It takes courage, brinkmanship and a certain degree of recklessness, not just with your own heart, but with someone else’s too. Someone else whose whole existence once meant more to you than your own ever did.

And if you’ve ever sat across the kitchen table from the person you’re supposed to be living happily ever after with and wondered where in hell the spark went…well, then you’ll know exactly what I’m going through right now.

I’m looking silently across the breakfast table at Dan and trying to pinpoint when exactly we first became such a disconnected couple. And I just don’t get it. When did we first start swapping ‘I’ for ‘we’? Dan and I used to be able to have unspoken conversations together. We used to finish each other’s sentences. We used to finish each other’s food. For God’s sake, there was a time when we’d even skip breakfast altogether in favour of an extra hour, tangled up together in bed, making love in a daze of exhausted pleasure.

Now I’m wondering if I sat here dressed like Lady Gaga, singing all the words and doing all the moves from the ‘Telephone’ video, might he even look up from his
Times
’ Sudoku puzzle? Because the sad truth is this: like wearing nappies as a baby, or the lost City of Atlantis…any love life we once shared is little more than a hazy memory now, as we sleep side by side, like stone figures on a tomb.

The thing about this house though, is that avoidance is generally considered to be a good thing. A sign of deep maturity and awareness. We both know that we’re in a minefield and have been for the longest time; so on the very rare occasions when we find ourselves alone together, we sidestep any embarrassment by just tiptoeing carefully around each other. On the principle that if you don’t acknowledge or talk about a thing then it’ll just quietly go away all by itself.

Trouble is that all this living in denial is physically starting to give me heartburn and I honestly think I’ll scream if I don’t get to articulate what’s going on inside my head. Which is that the current state of our marriage is a steady beep emerging from a heart monitor showing a clear, straight line.

We have officially flatlined.

I take a sip of tea and unconsciously stare over at Dan, my mind in whirling, agonising turmoil but he’s too engrossed in the paper to even notice.

Honest to God, if you were to look at us from the outside, having a civilised breakfast, utterly comfortable in silence, you’d swear our lives were perfect. Dan and Annie, Annie and Dan. Even our names go together. We’ve been together for almost half of our lives, which I know makes us sound like one of those silver-haired, middle-aged couples with
porcelain veneers that you’d see in an ad for stair lifts, and yet we’re not. Both of us are only twenty eight. But I can barely remember back to a time when we
weren’t
a couple.

At fifteen, he was my first boyfriend, I was his first girlfriend, and now, at an age when most of our old pals from our old life in the city are just beginning to think of settling down and getting married, here’s me and Dan like the Mount Rushmore of couples; utterly unchanged from the outside, even after all these years.

Dan reaches out for another slice of toast, but then his tanned, handsome face crinkles with worry as he catches my eye.

‘All right, love?’

I nod back, but stay firmly focused on the Pop-Tart in front of me.

There’s so much that I need to say to him and I haven’t the first clue where to start.

I want to tell him that even though the day has barely started, I already know exactly how it’ll pan out. It’ll be virtually identical to yesterday and the day before and the day before that. I’ll spend the morning working at a job that I don’t particularly like for next to no money, just to get me out of this house but most importantly of all, to keep myself busy. Because busy is always good. Busy means less time to think.

And on the way there, I’ll probably meet one of our neighbours, Bridie McCoy, who’ll chat to me in minute detail about that most gripping and urgent of subjects – her bunions. Like she always does. Then, when I get to the local book shop where I’ve got a part-time job, my boss will joshingly ask me the same question that she always does, day in, day out. Now that I’m pushing thirty,
and now that Dan and I have moved from the city into his family’s big country house, when exactly are we planning to start a family? And I will do what I always do: an adroit subject change by asking her whether she fancies Jaffa Cakes or HobNobs with her mug of tea this morning. Never fails me.

Then by the time I get back home, Dan’s mother will have dropped in, letting herself in with her own door key like she always does. She’ll comb through room after room, lecturing me on how the good table in the dining room needs to be polished daily, or else, my particular favourite, the correct way to clean out the Aga in the kitchen. And I will smile through gritted teeth and remind myself that The Moorings is really her house, not mine, so, in fairness to her, she’s entitled.

Then later on in the afternoon, Lisa Ledbetter will make an appearance to the soundtrack of thunderclaps and a cacophonous minor chord being bashed out on an organ in my head. She’ll charge in and do what she always does: sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee while moaning about her husband’s recent redundancy. Like this was a state of events he’d brought about on purpose with the sole intention of annoying her. Lisa, by the way, is a local gal and old friend of Dan’s from when they were kids growing up together. We’re roughly the same age and its received wisdom around here that she and I are each other’s greatest pals.

But let me dispel that notion right now and tell you that any real friendship between us is a complete and utter myth. Lisa, you see, is a funny combination of needy, vulnerable and demanding; one of those people who’s fully prepared to allow everyone around her to do everything for her.
Babysitting, cooking meals for her and her kids; you name it. From time to time, she even lets Dan help out with her household bills. And has absolutely no problem doing this, either.

So I’ll sit and listen and sympathise and nod my head at appropriate moments, like I always do. All while mentally steeling myself not to allow her to suck all the life and energy out of me, like she always does. If people can be divided into either drains or radiators, then Lisa is most definitely a drain. So much so that I’ve silently nicknamed her The Countess Dracula.

Later on Jules, Dan’s flaky younger sister, will breeze in, raid the fridge and then make a little cockpit for herself around the TV, surrounded by beer, nachos and last night’s leftovers. She’s just dropped out of college and doesn’t seem particularly bothered about finding something else to do, like, God forbid, looking for an actual job or anything. But she’s all the time in the world to flake out in our living room, watching all the afternoon soaps, back to back. Exactly like a lodger, except one that doesn’t pay any rent.

Don’t get me wrong though, this will actually be the brightest part of my day, mainly because I like Jules. She’s by far my favourite person round here. Otherwise I wouldn’t have any real friends here at all, just people who don’t hate me. Jules is dippy and quirky and fun to be around, like she’s got too much personality for one person yet not quite enough for two.

So you get my drift. Dan’s family and friends just come and go as and when it suits them.

Like weather. Or bloat.

But it’s all part of the joys of small town country life, it seems. And here, in the tiny Waterford village of Stickens
(its real name, look it up if you don’t believe me…makes me feel marginally less bad about calling it ‘The Sticks’), privacy is an utterly unheard of concept. Honestly, if I as much as sneeze leaving the house one morning, by lunchtime at least three well-intentioned locals would have called to ask how my terrible bout of swine flu was.

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