‘Yeah, but they’re not little girls any more, are they?’ she managed to get in just before he started his electric toothbrush buzzing. Mercifully he missed the rest of whatever else she wanted to say, and stared glumly at his reflection, hoping that an interval of dental care might draw a line under the conversation.
They were not little girls, his sisters, true, but he had always looked out for them. Since their dad had had a massive heart attack at the wheel of his cab, aged fifty-nine, then died days later, Ben, as the oldest sibling, had stepped in to pick up the pieces of the family as best he could. The newly appointed man of the house, as his mum kept telling him. The one they all leaned on too regularly, according to Kirsten.
The years had passed but old habits die hard, and it turned out that some habits were more difficult to shake off. The four siblings had moved individually around the country at various times but they’d all gravitated home to Cambridge eventually, and Ben had made it his business to keep an eye on his sisters. Not least because there was plenty to keep an eye on, what with their poor romantic choices, financial dramas and children galore, which meant oh-so many favours from their long-suffering big brother. ‘What would we do without you?’ Gwen, his mum, was always exclaiming with grateful fondness, and he secretly rather enjoyed his long-established position as golden boy of the family, never putting a foot wrong. That was the way the rest of them liked it too, as far as he could tell. Apart from his wife, apparently.
Tooth-brushing complete, he rinsed his mouth then turned off the tap with a certain amount of trepidation, as if he might discover that Kirsten was still bad-mouthing his family. Thankfully he heard nothing. Was he safe to return?
Back in the bedroom, he found her looking at her phone. She stopped and glanced up at him with a strange expression, and he eyed her warily, wondering what it meant as he got into bed.
‘Oh, by the way,’ she said in a casual, almost offhand tone he didn’t recognise. ‘I bought some paint for the downstairs loo earlier.’
Okay, he thought, recalibrating. The discussion had moved on, it seemed. ‘Right,’ he said neutrally. ‘Great.’ Then, just to show willing, added, ‘I’ll get on to that at the weekend.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, as if she wasn’t really listening. ‘So I went for a plum-coloured shade in the end. Something a bit different.’
‘Plum?’ Now he was baffled. Where had this come from? ‘For the loo? I assumed we’d paint it cream again.’
‘Actually . . .’ She was acting very cagey, he thought, surprised. No longer looking at him. ‘I got chatting to—’ She hesitated. Only a microsecond but he caught it. His ears were well and truly pricking up now – ‘someone in the paint aisle in B&Q, and I thought, why do we always go for such boring shades for our walls?’
‘So you bought some purple paint, is that what you’re telling me? For our downstairs loo?’
She attached her phone to the charger and put it face down on the bedside table. ‘Yeah, basically,’ she said. ‘Because I’m sick of everything being boring.’ You could practically hear the defensiveness crackling around her like a force field. Back off, it said. Don’t push it.
‘Right,’ he said, startled, as she marched to the en suite and shut the door. Boring, eh? He imagined how, if another person was in the room at that moment, he’d look at them in disbelief. That was weird, right? Ben’s eyes would say. What do you think’s going on there?
The conversation came back to him now as he sat behind the shop counter the following day, jotting answers into a crossword in the newspaper during a quiet spell. Friday afternoons were often pretty uneventful in the shop, the yawning lull before the weekend got underway. People had other things on their minds at that point in the week: plans for a night out, the prospect of a lie-in and some free time, or indeed mulling over the mystery surrounding who their wife might have been talking to in the paint aisle of B&Q. This unnamed person who may or may not have gone putting ideas in her head about her so-called boring existence.
When he got up for breakfast that morning, he’d glimpsed said paint, left pointedly on the kitchen table. Kirsten worked as a midwife and was on earlies this week, another reason for her bad temper the night before, he assured himself. Making tea, bleary-eyed and regretting the late round of whisky coffees Charlotte had served up, he had eyed the paint tin with suspicion before going over for a closer look. Iced Plum, the label said, and he’d pulled a face at the rich red-purple shade, already certain that the downstairs loo would look small and dark when painted that colour, like being inside a womb. Or a wound even. Neither seemed a relaxing option for a private moment.
Ben’s shop was on a quiet, not particularly picturesque, street and from where he was sitting, he could see a couple drifting by outside, hand in hand. Despite the closed door, he caught the sound of their laughter floating behind them, and experienced a twist of sadness inside. Was Kirsten bored? he wondered again. Bored of him, their life together? He tried to remember when they had last held hands like the pair outside and couldn’t put his finger on a single instance all year. When had they stopped holding hands?
The bell on the shop door tinkled and in came the couple. They were in their twenties, he guessed, both with golden tans and sun-streaked hair. Australian, Ben predicted. Working in retail in Cambridge gave you an eye for identifying tourists. ‘Hi,’ said the guy, who had a shark’s tooth on a leather string around his neck and bright blue eyes. ‘We love the maps you’ve got in the window – the personalised ones?’ Yes, definitely Australian, Ben thought, his mind conjuring up images of huge surfing waves and red desert. ‘Would you be able to do one for us?’
‘Sure,’ Ben said, jotting down some details from the man – Jonathan from Perth, Cate from Melbourne – while the woman (Cate, presumably) wandered around the small shop interior, eyeing the Cambridge prints and postcards he’d designed, before standing in front of Ben’s favourite piece in the entire shop: the steel-plate-engraved, hand-coloured Cambridgeshire map, from the mid seventeenth century. It was on sale for a cool eight hundred quid and Ben loved it so much he knew he’d be gutted if anyone ever actually bought it. He also knew that if he brought it home and hung it on their wall, Kirsten would raise an eyebrow in her most long-suffering manner and demand that it go straight back for someone else to buy. ‘It’s a shop, it’s not your spare bedroom,’ she was fond of saying.
Ben had owned the shop for twelve years now and business was pretty good. When he’d returned to Cambridge following his father’s death, he’d initially taken on his dad’s cab round for want of anything else to do with himself, ferrying passengers to and from the airport, the station, the hospital, the city centre, picking up the elderly and infirm, drunk club-goers and jet-lagged tourists alike. The money was decent and the work was steady, plus there was some comfort to be had from being in his dad’s cab, doing his dad’s job for him – especially since his father had disapproved of Ben’s decision to give up his lucrative corporate design job to go travelling. There comes a time in a man’s life when he has to grow up and settle down, he’d said, more than once, puffing out his chest as he liked to do when delivering one of his Dad Homilies. It had seemed to Ben as if the time to grow up had finally arrived.