The Two of Us by Andy Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

olive.
    ‘Weird, huh?’ I say to James Bond.
    James doesn’t answer, it’s not even eight o’clock and cads never rise before eleven unless their lives, or King and country depend upon it. Neither of these things applies to
me, but I do have a meeting this morning with Joe, my producer at the company I shoot commercials for. So I get up, open the curtains, and shuffle off to the bathroom to clean up Ivy’s vomit
and do what needs to be done behind closed doors.
    Ivy is propped up in bed when I get back to the bedroom, holding a mug of coffee with one hand, a book with the other. She’s reading a novel by someone I’ve never heard of, a wad of
pages held back behind her left thumb.
    The cafetiere is standing on a tray on top of the chest of drawers, along with a mug and a small jug of milk. I pour myself a coffee and, as I’m ahead of schedule, I climb back into
bed.
    ‘How’s the book?’
    Ivy rotates it in her hand, looking at the cover (Bohemian plaza, sunset, shadows, silhouettes) as if the answer to the question is printed there. ‘Well, it won all kinds of prizes,
apparently. But if it wasn’t for book club I’d probably ditch it.’
    ‘You totally should,’ I say. ‘Swap it out for something with vampires.’
    Ivy laughs. ‘It’s not that I never have – quit a book – but I dunno . . . it’s a bad habit to get into.’
    ‘Seriously? There was a woman on the tube last week clipping her fingernails.’
    ‘Ugh, you’re joking?’
    ‘Not joking. Just letting them ping off all over the carriage.’
    Ivy puts a hand to her mouth. ‘Stop, you’re going to make me barf again.’
    ‘Exactly. I’ll take a book-quitter over a public nail-clipper any day of the week.’
    Ivy nods as if considering the wisdom of this. ‘You’re probably right, but I don’t want to disappoint Cora – it was her choice.’
    ‘Will she even remember?’
    ‘You never know with Cora. She doesn’t know what day it is, but she can quote Dickens down to the dot and comma.’
    ‘Bah, humbug.’
    ‘Exactly,’ says Ivy, turning her attention back to the book.
    ‘So, how’s the sickness?’ I ask. ‘Feeling any better?’
    ‘I won’t miss this when it passes,’ she says. ‘You hear about it, but God, it’s dismal. A hangover every morning, without any of the upfront fun.’
    ‘Sorry,’ I say.
    ‘I should think so. You have a lot to answer for.’
    After Ivy told me she was pregnant, and after I knelt in a puddle and mumbled the words ‘I love you’ into her jumper, we spent the rest of the day in a state of happy, excited
perplexity. Ivy explained her silence over the previous several days – a mixture of anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty. She worried that I would be unhappy, that she’d misled me, that
I would want out of this relationship. And I explained that none of this could be further from the truth. We finished our coffee and our relationship slipped smoothly onto the next cog – we
walked to the deli, bought falafels, bread, humus, meat, sparkling fruit juice and cheesecake; we went back to Ivy’s, picnicked on the sofa, then Ivy passed out in front of the TV. We
didn’t make love.
    We have not, in fact, made love one single solitary time since the day before my dad gave us his bed and jinxed everything. I worked it out; it’s been forty days and forty nights –
that’s an abstinence of biblical proportions.
    I put my coffee cup down and place my hand on Ivy’s thigh.
    ‘You poor thing,’ I say. ‘You know what I’ve always found works wonders for a hangover?’
    Ivy lowers her book, looks at me over the top of invisible spectacles. ‘You are kidding, right?’
    ‘No,’ I say, moving my hand further up her thigh.
    Ivy places her hand on top of mine, halting its progress. ‘You do know that I don’t have an actual hangover?’
    ‘Yeah, but the princi—’
    ‘I have a foetus the size of an olive in my uterus, and it is flooding my body with hormones that make me
feel