Us

by David Nicholls

extremely ‘cool’ people, but coolness and kindness rarely go together and the fact that these people were often truly appalling, cruel, pretentious or idiotic was, to my sister, a small price to pay for their reflected glamour.

One of the actors had been performing excerpts from his one-person show, to my mind one person too many

But the unrequited love of one’s only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn.

Listening up in his bedroom, no doubt he had caught all of my words and none of my intention.

à la recherche du temps perdu

‘Pour moi, je voudrais pâté et puis l’onglet et aussi l’épinard. Et ma femme voudrait le salade et le morue, s’il vous plaît.’

Thankfully we were now of an age where we no longer felt obliged to maintain a constant stream of conversation. In between courses, Connie read her novel and I consulted the guidebook to confirm

Connie suggested we rent bicycles. Still a little drunk, we rode the municipal machines, unwieldy as wheelbarrows, along whichever street we liked the look of.

je suis désolé mais je suis perdu

‘We do love you, you know. We don’t always show it, I’m aware of that. But we do.’

I’ve never met a biochemist that I didn’t like. My friends and colleagues might not have been particularly glamorous but they were open, generous, funny, kind, modest. Welcoming.

Though not my field, I was familiar with the notion of alternative realities, but was not used to occupying the one I liked the best.

I feel like I’m being got at all the time, which isn’t much of a holiday for me, surprise surprise, so I’m heading

What a creepy kid.

As our finances melded, I was diligent and thorough in ensuring everything was in place: pensions, ISAs, insurance. I planned our holidays with military care, maintained the car, bled the radiators, reset the clocks in spring and autumn. While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries. Perhaps these achievements sound drab and pedestrian, but they were in stark contrast to the flaky, self-absorbed aesthetes she had known before. There was a sort of mild masculinity to it all that, for

But like a fading athlete, my response times had slowed and now it was not unusual for me to find the perfect witty comeback to remarks made several years ago.

I sometimes felt that Connie had spent the first three years laughing at my jokes and the next twenty-one sighing at them.

Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected. But to me at least, it felt like the culmination of many happy days, and the first of many more.

Six months after our wedding, my wife had an affair.

She is terrible .

Here he was as a Nazi in Cabaret (I was working late that week)

Bad dad

our marriage as I think of it now began around that time. We straightened our backs and began to leave the house, to go to films and exhibitions together. Ate dinner afterwards, began to talk once more. We didn’t really laugh, not to begin with. It was enough to be able to answer the phone.

Time being what it is, we got older. We thickened and sagged in ways that would have seemed implausible, comical even, to our younger selves, just as our son, before our eyes, began to elongate.