He felt old and frail and insubstantial. Like a shadow. All that seemed to exist of him was a feeling of anger that he couldn’t shake.
‘Of course I care about our relationship,’ he said. ‘More than anything.’
‘Then why are you doing this? Why are you avoiding me, avoiding conversations that you know we need to have?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m scared of how they’ll turn out.’
She smiled weakly. ‘Me too, but I think things will turn out worse if we don’t talk, don’t you?’
He nodded.
‘I’m tired and lonely and I’m not going to pretend I’m finding it easy to settle in up here,’ she said. ‘I miss Gemma and Mum and now I feel as though I don’t even have you.’
He was still holding her hand, and he looked down at their fingers, wrapped around each other’s. ‘I never meant for you to feel like that,’ he said.
‘Gemma suggested this ridiculous way of communicating with a pepper pot that she’d seen on TV.’
‘What?’ he asked, his brow furrowed. She’d been talking to Gemma about how things were between them. He felt a strange sort of betrayal when she told him that, even though he knew she would have needed to talk to someone and he wasn’t helping her in any way. Although if Gemma’s only advice involved condiments he did wonder if she was any more help than he was.
‘Don’t ask. The point is, if even Gemma can see that we need to talk, then we really do.’
He let go of her hand and leant back in his chair.
‘I’m sorry, Jessie,’ he said. ‘I never meant to make you feel like this. I never wanted you to be lonely and sad, and I know it’s too much for you at the moment to walk Captain every day. I know you’re trying to hide it from me, but I can see that you’re getting ill again. It’s been happening slowly since Christmas hasn’t it?’
She nodded, a tiny movement he could barely see as though she didn’t want to admit it to herself.
‘I feel so helpless,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
She looked at him for a moment. ‘Are you still seeing your therapist?’ she asked.
‘I am,’ he replied. ‘It’s just …’
‘I’m worried about you as well,’ she interrupted. ‘You don’t have to tell me what you talk about in therapy but we can’t keep both pretending we’re fine when we’re not.’
‘What can I do to help you?’
‘There’s nothing you can do. Not in terms of making me better, anyway. You can’t fix this, however much you might want to. But you can be at home more, look after yourself better, eat properly, try to sleep more.’ So she knew he wasn’t sleeping. They were both hiding all these things from each other but they both knew anyway. ‘Maybe we could work out a time when we can walk Captain together. It feels as though we’re drifting further and further apart with each passing day. It doesn’t feel as though it’s anyone’s fault but since Christmas everything has felt so hard and seeing Dan again seems to have made things worse.’
It was the most honest she’d been with him for weeks and it felt like a relief to hear her admit what he had already been feeling.
‘I love you, Jessie, but …’ He paused, closed his eyes. He thought back to his last therapy session when they’d finally got to the bottom of why he might be feeling the way he did. ‘The idea of you being with him, with Dan of all people …’
‘You have to try to let this go. You have to try to move on. We both do.’
‘I know, and I also know that none of this, none of the way I’m feeling is about you. We’d broken up; you were free to see who you wanted to see. This is my issue.’
‘What is your problem with him?’ she asked. ‘There’s been something since long before you went to America, since I was in London with him.’
‘He was the only friend I had at school,’ Rupert said quietly. ‘I hated that place but I put up with it as best I could, but when Dad introduced me to Dan it felt like I’d finally met someone I could get on with. Like you and Gemma and Caitlin. I always wanted something like that.’
‘Didn’t you have that with John?’ Jess asked.
He shrugged. ‘I did, I still do a little bit but it’s hard to maintain when you’re away at school all the time. Dan and I worked well together. We were so different but we helped each other. I helped him work harder and he helped me chill out a bit.’ Those last two years at school really had been better because of Dan and he should try not to forget that. ‘But none of that stopped me being jealous of him in the end.’
‘You were jealous of him?’ Jess asked, although he had a feeling she wasn’t surprised at his admission.
He looked up at her. ‘Listen to how childish it sounds. I can’t believe I’m even admitting it now, but I always felt as though he was cooler than me, less awkward, smarter, more charming, better-looking. He still is – I could see that in the few minutes we were with him. I always felt he made me look like a fool.’
‘He never made you look like a fool,’ she replied. ‘But he did really like you – he talked about you all the time. It was quite annoying.’ She paused, looking at him. ‘And he definitely isn’t better-looking. He never was.’
Rupert looked down at the frayed sleeves of his jumper. He could feel himself blushing, feel the flicker of adrenaline in his stomach that he always felt when he realised she still found him attractive. It was nice to feel something other than anger after all these weeks.
‘He must have had something going for him though – you lived with him for four years,’ he said.
She sighed, and he knew that what he’d said had sounded whiney and jealous. He hadn’t meant to sound like that but he couldn’t help it. Thinking about Dan always made him feel like this. He was expecting her to tell him off, to stop him from being jealous but what she actually said surprised him.
‘At first he reminded me of you,’ she said. ‘He helped to fill the hole you’d left behind a little bit and he understood how I felt about Dad dying in a way that other people didn’t. Everybody was encouraging me to move on from you. I think they thought I was finally letting you go when I moved in with Dan. I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t love him, but I only got together with him in the first place because he reminded me of you.’
Rupert looked across the table at her, the realisation growing that she had always felt the same as him. That when she told him she’d never stopped thinking about him she hadn’t been exaggerating. It was him she wanted, not Dan.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered.
‘I know, that’s really weird and creepy.’
‘No, it’s not that. All the while I was at Harvard thinking of you, and you were in London thinking of me and both of us too stubborn to admit how we felt.’
For a moment neither of them said anything.
‘Do you ever wonder how different things could have been?’ Jess said, breaking the silence.
‘All the time.’
He stood up then and walked around the kitchen table, crouching at her feet, and wrapped his arms around her.
‘This has all been really hard,’ he said. ‘I always knew you’d move on, get on with your life without me. I just never thought it would be with Dan.’
‘Things didn’t end well between Dan and me,’ Jess said. ‘But it wasn’t his fault; it was just circumstance. Everything was a mess back then and when he left it was a relief. I loved him but the moment he left all I could think about was you.’
He buried his face in her neck and knew that she was his reason to keep going, his reason to try to let go of all the anger and sadness he was feeling. They were both carrying their own problems, their own illnesses, and they both knew these weren’t little things like a cold that would clear up. But they had each other and somehow, together, they would make this work. They had to.
He looked up at her, the hint of a smile playing on his lips. ‘So are you going to tell me what Gemma wanted us to do with that pepper pot?’
�
�� If I was honest, I’d been feeling ill for a long time before the Christmas I got glandular fever. I’d realised, at some point over the previous summer, that writing for a local newspaper was nothing like I thought it was going to be. It was nothing like the university paper. I couldn’t stand most of my colleagues and every day seemed to be a fight to get the good stories, a constant competition, endless one-upmanship.
This wasn’t what I wanted to do.
I spent too much time that year regretting and trying to reconcile the catalogue of bad decisions that I thought I had made. At some point in June, not long after our twenty-fifth birthdays, I stopped being able to sleep. I lay awake worrying about what to do, what I needed to change, how I could start to feel happy again. I started to think about you again then, during those long lonely nights. Occasionally I’d look you up online – you had ‘Dr’ in front of your name by then and you were on the faculty at Harvard. You had everything you ever wanted. I didn’t think you’d be thinking about me.
Without any viable alternative presenting itself I struggled on, getting up early to go to the gym before work, not eating properly, working too much. Every day it got harder and harder to drag myself out of bed, but I didn’t slow down. I couldn’t stop. If I stopped it gave me time to think, and if I spent too much time thinking, regret would hit me again like a dark cloud.
So instead I pushed myself as hard as I could, pushed myself at work to be the best writer I could be, pushed myself at the gym with a personal trainer, pushed myself at home to be the best girlfriend I could be. I was always good at pushing myself though – we both were. We used to push each other all the time. Do you remember that?
By the time the glandular fever took over, I think my body was already at its limits. I doubt it could have fought off a virus if it tried. So the virus floored me and, even when the acute part of the illness was passing, when my temperature returned to normal and I stopped being almost delirious, the exhaustion persisted. I couldn’t stand up without leaning on something and even walking a few steps felt like climbing a mountain. The day Dan came home from work to find me lying on the bathroom floor unable to get back to bed was the day he insisted we went back to the doctor.
Dan was great at first. He came with me to all my doctor’s appointments; he worked from home more so that he was there to help me get showered and dressed, because although the process of getting clean each day exhausted me, the sensation of my dirty skin and greasy hair made me feel even worse than I already did.
The doctor signed me off work, but as all my test results came back showing I had nothing wrong with me and as winter turned into spring and I showed no signs of getting any better I began to sense Dan’s frustration.
‘Maybe if we just went out for a walk,’ he said. ‘Got some fresh air?’
So I did. I barely had the energy to lace up my trainers, but I forced myself to go out because I wanted to make Dan happy. It was a beautiful March afternoon, the sun was shining and the daffodils were out and for a moment it made my heart sing. It made me feel as though I could get better and move on, maybe even find another job that I loved.
But the next day I felt as though I’d been hit by a truck. It had been the first time I’d left the house since Christmas, aside from doctor’s appointments, and we only walked around the block, but it ended up putting me in bed for three days.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Dan said quietly, squatting down by the bed as he stroked my hair out of my face. ‘I’m really scared.’
I was scared too but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to make his fears worse by voicing my own. And I could hear the frustration in his voice beneath the fear, and his frustration scared me even more.
Work started asking questions about when I’d be back. I felt as though I had to prove something to them, as though they thought I was faking. Sometimes I caught a look in Dan’s eyes that made me think he thought I was faking too. I could almost understand where they were coming from – endless tests had shown there was nothing wrong with me.
And yet.
I tried to get better with a sort of ‘mind over matter’ regime. I thought that if I pretended I wasn’t ill, if I ignored all my symptoms and just got on with my life maybe it would all go away. I started going for short walks every day, even though they didn’t feel as though they were doing me any good. I knew I was pushing myself but by then I didn’t feel as though I had any support or guidance – I had no idea what ‘doing too much’ meant. I’d lost all perspective and I wasn’t sure that Dan believed me.
‘You’re not well enough to go back to work, Jess,’ Mum said one day. She had started to come round to Dan’s flat every lunchtime to make sure I ate.
I knew she was right, but the next stage in my crazy regime was to get back to work and maybe even the gym. If you’re not pushing to be the best version of yourself what’s the point after all? You taught me that.
In April, not long after the pain started, Mum made me an appointment with her doctor, a much more empathetic person than my own GP. The pain had started in my lower back and I’d thought it was just a lack of exercise, too much sitting around. But the pain spread into my ribcage, my shoulders, my hips, my knees. Some days everything hurt so badly that I couldn’t differentiate one body pain from another. But it was my hands that hurt the most – I couldn’t write or type, I couldn’t open bottles, I could barely hold a book for more than ten minutes without being in agony. Mum leant me her e-reader and insisted that I went to her doctor.
More tests, a trip to a rheumatologist, scans, x-rays and still nothing.
‘I think we’ve reached an impasse,’ Mum’s doctor told me one morning in May. ‘I think we’ve reached the point where I’m going to have to diagnose chronic fatigue syndrome or ME.’ She paused and shuffled some papers on her desk. ‘It’s a bit of an umbrella term,’ she went on, a note of apology in her voice. ‘I’m afraid it’s the term we use for symptoms like yours, when the test results come back without any indicators.’
‘What can I do?’ I asked. ‘How can I get better?’
She sighed quietly. ‘Rest,’ she said. ‘Try not to do too much but try not to do too little.’ She paused again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know that isn’t very helpful. The best thing you can do is educate yourself. Read and research as much as your fatigue allows you to, find out what worked for other people. You seem like a tenacious sort of young woman, one who isn’t going to let this illness beat her.’
I smiled then, the first genuine smile I’d smiled for a long time. She was right: I wasn’t going to let anything beat me. If I’d learned one thing from you, I’d learned that.
Mum was waiting for me outside the surgery and I told her the news on the way home. She looked grim but didn’t say anything, instead offering to come home with me. Together, we told Dan. He didn’t know what to say or what to do but I had the feeling he was keeping something from me. If I hadn’t found the letter I’m not sure what would have happened.
He came home from work one afternoon and I was trying to pack a bag but I couldn’t even manage that. I felt like such a failure. I wondered if I’d ever be able to manage anything for myself again.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Let me do that.’ He took the bag from me and made me sit down.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘To Mum’s,’ I replied. ‘We both know this isn’t working. I don’t want to hold you back anymore.’
‘It’s OK, Jess,’ he said. ‘You need me right now – it won’t be forever.’
‘I saw the letter,’ I said quietly. ‘From National Geographic.’
He paused for a moment, looking at me. ‘I’m not going,’ he said. ‘I can’t leave you.’ He crouched down beside me, holding my hand.
‘Yes, you can,’ I said. ‘And you will. If we go on like this we’ll end up resenting each other and I don’t want that to happen. I want us to take good memories away from this.’
My plans of being b
ack at work by my birthday had fallen by the wayside. By the end of June I’d handed in my notice at work and Dan was helping me move in with Mum.
‘It doesn’t have to be forever,’ he said to me before he left. ‘I’ll be back from India soon enough.’
‘Yes, it does,’ I replied. He opened his mouth to say something. ‘I don’t have the energy to argue with you,’ I said. And I kissed him for the last time.
I remember the day I moved all my worldly belongings, of which there seemed to be pathetically few, into my mother’s spare room. I lay on the bed and allowed the feeling of utter devastation to wash over me. I felt as though I’d lost everything: you, Dan, my job, my independence. I was no better than a child again – all I had was Mum and Gemma and Caitlin and the sanctuary of my own bedroom. It felt remarkably like those years after you went to boarding school.
Except this time, no one would be coming home for the holidays …
MARCH 2018
33
JESS
Since our conversation around the pepper grinder, Rupert and I had started building bridges again. He was home early from work most days and often worked from home in between teaching. We were slowly getting into a routine that worked around each other. With our heads down over our laptops, we had both started that terrifying but exciting first chapter of our new books. We walked Captain together when I felt up to it and we’d even started looking at potential new houses online.
Even though things felt better between us, I still wasn’t sleeping, I was still in pain and neither of us had mentioned Dan. I remembered Rupert saying part of him missed Dan and I wondered if he’d thought about seeing him again. If he had, he hadn’t mentioned it to me.
The Pieces of You and Me Page 18