Another Country by Anjali Joseph

had begun to ache. They had been sitting on his sofa on a Sunday night, the sky outside black. The weekend had passed in the usual way: late-night arguing, matinal apologies, interminable resentment.
    She said nothing for a bit. ‘You want us not to disagree?’
    â€˜Not that, but not have these horrible arguments.’
    She considered it coldly. There had been other things that had frightened her, but which she had dealt with: final exams, or moving to a new city. This too could be done.
    â€˜Are you angry?’ he enquired apprehensively. It was their pattern: when she became self-sufficient, he would break her down with affection or argument till the usual imbalance was restored.
    â€˜Not at all,’ she said. Later, when he was on the phone, she drew the set of squares, crazy in their alignment, each row tilting hopefully upwards.
    After that, her zeal for achieving, in a new but similar way to the meaningless achievements of the gym, made her manage to be pleasant and, at worst, a little withdrawn for ten days. They had a spat one Saturday at a party when Richard allowed a dull and not very attractive woman to flirt with him, while a silent, increasingly enraged Leela looked on; he then tried to talk to Leela’s friend’s very attractive girlfriend before she drunkenly disappeared to the bathroom. ‘You always get paranoid when I talk to anyone more beautiful than you,’ he observed. They had a teary row on the road towards her house; he grabbed her satchel and slung it over a wall into the garden of a block of council flats.
    He climbed over the wall, and returned with the satchel, and they continued up the road in sullen silence, but she ended up apologising the next day. On Monday, her bitterness at the usual betrayals – his, of her; hers, of herself – were compounded by having to record a black square in the notebook. She coloured it in with grim satisfaction – for a part of her was not sorry that the initiatives to control it had failed.

Chapter 13
    â€˜What are you doing today?’ Richard asked. For a moment, she saw him as he was – tall, slightly geeky, pleased to see her. She was so used to viewing him as the author of all her disappointment and frustration.
    â€˜I’ll ring the agency. But I’ve got to fill out my tax return as well. I wonder if I’ll find all the papers. Nightmare.’
    The morning was pretty. Through the streaky kitchen window, sun flooded; the water-stained steel sink was bright.
    â€˜I don’t have anything to do,’ he mused.
    â€˜How do you mean?’
    â€˜Well, Javier’s on leave, the proposal’s with the client. Clara said she might not come in.’
    â€˜Oh, right.’ She agitated the cafetière and plunged it. She poured carefully into a white bone china mug. Things always had to be a certain way in Richard’s house.
    â€˜I suppose I could work from home,’ he said. He chuckled.
    â€˜Huh?’
    â€˜We could hang out for a while, have a picnic or something.’
    On the way from the deli, his hair blew across his face. He looked younger, more defenceless than when he was dressed for work; he wore a baggy shirt with flowers climbing over it in faded rows.
    They stopped at the small park halfway up the road.
    â€˜What about here?’
    â€˜Isn’t this for kids?’
    â€˜But there aren’t any here.’
    She followed him. They sat on mushroom-shaped stools amid the wood chippings, under the pleasant leaves of early summer.
    â€˜Do you want some olives?’
    He ate half a sandwich, in sunflower-seed bread. He grinned at her with satisfaction and she, eating the other half, fingers slippery with oil from the sun-dried tomatoes, smiled too. She leaned back. The springy stool allowed her to look up and behind; only a few leaves were between her and the blue sky.
    â€˜It’s going to be summer.’
    â€˜It is summer.’
    â€˜Late