The Last Anniversary

He can feel Grace’s foot against his calf and maybe a few strands of her hair, which always gets all over the place, at the back of his neck. He lies very still.

It would be highly inappropriate to wake up one’s wife for sex when one knows that she was awake at two a.m. feeding one’s son. That would be something a Selfish Bastard Typical Man would do. Grace has never called him that, but other women in his past have and you need to be vigilant because it can happen without a moment’s notice, when you’re not concentrating–all of a sudden they’re furious with you, crying even, because you’ve hurt their feelings, clomping about with your big insensitive ways.

Sometimes Grace pretended to stay asleep when they had sex in the morning. She’d let her head flop around, even do a few fake snores, and then suddenly she’d open one green eye a fraction and give him a lazy, intimate wink, ‘Good morning’. Afterwards she would stretch her legs and arms with luxurious abandon, yawning gigantically. Grace’s yawns always end with a strange yelping sound. It sounds like ‘iip!’ She takes forever to wake up properly, stretching and moaning; while Callum, who wakes instantly (except when he’s been drinking red wine) watches this performance with fascination.

‘What a fuss. It’s like you come out of a coma each morning.’

‘Yes, and you just had sex with a girl in a coma, you sick pervert,’ she’d say without opening her eyes.

Callum really loves his son but he really misses sex with his wife.

They have (had?) such a good sex life. That’s the thing. Sex with Grace was so easy and uncomplicated, sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful, sometimes nothing special but still satisfying, like spaghetti on toast. All the women Callum dated before he met Grace had ended up using sex like an ace up their sleeves. Louise used to have a special irritable little sigh that meant ‘oh not again!’. He can still remember the humiliation of tentatively touching her on the shoulder and hearing that impatient exhalation of breath. ‘Forget it if it’s a bloody favour,’ he’d said once, and Jesus Christ, the drama, the tears, the phone calls to girlfriends! He was such a chauvinist pig. He was so insensitive to her needs. He was such a Selfish Bastard Typical Man.

Maybe it was because of Louise, or maybe it was some sort of inferiority complex dating back to when he was a skinny, pimply teenager who played the cello and did ballroom dancing on Saturday mornings, but Callum suffers from a mild neurosis about the whole concept of sex as a dull duty women perform for men. He doesn’t laugh when sitcom couples do their clichéd comedy routines about sex. He doesn’t join in jokey dinner-party conversations about husbands ‘getting lucky’ after they’ve done the vacuuming. (Grace never joins in with those conversations either. Sometimes he looks across the table at her and her eyelid will lower in the barest suggestion of a wink. One of the hottest things about Grace is her winks. It’s because they’re so unexpected and out of character. An ice queen winking at you.)

When Callum had met Grace he’d only just recovered from a very badly broken heart. Pauline. She was the one after Louise. One day, after two years together, while they were eating lunch on a Sunday–toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwiches–Pauline calmly informed him that she’d accepted a transfer to South Africa and she didn’t expect him to come because she ‘couldn’t be herself’ with Callum and she needed to ‘get herself back’. He can still remember how his mouthful of sandwich turned into a hard lump in his throat. ‘Be yourself! How am I stopping you from being yourself?’ he’d said, and she’d just looked at him contemptuously, as if she wasn’t going to fall for his sneaky tricks, and in his head he was yelling, What the f**k are you talking about? It was so humiliating. He’d seriously thought they were happy. He’d thought they were going to get married and have kids. It took him months and months to wake up without a sick sense of vertigo when he thought about filling the day ahead. But he got over it; of course he got over it. He decided–and he truly meant it–that he would be a bachelor forever. He would enjoy the company of his nieces and nephews. There was music. There was work. There was travel. There was a whole interesting world out there. He would never even bother asking a woman on a date. He was obviously not good at relationships in the same way that he was not good at tennis. It wasn’t his thing.

And then he’d gone to that wedding and met Grace. She was like a reward for all those months of misery. She was too good to be true. She was like winning the lottery when you hadn’t even bought a ticket. Even after all these years of marriage he still feels immense gratitude, relief and surprise when he thinks about how his life could have been if he’d never met Grace.

Of course, their marriage hasn’t turned out to be quite as fairytale perfect as he’d blissfully expected it to be in those early days. They have fights, horrible in their banality. Callum had truly thought that if they ever fought, their fights would be operatic and passionate, over big, complex issues, and they would probably end up in bed. He didn’t envisage these petty, pathetic spats. He hates that hatchet-hard tone she can get in her voice over something as trivial as a wet towel left on a bed or a breakfast bowl not put in the sink. And that look she gives him. Sometimes he clicks his fingers in front of her eyes when she does that. ‘Grace? Are you in there? Or have you been taken over by a cold-hearted alien?’ He’s disappointed that she keeps herself a bit aloof from his circle of friends. He wishes they could go out dancing together, or even just dance alone in the living room. He wishes she wouldn’t jiggle her leg when they watch TV. But even while he is frustrated with her, or hurt by her, or plain irritated by her, he still loves her, he still has a secret crush on her, he is still awed that someone this beautiful is with him. When she told him she was pregnant he even caught himself thinking, ‘She can’t leave me now’.

One of his brothers had told him, ‘Don’t be surprised if you don’t feel anything when you first see the baby. It takes a while to get your head around it. It’s different for women. They’ve got hormones. It’s an unfair advantage. The fact is mate, a baby is a baby. They all look the same. You might have to fake it in the beginning. Just do the Proud Daddy act. I just thought about the night we played at the Basement. Remember? Best night of my life. Anyway, when I was holding Em for the first time, feeling absolutely nothing, I thought about that night, and Sara’s mum was saying, “Oh look at the proud daddy, he’s got tears in his eyes!”’