Fiction

Wading in

Here’s something Jen would never, ever have dreamed of doing, back in the days when she was married – listening to relationship advice from her barely teenage son.

“Mum,” he’s saying, “there’s a lot of good guys out there.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. And how would you know? You’re in Year 8!”

Finn just grins and flips open his laptop. He’s winding her up, surely.

“Everybody meets online now,” he says casually, eyes on the screen. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Not everyone,” says Julia from across the room. “There’s a lot of sleazes and creeps out there too.” Jen shifts her incredulous gaze from her son to her 15-year-old daughter.

“Who’s told you that? Your teachers?”

Julia just shrugs. After her uncharacteristic outburst of voluntary speech, it’s standard shrug time again, as if her daily allocation is used up.

Just a phase she’s going through, Jen’s own mother would say soothingly, when Julia slouched through the house with her head down, eyes glued to her iPhone, shouldering past you like you were someone in her way at the train station. She thinks the world of you, her mother would add – totally unconvincingly, in Jen’s opinion.

“The thing is,” Finn is saying now, “don’t make the mistake of posting too many photos up there. And don’t sound too desperate.”

Jen watches his fingers on the keyboard, pecking away like a secretary. Types like an adult, handwriting like a seven-year-old, she thinks dazedly.

“Stop!” she says. “Finn! What are you – 13? Shouldn’t you be… I don’t know, out riding your Razor scooter?”

“I’m helping you.”

“Are you? To do what, exactly?”

“To get back into dating. Now that the divorce is actually final, Mum.”

“Dad doesn’t need to find someone online.” Julia again from the couch, granting them a few more barbed words. Jen’s chest tightens reflexively. She looks up, working to keep her voice level.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“He’s got Maxine, hasn’t he, Finn? She was there last weekend at his place again.”

Jen hears the challenge in Julia’s voice, sees the flash of those ugly purple braces as her daughter’s mouth hovers half-open, trembling as if at some great hurt. A phase. Maybe.

“I just don’t like the idea of being on some online dating app trawling for a guy like some middle-aged cliché, and I don’t know how you both suddenly know so much about it,” Jen mutters.

Finn grins again. “You’re not a middle-aged cliché, Mum,” he says, tapping. “You’re an attractive fun-loving professional with a terrific sense of humour.”

“See, that’s it,” says Jen. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

Which is how she’s come to be standing in the bathroom at work having a woeful crisis of faith, just 15 minutes away from a supposed lunch date with a man she’s only seen a photo of (outside, with daypack and dog, nice smile) and talked to on the phone.

Mike. The one she’s been lying on the couch talking to after the kids have gone to bed, nursing a glass of wine and stunned at how little it had taken to open up to a complete stranger. Well, as much a complete stranger as someone can be who knows your height, age, favourite movies and star sign. Knows your kids’ names and ages and, to your surprise, remembers them. Jen finds herself grimacing every time she ends a call with him, wringing her hands at what she seems to be getting herself into. He’s easy to talk to, though.

“Lunch,” he’d said yesterday. “That’s all.”

“And if we both realise we’ve made a terrible mistake...”

“Like…”

“I don’t know. Something.”

“Well, then you can just say, ‘You’re into medieval re-enactments? How interesting – gosh, is that the time?’ And you can leave. No harm done.”

“You’re not, are you? Into medieval re-enactments?”

“No.”

Just that, no. And no try-hard stuff about being a knight in shining armour. Nothing lame, as Finn would say. Julia would just roll her eyes in unconcealed disdain. The other day she’d come home from her father’s with a manicure in solid black – Maxine, apparently, had taken her to some fancy salon in the mall to have her nails done.

Jen had nodded, smiled. What else was there to do? Pretend she loved it? Name-drop Robert Smith from The Cure? Friends and workmates sometimes ventured to ask her how she was navigating things post-divorce, and the honest answer, although she never gave it, was there were no navigation devices available; she was just out on the open sea in a small boat with no engine, rowing like crazy. A few nights ago she’d stared at the wine in her glass, listening as Mike had said, I’m just wading back in, and she’d said, “Hmm, I know what you mean”, although really she’d thought, I just want to find the shore.

Here’s where saying yes even to a lunch date gets you though: berating yourself for the 10 kilos you can’t shift, the shirt that shows your bra strap, your terrified-deer-in-the-headlights expression, standing here in the miserable glare of work’s morgue-like fluorescents, and who are you kidding, thinking you’re ready for any of it?

Jen splashes her face with cold water, blots her eyes (not crying, definitely not crying), tells herself she will just call Mike and say she can’t get away. Maybe next week. She’ll apologise. But she can’t risk her voice not holding it together if she actually calls him, so she’ll text him.

No, she can’t. She just can’t. She’ll go there, down the road to the restaurant, and do this nice man the courtesy of at least apologising to his face. Tell him she wasn’t ready after all, but good luck. She’ll leave on her sunglasses, giving away nothing. Then she can just walk out of there and no harm done, no hearts broken, back to ordinary life and the quiet of the house after the kids are asleep, those weekends where she’s sure any day soon they’re going to bounce home from their father’s place and tell her he’s getting married again.

She starts walking. She’s pausing at a pedestrian crossing when she hears the stupid theme ringtone on her phone that Finn programmed for it, which she hates but can’t work out how to change. She digs in her bag for it. This’ll be Mike, cautiously asking where she is.

But no. It’s a text message from Julia. Julia who spends every waking hour on her own phone, scrolling and sending long communiqués to friends she never brings home, who only communicates these days in terse little dispatches. Hardly speaking. Gone from her.

Jen feels a cold gulp of worry as she presses her thumb to the screen and opens it up.

Mum, says the message. How do you tell someone you love them?

Jen feels, around her, people gathering to wait for the lights to change then moving forward as a single mass, eddying and surging, while she stands still on the kerb. One block away, in a restaurant, sits a man who’s waiting for her, checking his watch, a good and decent man who’s beginning to think now, probably, that he’s been stood up.

And, oh God, is her 15-year-old daughter at home right now with some boy, wagging school? In her room? Or girl? Someone. Them. Did it even matter? No. Absolutely the same advice, if only she could think what that was.

Jen’s finger hovers over the screen. She sees the cursor tapping like an impatient foot, a pissed-off adolescent foot, full of grievance and big feelings, tapping in time to the traffic lights’ ticking as the lights change back to red. And that blank box waiting for her too, as bad as the empty spaces on the profile page. Expecting her to know what to say, and then to press send, and commit it to yawning cyberspace, words you couldn’t snatch back, words you couldn’t get wrong. Do it now, Jen tells herself, before you can overthink it and fuck it up.

Julia my beautiful girl, she punches laboriously, letter by letter – because she’s never got the hang of doing it fast – when the time is right, you will know. Love, M.

And she presses send, and seals it.

By the time she looks up the lights have changed again and she steps off the kerb with the lunch-hour crowd, moving like a tide around her, to cross the road. She’s hurrying now, sure, but feeling weirdly, strangely unflustered. She lengthens her step, almost a stride. Down the street she goes, towards the restaurant. There’s a man there, a man who’d sounded warm and funny on the phone, waiting to buy her lunch.

Jen takes off her sunglasses as she walks, imagining his expression of recognition and relief when he sees her come in. She drops her phone back into her bag and runs her free hand through her hair.

It’s like a wave is carrying her, full of rolling momentum, lifting her feet off the ground all the way. A wave that’s not going to pull her under or squeeze the gasping breath out of her. It’s just going to wash her up safe and sound on the shore, stepping forward calmly, to hold out her hand to take his, before they both sit down.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 20, 2025 as "Wading in".

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