The Slow End

I have had a fortnight on the couch in Hammersmith to recover from Croatia, which is to say that I have had two solid weeks of bad sleep, slightly too much red wine in the evenings, and the kind of long quiet days where the brain finally starts to sort through what it has been carrying.

What I am ready to write, today, is the part of the story that comes before Croatia. Not the actual breakup — that one needs another month and probably another draft and I am not yet up to it. But the part before the breakup, the part where I knew it was over months in advance and was busy not admitting it. The slow end.

So. Here is how Josh and I went from the November 2016 post — where we were still a couple, still a household, still a unit going to Halloween in Berlin together — to a measured breakup conversation in our Tooting kitchen seven months later.

Walking Home

I started taking the long way home from work in November. The Arcadis office is in King’s Cross, the Clapham flat was — at that point — a Northern Line straight shot from the door, and yet I would find myself getting off the Tube at Embankment, or Waterloo, or sometimes the entire way at Vauxhall, and walking the rest. Camera in the bag. Hood up against the cold. Forty minutes of nothing but my own footsteps and the river.

I told myself it was for the photography, and that was partly true — I had been getting properly into shooting London at that point, particularly that hour just after dusk where the architecture goes black against a still-blue sky, and there is no better way to find shots than walking. It was also, I now realise, the only part of my day that was genuinely mine. Between the new role at Arcadis (which I loved, but which was full-on) and the flat (which I no longer loved, but had not quite admitted that to myself), the long walk home was the one bit of the day where nobody was wanting anything from me.

I would put my key in the door at Clapham around 8pm. Josh would be on the couch with Kurt and Dani — and increasingly, more and more, with Kurt specifically. The two of them had become each other’s main person in a way that I had stopped being for either of them. They liked the same teams. They liked the same hangover Sundays. They both wanted to keep going at midnight on a Friday in a way that I had — quietly, and without telling anyone — stopped wanting to. There would be beers open on the coffee table. There would be the football, or the rugby, or whatever was on Sky that night, with Josh and Kurt sitting together on one couch, half-shouting at the screen, and Dani folded into the corner of it on her phone. They would look up, briefly, when I came in, and then go back to it. I would get changed, pour my own glass of something, and sit on the floor or alone on the other couch, and try to insert myself into a conversation that had been going for an hour without me. After a while I stopped trying. Then I started not coming home until they had gone to bed.

That was November and December. I told myself it was a phase. I told myself we were both just tired. I drank progressively more on the nights out, the credit card kept creeping up, and I told myself that was a phase too.

The Frozen Pond

January was uneventful in a way I now find slightly poignant. The weather was the only event. The pond on Clapham Common froze over in the second week of the month — not perfectly, not entirely, but enough that the surface looked solid from a distance. Every single person who walked past it that week did the same thing. They picked up a piece of ice from the edge of the pond, weighed it for a moment in their hand, and threw it as high and as far as they could, to see if they could crack the central freeze.

Nobody managed it. I went down on the Saturday morning with my camera and watched, for about half an hour, person after person making the same attempt. A couple in matching beanies. An older man on his own with a corgi. Two teenagers who were clearly delighted to have an excuse to throw rocks legally. Each of them with the same brief expression of calculation, then the throw, then the disappointed bounce off the ice. Then they walked on.

I think it’s the only week of January where I found any real joy.

Going Home

February, Josh and I went home to New Zealand. I had been pushing for the trip since Christmas — partly because it had been three years since I’d last set foot in Auckland, partly because I think I knew, at some half-articulated level, that I needed to be in my actual home in order to see my London home clearly.

We were not really sleeping with each other by this point. Josh was working long hours, often entertaining clients in the evenings, and would come back to the flat after eleven smelling of beer and someone else’s restaurant. By the time the door went I would already be in bed — or pretending to be, which is its own kind of statement, and one I think we both understood. The few nights when he didn’t take the hint were worse. By February I was actively dreading him getting home. That is, I think, the simplest way to describe how I knew.

New Zealand was lovely anyway. We did a weekend with my parents at an Airbnb at Otama, on the Coromandel — long open beach, the sort of pale sand that makes Josh, who has British skin, go pink in about ninety minutes. We drove out for ice creams at the Kuaotunu Dairy, which still does the most disproportionately enormous scoops in the country. Goldrush and Goodie Goodie Gum Drops, side by side in a cone, two things tied for best ice cream in New Zealand. Mum and Dad were on form. Dad cried at the airport when we left, of course. He always does.

The trip’s other highlight was an evening kayak across the Waitematā out to Rangitoto with a small group, paddling in the blue hour from St Heliers. The water was glassy. There was no wind. The sound on a windless harbour at dusk is like nothing else — every drip from the paddle, every distant boat, the faint hum of the city behind you, all carried clean across the water. I hadn’t really been out on a small boat in open water since my rowing days at school, and the muscle memory came back faster than I expected. We climbed up to the summit just before full dark and watched Auckland come on in lights. It was gorgeous.

The genuinely useful thing about that trip, though — and this is going to sound bleaker than I mean it — is that Josh left a day early. He had a planned month working in Sydney, so he flew out before me. Kurt and Dani had also coincidentally left London the morning of the day I was due to land back. So when I got home to Clapham on a Sunday night in late February, I had the flat entirely to myself for almost two weeks. No Josh. No Dani. No Kurt. Just me and my own sourdough starter and the wide quiet of the place at 7pm with no television on.

I did three things in that fortnight. I slept properly for the first time in months. I went to a pottery class on a Wednesday evening in Brixton. And I started looking for a new flat for all three of us — telling myself, still, that what we needed was a different setting. A bigger place. A fresh start.

It is not lost on me, in hindsight, that I was looking for a new flat for a relationship I had already mostly decided was over. The brain is a remarkable organism.

The Clapham Flat Falling Down

The story of why we needed to move at all is its own paragraph. When we’d first taken the Clapham flat, it had been freshly painted and beautifully presented. We had been told the landlord was conscientious. He was not. The extractor fans, it turned out, had not been ducting to the outside of the building — they were pumping condensation directly into the void above the bathroom ceiling and through into the wall cavities of the flat. Weeks of this had compromised the wiring. When we finally got an electrician out — after months of nagging the property manager — he opened up the wall, looked at what was inside it, and said, in a flat tone, that he was amazed none of us had been electrocuted. He cut several holes in the walls to disconnect the corroded sections.

The walls smelt damp. We had been inhaling spores for about four months without realising. And one Saturday in early March, Josh and I came home to find that half the wardrobe ceiling had collapsed — water had been pooling above it for who knows how long, and it had finally given up — and that his clothes were lying in a damp heap under the rubble. He did not, fairly, take it well.

We had to move. There was no version of staying. So I scaled up the flat hunt.

The Hunt

I looked first at Clapham, which had become — in the year since we’d moved in — significantly more expensive than we could afford for what we wanted. I looked at Hampstead Heath, which I had loved for years and which Josh refused on the grounds that it was North of the River, a position he held with the immovable conviction of a man who had clearly never properly considered what was being denied. I looked at Balham, which had also gone up. And eventually I found it: a four-bedroom Victorian terrace in Tooting Bec, with two reception rooms, a small back garden, and rent we could just about manage if we got two more flatmates in.

Josh was in Sydney for the back end of the search and most of the negotiation. I had to send him photographs and floorplans. By that point he had stopped trusting me to make a decision, on the basis of nothing in particular except that the relationship’s general gravity was downward. It took Kurt to call him up and tell him that the flat was a good one and that I had done well. He signed the lease remotely. I felt several things about that, none of them good, and most of them I tried to put down.

Tooting

We moved in early May. Bobby — our sleep deprived friend from Ibiza — agreed to take the third bedroom. The fourth bedroom we let, after a couple of weeks of viewings, to a man called Stuart. Stuart was an FCA accountant, slightly older than the rest of us, slightly wary of the whole arrangement, and arrived with a Volvo and a case of cufflinks. Most of the legwork on the Stuart appointment was actually done by Kurt and Josh — by then, decision-making in the household had drifted into a configuration where the two of them functioned as the executive committee and I was a kind of consulted party.

Stuart was perfectly nice. He kept to himself. He cooked his own meals. He had, however, an extremely strong cologne that he wore in concentrations I have not previously encountered in a domestic setting — the smell would precede him into the kitchen by about thirty seconds, hang in the air for several minutes after he had left, and was distinctive enough that I once, walking down the corridor, genuinely wondered if there was a chemical leak. I came to think of it as the Stuart Front. After a few weeks I stopped noticing it. The mind is adaptive.

The flat itself was lovely. Big rooms. Light. The two reception rooms meant that, in theory, you could have one for the household and one as a quieter retreat. In practice, the household drifted into one room — the bigger one, with the better TV — and the quieter one became a kind of unused parlour that nobody could find a use for. Josh, Kurt, and Dani would settle on the big couch in the evenings, the three of them in a steady cluster with Josh and Kurt at the centre of it. Stuart would be in his bedroom with the door shut. Bobby would be at his girlfriend’s. And I would come home from Arcadis at half-eight, find the trio in their settled formation, and go to the gym instead.

A Weekend In Riga

One small reprieve in the middle of all this: a weekend in Riga for Wes’s stag do, but with all of the kiwi crew invited. Wes had been on the Mosel Valley trip the year before, and he was getting married to that Bianca. The Stag weekend was the usual format. Stansted out, two nights, a place called Kiwi Bar where we somehow ended up both nights, a beer-bike tour around the Old Town with several Australians we had not met before that morning. I do not remember much of it in any specificity. I remember being briefly, manageably happy. Which, by May 2017, was its own kind of result.

I came home Sunday night to the same flat, the same sofa formation, and the same low background hum I had been ignoring since November. Forty-eight hours of clean air. Then back into it.

The Chelmsford Weekend

The actual turning point came the weekend after Riga, on a trip to Chelmsford to see Michelle and Adam’s new house.

Josh drove. Josh’s driving — I have written about this before, in the November post, and the dynamic had not improved — involves a great deal of kinetic head-swivelling toward whoever in the car is talking. With Kurt and Dani in the back, Kurt animated, Josh’s head was on a more or less continuous pivot from the road to the rear seat for most of the M25 — mostly aimed at Kurt. We had a near-miss at one of the motorway interchanges. I, with the calm of a person who has been quietly building toward this moment for months, lost my temper. Josh lost his back. By the time we pulled into Chelmsford, the car was in the kind of silence that has weight to it.

I had not seen Michelle in six months. I was determined to enjoy the evening. We dropped the bags, got changed, and went out to a bar. I bought the first round. I was, for the first time in what felt like a long time, in genuinely good spirits — I love Michelle, I had not had a proper drink with her since the previous summer, and I wanted the evening to land. I went up to the bar for the second round, and ordered shots for the table.

Josh came over. Josh told me, in front of the bar staff, that I did not have the kind of money to be buying people shots and that this was now over, no more drinks. I told him, with what I think was reasonable restraint, to leave me alone and stop ruining the evening. He did not. He kept going, in front of the bar, until I was in tears at the bar.

What I want to record, because it is the thing I have been carrying for four months, is what happened next. Michelle came over. She did not come over to comfort me. She came over to tell me that I was being unreasonable, and that I was making a scene, and that I was ruining our first proper catch-up in months. Michelle — one of the people I love most in the world — sided with Josh, in front of me, on a public pavement in Chelmsford, against me. I have not yet found the language for what that felt like. I am still working on it.

We went back to Michelle and Adam’s house. I went to bed. I woke at 5am, jet-lagged into the wrong time zone by my own brain, and Josh — who had also been awake for some time, which I think is its own piece of evidence — chose 5am as the moment to relitigate my drinking and my spending. I took it for about ten minutes. Then I got dressed, packed my overnight bag, and walked out of the house.

He came after me to the front gate. He did not ask me to stay because he wanted me to stay. He asked me to stay so that I would not embarrass him in front of Michelle and Adam by leaving so visibly. I said no, and I walked. The trains were not running that weekend — engineering works on the Greater Anglia line — and I had to take a series of replacement buses across Essex back into London. The journey took five hours. Across that journey I received a series of messages from Michelle, increasingly abusive, about my apparent selfishness, my apparent self-pity and my apparent everything. I read them, and I read them again, and then I put my phone face-down on the seat beside me and I looked out of the window for about an hour.

I got back to the Tooting flat sometime in the late afternoon. The flat was empty. Stuart was at his parents’ for the weekend. Bobby was at his girlfriend’s. Josh, Kurt, and Dani were still in Chelmsford with Michelle and Adam, presumably reconstructing the events of the previous evening to whatever they wanted them to be. Josh and I had ordered an enormous IKEA wardrobe a few days before the trip — the box had arrived on the Friday morning, after we’d left, and was sitting in the hallway. The instructions ran to forty-three pages. I made a cup of tea. I changed into joggers. And I built the wardrobe by myself, room by room, panel by panel, dowel by dowel, over the course of about five hours.

I built that wardrobe with what I am going to describe as a clarifying anger. It is the most useful anger I have ever felt. It cleaned out my head in a way that nothing else had managed.

When Josh, Kurt, and Dani came back to the flat at around 3pm on the Sunday — they had stayed for lunch, apparently, in some unbothered fashion that I will not examine here — they walked into the bedroom, saw the wardrobe, saw me, and said nothing. Not a word. Josh did not thank me for building it. Kurt — Josh’s actual partner in everything by that point — made a small joke about something else entirely. Dani said nothing. They moved on with their evening as if the previous twenty-four hours had not happened.

That was the moment. That was the moment I knew I was leaving. Not in a spiritual revelation way — in a quiet, settled, I do not need to debate this anymore way. The wardrobe was up. The marriage was over. The two facts arrived in the same hour.

The Last Few Weeks

After Chelmsford, I went quiet. Not openly — I did not announce anything. I just stopped trying. I stopped offering to cook the elaborate dinners that nobody had been thanking me for anyway. I stopped getting involved in the household plans. I started spending most of my evenings at the gym or on solo walks back from work with the camera, and I started saving every spare pound I could against the cost of moving out.

Josh noticed eventually. He asked me, one evening in early June, if I was alright. We went for a walk around the block and talked.  It was the most measured conversation we had had in six months. We agreed it was over.

That was the breakup. The actual breakup was a quiet, fairly civil thing, in our own kitchen, on a Tuesday evening, with a glass of wine each and an admission from both sides that the patient had been dead for some time.

What came next — the two months of overlap, the helping-him-move-out, the moment I walked out of the Tooting flat for the last time — I will write about in the next post. It needs its own room. It needs me to be a bit further away from it than I am tonight.

For now: I have a couch in Hammersmith. I have a fortnight of clean air behind me. I have a week ahead of me where I do not have to see Josh or Kurt or Dani or Michelle, and where the only people I owe anything to are Connor and Kenji, who are owed approximately a lifetime of wine.

Tomorrow I am going to Borough Market and buying things I want to cook for myself.

Katie x