The last Sunday

Fiction, about two adults over 18. This is not the version where it quietly dies on both sides. This is the version where one of you is still holding it, and you have to take it out of their hands.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

Ben would have carried on. That is the difficult part and I want it at the top rather than buried, because everything I read about arrangements ending assumed a mutual drifting, and mine was not mutual. He would have carried on tomorrow. He would carry on now, if I said the word, and I am not going to say it.

Three years. My idea, originally, and that matters.

I asked him for it in the second year of us. He had never thought about any of this in his life and he did not pretend otherwise.

What he did was go away and learn it, in the plodding thorough way he does everything, and by about month eight he was better at it than I had any right to expect.

He knew what I looked like when I had gone quiet in the good way and what I looked like when I had gone quiet in the other way. He kept a note on his phone of things I had said afterwards, which I found by accident and have never mentioned.

A man taught himself a skill because I asked him to. Bear that in mind for the rest of this.

What changed was not boredom. I have read the pieces about it going flat, about the whole thing turning into a handshake, and that is not what happened to me.

What happened to me was dread.

Sunday would arrive and something in my chest would go tight at about four in the afternoon, and I would find myself hoping his sister would ring, and I could not have told you what I was dreading.

There was no content to it. It was not the pain, which I still wanted in the abstract on a Wednesday. It was not him. It was the arriving of it, the fixedness, the fact that it was going to happen because it was Sunday and it was always going to happen because it was always Sunday.

I tried to fix it before I tried to end it, which I think is to my credit, though I have wondered since whether it was to his cost.

We went fortnightly. Better for three weeks, then the same. We changed what we used. We changed the room, which sounds like nothing and was surprisingly effective for about a month. I asked him to be harsher and then, six weeks later, to be gentler, and he did both without a word of complaint, and I could see him working, and that made it worse.

In February we took a month off. It was framed as a break for my back, which was half true.

The first Sunday of that month I felt lighter than I had felt in a year.

That was the information. I sat on the end of the bed at six o'clock on an ordinary February Sunday feeling as though somebody had lifted something off my ribs, and I knew, in the way you know a bank balance, that I was not going back to it.

I then spent five weeks not telling him. I would like to say I was choosing my moment. I was not. I was going through the alternatives, which were: let it fade and blame work, which he would have accepted and quietly understood, and which would have been the cruellest of the three. Tell him it was my back, permanently, and let him believe a medical fiction for the rest of our lives. Or say it.

I said it on a Sunday, at the usual time, in ordinary clothes, which was deliberate. It seemed wrong to do it on a Tuesday as though it were an administrative matter, and worse to do it in the middle of anything.

He knew from my face before I got a sentence out.

I said that I did not want to do it any more. Not less of it, not differently. Not at all, and not for a reason I could give him.

He said, "All right." Then, after a while, "Was it something I did."

And that is the question, is it not. That is the one I had been rehearsing for five weeks and I still got it wrong the first time, because I said something about it not being anybody's fault, which is not an answer, it is a form of words. He asked again in a different way about ten minutes later. He asked a third time, quietly, later that evening, when we were washing up.

Three times. A calm, reasonable man who had done nothing wrong, checking three times whether he was the reason, because a person who is stopped will always go looking for a cause and if you do not give them one they will build one.

So the third time I stopped being delicate and said: no. Nothing. Not one thing. You were good at it, you were careful with me, and it is not about you, and I am aware that is unbearable to be told.

Then he said the thing that finished me off, which was: "Thank you for telling me rather than going off me."

I would have preferred anger. I am fairly sure that is true, and fairly sure it is a shabby thing to want. Anger would have been an exchange. Gratitude just sat there on the draining board between us.

We did the practical part the same evening, because leaving it would have meant a week of it hanging about the house.

He said out loud that the rules were cancelled, all of them, and named the two that had mattered most, which was more than I would have thought to do. There was one outstanding thing from the week before that we had not got to. He wrote it off in a sentence. He did not make a ceremony of it and he did not make nothing of it.

I offered to sort out the things in the cupboard. He said leave them, and I left them, and they are still there. He bought most of them. Two of them he made, badly, in the shed, in the first year, when he was working out what he was doing.

I do not know why he wants them there and I have decided it is not my business to ask.

He was flat for about a fortnight. Not sulking. Flat, in the way you are when something has been taken away and you are being extremely good about it.

I was worse, and I had less right to be, and there is nowhere to put guilt of that kind because there was no wrong done. We got through it, and we are all right, and it is nine months now and the ordinary parts of us have closed back over the gap.

One more thing, and it is the reason I have written any of this down.

I did not say maybe one day. I wanted to, several times, particularly in that fortnight when he was being flat and kind and I would have paid money to make him feel better. It would have been a comfort to both of us and it would have been a lie with a fuse in it, because he would have waited. He is exactly the sort of man who would have waited, quietly, for a year, checking.

So I ended it properly, with no door left open, and that is the kindest thing I have ever done for him and it did not feel remotely kind at the time.