Anxious People(48)

“You said you were going to pay the money back plus interest. Fixed or variable interest?”

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“There’s a hell of a difference,” Roger said helpfully.

As if the bank robber didn’t already have enough to worry about.



* * *




Meanwhile Julia emerged from the bathroom. She glared instinctively at Ro, who was standing in the living room.

“Where’s Anna-Lena?”

Ro’s face looked as uncomprehending as when she had found out that there was a right and a wrong way to put a plate in the dishwasher.

“I think she went into the closet.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t think to go after her to see how she was? She’s just been yelled at by that emotionally challenged old fart of a husband even though she does everything for his sake, and you didn’t even go after her? She could be facing a divorce now, and you left her alone? How could you be so insensitive?”

Ro curled her tongue behind her teeth.

“Just so I… don’t misunderstand me here. But are we talking about Anna-Lena or are we talking about… you? I mean, have I done something else that’s upset you, and you’re pretending to be upset about this so that I understand that…”

“Sometimes you really don’t understand anything, do you?” Julia muttered, and walked off toward the closet.

“I just mean that sometimes it isn’t what you say you’re upset about that you’re upset about! And I’d just like to know if I’m insensitive because I’m insensitive, or…,” Ro called after her, but Julia responded with the body language she usually reserved for communicating with angry men in German cars. Ro went into the living room, picked a lime from the bowl, and started to eat it out of nervousness, rind and all. But Zara was standing at the window and Ro was a bit scared of her, because all smart people are, so she went out into the hall instead.

There the bank robber and Roger were sitting at either end of a bench. Throughout her marriage Ro had always been told that she needed to “understand people’s boundaries!” but hadn’t quite understood them yet, so she squidged herself in between them on the bench. “Squidged” might not be a real word, but that’s what Ro’s dad calls it. He suffers from inadequate boundary perception as well. And Ro’s dad has taught her all she knows, for good and ill.

The bank robber glanced awkwardly at her from one end, Roger glanced irritably at her from the other, both of them now squidged so far that they each had one buttock hanging off the end of the bench.

“Lime?” Ro offered. They shook their heads. Ro looked apologetically at Roger and added: “Sorry my wife called you an emotionally challenged old fart of a husband earlier.”

“What did she call me?”

“Maybe you didn’t hear? In that case it was nothing.”

“What does that mean? What the hell is ‘emotionally challenged’?”

“Don’t take it personally, because most people don’t really understand Jules’s insults, she just says them in a way that makes people understand that they’re not nice. It’s quite a talent. And I’m sure that you and Anna-Lena aren’t heading for divorce.”

Roger’s eyes opened so wide that they ended up bigger than his ears: “Who said anything about divorce?”

The rind of the lime was making Ro cough. Somewhere inside the part of the brain that controls logic and rational thinking, a thousand tiny nerve endings were jumping up and down and shouting Stop talking now. Even so, Ro heard herself say: “No one, no one’s said anything about divorce! Look, I’m sure it will all work out. But if it doesn’t work out, it’s actually really romantic when older couples get divorced. It always makes me happy, because it’s so great when pensioners still think they’re going to find someone new to fall in love with.”

Roger folded his arms. His mouth barely opened when he said: “Thanks for that, you’re a real tonic. You’re like a self-help book, only in reverse.”

The nerve impulses in Ro’s brain finally got control of her tongue, so she nodded, swallowed hard, and apologized: “Sorry. I talk too much. Jules is always saying that. She says I’m so positive that it makes people depressed. That I always think the glass is half full when there’s just enough to drown yourself in, and—”

“I can’t think how she got that idea,” Roger snorted.

Ro replied dejectedly: “Well, she used to say that, that I was too positive. Since she got pregnant everything’s become so serious, because parents are always serious and I suppose we’re trying to fit in. Sometimes I don’t think I’m ready for the responsibility—I mean, I think my phone is asking too much of me when it wants me to install an update, and I find myself yelling: ‘You’re suffocating me.’ You can’t shout that at a child. And children have to be updated all the time, because they can kill themselves just crossing the street or eating a peanut! I’ve mislaid my phone three times already today, I don’t know if I’m ready for a human being.”

The bank robber looked up sympathetically: “How pregnant is she? Julia?”

Ro lit up at once.