The Relate counselling office was probably the most depressing building ever.
It had a tiny door with a broken intercom, sandwiched between two bins and at the back of a badly-lit car park. I half expected to be mugged as I knocked and knocked at the door.
If your marriage was failing, this really wouldn’t help inject the spice back into it, I thought, shivering in the cold.
The door eventually opened and a youngish funkily-dressed lady appeared in the frame. “Hey, Audrey? Sorry, this door has been broken for ever. Come inside.” I tried to shake her hand but she was already disappearing down a narrow corridor of scratchy grey carpet. I pulled the door shut and followed her, past children’s drawings tacked to the wall that said things like, Daddy was home late again last night. I really miss him.
Jane – Mr Simmons had told me her name was Jane – pushed through a tiny door to the right and sat herself down.
“Er. Thanks for seeing me,” I said as she gestured to one of the two chairs facing her.
“Please. Sit. I’m happy to help.”
I dumped my bag down and rummaged through it to get out my notepad, while Jane crossed her legs. She wore a pinafore dress with yellow tights and these really cute maroon Mary Jane heels. She couldn’t have been older than forty and all her blonde hair was piled up in a giant bun. She smiled. “I’d offer you a cup of tea but the machine’s turned off for the night. I can get you a glass of water?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine, thanks.” I took out my phone and held it up to her. “Is it okay if I record this?”
“Yes, of course.” She smoothed down her dress. “So, how can I help? Jack told me you were doing a project for school?”
Jack? I realized she must mean Mr Simmons.
“Umm, yes. It’s about romance films,” I explained, hitting record on my phone and setting it on the small table between us.
She smiled and recrossed her legs. “Ahh, yes. Those old chestnuts.”
I explained my project to her, flicking my pen around my fingers with nerves. “So, yeah, it would be really good to get your take on them. How useful they are, how problematic. And, yeah, anything you could add about relationships and what you see here would be great?”
There was a silence. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t quite know what the question was.”
“Oh, yeah, right. Umm, I’ve never done this before. So, well, what do you do, I guess? We can start there.”
God I wanted her yellow tights. I wanted them so much I didn’t quite hear her begin. “Well, we offer counselling to couples and individuals who want to explore their relationships.”
I made a note in my book. “And what sort of people come in. And for what?”
She blew out some breath. “All sorts, I guess. I mean, we mainly get married couples, in their middle age I guess, but it’s not definitive. We have a lot of couples come in because one of them has had an affair. Or because they want to get divorced but they don’t want to upset their children. We get younger couples in too though. And lots of individuals who just want to break patterns in their relationship behaviours that aren’t making them happy.”
I had a sudden thought. Would Mum and Dad still be together if they’d come and seen Jane? Would it have made a difference? Would he still be at home, waiting for me to get back tonight?
“You must see the very worst of love then, right?” I asked.
She smiled again, a small one, through tight lips. “You see good stuff too. You see couples fall in love again. You also see some couples who, after counselling, learn that actually the best thing is to walk away.”
“So, what’s your take on romance films?”
Her smile grew tighter. “Lots of people find them enjoyable. I guess the word I would use for them is…” She looked to the ceiling tiles for inspiration. “Unhelpful?” she offered. Then she broke into a wider smile. “How about you give me some famous romances, and I’ll try and offer my professional opinion on them?”
I sucked on the end of my pen lid. “Er, okay,” I said. “Umm, Romeo and Juliet?”
She laughed and clapped her hands. “A good start! Oh, where do I begin?” She leaned forward in her chair. “Well, let’s see. One of the issues I have with romantic movies is they always tend to end way too early. The movie either ends when the couple gets together, or someone dies before you can see the relationship develop. So you only see this perfect idea of this couple. You don’t see the niggles that can become cracks and how those can become giant crevices over time.” She leaned back again. “I mean, in Romeo and Juliet they both die. But, if they hadn’t, my professional guess is that the warring families would really have caused issues between them over time. It may seem romantic to fight against your family for True Love at first, but, well, your family plays a huge part in how you understand your relationships. Plus you shouldn’t ideally ask your partner to reject their entire family just for your love. Where would they spend Christmas? Who would come to the christening of their first child? How would Juliet cope with Romeo making underhand digs about her parents all the time? It would definitely cause conflict.”
I decided then that I liked her. Very much.
“Dirty Dancing,” I put forward, and her face lit up. “Oh, I love that film! I had a couple in here once who did the dance at their wedding. Umm, another thing to point out about relationships is that often what attracts you to someone in the beginning is what starts to bother you over time. There’s this theory that we look for a mate that colours in a blank part of ourselves. That’s why opposites attract. But what drives that initial attraction is often what causes the issues eventually. So, let’s see, Baby and Johnny in Dirty Dancing. He’s attracted to the way she sticks up for what she believes in, because he wants to be more like that. And she’s attracted to his subversive way of living.” Jane’s foot tapped in her gorgeous shoes. “But, give them ten years, and I can bet Johnny’s maybe rolling his eyes whenever she starts ranting about the Gulf War again. And she’s getting pissed off that he can’t hold down a regular job. She feels insecure about how sexually experienced he is, when, initially, that was part of the sex appeal—”
“So they’d break up?” I interrupted. “They wouldn’t last?”
“Ahh…” Jane put her hand up, stopping me. “I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is, love changes over time. No person is ever perfect for another person. No couple goes through life without an argument or a bad patch, or even just a dull patch where they look at the other and think, Is this it? But romance films never really show those parts.” She sighed, staring past me to the tissue box as her thoughts organized themselves. Then, she looked up. “Can I ask you a question?”
I nodded, finding myself hanging on her every word.
“Do you think love is a feeling or do you think love is a choice?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s no wrong answer. But if you had to choose one?”
I thought about Harry and Milo and how I didn’t seem in control of how I felt about them. My stomach curdling, my dry mouth, my heart being plugged into an electric chair that shot me with yearning and emotion. “It’s a feeling,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”
“Well, yeah. Love…it’s something you feel. You can’t help who you fall in love with.”
She pointed her finger. “Ahh, well you say that, but ask any couple who’ve been married a few decades the same question? They all say it’s a choice. Every last one of them.”
I wrinkled my nose. “A choice? Like what to have for breakfast? Or where to go on holiday?”
Jane nodded. “Yep. They get up every single morning and make a conscious decision to stay with the person they’re with. On the good days, that choice is easier. On the bad days, they really have to fight the feeling in them to make the opposite choice. To leave. To find someone else. To walk away.”
I shook my head and I was surprised to find I wanted to cry all of a sudden. Being a therapist, she sensed it.
“Oh, I’m sorry. You’re upset,” she said.
“No, I’m fine.” But my voice squeaked. “I just…I just hadn’t thought of it like that before.”
Because it was easier to see what Dad did as something beyond his control. It was easier to tell myself he couldn’t help his feelings. I mean, I guess you can’t help your feelings. But you can choose what to do about them. He chose. He chose to let them overwhelm him. He chose to leave Mum. He chose to leave us.
“I didn’t mean to make you sad,” she said, her face somewhat panicked now. “I thought you may even find it reassuring? That every couple has these moments of wanting more sometimes – it’s normal. It’s just we don’t see these moments in romance movies.”
I nodded and gulped and insisted I was okay.
But I wasn’t sure if I actually was…
Harry thought everything Jane had said was brilliant.
“I love it,” he said, Hoover in hand. “She sounds awesome!”
“She was.” I moved over on my belly to drag out an espresso cup someone had left in a tucked away crevice. “But, don’t you think it’s a bit depressing? Like, surely there must be SOME couples who don’t get sick of each other.”
I emerged to find him standing right in front of me, his smile stamped across each cheek.
“I don’t think I could ever get sick of you.” He yanked me over and I squealed as we fell onto the popcorn-laden floor. He leaned down on top of me, grinning as he went in for a kiss.
“Get off,” I said, reluctantly pushing him away. “We don’t want LouLou to find us and have another go.”
She’d already walked in on us in a compromising position in the stockroom. After yelling, “AGH, MY EYES, MY BEAUTIFUL EYES,” she’d actually given us a Proper Talking To in her office. “Don’t make me be that boss. Now, please behave.”
I clambered to my feet. “Anyway, that’s very sweet of you, Harry,” I said. “But we’ve only been together a few months. I’m sure, in time, you’ll find all sorts of things that piss you off.”
We’d already had our first fight, coincidentally. About Rosie. Unsurprisingly. He’d turned up outside my house. Wasted. Again. And I’d not found it endearing. Again. And I’d blamed it on Rosie. Again. And he’d defended her. Again. And then I’d started crying and saying “She fancies you” and he’d called me paranoid and I’d told him I wasn’t and he just didn’t see her how I did, and he said they’d been friends for years, and I said I didn’t know getting stoned in a car with someone counted as friendship, and we’d woken up Mum shouting and Harry had stormed off into the night and not answered his phone all day… But then we’d made up at work and…well…that was the day LouLou found us.
“NONSENSE,” Harry said, pulling me in for a quick hug. “Now that we’ve sent off your incredible zombie showreel, you’re going to bugger off to Wales and become all famous. And I’m going to have to trail after you saying, ‘Audrey, it’s me, YOUR BOYFRIEND’, and you’ll have to stay with me otherwise the tabloids will say you’ve lost touch with your roots.”
I stiffened, as I always did whenever he brought up Wales.
“Harry, I’ve not even got an audition yet. And the zombie bride is not their sort of thing.”
“It will be, when they see you… HANG ON…” He jumped up on one of the folding chairs and almost fell off it again.
“Harry, get down! What is it?”
He pointed down at me. “You’ve got it, you’ve totally got it. The ending! I know how the film will end now.” He tumbled down again, picked me up and lifted me off my feet. “You, Audrey. Why are you such a good muse? Such a sexy, brilliant, wonderful, lovely…” He kissed me between each adjective. “…insightful, sexy, perfect, sexy muse.”
I started laughing. “What are you on about?”
Harry gave me one last kiss and put me down. “The zombie bride! She needs to get married. The film should end with a wedding!”
I opened my mouth. “Where has this come from?”
“Think about it, think about it.” He started racing around the screen with the Hoover. “She didn’t choose to be a zombie. And, initially, she didn’t choose to be a bride. But she got turned BEFORE the ceremony, right?”
“Riiiiight.”
“But what if she and him” – I assumed by “him” he meant his character – “find a way to be together? And they get married. Have a zombie wedding! Oh man, we can throw guts as confetti and the wedding favours can be little jars of brains and…and…”
I held up my hands. “I don’t get it. And, why would a feminist zombie end up getting married?”
He danced back to me, his face ablaze. He was in that sort of Tasmanian Devil tornado where I could never quite get through. “Yes, but what you were just saying about choice. It’s given me an idea. We should end on her CHOOSING the one thing she didn’t want at the start of the film. And and…”
The doors swung open and LouLou’s new purple Mohawk appeared between them. “Are you two still not finished? Do I need to start putting you on separate rotas?”
Harry ran up the stairs of the aisle and hugged her. “LouLouLouLouLOU, I’ve got the ending for the film!”
“The only thing I care about is you having the end of the Hoover in your hand. This place needs to be ready for the next showing.”
He batted her comment away and picked her up too. She squawked like a bird.
“Ahh, it’s dead at the moment, Lou. All the Oscar films have finished, and DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? I HAVE AN ENDING FOR MY MOVIE.”
She looked over at me and I shrugged, still holding the empty cup. “He wants to marry off the zombie bride,” I explained. “He is having a light-bulb moment.”
“Not just a light-bulb moment, an apple-on-the-head moment! A bullet-time moment, a…a—”
“Harry, you’re not the Wachowski sisters,” LouLou interrupted. “You’re just late. Can we get this place clear? I need you both in the staffroom.”
“Okay okay,” he grumbled.
We cleared up the rest of the place quickly, acting like kids who’d just been told off. Soon enough, it was sparkling clean again. The seats and floors devoid of any popcorn bits for a whole half an hour.
“You know what this is about?” I took Harry’s hand as we walked to the tiny staffroom.
“Nope. But Ma was here again yesterday.”
“Oh God, they’re not going to change our uniforms, are they? Make us wear some ridiculous neon get-up with a matching beret or something?”
Harry leaned over and kissed my neck. “You’d look hot in a beret. All your hair spilling out of it? I’d like that. You could put on a French accent and…oww…stop hitting me.”
LouLou held her head in her hands in the staffroom.
“Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay.” Harry perched on the edge of her desk. “Now, what is it?”
She didn’t smile, but stared up at us both. “It’s about the gents loo.”
Harry threw his hands up. “No way. Not again, LouLou. I’m not unblocking it again after that dude’s bum exploded. I still have nightmares. I wake up scratching underneath my nails to make sure the shit is still gone!”
“Calm down, nobody’s defecated all over the loo,” LouLou said. If her face hadn’t been so worried I would’ve laughed at LouLou saying the word “loo”. “But…” She paused. “You know how the one on the end has been playing up?”
We both nodded. It had been flushing itself non-stop for about four days now.
“Well, Ma came yesterday and, instead of fixing just that one, she wants all the toilets refurbed now, as it’s quiet season. So we’re closing for a week. Next week.” She gulped. “Sorry, guys.”
Harry jumped off the desk. “What about our shifts? My rent?”
LouLou shook her head. “I’m asking to get you transferred to our sister branch in Richmond.”
“It will cost as much to get there as I’ll earn!”
“I’m sorry, Harry. It’s out of my hands. Audrey, I’m sorry too.”
I coughed. “It’s okay. I mean, I’m here to get a break from Mum more than for the money.”
Harry kept running his hands through his hair. I reached over to squeeze his arm but he pulled away, leaving me feeling stupid and confused.
“Oh God,” he was saying under his breath. “I’m going to have to ask them for help. They’re going to be UNBEARABLE.”
“Ask who?” I wondered, but LouLou gave me a warning look.
“Fuck this!” Harry shouted. And before I knew what was happening, he’d stormed out the door, slamming it behind him.
I went to follow him but LouLou called, “Audrey? Don’t.”
“But he’s upset.”
“And I’ve worked with him long enough to know when to leave him alone. Trust me. He doesn’t want you to follow him.”
“But…” But I was his girlfriend. Surely I could help? Talk it through? But LouLou looked so sure of herself that I perched where Harry had been.
“I’ll try and sort him some shifts. I feel terrible, but you know what Ma’s like.”
“It’s not your fault. Are you sure I shouldn’t check he’s okay?”
“Honestly. If he has to ask his parents for money, it won’t be good. He just needs to calm down.”
I pulled a face. “His parents can’t be that bad.”
LouLou’s mouth dropped open. “You mean he hasn’t told you about them?”
“I know they’re super religious and they don’t get on. But, I mean, he still sees them. Why? What do you know?”
She stared at me, like I was a maths problem she couldn’t do, and I felt a creep of dread. What did she know that I didn’t? Why did LouLou know this and not me?
“It’s not my shit to tell,” she said. “But there’s drama there… It’s weird he hasn’t…” She held her hands up. “I’m not getting involved. You two can figure things out for yourselves.” She blew out a long breath. “Bloody Harry. He’s not the only one having to commute all the way to Richmond.”
I smiled at her tightly, my stomach feeling like someone had punched a hole in it and then released a can of maggots. I knew we were new. I knew we weren’t, like, the most talky couple, but still… It hurt there were bits of him, important bits, that he’d chosen to keep to himself.
Still to this day, I don’t know what went on between Harry and his parents.
Because the week the cinema closed?
Well.
That was the week we broke up.
Ahh, come on. You knew this was coming.