Us

by David Nicholls

Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow – to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions

There was always the ‘panic button’ by the side of our bed, but I could never imagine pressing it in case the alarm disturbed someone – say, a burglar for instance.

‘I didn’t say anything about burglars. I said I think our marriage has run its course. Douglas, I think I want to leave you.’ I sat for a moment on the edge of our bed. ‘Well at least it’s not burglars,’

it’s a small family, somewhat meagre, and I think we each of us feel sometimes that it is a little too small, and each wish there was someone else there to absorb some of the blows.

there’s no denying it; I am now middle-aged.

surprise. I’ve been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me?

she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud.

Instinctively, I feel my life could be divided into two distinct parts – Before Connie and After Connie,

This is a love story, after all. Certainly love comes into it.

I rarely encounter a fruit fly now, outside of a bowl of fruit.

I am employed to co-ordinate and manage younger people who do the work that I used to do.

it doesn’t thrill me like it used to.

It’s a little like embarking on an immense jigsaw. To begin with you think ‘this will be fun’ and you put on the radio and make a pot of tea, before realising that there are far too many pieces, nearly all of them sky.

I did occasionally suspect something was missing, well – didn’t everyone?

I contorted myself onto a tiny folding chair between a handsome, hairy man in black tights and a striped vest, and an extremely attractive woman.

oh God, an artist. If she’d said ‘cellular biologist’ there’d have been no stopping me, but I rarely encountered such people and certainly never at my sister’s house.

the fleecy man in vest and tights, was a circus performer who loved both his work and himself, and how could I possibly compete with a man who defied the laws of gravity for a living?

it was impossible to discern if she found something impressive or ridiculous, an attitude that she has maintained throughout the entire course of our marriage.

‘Tell me, do you find, as a trapeze artist, that it’s hard to get decent car insurance?’ The percentage varies, but some of the things I say make no sense to me at all.

I want to feel this is the beginning of something new, not the beginning of the end.’ The beginning of the end. Was she still talking about me? She made me sound like some kind of apocalypse.

why couldn’t she rediscover herself with me around? Because, she said, she felt our work was done. Our work was done.

I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.

‘You can still meet girls and get drunk,’ said Connie. ‘You’ll just have to do it with me and your father watching.

I had no time for a nervous breakdown.

boy she’d fallen madly in love with in Lyon in ’84, the Citroën mechanic with his strong hands and broken nose and the smell of engine oil in his hair.

Europe represented first love and sunsets, cheap red wine and breathless fumbling.

‘She said she found you very interesting, even all that science stuff.

‘She said she found you very attractive.’ I laughed. ‘Then the drugs have kicked in.’ ‘I know! I was as surprised as you.’

my son makes me feel like his step-father.

you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.

At one point he had been intending to study theatre – theatre! – and at least I had managed to nip that in the bud,

how could Albie hope to excel in a field where anyone with a phone and a laptop could be broadly proficient?

‘I’ve got nothing against his dreams as long as they’re attainable.’ ‘But if they’re attainable then they’re not dreams!’

It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough – it just isn’t.

I was so vocal, because I wanted him to have a secure professional life,

‘When did you start to drain the passion out of everything?’

I hadn’t spoken this much for years. I hoped, from Connie’s silence, that she was finding me fantastically interesting, but when I looked her eyes were rolled far back into her head.

I like listening to your voice. It’s like listening to the Shipping Forecast.’

voices clear in the night air, and told the stories that we choose to tell when people are new.

I loved the conversation that we had that night, especially once she had stopped hallucinating.

after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and we’re left with ‘how was your day?’ and ‘when will you be home?’ and ‘have you put the bins out?’

‘What’s French for pubic hair?’

when it’s the last time, you will know.’

I’ve always been better at that kind of thing than others might expect.

I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?

in the first flush of love, if someone tells you to read something then you damn well read

It had sometimes puzzled me why falling in love should be regarded as some wondrous event,

It was hardly a ‘cry for help’; I would have been embarrassed to make that much noise. ‘A cough for help’, perhaps that was what it was.

I introduced her to Bruce, our pet fruit fly, to show that it was not only the art-school crowd who knew how to have a good time.

suppose, I want to be … cautious. I want to proceed with caution.’ ‘But you want to proceed?’ ‘With caution.’ ‘With caution. Which means?’