Page 4 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage
‘Could you turn the bathroom light off?’ I ask. He doesn’t look pleased about it, but gets up without objecting. While he’s gone, I lean over to his side of the bed and, without pausing to think about what I’m doing, I pull his bookmark out and move it forward about ten pages. He gets back into bed and we turn the light off, half a mile of Egyptian cotton between our bodies, lying on a mattress which must have seen a thousand fucks. I smile into the dark at my own tiny, malicious little triumph and try not to wonder what it means that moving his bookmark has given me more satisfaction than the mature, sensible discussion I attempted earlier.
Jack
Jessica’s fancy alarm clock allegedly senses when she’s in the lightest part of her sleep cycle and then gently wakes her up with the sound of birds and waves. My alarm clock is on my phone. It doesn’t sense anything, but when it reaches the time I’ve set, it makes a loud beeping noise to ensure that I wake up. So, while I’m up ten minutes before we need to leave, she is not.
This is, apparently, my fault.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ she shouts as she runs around the room throwing things into her suitcase. ‘How can this have happened? Why didn’t you wake me?’
I sense that my opinion on her choice of alarm clock will not be well-received, nor will my observation that she didn’t have to unpack as if on a two-week holiday for a nine-hour hotel stay. So I say nothing. Instead, I try to be helpful and pick up a pair of shoes. ‘Shall I pack these?’
‘No, I’m going to wear those.’
‘Okay.’ I pick up another pair. ‘These?’
‘I might wear those.’
‘You’re going to wear four shoes?’ I ask, attempting to add some levity to the situation.
‘Just let me do it!’ she shouts. So, I do. I get my book out and settle in one of the many armchairs scattered around this comically large room.
‘The cab’s downstairs!’ I shout at the closed bathroom door. I know hurrying her up will anger her further, but my phone now has three texts from Addison Lee.
‘I’m nearly ready!’ she shouts back.
‘I think the driver gets a fine or something if we’re late,’ I try to reason. ‘Can’t you do some of this in the car?’
She pulls the door open, looking absolutely fine – beautiful, actually, because she always looks beautiful – but she seems to be on the brink of tears. ‘No. I can’t. And I’m sorry about that. I’ll get his number and I’ll pay him. But I can’t go to a meet-and-greet looking like shit, otherwise people will take pictures and put them online and then discuss why I look so shit.’
‘I look rough as a badger’s arse,’ I say, because if I make enough jokes, or half jokes, then eventually one of them has got to land. ‘The event’s about the book, not about what we look like.’
She gives me a look, which says ‘are you fucking thick?’ without having to say anything. I take her point. We might have written the book (and unlike most ‘influencers’, we did actually write our own book) but we’re not exactly going to a literary enclave. The people who buy our books will very much care what we look like, which is presumably why Jessica never stops working out and mostly eats tenderstem broccoli these days. I try a different tact.
‘Maybe they’ll think that we were up all night shagging?’
‘Well, then they’d be wrong, wouldn’t they?’ She sighs, and closes the door between us. I am more hurt than I have any right to be, given that her comment is completely true.
When the publishers first mooted the idea of a book tour, we were delighted. We’d never spent more than a week together on holiday, because we’d always spent most of our annual leave on other people’s weddings and hen dos. The idea of two weeks going from hotel to hotel, just the two of us, sounded like a dream. Stupid as it sounds – especially from two people who are allegedly experts in this stuff – I don’t think it occurred to either of us that we might start to find each other annoying.
Eventually we emerge from the warm yellow glow of the hotel lobby on to the freezing, dark street. Cold air goes straight down every gap in my jacket and I wince. The driver jumps out of the huge black van he’s been waiting in patiently for half an hour and takes our bags, shivering in his suit. We slide into the warmth of the car and I feel myself relax. For everything I said to Clay last night, I’m pleased that I don’t have to drive.
‘It’ll be about four hours,’ the driver tells us.
I take a jumper from my bag and scrunch it up, putting it into the gap between my head and the car door, ready for another four hours of kip before we arrive. We’re on the home straight now, almost done being show ponies. I’ve just got to do a decent job on this, and the breakfast TV show slot tomorrow, and then we’re done.
‘I think we need to go over some talking points,’ Jessica says.
‘We can do that,’ I say, without opening my eyes. ‘But I promise I will not remember anything you say to me before a cup of coffee.’
If she replies I don’t hear it, as my head sinks into its makeshift pillow.
When Jessica first mentioned this event, I will admit, I was sceptical. I worked as a news producer for over ten years, so half the people I know have written a book, and they all say the same thing: book tours don’t happen anymore. Big, famous authors do talks. Normal people don’t. It’s the classic lament that they give at dinner parties so that they don’t sound up themselves while talking about work – ‘Oh, I did a reading and three people came’ – ‘Oh, I went on a book tour and it was empty shop after empty shop’. Privately I’ve always thought that talking to a small group of people about a novel you’ve written sounded like the best thing imaginable, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, when Jessica told me we were doing this, I nodded and said yes without objection, even though it was miles away and the day after the launch party, because I assumed it would be cancelled closer to the time due to lack of interest. But apparently the people who follow us (mainly her) actuallywant to spend their morning at a bookshop in the centre of Leeds so that they can talk to us. We’ve already done four of these in different places and every time I’ve been shocked by the attendance. Today is no different. As I nurse a cup of coffee like it’s a dying lover, I’m feeling rather ill-equipped for this crowd. There was an email detailing everything about it, but it’s on our shared email account, which I don’t have on my phone, because I told Jessica I did, but I didn’t, then I didn’t really want to admit that I didn’t, so I couldn’t ask her for the password. I could have asked her, obviously. But for the majority of our relationship, I’ve been the sorted one, the one who prints out the tickets, returns her clothes to the post office so she gets a refund, fills out the RSVPs to weddings. But when it comes to Seven Rules, that’s her role. I miss being the competent one, and I don’t like disappointing her. But somehow lately all of my efforts not to disappoint her seem to directly result in me disappointing her.
The hangover I had when I woke up at the hotel was apparently only the John the Baptist of hangovers. The three-and-a-half hours of sleep I enjoyed in the car were supposed to leave me refreshed and ready to work, but very unfairly they have instead left me with a blinding headache and the feeling that my brain is a liquid, easily slopped around if I move my head too much.
‘You understand what you’re doing, right?’ asks Suze, who is holding a clipboard and a Starbucks the length of her forearm. It occurs to me that she must either have driven up last night when the party ended, or got a monstrously early train, when she could easily have got in the car with us. My best guess is that now we’re beingtreated like celebrities, they don’t expect us to share our car with ‘the staff’. I make a mental note to make sure she can get a lift home with us afterwards if she wants one.
‘Yes,’ I lie. I have got no idea, and I can’t remember whether or not Jessica told me. Presumably it’ll be the same drill as ever – people asking us questions I’d rather not answer. ‘But let’s just go over it one more time,’ I say, because I’ve worked in radio long enough to know that only an idiot turns down a briefing on offer.
