The card aisle in the big Tesco at Handforth is arranged by occasion, and Graham has known exactly where to stand in it since about 2008. Past the birthdays, past the new babies, past the sympathy ones nobody lingers at. Anniversary cards are at the far end near the wrapping paper, and there are two useful sorts: the ones with a photograph of a beach on them, and the ones with a joke about how long you’ve put up with each other. He buys the beach.
He’s 51, a quantity surveyor, married nineteen years last Thursday. Alison had a late meeting so he did the shop on his own, which is how he came to be standing there at ten past eight on a Wednesday evening with a trolley containing potatoes, cat food and a card he’d already decided on before he left the house.
He got as far as the car park before he opened it and wrote in it, balanced on the steering wheel, because doing it at home means hiding it, and hiding things in your own kitchen is more effort than it sounds. He wrote her name. Then he wrote: love always, Graham.
And he stopped. Because he could see, quite clearly, that he had written those three words in nineteen consecutive cards. Not similar words. The same ones. He couldn’t remember choosing them the first time, and he certainly hadn’t chosen them since. Somewhere in the loft there’s a box of them, in Alison’s handwriting on the outside — CARDS, 2007 onwards — and if you opened it and fanned them out you’d get the same sentence nineteen times in the same biro-ish scrawl, getting slightly shakier as the years went on.
He sat in the car for a while. Not upset, exactly. Just caught out by himself.
Here’s the thing he’d have told you, if you’d asked him that morning: the marriage is fine. And he’d have meant it. Nobody shouts in that house. Alison is, by his own account, a genuinely good person who has never once let him down, who nursed his mother through the last eight months of her life without being asked, who still makes him laugh at the news. They have a decent life in a decent semi with a decent mortgage nearly paid off. He wasn’t sitting in that car cataloguing grievances, because he doesn’t have any.
What he had instead was a card he couldn’t finish. He tried. He put the pen back down to add something — anything — about the year they’d just had, and found he couldn’t think of a single thing that had happened between the two of them that hadn’t also happened to the house, the dog, or their son’s GCSEs. Nineteen years of a shared life and no shared story. He drove home, gave her the card on Thursday morning with a cup of tea, and she said it was lovely, and it was.
Graham messaged us in the spring, about four months after he’d joined. He didn’t join because of the card. He joined because of what he did afterwards, which was nothing, for eleven weeks, while the thought sat in him like a stone in a shoe.
What he wanted, he said, wasn’t drama and wasn’t really even sex, although he was honest enough not to pretend that had nothing to do with it. What he wanted was to be asked a question he’d have to think about before answering. He’d been running on autopilot so long that he’d forgotten he had opinions — that there were books he’d like to argue about, that he used to have views on things that weren’t planning permission.
He met Kath in a pub near Alderley Edge on a Thursday lunchtime, and she asked him what he’d wanted to be at twenty-two. He said he had to sit and think about it for a good few seconds, and that the sitting and thinking was the best part of his year.
That’s the bit people outside this world never quite believe. They assume the moment of no return is a hotel corridor, or a text message, or a hand on a knee. Far more often it’s smaller and stranger than that. It’s a man in a Tesco car park with a pen in his hand, discovering that he ran out of things to say to his wife somewhere around 2013 and neither of them noticed, because nothing went wrong. Nothing ever goes wrong in these marriages. That’s what makes them so hard to leave and so quietly unbearable to stay in.
Graham still buys the beach card. He still writes the three words, and he still means them, which is a thing plenty of our members will recognise and plenty of people outside will refuse to. But he doesn’t hand it over on autopilot any more, and he’s stopped pretending to himself that it’s the whole of him.
If you’ve read this and thought about a card of your own, you already know where to find illicitencounters.com.
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