After a long, leisurely breakfast with Emma and Dad, followed by a brief blustery walk along the seafront, I climbed in the car to head home.
As I drove, I worked out the details in my mind. Any future jobs that we hadn’t yet started – the kitchens we’d planned to fit from March onwards – I’d just cancel. If Joe and Marius wanted to take those on then, as long as they could convince our clients, they could have them. That would be my parting gift.
I’d talk to Amy and Ben to negotiate a new deal whereby he’d either come to me in school holidays or during term time. If I was living with or even nearby Dad, then either of those solutions would work fine. All Ben had to do was to choose.
The furniture? Amy could have it. The house? I didn’t want to see it ever again.
During the three remaining weekends in January, I’d start moving my stuff up to Dad’s, and by February, it would all be done. I’d have a fresh life waiting for me in Whitby – I was taking control, and that felt good.
Back in Chislet, I found Amy and Ben watching Star Trek while they waited for me. The scene was so domestic, so familiar, that the sight of the two of them together gave me a physical pain in my chest.
I pinched Ben’s shoulder affectionately, Star Trek style, and then, catching Amy’s eye, I nodded towards the door.
‘Good visit, then?’ she asked, on entering the kitchen.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘It was fine.’
‘Are you moving back up there?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘I think I might be. How did you know?’
Amy shrugged. ‘It just came to me when you drove off yesterday,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, but it did.’
‘It makes sense,’ I said. ‘I need a proper fresh start somewhere new.’
‘Only Whitby isn’t new, is it?’ Amy said. ‘It’s more like going backwards.’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t you rather start over somewhere fresh?’ Amy asked.
I looked at her in consternation, and she got the message. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s, of course, entirely up to you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it is, kind of.’
‘I suppose you’ll be taking Ben in the holidays?’ Amy said. ‘So that he doesn’t need to swap schools?’
‘Hopefully. That would seem to make most sense. Do you think he’ll mind?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I honestly don’t think so. As long as he can live in his beloved bedroom here, he’ll be fine.’
‘When he’s eleven, he’ll have to change schools anyway,’ I said. ‘So he can decide then where he wants to be.’
‘Maybe. We’ll see. You look happier, anyway.’
‘I am,’ I told her. ‘I needed to make a change. And now I’ve worked out this is it.’
‘I get that,’ Amy said. ‘I’m the same.’
On Monday, I took Joe and Marius for a pub lunch. It was the gentlest way I could find to break the news. Neither of them seemed unduly worried or even particularly surprised when I told them. If anything, young Joe looked positively stoked about it all. ‘So we can set up our own company, and just take over all the new jobs?’ he asked, bright-eyed. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
I nodded. ‘That’s pretty much it. Yeah.’
‘You up for that, then, Marius?’ he asked. ‘Just me and you?’
Marius wobbled his head from side to side. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘I have to deal with this, how you call it? This leave to remain. When I deal with that, we’ll see.’ Leave to remain was the new legal status for EU citizens who wanted to stay in the UK post-Brexit, and the press had been full of horror stories about people being unexpectedly refused.
‘You’ll be OK, won’t you?’ I asked. ‘You’ve been living here for years.’
‘Of course he will,’ Joe said. ‘He’s almost as English as I am.’
‘We’ll see,’ Marius said again.
Telling Ben wasn’t much more challenging when it came to it. At nine, he was in a phase where his most frequent reaction to things was Whatever. Though that had frequently annoyed me in the past, and though I suspected he was using this fake nonchalance to hide his pain about everything that was happening, I’ll admit that it suited me right then. So I restrained myself from digging any deeper. Life almost certainly wasn’t panning out the way Ben would have liked, but nor was mine . . . Whatever seemed as good a reaction as any.
I spent January deconstructing everything I’d built: cancelling jobs, closing bank accounts and, back at the house – a house I now thought of as ‘Amy’s’ – pulling pictures from the walls. As my stuff was withdrawn from her carefully constructed love nest, the place started to look threadbare and sad. It was surprising how little I needed to remove – revealing a stain where a picture had once hung, or a closet containing nothing but mouse droppings – before the whole place began to look as if it had been abandoned. As this new shabby status seemed to match the reality of our lives so much better than the catalogue-perfect interior we’d been living in, it didn’t feel so much like destruction, more a kind of reveal of an innate shabbiness we’d been masking all along. Pulling it apart felt honest, somehow, like ripping a plaster from a wound so that it could heal.
January went by so fast that I didn’t find time to drink, or even notice that I wasn’t drinking. And that was a very good thing.
I was working twelve-hour days, from eight
