The Gas Bill Is Still in the Drawer, Under the Takeaway Menus

She said no, and she said why, and the why took the whole hour.

It was not that she did not want him there. She had spent nine days iced into a house and had wanted him there very much, and said so, which she considers the important part of the whole conversation.

It was that she knew what she would do.

---

Her children think it is strange. Her son mildly; her daughter considerably.

Kate in particular has asked, more than once, in a tone Fran recognises perfectly well as her own, what exactly the point is of a relationship where you keep two sets of everything, two council taxes, two boilers, two of all the dull things.

Fran has given the same answer every time, and it is not romantic.

---

“I spent nineteen years being the person who made everything work,” she says. “And I can do it. That’s the thing nobody hears properly. I’m very good at it. I’m better at it than anybody I know.”

“And if we live together I will do it again. Not because he’d ask. He wouldn’t ask; he’s not Gordon, and he does more than half of everything when he’s here. I’ll do it because I can’t help it. I’ll start doing the dinners and then I’ll start doing the diary and then I’ll be doing his prescriptions, and none of it will be discussed, and in about a year I’ll be exhausted.”

“And I will not say so.”

---

“So it’s about the housework,” Kate said, the first time.

“No,” said Fran. “It’s about the not saying so.”

---

Kate is, slowly, coming round. She is thirty-five now and has a partner and a flat and a set of opinions about her own arrangements that Fran has been extremely careful not to comment on.

Last summer she rang about something else entirely and said, halfway through, “I’ve been thinking about your list.”

“Oh yes?”

“I think I’d have four on it as well,” said Kate, “and I’d be lying about why.”

Fran did not say anything for a second.

“That’s the whole trick of it,” she said. “Working out which bit you’re lying about.”

---

Bridie has never conceded on item four and never will.

She says, roughly once a year, usually in a car park: “You’d both be better off in one house and you know it.”

And Fran says: “You might be right.”

And Bridie says: “I am right.”

And that is the entire ritual, and both of them enjoy it, and neither of them has ever moved an inch.

---

Roy is sixty-five now. There is a version of this in which one of them gets ill in a way that is not six weeks and a hip, and both of them know that, and they have talked about it exactly twice, and there is a folder.

That is item nine, still doing its work.

---

The gas bill is in the drawer in the kitchen, under the takeaway menus and a roll of freezer bags.

Roy has seen it a handful of times over four years, when it has surfaced during a tidy or when somebody has been looking for a pen.

Every time, he picks it up and reads it again — right through, all nine, taking his time, the way you reread something you already know — and then hands it back.

And in four years he has never once asked her to change anything on it.

Not one item. Not even four.

He has told her, twice, that he is going to want to. Which is not the same thing, and which is exactly what she asked for, in March, on the back of an envelope, fourteen months before she met him.