These Things Are Mine

By

John Hargan

He took the kitchen table, which I didn’t mind, because it’s too big really, now there’s just me in the house.

We sat together at that kitchen table just after we’d moved into the house. It was one of the few pieces of furniture we had. It was given to us by his Mum, so it made sense he should have it really.

Oh but the excitement when we sat there, so young and fresh and naive and nervous as we set out on our adventure, before his belly grew and my hair started to go grey. I sat and I looked across the table at him and I knew all I wanted in this world was to be with him, to be his wife.

He took the single bed in the spare room, the bedroom that was Nathan’s when he was growing-up. There’s no one ever stays here now, not since Nathan emigrated. We lost touch with a lot of our friends over the years and all the ones we do have are close enough they wouldn’t need to stay over, not that they would do anyway.

It was that room Nathan grew-up in and that bed he slept in for so many years. It all went by so fast, didn’t seem like five minutes since he was in nappies and then there he was with his first girlfriend. And the nights waiting up for Nathan to come in, not knowing where he was or what he was up to. His father would pace the hall, looking at the clock in the kitchen, face like thunder. Of course, Nathan always came home in the end. Lads look after themselves, don’t they?

He took the clock in the kitchen, the one we put up a year after we moved in. Nothing fancy, just a simple white face with black numbers. There are lots of other clocks in the house, so I can let one go.

It’s the clock I used to look at when he was late from work. He’d call and tell me he was staying late at the office and I believed him.

Well, he was staying late at the office. I just didn’t know he wasn’t working. He was busy with some young management trainee called Julie, who’d joined the company straight out of university. They always let it slip somehow. They think they’re being clever and devious and secretive and getting away with it but the truth is you know; in some small and secret place at the back of your mind, you know.

He started letting slip about how he was mentoring this new trainee and how she found his experience and his self-assured nature some helpful. He even told me her name and the way he said it, I just knew.

He’s taken the mirror that used to hang in the hallway. I never liked it anyway and there are plenty of other mirrors in the house.

It’s the one I looked in after he’d stood in that hallway and told me he was leaving me - for her, of course. I looked long and hard at my face in that mirror after he’d gone, seeing every line, every wrinkle, every crease in my face.

He told me he wanted one last grand passion, as he called it, one final roar of youth before he slipped from middle age into old age.

Of course, he could have had that with me. He could have given me the attention, poured all his passion into me. Nathan was gone by then and we had the house to ourselves once more. We could have found a new love, not rekindled the old one, for that changes with time, to such a degree you can never truly recapture it. But we could have developed something new, given a name to this new love that evolves with time, one based on getting to know someone so intimately you can know what they are thinking. That kind of closeness is something worth celebrating, even if it lacks some of the feral passion of the early years.

She made him feel young, he said, wild and free and energised, as if he had a new lease of life. I could not compete with that and my pride would not allow me to. At least, that’s what I told myself, though in truth, I think I knew I might lose any competition with her and that would be too much to bear.

I hate to admit this but I think if he had not told me, I might have never mentioned his fling and just allowed it to runs its course.

He took the couch from the living room, which is fine, as I rarely sit in there anyway and there’s never enough people in the house these days to warrant keeping it really.

It’s the same couch he sat on when he came back, six months later, all glassy eyed and desperate, wailing he had made a terrible mistake. She was too young, too impulsive, too much for him.

Part of me wanted to wrap him up in my arms and tell him I would never let anything hurt him again. Another part of me hated her for doing this to him, for he was, in his way, a decent man, a good father and he had, until six months ago, been a good husband to me. And yet there was - in some small part of my heart that was so dark I dare not look into it fully for fear of what I might see - some satisfaction in listening to his story of the failure of this affair.

To listen to him complain of his humiliation at work, of a lifetime’s service to a company forgotten as he was reduced to the laughing stock of the office, the foolish older man who thought he might really be attractive to some pretty young girl. That part of my heart that was cold and dark against him savoured every word, devoured every detail, and felt strong in his weakness and his misery. When he asked to stay the night at least and I told him he could not, for I had friends coming over that night, there was some delicious sense of revenge at the way the small flicker of hope that had been in his eyes dimmed and then died. He could never come back here, never come back to me. He knew that then.

Of course, no one was coming over. But making him think someone was made me feel better than I had in the six months he had been gone.

He took some of the furniture in the house today, took it to his new home, a small flat not too far from here.

He took the furniture but he could not take the memories, for these things, these things are mine.