I am standing in a park in Glasgow at four o’clock in the morning. It may be August but I’m absolutely freezing. No matter. I am kissing Mr D, our cold noses brushing, and I have an Elbow song going through my head that is so loud, it threatens to take over:
‘We took the town to town last night. We kissed like we invented it.’
Indeed, it was some party we had been to and I love the way we kiss. I could stay here for ever, even if it means I freeze. No past, no future. It’s enough. I’m happy. I’m also merry on a cocktail of warm, cheap prosecco drunk from a mug (sorry, Nanna, not classy), shouty conversation and that feeling of smiling brown eyes watching me from across a crowded room. Just checking.
I had made up my mind that we should part – a noble sacrifice for the greater good of myself and my girls. I needed to prove I could survive on my own.
But my friends were horrified: ‘Don’t be daft!’
My girls were horrified: ‘But we really like him!’
And a wise old psychoanalyst friend said: ‘Why are you trying to write the end of the story when you are barely at the beginning? Hasn’t he got some say in this? What would be wrong if, for once, you let the story write itself?’
And I thought about it and I remembered all the years I had told myself a story about my relationship with my ex-husband. That we were childhood sweethearts who grew up together, went to London, made our fortunes, and had three beautiful daughters and then shared our grandchildren. I thought we would be buried together. I had held on to it for too long, because I loved that story and it blinded me to what was really happening. I had written the end before it had actually happened, and that’s dangerous.
And now was I not writing an end to my story with Mr D? It was the opposite – a negative end, but still, I was just making it up. That ‘gap’ was still driving me. Before, it had kept me in a relationship; now it was driving us apart. Could I not work at growing up, and being a heroine, and still have a relationship? Is the heroine not allowed a boyfriend?
I decided it’s all about the difference between need and want. As long as I am with Mr D because I want to be with him, rather than need to be with him, then that’s OK. Besides, every time I see him, all resolutions quickly evaporate. He disarms me. Yes, I want to be with him. For now. Another song keeps going round my head called ‘It Is What It Is’. It’s country and western, on an album full of trailer parks; early, disastrous marriages; love and loss. The lyrics are so darkly humorous I chuckle and somehow it seems to fit the story of the Scarlet Sisters. But that one line has become my mantra: ‘It is what it is, ’til it ain’t anymore’.
For now, with Mr D, all stories are banished.