Things we can be sure are of no importance
Katy McAulay
I am twenty-six and I have bought my first home; a one bed flat just big enough for two.
We are new to this. Bed, bookcase, bits and bobs cobbled together from previous residencies we rented solo make do for the most part and we are just fine.
The living room is lacking. Just an old television, a fireplace we attach fairy lights to, and one sofa. It's really an armchair. Blue once, it can become a credible bed for one when its innards are wrestled with, but in sofa mode: too small. He is six-two. In bed, arms, legs and heads cradle in the appropriate places and his heartbeat sings me to sleep. On this sofa elbows and knees surface. Necks are cricked as a new geometry is sought.
The responsibility of this purchase is more squarely mine than his. I feel it. Though we do not refer to it in these terms, it is my money and it is my flat, and yet home for the both of us. When he can, he'll put in for half of it, or we'll buy another together, but for now, that's the way it's worked out, and we are just fine.
We work different schedules. One day in our allocation of Christmas holidays has to be earmarked for the purpose. I hire a car to make the sweep around DFS speedier.
Before we leave we measure up. We snake the tape around doorways - living room and front - making sure we can accommodate our new arrival and we decide from the brochure that the cheapest one will be just fine.
It's a drizzly Saturday - one of the depressed days between Christmas and New Year. On the shop front a plastic banner screams BETTER THAN HALF PRICE SALE! We are there for opening time; he wants to go ten pin bowling in the afternoon.
There is free champagne at the door. Salesmen ooze out of every crevice. We breeze past offers of help, seeking out the deal we have planned to buy into.
It's girly. The aubergine colour from the picture is more pink in real life. It's freakishly narrow too, like a church pew, or pigeon perch. We circulate. The second cheapest option is only available in light grey. It looks like office furniture. The floor is becoming crowded. A glass of bubbly might make this easier, but I'm driving.
We drift. He is distracted by a huge leather thing that could swallow me up, and then we consider a red one for a while. It's double the price of the chair we came for, but it's comfortable at least. The salesmen sniff victory.
We get to the filling in forms stage and I can't do it. The numbers aren't making sense. What happens if it won't fit in the front door? We've got a very narrow front door, I remind him. We've been in here three hours, he tells me.
I need more time. A tape measure. Some guts.
Should we try Ikea?
His face falls but he trails obediently across the dripping car park and folds himself into the Kia Picante we have rented. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. Embarrassment is swimming in my eyes.
At Ikea the options crowd in. Measurements, prices, colours, opportunity cost. This one is £75 more but the covers are washable. There are no windows in this place but I can sense the dusk gathering outside, waiting to rush at us. Do we have time to nip back to DFS? Look at the red one again - make sure? We trudge to our vehicle again, a metre's worth of air between us. His cheeks are red from the cold. I want to rest my face against them, cool my own burning cheeks with his, but I don't.
Inside the doorway of DFS I consider a new option. Was this one here earlier? I don't remember it. He chooses a recliner and tips himself back, showing me the soles of his boots. The champagne has run out. We are both weak with hunger. It will cost an extra £114 to have the red one sprayed with some stuff to stop it staining if we spill. When we spill.
We consider the pink one again. He scuffs his boot against the floor and says quietly, we won't make it to bowling then?
I'm out in the dark car park and scrabbling the key in the lock and I heave the seatbelt across me and turn the headlights on and I would drive the thing into the back of the McDonald's ahead of me if only it wasn't a hire car so instead I switch the engine off and open my mouth and begin to scream. He stares at me in astonishment as I yell and yell, unable to hold it in because I don't want to spend time in which I am not working looking at sofas and I don't want to care whether something will match with my curtains and I didn't think something so ridiculous could be so difficult and I don't understand when I stopped being a teenager.
When I am finished we are both quiet. It's pouring; the windscreen and window on my side opaque with steam. I can't look at him. In the tiny space we inhabit, he is miles away.
And so I turn the key and the engine starts again and I switch the demister on and swipe my sleeve across the windscreen and then I manoeuvre us carefully away.
On the motorway back to Glasgow he turns on the radio and inserts one of his Tom Waits tapes into the deck.
I will love you forever, Tom sings. He winds down the window and turfs the DFS brochure out into the rainy dark and then he reaches over and gently unpeels one of my hands from the wheel.
