The Flatshare

by Beth O'Leary

People struggle to see it’s not about whether she’s going to die—palliative care isn’t just a place you go to slowly slip away. More people live and leave than die on our wards. It’s about being comfortable for the duration of something necessary and painful. Making bad times easier.

The words hit like a punch in the gut. Too often this last year I’ve felt that connection in my stomach like a bunched fist. Always at times like this, when reality hits afresh after days of blocking it out.

Sometimes it annoys people, like I’m purposefully taking up more room than I’m allowed, and sometimes it intimidates them, especially when they’re used to looking down at women they’re talking to, but mostly it just makes them compliment me on my “proportions” a lot.

Yes, we fought a lot and I made a lot of mistakes in that relationship, but mostly I’d just felt so lucky to be with him. Without him I feel … lost.

“Don’t worry,” Gerty says, standing up smartly and patting me on the head, “we won’t let you.”

wonder if Leon will talk the way he writes, all short sentences and no pronouns.

They don’t know, though, that actually he saves all his talking up for the really good people, like me and you.”

That feeling again, the trapped hateful rage at hearing someone you try so hard to love saying the worst things.

don’t know how to help when he won’t tell me, though,

Justin’s presence always does this to me—makes me all confused until I lose my train of thought. That was part of the romance, I guess, but right now it doesn’t feel nice at all.

“You want to talk to me, you call ahead and we arrange a time. Not now.”

Don’t say anything. It’s annoying, being so completely understood by one so very small.

“Your brain can do amazing stuff to protect itself from pain,” Mo tells me. “But it’ll struggle to keep secrets from the rest of you for long.

My dad likes to say, “Life is never simple.” This is one of his favorite aphorisms. I actually think it’s incorrect. Life is often simple, but you don’t notice how simple it was until it gets incredibly complicated, like how you never feel grateful for being well until you’re ill, or how you never appreciate your tights drawer until you rip a pair and have no spares.

don’t like the thought of everyone seeing me in that relationship and thinking

I was an idiot for being with someone who treated me that way.

“You had to come to this on your own, Tiff. As tempting as it was to bulldoze in and whisk you away from him, you would have just gone back.”

Thank god for friends and flatmates. Leon has no idea this is all going on, of course, but seems to have clocked that I need some distraction

“have you ever looked forward to reading a book so much you can’t actually start it?”

stare at her. Tiffy is full of surprises. It’s rather disorientating. Not sure I like this idea.

Isn’t this brilliant? she mouths at me. Can’t help smiling.

This rush of doing something ridiculously spontaneous—the total aliveness of whirling yourself off-plan and shutting up all the bits of your brain that tell you why this isn’t a sensible idea … God, I’ve missed this.

There’s a touch of pink in her lips and cheeks again. She smiles up at me and I feel something shift in my chest. Hard to describe. Maybe like a lock clicking into place.

like horoscopes for businesspeople.

Richie gets the reputation for being the romantic, but it’s always been me. He used to call me a pussy when we were teenagers, him chasing anything that’d give him so much as a look, me pining after the girl I’d fancied since primary school and been too scared to talk to. I’ve always been the one who thinks before they fall—though both of us fall just as hard.

Don’t want her to see that I’m smiling like a love-struck teenager because she just said “next time.”

He smiles. Getting one of those lopsided grins from him feels like winning at a game I wasn’t aware I was playing.

weird how easily you can get to know someone from the traces they leave behind when they go.

“Relationships like that stop being about ‘voluntarily’ very quickly. There’s lots of ways someone can make you stay with them, or think you want to.”

BAD THINGS REALLY DID HAPPEN. (Mo asked me to remind you.) But you got through said bad things, and now you are stronger for it. (Gerty told me to pass on … though her version had more swearwords.) You’re lovely, and I will never hurt you how he hurt you. (That part was me.)

Feels so different now I’ve met her. Can’t believe I wasted all that time—not just those months, but the time before that, the years of dawdling, settling, waiting.

She’d just leave me to stew on the fact that this weird fear of getting trapped is almost certainly to do with the fact that I was in a relationship with a man who never really let me go.

want her to mother me, not the other way around, and it almost makes me angry seeing her like this, even while it makes me sad.

Some part of my brain reminds me Mam didn’t want to be with those men. She just didn’t think she was allowed to be anywhere else. She didn’t think she meant anything if she was on her own.

Remind myself that there is no saving of people—people can only save themselves.

Mr. Prior has days to live. Hours, possibly. I look at Johnny White and feel it like a punch in the gut. He left it so. Fucking. Late.

Left to my own devices, I’m the sort of man who’d never walk through those doors. And where’s that ever got anybody?

Richie: Just because Mam always went back to the men who treated her like shit, or found another version of the same guy, that doesn’t mean Tiffy’s the same.

got scared. I know it’s no excuse, but all this is scary for me. The trial. You, us. I’m not good when things are changing. I get…”

“Sometimes it feels easier to just be the way I was before you. Safer. But … look what you’ve been able to do. How brave you’ve been. And that’s how I want to be. OK?”

look around at them all, huddled out on the balcony with me. It helps—only a little, but I don’t think anything could help more than a little right now. I close my eyes and lean into Leon, concentrating on my breathing the way Lucie told me to, and try to imagine that the banging noise is just that—a noise and nothing more. It’ll stop eventually. Breathing deep, Leon’s arms around me, I feel a new sort of certainty settle. Even Justin cannot last forever.

all seems too good, like we can’t possibly deserve it, like we’re taking too much happiness and not leaving enough for everyone else. “This is the bit where we turn on the telly and a nuclear war has started,” I say, twisting to lie down next to him. He smiles. “I don’t think so. Doesn’t work that way. Sometimes the happy thing just happens.”