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HE WON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HER.
Underneath the image, she types in a row of love-heart emojis interspersed with strong-arm emojis. She presses send.
Tuesday, 9 July
Alix looks at the image on the screen of her phone that Josie sent her yesterday. A black square with the words ‘A weak man can’t love a strong woman. He won’t know what to do with her’ in white capitals. Underneath are some emojis and for a few seconds Alix squints at it trying to work out what it means and why Josie has sent it to her. And then she realises that Josie is using memes and quotes to bolster her resolve to change her life, so she types in a thumbs-up emoji and presses send. Then she carries on getting ready to leave the house with the kids.
‘Nathan, have you seen my bracelet? The one you bought me for my birthday?’
She hears his disembodied voice coming from somewhere else in the house. ‘No. Wasn’t it by the front door?’
‘Yes. That’s what I thought.’ She opens the drawers and goes through them again. She calls out to Eliza, who also has no idea where it is. Alix sighs and closes the drawers. She’ll look again later. Now she needs to get the kids to school.
Josie is wearing one of the dresses she bought at the boutique yesterday when she arrives at Alix’s door at nine thirty. She looks almost like a completely different person and there’s a second of dissonance, before Alix smiles and says, ‘Josie! Hi! I didn’t think we’d …’
‘Didn’t we?’
‘Not that I …’ Alix scrolls through her mental diary and fails to find the moment that they agreed to another interview today. ‘Not that I remember. But that’s OK. I’m not busy. Come in. You look great, by the way.’
‘Thank you! Walter nearly had a coronary.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Oh, Walter doesn’t say much. Man of few words. Asked how much it cost, obviously. First thing they all ask, isn’t it?’
Alix laughs. Nathan never asks her how much things cost. ‘So true!’ she says.
‘But yes. I think he liked it. But the important thing is that I like it, isn’t it?’
There’s a brittle note of uncertainty in her tone and Alix recognises the need to bolster her.
‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘That is absolutely right. Come through.’
‘No Nathan?’ Josie asks, peering into the living room as they pass.
‘No. Like I say, he rarely works from home.’
‘And all OK? You know, with what you were telling me about yesterday?’
Alix blanches. She’s beginning to wish she’d never said anything to Josie. ‘I guess,’ she says. ‘I mean, we haven’t really talked about it.’
‘It’s really shitty, you know, that sort of thing. You deserve better. That’s what we both need to start to understand. We’re forty-five, Alix. We can do better. We have to do better.’
Josie’s words sting slightly. Alix knows that she deserves better than being abandoned by her husband twice a week while he gallivants around spending money on tequila shots and hotel rooms, that she deserves her messages to be replied to, her calls answered, a proper explanation for the absence of her husband for twelve straight hours. She knows it, but somehow the pendulum of pros versus cons keeps swinging back to the pros.
‘Do you love him?’
Alix spins round to face Josie.
‘Nathan. Do you love him?’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well, yes. Yes. Of course I do.’
‘Because, you know, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about love. About what it is, what it’s for. And I feel like maybe I have no idea. That I’ve got to forty-five years of age and I really don’t know. And people talk about it all the time like it’s, you know, something real, something you can touch – like when we talk about love, we’re all talking about the same thing. But we’re not, are we? It isn’t a real thing. It isn’t anything. And sometimes I make myself imagine what it would be like if Walter died, to see if maybe that will make me know if I love him or not, and I really do think, if he died, everything would be better. And surely, if that’s the way I feel, then I don’t really love him? Do I?’
Alix says nothing.
‘And I have to wonder, then, what it was all for, at the end of the day. All the smallness of everything. All the quietness . And you don’t know yet, Alix. You’re still in the middle of it all – your kids, they still need you. But after they’ve gone, then what? Will you still want this? Everything you’ve built? Will you still want Nathan?’
