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FOUR FOUR YEARS EARLIER

I kiss my wife on the lips. Her breath smells of last night’s toothpaste mixed with sleep.

But I kiss her every morning. It’s what I do.

It’s part of the thing, the illusion, the rhythms that have formed the percussion of the last four years of our lives.

If I did not kiss her on her lips in the morning, then she would wonder…

and I don’t want her to wonder. If she starts to wonder at the little things, then she will eventually start to wonder at the bigger things.

So, I manage the little things forensically to make sure that everything is the same. Until it isn’t.

“Morning,” she says, curling into me, an arm reaching across my chest, her face nestling into the space between my shoulder and chin.

“Morning, my love.” I kiss her hair. It smells of her laundry, and also slightly of her scalpy essence, which I don’t love, but it’s part of the deal.

I snuggle into her, and we lie like that for a moment, as we do every morning.

And then I peel myself away from her and stretch and yawn and climb off the bed, find my gown where it is slung across the armchair in the window, and slide my arms into it.

The sky through the window is a rich blue, more like July than February.

It sends a shiver of hopefulness through me.

My time here in this stultifying, unsatisfying place is drawing to an end.

I can feel it sliding away, like a dropped silk scarf running between my fingers.

I turn and smile at my wife. “I love you,” I say.

“I love you too,” she replies.

Then I say, “Oh, by the way, I’m speaking to George today.”

George is my fictional financial advisor.

“He wants us to put a little more into our pensions. Just a thousand or two. He’s found a little wriggle room.”

Fictional pensions too. For the fictional future that we will be spending together.

“Oh,” says my wife. “That’s good. But I don’t really have the cash to hand right now. Not after paying for your knee surgery.”

I feel my jaw clench.

“I really think we should do it, though. Darling.” The word almost hurts to utter.

“Think about our future. You don’t want to be doing this forever.

You work so hard. We both work so hard. We need something soft to fall back onto, and the sooner the better.

Every penny we put into that pension now, the closer we get to what we both want. ”

I hear her sigh, and I know it’s a sigh of acquiescence and I feel my jaw unlock.

The picture of the future I have painted for us is so exquisite that I almost wish it could be real.

We will sell this house, this stupid house she bought when she left her stupid husband (nothing makes me happier than talking about how stupid her ex-husband is), and we will buy a house in the Algarve and she will paint and I will potter, and her children will come to stay and all of this, this dreadful day-after-day toil and drudgery, it will be over and we will be happy, forever.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she says.

“Thank you, darling,” I say, and this time the word doesn’t hurt because this time I mean it. She is my darling. My darling wife who would do anything for me. Absolutely anything.