“Hmm,” she says. “When did it come out?”
I tell her seven years ago, and as I’m saying it realize it was actually eight. Eight years. It’s hard to believe that. It certainly came as a shock to me when Emmy gently suggested that it was time for me to stop using the author’s photo from the back cover as my profile picture on Facebook. “It’s a nice photograph,” she told me reassuringly. “It just doesn’t really look like you.” Anymore being the unspoken word hanging in the air.
The photographer asks me what the book was about—that question authors always hate, with was providing the final twist of the scalpel. At one time I probably would have told him that if I could boil down what it’s about to a single sentence or two I would not have needed to write the thing. In another mood I might have joked that it was about two hundred and fifty pages, or £7.99. I am no longer quite that much of a twat, I hope. I tell him it is about a guy who marries a lobster. He laughs. I find myself warming to him.
It was pretty well received at the time, my novel. Generous cover blurb from Louis de Bernières. Book of the week in the Guardian. Reviewed with only mild condescension in the London Review of Books and with approval in the Times Literary Supplement. Film rights optioned. On the back flap, in my leather jacket, leaning against a brick wall in black and white, I smoke with the air of a man with a bright future in front of him.
It was a fortnight after the book came out that I met Emmy.
Seeing her for the first time across the room will always remain one of the defining moments of my life.
It was a Thursday night, the opening of a mutual friend’s bar on Kingsland Road, the height of the summer, an evening so hot that most people were standing outside on the pavement. There’d been free drinks at one point, but by the time I arrived there were just a load of buckets of melted ice with empty wine bottles in them. The crush at the bar was three deep. It had been a long day. I had things to do in the morning. I was just looking around for the mate whose bar it was to say hello and goodbye and apologize for not staying longer when I spotted her. She was standing at one of the tables by the window. She was wearing a low-cut jumpsuit. Back then, before it went an Instagram-friendly shade of cerise, Emmy’s hair—a little longer than it is now—was more or less its natural shade of blond. She was eating a chicken wing with her fingers. She was literally the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Emmy looked up. Our eyes met. She smiled at me, faintly quizzically, slightly frowning. I smiled back. I could not see a drink on the table. I made my way over and asked if she wanted one. The rest is history. That night she came back to my place. Three weeks later I asked her to move in with me. I asked her to marry me within the year.
It was only much later that I realized how little Emmy can see without her glasses when she doesn’t have her contact lenses in. Not for ages did she confess that they had been bothering her earlier—something to do with the high pollen count, perhaps—and she had taken them out, and her smile across the room that night had been at a vague pink shape she could just about sense was staring in her direction and assumed was a fashion PR. It was only later I found out she already had a boyfriend, called Giles, who was on a work secondment to Zurich, and was as surprised to learn they were no longer in an exclusive relationship as I was to learn of his existence. There was an awkward moment a fortnight into things when he called and I answered and told him to stop pestering Emmy, and he told me they’d been going out for three years.
She has always had a fairly complicated relationship with the truth, my wife.
I guess that business with Giles might have bothered some people. I guess some couples, starting out, might have felt it cast a bit of a pall over things. I genuinely can’t remember it troubling either of us very much at all. As I recall, by that weekend we were already telling it as a funny story, and very quickly after that it became the centerpiece of our repertoire of dinner party anecdotes, both of us with our agreed part to play in the telling of it, our allotted lines.
“The fact of the matter is,” Emmy would always say, “I knew from the moment I met Dan he was the man I was going to marry, so the fact I was seeing someone else seemed irrelevant. I had already broken up with Giles in my head; he was history. I just hadn’t got around to telling him that yet.” She would shrug sheepishly as she said this, offer a rueful smile, glance across at me.
I used to think it was all quite romantic, to be honest.
The truth is, we were probably both pretty insufferable in those days. I imagine most young lovers are.
I can vividly recall announcing to my mother over the phone (I was wandering around the flat in a towel at the time, wet-haired, holding a cigarette, looking for a lighter) that I had met my soulmate.
Emmy was like no one else I had ever met. She is still unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Not just the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on but the funniest, the cleverest, the sharpest, the most ambitious. One of those people you know you need to be on your best form to keep up with. One of those people you want to impress. One of those people who get every reference before you have even finished making it, who have that magic that makes everyone else in a room recede into the distance. Who have you saying things you’ve never told anyone within two hours of meeting them. Who change the way you look at life. Half the weekend we used to spend in bed, the other half in the pub. We would eat out at least three nights a week, at pop-up restaurants serving Middle Eastern small plates or at modern barbecue joints that don’t take reservations. We went out dancing on Wednesday nights and did karaoke on Sunday afternoons. We went on city breaks—to Amsterdam, to Venice, to Bruges. We dragged our hangovers out for 5K runs, laughing and shoving each other along when one of us started to flag. When we weren’t out in the evening, we used to spend ages together in the bath, with our books and a bottle of red wine, occasionally topping up our glasses or the hot water.
“Things can only go downhill from here,” we used to joke.
It all seems a very long time ago now.
Emmy
You know that thing that middle-class women do the day before their cleaner arrives? Running around the house, picking up the most embarrassing bits off the floor, giving the bathroom a wipe, putting stuff in piles, so the place isn’t quite such a mortifying mess?
I don’t do that. Never have. I mean, obviously, we have a cleaner who comes twice a week, but our house is usually tidy. It was tidy before we had children, and it is tidy now. Toys go away before bedtime. Storybooks are back on the shelf. Piles on the stairs are not allowed. No mugs on the countertop. Socks left on the floor get thrown away.
Which means the hours before a camera crew arrives for a shoot are always spent untidying. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not talking empty pizza boxes and unwashed pants—just a light dusting of knitted dinosaurs, Lego bricks and talking unicorns, a two-day-old newspaper lying here, a collapsed cushion fort there, and some single shoes in awkward places. It takes effort to calibrate just the right level of chaos, but dirty isn’t aspirational and perfect isn’t relatable. And Mamabare is nothing if not relatable.
I can only tackle the mess making, of course, after I’ve seen to my social media feeds. It’s not a routine Dan’s especially keen on, but Bear is his responsibility for the first hour of each day because I need both hands and my whole brain to catch up on what has happened overnight.