Reuben is tall and lanky. His hair is ginger and his beard – currently at stubble length, though it varies – is a darker auburn. His skin burns easily and is freckled. His hips are slim. His face is more lined, these days, at thirty-two, though there are no grey hairs on his head. But I know we must be getting older because the people I mistake him for are older. A red-headed man in the street I’ll think for a moment is him – he will have Reuben’s light gait, his gracefulness, his grumpy way of looking at people – won’t be. And, on closer inspection, the man will be about forty, and I’ll be surprised that I might have mixed them up at all. He doesn’t like pointless chatting and his worst quality is that he’s so blunt he is often rude. His hopes are to live in a better world, I suppose.
He is my most favourite person in the entire world.
I think often, recently, of the babies we will have. They will have his beautiful, bright red locks, his pale eyelashes, his green eyes. People on the street will smile at me and my ginger family.
‘What happened?’ he murmurs into my hair. ‘The man from the bar?’
I nod, once, against his chest.
‘Awful.’ He says, rubbing his hands up and down my back.
I swallow stomach acid that’s sloshing around my mouth and turn my head to the side to look around the kitchen. As I thought it would be, it’s immaculate. I can see the soil in our many plants – it was one of my recent fads, to set up a kitchen garden – is wet. He’s watered them. He’s washed up, too. He’ll no doubt have done some work, watched a film. He is calm, organized. I piss away my evenings, spent shambolically on BuzzFeed and looking up old school friends and thinking I ought to preheat the oven but don’t want to move, and then it is eleven o’clock at night and I haven’t eaten.
‘Have a good night?’ I manage to say, though every few seconds the wave of sweating begins again and I can almost feel my pupils dilate and my hands shake.
‘Sure,’ he says, looking down at me briefly.
‘What did you do?’
‘Load of box-ticking,’ he says. ‘Form-filling for my client.’
Reuben is one of those people with too many jobs. He’s a social worker, for an Islamic charity. He is starting to assist his MP at her surgery, especially where gang culture is concerned. He’s a social work expert, occasionally appears in court and tells lawyers what social workers should have done; whether they did the right things. He doesn’t sleep much and there is forever something on his horizon. He is fastidiously organized, writing up case notes late at night and filing them immediately. He never seems to wane in his enthusiasm. He can never not be bothered. He never puts things off.
He releases me, and a peculiar sensation comes over me, as though these are my final moments in this world: a world of these First World problems. Writing up case notes and tidying the kitchen. I’m wrong, of course, I tell myself. Everything’s the same. I’ve avoided changing my world by avoiding making that call. I step back towards Reuben, riding on a wave of relief, and he immediately raises his arm, as he always does. I step underneath it, and it seamlessly falls around my shoulders.
‘Be alright,’ he says to me. It’s one of his phrases. ‘You’ll be alright,’ got shortened; a couple’s language we often speak.
I nod, tears in my eyes, which he wipes away.
His hand slides down my back. Even my coat is damp with sweat, but he doesn’t say anything. He never would.
He pours me a glass of red and I sip it in my right hand, my left hanging limply. It’s becoming stiff and feels strange. I’ll enjoy tonight, our wine together. I’ll try to dispel the shakes, the dread. And then tomorrow – tomorrow I will face it.
Reuben goes to sit down in the living room. It’s in the same room as our kitchen.
I look out of the window. Our neighbour is outside. She’s one hundred and two years old. Her seventy-year-old daughter comes to visit her, bringing her teenage dogs. Everyone is old in that flat, Reuben and I joke. Edith’s face appears beyond our plants, and I make out her features before raising my hand in a wave. An alibi, I think uselessly to myself. I’m glad she’s a night owl.
Reuben comes into the kitchen again and picks up a piece of paper from the kitchen counter, his body just brushing mine.
I’m remembering again. The feel of Sadiq’s body against my gloved hands. The way he tumbled so easily, like a domino, falling after the gentlest of flicks.
‘Edith behaving herself?’ Reuben says to me, throwing me a look.
I once told him I pretended Edith was a robot; that nobody could be that old. That she was a government experiment. He laughed so hard his face went bright red, and he said, ‘Never change, Jojo.’
‘Yes,’ I say woodenly.
And then I’m remembering before that. The feel of his hand in mine in the bar. His penis against my leg. It’s not fair.
‘Got time for number seventy-eight?’ Reuben says, gesturing to the list on our blackboard.
Written in red chalk, it’s the top one hundred movies of all time, according to some worthy poll. We are rubbish with films – a rite of passage we both somehow missed during our teens. I was too busy overachieving – studying and amateur dramatics and ballet and clarinet – and Reuben was becoming Reuben; learning. He’s the most well-read man I’ve ever known. Can give you chapter and verse on Lacan, Marx, Kant. He was adopted as a baby into a very scholarly family who ran a pub. His entire childhood was spent reading books in the rooms above the bar. Even now, when we go to visit them in Norfolk, they talk about economics, politics. The bar is littered with paperbacks they’re halfway through.
And so now we’re watching the films together. A few a week. We just watched number seventy-nine, and I see that the next one is The Exorcist. When we started, Reuben bought a blanket that we always get out now, and snuggle under it. Every now and then, while we’re watching, he will pause the film and say, ‘Are you listening?’ and we’ll laugh when I am not.
A siren goes off in the distance. I can hear it getting closer and closer. Reuben is looking at me. I can’t look back. I can’t speak until I know whether or not it’s for me. It gets louder and louder and I expect it to cut off. There’ll be two strapping policemen getting out, wearing heavy boots and carrying batons. They will ring the doorbell. Any second. Any second now.
Only, the siren continues again, into the distance, getting quieter and quieter, orbiting away from me. It’s not for me. This time.
I gulp and look at the wintry blackness of the window. Is this how it’s going to be now? Will my London – the London Reuben and I love so much – become a kind of waiting room for my … for my what? My capture? I shake my head. I can’t think of it.
‘I’m not really up for The Exorcist,’ I say with what I hope is a gentle laugh.
‘We said we’d do them in order,’ Reuben, a stickler for rules, says. He turns away from me and indicates the board.
He’s standing at the end of our long, narrow kitchen, and the way the light catches him reminds me of our wedding day. Reuben was half in shadow at the end of the aisle. I’d spent so long imagining our wedding day – the planning and organization almost killed me – that when it finally arrived, I spent the entire day pretending it was somebody else’s, and that I was simply a guest, instead. I could enjoy it better that way.
I remember the kiss he gave me. Our first as husband and wife. Perhaps he was just embarrassed to be kissing me in front of a handful of people. Or preoccupied with the life commitment he had just made. Or maybe he thought I pulled away, first. But I remember that kiss. It was dry, formal. Not like his usual kisses. I’ve never asked him why. But I’ve always remembered it.
‘Okay,’ Reuben says, leaving the room with his wine. I hear him go into the bedroom.
I stare at the kitchen counter after he’s gone. Something is folded neatly in half in the letter rack. I pick it up, trying to distract myself from the seismic swirl of thoughts just off stage-left in my brain. It’s an application form. I frown, looking at it. It’s my handwriting. I pull it out, unfolding it. It’s my application for a creative writing course. How could I have forgotten? I hold it up to the light. It’s like a relic from my life Before. It had seemed like the answer, last Tuesday, when I printed it out and filled it in and then forgot to post it. Reuben’s attached a stamp to it, neatly, with a paperclip. It’s exactly the sort of thing he does: hands-off, but helpful.