Lou smiled and started setting up camp. ‘You alone?’
‘For now, yes. JoJo is up the coast with her mother, so I’m off the hook until the weekend.’
The girls began peeling off their T-shirts and shorts to reveal their bright swimmers underneath.
‘Can we go swimming with you, Aunty Gretch?’ Stella was pulling on Gretchen’s hand and it touched Lou to see the excitement in her older daughter’s face.
‘Swimming? In this cossie? This is a posing cossie, Stell. This is an Instagram-only cossie . . .’ But Gretchen was allowing herself to be pulled up and away by the will of Lou’s daughters.
Twenty minutes later, the salty-sandy girls were digging a hole a few feet away, in sightline but out of earshot on the crowded beach, and Gretchen, her Instagram cossie dark and damp, was lying beside Lou, panting lightly.
‘Those girls are dynamos,’ she was saying. ‘So much bloody vim.’
Lou laughed. ‘Who says vim anymore?’
‘I’m bringing it back,’ Gretchen said. ‘I’m hoping JoJo might catch some. Anyway, how the hell are you?’
Lou inhaled and raised herself onto her elbows to check where the girls were. They were piling sand on their legs, entirely involved. Stella’s hat was off.
‘I’m giving my marriage a year,’ she said.
*
That morning, Lou and Josh had sat at the kitchen table with an iPad between them. On it was a contract she had written.
SEX CONTRACT
I, Louise Emily Winton, pledge to engage in energetic sexual activity with my husband, Joshua Mika Poole, every day for 30 days.
If, for any reason, unforeseen circumstances prevent the fulfilment of the terms of this agreement, the agreed amount of quality sexual intimacy will roll over to be claimed on a date agreeable to both parties.
‘So we sign it,’ Lou said when she’d finished reading it aloud. ‘And we start.’
Josh had both hands around his coffee cup. It was an oversized white mug bearing the words: I look like I’m listening, but in my head I’m playing guitar. He rarely drank out of anything else. Stella had bought it for him, with Lou’s help, for Father’s Day a couple of years ago, and Lou had come to hate it because, well, it was mostly true.
‘You want me to sign it?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow at her.
‘Don’t do that,’ Lou said, more sharply than she had intended. ‘The eyebrow. Don’t do that.’
The eyebrow went down. ‘You want me to sign an iPad agreement about sex?’
‘Yes, Josh, I do.’
‘Where did you even get that?’
‘I copied it from the internet.’
‘A sex contract? With the word “energetic” in it?’
‘Well, I might have edited just a little.’
He raised the eyebrow again, took a slug of coffee.
The annoying bastard is ageing well, Lou thought, looking at her husband looking at her. His curly dark hair was retreating a little, but in a symmetrical way that made him look intelligent and kind of rakish, somehow. It was Rita’s hair too, now, which Lou tugged a brush through every morning to little effect.
The lines around his eyes made him look like he was laughing, and she’d always loved that his eyes were pale blue and, as her mum would say, ‘twinkle like the devil’s Christmas lights’. One of those northern English things she couldn’t shake, clearly. They were Stella’s eyes now.
Her husband was still attractive. Objectively, there was no doubt about that. Still tall and lean with only the slightest push of a beer belly against the old shirts he wore in the workshop. The other week she’d turned up to find him sanding a table wearing the now-grey and tattered Ramones T-shirt he’d been wearing the night they’d met. ‘For God’s sake,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t you throw anything away?’
And he’d looked down at it, holes and all, shrugged and said, ‘It’s my favourite.’
But today his crinkle-twinkle eye thing was making her irritated rather than excited, which rather went against the spirit of this agreement.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking around to make sure the kids weren’t close. ‘I want you to sign the iPad sex agreement.’ Lou pointed at the line at the bottom of the screen. ‘You can do it with your finger.’
Josh looked at the screen, then up at her. Why was he looking at her like she was insane?
‘It’s going to be fun,’ she said, tapping the screen.
‘Contractually obligated fun?’
Lou let the iPad drop to the table and sighed. A rush of fury was surging into her chest.
I’m trying to fix things. I’m trying.
She stood up from the table and went over to the sink, where an eggy pan was sitting, soaking. Lou fished around in the tepid water for a scourer and started going at it.
After a few beats, Josh spoke, as she knew he would. He hated it when she went silent, always had.
‘What’s all this about, Lou?’
The girls were upstairs, supposedly getting their swimming things together for the beach, but Lou, unconsciously tuned in to wherever they were, could hear the telltale squeak and thunk of them jumping on Stella’s bed.
‘Stella!’ she yelled, without moving from the sink. ‘Stop jumping! You should know better!’
The faint noise stopped, then started again, more softly.
‘And you, Rita!’
She pulled the pan out of the water, ran it under the cold tap, put it upside down on the draining board. Drying her hands on the tea towel, she turned around.
‘It’s about us getting –’
‘Are you going to say “our spark back”?’ Josh cut in, still sitting, still cradling his coffee, his face set in something like a sneer. For a second, she wanted to slap him.
‘I was going to say “back in step”.’ Lou leaned against the sink. ‘I know you’ll roll your eyes, but we need to reconnect and I . . .’
‘I know what happens when you’re feeling disconnected.’ Josh stood up, pushing his chair back with a scrape.
Lou flinched at the force of that comment, but she could sense what Josh was thinking right now; she knew him so well. He was silently debating whether to throw petrol on this fire or let it die down.
She hoped he couldn’t read her mind quite so effectively. Because with ‘disconnected’ hanging in the air, Lou had a flash of a pair of firm hands on her hips, moving them slowly forwards and back again. Two nights ago.
She sighed, shook herself a little. ‘Josh, I’m trying to stop us from fighting, not make things worse,’ she said. ‘So, please, humour me. Let’s start this year differently. Let’s try to shake things up.’
Josh brought his mug over to the sink. He stood right in front of her, close enough to kiss. ‘I didn’t know we needed to shake things up,’ he said softly. ‘I thought things were better.’
‘So, then . . .’ Lou decided to disarm. She looped her fingers into the waistband of his jeans and pulled him in to her. ‘Why don’t you want to have sex with your wife every damn day?’
Josh bowed his head into her neck. ‘I do,’ he whispered, ‘you know I always do. I just don’t like contracts.’