Page 14 of Famous Last Words

‘I mean, no,’ Cam says, but the second she speaks these words, she knows that they are lies. Luke is not ordinarily stressed, but hasn’t he been – lately?

Sometime in the spring Luke had got in late from driving Polly around, then hardly slept one night. She’d been aware of him moving around in the bed next to her, in the small hours. After a while, she’d woken again to him watching television on his iPad, headphones in, the blue flickering of the screen interrupting her sleep. The next day, she’d asked him about it, but he’d said only that Polly had taught him how to be an insomniac. ‘Really?’ she’d said. ‘I fall asleep the second I’m horizontal.’

‘Ha, yeah,’ he’d said, and that was that. None of his usual humour.

The truth is that Luke’s been tetchy for a good few weeks, exploding sometimes over undone household admin, nappies, the MOT.

Cam meets Lambert’s eyes and something seems to cross between them. He –Protect and Serve– wants information atany cost. But these things, these intangible but damning things, Cam is not willing to give to him. There are some lines she cannot cross, and here they are.

Because, despite everything –everything– she believes her husband to be good.

Lambert breaks her gaze, looks out of the window. She deflects the question. ‘Nothing beyond the usual stresses of having a baby.’

Lambert’s head swivels around like an owl’s. He doesn’t miss it. ‘So Lukeisstressed?’

‘No!’ Cam says, thinking maybe Luke has had enough of them. Is that it? He’s had some sort of mental health event, his brain broken, betraying him, some sort of split from reality after nine months of propping Cam and her worrisome Google searches up? Of giving her time to herself that she needed? Of cooking every single dinner? God, how selfish she has been, reading a book every night in the garden while her husband carried the load. No other new mother gets that me-time, she thinks viciously about herself.

Or is it sleep deprivation, and everything else?

‘Can I see your phone?’

More invasions of privacy. She numbly unlocks her phone and hands it over, reminded – perversely – of childbirth, where after the first examination, all inhibitions were lost. Look at anything, she thinks despondently. Go through it all. I no longer care.

Lambert scrolls, pen poised in his hand. Cam lets out a sigh. Luke’s jacket is on the chair and she has a bizarre urge to go and fold herself inside it, the zip done right up to the top. She’s had enough of the questioning. She is peopled out, if nothing else, feels the way she does at the end of aworking day, at parties. Sometimes, too, after an evening with her chatty husband.

Lambert is studying her message chain with Luke. They’re the ones from yesterday. They’d gone to a café and texted while Luke sat at the table with Polly and Cam had ordered at the counter. A last outing before Cam went back to work.

Luke: Chicken salad with mayo or similar? Can’t see the menu!

Luke: Unless they have a car quiche? lol

Cam: Let me see what they’ve got.

Cam: I’m afraid no quiche!! I can do chicken salad. Caesar dressing?

Luke: DEFINITELY.

Cam: Coming up. Coffee?

Luke: Obviously.

Car quiche. One of the many monikers they have made up. Perhaps due to their occupations, Cam and Luke are more prone than most couples to adopting their own lexicon. Car quiche refers to a quiche they once ate from a service station that they both deemed the best of their life, only afterwards they couldn’t remember where it was from. They have spent several years trying to track it down.

Cam and Luke have dozens of these words, some of them made up entirely. Slabbidon, an invented word for when you’re feeling jaded and under the weather for no reason. A Ford Focus moment – named after a time Cam worked out a problem with her client’s manuscript in the car: breakthroughs of any kind were thus called this. Ordering the fillet steak,that time a friend of theirs checked they were splitting the bill, and then ordered the most expensive item on the menu, now a sobriquet for chancers everywhere.

And sweepy, perhaps their favourite expression, coined by Luke. ‘I feel a bit woe-is-me,’ he had said one day, not long after they’d first got together and he still worked in journalism. They were eating out somewhere, the sort of place they went to before kids. Cam can’t remember the name, only that they’d sat outside and it had rained unexpectedly, rivulets running off awnings like tassels. They had stayed out there –Oh, fuck it, I’m not moving now, said Luke – the night still warm, their arms and ankles occasionally getting splashed.

‘How so?’ Cam had said.

Luke had gestured with a slim hand holding his drink. ‘A bit down on myself. Captain Pete –’ how he referred to his boss – ‘wants me to try and bring advertisers in for the paper.’

‘And?’

‘He wants me to just cold-call sponsors, like a pathetic little … I don’t know. A chimney sweep, begging people to let me in.’

Cam had laughed so loudly it had echoed on the rainy, empty terrace. ‘Are you now a Victorian? Fancy yourself the new Dickens?’

‘The metaphor stands.’

---