Happily Ever After

Do you believe in reincarnation?

I don't think I would, if not for being the incarnation of Marian Dubois. I mean, it's pretty out there, the idea that you can die and be reborn as someone else.

What would you do if one morning you woke up to find your husband had forgotten who you are? Suddenly there’s only your word for it that all of those memories you’d once shared - your first meeting, the birth of your children, mundane chat before bed - ever happened at all. You could try and convince him, of course…but he’s already got a new life. And even if he did believe, what then? Could you really live knowing he’d never quite remember everything that you were to each other?

You have my life in perfect focus.

Sort of, anyway. That’s all a bit psychological-thriller, and my life is a lot less late-night movie. Experimental art-house, maybe: I’ve not just woken up to find my husband with amnesia. I’ve woken up, like I do every morning, to find a world eight hundred years in the future, where I’ve been forgotten by history, and my husband has been reduced to a legend. Robin Hood. It doesn’t sound quite right, but I suppose it suits him even now he’s Robbie Woods, who pretty much lives in a series of dark hoodies (usually grey or blue, but sometimes khaki green).

The thing is: he lives across the road. Almost directly opposite, actually, at number sixty four, the middle of a strong of council houses shoved in front of middle class estate so as to encourage the peasant underclass to keep their front gardens tidy. It’s weird beyond telling, being in love with someone who barely even sees you as a friend.

Which is part of the reason I try not to be too much of a bitch to Eddie.

Eddie smug-ass Sheriffs (guess who he used to be. Rob and Eddie’s names are either are a private joke by the Powers That Be, or a bizarre coincidence: either way, sit back and enjoy the irony.) Eddie.

Every school has one, the perv who’ll get with a vending machine if it’s wearing a skirt, and thinks every girl in the world is playing hard to get.

Actually, some people like him. But of course that has nothing to do with his gorgeous sandy hair or sky-blue eyes, honestly. In fact, even some of my friends like him. Like Shauna Stone, a girl who lives around the corner from me who I sit next to in Health And Social, who talks about him endlessly. "He's just so hot. I saw him with his shirt off, once, and he's got the most amazing six pack... I know he does crack, but that just makes him even more bad boy, y'know," I usually tune out at that point.

Eddie has done cannabis - not crack, cannabis - exactly twice, and the second time it made him sick.

He smokes ordinary tobacco and happens to know a lot about drugs because his mum is an addiction councillor.

Most things about Eddie are fake: his hair is dyed (he's a natural brunette), he's as Irish as his dad's Mercedes and he only managed to scrape a B in last month's science modual because he cheated. But there's one thing, only one thing, I've ever really believed he was genuine about: he’s definitely in love with me.

Which is a pity, considering we might have had a chance, had he not raped me. Or if I hadn’t killed him.