Free The A-Z of Us by Jim Keeble Page B

in suits and expensive streetwear. Some drive large SUVs, others gleaming new Minis. What goes on in the house is unclear – maybe he’s just a popular man, with plenty of cool, well-heeled friends. After all, this is one of the capital’s up-and-coming areas. Yet the blinds always remain down. There’s never a chance to peek inside.
    â€˜The layabout,’ Raj calls him. I remember how annoyed I was with my husband; he was so judgemental – anyone who’s a bit different ends up condemned by the scathing prosecution of Mr Raj Singh LLB. Partly because of Raj’s disapproval, I became covertly intrigued by the rakish man in the silk dressing gown. He was different. He did things his own way, following his own inscrutable plans. I admired that. Secretly I hoped he was running some sort of sex club, or upmarket brothel. It excited me to thinkthat behind that stately door, all sorts of debauchery was being performed.
    But tonight, the black front door remains resolutely closed. The street is silent, just a dull hum from traffic in central London where people are still drinking, dancing, fighting, fucking. Here the dark, empty park is still. It begins to rain, streaks of drops like veins down the window pane.
    As the minutes become half, then full hours, I try to banish the thought that nags at me like a bluebottle buzz, that I married Raj because Molly made me dump Neil Farrelly.
    Neil Farrelly. I still enjoy saying the words, lingering over the syllables. He was studying Veterinary Science at Liverpool, the career he’d dreamed of since his childhood on the family farm in the Scottish borders. We met two months into our first year at university, during rag week, and started a trans-Pennine relationship that seemed to me as exciting and dangerous as
Wuthering Heights
or
Tilly Trotter
. We met up every weekend, enduring train delays and motorway traffic jams to spend thirty-six hours in each other’s company. It was exhilarating, to begin with. I craved the weekends like a desperate office worker rather than an indolent student. In the face of derision and gloomy predictions from friends and family, we survived Christmas, then the spring term, Easter and the first few weeks of exam preparation.
    Then, one June night, Neil did not return my call and I panicked. It was as if a huge crack had appeared in a newly finished building. He called the next day, apologizing, saying he’d fallen asleep because he was exhausted fromrugby and revising. We agreed not to speak for a couple of weeks, until exams were over.
    On the day of my last exam my sister came to stay. While everyone else was celebrating, I sat with Molly in a pub and told her of my concerns and fears for my relationship with Neil. My sister listened carefully before informing me that her one big regret of student life was having continued to date Mike Peters in her first year, travelling between London and Manchester, when she could have had a much more ‘interesting and wild time’ being single at UCL.
    â€˜The whole distance thing, Gem, it’s just not worth it.’
    I came away from this conversation very worried – less about my own need to ‘explore’ student life in Sheffield, and more about Neil and what I was doing to him. Men were different, I told myself. Maybe he was just stringing me along, waiting for the right moment to dump me for someone else, just like my sister had done with poor Mike (I recalled his tearful phone messages, his six letters in one week, and his eventual appearance on our doorstep one Friday evening, when Molly hid under my bed and I was instructed to inform her now ex-boyfriend that she’d gone to Dublin for the weekend).
    It was a miserable beginning to the summer holidays for me, as I battled in my mind with my insecurities and sense of morality. What was the best thing for Neil? Should I give him his freedom, if he wanted it?
    We booked a holiday together to Turkey,