The White Sofa

Nick and I had been together for one year too long. We should have called it quits at six months, shook hands, said, “well, dear, I’ve had an interesting time. Good luck with the move and the new job, and lets just put this down to experience.” Instead my eighteen year old self went with him.

A year later we were visiting his parents. I got on grandly with his Dad but his Mother had always been that little bit cagey. I don’t think it was purely to do with me; she was the same with all her children. I just didn’t like it - kindness and smiles felt like they came with ulterior motives. The last two “mother in-laws” had doted on me. The second one had warned her son, “Watch what you’re eating. You’ll get fat and Sophia’ll leave you.” She should have warned him about jealously being an unattractive feature in a man, for in the end that was our demise.

At Nick’s parents we came home from town one evening to find his Mother enrobed in a white dressing gown, legs outstretched, on the new white, leather sofa that had been delivered while we were out. “Oh, very nice,” I lied, wanting to take a scissors to the atrocity that absorbed all attention in such a small living room, and would have been better suited to a Soho strip-club or an elaborate Amsterdam brothel. We said goodnight from the doorway and went to bed.

The next morning we made our way downstairs to an empty house. In the kitchen Nick said, “If you’re going in the living-room don’t sit on the sofa. My Mum doesn’t want it marked.”

“I’m sorry?”

“She said we can’t sit on it wearing jeans. They’ll scratch it.”

Chuckling, I said, “You’re telling me that no one can sit on that sofa wearing the most commonly worn item of clothing?”

His head whipped round and his eyes became small. “Are you taking the piss out of my Mum?”

I failed to take his sternness seriously and laughed, “Well, you have to admit it’s pretty funny.”

Sadly he couldn’t see the joke. “You disrespectful bitch. How dare you insult my family.”

Taken aback I gasped, eyes unblinking, suppressing spluttered laughter in his face. The boy was deadly serious and making the joke worse - the joke he was a mummy’s boy, the joke I was trailing behind on a list of what was important to him, the joke that I was still with him.

On the bus into town we sat in silence and thoughts of making the first scuff on that vomit inducing sofa pleased my aching heart and head.