She Wrote Nine Things on the Back of a Gas Bill

The list, in the order it ended up:

One. Someone who has dealt with their divorce. Not is dealing with. Dealt.

Two. Someone who is on good terms with their children, or can explain honestly why they are not.

Three. Someone who has their own friends.

Four. Someone who does not want to live with anybody.

Five. Someone who can cook one thing properly.

Six. Someone who reads.

Seven. Someone who does not talk about their ex-wife’s spending.

Eight. Someone who will drive at night.

Nine. Someone who says what they mean the first time.

---

She wrote it in the March, at the kitchen table, on the back of a gas bill, in about eleven minutes.

She had not planned to write it. She had been paying the bill. She had a pen in her hand and a sort of low hum in her chest that had been there since about January, and she turned the envelope over and wrote THINGS at the top and then crossed it out and wrote nothing instead, and then wrote the first one.

Number one came out fully formed and she looked at it for a while.

---

Fran was fifty-four. She had been married to Gordon for nineteen years and separated for two and divorced for eleven months.

The divorce had been, by the standards of divorces, extremely civilised, which she has come to think was the problem with it. Nobody shouted. There was a mediator called Yvonne. Gordon was reasonable throughout in a way that made Fran feel, for about eighteen months, as though she had made the whole thing up.

She got the house. He got more of the pension than she should have agreed to and she knew it at the time and agreed to it anyway because she wanted it finished, which is a thing she has since told two friends to watch for in themselves.

---

Her sister Bridie read the list in March, about four days after it was written, standing up, in the kitchen, with her coat still on.

She read it twice.

“Fran,” she said. “This is far too specific. You’ll die alone.”

“Which one would you take off?”

Bridie looked at it for a long time, which Fran had not expected. She had expected an instant answer, because Bridie has an instant answer for everything.

“Four,” said Bridie eventually.

“Four’s the whole point of the list,” said Fran.

---

That exchange is, in miniature, the entire story, and neither of them knew it at the time.

Bridie’s objection to four was not stupid. She said, that afternoon and several times since: “You’re saying that before you’ve met anybody. You’re ruling out the good version of a thing you’ve only ever had the bad version of.”

Fran’s answer, which she has refined over four years and which was much less articulate in March, was: “I’m not ruling out living with somebody. I’m ruling out wanting to.”

---

The other items, briefly, because people always ask.

One she describes as load-bearing, and she is right, and we will come back to it.

Two came from a man she had met twice through friends whose entire conversation was a grievance against his daughter, delivered in a reasonable voice, in which he was blameless.

Three came from Gordon, who had her friends. Not took, exactly. It had simply turned out, at the end, that every couple they saw had been somebody he knew first, and that when they divided things up, they divided along a line that had been there the whole time and that Fran had not noticed for nineteen years.

Five is the only frivolous one and she knows it and will not remove it.

Seven is not about money. It is about the specific voice men use when they say the word “spending”.

Eight is about the fact that she does not, herself, like driving at night any more, and that for nineteen years this was not a problem, and that in the second year of being on her own she turned down three invitations in a month for that reason alone and then sat in the house feeling about ninety.

---

Nine she wrote last, and she wrote it quickly, and she did not fully understand it until June of the following year, when somebody read the list at a table and told her, in advance, which part of it he intended to have an argument with her about in ten years’ time.

---

She put the list in the drawer in the kitchen, under the takeaway menus, and did not look at it for fourteen months.

That is the next part, and it is the part she thinks people ought to hear more often, because it is the part that gets left out of every version of this story anybody tells.

Fourteen months. Four first dates.

And every single one of them failed on item one.