Page 42 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

Jess pulls her robe around her and hurriedly makes her way out of the room. I stand, dithering, not sure whether to go make sure she’s okay or just give her some space. Everyone else is standing around like they’re at the site of a road traffic accident, wrapped in their robes with ashen expressions on their faces. I look to Hibiscus, as if she’s going to tell me what to do. Then I notice Suze in the corner of the room giving me a hard stare and looking at me like I’m a complete fucking idiot, which is probably a fair assessment.

‘I’m going to, uh, just go and check that Jess is okay,’ I say.

I knock, gently, on the bedroom door. ‘Jess? Are you there?’

There’s no response. I wait a couple of minutes, agonising about whether to go straight in, or leave her alone. Eventually I knock again and then gently push the door open.

‘Jessica? Can I come in?’

‘Sure,’ she answers. When I get inside, she’s sitting on the bed wrapped in a towel, clearly having just got out the shower. She looks both much older than usual, and somehow like a teenage girl. Her face is still swollen from crying, her eyes red, beads of tears on her eyelashes.

‘What happened?’ I ask.

She looks confused. ‘It was the pressure point?’

‘Okay. Sure. But what really happened?’

‘What do you mean? Hibiscus said that it might prompt an emotional release, and it did.’

‘Okay. But you don’t really believe that, right?’

‘Why would I not believe that? It happened.’

I’ve got to believe that she’s being deliberately obtuse at this point. ‘Because pressure points are bollocks?’

She gets up, picks up a hairbrush and starts pulling her hair into a severe bun with the parting in the middle. ‘They’re not bollocks, there’s plenty of research around alternative medicine, including massage and acupressure; it’s even offered on the NHS for some illnesses.’

‘I don’t think this is the moment to debate the efficiency of alternative medicine.’

‘You’re only saying that because you’re in the wrong.’

‘I’m not in the wrong, I just don’t want to have you crying for another half an hour.’

That was unkind. I don’t like that I said it. I’m frustrated and I feel like a complete idiot for not knowing how to fix this, which is a really illogical reason to start making things worse.

‘The idea was to cry,’ she reminds me. ‘That was the point of the exercise.’

‘Right, so you were crying because you’d been told you were supposed to.’

‘Or maybe I was crying because I’ve got a lot of shit going on in my life which I don’t have time to deal with on a day-to-day basis, and my body is holding a lot of stress chemicals and hormones, and the massage just happened to release them. I suppose once I started crying, it was an outlet and I cried about everything else which is hurting me and making me miserable.’

‘Why does it have to be the massage? Why can’t it just be all that stuff about your feelings?’

‘Do you realise how insane it is that you just heard me saying that I’m miserable and that I’ve got all these unreleased feelings, and the only part that you picked up on was the bit about the fuckingmassage?’

Jesus. She’s right.

She starts getting changed, pulling on a white T-shirt and jeans.

‘You just want to go and pretend everything is fine right now?’ I ask, surprised.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Why?’

‘Could you perhaps hazard a guess as to why I want to go downstairs and finish the evening properly?’

I want to explain that whatever the reason, pretending that everything is great all the time, to our friends and the internet and our management and every single stranger on the street, is exhausting. But I don’t have the words. So instead, I shrug. ‘For “the brand”.’

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