She Asked Him on a Sunday, Standing Up, With the Radio On

She had thought about how to do it for about six days.

She had considered producing the phone, which she rejected because it would turn the conversation into a trial. She had considered doing it in the evening, which she rejected because there would be a whole night afterwards. She had considered writing it down.

In the end she did it standing up, on a Sunday morning, in the kitchen, with the radio on, because she wanted it to be somewhere she could leave.

---

“There’s a phone in the shed,” she said. “In a tub, under the tarpaulin. Whose is it?”

Barry was at the sink with the tap running.

He stopped. He did not turn the tap off, which she noticed, and it ran for about another four seconds before he reached over and turned it off without looking.

He did not look surprised, which she had braced for.

He did not look guilty, which she had also braced for, and which she had spent a fortnight constructing in advance in some detail.

He looked, for a second, absolutely exhausted.

---

“It’s Michael’s,” he said.

---

Michael is their son. He is thirty-four and he lives in Leeds.

At that point he had not spoken to Nell for two years and seven months, since a Boxing Day that everybody in the family refers to as “Boxing Day” and which nobody describes further, including Nell, including here.

---

Nell put her hand on the back of a chair.

“He rings me,” Barry said. “On that. Every couple of weeks.”

She did not say anything.

“Sometimes it’s a month. It’s not — it’s not a big thing, Nell, it’s twenty minutes. He rings on a Tuesday, usually.”

“Since when?”

“Since about eight months after.”

---

She did the arithmetic standing up.

“Two years,” she said. She said it flatly, testing the shape of it. “You’ve been talking to him for two years.”

“On and off.”

“Barry.”

“About two years,” he said. “Yes.”

---

“Why is it in the shed?”

And here he did something she had not seen him do in a very long time, which was to sit down in the middle of a conversation, on one of the two chairs at the small table, without moving it out properly, so that he was sitting at an angle.

“Because he asked me not to tell you,” he said.

“He asked you—”

“And because I’m a coward,” said Barry, “and because every time I nearly did it, I thought: if I tell her, she’ll want to speak to him. And he’ll say no. And then she’ll have lost him twice.”

---

Nell has said that if he had said any one of those three things on its own, she would have walked out of the house.

It was the fact that he said all three, in that order, without stopping, that made her sit down.

Because it meant he had said them to himself before. Many times. Possibly in a shed.

---

“Say it again,” she said.

“Which bit?”

“The bit about twice.”

He rubbed his face.

“He’s not ready to speak to you,” Barry said. “That’s not — Nell, that’s not him punishing you. He’s said it to me about six times and it’s always the same words. He says if he sends you a message he’ll have to hear what you say back, and he’s not ready for that yet.”

“And you decided,” said Nell, “that I could wait.”

“Yes.”

“For two years.”

“Yes,” said Barry. “And I’d have gone on deciding it. That’s the bit you should be angriest about, and I’ve known that the whole time.”

---

The radio was still on. It was something about a garden.

Nell reached over and turned it off, and the silence in the kitchen afterwards was so complete that she could hear the fridge.

“Right,” she said. “Start at the beginning. What’s he doing. Where’s he living. Is he all right.”

Barry looked up.

“Sit down properly,” said Nell. “We’re going to be here a while.”