by Sharon Owens
‘Right, I’ll ask for a menu on the way back from the Gents,’ he said, finishing his pint and standing up.
‘And I’ll get another round in,’ Emily said, picking up her handbag.
As Emily was waiting to be served at the bar, the pub doors opened with a shudder and a bunch of rowdy guys came staggering in, almost knocking the tree over. Some of the men grabbed handfuls of tinsel and placed it on their heads, laughing uproariously. They’d clearly been drinking already; possibly for several hours. Then she realized that she knew the men, especially one of them. His name was Glenn and he’d been Alex’s best man on the day of their cancelled wedding. Mercifully Alex was not with them tonight. The others had all been at school with her. They were wearing football shirts, so they must all be over in London on some sort of a soccer jolly, she thought. Glenn walked up to the bar and asked the barmaid for a menu.
‘Oh shit,’ Emily muttered, turning away from the men.
But it was too late. Glenn had recognized her, and he came straight over.
‘Well, look who it is, lads,’ he said loudly. ‘It’s none other than Emily Reilly from dear old Belfast town. Fancy meeting you here, Emily. What’s new, pussycat?’
‘Shut up, Glenn,’ Emily said. ‘Everyone’s looking.’
‘Come here, you,’ Glenn laughed, giving her a crushing bear hug and kissing her messily on the cheek.
‘Get off me,’ she said angrily, trying to push him away.
‘What’s the matter, pet?’ he said, hugging her again.
Emily thought she might suffocate if he didn’t let her go at once.
‘I said, will you get off me?’ Emily told him. ‘I’m here with my boyfriend.’
‘Oh, Emily’s got a boyfriend, lads. We’d all like to meet this boyfriend of yours,’ Glenn said in a slightly sinister voice. ‘Is he real? I wonder. Or is he just an imaginary boyfriend?’
The other men all guffawed loudly. Emily’s tragic wedding story had obviously been spread far and wide. They must all know that Alex had left her at the altar on their wedding day. She wondered frantically if Glenn had given them the final detail of that most humiliating period of her life.
‘Go away and leave me alone,’ Emily said in the firmest voice she could muster, slithering from his grasp, paying for her drinks and turning away from Glenn and his lecherous smile.
But Glenn wasn’t going to be swept aside. He followed Emily and pinched her bottom, causing her to hunch up and drop her drinks. Glasses of cola and lager hit the floor with a watery crash, and the men started laughing all over again.
A tired waiter appeared from behind the counter with a mop and bucket.
‘Keep the noise down, folks,’ he said anxiously.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Emily told the waiter as he bent down to pick up the remnants of broken glass. ‘Mind you don’t cut yourself.’
‘What’s going on here?’ someone said, and Emily knew that Dylan had come back from the bathroom.
‘You must be Emily’s boyfriend,’ Glenn tittered.
‘Yes, I am,’ Dylan said firmly. ‘What of it?’
‘Let’s go home, Dylan,’ Emily said nervously.
‘Are you not going to introduce us to your boyfriend?’ Glenn asked. ‘Are you engaged yet? Are we all invited to the wedding?’
The men laughed even harder.
‘Who is this idiot?’ Dylan asked. ‘What’s his problem?’
‘Leave us alone, Glenn,’ Emily said, taking Dylan’s hand and leading him towards the door. ‘We don’t want any trouble, do you hear me?’
‘Would you look at Love’s Young Dream,’ Glenn said, angry now at being left standing on his own in front of everybody.
His friends were all expecting a bit of a show, and he was damned if he was going to let it end like this.
‘Don’t go, Emily,’ he shouted. ‘Stay and have a drink with your old muckers.’
‘Please don’t say anything to him,’ Emily whispered to Dylan. ‘He’ll only hit you, and then it’ll kick off. There are eight of them, and they all enjoy a good punch-up. Glenn always did like to stir things.’
‘Okay, let’s go,’ Dylan nodded as Emily reached for the door handle.
‘You weren’t ignoring me last time we met, were you, Miss Reilly?’ Glenn called after them. ‘You couldn’t get enough of me that night, could you?’
Dylan stopped in his tracks, and turned to face Glenn and his cohorts.
‘Have you got something to say to my girlfriend?’ he asked in a low voice.
‘No, mate, I haven’t,’ Glenn said quietly.
Emily was weak with relief. She tugged again at Dylan’s hand, eager to be out of the pub and safely home in her cosy, lovely flat. Giving Glenn one final look of disdain, Dylan turned to go.
‘I have nothing to say to your girlfriend, but there’s definitely something I’d like to do to her,’ Glenn said loudly.
The laughter rang out again. By this time everyone in the bar was looking at them. The bar staff were terrified that a full-scale riot was about to erupt. A load of drunken guys in football shirts, with very strong Belfast accents – what else were they to think?
‘Oh please, no,’ Emily said.
‘Come over here and say that again,’ Dylan said, letting go of Emily’s hand and fixing Glenn with a cold hard stare.
Emily thought Glenn would run for cover, but instead he casually strolled over to Dylan and repeated his nasty words. Before he had finished the sentence, however, and before Emily could even blink, Dylan had reached out and landed an expert punch on Glenn’s sneering face. Glenn crumpled and went down like a ton of bricks, and Dylan then asked Glenn’s mates if any of them would like to have a go. There were no offers, strangely enough – Glenn’s friends had decided they were all too drunk to take on a man with a rugby player’s build. The bar fell silent, except for Glenn’s agonized moaning. A trickle of blood appeared on Glenn’s top lip.
‘I think you’ve broken my nose,’ he said accusingly.
‘You asked for it,’ Dylan said calmly.
‘We’ll get you back some other time,’ Glenn said to Dylan menacingly.
‘Not to worry, mate. You might have your little gang with you tonight, but I have plenty of pals too; we’ll be looking forward to the rematch.’
‘I’ll sue you,’ Glenn said.
‘I’ll see you in court,’ Dylan said, ‘though if I were you, I wouldn’t bother. I haven’t got any money, and you were sexually harassing my girlfriend. There’s no shortage of witnesses.’
The waiter handed Glenn a towel and asked him and his friends to leave the bar as soon as Glenn was able to walk, or else they’d have to call the police. Glenn’s friends then gathered round him and helped him to his feet.
‘Okay, we’re done here,’ Dylan said, and he took Emily’s hand and led her outside.
They went home to Emily’s flat as fast as they could. Dylan was so angry, he told Emily he would gladly have taken on the lot of them. But Emily didn’t want him to become a mere footnote in Glenn’s bloke-fest booze-up.
‘He’s so not worth it,’ she told him when they got back to her flat. ‘People who go around picking fights like that are just messed up in the head; I mean, properly messed up. That Glenn needs a whole team of psychiatrists to sort him out. He’d rather get his nose broken by a man than be civil to a girl. He’s crazy.’
‘Scumbag! I hurt my hand hitting him,’ Dylan said, flexing his fingers.
‘I’ll put some ice on it,’ said Emily.
She quickly wrapped some ice cubes in a tea towel and handed it to Dylan.
‘Cheers, babe.’
‘What bad luck to bump into him,’ Emily said, still furious. ‘He ruined our lovely evening.’
She couldn’t sit down, and had resorted to pacing up and down the sitting room.
‘What’s the story with him, anyway?’ Dylan asked after a couple of minutes.
‘You could say he was an ex of mine,’ Emily admitted. ‘A s
ort of ex, you might say.’
‘Well, it must have been beer goggles, then. Tell me, did he hit you?’
‘No, Glenn was always getting into brawls. But as far as I know he doesn’t beat women,’ Emily said quietly. ‘I ran into him a while after the wedding fiasco. I was at a hen party at this hotel in Dublin, and he was there too on a stag weekend. And to my eternal shame, well, we had a one-night stand.’
‘Is that all?’
‘I’m so embarrassed.’
‘Don’t be, we’ve all been there, done that,’ Dylan said ruefully.
‘Still, I should have known better,’ Emily said heavily. She felt incredibly embarrassed. ‘Even though I was tired and emotional, I should have known better.’
‘He seemed like a right lowlife,’ Dylan said, mystified.
‘I know. He is. He always was.’
‘So what happened? Were you on drugs when you kissed that particular frog?’ Dylan joked.
‘No, I was feeling sorry for myself and incredibly drunk. And he was just very nice to me,’ she said simply. ‘We got talking in a quiet corner of the hotel bar, and he was all sympathetic about the wedding being cancelled. He said Alex was a right fool and that one day he’d bitterly regret not marrying me. Looking back, I think he faked the sympathy to get me into bed. And it worked. I got a bit emotional and started crying my eyes out, we went up to his room and, well, basically we had a five-minute fumble on top of the bed. And then we fell asleep. We were both plastered. We didn’t even take our clothes off. It was awful, really – it was a pointless encounter from start to finish. I’ve never gone in for one-night stands, I swear to you, and that night reminded me why.’
‘Listen, Emily, I told you – I’m not judging you, babe.’
‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry, I know you aren’t.’
‘So that was the end of it?’
‘Not really. The next morning he was all keen to do it again, now that he was sober and everything. The room had a walk-in shower, and he thought it’d be fun to, you know, get frisky in there.’
‘And you didn’t fancy it?’
‘No, I did not fancy it. I felt completely disgusted with myself. I just wanted to go home and forget I’d ever spoken to him. He’s so immature, he turns my stomach. I told him I never wanted to see him or speak to him ever again – and he wasn’t very pleased, I can tell you.’
‘He didn’t try it on with you, did he?’ Dylan said, his face lined with worry.
‘Thank heaven, no, he didn’t,’ Emily said, shaking her head. ‘I said I wasn’t the type of girl who slept around, and he called me a tease and a bitch. Said it was a bit late to be saying that. I grabbed my shoes and left the room, and I got the hell out of that hotel as fast as I could.’
‘Sounds like he could have turned nasty.’
‘Yes, I know … and I hoped I’d never lay eyes on him again. To tell you the truth, he’s an awful bully; he always was. I really have no idea why I went anywhere near him that night. I should have known he was only faking the sympathy to take advantage of me. I should have known he’d tell his stupid mates about it. No doubt he told them I was a right tart.’
‘I’m sure all his mates know he’s the kind to exaggerate.’
‘I hope so. Why do some men think that just because you spent five minutes with them once, when you were at your very lowest ebb, you’ll now be available to them for all eternity?’
‘Search me. All I know is, that creep better not come near you again,’ Dylan said.
‘I hope he doesn’t press charges,’ Emily said.
‘No, he won’t do that, I could tell. He won’t go to the police, because he knows you could have him charged with sexual harassment. That bar was full of witnesses – and, thanks to his big mouth, they heard every word pretty clearly.’
‘Remind me not to drink in the Twickenham Arms for a very long time. Hopefully that’s the end of it now,’ Emily said. Then she got up and went towards the bedroom. ‘I still have the outfit I was wearing that night,’ she called out to Dylan.
She unlocked the wardrobe and took out a short black dress and matching jacket, a pair of five-inch black stilettos and a tiny black handbag. She brought her things back to the sitting room to show him.
‘I don’t want to keep these around any more,’ she said.
‘That’s understandable, but I don’t think we should sell them in the shop in case they bring bad luck to their new owner,’ Dylan said. ‘I’m not superstitious – but then again, you never know.’
‘Agreed. I’ll just bin them now,’ Emily said, and she folded the outfit neatly and placed it in her kitchen bin. ‘Do you know that the wardrobe is almost empty now?’
‘You’ve done a lot of de-cluttering these last few months,’ he said, putting his arm around her.
‘I have, haven’t I?’ she agreed. ‘All I have left in there are a few power suits and some pairs of court shoes that I thought would be just the ticket for the magazine industry. Before I found out that most of the photographers and stylists wear casual clothes. They nearly died laughing the first day I turned up for work. How naive was I, Dylan? I’ve done nothing but make mistakes my whole life.’
‘You haven’t made mistakes your whole life.’
‘Trust me, I have.’
‘Only until you met me?’ he said, kissing her tenderly.
‘Until I met you,’ she said, kissing him back.
19. Christmas in Appleton
‘Oh, Dylan, I hope they like me,’ Emily said, checking her make-up in the passenger-seat mirror.
‘My family is really nice, Emily. They just want to meet you; they won’t bite you or anything. And we really can’t put this off any longer. Mum has been begging me to bring you to meet them all for months and months now. If we didn’t agree to this dinner, they’d have come to London in a minibus looking for you.’
‘I know,’ Emily said, patting her fringe – even though it didn’t need patting.
‘You’ve nothing to worry about, babe. They’ll love you just as much as I do,’ he said tenderly.
‘Yes,’ she smiled. But she wasn’t fully convinced.
Emily almost wished they could get a flat tyre, or that the motorway would suddenly be closed for repairs, or that there’d be a genuine emergency back in London and they’d have to do a U-turn. She glanced into her handbag at her mobile phone, but it stayed resolutely silent.
‘It’s a pity your parents couldn’t come with us,’ Dylan said.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Emily agreed. ‘But they’d already bought the cinema tickets.’
And then she felt a wave of guilt, for she’d warned her parents that she’d kill them both in cold blood if they accepted Dylan’s offer to bring them to Appleton to meet his family. And the guilt was doubled when Emily remembered that her father was still due a visit to see Sylvia’s stables, which were en route to the village. But Emily knew in her heart that she’d have enough to worry about without her parents disgracing her at the dinner table. She’d have her hands full just trying to put on some semblance of being a normal, happy human being. Mind you, they’d been behaving quite normally recently. Maybe she should have brought them along for the company? But then again, it was nice to have Dylan to herself for the drive to Appleton.
‘Why are you jittery about today, anyway?’ Dylan asked.
‘I have no idea.’
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘Maybe I was born this way?’ Emily said. ‘Maybe my parents were born anxious, and I inherited a double set of anxiety genes? I don’t know.’
‘Look, I promise you that five minutes after you’ve met them, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.’
‘I do hope so.’
‘I think it’ll be fun to celebrate Christmas early, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Emily muttered. ‘I hope they like the gifts I got them. That chocolate shop was half empty by the time I got through the list.’
She stared out at the green field
s flying past her window. Some of the distant hills were topped with snow. Dylan’s mum and dad were going away skiing for Christmas, and his three sisters were spending the day with their in-laws. So Mrs Shawcross had come up with the great idea of having a big turkey dinner on the 17th of December.
Emily had bought gifts for everyone, and she was wearing her best jeans and one of Arabella’s designer jackets. But all she wanted to do was open the car door, roll out on to the hard shoulder and walk all the way back to her flat in the city. She wouldn’t mind the lofty ceilings and the freezing sitting room tonight, she thought to herself, if she could only curl up in bed with a good book.
‘I do love you even more than I did already for doing this,’ Dylan said, caressing her knee.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, giving his hand a little squeeze and then placing it gently back on the steering wheel.
‘Nicely done,’ he said, laughing. ‘But I can hold the wheel with one hand, you know. I’ve been driving round the farm since I was fourteen.’
‘Have you really?’
‘Yeah, I can drive a tractor too. I can do hand signals and everything!’
‘I sometimes wonder what it’d be like to be a more confident person,’ Emily mused.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, like you are. I’d love to be like you – you know, the way you just do things without a lot of over-analysing. You just decide to do something, and then you do it. And I bet if it didn’t work out, you’d just laugh it off and forget about it.’
‘Well, sure I would. You only live once; why bother with regrets?’
‘Some of us must be hardwired to hang on to our regrets. I wish I could be like you for just one day, Dylan.’
‘You’re not that bad.’
‘I am, though, I am that bad. Sometimes I annoy myself, because I get so annoyed about silly things – and certain people. I wish I could just sail through life oblivious to all irritations. And that’s why I love my job – because it’s got nothing to do with people.’
‘You interview people all the time,’ Dylan pointed out.
‘Not really; I ask them a few set questions, and then I compliment their home and take a sip of tea. And they’re usually so exhausted from staging their houses, they’ve barely got the energy to talk to me or look at me. On a good day I’m out of the place in less than an hour. I spend more time choosing pictures for the magazine than I do actually talking to anyone.’