The Next Adventure

by Janice Horton

  To me, it feels like there is still unfinished business here. Part of me never wants to see Charles ever again. But another part of me wants the satisfaction of saying to his face all the things that my mind has been screaming at him from the other side of the world.

  It’s been easy to be stay emotionally detached and to close myself off and ignore the consequences of his betrayal and our separation and divorce after twenty-five long years of marriage while there has been a distance between us. Like keeping my head buried in the sand.

  But now that I’m back here, it’s like my emotional scar tissue has once again become an open wound. I’m still angry. I still harbour resentment for all the years that I’d spent mindlessly dedicating myself to him and to our home. Cooking and cleaning for him. Ironing his shirts.

  All while being overlooked, stifled, ignored, and treated with complete indifference.

  Then, of course, there are our two children. Not that they are children anymore.

  And Ethan? Well, he doesn’t have children—as far as I know.

  At this thought I stop myself and roll my eyes in exasperation and in new realisation.

  It seems that since Ethan’s surprise brother turned up, I might have developed a new trust issue. I can’t help but to wonder if there’s any other skeletons in his closet that I should know about before I can possibly consider marrying him? Then, there’s his ex-wife, Marielle. She’s French, attractive, but highly unstable. I met her last year at the same time that I’d met Ethan.

  I didn’t know they were married then, of course. I’d watched her slap his face before she left us and after she’d almost successfully warned me off him. She’d been angry too. Not at me I hasten to add. But all slighted women are angry in my experience.

  That said, I do love Ethan. Of that fact I am totally sure. And, he’s nothing like Charles.

  But surely, co-habitation seemed a far safer and uncommitted option for people of our age?

  When he proposed to me, I thought it seemed inappropriate somehow.

  Although, it was also terribly romantic.

  But what if my boys never came around to liking him when they met? What if they remained vehemently opposed to me being in another relationship never mind a marriage? I couldn’t just ignore their feelings because they didn’t know which parent to blame for their pain over our divorce. Oh dear, the angel and devil on each of my shoulders were busy arguing again.

  I decided that I’d just let them get on with it because I now had something important to do.

  I decided I would very much look forward to Hogmanay, as Ethan (being Scottish) liked to call New Year. But, in the meantime, I would focus my mind on what mattered in the present.

  For as Buddha said: Do not dwell on the past. Do not dream of the future. Concentrate the mind only on the present moment.

  Chapter 7

  It’s the first week in December and weather warnings have been issued for the whole of the UK. All bets are on for a white Christmas in London. The big high street shops are now playing Christmas tunes in store and streaming their festive commercials on TV. There’s one advent advert that’s really winding me up. It has a catchy tune. It’s beautifully filmed. There’s dancing elves and real reindeer. But it shows Santa coming out of a well-known supermarket pushing a shopping trolley that is overfilled with plastic carrier bags full of festive food.

  The advert goes on to suggest what festive items are entirely necessary for yule time joy and the magic of Christmas but it’s the trolley loaded with plastic bags that’s really ruffling my say-no-to-plastic feathers. I mean … what on earth are they (not) thinking?

  Plastic carrier bags! Really?

  We have plastic pollution all over the world and most of it ends up in our seas and oceans.

  It’s a sad fact that every single piece of plastic ever made still exists in one form or another to this very day. This plastic pollution must stop. There are now more ethical options. But of course, it costs more to provide shoppers with biodegradable bags or to promote reusable non-plastic carrier bags and this supermarket is clearly guarding their profit margins at the expense of the planet. I see that I’m not the only one to think this way about this particular advertisement as there is already a backlash storm brewing on social media against said supermarket.

  Feeling motivated to do something about it, I made a quick banner from a roll of spare wallpaper that I found in the cupboard under the stairs and I wrote on it in thick marker pen and in very large letters. SAVE THE PLANET! SAY NO TO ONE USE PLASTIC BAGS!

  Then I stood outside the well-known supermarket for an hour holding up my banner, until my feet where soaking wet and my toes were frozen, and the icy rain had made my homemade banner too soggy to hold up anymore and the two example supermarket plastic bags I’d stapled to it had filled up with water. Most people had ignored me, including the supermarket staff collecting discarded trollies from the carpark, but a handful of interested shoppers had stopped to ask me what I was doing with my say-no-to-plastic crusade and so I felt it had been worthwhile. I was just rolling up my soggy banner when a woman tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘I’d heard you were back, Lorraine. What on earth are you doing here?’

  I looked up and my heart sank to see it was Sally. My ex-friend and husband stealer.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I snapped. ‘I’m educating people about plastic pollution.’

  She looked at me from under the shelter of her umbrella with her eyes raised, as if I’d just said that I was telling people Santa was an alien and that Christmas was a commercial scam.

  ‘It’s something I feel very strongly about,’ I clarified, trying to not to look horrified and hopelessly unprepared at seeing her so unexpectedly. I lifted my head in an attempt to look dignified while knowing I was soaking wet and slightly steamy in my mother’s sodden woolly hat and heavy coat.

  ‘Well you do look like you’ve just stepped out of a rainforest. Do you fancy a cup of tea?’

  Sally gestured towards the supermarket café, which I’ll admit looked warm and inviting.

  I did fancy a cup of tea but not with the woman who had betrayed our friendship and slept with my husband. We weren’t the best of friends anymore. We weren’t friends at all.

  But I nodded in resignation and we went into the bright lights of the warm café.

  We took our cups of tea and sat down opposite each other on shiny plastic seats at a wipe-clean plastic table. Sally propped up her wet umbrella and slipped a silk scarf from around her neck, while I pulled off my coat and hat, knowing my hair would be a flat mess stuck to my head. I glanced up at her with reticence to notice how along with her perfectly made up eyes she was wearing a bright shade of red lipstick. But in the harsh bright lights, it all looked too much, and her skin looked pale and her face insipid and pinched-looking. Her silver-grey shoulder length hair that had always looked so natural and chic was now pulled back into a far too severe-looking chignon and looked oddly unreal. As she slipped her cashmere coat from her shoulders, I noticed how much thinner she was looking these days to the point of being bony.

  ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight.’ I told her in a way that might convey it wasn’t a compliment.

  ‘And so have you.’ She answered with her red lips quivering. ‘Only it suits you.’

  We sipped our hot tea silently for a few minutes while I wrestled with every negative emotion that I’ve had to endure over the past year racing from my heart and ending up in a colossal collision in my brain. Carnage. Then the floodgates finally opened. Hers not mine.

  I braced myself for the resulting tsunami as Sally disintegrated into shuddering sobs.

  ‘Lorraine, I’m really s-s-sorry for what I did to you. I want you to know that I’m paying for it now. You might take some c-c-comfort from knowing, after you left, I l-l-lost everything.’

  I could hardly believe her nerve. Was she expecting my forgiveness? My sympathy?

  ‘You know, I really doubt that, Sally.’ I
cut in waspishly. ‘You see, from where I’m sitting, it still looks to me like you took everything!’

  She shook her head insistently while her shoulders shook and tears ran down her face.

  ‘I lost my home, my husband, all my friends, and my job. I loved that job. I was s-s-sacked from a voluntary job for h-h-heaven’s sakes. When you left, no one wanted anything t-t-to do with me. They all b-b-blamed me. Not C-C-Charles of course. Just me!’

  I watched her rummage frantically through her designer handbag for a tissue to soak up her tears and her runny nose and I thought about the time when Sally and I had first met. I’d been so impressed with her. She’d seemed so glamorous and stylish at a time in my life when I was feeling drab and outdated. She’d always worn makeup and nice clothes. She’d looked so sophisticated. It was laughable now that Charles had called her ‘my high-maintenance friend’.

  Both mine and Sally’s fathers were under palliative care in the same hospice and that’s how we became friends. Over a few long weeks, during that summer, we’d got chatting in the visitor’s kitchen and consoled each other over cups of tea as both our father’s health deteriorated. I’d enjoyed and looked forward to her company. She told me she had two girls and I had my two boys. Sally was married to Craig, a bank manager, and they had a townhouse at the other side of town. I was married to Charles, who ran our travel agency, and we lived in a three-bedroomed home in suburbia. She had a top of the range BMW and I had a little old budget run-around car. She’d always donated her worn once designer clothes to a charity shop and I’d always bought all my clothes from a charity shop. Then, after both our fathers sadly passed away and our youngest children had happily started school, Sally and I met up again.

  We’d both responded to a ‘volunteers wanted’ poster in the charity shop window in town.

  I remember on that first day working together, while sorting through and pricing donations, she’d confided in me that she was terribly lonely living outside of town. I told her how, now both my boys were at school, I was feeling bored. Especially as I’d given up work to become a full-time housewife. Then we became really good friends. Better than that, we became like sisters. Until, of course, the day she’d crossed boundaries both literally and figuratively.

  But now, sitting here and watching her face crumple and tears spurt from her eyes, I regretted being so generous to this woman. What a fool I was to trust her. To confide in her.

  Her affair with Charles had been one thing; calculated and quite unforgivable.

  But what was worse – far worse and more hurtful – was that she’d betrayed our friendship.

  Sisters simply didn’t do that to each other. There was supposed to be an unbreakable bond.

  People sitting around us started to stare as Sally wiped away her tears with a flailing hand.

  I noticed how the large collection of rings she always wore were now rattling against her knuckles and swinging loose on her long thin fingers. That her nails that were once famously long and always professionally manicured, were now nothing more than chewed stumps.

  ‘We never meant to hurt you, Lorraine. It all sort of happened in the heat of the moment.’

  I leaned forward across the table and whispered to keep my voice down.

  ‘Hardly. You were shagging him for a whole year behind my back.’

  When Sally looked up, she was an absolute mess with red watery eyes and with mascara streaking in black lines down her cheeks and her previously perfect makeup now smeared across her face, making her look something like a tragic clown. I stared at her for a moment.

  I’m not used to feeling hard-hearted. Since I’ve been with Ethan, I’m quite the opposite.

  Seeing Sally this way made me feel pity for her and incredibly sad for both of us.

  ‘I don’t expect you to f-f-forgive me. I just want you to know that I’m truly s-s-sorry.’

  I stood up to leave. I’d let go of my anger towards her but certainly not my pride.

  I reminded myself that Buddha had once said: ‘If there is something you’re not ready to forgive yet, then you can forgive yourself for that.’

  ‘Happy Christmas, Sally.’

  I walked away, not taking any comfort from her situation, as she suggested I might.

  I headed straight through the shopping mall and over to the charity shop, where I saw Taryn stoically working alone again, while a backlog of people were queuing up to pay at the till. I could see she was frazzled. I picked up a couple of tops that I wanted from the sale rail and then I offered to help her out just for the hour that it took to disperse the queues.

  Taryn was so appreciative and so I suggested that she might want to give Sally a call.

  She looked surprised. ‘Really? Sally? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I think she might really appreciate it. Especially at this time of the year.’

  Taryn smiled and nodded. ‘Okay, if you say so, Lorraine. I’ll certainly give her a call.’

  I’ve now been waiting for a week to receive a copy of the lease to Waterfall Cay from Ethan’s lawyers by email. But it still hasn’t arrived. I’m starting to wonder if he’s forgotten to ask them for it or they have simply decided not to send it to me. I really wanted to check it over to see if there were any clauses that might clearly constitute an offence – something that would get Damion and Gloria Goldman evicted from Waterfall Cay – because surely drilling through coral reef and pouring concrete on a pristine habitat where turtles might nest must be a crime.

  Plus, I’m now dithering over the plausibility of my Plan A, which was to gently but persuasively talk Damion and Gloria into giving up Waterfall Cay voluntarily for the sake of family and common decency. I still happened to think, based on our short but eventful meeting on the island, that Gloria might be approachable, but I have my doubts and misgivings about her despicable husband. Ethan has certainly portrayed him as a formidable opponent.

  Today, to curb my boredom, I’ve been up in the loft to retrieve the family decorations and tinsel, despite our low-key Christmas plans. I’ve found a box of Christmas themed candles and a nativity set and a set of outdoor twinkly lights that would look lovely on the small fir tree in mum’s small front garden. I’ve pleaded with her to let me make a start on putting up the decorations, but she has refutably said ‘no’ because no one else in the cul-de-sac has started decorating yet, and so therefore neither should we.

  It’s true. In the street outside there’s not one single light bulb or sprig of holly or Christmas tree on display yet. It seems people around here are not so keen on starting their Christmas celebrations too soon. Mum’s in the same camp. She absolutely insists that Christmas decorations can’t possibly go up until the third Sunday of Advent. That’s in mid-December.

  I do remember her being staunch about this when I was a child too.

  No amount of pleading or persuasion then or now seems to be able to change her mind.

  Instead, she’s tried very hard to get me to join her in whatever it is she does all day.

  I’ve politely resisted and insisted that I’ve plenty to do and she should carry on regardless.

  Since then she’s taken me at my word and I’ve hardly seen her during daylight hours.

  She seems far busier and much more capable than I’d ever previously given her credit.

  When I was married to Charles and we lived twenty miles away, I used to come into town and take mum to the cinema one afternoon a week. It was our special time together. I’d really thought I was being a dutiful daughter and doing her a huge favour in taking time out of my busy life to spend some time with her. Now, it seems quite clear that it was entirely the other way around, and she had been taking time out of her busy life to spend time with me.

  Don’t get me wrong, after being away for so long and after the shock of thinking I’d lost her, I’m delighted to see that my mum is fabulously busy and independent. But it seems achingly unreasonable for me to be so physically close to her and in such proximity to my darlin
g boys and yet only see them for a short period of time on weekends.

  Knowing that I won’t see my boys much over Christmas either, I’ve been trying to make arrangements – appointment or so it seems – to see my sons for just an hour this week. Of course, I do know they are both busy men. Josh is a scientist and works in a laboratory on the outskirts of town. Lucas works in marketing for a big company in London and he commutes every day and so keeps long hours. Their work sounds very interesting and important and I’m so very proud of them both. I’ve made it perfectly clear I don’t want to be a nuisance. I’ve also told them that I’m entirely flexible. I’m willing to fit in with whatever time they happened to be free. I’m happy to meet up for lunch or in the evenings for dinner.

  But, disappointingly, it turns out they rarely have time to spare and no time suits them.

  ‘Sorry Mum. I never get a full hour for lunch. I really don’t have the time.’

  ‘Sorry Mum. I often have to take clients out at lunchtime.’

  I phoned Zoey to suggest we might meet up for a girly lunch, but she said she wasn’t feeling very well with ‘winter flu’ and so she was best avoided all this week in case she passed it on.

  It just seems practically impossible for me to spend any time with my kids.

  ‘What about after work? In the evenings?’ I suggested, trying not to sound desperate.

  Hello – I’m here now! I’ve been away for a whole year and I might go away again!

  But Josh and Lucas say that after work they need to ‘relax and chill’ and they both apparently do this by staying home in their apartments playing Xbox Online with their cyber-friends.

  To prevent complete boredom and total misery setting in, I’ve cleaned and tidied the house and I’ve been shopping. I’ve made soup and cooked a meal and I’ve set the table nicely for when mum comes home at around 6p.m. But when she does get home (closer to 7p.m.) she tells me that she’s already eaten. So, I eat my dinner alone while she takes a long soak in the bath.