We Were On a Break

by Lindsey Kelk

  Hi, it read. How’s your week going?

  It was simple, polite and weirdly familiar from a complete stranger. But then what else was he supposed to say, Hello woman I don’t know but liked the look of based on one photo from the internet. At least he hadn’t opened the conversation with a picture of his knob. I’d suffered through more than enough second-hand dick pics Abi had been treated to through Tinder. This was definitely better.

  ‘Not too bad,’ I whispered as I typed the words. It was a blatant lie but he was a picture on a phone, I wasn’t ever going to meet him. Like David said, it was nothing but an ego boost and an ego boost was sorely needed. ‘How about you?’

  Before he could reply, I put my phone away and raced across the muddy field to catch up with my friends. Running away from the pub before we got caught for something we really shouldn’t have been doing. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

  18

  ‘I can’t find them in the ladies and the bloke behind the bar says they haven’t been handed in.’ Jane dug behind the cushions of our corner again and I winced at the thought of what she might find. ‘I must have dropped them when that girl hit me with the door in the toilets but I can’t work out where they’ve gone to. They can’t have just vanished?’

  ‘And you don’t have a spare set?’ I asked, looking around the floor and tapping a probing foot underneath the seat.

  ‘Not with me,’ she said, growling in frustration. ‘I’ve got my key code but my spares are at Jim’s flat. It’s going to cost me a fortune if I have to call a locksmith. I bet it would be cheaper to get the train home and come back up for the car.’

  ‘Then leave it,’ I suggested. She turned her eyes on to me without moving her head. ‘I’ll tell the landlady what happened and I’m sure they won’t mind you leaving the car here for a bit.’

  ‘Oh man, that would be amazing.’ Jane pulled her hand out of the cushions and rubbed them hard on her thighs. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind? I’ll be gone first thing in the morning, I promise.’

  In the morning? She couldn’t get the train back this evening? I looked up at the clock and saw that it was after nine o’clock. We’d been sitting there since three and I hadn’t even realized. It was hours since Liv had called and I’d promised myself I would call her back when I got home. Where had the evening gone?

  ‘You’d be my lifesaver if I could crash on your settee,’ she said, all hopeful eyes and shiny hair.

  I felt myself gripping my knees and staring at my empty pint pot. Why did this feel like the beginning of a wonderful and terrible porno? I was only doing the decent thing. I couldn’t expect her to piss away hundreds of pounds on a taxi or a late-night train when I had a perfectly good spare room, could I? Well, one spare room and one very special room, to be truthful. If it were my sister, I’d want to know she had a safe bed for the evening. Besides, even though I didn’t feel drunk, I was certain we were both over the limit anyway. She really shouldn’t have been driving. It was entirely innocent. Gentlemanly, in fact.

  ‘Mi casa es su casa,’ I said, checking my pockets for my own keys. This really didn’t feel like a great moment to have to ask Liv for my spares. ‘And you can even stay in the spare room.’

  ‘I don’t want to be any trouble,’ she said, beaming. I raised a hand to Liv’s schoolfriend, still alone at the bar, but he did not return my friendly gesture. In fact, the look on his face was altogether more disapproving. Wanker. ‘This is so good of you, I really appreciate it.’

  Really, when you thought about it, I was the hero in this situation.

  ‘Thanks, Adam.’ Jane leaned across the bench and curled her arms around my shoulders in a brief hug, confirming my suspicions. I was a hero. The man at the bar and the red-bearded bartender exchanged a look and I pulled Jane away quickly. What did they know? ‘You’re my hero.’

  Superman, Batman, Adam Floyd. The people had spoken.

  ‘I’m so excited to see beyond the kitchen.’ Jane hovered at my shoulder as I unlocked the front door fifteen minutes later. ‘Did you design all your furniture?’

  ‘Not quite,’ I replied, wiping my muddy shoes on the mat and watching as she did the same. She sat down on the bottom stair and unzipped her boots, leaving them next to the door. Her little white socks clashed with the rest of her sleek outfit but there was something insanely cute about it. ‘Bits and pieces, but a lot of my stuff I inherited with the house.’

  ‘Woah.’ She followed me into the living room and stopped short in the doorway. ‘Were your grandparents the coolest grandparents ever, or what?’

  ‘My granddad built a lot of it.’ I flicked the light switch to reveal my mid-century modern living room in all its grandeur. ‘The settee is new but he made the TV cabinet, the side tables, that coffee table. The other cabinet they bought, just after they got married.’

  ‘I love it.’ She padded across the hardwood floors in her little white socks and ran her hand along the wood. ‘I want one just like it for the bar. Could you make one?’

  ‘I’ve never tried,’ I admitted, stretching one arm above my head and gripping the doorframe before slapping my arms back down by my sides. I wasn’t trying to impress her. ‘But yeah, in theory. I’m not sure it would go with your décor though.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t run this past Jim yet, but I’ve had an idea brewing for a while and I think I’ve just cracked it.’ She looked back at me with a huge smile. ‘We’ve actually got the upstairs of the bar as well and I was thinking we could open a cool little speakeasy up there and do it all out in sixties stuff. So it’s a summer camp downstairs and then upstairs looks like a really cool 1960s living room, only it’s a bar. And, basically, I’d need to steal all your furniture.’

  ‘I think that’s a brilliant idea,’ I agreed, my brain racing ahead with ideas. ‘You could do some really nice bespoke pieces and then pick the rest up second-hand.’

  ‘I was thinking we’d do a completely different drinks menu upstairs.’ Jane’s eyes were bright with excitement and it was hard not to get swept along. ‘Proper sixties cocktails like Manhattans and Old-Fashioneds. I’ve even found a place where we could get original period barware. I think it would be really fun.’

  ‘And really popular,’ I agreed, crossing the living room to open the cabinet. ‘This was my granddad’s whisky decanter. How cool is this?’

  ‘So cool,’ she started to put her hand inside and then stopped. ‘Is it OK if I touch it?’

  I looked away as she burst out laughing, snatching her hand back as I closed the cabinet. Her laughter sputtered out into an awkward sigh as we stood there, inches apart, all alone in my living room at night. There it was again. Not just my semi, but the inescapable something that sparked between us, the something that made me want to rip those socks off with my teeth.

  ‘I should sort out the spare bed,’ I said in a hoarse voice, much closer to a whisper than I’d intended. ‘I need an early night, busy day tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she replied readily, pressing her hands underneath her armpits. ‘I’ll need to get up early to get the train anyway.’

  ‘I’ll make the bed, won’t take a minute.’

  Leaving Jane, the decanter, and my confusing feelings behind, I jogged upstairs, opened the spare bedroom door and looked inside. It was so much worse than I remembered. As soon as I’d got home from Mum and Dad’s I had cleaned the living room, scrubbed the kitchen and attacked the downstairs toilet, just in case, but I hadn’t done a thing to the upstairs. Classic avoidance tactic. Liv told me she never used to shave her legs before a first date but I couldn’t say that would have put me off. The state of this place, however, would turn anyone away. Once upon a time it was a delightful spare room, all fluffy pillows and unnecessary cushions, but now it was nothing short of a total boner killer. Dirty clothes in piles by the door, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, several completely empty beer bottles and two pizza boxes. This was not a picture of my finest hour.

  ‘
Shit, Adam. Have you been Air BnBing to Stig of the Dump?’

  I turned around to see Jane at the top of the stairs.

  ‘No. I’ve been sleeping in here recently,’ I said slowly, not sure exactly what I was going to tell her. Or exactly why I had opened my mouth in the first place. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have to apologize for where you sleep in your own house,’ she replied as I scooped my mess into the wash bin before she could get a better look. ‘Is this something to do with your girlfriend? Does she live here too?’

  ‘No, no she doesn’t.’ I hadn’t mentioned having a girlfriend since that first time but she had remembered. I didn’t know if I was happy about it or not. ‘We don’t live together. I need to get clean sheets.’

  ‘I’ll strip these, you get the fresh ones.’ Jane placed her hands on my hips and gently pushed me out the way, grabbing a pillow and shaking it out of its case. ‘And then we can talk. If you want to.’

  Obediently, I went to the airing cupboard and pulled out a stack of sheets, giving them a cursory sniff just in case. In the bedroom, Jane was sitting on the bare mattress, her leather jacket and handbag on the chest of drawers, her bare feet buried into the plush cream carpet.

  ‘So, you said the two of you were on a break,’ she said, holding out her hands for a clean pillowcase. ‘What does that mean exactly?’

  It was a strange thing. I wanted to tell her because I felt so comfortable with her but because I felt so comfortable, I didn’t want to say a word. I wanted to keep Liv in the Liv box and Jane in the Jane box where never the twain should meet but there was something about the look on her face and all the pints I’d sunk at the Bell that made it impossible to keep my mouth shut.

  ‘We are on a break,’ I started, shaking out the fitted sheet. ‘But I don’t know what that means in the slightest. It’s my fault, I started it, but now she’s really mad at me and I don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘You started it?’ Jane asked, standing up so I could snap the sheet over the top of the mattress. ‘You broke up with her?’

  ‘I didn’t want to break up with her, I wanted a break,’ I replied. Why was that so hard for people to understand? ‘To get my head together. But I didn’t really. I don’t know what I wanted. And last time I saw her she said she wanted to take a break too and now I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Right. I think this should be easy, Adam. Do you want to break up with her?’ She sat down on the mattress and placed two freshly plumped pillows at the top of the bed. ‘Or do you want to fix it?’

  Cross-legged on the floor, nursing the duvet cover in my lap, I stared at my fingernails. They needed cutting.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I don’t know what she wants.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked,’ Jane said in a low, soft voice. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at me. All I had to do was kiss her, push her backwards against those pillows, and it would be happening. Did she want me to? Could I? Should I? I used to be so good at reading these situations.

  It would be so easy.

  ‘What do you want, Adam?’

  I couldn’t. I shouldn’t.

  ‘To get some sleep,’ I stood up and dropped the duvet cover on the spare bed. ‘Night. See you in the morning.’

  ‘Goodnight, then,’ she said, pulling her feet up onto the bed underneath her, her long dark hair falling around her face. Was I imagining it or did she look disappointed? ‘Sleep tight.’

  Closing the back bedroom door on my guest, I stood still in the cool dark of the landing, listening to the mattress creak as she moved around. What would she sleep in? Should I go back and offer her something? No. No good could come of going back in there. Well, some good, but that would last for about seven seconds, the state I was in, and what would follow was a world of hurt. Instead, I took four steps over towards my bedroom door and rested my hand on the brass handle.

  I hadn’t slept in my own bed since we got back from Mexico. The first night I’d collapsed on the settee; the second, I’d tried, but as soon as I got into bed, all I could smell was Liv’s perfume. Ever since I’d avoided it after the sun went down. The bed was neatly made inside and an almost-full moon shone through the window, reflecting on the spare pair of glasses Liv kept on my bedside table. Her glasses, her moisturizer, her little collection of hair ties. There was even a dried up contact lens that hadn’t made it into the bin the last time she stayed over. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.

  I unfastened my belt and shuffled out of my jeans with a heavy yawn, inching across the room to close the curtains. One of the neighbours was walking their dog and waved when he saw me in the window. I waved back, looked down at my boxer shorts and whipped the curtains shut. Unfastening the top three buttons of my shirt, I pulled it up over my head and tossed it into the corner on top of my jeans, yanked off my socks and clambered over the end of the bed. It still smelled of Liv. Her pillow smelled like coconut while the sheets sang with sweet lemons and something herbal, the scent of that big blue tube of body lotion she loved. I pulled the sheets down and crawled inside, cocooning my body and burying my hands under the pillows until I found what I was looking for. It was such a knackered old thing, a baby blue T-shirt with the picture of a wombat on the front. For a moment I clutched it to my chest and inhaled, but instead of being comforting, the whole thing felt incredibly creepy.

  I held up the shirt in the dim twilight of the room. I loved the way it looked on Liv, sloppy and cute but cut short enough so I could see her knickers. She had a brilliant backside, probably even better than Jane’s, probably the best one ever, but she never believed me when I told her. I felt around for the neck hole in the shirt and stuck my head inside. It was really small. It was really, really small. Forcing my hands through the sleeves, I lay in bed, Liv’s wombat shirt stretched tight across my chest, sleeves cutting off the circulation in my arms and tried to sleep.

  ‘Oh, fuck it.’

  With a commando roll, I leapt out of bed and crawled over to the pile of clothes in the corner to dig my phone out from the pocket of my jeans. Enough was enough, this break was bollocks and whatever was wrong with her didn’t matter, we’d sort it out. We’d sort everything out. With her T-shirt riding up around my belly button and my knees creaking against the wooden floors, I dialled her number and waited for it to connect. It rang three times and then I heard a click, as though it had connected, but there was no sound on the other end.

  ‘Liv?’ I said, my voice hesitant, my belly freezing cold. We should have carpeted my room as well, stupid good-looking oak floorboards. ‘It’s me.’

  I heard breathing and shuffling and a deep breath.

  ‘Liv? I’m sorry I couldn’t talk earlier, but I’m here now. Are you there?’

  More shuffling, and then, ‘Don’t call again,’ she said before ending the call.

  I held the phone an arm’s length from my face and stared at the picture peeping out behind all my applications. Me and Liv at Chris and Cassie’s wedding, arms around each other, nose to nose, laughing so hard I remembered wiping away tears, and even though I couldn’t remember what we were laughing about, it didn’t matter. Lying on my bedroom floor at the foot of my bed in Liv’s shirt and my second-best pair of boxers, I rolled over onto my side and cried.

  And the first prize for the greatest twazzock of them all goes to … Adam Floyd.

  I climbed into bed, closed my eyes and lay back against the pillows.

  ‘Did that really just happen?’ I asked.

  ‘Which part?’ Abi asked. ‘Adam and the girl, you falling out of a window, us breaking into a car or Cass losing her mind and chucking the keys into a briar patch? At least it was nice to see the old Cassie for once.’ Abi was full of admiration. ‘Do you think she hit her head when you fell on top of her?’

  ‘That or her common sense fell out at the same time as the baby,’ I suggested. Abi got up to rifle through the top drawer of my dressing table, produce a packet of face wipes a
nd set about removing her eyeliner. ‘She’s been so weird lately.’

  ‘She hasn’t been weird, she’s been completely insane,’ she replied, black streaks running up and down her cheeks. ‘She is not my favourite example of motherhood. We never see her and then, the first time in forever that she’s had more than two hours to spend with us, she goes the full 2007 Britney on the situation.’

  I pouted, kicking my legs behind me and stared at the floor.

  ‘What?’ Abi said. ‘What do you want to tell me but think you shouldn’t?’

  Such were the perils of knowing someone for twenty years.

  ‘So, don’t go mental but I suggested she come and work with me at the surgery,’ I started, rolling upright and protecting myself with a pillow. ‘We need to get someone in a couple of days a week now Dad’s retiring.’

  ‘That’s actually a brilliant idea,’ she replied, mid-wipe. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

  ‘Because you’re not allowed to think of all the brilliant ideas,’ I said. ‘Anyway, she turned me down. Because she’s going to be a stay-at-home mum.’

  Abi didn’t say anything but instead of removing her make-up, she was suddenly removing several layers of skin.

  ‘I think you’re scrubbing too hard,’ I said, gesturing at her face. ‘You’ve gone a bit red.’

  ‘Good for her,’ Abi said, her voice tight. She tucked her short brown bob behind her ears and threw the used face wipe in the bin. ‘That’s nice.’

  Peeping out from behind my pillow, I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she replied. ‘But whatever, she’s got to do what makes her happy. We were always going to drift apart eventually anyway.’

  ‘We won’t drift apart,’ I argued. ‘She literally lives closer to us now than she ever has. Apart from when we were all in the same flat, obviously.’

  Abi had the same look on her face she had when she assured me her dog was going to die. ‘It’s already happening, Liv,’ she said. ‘How often do we see her? And when we do, what do we talk about? I know she’s got a baby and a husband and those things are really important and I don’t dispute it, but I can’t remember the last time we had a conversation that wasn’t about you or the baby. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I heard from her without me starting the conversation.’