Suitcases

I was the one who always thought of the future. You could depend on that. Just like clockwork. It was me who was worrying about what was going to happen in twelve months’ time.

I liked to call myself The Calendar King – it was a little joke I shared with myself. My pat on my own back. I’d look in the mirror of a morning and say, ’Good planning. Good planning solves it all.’

My instinct was to stand away from what was going on and take a long-term view. Telescope on the horizon. My right hand held horizontal against my forehead to see into the distance against any emotional glare.

As for her? She only lived for today.

’Why don’t you plan?’ I said. I held my spoon out at the breakfast table and pointed it at her.

’I used to,’ she said, ’and I was good at it, but I haven’t done it for ages.’

’How would you cope without me?’ I said. ’If I wasn’t here, what would you do? Would you change – let’s say I took my suitcase tomorrow, would you change?’

Let me tell you something. The suitcases were the key. When we first got married, and moved into the flat in Tenby Street, I made sure each of us had a ready-packed suitcase in the hall. A red one and a green one.

The red was hers, the green was mine. She had a Brownies sticker on hers – she’d used that suitcase all her life – but mine was plain. And they would sit there, in the hall, each day, all day long. Twenty-four seven.

All packed with enough clothes and toiletries to last you a few days, and ready to go.

I wanted us to feel we could just walk out the door at any time, if any one of us got fed up with how things were. And I thought that the sight of each other’s suitcase would be like a warning sign to the other, an encouragement to behave, to think twice before opening an arrogant word towards the other person.

To think twice before making claims, dictating terms, and laying down the law.

So they sat there, for twelve months, like a set of traffic lights – you’d pass by them on the way to breakfast and think, well, red for stop, green for go, is this relationship going anywhere or what? Is it stopping or starting?

That’s how it was. She hated it.

’How normal is this?’ she said. ’Other couples don’t do things like this.’

’We’re not other couples,’ I said. ’We have to find our own way. It’s the art of living.’

She told her sister about it and her sister hated it too. They’d talk about it on the phone while I was on the internet. Use it as a chance to feel close to each other and gang up against me.

Anyway. When my wife was at work, her sister would usually come round, in her shorts, in her tennis shoes, on August afternoons when the bright sun was baking the pavement hot, and after we’d make love, as we lay on the bed, she’d say I was betraying my wife by not putting any trust in her. That it was cruel to use these suitcases the way I did.

I said, ’I’m giving the relationship a chance to work.’

She said ’You’re being selfish.’

I said, ’Well what are you doing naked in bed with me? In bed with your sister’s husband?’

She said she had needs, the same as everyone else, and told me to shut up.

[end of extract]

Copyright © Paul Badger 2008