12
Once, a long time ago, Grace left Callum a love letter in their microwave.
Dear Callum,
Here are five reasons why I love you.
1. You dance with me even though I can’t dance.
2. You buy Fruit and Nut even though you prefer boring Dairy Milk.
3. Your gigantic hairy-caveman feet.
4. The way you always laugh at your mum’s terrible jokes.
5. The three little freckles in a triangle on the back of your left shoulder.
Love from your Grace. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PS. STOP! Avoid splattering. Put Gladwrap over whatever you’re about to microwave!
Sometimes she still leaves letters for him in the microwave, but now they consist of just one word written in capitals on a Post-it note:
GLADWRAP!
It is the day after Aunt Connie died and Grace’s first day alone with the baby. Callum had taken two weeks off but today he is due back at work. It is time for their new lives playing Mummy and Daddy to begin.
‘I could extend it,’ Callum offers as they sit down to breakfast. ‘Death in the family.’
‘I’m fine,’ says Grace.
Actually, she has woken up with a headache unlike any other headache she has ever experienced. Her head feels like mashed potato. When she tentatively puts her fingertips to her scalp she is surprised that it still feels hard, not soft and pulpy.
She remembers her horrible dream last night about Aunt Connie. Perhaps the headache is grief, but this seems unlikely considering that when Grace thinks about Connie dying she feels absolutely nothing. Grace loved Aunt Connie. She knows that as if it were a biographical fact about somebody else’s life. It is just that there is no time to feel things any more. Looking after the baby is like taking some sort of terrifying, never-ending practical exam. All she does is respond to what the baby is doing. Feed baby. Change baby. Wash baby. Keep baby alive. Prepare for when baby wakes again.
When will it all be over? When will she have time to think and feel again? Presumably not till the baby is a teenager and can safely fend for himself. Although, of course, teenagers need to be taught to drive and say no to drugs and wear condoms. She wants to say to Callum, What have we done? We must have been mad! We can’t do this!
Except that Callum can do it. He holds the baby nonchalantly in the crook of one arm and talks on the phone with the other. When they can’t get the baby to sleep, Callum puts him over one shoulder and waltzes around the room, humming Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 2 to him.
Callum is a high-school music teacher. He tells Grace all about something called the ‘Mozart effect’ and how classical music can develop Jake’s ‘spatial-temporal reasoning’. Whatever that is. Grace is pretty sure she lacks it. It is extremely unlikely that her own mother ever hummed Mozart to her.
The first time she ever saw Callum he was dancing. They were at a mutual friend’s wedding and Grace was sitting at a table drinking champagne to take away the taste of the worst crème brûlée she had ever eaten in her life, when she caught sight of a guy walking onto the dance floor. In spite of his perfectly nice suit there was something strangely loutish about him. His shoulders were a bit too big, his arms a bit too long. But oh my word, as her Grandma Enigma would have said, could that man dance! He danced as naturally as if he were walking. There was no self-conscious ‘Yes, yes, we all know I’m the best dancer in the room’ smirk. Grace quickly put down her champagne glass, wondering if she was drunk because she had never felt so instantly attracted to a stranger in her life. That big dancing gorilla made her insides go as soft as butter.
She had been thirty years old and she’d never fallen in love so hard or so fast or, well, at all. She had always thought she just wasn’t the type to fall in love, not in that abandoned way that other people could: she was too uptight, too hard-headed, too tall. Romantic scenes in films made her toes curl; she wanted to avert her eyes from heartfelt looks the way other women looked away when there was too much blood. When men started to get those sappy expressions on their faces she always felt an inexplicable desire to sneeze.
So when Callum came to pick her up to take her to the movies on their third date, and she opened her front door and her heart fluttered and her legs trembled, it was such a foreign sensation that she genuinely thought, Oh dear, I must be coming down with the flu. When it finally dawned on her that the reason love songs on the radio were starting to sound so poignant was because she was in love herself, it was like discovering a hidden talent, like waking up one day and finding you could sing. So she wasn’t a Cold Unfeeling Frigid Bitch after all (the last words of an ex-boyfriend before he slammed down the phone). She was a real, red-blooded woman in love with a high-school music teacher who looked like a labourer but played the cello with his eyes closed, a man with size twelve feet and a secret stash of ballroom-dancing trophies, a man who ate spaghetti straight out of the can while listening to symphonies, a man who seemed fascinated by her every thought and feeling and memory, a man who never kissed her hello or goodbye without whirling her around in a waltz or making her go all weak and giggly with a dramatic cheek-to-cheek tango. He never actually danced with her because she couldn’t. ‘Wouldn’t,’ Callum said. ‘Move, woman!’ But then he’d dip her to the floor and kiss her and she’d think, Oh God, I’m so happy it’s embarrassing.
Of course, now, four years later, it turns out they are just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill married couple. She is fine with that. She is so fine with that. After all, she’s a realist. Callum doesn’t dance her around the room quite so often, but that is to be expected after all this time. You have to expect the passion to wane. You have to expect these hot flares of irritation, like lit matches.
They are having one of those flares now, at the breakfast table.
‘Are you sure you’re OK for me to go back to work?’ Callum asks. He is eating Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and his spoon clinks against his teeth with each mouthful. When Grace watches television she apparently jiggles her knee up and down. He clinks, she jiggles. One annoying habit cancels out the other.
‘I said I was sure.’
‘OK. I’m just asking.’
‘What, do you think I’ll drop him without you here to monitor me?’ Grace’s terror that she will do exactly that makes her voice sound its meanest and most sarcastic.
Callum once asked her why she sometimes spoke to him as if she hated him. ‘I do not!’ she’d said, surprised and guilty.