1.

Small kitchens are for lovers. His wife had said as much during an open house, back when they were a couple on the cusp of shedding their newly-wed status, touring airless rooms. She said it again, a few days after they closed on a place, as they tested paint samples on the walls.

Years later, the kitchen feels big; terribly big and wide and wall-less. And his wife, who he is so accustomed to saying something slick in the mornings, says nothing. She leans against the counter, holding her mug loose — as if the coffee couldn’t scald her.

Normally, she’s got jokes. Plenty of them. Bad ones. Like: here’s to bad news! Or, let’s hope it’s bad news today. Or, on days when she’s feeling acutely thespian, she’ll lay her toast to one side, turn her cheek and say: hit me, hit me with your bad news. 

His job is the punchline. This idea, stale as it is, that bad news is a commodity for a local reporter. The kind who writes for the type of rag that traffics in misfortune; a paper not small enough to idle in the community blues, but not sizable enough either for international affairs or, say, celebrity gall. 

He knows she doesn’t mean anything by it. She knows he doesn’t care. He’s always said that he leaves his stories to the world beyond their doormat. He doesn’t even collect his bylines. What they have is a morning ritual, since rituals are for lovers too, but today she doesn’t bite. She places her mug in the sink, adjusts the top of her skirt, taps her stomach and lays her hands on the counter like she doesn’t know what to do with them. There’s no tie to adjust, no lapels to smooth. Today everything is stilted: the air, the kiss he plants on her cheek and even his hesitation when she says “Nothing good will come of this visit.” 

“Let’s see where it lands,” he says.

On the motorway, he handles the steering like he is fifteen and not months shy of fifty, and it is irritating to drive like this, as if experience doesn’t count for anything, as though time doesn’t make us better people. He’s afraid to test the speed limit with these nerves, and so it takes a while before London’s greystones and poster boards fall away — and there’s the conurbation, chavland, the cockney overspill, the dense Surrey brush, the pungent smell of meadow. He stops paying attention to the road signs. His sense of direction guided less so by the navigation system pinned above the cigarette lighter, than by a rapid heartbeat and the research gathered within the folder on the dashboard.

Let’s see where it lands.