Turning Forty Read online

  ‘And having the time of my life travelling around the world with a gorgeous but highly neurotic guy I’ve known half my life.’ Ginny laughs and kisses me. ‘I’ve thought it through, Matt, and if it was up to me we’d be going next week rather the end of next term. Since we started making these plans I’ve felt more alive, more excited, more everything and it’s all because of you! I know you think we should be sensible: take things slowly and see how they go. And before my last birthday I would’ve agreed with you . . . but not now. If I’ve learned anything since turning forty it’s that life’s too short for the sensible option. Sometimes you have to just go with your gut and see where it takes you. So what do you say?’

  ‘You had me at “gorgeous”, ’ I reply. Breaking out into a grin I grab her by the hand and head back to Jean’s desk.

  Jean looks up from her computer screen. ‘All decided?’

  ‘All decided indeed.’ On cue Ginny hands over her credit card. A flurry of jabs at the card machine’s key pad and the job is done. Ginny (on my behalf as well as her own) has just committed the best part of two thousand pounds that she can ill afford to go on a trip with a man who was never even a proper boyfriend.

  Jean hands Ginny the printed receipts and informs her that our tickets will be emailed two weeks before we’re due to fly. We thank her, stand up and leave. Straight away my mind starts churning over the full impact of what I’ve done and more importantly what I’ll need to do now. I’ll have to find a way of telling my parents that won’t make me sound insane, and of course I’ve got to find a way to explain to Lauren that she’ll have to sort out the whole house sale thing on her own and maybe even that I’ve found someone new. It’s all going to be pretty hard to do but as Ginny and I head back to the Bullring car park a huge grin spreads across my face. I’m happy. I’m doing this crazy, reckless, financially irresponsible thing and nothing, not divorce, unemployment or even turning forty is going to stop me seeing it through.

  That evening we go to a Moroccan restaurant in Moseley and our only topic of conversation is the trip. Of all the plans I have ever made this one feels like it’s going to pay the greatest dividends, to clarify part two of the story of my life. Everything I need to know will be somewhere out there waiting for me to stumble across it. Ginny feels exactly the same. This trip is going to be the making of us.

  As usual I stay over at Ginny’s that night but in the morning I go back to Mum and Dad’s because Ginny’s got to pack for a five-day field trip to Barcelona with some of her sixth-form students.

  ‘It’ll go faster than you think,’ she says as we stand on her doorstep, ‘and I’ve promised myself that next weekend I’m not going to do a single shred of work. It’ll just be you, me and whatever you want to do.’

  ‘Sounds like a great plan.’ We kiss one last time and then I leave.

  I decide to try phoning Gershwin. I’d called and left a message earlier in the week and he still hasn’t got back to me and even though he’s busy at work I can’t help but think there’s something more to it. I pull out my phone and try his number but after several rings it goes through to voicemail and so I leave yet another message: ‘Mate, it’s me. Just checking in. Have news for you so ring or text soon and we’ll go for a pint.’

  At home my parents are in the garden where Dad is weeding his vegetable patch and Mum is hanging out the washing. This could be the moment that I tell them my plans and as I open my mouth my dad stops digging and looks at me.

  ‘Were your ears burning?’

  I look at Dad, confused. ‘Why should they be?’

  ‘Your mum and I were just commenting how nice it’s been having you home. We were thinking you might like to come to your sister’s again next weekend.’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t, Dad,’ I reply, ‘I’ve got plans for next weekend but I’m definitely free the weekend after.’

  Mum is clearly annoyed at my unwillingness to get into line. ‘You’re very busy for a man with no job.’

  Dad rolls his eyes and nods his head towards the house. ‘I’d make your escape now son, if you know what’s good for you.’

  Taking my dad’s cue I head up for a shower but as I’m rummaging in my drawers for clean underwear my phone buzzes with a message from Ginny: Miss you already! Try not to be too miserable without me!. I reply straight away: Have a great time! Will try and keep it together until you get back! and then I don’t hear from her again until Monday evening: Arrived safely. Hostel is awful but students don’t seem to have noticed as they are too busy trying to get off with each other. Miss you, G x. Late on Tuesday night I get another text: Am in bar with students watching live music. Think after our world trip we should move to Barcelona and open a bed and breakfast. What do you think? Night, night G x PS Will text again in morning!

  Ginny doesn’t text me the following morning or indeed that night. When her text silence continues throughout Thursday morning I begin to imagine that she’s had some kind of accident but when I ring it goes straight through to voicemail. In the end I leave three voicemails, send three texts and even leave a message at the youth hostel with my phone number in case she’s somehow lost it. But it’s only on Friday morning, having barely slept, that I get a message. The contents take me completely by surprise: I’m so sorry, Matt, but I can’t follow through with our plans any more. Please don’t think too terribly of me. It’s been the most difficult decision of my life to make. Please promise me you’ll take the trip anyway. You deserve to be happy. Take care, Ginny x.

  As I return my phone to the bedside table I close my eyes trying to block out all of the self-directed anger I feel. I feel stupid. Stupid and embarrassed. How did I not see this coming? How did I ever think that this thing with Ginny would work? It’s not like I hadn’t anticipated a car-crash ending from the moment we first kissed or hadn’t appreciated that the odds of the crash happening sooner rather than later had doubled the moment we started making plans to go travelling. I mean, who does that? Who gets together with a ‘not quite ex’ that they haven’t seen in six years and the very next day starts making plans to spend a year travelling around the world with them? A year ago I would never have entertained this kind of recklessness and yet here I am making decisions that even a six-year-old would think twice about.

  I need a drink.

  I get dressed and go and find one.

  ‘Nice weather we’re having isn’t it?’

  I glance up from my fourth pint of the afternoon at the crumpled old bloke sitting opposite and grinning inanely. He’s wearing a stained black suit jacket over a bright green zip-up cardigan. In front of him is a half-drunk pint of mild and a bedraggled newspaper that like him has seen better days. He could be me thirty years from now. Turning seventy, now’s there’s a thought.

  ‘Brilliant,’ I reply. It’s been chucking it down all day as we’re well aware. ‘Easily the best day of the year!’

  ‘Good one.’ The old bloke chuckles so hard that he hacks up something dreadful from his lungs, which he spits into a handkerchief.

  The pub I’m in is the kind of cool, down-with-the-kids drinking establishment that features arty-looking second-hand chairs and posters for various drum ’n’ bass club nights, but back in the day it had held a special place in my heart for being where Ginny and I, along with the rest of our friends, had spent many hours watching long-forgotten local bands with ridiculous names in its upstairs function room. I purposely chose it as my destination because I feel like torturing myself and what better way than to select a venue where one New Year’s Eve some twenty years ago you and the woman who’s just broken your heart spent a good portion of the night groping each other near the upstairs gents’ toilets?

  And as much as I’d like to blame my behaviour on my separation, or quitting my job, or even turning forty, the real problem here is all the time I have wasted. Time that I’m never going to get back. Whenever I look back on my life all I see is fragments: stints working here, relationships happening there, never a whole p
icture, and certainly never a picture like that of my own father. By the time Dad was forty he had three kids, a wife to whom he’d been married for ten years and a job that he’d had since turning twenty-one. What did I have to show by comparison? A half-decent career that I’d abandoned just as I was about to reap the rewards of years of hard work, a failed marriage, a big house in London that I can’t afford to live in and a long, long line of failed relationships: it isn’t exactly the stuff carved on to headstones.

  ‘Got a lot on your mind have ya?’

  It’s the crumpled old bloke again. I raise my glass towards him and nod.

  ‘Woman trouble?’

  ‘Of a kind.’

  ‘They’re not worth it.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘I know. Take it from me, big man. You’re better off on your own.’

  For a moment I seriously considered that my unwanted companion wasn’t just some random alcoholic, but a wise old guru sent to show me the true way. Then he coughs again and pulls out his filthy handkerchief and that convinces me that he’s not. He catches me looking at him as he spits into his handkerchief again. ‘Catarrh,’ he explains.

  ‘You should see a doctor about that. It can turn nasty.’

  ‘Doctors? I’ve got all the medicine I need right here!’ He gestures to his pint.

  It’s time for me to go. ‘Good to talk to you,’ I say to the crumpled old bloke and then I hand him a fiver and tell him to have a drink on me.

  His face lights up. ‘You’re a good man. A good man indeed.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I say, as it dawns on me that I’ve drunk just about enough to think turning up at Ginny’s school is a good idea, ‘I just wish a few more people knew it.’

  18

  I’m sitting on a bench opposite the main entrance to Ginny’s school. There are kids dotted about playing football and chasing each other around the playground but to them I am invisible: just a bloke on a bench. I don’t have to wait too long before I spot Ginny, dressed smartly in a long black woollen coat and dark trousers and carrying a heavy leather bag. She exits the building and begins walking over to the car park. I don’t have a clue what I’m going to say to her. Her text clearly indicates that her mind’s made up and it isn’t as though I have been half expecting her to change her mind. I mean, I’ve just stopped living with my wife, Ginny’s recently come out of what seems to be a pretty intense relationship and our solution was to book ourselves round-the-world tickets and make out like we’re teenagers on a gap year? It was never going to work, yet here I am, determined to change her mind. Maybe this is why people have jobs: having too much time on your hands is a guaranteed way to get yourself into trouble.

  I call out her name and she looks over at me.

  ‘How long have you been waiting?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Not excessively.’

  Ginny shakes her head. My presence here is making her sad. ‘I wish you hadn’t come.’

  ‘I haven’t come to shout. I just want to talk.’

  ‘There’s nothing to say, Matt.’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ I say, ‘that’s all I ask.’

  She briefly glances over at her car as though imagining herself escaping and then sets her bag on the ground and sits down on the bench. It’s only as I sit down too that I realise this is the same bench on which we first kissed all those years ago.

  I wonder if Ginny’s even aware of this bench’s place in our joint history.

  ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Long,’ she says. ‘We only got back from the trip just after lunch but since then I’ve witnessed a student teacher being reduced to tears by a fellow member of staff, two fights in the playground and a couple of policemen escorting three year-eleven boys off the premises. It’d be quieter in Beirut.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t recommend teaching?’

  ‘Who to? You?’

  I nod even though the thought has only just occurred to me. ‘I need to find myself a new career and they’re always saying how fulfilling teaching is.’

  ‘Who are “they”?’ She sighs and rubs her eyes. ‘Don’t do it. The hours are too long, the job satisfaction virtually nil and the remuneration pitiful. Take it from me, you’d hate it. I know I do.’

  We watch a couple of pupils walk by kicking a football between them. With different haircuts, fatter ties and yet still carrying the same Gola sports bags (do those things never go out of fashion?) they could’ve been Gershwin and me back in our school days.

  I decide to get to the point. ‘So are we going to talk about this or what?’

  ‘What is there to say? I feel awful about it, Matt. You must know that I didn’t make this decision lightly.’

  ‘But I don’t understand why you reached it at all. What’s happened to change your mind?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what happened. My mind’s made up and it’s not going to change.’

  ‘But was it me? Something I said or did? I just need to know.’

  Ginny places her hand on my arm and I sense that her steely resolve is finally melting. ‘It wasn’t you. These past few days have been some of the best I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Well that’s how I feel too,’ I say, ‘so what’s changed your mind? I know I don’t have the best track record. I know I’ve let you down in the past but this . . . this would’ve been different.’

  Ginny stands up. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘So that’s it?’ I stand up too. ‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And nothing I can say will make a difference?’ I’d promise her the world and everything in it even though it isn’t mine to give. ‘Look, Ginny, please, I’m begging you, let’s just try and work it out.’

  Ginny picks up her bags and starts walking towards the car park.

  I’m rooted to the spot, my head spinning, then a thought occurs to my addled brain and suddenly it all makes sense.

  ‘You’ve gone back to your ex, haven’t you?’

  Ginny stops dead in her tracks and before she’s even opened her mouth I know it’s true. I can see it in her eyes, in her face, in her body language. She begins to cry. ‘He’s changed his mind, promised you whatever it was that you wanted and now you’ve gone back to him.’

  ‘I never meant to hurt you like this.’

  ‘This was our bench,’ I say.

  Ginny looks confused. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I reply, and then I stand up and walk away.

  There are none of the usual signs of life when I reach home and I find out why from a note for me in my mum’s handwriting on the kitchen counter:

  Have gone to Yvonne’s. Shouldn’t be back too late. Help yourself to whatever you want from the fridge. Love, Mum.

  It feels odd being in the house on my own. I never liked it when I was kid and I’m still not that keen now. I always remember this house being full of life. With just me, it feels cold and empty and I find myself wishing that my parents had already returned so that I could hear something other than my own thoughts.

  I should have known that ex of hers was going to pop up out of nowhere and wreck everything because that’s what exes do best. They give the impression they’re out of the picture just long enough for you to think you’re safe and then in a puff of smoke, they reappear claiming a change of damascene proportions.

  It had even happened to me a couple of times in Oz. Jenna, a colleague from work who I’d started seeing a few months after I moved to Sydney, got back with her ex-boyfriend six weeks into our relationship because he was allegedly ‘filled with regret’ over their break-up which he’d institigated and then a year later my fledgling relationship with Thalia, a single mum who I met at a party in Melbourne, was scuppered by the return of an ex-husband determined to ‘clean up his act’.

  And this, I suppose, is one of the intrinsic problems of dating when you’re my age: too many people over thirty-five have baggage
, and the fact that they choose to carry it rather than, say, putting it in a locker and forgetting about it should tell you everything you need to know. They carry the baggage because the baggage still has value. It was true of Jenna, it was true of Thalia and it’s true for Ginny and her ex too. My guess is that the ‘something’ that happened to her in Barcelona was a call from her ex-fiancé that convinced her he had changed. Faced with the choice of the couple of shabby carrier bags she had with me or the embossed leather storage trunk she had with the guy she’d planned to marry and who would give her the family she longed for, I hadn’t stood a chance.

  As I go upstairs for a shower I pass my room and spot the papers Lauren sent me to sign lying on the bedside table. She’d already texted me three times but I just couldn’t bring myself to look at them. Reaching for a pen I sign the papers one after the other, tuck them inside the stamped addressed envelope that she’d enclosed and seal it up. It feels good to have ticked this one thing off. Almost the beginning of a new era: one where I no longer hang on desperately to the past. This nice idea is proved wrong in a matter of minutes when my phone vibrates and I practically leap on it, hoping that it might be a message from Ginny. But it isn’t. It’s just another text from Lauren asking about the papers. I tell her they’re in the post and then switch off my phone.

  For the next few days I pretty much go to seed. I don’t go out, I field a number of texts from Jason Cleveland asking me when I’m free for a drink, I barely leave my room and I don’t speak to anyone other than my parents. Just as I’m beginning to wonder if what remains of my thirties is going to seep away down the plughole of my existence I get a text from an old workmate telling me that he’s going to be up in Birmingham for the weekend and did I fancy joining him and some friends for a night out. Unlike Jason Cleveland’s proposed night out (which I know will be as horrible as it is beery) this is exactly what I need right now, something fun and out of the ordinary to look forward to, so I text back straight away and get the details.