We still know how to bring on a flutter when we need to
NIALL and I both work from home, so we see more of each other than most couples. While we both have our own work spaces — Niall a painting studio in the garden, and me an office looking out at the sea — we also spend a lot of our working lives in our kitchen, working on our laptops.
When either of our e-mails pings we say “who’s that?” Our working days blend into home life with hoovering, Skype tutoring, running to the shop to get bread and screeching deadlines all melding into days that are sometimes so busy, we don’t put our noses outside the door except to drop and pick Tommo up from school.
The main problem with working from home is that we are always on top of each other. But not in the right way. Children invade out work. Clients invade out kitchen. Even though we are ‘by ourselves’ we rarely have the space to be ’together’.
Every now and again we need to get away, by ourselves, for a couples’ weekend. We could book a local hotel — as long as it has an ensuite, a bar and a TV, but we decided to head to London and check up on Mum’s house.
‘There’s a bit of wainscotting in the bathroom could do with a lick of paint,’ Niall said. I said nothing. No kids and no laptops, like we agreed, suited me just fine.
We flew into Luton and spent the day hanging out with old friends in Covent Garden, drinking in a private members’ club. At around 10pm they were ready for dinner, I was ready for bed.
I looked across the plush bar and gave him the ‘let’s split’ look. We had hardly spoken all day.
We splashed out and took a taxi to Hendon, managing to catch the local fish and chip shop just before it closed. We happily took whatever they had left in the fryer, then we sat outside and ate it. No meal ever tasted as good. Sitting on a shallow brick wall on the edge of a small housing estate late on a Friday night reminded me of being young. I noticed he was handsome. That happens sometimes when we are away.
‘No kids,’ I said. ‘It’s weird.’
We fill our lives with kids, clients, friends, being too busy for each other.
‘I’d forgotten about them,’ he said, joking. For a moment it felt like we had just met.
The next day we got the tube across to Notting Hill Gate. Niall moved from Dublin to Notting Hill in the 1980s to live with his older brother Fintan. Niall had an idea to go and find the house they used to live in. We escaped the mash of shoppers and tourists that snaked from the tube towards Portobello Road. Culchies now, we’re not used to the push and shove of city life any more. I gripped onto the back of Niall’s jacket and he led me through the crowds like Harrison Ford.
The flat was gone. The whole building raised and rebuilt into a Georgian Terrace. Niall was disappointed, but we walked on and found the Windsor Castle, a quirky old pub they used to go to back in the day.
WE went in and had a drink, and Niall told me how it had changed. They had opened up the snug, changed the entrance.
I could see them there. Two handsome young Irish men — Fintan, a successful graphic designer, his younger brother starting out, the two lads talking music and trying their luck with the trendy London girls.
Niall and I are husband and wife now — parents. The everyday makes us dull to each other. Yet our histories — the story of our past, of how we were before we met — is as much part of who we are now as the uncut lawns and bin schedules and Lidl trips of today. We took the tube back to my sister’s house in Hendon and I remembered the years I spent travelling these tunnels with my brother Tom. Going to parties, gigs, drinking, mad teenage messers — he was my best friend.
I reached my hand into the crook of Niall’s arm and felt grateful I was sharing the journey with him. Reaching into the past can be sweet, but painful. We painted the wainscotting, had bagels for lunch, took the bus to Stanstead and flew home to Knock.
No great excitement — but in our hearts, we still know how to bring on a flutter when we need to. And that’s enough.