With nowhere better to go, I found myself on the path to the beach but without Sam and a sandwich or Joshua and a surfboard it felt pointless. This isn’t what was supposed to happen; the thought circulated around my head, deafening any comforting reassurances I had once been able to tell myself: Sam will come back; this isn’t the end; just wait, your happily-ever-after will come; you can make it; you can fabricate it. Maybe Zoe was right. I was naive at best, deluded at worse. Sam and I were never getting back together. My future was never going to be what I imagined.
Scrambling to take my shoes off, fumbling under the weight of my rucksack, I let my feet sink into the sand. This time it didn’t feel cool, refreshing or nostalgic. It felt like a lie, a promise unfulfilled. Sydney was meant to be the answer. A fresh start. A chance to forget about Sam, to forget about the future I had invested every scrap of time, energy and delayed gratification in. Call it fate, call it the universe, call it God – whatever or whoever was up there wasn’t looking out for me, they were looking down on me – laughing sadistically. My life was a Saturday Night Live sketch for the deity.
Flinging my rucksack to one side, I crumpled down onto the sand. Looking down at my bare feet, I let my mind escape, transporting me to my fifteen-year-old self. Fun-loving, vivacious, ambitious, and with such big dreams for such a small girl. She had never wanted to be an editor, or an art therapist, or just somebody’s girlfriend. She had wanted to paint, to be a barefooted, free-spirited artist, with massive dreams; not heels, champagne and flipping Art Today. I missed that girl.
I picked up a stone from the sand and flung it out to the ocean. That’s for you, Lady Devon Atwood. Thanks for screwing up my career before it even began. I was twenty-seven, I shouldn’t just be starting out. I was nearing thirty and yet had little to show for my twenties. Zoe had her house. Jamie had her fiancé. Joshua had his youth group. Sam had, well, everything. And I had nothing. I picked up another stone and threw it into the sea, too weak to make a ripple. That’s for you, fucking fate. My phone jabbed into my back pocket as my arse sank further into the sand. I pulled it out and looked at the screen. No calls. Not one. I scrolled down the list of contacts again and again: Sam, Jamie, Joshua, Tim – it was a who’s who of people’s lives I had made worse just by being here. Why had I even pretended, even for a moment, that I had things made?
I reached for another stone, and with all the strength I had left, launched it into the ocean. And that’s for you, Jess. You screwed everything up. You always do. Angry tears started to sting and fall as the stone sank heavy into the water and a thought started to rise: I have no one to blame but myself.
21 October 2017 – Nottingham, England
‘I don’t blame you, Jess. I just need space, I just need some time.’
Sam’s words filled the room and yet still I couldn’t hear them. He stopped his pacing and came to sit down on the bed beside me. I couldn’t turn to look at him. I didn’t need to. I knew his profile better than my own – strong jawline, but with more stubble than there had been five years ago; deepening laughter lines, so many of which I had been responsible for. The extra etches of worry on his forehead; I guess I’d had my fair share to do with those too.
‘I just need space,’ he repeated. I had no idea where this was coming from. He’d been happy. I’d been happy. Well, not in work, and not when we went days without seeing each other, but we’d been happy together. We were happy together.
I turned to look at him. He looked like a boy, reluctant to extend a comforting arm in my direction for fear that I might shake it off. I desperately wanted him to reach out. I didn’t understand, I couldn’t. Sam sat rigid, my best friend turning into a stranger right before my eyes. I looked around Sam’s bedroom, every inch of it holding its own memory of our time together.
‘Space?’ The only word I managed to utter sounded foreign in my mouth. No. Why? It didn’t matter, I’d probably got the wrong end of the stick anyway; Sam was always saying I jumped to conclusions too fast. I looked down and pulled the sleeves of my jumper further over my hands.
‘Jess?’ Sam gently rested a hand on my shoulder. I saw tears welling in his tired eyes. Sam never cried. My stomach turned in fear. ‘You know I love you…’ I savoured each precious word, desperately trying to ignore the ‘but’ I knew was coming.
‘I love you too,’ I whispered softly, but Sam had already begun speaking over me.
‘…amazing times together… five years… best friend…’
My heart ran a mile a minute as I tried to make sense of the words coming out of my boyfriend’s mouth.
‘…too much… concentrate on work… need time… something different…’
I absorbed his lines in broken shards, trying to process them in a way that led to a different conclusion than the one I couldn’t bring myself to think, never mind hear. Sam reached out and took my hand. His was shaking. Mine was still.
‘I think we need to be on our own for a bit,’ Sam said, tears now falling down the familiar face I had seen mature before me over the last five years. ‘You know, find out who we are without each other, who we are outside “Sam and Jess”?’
This was all wrong. It couldn’t be happening. I studied his tear-stained face, my eyes tracing his jawline, clenched and sure. How could he even comprehend a future without me? We had it all planned out. Everything we’d be, everything we’d do. I searched for the words. Words that would make him want me. Words that would make him want us.
‘But I like “Sam and Jess”,’ I whispered, so quietly I wasn’t sure I’d even said it out loud.
‘So did I,’ Sam responded, wiping the tears from his cheeks.
Did.
‘Sam, please.’ I wasn’t above begging for what I knew was right. ‘I know it’s been hard since I finished uni. I know I haven’t been perfect, but we’re great together, we’ve always been great together, things will get easier when I get a new job…’ Sam placed his free hand on top of my own and squeezed, shaking his head.
‘It’s not you, Jess,’ he said, a cliché I never thought we’d become. ‘I’m just not ready…’
‘Ready for what?’ We could diagnose the problem; we could find the cure. He always did. He’d promised he always would. ‘Moving in? Marriage? What, Sam?’ We could save this. We needed to save this. ‘We can take our time with all of that; we don’t need to do anything we aren’t ready for.’
‘I’m just not ready for what we are, J.’ Sam’s words cut through my chest. I couldn’t lose him. I couldn’t. He was my future. I was his. I wouldn’t cry. Because it wasn’t over. I held his hands tighter, looking down at mine intertwined with his. To have and to hold.
I wouldn’t let go.
‘Maybe one day I will be.’ He reached a hand up to my cheek and delicately tilted my chin to face him. ‘Maybe one day.’
I shook my head. This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t over. It couldn’t be. I leaned my face in closer to his, my lips lightly grazing his nose, then tracing their way to kiss the freckle just above his lips. He breathed deeply, drawing me in, kissing me, firm and strong. Maybe one day. He pulled away and time slowed down. Fractions of moments, like the parts of our past coming undone. Sam offering me a lift to the station. Me refusing. Sam opening the door. Me leaving. Sam closing the door. Me looking back. Then realisation, then fear, then falling, tears falling. Tears and tears and tears and tears until there were no tears left to fall.
But hope, a tiny hope.
Maybe one day.
Maybe.
One day.
6 September 2020 – Sydney, Australia
Three words I’d held onto for three years. And for what? A chance rendezvous on the other side of the planet where Sam could dole out scraps of hope – a box room here, a job there, a lunch, a graze, a gaze – and then take everything back like a twenty-eight-day return policy. Keep the receipt. That was probably what Sam had thought about me. And Tim. Take her, use her, be amused by her. And then take it all back. I’d gi
ven Sam my truth, every bit of me – it had never been enough. Why would my lies be any different?
I looked out over the ocean, the stones I had thrown lost forever. It was my fault. All of this was my own fault. I wasn’t a twenty-eight-day return policy; I was damaged goods, faulty and broken.
I looked at my rucksack, bursting with baggage. I glanced at my watch, thin and cheap. An hour had passed since I had first sat down. But where the hell was I meant to go next? Sam had always been my true north. I pushed my feet even further into the sand. Fucking Sydney. Maybe it was time to go home.
Home; the thought of it caught in my throat. I cast my mind back to London, conjuring images of red buses, red phone boxes and red-faced commuters. It had never really felt like home. Nottingham had always been my home – but that was when we were all there: Zoe, Austin, Sam. I looked up at the waves crashing, churning as realisation rose to the surface. For a long time, home had been where Sam was. Home didn’t exist any more. It was like all the tears I had held back since arriving in Sydney were finally coming to the fore. Sydney had been one big disappointment. The past three years had been one big disappointment – but at least they had had the hope of ‘maybe one day’.
I tried to imagine the next three years without it, without that shard of hope that the life I had imagined might actually become a reality. Tears continued to fall, uncontrollable and messy. Not content to ruin my own life, I’d had to go and ruin Sam’s future too. He’d been happy. I had wanted him to be happy. I sobbed harder, sick to my stomach. I needed to stop doing this, screwing up, leaving a trail of destruction in my wake. I closed my eyes. I needed hope. I needed a miracle. Fuck it. God, if you’re real and you actually give a shit. I need help, I need a plan, I need a job, rent money and somewhere to stay until I get all of the above figured—
‘Jess?’ I heard a woman’s voice interrupt from behind me. ‘Jess, are you okay?’
Chapter 32
‘Jess, is that you?’ the voice rang out behind me. A small part of me prayed for it to be Zoe – stranger things had happened – before I realised she had a thick Australian accent. Please don’t be Jamie. Please don’t be Jamie.
‘Are you okay?’
I brushed the tears from my face but knew the redness and puffy eyes would take hours to fade. Hopeless. In slow motion, I turned. At least it wasn’t Jamie.
‘It’s Alice?’
My blank stare prompted her to reintroduce herself even though we’d met several times. I nodded in acknowledgement but said nothing.
‘Can I sit down?’ Alice asked, as if I wasn’t down and out but just having a quick sit down. Surely she didn’t want to put that crisp outfit on the ground, never mind inches next to me? I was a mess. I shrugged. It was a free country. She sat down beside me, taking no care to stop her clearly expensive knit from catching underfoot. I dreaded to think how much she knew, how much she could tell.
I tried to smile, weak and apologetic. She smiled back. I opened my mouth, but no words came out. Instead, tears began to fall again – it surprised me that there were any left. Alice didn’t say anything but placed an arm around me, no words necessary. I wished I knew how to say so much with so little. She turned her striking profile towards the sea and looked out across it like she had all the time in the world. I let her arm rest there and cried into her cashmere. I savoured the human contact, knowing that the second she knew what I’d done I’d lose her too, an almost-friend who’d never had the displeasure of knowing me better. Moments passed, but still Alice didn’t move. I caught her giving a fleeting glance at my rucksack.
‘You fancy a coffee?’ she asked cautiously, as if knowing I was volatile. ‘We could head back to mine?’
I began to well up again. Sam had extended his charity to me the moment he saw me. Now Alice. I couldn’t. She wouldn’t want me to. Not if she knew the things that I had done, how I’d hurt Sam and Jamie, how I’d ruined everything with Tim, how I’d even managed to anger the kindest man in Sydney. But I had nowhere else to go.
Again.
‘Thanks,’ I began through sobs, ‘but I can’t. Alice, I’ve screwed everything up. With Sam and Jamie, with work – I don’t want you to get caught up in—’
‘Jess,’ Alice interjected, ‘it’s a coffee.’ She shook her head and smiled again. She was being so nice and, better still, was making it feel like it was no big deal. That it was no big deal that I’d just fucked up her friends’ lives. Unless she didn’t know?
‘I’ve done something terrible,’ I confessed, struggling to meet her eye through my tears, through my shame.
Alice looked back at me, her hair long and straight, skin brown, eyes wide. She was a doctor, who looked like a model. A churchgoer. A good girl. Her head probably couldn’t even comprehend drunkenly pursuing your engaged ex-boyfriend whilst living beneath his fiancée’s roof, or fibbing your life into shape because it was anything but.
‘Unless it’s worse than shagging your cousin’s boyfriend, you’re in good company.’
Alice? She couldn’t have. She smiled and shrugged, neither proud nor apologetic as my broken heart shed a piece for her too; I’d thought she was perfect, writing page after page of her story on a pristine white slate.
‘Coffee?’ she repeated, pushing herself up. Dumbfounded, I stood, lifting my bag onto my shoulders, and followed. Too tired to argue, I shadowed her every step away from the beach, towards somewhere or something I hoped was better than here.
4 November 2017 – London, England
‘What have I got keeping me here?’ I looked across at my mum. Twenty-four and I still needed my mummy to have the answers. ‘I’ll start again, somewhere new, like…’ I searched my mind for solutions. ‘Manchester?’ I didn’t mean it to sound like a question. Mum pushed the menu across the red and white chequered tablecloth. Break-up carbs; it had been two weeks since Sam and I had gone our separate ways and I still wasn’t ready for them.
If I was going to be sad, I may as well be skinny too.
‘Your friends?’ My mum pointed to the carbonara on the menu, my favourite when I was a little girl.
‘All in relationships,’ I said, as if it discounted them.
‘Zoe?’
Even Zoe. Even the relationship-adverse and perpetually single had overtaken me in the race of life. I took a gulp of red: the only thing I could stomach.
‘Work?’ she asked as I scoffed at the question.
‘I’m wasting away there,’ I replied, loathing my dramatics but addicted to them all the same.
‘Well, you’ll be wasting away here if you don’t order some food.’ She beckoned a waiter over to take our order at the exact same moment I broke into tears. ‘We need a bit more time,’ I heard her mutter in the distance. She had travelled almost three hours to London for a dinner with her delightful daughter. Sadly, said daughter hadn’t shown.
‘You should do some painting; you always found that soothed you,’ she went on.
‘Soothed me?’ I scoffed. ‘I’m not a baby.’ I was acting like one, though. ‘I’m done with messing around with that; I need to take life seriously.’ I knew that’s what Sam had wanted. ‘And I need to leave.’
She looked around the room, desperate to make me stay, make me eat. ‘Oh, Jess,’ she said, pulling her chair closer to me. We were causing a scene, but she didn’t seem to care. ‘You don’t know anyone in Manchester. I know it’s hard, I know you have memories of Sam here…’
‘It’s not all about Sam,’ I sobbed, forcing away my mum’s offer of a napkin. I was a mess and I didn’t care who knew. ‘It’s all of it. I was meant to be the successful one, the settled one, the one who had it all sorted. Do I look sorted to you? Do I?’ A passing staff member looked at us, answering my question with one pitying expression.
‘You’re just having a wobble, love,’ my mum soothed. ‘It’ll pass. It always does.’
‘Not without Sam it won’t.’ Back to it all being about Sam, again.
‘Give it a few more we
eks. Lay low, don’t make any sudden changes,’ Mum said. ‘And if you’re still unhappy here, maybe you can move home for a while? Recalibrate?’
‘I don’t want to recalibrate,’ I whispered, ‘I want to calibrate.’ I wasn’t even sure what that meant. ‘I want everything to go back to normal. And I want to go to Manchester.’
Mum sighed. I wasn’t making sense. She knew it, I knew it, but she also knew better than to reason with me. I was a walking contradiction: wanting to go back, wanting to move forward, just wanting to be anywhere but here.
‘Jess, I know it hurts.’ She sighed. But how did she know? She was bloody sorted by my age. ‘But you can’t keep looking back and you can’t keep running away.’
‘Then where can I go?’ I whispered, sulking like a child pulled off the playground.
‘I guess you have to stay in the present and kind of…’ Mum struggled for the right words, both of us unsure as to whether they even existed. ‘Muddle through?’
6 September 2020 – Sydney, Australia
Alice switched on the lights, stepping into the apartment and flinging her cashmere cardigan onto the brown leather couch.
‘You take milk?’ she asked, walking into the open-plan kitchen space, opening cupboards and pulling out two large mugs. I stood just inside the entrance, rucksack still on, taking in the space. The two large sofas looked every bit as chic as their owner against a backdrop of exposed brick and polished floorboards.
The Spare Bedroom: A totally heartwarming, funny and feel good romantic comedy Page 24