Reminiscence
Christopher never thought his wife was an attractive woman. Sure, he reminds himself, she isn't unappealing. She has a nice arse, she shaves her legs more often than most women her age. Nothing much to boast for breasts, but she makes up for that in being open to other things he knows he should be thankful for.
Chris considers himself a simple man. He likes simple pleasures. Susan, when he popped the question, ticked all the important boxes. That was good enough for him.
Their how'd-you-meet was so cliché they used to make up better ones, jovially outdoing each other before bewildered colleagues. Chris's favourite is that Susan was a Greenpeace girl. Nineteen ninety-nine. Fresh out of high school, craving moral validation after years of privileged city life, Chris went to Vietnam for volunteer work. This much was true. The falsity was meeting Susan island hopping the Philippines; the usual NGO charade of liberating "backwards" people from their meagre living standards.
One year's office Christmas party, soaring on the magic rug of countless different cocktails, Chris told someone he and Susan finally hooked up in a jazz club in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. The rest of the adventure – escaping their respective charities, taking to the wilds of South East Asia – had been worthy of an Indiana Jones film. Chris had thought so anyway.
The truth, unfortunately, was just an undergraduate party. University of Glasgow. Pretty boring. They courted only fifteen months. Susan Pett, nominally Catholic, had no qualms with letting Chris into her pants. Second date ("put it there, mate"). Less than two years after meeting they were married. Their further years of study would consist of getting stoned, getting laid, exploring one another's bodies and scraping narrow passes.
Chris then got his act together, finishing a Masters in finance. Susan learned, surprisingly, that vaguely inspired Art graduates were not really in demand. Happily, she abandoned her dreams, intent instead on raising kids. Chris, despite a deep-set twist of claustrophobia, knew that he was wrong to thwart his wife in seeking purpose.
They had a boy: Cameron Peter Venky. Then within two years they had another – Samuel Jacob. The rollercoaster of young adulthood ended so damned fast that Chris and Susan never got the chance to realise they were not in love.
YOU ARE READING
Graceful Abaddon
General FictionAs something of a refuge when I hit writers block with my novel, 'Pluto Belt', this book is a very large collection of short stories and novellas which I am writing at the same time. Some are short, most are long, but I hope each of them has somethi...
