Pulse

wound together and sewed it up. And she’d do the same for you without turning a hair. That’s what she’s like. If there is a secret in her life, it’s probably that she helped someone and never told anybody about it. So fuck Janice, is what I say.
    My parents met when Dad had just qualified as a solicitor. He used to maintain that he’d had to chase off a number ofrivals. Mum said there wasn’t any chasing to be done because everything was perfectly obvious to her from the day they met. Yes, Dad would reply, but the other fellows didn’t see it that way. My mother would look at him fondly, and I could never work out which of them to believe. Or perhaps that’s the definition of a happy marriage: both parties are telling the truth, even when their accounts are incompatible.
    Of course, my admiration for their marriage is partly conditioned by the failure of my own. Perhaps their example made me assume it was more straightforward than it turned out. Do you think there are people who have a talent for marriage, or is it just a question of luck? Though I suppose you could say that it’s luck to have such a talent. When I mentioned to Mum that Janice and I were going through a bad patch and trying to work at our marriage, she said,
    ‘I’ve never really understood what that means. If you love your job, it doesn’t feel like work. If you love your marriage, it doesn’t feel like work. I suppose you may be working at it, underneath. Just doesn’t feel like it,’ she repeated. And then, after a pause, ‘Not that I’m saying anything against Janice.’
    ‘Let’s not talk about Janice,’ I said. I’d already talked enough about Janice to Janice herself. Whatever we brought to that marriage, we sure as hell took nothing away from it, except our legal share of money.
    You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happy marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer? I don’t know. Only that I don’t blame my parents; nor, really, do I blame Janice.
    My mother promised that she would go to their GP if Dad saw a specialist about his anosmia. My father was typically reluctant. Others had it far worse than him, he said. He could still taste his food, whereas for some anosmiacs dinner was like chewing cardboard and plastic. He’d been on the internet and read about even more extreme cases – for instance, of olfactory hallucination. Imagine if fresh milk suddenly smelt and tasted sour, chocolate made you retch, meat was just like a sponge of blood to you.
    ‘If you dislocate your finger,’ my mother replied, ‘you don’t refuse to get it looked at because someone else has broken their leg.’
    And so the bargain was made. The waiting and the bureaucracy began, and they both ended up having MRI scans in the same week. What are the chances of that, I wonder.
    I’m not sure we ever know exactly when our marriage ends. We remember certain stages, transitions, arguments; incompatibilities which grow until they can’t be resolved or lived with. I think that for much of the time when Janice was attacking me – or, as she would put it, the time when I stopped paying attention to her and just went missing – I never really thought this was, or would cause, the end of our marriage. It was only when, for no reason I could comprehend, she turned on my parents that I first began to think: oh really, now she’s crossed the line. It’s true, we’d been drinking. And yes, I had exceeded my self-imposed limit – well exceeded it.
    ‘One of your problems is, you think your parents have the perfect marriage.’
    ‘Why is that one of my problems?’
    ‘Because it makes you think your marriage is worse than it is.’
    ‘Oh, so it’s their fault, is it?’
    ‘No, they’re fine, your parents.’
    ‘But?’
    ‘I said they’re fine. I just didn’t say the sun shines out of their arses.’
    ‘You don’t think the sun shines out of anyone’s arse, do you?’
    ‘Well, it doesn’t. But I like your dad, he’s always been nice to me.’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘Meaning, mothers and only