to a position he still currently held. He understood himself to be a dull and nondescript man who maybe could and should have done something better with his life, but didn’t. Just one of the millions. He frequently felt sorry for himself. This was sometimes accompanied by deep sympathy for his parents, who hadn’t asked for much from life, yet seen all their best intentions wither and shrivel. For years he’d made just enough money to live on and no more, and simply put up with it, and grown older.

Looking around his workplace, he thought about all the friends he’d made there who had left and moved on. He was able to reminisce all the way back to when he had started working there aged 19, a completely different person with a completely different set of worries who knew so much less about life. It was heartbreaking to think how different that young man could have made things.

There were times he wanted to rewind time and somehow stop himself from being born. It would save people, chiefly himself, from such sorrow and disappointment. With the exception of Georgia, he regretted everything. He felt tired all the time, and lazy. With each day that passed he believed less and less in any kind of afterlife. He didn’t believe anyone was on Earth for a purpose, and he didn’t believe anything bigger than the human race knew or cared they were there.

And he knew that these feelings were not special. He knew all the major writers had tackled them with far more poetry and meaning than he could ever muster, even if he tried. But looking around his workplace, he wondered why he was still here. This place had stolen fifteen years of his life. He’d found himself luckier than ninety-nine percent of people would ever be. Why was he still here? Sensible Georgia had outdone herself this time, insisting they kept their jobs and lived on their wages while they worked out a plan for the future, though he supposed it wasn’t really her fault. He’d agreed in principle. It had sounded like a good idea.

He began to worry he was never going to stop working here.

He began to think about all the women in his past who hadn’t wanted him.

TWO

Even level-headed Georgia, who never got ahead of herself, was surprised when the pregnancy test was negative. There was no doubt it had been a good night on the beach, and though she’d put it on a bit for Tom’s benefit, she really had found herself surprisingly satisfied, and intuition told her with its usual quiet confidence he’d left a little human inside her.

She shook the plastic stick and looked again, disbelieving. In the interests of tasteful humility she’d never let this on to anyone, but she considered her inherent intuition flawless.

He’d spent the ensuing days walking round like the cat that got the cream, smirking, which had annoyed her.

She shook it again.

When to tell him? Should she give him one more day of blissful ignorance? Two more? Or would dragging it out just make it more painful for both of them? She sighed and pulled her pants up. Washed her hands and dried them. Looked at herself in the mirror.

Despite her expression she looked good. Blue eyes, black hair. Very striking. The laughter lines that had appeared since she hit thirty appeared to be receding.

She didn’t want to go to work. She wanted to take a nice long maternity leave and then never go back. Without thinking she threw the pregnancy test across the bathroom; it bounced off the wall. If she’d been wearing shoes she’d have stamped on it. Thrilled with adrenaline, shocked at the uncharacteristic loss of control, but above all powerlessly frustrated, she took a deep breath, stealing one last hateful glance at the test before dutifully picking it up and putting it in the bin, taking the time to bury it under the previous rubbish.   

She had to be at work in an hour. Was it enough time to read the note? Shifting into the bedroom with preoccupied mind, in a rehearsed easy move she reached past razors and tampons and roll-on deodorant to the very back of her wardrobe and pulled out the trinket-box. The first note she came to was one she’d written herself back when she’d thought she might one day be a professional writer.

The night is a time of great mystery. I prefer sunsets to sunrises: they suggest the advent of that quiet time when the only things awake are the wind and the night-owls, and peoples’ dreams drift past other in the empty streets. It gets to me when I can’t sleep, though I guess it gets to me no more than it does the average person. The night’s for lovers and dreamers; being neither, the night serves only to make me terribly alone.

The final line made her shiver. Had she really felt like that, or had she been putting it on in an attempt to give her writing portentous philosophical weight? She knew the answer: a bit of both.

Moving on, she found what she was really looking for.

Georgia was a woman who was hungry for love. At least, she thought so. She was hungry for something. Was it love, or life? Were they interchangeable? Sometimes she thought that maybe life itself- the whole thing, all of it- might be defined by love, that abstract term so gloriously full of meaning. She loved life, but she was hungry, she knew not for what! For life to start. For the smell of roses.

Twenty-two and beautiful, she had plans. She had plans to be a great woman. At times she wanted to imbibe the entire world, become a receptor to every little concept and idea, to walk a golden path and bring to everyone a sense that surely they should feel the goodness in their chosen race, the beauty inherent in and out of nature’s bountiful Bayeux Tapestry. The milk of human kindness was as thick as cream, but so difficult to see when even trees seemed to drip with cynicism and self-aggrandisation and obscure pain.

Georgia wanted to retain an ambiguity to everything that life stood for- it was in this that she felt herself alive. What was she? She was a domino, but what a thrill she got from being a domino. She was a beautiful domino, one who saw every spot on her neighbours as a beauty spot. One day, she knew, a baby would rip itself from her body and scream bloodily. Friends her own age, or even younger, were already beyond that step in their own personal tapestries. Perhaps their colours were stranger, but perhaps- who knows?- hers were somehow more beautiful. There was no way of telling.

Self-appreciation of her simpler colours was paramount. Sometimes she felt like the QE2, then sometimes she felt like an inflatable canoe, popped, repaired, and popped again. A domino is fine and strong, it can be flung against a wall and still stand, but it will feel the little scratches. She was aware of the dominoes without spots and she was envious.

I was in love with Georgia. I thought the world of her. All other humans were like prototypes. I was prepared to love her colours for as long as she would let me.   

It had been written by a young guy of 19, just on the cusp of manhood, who was in her philosophy class. They’d recognised each other at a student party, got chatting, ended up talking on the sofa for hours about life, then at the end of the night she’d slept with him, finding out later that she’d taken his virginity. His philosophical musings had been pretty standard, his gentlemanly earnestness rather hit and miss, but she was mildly attracted to him, as she was most men, including those old enough to be her father, and wanted to do it so she did. She woke up next to him with a fuzzy head from all the wine, but as usual did not regret it at all.

He’d pursued her. Casual at first, friendly, then increasingly more desperate. Eventually, completely broken, struggling to walk under the weight of so much passion, he’d literally begged her, on his knees, to at least, please, have a coffee with him one Saturday afternoon, just so he could see her. With a wealth of emotion in her eyes she’d smiled at him fondly and gently shook her head. Her pity had cast a great net over the years, as she was sure it would for many more, and it did not even need the evocation of that particular scene to be drawn out. She felt it wash its soothing balm over her. Such was life, she sighed, bittersweet. Satisfied.

Tom took the news hard and went into a little sulk, as she knew he would. The following few days were grey and drab. He had even lost interest in repeating their night on the beach, a prospect that had been hitherto all-consuming. She’d faked those orgasms that night, he reasoned, just as she had faked every single one since the beginning. She was nothing but a cheap harlot.

He hated having these thoughts, but they gave him a peculiar thrill. He’d given Georgia so much unconditional love, and this was how she’d repaid him. Why did she have to be so cold and distant? He was sick of looking in her eyes and seeing that she was somewhere else entirely. He used to like it. He thought at some point he’d be privy to all those mysteries in her head, but if anything she’d gotten quieter over time. Even the one thing he knew for sure, that she enjoyed lovemaking down to her bones, was useless to him.

Georgia searched the boy on the internet. Of course he was a man now, she reminded herself. Of course. He’d be thirty.

He was an MP for a constituency down south somewhere. She was startled by how handsome he’d become. The spots, of which there hadn’t been many in the first place, were gone. His smile to camera was large and confident, his hair professionally coiffured, his designer stubble tasteful. He looked completely relaxed.

She wanted to ride him right there and then. She wished he was in the room.

Flushing hot red, she composed herself and closed the browser. It was a reasonable thing to do to look up someone she used to know and see what they were up to, wasn’t it? People did that all the time.

Tom was just such a misery at the moment. She resented his unsmiling face. Could it really be all to do with the baby issue? She hadn’t even thought he wanted one that much. Flashbacking shamefully to her little tantrum in the bathroom, she supposed she’d been more upset than she thought she’d be too. A pang of sympathy for him rose up inside. Then she felt even worse about what had just happened, which for the time being at least, she knew her mind’s eye would not be able to undo.

But still she wished he would find another way to deal with his disquiet.

Out of the blue he took her for a meal that night, even though it was only a Tuesday. She wore a dress he’d always liked.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked when they were seated.

‘I’m OK.’

‘Really. I want to know.’

‘Well, I’ve had better weeks.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

She nearly said I’m sorry too and stopped herself, settling instead for ‘It’s OK.’

‘I think I hate my job.’

She smiled, understanding. ‘Yeah.’

‘How much longer?’

She thought about it. ‘A month maybe? If you really can’t stand it any more.’

‘It feels weird. It feels like nothing’s changed. They speak to me like I’m an idiot. Sometimes I worry that they’re right.’ He paused. ‘And I don’t want to be away from you.’

‘That’s sweet.’

‘You still want to try again for a baby, don’t you?’

‘I’m thinking about trying to write a novel. I’ll finally have time.’

‘But the baby?’

She sighed. ‘It was disappointing, wasn’t it?’

‘You know how much I love you. Anything you want is fine with me.’

‘I suppose there’s nothing to stop me writing when I’m pregnant.’

‘I’ll do anything for you.’

‘Oh stop,’ she said, but she was smiling. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’

‘Nobody’s listening.’ He was right; they weren’t. They hadn’t even seen the irritatingly attentive waiter for a few minutes.

As usual they were among the older couples in the restaurant. It was something they had slowly had to get used to, though there was a lingering feeling for both that they would never really be fully used to it. Couples at their stage of a relationship didn’t go out so often anymore. There was no-one left to impress. Of course Georgia wanted her twenties back, that was normal, but she didn’t dwell on it the way Tom did.

Sat there, she daydreamed.

His was the only heart she’d ever broken. Look at him now. He must have a girlfriend. Probably a wife. He must have had his teeth done aswell. They’re almost flawlessly straight.

Tom had wished for so long to be able to afford to bring Georgia to a place like this, and here she was, again, silently staring into the corner of the room, food practically untouched. He wanted to slam his knife and fork down and snap her out of it, to see the look of shock it would bring.

He peered out the factory’s upstairs windows. It was a fine day and there was a blonde at the bus-stop, probably no older than twenty-one, her hair long and wavy in a manner that suggested she’d spent some time on it, dressed casual in a pair of jeans that clung close to her buttocks.

Tom felt sexual desire for her, but that wasn’t his only reason for looking. She complimented the sunshine, as did it compliment her. It was a day like this that made one want to get outside. He wondered where she was going and how vastly it would contrast with how his day was sure to ensue. She would either be on the way to work herself or going into town to shop. Maybe her boyfriend was waiting for her. Maybe she was going on a date. Unusual time for a date, he supposed, 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, but who knows.

It would now be distasteful for a man of his age to court a twenty-one year old. When had that point been reached? Around thirty? Sometimes it seemed there was nothing more sad than the passage of time. From sunrise to sunset and back again, everyone Tom saw on the street and at the bus-stop was on the clock, tick-tock. They didn’t seem to be feeling it, going about their business, but when they stopped, as Tom had, they would. They’d wonder where the month had gone.

There really weren’t enough hours in the day. With all-new financial avenues open to Tom, he resented the amount of sleep that his body demanded. Did it really have to be every night? Did it really have to be eight hours? Could he not save it up, sleep solid for a week and meter out his excess time over busier spells? Why not?

He resented his own inability to be carefree and breezy, it had affected his relationships with people, probably his ‘career’ too. It was the reason the phone didn’t ring on Saturday night. He resented having to go to the toilet so regularly. In fact, come to think of it, there were days when he really did resent pretty much everything, especially that which he couldn’t escape: time. She was a cruel and unforgiving mistress, cutting off summers long before they were due to end, thrusting adulthood on those more than happy being teenage. She counted every day that one sat and did nothing, stayed in bed, had an illness- they all counted, time put every single one of them on your face, no exceptions, no extenuating circumstances, not one. Time took and took and took and never once gave nothing back, not a solitary second. You weren’t even allowed to know how much you had.

It seemed to Tom that every single aspect of his life was infused with sadness. His happiest memories were sad simply because they were gone, and would die with him. A day, for example, when everything had gone right: he’d had an easy shift at work, no unsettling exchanges with his boss, ennui had largely left him alone, the new girl appeared to be almost flirting with him, and he’d gone home to find Georgia effervescent and pliable and they had drunk wine and curled up together in front of the fire like cats. Days like that- completely immaterial, probably gone forgotten by Georgia herself, that existed only in Tom’s brain, and even then, only in a little box-room at the back, driven there by more important things. In a nearby room, a halcyon month aged 17 when he worked at a car-wash with a young vision named Clare who had trailed him and given him his first kiss. He hadn’t been thinking about what he wanted from life, despite his parents’ protestations. It wasn’t real yet.

Was he really twice that age now? Twice the age he’d been when he spent every waking moment with Clare Simmons, who’d been really into him, and he decided he didn’t really want, reasoning that others would be forthcoming? She was uncouth, smoking, wearing huge looped earrings, but she liked him, that should have been more than enough, and she had a body slim and lithe beyond words. He could have had that body if he’d wanted; he let her kiss him, but he could have had it all.

Though his affection for her was always a tame beast, he’d also been scared- scared of girls, especially those that were as forthright as she was. He had thought it was normal and natural, instead of something to grow out of as quickly as possible. Though he’d applied many small changes to his psyche since then (he’d realised people don’t tend to find shyness endearing, quite the opposite), he was still the same person- different, but the same. The information he’d acquired about himself and about human interaction would have served him far better back then when girls like Clare Simmons were in and out of his life every day- not necessarily showing the same interest, but nonetheless there, and some of them were worth a strong, long relationship; he could list their names if he so chose, as if these things were still real, as if they hadn’t been rolled into a ball by time, fed into a cannon and blasted into the horizon.       

His boss caught him standing there with his arms folded and asked him in the office for a word.

‘I’ll be blunt,’ he said, clipped and monotone. ‘You’ve been lackadaisical lately. You were late this morning. You were late yesterday. Can you tell me why that is?’

‘I’m sorry sir.’

‘It’s not good enough Thomas. And I notice you’re behind on your hours. I’m going to have to ask you to come in Saturday.’

‘No.’

There was silence.

‘I’m afraid it wasn’t a request.’

‘I’m not doing it.’ He kept his face nonplussed, knowing it would antagonise the boss further.

‘Look, none of us want to be here. But we try to make the best of it. Fact is it’s in your contract.’

‘No it isn’t. I’m contracted to pay my hours off over the next four months, which I will do, at my convenience.’

‘That’s not really in the spirit of the contract.’

‘Which is?’

‘What’s best for the company.’

Underneath his calm veneer Tom was nervous. He’d always found his boss off-putting, impossible to please and openly contemptuous of the factory dogsbodies. He avoided him, and had never argued like this in all his fifteen year employment.

He simply repeated himself. ‘I’m not doing it.’

‘Then you’ll be getting a formal disciplinary next week.’

‘OK.’ Tom stood up to go. ‘I’ll contact my union representative.’

‘You’re not excused.’     

Tom stopped but didn’t sit back down.

‘Sit back down.’

He did so, slowly.

‘Are you sure you want to go down this road?’

Tom nodded.

‘You really think this will turn out well?’

He shrugged.

On his way home he was in two minds whether to tell Georgia about the confrontation. When he walked in the door she was sat at the computer in pyjamas, wearing reading glasses with dishevelled hair and a cup of tea.

‘I quit my job,’ she said sheepishly. He laughed. Hugged her.

THREE

That feeling you get, waking up from a really deep sleep, like something strange and indefinable has happened to you. The dream may not have had any overly unnerving aspects to it but there was something primal in its tone, tinged with fear, excitement possibly, but that feeling of being somewhere else, somewhere often very much like the reality we live in, but not.

You wake up, and suddenly you’ve gone from thousands of miles away to here. Thump. You might feel your stomach do flip-flops as your eyes adjust. Oh yes, that’s who I am, that’s what I do. I did go to sleep here last night. What in heaven’s name was I dreaming? It all made perfect sense at the time, sort of. How could I not have known I was in a dream?

Not that it helps, in my experience, on those rare occasions I know I’m dreaming. I’m not suddenly able to take control of the dream and direct it wherever I want it to go. That’s one of life’s little downsides, I suppose, because there’s no reason why that minor luxury is unavailable. There doesn’t need to be a reason. It just isn’t.

Sometimes, of course, one wakes and real life comes as a relief. There was some terrific problem to be overcome in the dream, but you wake up before the end and you’ll never know how things turned out. You don’t have to worry about it. It’s gone.  

When I dream heavy, it tends to come in batches. I might spend near enough a whole week living a double life, lurching in and out of this world.

She took a big swig of tea, wiping her mouth with a pyjama sleeve in a decidedly unrefined manner. That was the way she felt today. She hadn’t showered, her legs went unshaven and she didn’t like what she’d written.

Tom came in the front door, startling her a little. She hadn’t realised it was that time already. She felt guilty. He looked positively content, humming a little tune, and kissed her on the head and tousled her hair, hands moving down over her shoulders, glancing her hips. She actually found herself jealous.

‘What’s got into you?’

‘I got a disciplinary today.’

‘And you’re happy about that?’

‘Mmm-hmm. Tea?’

Hers was cold. ‘Yes.’ She frowned, partly at him, mostly at herself, but in any case he missed it, his back to her, pulling mugs from the cupboard, whistling.

‘Maybe we should get a cleaning woman,’ he said.

‘What are you saying?’

‘That if you don’t want to do cleaning anymore, I don’t mind if we pay someone else to do it.’

‘That’s very big of you.’

‘Are we in a bit of a bad mood?’

“We’ are whistling.’

He came over and nuzzled her ears.

‘I wouldn’t do that. My hair’s all greasy.’

‘I don’t care.’ His hands wandered again, her navel, her thighs. ‘Going to tell me what’s wrong?’

She sighed and said ‘Read this,’ gesturing to the monitor.

So he did.

‘I like it.’

‘You would say that.’

‘I do.’

‘You never criticise me.’

‘And you’re complaining?’

She turned on him. ‘This is the product of me sitting here all day.’

‘OK.’ He was finding her disgruntled expression quite cute.

‘I can’t use it. I can’t start a novel with this.’

‘Well what did you want to write about?’

‘I don’t know. Something important. Something evocative. And I need proper criticism.’

It had actually only taken her about half an hour to write. She’d watched daytime television, trawled in detail through the boy’s personal website, his hundreds of photos of galas and openings and church fetes, all smiling, and she had masturbated, something she’d barely done since she was a teenager. Despite washing her hands thoroughly, she could still feel it on herself and was sure any moment Tom would notice, pulling away repulsed.

But he didn’t. His embrace actually got tighter. Her mood softened. Sometimes it was easy to forget how much she loved him, why she had married him in the first place, silly misery-guts that he was.

‘Misery guts,’ she said.

‘Look who’s talking.’ Finally, he let go, and went to make the tea, whistling.

Things were looking up at work. He’d decided to turn up late every single day, only very slightly, by two or three minutes, and to make his excuses ludicrous. He was informed that the next step would be a final warning, and remained unmoved. Countless people still working there had gone beyond final warnings.

He wondered what his boss was like outside work, whether he genuinely ceased to exist. He was a one-dimensional cardboard cut-out of a man on whose opinions Tom had wasted greatly disproportionate amounts of concern, another cause for regret. Forget it, he told himself. History’s written.

He felt that these days he had bigger things on his mind. A little son or daughter was just the start. Time, that cruel mistress, could only be tempered when one discarded the flotsam and jetsam floating useless on the top of real life, having risen there because of its very weightlessness, bobbing about, constantly making its presence felt, disguising the true substance underneath. This was going to be easier said than done, but Tom, thirty-four, was going to have a good old go.

That Georgia did not appear to be sharing his new outlook was troubling. He’d felt similar serenities in the past, sometimes lasting weeks, but all had eventually degraded. He needed Georgia to be on the same page if it was to stick this time, and her impulsive resignation was just the kind of signal he’d been waiting for. Now surely she was all his. She hadn’t seen her friends for a while and not one of them knew of the money.

Georgia’s girlfriends didn’t like Tom, for little other reason than they found him ineffectual and bland, ‘hard work’. He seldom said anything engaging or amusing. If he’d been flat-out dark and moody, that might have actually worked better for him. He wondered if any of them had ever encouraged her to leave him, or have an affair.

What was wrong with Georgia? He didn’t care that she’d spent all day at home writing about dreams- in fact, he liked it. There was no level on which he did not find her the most delightful human being on God’s green earth. He liked it when she wore lipstick and summer dresses; he liked it when she cut her hair short and put ripped jeans on. He liked it when she was squiffy on red wine. He loved it when she would come in from a good night with the girls and drag him to bed like some delicious vixen.

Everything, he loved…everything about her but the arm’s length she insisted on keeping him at. He felt sure she would feign ignorance if confronted. Yes, she would say, she’d been in bad moods, same as everyone, and he was hardly one to judge, was he?

From frustration came a flash of anger. She could take a running jump, being so difficult.

He sighed. It subsided. If she came home one evening with another man and informed Tom that he would now be co-habiting, spending alternate nights in her bed and on the sofa, and that if the mood struck, she would be taking a third lover, and she might have them all pleasure her at once, he’d have no choice but to take his disgust and flush it straight down the drain of his mind’s eye, and simply adapt, and even come to appreciate the practicality of the arrangement.

FOUR

Summer was in full flourish. Tom sat on a bench in a field fifteen minutes’ walk from the factory, a place he visited regularly on his breaks back before he’d made any friends, and sporadically after. How long had it been since he’d sat here? Six, seven years? Always the same bench.

The field was covered in yellow dandelions, rippling in the breeze. The dandelions worried about nothing. Nothing. They would die with the summer. Tom didn’t know why they were there, but he was glad they were. It was difficult to gauge if his own life, when all its numerous pros and cons were weighed up, made any more sense than the dandelion’s, or was more worthwhile.

For years it had been money, or lack thereof, that made him feel like a lesser man and stopped him procreating. What was it now? What was he so worried about? He worried that Georgia didn’t love him, that it had just taken her a little longer to realise than the others. He worried that his sperm wasn’t potent enough. He was scared of death. He worried that all his worrying was going to give him heart disease or make his hair fall out. He worried that having a child- the one thing that could potentially change his life, properly, for the better- was a mistake, that they would grow up to be just like him, finding sadness in everything, finding every day a chore, finding other people maddening, and struggling for every ounce of peace and comfort.

With a start he saw it was his boss that had appeared from the cluster of trees in the field’s corner, making his way toward the street. He was coming closer, but would not need to make his way directly past Tom, who averted his eyes accordingly. And he was gone.

His boss, with far more power and respect around the factory than Tom would ever muster, for whom it still wasn’t good enough, who still walked around with a face like a never-ending rain-spattered Monday morning.

That was strange. He’d known the man for fifteen years and never thought he’d see him strolling through a field on a sunny day. It offended his sensibilities.

Georgia was struggling to find ways to fill time. At her behest, Tom had called in sick mid-week and taken her up into the hills where they had eaten ice cream and forced conversation. It was unusually lovely. When it came time for the kids to finish school they had swarmed around the small rural town in their uniforms; elsewhere, young men and women with pushchairs idled, their preschoolers filling the air with the unmistakable enthusiasm of extreme youth and Georgia felt broody. Her mother and father were both aged sixty-one, how long did they have left to see a grandchild? None of her grandparents had lived to see eighty, and suddenly twenty years seemed like nothing, nothing. There just wasn’t enough time. Life hardly seemed worth the effort. She could have a baby, and she could love them, but they’d just end up far too old far too quickly and already be thinking about death by age thirty-three. There was no way to justify oneself against the overwhelming natural beauty of a day like this, no words to express how much she wanted to be worth her parents’ endeavour.

‘Do you want to move up here?’ she asked Tom.

‘Hmm?’

‘Live up here. Do you want to? I mean, you’re not too attached to the house, are you?’

He wasn’t, particularly, but the commute would be pretty terrible, and something was stopping him leaving the factory. He’d invested so much time in it, on some level he still wanted to believe that those fifteen years meant something, something that couldn’t just be walked away from so simply, that all his favourite co-workers from bygone days were only taking temporary reprieve, that they’d all return one at a time and all relive their box-packing glory days together, til the day came that Tom himself woke up one morning, somehow the same age, and finally ready to move on. They’d all cheer as he embarked on the start of his real life.

He also felt leaving would prove right all those who had treated him as disposable, or even just been slightly patronising. They’d never know how much truly better he was than that cesspit, that he’d chosen to work there for devil’s amusement, no more. He still had some point to prove.

‘Do you really want to?’

‘I don’t know.’ She crinkled her nose, nudging up the glasses she’d taken to wearing. ‘Look at this place. It’s so peaceful.’

‘We can live here, if you want.’

‘Good place to raise a baby, don’t you think?’

It really was, all churchyards and giftshops, a picture postcard. Things might be simpler if he just got sacked. Out of his hands.

People complained about the loss of their youth all the time, always expressing how wonderful it would be to be, say, 17 again. But Tom hadn’t enjoyed being 17, or 18, or 19, or 20 or 21. They were all the same. His life was spotted erratically with good moments like solitary flared matches lighting up small sections of a tunnel, otherwise identical all the way along, ending with a now-visible in the distance solid brick wall.

But if he had truly had enjoyed being 17, and that truly was the best time of his life, all downhill from there, would he feel the regret all the more acutely? Was his way, all told, better?

At the age of 23, his only one-night stand occurred with an older woman he’d met just once before. Typically, he found the whole thing a bewildering maelstrom of conflicting emotions, only marginally worth it and subject to ill-advised over-analysis. He didn’t love her, probably, so it was all academic, but seemed no reason to put such an abrupt end to this pleasantly strange period of his life.

He woke up one morning thinking about her, for no reason. She’d been in his dream, maybe, in the background somewhere, and he’d been pleased to see her. He still wondered where her life had ended up. She hadn’t wanted any sort of friendship or further interaction with him at all. It was alien to him. If he’d slept with a girl he held no interest in, which he never had, he simply would not have cast them off in that same manner. If he hadn’t been so shy around Clare Simmons they would have been boyfriend and girlfriend for a short while, even though he already knew she wasn’t the one, and she would have dumped him, eventually, when she realised how boring he was, how badly he fit in with her friends.

It was almost masterful how the woman had been so forthright in her rejection without being particularly hurtful or cruel. She hadn’t commented on his obvious shortcomings in bed; it wasn’t necessary, and she seemed to instinctively know that. His friends protested that the brash, outspoken woman was a ‘slag’. He was impressed. He wanted her.

He could still feel her heat.

Georgia stirred beside him, murmuring a little. She’d slept with him on the second date. Lately, more than usual, he’d been looking to her for some great truth, despite being old enough to know better. But she was just a girl, daughter of Carol and Jack, as he was the son of Susan and Alan. And girls were bags of bones and meat who grew up and walked around and procrastinated and died. That was it. They held the key to nothing. They were not vast continents of mystical emotion. There was probably less going on between her pretty ears than Tom had ever imagined, and that was how things were able to bounce off her.

He wanted to shake her awake and demand to know how many hearts she had broken, this harmless-looking waif of a lady, how many foolish boys dangled useless and pathetic on the chain engraved Georgia Elizabeth Fitzpatrick. He loved her absurdly. She always smelled wonderful. It was like having a bouquet of flowers across the pillow- sweeter, even.

They had resolved to settle their parents’ mortgages once the sufficient interest had accrued; Georgia’s parents’ was fifteen thousand, Tom’s parents’ was eighteen and a half. The fifteen thousand point had now been reached, and Tom was pleased they’d be telling her parents first. He’d always found them to be very amenable people who deserved far better than their mediocre two-up two-down and meagre pension, but they seemed happy enough, and their attitude was infectious. He relaxed more than usual in their company.

Georgia’s dad Jack greeted him warmly with a handshake. He was of average height, still slightly taller than Tom, rakishly thin, bespectacled and bald on top with grey hair round the sides.

‘I must say it’s a surprise to see you two. We thought you’d forgotten us.’

‘I’m sorry Dad,’ Georgia said, hugging him. ‘Busy busy.’

‘Indeed. Well it’s lovely to see you.’ As Georgia began to walk through to the lounge and kitchen he said ‘Your mother’s got a roast on.’

He put his arm around Tom’s shoulders, eyes sparky with mischief, and said conspiratorially ‘How about a whisky Tom?’

‘Lovely,’ Tom replied, even though he had work early morning and could already feel tomorrow’s hangover.

Jack Fitzpatrick had a sizable shed which took up most of the garden; his wife had insisted on filling the remaining space with foliage. He clicked on the light and pulled a bottle from the shelf with obvious excitement, handing it to Tom for inspection.

‘I got this from Ireland,’ he said. ‘A tiny distillery in Laois. Aged 20 years. It’s superb.’

Pouring two glasses, he pulled ice from a mini freezer and dropped it in them. The two men raised, clinked, and drank in silence. As the liquid trickled down their throats, the older man let it evoke the hills and fields of his homeland, whilst Tom experienced a few brief moments of rare, clear-headed contentment.

Georgia refrained from complaining to her mother about her husband. The day was meant to be a happy occasion. Luckily, it wasn’t too difficult. Her rosy-cheeked mother chattered away blithely in her thick Monaghan accent. ‘Thomas is looking well,’ she said. ‘Healt’y.’

And she was right. Despite his melancholy, which Georgia was finding more ridiculous by the day, his complexion had improved and he’d lost weight.

Her parents had met when her Cork-born father, aged eighteen, had simply gone wandering Ireland with a friend, visiting every single county, finding the young lady working in a tavern close to the border. They were married within the year, bearing child- Georgia’s brother Robert- before they’d hit twenty-one, going on to lead simple and deeply satisfactory lives. Her mother was especially fond of saying ‘I wont for nothing.’ Theirs was the kind of romantic story that one never heard anymore, and barely seemed real. She’d asked them many times why they’d moved to England and never got a satisfactory response from either, which was typical. The pair of them had always been something of a riddle and seemed to have their own secret language, laughing together when no joke had been made.

Tom had never seen them be remotely hostile, even when drunk, though he was told her mother was quite the firebrand under certain circumstance. He wasn’t aware, then, why he knew Georgia’s parents were disappointed in her. He just did. He’d have staked his entire 3 million pound fortune on it. At one point it had been the only thing that stopped his love for her sprouting wings and taking flight into the great unknown. If even she couldn’t win her parents’ satisfaction, what hope was there for anyone? She must be just as fallible and human as him, all told. With the swings of his moods, her clumsiness veered from heartbreakingly charming to violently discordant.

She was the only girl out of four children, and the youngest. She wasn’t meant to be. After her, they’d found themselves suddenly and steadfastly unable to conceive. Disproportionate energy was then poured into raising Georgia, not that her brothers minded; good-natured lads, they too showered their little sis in love and attention.

It was clear from the age of about five or six, Tom could see from the photos, that Georgia would grow up to be a devastatingly pretty woman, and though she was undeniably a ‘looker’, with precious little of her mother’s matronly air, she hadn’t really followed through on that promise. She was at her best aged eighteen, on a beach in a bikini, smiling. Walking toward the sea, turning to the camera almost in afterthought, she looked like a dream. Probably hadn’t even heard of the word ‘cynicism’. She’d have charmed even the most vocal and unthinking of alpha males into a few moments of quiet appreciation. This was a Georgia Tom would never ever know. He’d been given Clare Simmons instead. Was it possible that he himself was draining the life from her? She still had youth, sort of, and potential, and she’d attached herself, dumbly, to an egregious emotional parasite named Thomas Atherton. She was better off without him.

The colours had faded just enough to let one know that though this was fairly recent past, it definitely didn’t depict yesterday.

Returning from the toilet, slightly tipsy, chatter from the kitchen floated up the stairs, punctuated by Carol’s shrill chuckle. She was placing the roast on the table just as Tom walked in.

There was quiet in the room as they ate.

Nights inevitably drew in, as they will, and inevitably brought lament. September came and went. One Sunday evening in October Tom lay in their bedroom staring out the window, trying to muster the energy to get in the shower. It was 8 p.m., fully dark, with a half-moon.

The street looked peaceful and he liked it. With the lights on behind their curtains and blinds, everyone, just like him, was looking for nothing more than a way to relax and stave off the Monday that was in such a rush to spoil everything.

What exactly was it that he wanted? To freeze the street in a perpetual twilight world? He wanted to control the weather. He wanted the sun to rise when he, Thomas Atherton, was in the mood to see it. He felt these nights, when the world was in its downswing, were sometimes simply not long enough. More recharging was needed, more repose.

Many times he’d woken from a deep sleep that lasted forever and a day, somehow still tired, and surprised that he remained alive.

Tom always took an unnecessarily long time in the shower. It was true he washed and rinsed very thoroughly, but there was a deeper reason: that once he was in, he couldn’t be bothered getting out. When cutting his hair, he had it cut as short as reasonably possible to maximise the length of time before having to get it cut again. He worked a job where he could get away with shaving only twice a week, and still somehow resented that small inconvenience. He hated job interviews and had diligently avoided them.

It was an attitude, of course, that had gotten him precisely nowhere. He lived his life in an endless Sunday evening, where the only chores that got done were the very most essential ones, in this case a shower. He yawned in the middle of weekday conversations, forgetting it was bad manners.   

His whole life was almost characterised by great pain and sadness, and though some of it could be traced back to this incident or that one (often, inevitably, a girl), most of it didn’t seem to come from anywhere. It was just there. If he looked back to his college days, he wondered, as he did then, why everyone appeared to be so happy, so comfortable. A simplistic side of him said that being 17 was reason enough to be happy.

He’d stubbornly refused to adapt and accept the world as it was, and it had simply moved on and left him behind. What he felt at this refusal wasn’t pride exactly, but a tiny sliver of satisfaction, somewhere behind all the resentment. He’d done it his way, and he’d won. He was richer than his boss. It had taken a seismic stroke of blind luck, but he’d done it. They’d all find out soon enough.

So what to do now, with victory his? He’d read somewhere that retiring could kill you, that the shock of suddenly doing nothing after years of toil could literally make you keel over and die.

He had a sudden urge to take out all the money in the bank and spend it on anything and everything. Georgia would come home to find the house filled with trinkets- some, by law of averages, useful, thoughtful, desirable, others downright absurd.

Then, seriously: why didn’t he buy her a new wedding ring? And why hadn’t that occurred to him before? He’d been a fool. It was the very first thing he should have done. It seemed obvious now that she was waiting for him to do it.

He had to strike a balance. It needed to be beautiful enough that it reflected how much he loved her and, more importantly, how much he relied on her, but it couldn’t be so extravagant that it offended her natural aversion to spending money for spending money’s sake, or made him look like he was feeling guilty for something.

Georgia had taken to sleeping ten hours or more, sometimes not rising until 3 p.m. Tom appeared oblivious. Nights began to follow a pattern: she would dose him with lovemaking, he would go to sleep, she would then get up and go downstairs. She was considering buying a sex toy, but for the time being her fingers were enough. Where would she hide such a thing? She didn’t completely trust Tom not to go through her drawers, as she occasionally went through his, also checking his phone. She knew there wasn’t anything on it from the way he left it lying around; she checked anyway, just because she could.

There was a lock on her trinket-box.

FIVE

Though there was little fanfare pending its release, Georgia was well aware that the boy’s novel was coming out because it said so on his website. She travelled to the city centre and bought it the very day it was delivered to the bookshop. 

The inside page read:

Daniel Clemence is an MP for Dunniford, Wiltshire, where he lives with his long-term partner. This is his first novel.

 The next one, amongst a long list of acknowledgements:

-Thank you to mum and dad, sorry it’s a bit ‘racy’!

-Dedicated to G.

 Then it began.

‘This,’ said Stephen, ‘is a gentleman’s house.’

I surveyed the brown, crumbling building and then looked back at him. ‘It doesn’t look like one.’

‘Oh, it is. It will be.’

‘It doesn’t look like much of anything.’

‘You mark my words, Walker. The best years of our lives are imminent. The best! Can you feel them?’ He drew an enormous breath through his nose, raising his shoulders with it. ‘Oh, can you feel them on the back of your neck? As sure as the tide comes in we are now on the cusp of something quite brilliant.’

‘You want to open a brothel.’

‘Of course I want to open a brothel. My goodness, Walker, of course. I can barely keep still. Think of it. It’ll be beautiful.’

‘Hmm.’

It was an abandoned cinema and the titles of decade-old films that no-one ever went to see were displayed across it, partially obscured by bits of plasterboard and posters advertising bangin’ techno nights. I felt his arm go around my shoulders. ‘Me and you, Walker. You and I.’ He was still doing that funny laboured breathing, adding ‘Smell that air!’ for effect. ‘My biography starts here.’

Stephen was wearing a cheap grey suit and sunglasses and clearly imagined that this was a moment pregnant with meaning, one which the two of us would remember for eons to come. He could probably picture us elderly-ish, awash with cash and flanked continually by nubile starlets, marveling at our humble beginnings and all that bloody life that lay in front of those two charming, naïve young men.

I admired Stephen’s talent for drama. I always had. But it was going to rain. The sky was the colour of hair that had lost pigment. There was no reason for him to be wearing sunglasses.

Stephen insisted on calling me Walker, which he, I imagine, thought gave me an air of distinguished English gentleman; silly, really, since I was Irish. Several people thought Stephen was gay, and for the very reason that they thought that, he didn’t care, or at least didn’t seem to. But there was no question that this enterprise was one of rampant machismo. Was it threatening? I wasn’t sure. Certainly women intimidated me, especially ones who were young, and ravishing, and insufferably vain. But Stephen was sure to argue that threatening was good, that it made the blood pump and the spirit fly, that life simply wasn’t life without a giant great teeming brothel in front of you.

But more than anything I would first like to tell you about Georgia.

Georgia was a woman who was hungry for love. At least, she thought so. She was hungry for something. Was it love, or life? Were they interchangeable? Sometimes she thought that maybe life itself- the whole thing, all of it- might be defined by love, that abstract term so gloriously full of meaning. She loved life, but she was hungry, she knew not for what! For life to start. For the smell of roses.

Twenty-two and beautiful, she had plans. She had plans to be a great woman. At times she wanted to imbibe the entire world, become a receptor to every little concept and idea, to walk a golden path and bring to everyone a sense that surely they should feel the goodness in their chosen race, the beauty inherent in and out of nature’s bountiful Bayeaux Tapestry. The milk of human kindness was as thick as cream, but so difficult to see when even trees seemed to drip with cynicism and self-aggrandisation and obscure pain.

Georgia was a woman now. She loved the dawn. She wondered how anyone could possibly comprehend a murder. Her humanitarian spirit dulled her sense of forgiveness. She wanted to retain an ambiguity to everything that life stood for- it was in this she felt herself alive.

What was she? She was a domino, but what a thrill she got from being a domino. She was a beautiful domino, one who saw every spot on her neighbours as a beauty spot. One day, she knew, a baby would rip itself from her body and scream bloodily. As it was held in a pair of firm, weathered hands, she would gawp at its black hole of a mouth. She may well at some indistinguishable point feel disgust. But what choice? Acceptance of every little foible was a prerequisite of existence, and existence was an everyday occurrence.
Imagine a human to be made from half of her! The mind boggled, but then friends her own age, or even younger, were already beyond that step in their own personal tapestries. Georgia could not decide if theirs were more colourful than her own or not. Perhaps their colours were stranger, but perhaps- who knows?- hers were somehow more beautiful. There was no way of telling. She didn’t really want to know, for fear she might find her life to be closer to grey, or brown, than she could be comfortable with. Self-appreciation of her simpler colours was paramount.

Sometimes she felt like the QE2, and sometimes she felt like an inflatable canoe, popped, repaired, and popped again. A domino is fine and strong; it can be flung against a wall and still stand, but the little scratches will remain evident. She was aware of the dominoes without spots and she was envious.
I was in love with Georgia. Head over heels in fact. All other humans were like prototypes. I was prepared to love her colours for as long as she would let me. I wanted to make a mother of her. I wanted to put a baby between those hips; a little daughter, who would look like her and look like me, and grow to be as shiny and as rosy as an apple.

But Georgia didn’t love me. I don’t know why. It was just one of those things. She was very apologetic about it. She was the latest in a list of eight young women whom I’d had crushes on, a virtual trophy-room inside my head. At that time, their ages ranged from twenty to twenty-eight. I had made love to precisely one. I had kissed precisely one.

And Georgia…well, Georgia was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Even nearly three months after the fact, she was the last thing I thought about before I went to sleep, the first thing I thought of when I got up, and a ghost beside me in all the moments in between.

‘So where are you going to get the women from?’ I asked Steven for little more reason than it was something to say.

‘You leave that to me,’ he answered with conspiratorial drama, as I knew he would.

As soon as we had stepped inside, it was obvious that much of it would have to be ripped up and restructured. You could hear the rats scuttling around, you could smell the splintered wood as it rotted. Stephen wore a hard hat and a grin.

‘Very soon, Walker, all this, all this is going to be…’ He tapered off into another valley of nonsense. I felt the creeping feeling as I began to lose patience with him. I wasn’t feeling myself, and he knew, and he was trying to cheer me up, as I knew, and some moments worked better than others. There was no mistaking I was stood in a dilapidated building which stank, and his cheery voice rattled about like a slightly sour, off-kilter vaudeville act.

‘I think you’ve been a fool with your money,’ I told him.

He shut up.

‘Look at this.’ I picked up and waved a dismembered wooden beam, covered in woodlice and spiders, dropping it in disgust. Dust came up in a wave from the floor. ‘Where are the windows in this place, man?’ I climbed over some rubble to search for one and, having found it, scrubbed at the muck that made it opaque.

His arms were folded and his face had the attitude of one whom, once again, had to put up with understandable but grating behaviour. ‘Do you know anything about buying property?’ he proposed.

‘No.’

‘Well if you did, you’d know that considering the size of this place, even factoring in the renovation costs, I got a bloody good deal.’ He strolled over and, arms still folded, said, ‘Don’t talk to me as if I’m stupid, Walker. Do you think I’m blind? Yes, it’s a shithole. But it won’t be a shithole for long. I don’t need anyone dragging me down. Too many people have tried to drag me down. It’s boring.’

‘You want to open a brothel.’

‘Of course.’

She didn’t love me. There was nothing I could do about it. She didn’t refuse to have anything to do with me, she just refused…it was all too painful for words. I was here with Stephen only to get myself out of the house.

Georgia felt the whole world moving round her as she read- sometimes excruciatingly slow, sometimes at sickening, rapid speeds. She stumbled upstairs thinking she was going to be sick in the toilet but there was nothing there and she gave herself a sore throat trying.

When Tom got home she was lying motionless on top of the bed with wine at her side, staring at the ceiling.

‘You OK?’ he said.

‘Mmm,’ she replied. ‘I want to have sex.’

He started to undress her, then when he’d finished, gently ran his hands all over her body, massaging. He wasn’t too bad at it, truth be told, and it had the desired effect.

Tom had had one of those days when nothing had gone particularly wrong, but his body just didn’t want to be upright, his brain complained at having to make small talk. For Georgia to give herself to him so quickly and easily was just what he needed, and smoothing his hands over her milk-white legs, he wondered if he actually enjoyed this more than the lovemaking itself. Women were fascinating. He was fixated with breasts, even, perhaps especially, modest ones like Georgia’s.

And it was now fully conclusive, unquestionable.

He wanted to make a mother of her.

Why hadn’t he changed her name?

‘I think you should go to a doctor,’ Georgia said as Tom got ready for work the following morning.

‘What?’

‘A doctor.’

‘Why?’

‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong?’

‘I feel fine.’

‘You know what I mean.’

He looked at her befuddled.

‘When are you going to be happy?’

‘You think I should get some tablets?’

‘Honestly, yes.’

‘If you think I should get some, then I will. I’ll try.’

‘It shouldn’t be for my benefit.’ She paused. ‘Miserable is easy. It becomes normal.’

‘You’re right. I’ll make an appointment.’

She sighed. He’d agreed too quickly, and, somewhat perversely, he appeared to be in a good mood.

Why hadn’t he changed her name? She was angry, but the overriding feeling was one of stark, simple confoundment. Why…on Earth…hadn’t he changed it? She looked longingly at the wine, knowing full well it was far too early. Tom didn’t notice.

Should she sue?

Her regular gigolo, Anthony, was unavailable that Thursday, but he’d sent a friend along instead. Alphonse was Filipino, aged twenty-five, and the most well-endowed man Georgia had ever been with. Adopting a noncommittal, diffident expression, she hid her mixture of shock and excitement, propping herself up on the pillows.

When they’d finished he turned to her, a lackadaisical smile on his face, and said ‘Anthony was right. You are a beautiful woman.’ He began to stroke her and she almost told him to stop, finding the touch too intimate, her sexual reverie fulfilled and dissipating and turning into the slow thin hum of guilt, but she didn’t and he lowered his face to nuzzle her breasts. ‘It’s an honour to make love to such a beautiful woman,’ he went on, slightly muffled. Then in a wild moment she pulled his face to hers and kissed him passionately. A wave of heady regret rose up immediately, serving to actually make her excitement more potent.

‘Your husband cannot please you like I can.’

She froze. Shoved him away.

‘Who told you about my husband?’

He was dumbfounded. She was obviously married, he could see men’s clothes and aftershave…

‘Get out.’

‘I…’

‘Out.’

She got up and gathered his clothes, trying not to look at his obscene penis, well on its way to another erection. 

His face had hardened, smile gone. She can see there was an insult on his tongue, but he bit it back, snatched the clothes, and staggered out with exaggerated defiance, leaving her catching her breath and covered from head to toe in tiny beads of sweat.

It was beach-house week, despite the brisk weather and the protestations of Tom’s boss, who reminded him of all the hours that he owed. It was an excuse to visit a sleepy town where time moved more slowly, outlooks were different and the flotsam and jetsam could be theoretically forgotten for a while. The very air was sepia-toned, vintage. If they chose, they could pretend it was a decade- say, the 1980s- that they would never see through adult eyes, yet somehow still seemed close enough to touch.

Everyone else there at that time of year were locals. Tom and Georgia, as the only tourists, felt like outsiders, though neither minded, giggling, arm in arm as the wind ripped at their clothes and hair. She was growing her hair out long, Tom had noticed, and it would actually hit him in his face under a strong gust, obscuring hers completely.

She’d said that the retreat would help her write, but spent much of the time with her nose in a book.

Georgia was in my dream last night. For some reason, she was staying with me but I was in the same situation- her knowing how much I liked her and saying no, but being sympathetic. And it was temporary. The house isn't one I know. It was big. She went out somewhere and I stayed in the same room and pulled all the wallpaper off the walls. It was in the back of my mind that we were meant to be decorating it anyway. The walls weren't just bare underneath, they were smeared with dark, lurid pinks and reds. It looked horrible.

When she came back I said 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'

She answered, smiling and bespectacled, 'It's okay.'

I wanted her to stay and talk to me. I'd been waiting for her to come back for hours, but I didn't know what to say to keep her there. Surely she must have some sort of reaction to the state of the room? I just kept saying 'sorry.'

Her mind was elsewhere. 'It's okay, I'll sort it out in the morning.'

And she just left to go to sleep wherever she was sleeping. In the morning the room was redecorated and completely pristine.

Tom had a theory that some people never grow up. His parents had spent all of their thirties and half of their forties doing kid stuff with him and his younger sister- going to amusement parks, watching cartoons, reading stories about puppies and bunny rabbits, and they were very keen to do it all over again with grandchildren. It was as if they didn’t want the real world encroaching.

He was walking alone along the seafront, descending the steps to move over the giant craggy rocks, one by one, until he reached the lip of the sea and looked out into it, trying to ignore the wind.

The ocean was so poised and so graceful that Tom found himself actually wanting to be it. He allowed the phrase to swim to the forefront of his mind and actualise itself: I envy the ocean. He didn’t want sentience. What good was sentience anyway? In the news that day a lovely-looking fifteen year old girl had hung herself because internet trolls had told her she should get cancer, family devastated beyond all mortal comprehension. Two eighteen year old girls on holiday in Malaga had randomly had acid thrown over them, their injuries horrific. Sentience was the very last thing Tom wanted, the very last. He was out of step with the entire world, its rotation actually made him feel ill; the ocean, by contrast, was the world, the most natural thing one could ever imagine, immensely powerful, far bigger and more important than mere humans, who seemed determined to step on each other every chance they got. Little wonder that the sea sent a tsunami every now and then.

It didn’t have to be the ocean. Maybe that was too much. To be a tree would do, in a nice park somewhere. Have lovers carve their names into his face. Feel the seasons change on a most primal level, wind tearing at his branches, pulling off his leaves. See every single sunrise and sunset, watch families grow, and one day, after over a hundred years, quietly die and go back to the ground, where his roots had always been. Instead, middle age sat grey, forlorn and apologetic on his shoulder like an overcast morning; at his back with its dusty breath on his neck was old age, a decrepit vulture-like creature stinking to high heaven of decay and regret.

Georgia was just as he left her when he got back, curled up asleep, even though it was gone noon.

November 28th

Everywhere I go

You’re never far away.

You’re like an old T-shirt

That’s ripped and torn from wear

That I can’t quite get to fit

Yet’s somehow still more comfortable

Than every other piece of shit

Lying in the wardrobe.

Bitterly.
 

You just won’t slip from view

And though I worry

About rising house prices

Unruly teenagers next door

Death, disease and misery

(The State Of Things)

You’re never far away.

I’ll slip

Uncomfortably              again

Into your cotton polyester mix

That won’t come clean

Even with a dash of bleach.

More than a dash;

The whole bottle, I’ve used

But still

It comes

Up smelling

Well, of you.
 

Out to sea

I’m always back to your shore

Of dark oil, seaweed

Broken glass

Rock after dead grey rock

Fish carcasses with bulbous staring eyes

The sharp jarring laughter of children

The footprints in the sand

The dogshit everywhere

The endless row of shops selling cheap tat.

Even when the sea is still

It will always bring me back.
 

The night’s the worst

The wind, screaming

The ungodly chill

Waves crash against the railing

Spray flies up

Hits me in the mouth

The salt

It turns my stomach

And I spew up all my guts

And after green bile is all but gone

I dry heave, breathless

In the bone-coloured light of the moon.

The stars are where I

Have (in rage)

Heaved javelins at the sky.

Holes that won’t close up.
 

Should she sue?

Afterwards, coming down from three orgasms, all of a particularly high standard, she turned to Anthony and finally mentioned Alphonse.

‘What were you doing sending that boy here?’

‘He was no good? All his other women have been very happy.’

‘He was fine. That’s not the point.’

‘He says you kicked him out.’

‘That’s putting it a bit strong.’ She paused. ‘He mentioned my husband.’

‘Ahh.’ Anthony nodded, understanding. ‘He is young, madam. He will learn.’

‘It was very good today.’

‘Isn’t it always?’

‘Yes. But today was very very good. I’m going to increase your pay.’

‘Madam, you know that I would come here for free.’

‘Yes, yes, we know.’

‘Stop paying me if you want. See what happens.’

‘You could charm the birds from the trees, Anthony.’

‘I’m only being honest.’

She nestled in the crook of his arm. There was nothing to suggest that the softness of his touch was anything more than professional skill, but the remnants of her orgasms still smouldered all across her body and for a few moments, everything was right with the world.

SIX

‘The girls should be classy,’ he told me. ‘We’ll pay them double the going rate, and we’ll be very selective.’

‘What about foreigners?’ I said.

‘What about them?’

‘How can we be sure that they’ve not been trafficked or something?’

He looked pensive. ‘I’d like girls from the local university working for us. They take stripping jobs on the side, why not this? Never mind double, we’ll pay them triple. Think of it, Walker. Beautiful, sensitive, learned girls. It’s not just about the sex. It’s about the quality of the lady’s company, and the standard of our clientele will respond accordingly.’ His eye turned to me. ‘We can’t be letting in just any drunken lout. The girls won’t stand for it, and nor should they. In fact, we should operate on the same principle that bars do- if you’re already drunk when you turn up at the door, then you’re not getting in.’

That’s going to reduce the level of clientele significantly, I thought, but said nothing.

The first time I saw her I did a double take. It must be Georgia. That black hair. The nonchalant expression. Those eyes.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Stephen.

‘Evelyn.’

‘Lovely name. And how old are you?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘Are you currently addicted to any drugs?’

‘No.’

‘And you’d be willing to undergo a test to prove it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you done any work like this before?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘OK. Well, I’ll be honest with you.’ He lowered the clipboard to his lap. ‘Neither have we. In fact, we wonder what exactly we’re doing here ourselves sometimes!’ He thumped my shoulder and let out an overcooked guffaw. She smiled mildly. ‘Anyway, I won’t mince words, Evelyn; you’re very pretty and if you want the job, it’s yours.’

His eyes widened to anticipate her response, which was ‘Yes, OK.’

‘Excellent.’ He stood up and offered his hand, which she shook meekly. ‘We want to give you exactly the same rights as any other workplace. We’re taking steps to make this a far more respectable, upmarket establishment than your usual. Do you want the tour?’

She shrugged. ‘Erm, yeah.’

He began to lead her out. ‘Now, I see you’re studying sociology…’

And as they left I could have sworn she turned, almost imperceptibly, just for a microsecond, to look back at me.

‘So which one’s your favourite?’ he asked, pouring two scotches after a full day of interviews.

‘Evelyn,’ I said without hesitation.

‘Evelyn. Evelyn, Evelyn…’ he began to look through his notes, pulling out her file, replete with photo. ‘Aha! Yes. A beauty, Walker. A beauty!’ My elbow was nudged. ‘She going to help you mend that wounded heart of yours?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Why?’

‘A whore?’

His features hardened. ‘I don’t want you using that word around here, Walker. Or any of the other ones.’

‘Other ones?’

‘You know exactly what I mean. The other ‘terms’. If you want to sleep with this girl then do so, with my blessing, on the house. But she is a young lady, and you will refer to her as such. She’s entitled to just as much respect as anyone else.’

‘Am I being disrespectful?’

‘You can argue semantics all you want. I am the proprietor of this establishment, and you will not use those words towards the ladies.’

Out of the blue, a woman Tom hadn’t seen for years was stood in front of him as he sat alone in the canteen on his dinner break, reading the paper. She was one of the illustrious few he’d loved working with, and missed dearly. There was a razor-sharp intelligence hidden behind her laconic demeanour, along with a sly, dry sense of humour that, again, was lost on most people. Across the calendar year 2011 she was his favourite person in the world.

They’d maintained sketchy contact through social media, deeply unsatisfactory for Tom, who had wanted in her- since romance was out of the question- a confidante, a muse, but she had better things to do- a relationship to maintain, a baby son to tend to, more interesting friends.

So he was startled.

‘Oh my God. What are you doing here?’

‘I’m on a first aid course.’

‘Leading onto something else?’

‘No. For my baby.’ Long pause. ‘So…how are you?’

‘I’m okay.’ His bank balance flashed across his vision for a second. ‘I’m…the same. Just, y’know, the same as ever. Don’t really want to work here anymore.’

‘So why do you?’ She was looking round as if she had to go.

‘I don’t know.’

The IVF doctor assessed the couple in front of him. They were holding hands but had a stilted, self-conscious manner, especially the man.

‘Right,’ he said, pulling documents from a folder. ‘The moment of truth. You want to know which one of you has the problem? The answer is neither. You’re both fine. In fact, your fertility rates are actually above average.’ He paused, gauging a reaction. Their bodies relaxed slightly, but there was no outpouring of relief. ‘Are either of you under any particular stress?’

‘No,’ Georgia said quickly.

‘No, not really,’ followed Tom.

‘Everything fine in your sex life?’

Both nodded. The past week or two Georgia had been all over Tom, wanting it twice a day minimum, including in the morning before he set out for work.

‘Well you can have the treatment if you want but I can’t see it making any real difference.’

‘Doctor, my parents had the same problem,’ said Georgia. ‘They tried for years.’

‘So you’re an only child?’

She blushed slightly. ‘No. I’ve got three brothers. But they wanted more.’

‘And they were older than you are now?’

She bit her bottom lip and looked at the floor. ‘Younger.’

His eyebrows arched. ‘Well, that was a different generation, I suppose.’ Pause. ‘Look, if there’s no excessive consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, or any other drugs, it’s really just a matter of time.’ Sensing a certain tension in the ensuing silence, he asked with genuine surprise ‘You’re not drug users, are you?’

‘No,’ they replied in unison, with Tom continuing ‘But I am on a script of antidepressants.’

‘And I’ve been drinking rather a lot of wine.’

The doctor smiled. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much. I think that’s your main problem. Try to find a cast-iron way to relax, something that you both enjoy. Get away for a few days, just the two of you.’ And he stood up, placing the folder underneath his arm, and they thanked him and left.

I was taken aback the first day that Stephen’s widowed father turned up to the brothel- justifiably so, in my opinion. Stephen, without breaking stride, approached swiftly, beaming, wearing a slightly better suit, and vigorously shook his father’s hand and proceeded to give him the full tour. He was proud of what he’d done.

When Georgia opened the door to Anthony that Thursday afternoon, she got a surprise. Alphonse was with him.

‘Forgive me, madam,’ said Anthony. ‘But the gentleman has something to say to you.’

‘My most sincere apologies,’ said Alphonse, handing her a rose, and appearing to be holding something else, something black, in his other hand.

‘We have a proposition,’ went on Anthony. ‘We would like to both make love to you, together. You need only pay the single rate.’

And she realised what it was that Alphonse was holding. A blindfold.

She gestured them inside.

January 4th

I sleep better in autumn

Thin streams diverge into rivers

My spirit becomes brown

Then, looking closer,

There’s all the colours of the rainforest.

Time moves slower in autumn.

Every second is a hair’s breadth

Each fallen leaf a fresh death

Every street corner a new excuse to mourn.

In autumn

Summer’s passion cools

To whispers

Like dry kisses on your neck

Like last hot gasps

Before she says

‘It’s over.’
 

And watches as the skin

Falls from your limbs.
 

In autumn

The skies are mild

The breezes are mild

And everyone’s terribly mild to each other.

These breezes aren’t enough

To brush away the cotton wool

That she has pressed into your spine

So that you won’t forget her.
 

In autumn

Coats are buttoned

To protect hearts.

SEVEN

Georgia was drinking at least one bottle of wine every night, and it bothered her that Tom didn’t mind. She was insatiable when tipsy, so lovemaking became a twice or thrice nightly occurrence. She wanted to give him as many chances to please her as possible. He deserved it; he was a good man, despite everything, and sometimes he struck lucky, and when he did, all her frustrations were reset to zero and she could love him again for a while, and even forget about Daniel Clemence, and she would lie in the dark, Tom snoring lightly, and actually start to dream about the future. She had warmed to the name Peter. It wasn’t so old-fashioned, now she came to think about it. Lots of people were called Pete. Phillip would be okay too. But then, in the morning, things were different. She became unsure again whether she could even have a child, irrespective of it actually being a good idea. The hangover told her she’d be a terrible mother, just as she was a terrible wife. Nothing was Tom’s fault, it was all hers. Little wonder he was depressed.

She’d been unable to return Daniel Clemence’s love, and that was her fault too. At the time she’d been sleeping with two other men, both Pakistani Asians, one an obese mature student in his late thirties who was married with three kids, the other a tall, bookish twenty year-old, intense in his own quiet way, who’d actually proposed marriage to her after a fortnight, but didn’t seem too put out when she’d decorously let him down. The older man had been particularly satisfying. There was no pretension- she was nothing but sex to him, his bit on the side, and in that mutual understanding she felt like an adult, a fully grown woman who made her own decisions and her climaxes were nothing short of phenomenal. Though he was always polite, she could tell he wasn’t listening when she spoke to him afterwards. She wondered in what state she was sending him home to his wife: fully charged and ready for more, or, more likely, breathless and exhausted. Of their clandestine arrangements, two were in his car, directly outside the university, the rest in her dorm room whereby her co-habitants actually started complaining about the noise.

She could, of course, afford a personal chauffeur to take her anywhere she wanted during the day, but there was nowhere to go, what with all her friends being at work. She still assumed that she would see the world when they’d agreed that Tom’s own work situation was finally sorted, and maybe she could even give birth in some exotic, faraway place where the healthcare was acceptable.

The older man, Abdul, after breaking off the tryst, went round telling everyone what they’d been up to, and what she was like in bed, placing special emphasis on how loud she’d been. Strangely enough, she found herself unmoved. She still spoke to him, same as before, and flirted, scowling instead at the whispering cliques that had emerged, remonstrating with them, on one occasion in front of a completely ignorant Daniel Clemence, who was attempting to convey ease whilst simultaneously holding his entire body tense and thinking deeply about every word he was speaking, his eyes widening when she suddenly broke off their conversation to rebuke a group of smirking people that he hadn’t even noticed were there.

‘I want a baby,’ Georgia said. ‘I want to share this money with a child. I don’t have anything else I want to do with it.’

‘I know,’ replied Tom. He’d just come in from an evening shift and was slowly getting ready for bed, whilst she was already under the duvet, waiting for him, speech slightly slurred, her expression blank, briefly looking over to gauge his reaction.

He slid beside her and put his arms around her waist in an act of apparent mutual comfort, attempting to share their similar but distinct frustrations. She thought she could feel tears forming in her eyes and actually tried to force them at one point. He laid a kiss on her lips- soft, gentle, and relatively platonic, the kind of kiss she’d have felt from a somewhat slightly nervous new lover in the first flush of fresh attraction.

‘You can quit your job if you want,’ she told him with a sigh.

‘I know.’

She wiped her eyes, even though they were dry. ‘So you will?’

‘I’d quite like a new job to be honest. Something better.’ It was something he’d been saying to no avail for years, since she met him in fact, and he knew that just as well as she did, so it seemed churlish to point it out.

‘Well you need to go back to uni then.’

‘Have you thought about that yourself?’

‘Not especially.’ She’d gained her degree; her college days were over. ‘I told you. I want a baby.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry for what?’

‘Sorry I haven’t been able to give you one.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘I’m sorry anyway.’

She laid a kiss on his head, which was resting on her bosom, and this time tears did find their way to the corners of her eyes; she blinked them away.

‘God I love you,’ he murmured into her breast.

‘What are we going to do with you, Thomas? You can do anything you want now. What is it is that you really want to do?’

He imagined himself in an office job. He imagined himself struggling with the interview questions. What was the toughest decision he’d ever had to make? He didn’t know, but it was certainly nothing whatsoever to do with work. What experiences had he had working as part of a team? Far too many to mention, none of them noteworthy. He imagined enrolling in a uni course, assuming they would have him, which would take him all the way into his forties, or as close to it as made no odds. He imagined trying to juggle that with raising an infant. He imagined all the time it would mean spent studying at home, with an ever-present Georgia, and he wasn’t sure the marriage could withstand it.

Wearily, he supposed his toughest decision was the one to ask Georgia out, and the ruminations on exactly which approach might be best.

‘There’s a new girl at work I like,’ he’d told his mother, who he was still living with at the time.

‘And? Have you spoke to her?’

‘Yes. She’s quite friendly.’

She’d been one of the many young women who had drifted through the factory, stayed for a year or so and then moved on. With her qualifications, she was stationed in the office rather than on the factory floor; Tom never really found out with full clarity what exactly she did up there.

Quite soon after she’d started, a few months maybe, they’d put a life-size picture of her, smiling, in the corridor, ostensibly to display the proper way to wear a hairnet and overall. Rumours began to circulate that she was ‘shagging’ this highly self-confident engineer or that handsome, likable supervisor. They said her tits were too small. She was stush. She was too skinny.

Tom found her to be one of the most thoroughly charming women he’d ever met in his entire life, and that he could speak to her with something approaching ease. He never, ever saw her even slightly riled. She didn’t seem to mind if he tripped over the occasional word. She didn’t seem to mind that he was clearly making excuses to come and see her. 

‘So have you asked her out yet?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Trying to pick the right moment.’

‘Are you sure she hasn’t got a boyfriend?’

‘No, I’m not sure.’

‘You want to be careful. If there’s a fella involved you might end up getting beaten up.’

‘I’m not too bothered about that.’

‘Well what are you scared of then?’

He didn’t answer. It felt too foolish to say out loud. He was scared of falling hopelessly and uselessly and pathetically in love with her. He was scared that the process of it had already begun. So he was more scared of love than he was of violence, all told. He was scared he’d misjudged her. He was scared that her sweetness was an affectation, a sideproduct of being socially astute, and that that kind of sweetness didn’t really actually exist anywhere, at all, and that his desire for it, and subsequent sadness at its scarcity, rendered him a little boy in a grown man’s body, incapable of procuring any worthwhile woman, let alone the near-angelic Georgia Fitzpatrick. What he would have given to have known what was going on inside her beautiful head, whether anyone could possibly be that serene.

The fateful night that he first slept with her they were both drunk and giggly, having come in from a good meal and plenty of wine. She just started undressing; as her body became uncovered bit by bit Tom felt years of fruitless toil and unheeded benevolence drift defeated out the window into the bristling July night. Her flat stomach and toned legs were far above and beyond any girl that had come before, the merest hint of a stumble in the final act only serving to intensify things. She was as pale as a ghost.

‘You’re by far the best looking girl Stephen has taken on,’ I said plainly and simply. ‘You’re astoundingly attractive.’

Evelyn didn’t answer, just carried on undressing, inscrutable.

‘Don’t you have anything to say?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

‘No. Not at the moment.’

She actually looked younger than twenty-two and to my surprise she came over, sat on my knee and gave me a full, intense kiss.

EIGHT

Georgia’s mum had the stroke in the middle of the night. Her dad was woken by the sounds of gurgling next to him, and when he asked her what was wrong she couldn’t answer. He fumbled around for the light but in his panic couldn’t find it so was forced to endure a terrible minute of pitch darkness, wondering what exactly the scene meeting his eyes would be, the suffocating sounds from his wife unabating.

She was going to need a wheelchair for the rest of her life, wouldn’t be able to speak with any coherence, and had lost all control of her bladder. Georgia and Tom drove Jack back from the hospital as the sun was just beginning to rise. Tom couldn’t help but think that he had to go straight to work but Georgia could theoretically get back in bed. She was visibly shaken, but appeared very much in control of herself and her emotions, with every indication that she always would be.

Jack was silent. They entered the house and sat round the kitchen table nursing cups of tea laced with whiskey.

‘Who’s going to tell the boys?’ Georgia asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I can do it if you want, Dad.’

He nodded.

‘We’ll drive you down when they’re letting her out.’

He nodded.

‘Why did you kiss me?’

‘That’s what I do. The girlfriend experience.’

‘Why did you come out with me for coffee?’

‘I thought why not, maybe he doesn’t have many friends.’

‘Come on,’ I said, pulling her down on top of me. ‘Come on, you want this.’

I kissed her roughly and began to slide my hand up one of her smooth legs. She waited a few moments before resisting, then pulled her mouth away and said ‘That’s enough,’ presumably because my hand had gotten too high. She smoothed out her skirt and tended to her hair, her lipstick smudged.

‘You’re a prostitute,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘You sleep with men for money. I’m offering you money to sleep with me.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘But you must sleep with men you don’t want to sleep with all the time.’

‘I want you to leave.’

‘What is it that you and your old man talk about?’

‘Would you please leave?’

I kicked a chair, sending it clattering into the wall, filling the air with the sound of splintering wood, giving her a wide-eyed start in the mirror where she fixed her hair, her arms framing her head, and as I slammed the door behind me and charged down the corridor I could still taste her chapstick.

Finally the day came, with no fanfare: one rainy Wednesday, when he was halfway through his shift, Tom walked into the manager’s office and told him he was going home and not coming back. It hadn’t been a bad day, in actual fact it had been fairly quiet, but he felt that the decision had already been subconsciously made when he saw Carol Fitzpatrick struggling to breathe and urinating all over herself. Over the course of a few days the notion had gradually risen to the top of his psyche like plankton and announced itself with graceful, understated clarity.

‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ the boss said with casual briskness, barely looking up. ‘You have to work your notice.’

‘No. I’m going now.’

‘You are NOT going now.’

Tom was already almost out the door. ‘End of conversation. Goodbye.’

‘I know what I want to do with my life,’ said Tom that evening as they lay in bed after the usual attempt at conception.

‘OK,’ replied Georgia, waiting. Drunk.

Tom was aware that as a child he’d had that juvenile narcissism which held that he was the most important person in the world and possibly the only truly ‘real’ one, an outlook which had come full circle as he’d grown older- though still undeniably and regrettably selfish, he was often taken by the impression that he was the only person in the world who wasn’t real. This did not manifest itself in any delusional beliefs. He knew he would die far sooner than he would like, though still many years after his body had duly and diligently fallen to pieces. He just felt sometimes that he flickered in and out of existence like a faulty hologram, that he only ever crossed anyone’s mind in the moments when he happened to be physically real there in front of them, and that when he was dead the world would likely run slightly better without such glitchy interference.

‘Nothing. I don’t want to do anything with it. I want to sit on the beach and watch the sea come in and out.’

Georgia sighed. ‘Well do that then.’

‘And you’ll be with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘I wanted more. You know that. All my life I thought there was going to be more. But we’re here, we’re thirty-four, and there probably isn’t. And I accept that.’

‘You can keep writing.’

‘I’ve nothing to write about.’

‘Keep writing anyway.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘Won’t peace and quiet and the sea air be exactly what you need?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘Do you think you can stop drinking if you get pregnant?’

‘Yes.’

‘This wine,’ he said, picking up an empty bottle from the dresser and examining it, ‘It’s not even the good stuff. It’s the cheapest you can get from the off licence.’

‘I know.’ She could feel it swirling round, warm and red, in her stomach. ‘I like it.’

‘You’re better than this.’

‘We all are.’

Silence.

‘I was going to open a whiskey distillery with your dad.’

‘You still can.’

‘I can’t. He insists on giving your mum round-the-clock care.’

‘He can’t do that. He’s too old.’

‘He insists.’

‘We’ll have to hire a helper.’

‘He won’t have it.’

‘I’ll make him.’

‘Okay,’ he said doubtfully, turning out the light.

She started snoring and he lay there, scared that his son would someday turn to him and say ‘I don’t like life. Don’t like living. Don’t like the world. Don’t like people. You wasted your time. I’d rather be the sea.’

Then he started dreaming. He dreamt about his boss.

‘I feel the same sadness you do,’ the boss said.

‘No you don’t.’

‘I do.’

‘It’s not possible.’

‘None of us want to be here.’

‘You don’t feel anything. You’re an idiot.’

‘Everybody feels the same. We just deal with it in different ways.’

A clock on the wall tick-tocked loudly and relentlessly, echoing round the room, rattling Tom’s brain.

‘Everyone has the same problems talking to people that you do.’

‘No.’

‘They forced themselves to power through it. They’re braver and stronger than you. They’re better.’

Pause.

‘What do you want a baby for, Tom?’

There was no answer.

‘Because no matter how worthless you become later in life, no matter the extent to which you underwhelm everyone you meet, there’ll always be the unchangeable fact that once a woman thought you well enough to put a baby inside her.’

Pause.

‘It’ll make you feel like you’ve done something, even though you haven’t really. It’ll be a distraction from the ticking of the clock. That’s why we have such contempt for our elderly. They spent their whole lives being nondescript, now they’re going to die nondescript; they’re people who have failed in life. They created nothing. They simply allowed the clock to tick and tick and tick.’

NINE

‘God forgive me,’ said Jack Fitzpatrick, and Tom wondered if he was going to see him cry for the very first time. ‘God forgive me for what I’ve been thinking.’

It was winter now and a fierce wind rattled the windowpanes in the kitchen. Tom wasn’t sure if he wanted to know what Jack was about to tell him.

‘I’ve been thinking that maybe Carol wasn’t supposed to survive this. I’ve been thinking maybe God made a mistake.’ Silence. Wind. Rattle. ‘The stroke wasn’t strong enough. She should be in heaven.’

Tom had never, not once, found Jack to be a piteous man, and had to force himself not to start now. Consoling words were beyond him.

Georgia breezed in. ‘Mum’s sheets are changed. She’s sleeping.’

‘I told you not to do that,’ Jack berated his daughter.

‘Now don’t be silly.’

‘She’s my wife. It’s my job.’

‘Now don’t be silly! You can’t do it all yourself! You’re too old.’

Jack sank into his chair and visibly withered. ‘Georgie…’

‘It’s all right Dad. She’s my responsibility too.’

‘You’ve got a life to lead Georgie. You’ve got things you need to be doing with it.’

‘You know,’ she said slowly, delicately, ‘We can afford the very best care…’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘You won’t even consider it?

‘I won’t have it.’

Well if Tom wants to go and sit by the sea, she thought, he’ll just have to wait.

I’m a lottery winner. I can’t believe this is how I’m spending my time, thought Tom as he fed the soiled sheets into the washing machine. I’d rather be at work.

Jack, exhausted, had fallen asleep in the middle of the day. He’d stopped opening his post and Georgia was now sat at the kitchen table going through it, making up a list of bills that needed to be paid.

‘Sometimes I wonder how much you love me,’ Tom said to the back of her head.

‘This is not the time.’

‘You try to make up for how little you love me with sex.’

‘My mother just had a stroke!’ she hissed with a deliberately lowered voice so as to not wake her dad. ‘She almost died!’ Turning back to her list she concluded ‘Take your lost little boy act somewhere else.’

‘Is that how you see me?’

‘Do you really need constant validation? I love you. I married you.’

‘What do you love? I’m so miserable.’

A sigh. She put down the bill and looked him in the eye. ‘You’re sweet. You’re a good man.’

His heart swelled. ‘I got you something.’

It was a diamond ring.

That night Georgia couldn’t sleep. She slipped out of bed without disturbing Tom and wandered into the bathroom. A particular thought had occupied her for at least an hour. It was perverse that her mother and father, who had never lived anything but frugally, who had never known financial comfort and now, for the first time, for the meagre portions of their lives that remained, never had to worry about money again, had been befallen by such seismic misfortune at this exact time. They could, and should, have ended their lives with their very best years. Flares of anger rose from the pit of Georgia’s barren stomach. She scowled at herself in the mirror and saw- no, surely- but yes- a single grey hair cascading down the side of her head, so long that it was silly she hadn’t noticed it before, glaringly sharp against the sea of black. And she turned, her face utterly twisted in disgust, and aimed a swift kick at the bath panel, and it broke.