One Day

by David Nicholls

It’s like they’ve been drinking the same cup of tea for two hundred pages, and I keep waiting for someone to pull a knife or an alien invasion or something, but that’s not going to happen is it? When will you stop trying to educate me, I wonder? Never I hope.

Good. Here it is. I think you’re scared of being happy, Emma. I think you think that the natural way of things is for your life to be grim and grey and dour and to hate your job, hate where you live, not to have success or money or God forbid a boyfriend (and a quick discersion here – that whole self-deprecating thing about being unattractive is getting pretty boring I can tell you). In fact I’ll go further and say that I think you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it’s easier, isn’t it? Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it. Is this annoying you? I bet it is. Well I’ve only just started.

He would prefer the unsayable to be left unsaid.

am not up to this. I am not capable. I thought I would be, but I’m not. Some part of me is missing, and I cannot do this.

She glanced at the other diners, all of them going into their act, and thought is this what it all boils down to? Romantic love, is this all it is, a talent show? Eat a meal, go to bed, fall in love with me and I promise you years and years of top notch material like this?

‘Actually I thought you might know what that’s like yourself.’ Emma’s hand went to her chest. ‘Me?’ ‘Putting on an act.’ ‘I don’t put on an act.’ ‘That bit about the funfair goldfish, you’ve said that before.’ ‘No, I … so?’ ‘So I just think we’re quite similar, you and me. Sometimes.’

Part of her is vaguely aware of failing as a girlfriend. It’s a new role for her, and she sometimes finds herself plagiarising ‘girlfriend behaviour’: holding hands, cuddling up in front of the television, that kind of thing. Ian loves her, he tells her so, if anything a little too often, and she thinks she may be able to love him back, but it will take some practice. Certainly she intends to try and now, in a self-conscious gesture of sympathy, she curls herself around him on the bed.

intimately bellows,

For the first time since she met him he appears to be making an effort.

She senses her own performance is losing conviction now, and decides to bring it to a close.

domestic life continued against this tinnitus of mirth.

Copies of the magazine were accidentally scattered round the flat, so that guests might casually stumble upon it.

In a recent what’s hot and what’s not column, he had been listed as not-hot. This not-hotness had weighed heavily on his mind,

They stood on the edge of a long pointless argument that she felt she would win, but which would leave the evening in tatters.

the endless, endless self-deprecation.

Emma shrugged. ‘Maybe we’ve grown out of each other.’ He said nothing for a moment, then spoke. ‘So, do you think I’ve grown out of you, or you’ve grown out of me?’

For a moment, Dexter had a fleeting but perfectly clear memory of himself at his mother’s funeral, curled up on the bathroom floor while Emma held onto him and stroked his hair. Yet somehow he had managed to treat this as nothing, to throw it all away for dross.

She smiles because he wants her to smile.

‘There’s this thing where they have robots fighting and you have to sort of introduce the robots …’ ‘Why do the robots fight?’ ‘Who can say? It’s in their nature, I suppose. They’re aggressive robots.’

‘Go on then.’ ‘People love you, Dex, they really do. Problem is, they love you in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek, love-to-hate kind of way. What we need to do is get someone to love you sincerely …’

There’s something about being with the Cope family that makes him behave as if he’s in a costume drama. Perchance, ’tis rather late-night fare. Still, if that’s what it takes…

trips that Sylvie pre-plans with the precision of an invading army. A

You can’t build your life around what’s cool, and there are benefits to this less chaotic, more ordered lifestyle.

But the single most striking thing about Sylvie is that he likes her so much more than she likes him.

Of course he likes the way she looks, and the way they look together,

She was having a wonderful time, she said, but she didn’t like to laugh in company because she didn’t like what laughter did to her face. And although a part of him felt a little chill at this, a part of him also had to admire her commitment.

Sex with Sylvie is like a particularly demanding game of squash, leaving him aching and with a general sense that he has lost.

‘YOU DIDN’T EVEN ASK IF SHE WAS THERE MORIARTY!’

He wonders if he still might tell her that he loves her or, more tentatively, that he ‘thinks he might be in love with her’, which is both more touching and easier to back out of.

Everything will be fine, just as long as nothing ever changes.

Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.

Loss has not endowed him with any kind of tragic grandeur, it has just made him stupid and banal. Without her he is without merit or virtue or purpose,

So the two men shuffle around the large musty kitchen, a pair of widowers making more mess than is really necessary in warming two cans of soup.