I Owe You One - Sophie Kinsella Page 0,150

message from Miss Blake.” He raises his eyebrows.

“I know.” By now I’m combing detangler through Anna’s hair with my fingers, and I mouth over her head: Hilarious.

Miss Blake is our headmistress and her message was in Anna’s home message book. It was a typed memo to all parents, asking them please NOT to discuss or gossip at the school gate about a certain incident, which had absolutely NO FOUNDATION.

I had no idea what she was talking about, so I immediately emailed round the other parents, and apparently Miss Christy, who teaches the top year, was seen googling one of the dads on the classroom computer, not realizing it was linked to the whiteboard.

“Can I have the—”

Dan hands me the shower attachment and I blast Anna’s head with warm water, while she giggles and yells, “It’s raining!”

Were we always so psychic? So in tune with each other? I’m not sure we were. I think we changed after we had the girls. When you have baby twins, you’re in the trenches together. You’re feeding, changing, soothing, passing babies back and forth in rotation, round the clock. You hone your routines. You don’t waste words. When I was breastfeeding Anna and Tessa and too tired to even talk, Dan could pretty much tell just from my expression which of the following I meant:

Could I have some more water, please? Six pints should do.

And a couple of Galaxy bars? Just shove them into my open mouth; I’ll suck them in.

Could you please change the TV channel? My hands are full of baby and I’ve watched thirteen straight hours of Jeremy Kyle.

God, I’m exhausted. Have I said that more than five hundred times today?

I mean, do you realize the levels of exhaustion I’m talking? My bones have collapsed inside my body, that’s how tired I am. My kidneys are slumped against my liver, weeping gently.

Ow, my nipple. Ow. Ouch.

Owwwwww.

I know. It’s natural. Beautiful. Whatever.

Let’s not have any more after this, OK?

Did you get that? Are you paying attention, Dan? NO MORE BABIES, EVER.

“Argh!” My reminiscing comes to an end as Tessa swooshes the water so hard out of the bath, I’m drenched.

“Right!” snaps Dan. “That’s it. Get out of the bath, both of you.”

At once, both girls start wailing. Wailing happens a lot in our house. Tessa is wailing because she didn’t mean to splash me so hard. Anna is wailing because she always wails when Tessa does. They’re both wailing at Dan’s raised voice. And, of course, they’re both wailing because they’re exhausted, though they’d never admit it.

“My sti-icker,” says Tessa in choked tones, because she always brings every calamity she can think of into the frame. “My sti-i-i-i-cker bro-oke. And I hurt my thu-u-umb.”

“We’ll take it to the sticker hospital, remember?” I say soothingly as I wrap her in a towel. “And I’ll kiss your thumb better.”

“Can I h-h-h-have an ice lolly?” Her eyes slide up to me, spotting an opportunity.

You have to admire her chutzpah. I turn away to hide a giggle and say over my shoulder, “Not right now. Maybe tomorrow.”

While Dan takes over story duty, I go to change out of my wet clothes. I dry myself off—then find myself moving over to our mirror and staring at my naked body.

Sixty-eight years. What will I look like in sixty-eight years’ time?

Cautiously, I press the skin together on my thigh until it’s all wrinkled up. Oh God. Those wrinkles are my future. Except they’ll be all over my body. I’ll have wrinkly thighs and wrinkly boobs and…I don’t know…a wrinkly scalp. I release my wrinkles and survey myself again. Should I start more of a beauty regimen? Like exfoliation, maybe. But, then, how’s my skin going to last me till the age of 102? Shouldn’t I be building up layers, not scrubbing them away?

How do you keep your looks for a hundred years, anyway? Why aren’t they telling us this in the magazines?

“OK, they’re settled. I’m going for a run.” As Dan comes in, he’s already peeling off his shirt, but he stops when he sees me standing naked in front of the mirror.

“Mmm,” he says, his eyes gleaming. He throws his shirt on the bed, comes over, and puts his hands around my waist.

There he is in the mirror. My handsome, youthful husband. But what’s he going to look like in sixty-eight years’ time? I have a sudden dismaying image of Dan all elderly and wizened, batting at me with a stick and yelling, “Humbug, woman, humbug!”

Which is ridiculous. He’ll be old. Not Ebenezer Scrooge.

I shake my head sharply to dispel the image. God, why did that doctor ever have to mention the future in the first place?

“I was just thinking…” I trail off.

“How many more times we’re going to have sex?” Dan nods. “I already worked it out.”

“What?” I swivel to face him. “I wasn’t thinking that! I was thinking—” I stop, intrigued. “How many times is it?”

“Eleven thousand. Give or take.”

“Eleven thousand?”

I feel my legs sag in shock. How is that even physically possible? I mean, if I thought exfoliation was going to wear out my skin, then surely…

“I know.” He takes off his suit trousers and hangs them up. “I thought it’d be more.”

“More?”

How could he think it would be more? Just the thought of it makes me feel a bit dizzy. Eleven thousand more shags, all with Dan. Not that—I mean, obviously I want them to be with Dan, but…eleven thousand times?

How will we even have the time? I mean, we have to eat. We have to hold down jobs. And won’t we get bored? Should I be googling new positions? Should I install a TV on the ceiling?

That figure can’t be right. He must have misplaced a zero.

“How did you work that out?” I demand suspiciously, but Dan ignores me. He runs his hands down my back and cups my bottom, his eyes full of that intent, single-purpose look he gets. The thing about Dan is, you can only talk about sex with him for about thirty seconds before he wants to be doing it, not talking about it. In fact, he views talking about sex, generally, as a total waste of time. (I rather love talking about it, but I’ve learned to do that afterward. I lie in his arms and tell him everything I think about…well, everything, and he says, “Mmm, mmm,” until I realize he’s fallen asleep.)

“Maybe I’ll put off my run,” he says, kissing my neck firmly. “It is our anniversary….”

And it is. And the sex is great—we’re pretty psychic at that, too, by now—and we lie in bed afterward and say things like, “That was amazing,” and “I love you,” and everything that happy couples say.

And it was amazing.

And I do love him.

But—totally, absolutely honestly—there’s also another tiny voice in my head. Saying: One down. Only another 10,999 times to go.