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ELEVEN

Suzie

The mattress undulates up and down, the waves rolling in line with my spine, my arms firmly by my side.

‘I think it’s too soft.’

I don’t answer.

‘No purchase, it needs to be firmer. Let me change position and see if it makes a difference.’

‘It won’t. You’re right, it’s too soft. I’ll do my back in on this,’ I say.

I turn my face to the side to see an Asian family watching Lucy curiously as she bounces on the mattress like a cat.

Probably not what IKEA anticipated when they invited us to try out their mattresses.

But I guess they’ve never met my cousin.

‘You talk about your back like you’re an old woman,’ she tells me, lying still for a moment and turning to her side, propping her head up with her hand. I still lie there looking at the ceiling of this IKEA, that Asian family still waiting patiently to try out this mattress we’re lying on.

‘Come and do Pilates with me. There are machines, we’ll stretch you out,’ she says .

‘I wouldn’t think you needed a machine to stretch you out?’ I jest.

She grabs a cushion from behind us and hits me over the head. ‘That’s the Suzie I know and love. Come on, let’s try that big king size.’

She crawls off the bed, holding two hands out to lift me up. In the king size, a couple lie there holding hands, trying out the mattress and smiling. It’s all so wholesome.

‘You think you’re going to hold hands in bed when you’re married?

’ Lucy tells them. ‘What you need to do is practise sleeping with your backs to each other looking at your phones, ensuring there’s space for a toddler to fit in between you, working out if you can get far enough away from him when he drops an absolute bazooka of a fart. ’

The couple look at Lucy half smiling but also annoyed that she would want to disrupt their perfect IKEA date. They move on, Lucy happy that her words worked and she jumps on like a wildcat, landing in a star shape. ‘This is why I don’t have a partner.’

‘Because you sleep in that position?’ I ask.

‘I don’t want to share a space where I’m supposed to be resting.’

‘Budge up,’ I tell her. I slide in next to her and again feel the mattress under me as she jumps about.

There’s less undulation with this one. Without wanting to be too Goldilocks about it, I think this one is too firm.

I roll over multiple times as an IKEA staff member in their sunshine yellow T-shirt looks on curiously.

In my haste, when I rented my new place in London, I got a really rubbish mattress from Amazon that came vacuum packed and which I swear was stuffed with the same filling they put in stuffed animals so I’m here looking for a replacement.

All I knew was that I didn’t want to do something like this alone, and Lucy was the answer.

IKEA alone is painful for the soul; it’s always filled with couples, cheekily posing in the kitchens, sitting in fake dining rooms discussing their futures.

In that respect, Lucy was the best person to tag along.

‘So, you started your story about the sex but you didn’t finish it,’ Lucy tells me, on the hunt for morsels of juicy gossip. The other reason I’ve asked Lucy here is she is the only person I can talk to about the confusing recent sex debacle I experienced.

I stare at the ceiling. ‘So yeah, it was just…’

‘Shit?’ Lucy says.

I manage a whisper of a laugh. ‘Shit is harsh, it’s not that I didn’t want to be there. I liked being in that position,’ I tell her.

‘What position is that then?’ she asks, her eyes lighting up to be getting to the juicy stuff.

‘We were on the sofa, missionary,’ I explain. She nods to tell me she can visualise such a position. ‘But it was nice to be there with him. Does that sound soppy?’

‘Yes.’ A couple walk past our bed watching us curiously. Lucy stares them down, ‘Did you say you had ringworm, should we be lying on this, honey?’ They walk away.

‘It just lacked a bit of spark. A bit of oomph,’ I say, punching the air. ‘We kept talking through it, we took off our clothes very politely. It wasn’t like Mallorca, it was just a bit…’

‘Shit,’ she repeats. I hit her with a cuddly dinosaur toy that’s on the bed. ‘Babe, we’ve all been there. I’ve had more disappointing shags than this place has meatballs.’

I laugh. That’s a lot of meatballs. ‘But what I don’t get is that Mallorca was not shit.

It was the other end of the spectrum. It was some of the best sex I’ve ever had, full stop.

No notes. We were totally in sync,’ I tell her, my voice lowering to a low whisper to keep it appropriate for the families in the vicinity.

‘You know that sort of sex where you’re in the moment, it’s just… ’

‘Feral, primal, take me now, orgasms in your eyeballs?’ Lucy says.

‘Well, in so many words, yes…’ I say. She howls with laughter and I have no choice but to laugh back.

Lucy sits up and crosses her legs. ‘Look, we know Mallorca was good. No need to brag but isn’t that just holiday sex?

’ she explains. ‘Holiday sex is all heat and nudity, no one is wearing very much, we’re all drunk and liberated and want to play out sex fantasies in the sand.

Even the smell of suncream is an aphrodisiac.

’ She lies back again and nods. ‘Yeah, if I had to list some of my best sexual experiences, they’ve probably all been on holiday. ’

‘You took a while to go through the ol’ mental Rolodex there, cuz.’

‘Cheeky bitch.’ She sits up to look out across the showroom.

‘Look at that couple over there,’ Lucy says, looking at a pull-out bed across the way where the man has a paper tape measure trying to gauge the dimensions.

The lady sits on it gently, rubbing her hand over the linens.

‘I bet on Saturdays they come here, pick up some tealights, a new colander and think about what bed to put in the spare room. “We could put blankets in this drawer, Janet,”’ she says, mimicking the man’s voice.

I’m not sure why he’s Northern but we’ll go with it.

‘They’ll drive home and decide what to have for dinner and then go to sleep in sensible pyjamas.

Him with his snore strips and her with a Horlicks and a Mills & Boon. ’

They stand there, him with his hand on his chin, turning to a bed with a fancier wrought-iron frame.

‘But I bet they go to Lanzarote once a year, get to a villa and they let loose. They have sex on the deck, she gets her baps out and they probably do stuff that their three-bed bungalow has never seen before. “Oooh, Janet, put it up my bum, just like that, love.”’ I can’t stop laughing.

Janet and her husband look over curiously at us.

‘So how did you leave it? Are you sexting? Chatting?’

I shake my head. That was a fortnight ago.

We didn’t talk about it, he didn’t stay.

He helped Maureen fix her hot water and she offered him a drink to say thank you but he didn’t take it.

He didn’t finish his beer. He just said he had a lot of marking and left.

Since then we’ve been polite at work. We’ve sat across each other in departmental meetings, joined in group conversations in the staffroom and waved to each other in the car park.

But it feels like both of us are too disappointed to admit that we were good on holiday but under the harsh spotlight of real life, when we weren’t Carlos and Aurelie, then it was really quite average and that’s a horrible, horrible word.

‘Well maybe that’s just the end of that then. You lock in Mallorca for any time you want a wank and some inspiration and maybe just friendzone him so you can survive at work,’ she tells me.

‘Surely it’s not that simple?’ I ask her.

‘Hun, I don’t believe in spark, magic, all that gubbins. I think you can have that with a multitude of people. Personally, after the year you’ve had, I would just look at options, shag about. How is Paul the Prick anyways?’

I love how she says his name so casually but it still unsettles me.

In the same way you feel when you eat a bad prawn.

This was exactly the kind of thing we used to do together: IKEA.

We’d walk hand-in-hand around this place and sit in fake living rooms and try out all the sofas.

It sometimes still seems bizarre that that life doesn’t exist anymore, that he’s not here, that he opted out.

‘I wouldn’t know. We’re not in touch,’ I say bluntly, knowing it’s a slight lie.

The fact is I continue to keep moving, to not look back, but he’s still trying to flag me down and get my attention with emails, the occasional text.

It’s infuriating, annoying, boring. I want to move on, not with Charlie per se, but he lingers.

‘Good. You know, every night I pray that something awful happens to him. Like that girl from Game of Thrones who has her hitlist of people she wants to avenge. I list them all as I sleep.’

‘What do you pray for?’ I ask, amused.

‘Oh, minor annoyances. That every time they go on holiday their luggage gets lost, herpes, ingrown hairs on their face.’ I laugh. ‘Am I putting Charlie on that list then?’

‘Nah. Leave him be for now,’ I joke. I continue to look up at the IKEA ceiling with its silver aircon vents and messily wired ceilings.

I wonder if I’m sad because it wasn’t just sexual spark, it was conversation and laughter and feeling completely at ease with him.

Estás a salvo conmigo . That was what he first said to me when I was bobbing around in the sea trying to work him out.

You are safe with me. I felt that, whether it was in his arms or sitting on a bench with him eating bunyols.

It’s a hard feeling to ignore or throw away.

It’s sad that this might be the end of all that.