Kay’s salmon was dry, and in compensation she ordered that port. In fact, she ordered two, and at eleven twenty-five p.m. the invisible old fogies in the corner banquette closed the joint. After all, Cyril had called her tentative proposal to stick around just a smidgeon longer “apostasy.” So assuming that she didn’t tragically stumble from being so tipsy on the walk home, this was the only remaining birthday that she was guaranteed to live all the way through.
* * *
To say that the following year went by quickly would be an understatement.
Kay was well aware that despite the rejuvenating effects of Remainer indignation her husband was playing up his physical infirmities. His back gave him legitimate grief, but he was the one who’d refused the surgery. He often left his hearing aids out on purpose, because making his wife repeat, “Do you want another piece of toast?” four times made his company seem more geriatric. Believe it or not, he was still fairly spry. (How curious, that by convention an adjective meaning “agile” applies exclusively to old people. She’d looked it up once, and the strict dictionary definition had nothing whatsoever to do with the unfeasible leaping about of the decrepit.) Yet he deliberately slumped when he read, deliberately fell behind when they walked along the pavement, and deliberately vocalized moments of discomfort with groans and cries of dismay, although after stubbing his toe as a younger man he’d been stoic. He sometimes requested that one of the children give him a hand doing chores like stashing the outdoor furniture in the tool shed in the autumn that he was perfectly capable of dispatching by himself.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So stiff did Kay’s upper lip become that it was doubtful she could use a straw. In truth, her right shoulder had developed a fierce pain whenever she raised her arm higher than about forty-five degrees, but she merely popped discreet overdoses of ibuprofen when Cyril wasn’t looking. She was constantly tortured by nocturnal leg cramps, which she walked off in silence after slipping from the bedclothes without waking her husband. Her joints and spine made a cacophony of sinister noises, although the internal snap, crackle, and pop wasn’t that audible to other people, and she let the advert for Rice Krispies broadcast its continuous loop without remark. The arthritis in her toes, of all places, had become so agonizing that a Sunday walk along the South Bank had become more grim discipline than refreshing jaunt, and she’d taken to lingering over a coffee at her turnaround, the better not to admit to Cyril that she’d cut her former distance in half. She concealed her GP’s consternating verdict of high blood pressure from her husband, disguising the medication in a bottle that once held antacids. So whilst suffering the same insults to her physical person as anyone else on the cusp of eighty, to all appearances Kay Wilkinson was a model of functionality. (She was spry.) She refused to present herself to her murderous husband as a high-mileage, petrol-sucking jalopy in need of so many replacement parts that, rather than maintain the old girl, it was cheaper to throw the clunker on the scrap heap and buy a new car.
As the months flew by, she grew ever more dissociated. The split into two Kays now seemed perpetual, and she was wont to watch herself from a long way off, as if she were practising for being dead. It is commonplace to stare blankly into the refrigerator in mystification over whatever you’re looking for, but Kay didn’t stare blankly but fixedly, as she knew full well what she was looking for: the black soap-dish box in the back left-hand corner, which never accumulated the bits of food the other containers did, leading her to wonder if Cyril was reverently wiping it down when she was away at the shops. The rectangle seemed to peer back at her with a hint of smugness: such a small object, yet more powerful than its owners, whom it was poised to annihilate in . . . 184 days? No, the countdown was relentless: it was already 183.
The panic was now unabating. Was a documentary about loss of biodiversity in the Amazon really worth purchasing with the precious currency of her life, when she wasn’t going to be around to mourn the extinction of the white-cheeked spider monkey? Probably not. Although even at her advanced age Kay had still been taking on small interior design jobs, mostly for friends, she abruptly bowed out of doing over Glenda’s ground floor halfway through, at some cost to the friendship, owing to a sudden, frantic impatience amidst
