by Cathy Bussey
‘Go ahead.’
Overhead she could hear the distinct yaffling call of a green woodpecker then, a couple of seconds later, the higher-pitched laughter of its mate. Bickering and laughing, like all the best couples.
If you can siphon out that pond — twice — she urged herself, then you can do this.
‘Rik,’ she said. ‘I do remember Minel’s party.’
He exhaled loudly.
‘You remember too, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ he confirmed, but he didn’t sound particularly happy about it. ‘I remember all of it, quite vividly as it happens, and the part I remember the most was you telling me you wished you’d never met me.’
Oh Christ, Faith thought. Now I wish his memory really was more selective.
‘There was a reason for that,’ she said in a small voice.
‘I guessed there might be,’ he said. ‘I was actually hoping you might enlighten me at some point. But don’t let me push you,’ he added sarcastically, ‘if you’re not quite ready yet. It’s only been nine years.’
This was new too, she thought, this acidity, the sarcasm. Did I do this to him, she wondered. Did I turn his sweetness knowing and sour?
‘I had a bit of trouble at home,’ she said, thinking she might as well begin there because she’d never actually told Rik what had happened with her parents and she could see with hindsight that had affected her judgement, that was one of the reasons she’d been so quick to assume the worst. ‘Quite a bit, actually. I came home after that weekend — after I’d been with you,’ she hoped he’d know to which weekend she was referring, because she couldn’t really bear to spell it out, ‘and my mum told me she and my dad were getting divorced.’
‘OK.’ He digested this for a moment. ‘And this came as a shock?’
She nodded. ‘I had no idea,’ she said sadly. ‘I knew they hadn’t been getting along well but I didn’t realise it was that serious. I felt really guilty,’ she admitted, ‘because I was so distracted by you I really hadn’t seen it coming. It took all the wind out of my sails. I literally couldn’t think about anything else, not even you. My mum was heartbroken, and I was too, and so hopelessly, powerlessly, vociferously angry at my dad.’ She took a deep breath. ‘They made me promise not to tell anybody,’ she said, ‘but my dad had — he had an affair, and my mum found out somehow and that was why.’ She paused, feeling familiar waves of sadness wash over her, and guilt at betraying her parents’ confidence. ‘I felt like I owed it to my mum to be there for her.’
‘I can see why you would feel like that.’
‘She was devastated of course. But I really didn’t want them to split up.’ She hung her head. ‘She wanted to move to London to live with my aunt, and take me with her while my dad organised selling the house. I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving here so I pleaded with her to go for counselling and eventually she agreed.’ She sighed. ‘It must have worked, to some extent, because they did stay together. But it took a long time and that was pretty all-consuming for me.’
‘It must have been,’ Rik said gently and she felt a wave of gratitude towards him for being able to muster up some sympathy for her. But then his voice hardened again and he went on, ‘But I still don’t see what that has to do with me.’
‘I came here,’ Faith said, feeling that her heartrate had quickened and swallowing down the sudden rush of nausea it had brought along for the ride. ‘To Hollyhocks,’ she added. ‘To see you. It had been a few weeks since Jason’s party and I hadn’t seen or spoken to you since.’
‘I remember the party,’ Rik said curtly. ‘You don’t have to give me any more context.’
‘I kind of do,’ Faith said desperately, ‘so you understand — anyway, I hadn’t spoken to you and I knew you’d been trying to ring me and must be wondering where I was, especially after…’ she tailed off again. ‘I hadn’t been ready to see you, I knew I would just tell you everything and that would be going against what I’d promised my parents and it all felt very precarious and up in the air and such a mess.’ She sighed. ‘But I had really missed you and all I wanted was to be with you.’ She bit her lip. ‘I came over early one Sunday morning, very early actually, nobody had really got up yet except Minel who answered the door and she told me…’ Faith took another deep breath and blundered on, ‘She told me you were upstairs with some girl. With Sophie.’
‘Sophie,’ Rik repeated, as if he’d never heard the name before.
‘I thought Minel was joking,’ Faith said. ‘She said you had a girlfriend, was talking about how you’d been acting totally loved-up and I just assumed you’d told her about you and me and she was trying wind me up but then I went upstairs into your room and I saw — I saw…’
Something approaching enlightenment was drifting across Rik’s face. ‘You saw Sophie?’
Faith nodded. ‘I saw Sophie and you — at least I thought it was you. It was really sunny,’ she said quickly, ‘and I couldn’t really make out faces or anything and to be honest I wasn’t looking that closely but I saw two people and one of them was definitely Sophie because I saw her hair and the other one…’ She could feel hot tears prickling behind her eyelids but pressed on regardless, ‘I mean — who else could it have been but you?’
Rik shook his head. ‘You didn’t check?’
‘Why would I check?’ Faith asked. ‘I didn’t know you were conspiring with Jason. I had no idea about all that, I’d been in a totally different zone for weeks, I’d forgotten all about Jason and Sophie and pretty much everything other than my parents, and you. And then Minel was full of chat about you and her, and I saw what I thought I saw and what else was I supposed to think?’
There was a long, long, painful silence. Faith stared at the ground and twisted her hands together, wringing them absently, then she looked back up at Rik and saw that he looked equally shellshocked.
‘So why didn’t you say something?’ he asked eventually. ‘Why didn’t you ask me what was going on? Why didn’t tell me you’d seen her in my room?’
‘I didn’t think I had to,’ Faith said quietly. ‘I assumed you would figure it out.’
‘A bit tricky,’ Rik said, ‘seeing as I didn’t actually do anything in the first place.’
‘Well, I know that now,’ Faith said. ‘But like I said, what else was I supposed to think?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rik said. ‘I don’t get why you wouldn’t be upfront with me then I could have told you what really happened and then…’ His mind was wandering, she realised, he’s coming to the same conclusions I’ve come to this last weekend, that if I’d just asked him straight up what was going on we wouldn’t have had to go through any of this, back then or now, and instead we would be — we might be — we could still be —
‘I didn’t say anything to you,’ she said, ‘because I really didn’t want you to know how much it had hurt me. I was devastated. The only possible thing I could salvage from the whole mess was not to lower myself to telling you or showing you just how much I cared about you.’ She sighed. ‘So rather than give you an earful I thought it would be better if I made it all out to be a bit of fun on both our sides, which is what I assumed it must have been to you.’ He opened his mouth to contradict her but she cut him off. ‘Rik, what other explanation could there be?’
‘Loads of them.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as it didn’t actually happen in the first place?’
Faith could feel herself becoming annoyed. ‘Minel told me she’d stayed over a few times. She called her your girlfriend. She said she’d heard you. And she was in your room and there were clothes all over the floor…’ She could still remember her reaction to the scene, the sickening lurch in her stomach, the disbelief, the tugging in her chest as if her heart were physically sinking and pulling at all her arteries and veins on its relentless way down. And then that unbearable pressure behind her eyes that told her she was going to cry, much like she was feeling now actually.
Oh god,
she really was going to cry. She was going to bawl her stupid tortured heartbroken little eyes out right here and now in front of him. It was going to be a fountain of misery, tears would spray almost vertically from her ducts straight onto him, soaking him and knocking him bodily to the ground with their velocity.
They were coming now, she could feel them beginning to gather and collect, spilling silently down her burning cheeks, and she put her head in her hands and stuffed her palms into her eyes, hoping to stem the flow but it was unstoppable, a tirade. She gave a horrible, snotty, choking sort of sob that turned into a groan and pressed into her eye sockets once more then gave up altogether and dropped her hands into her lap, watching droplets splash down upon them, huge and distorted like summer rain.
Rik was silent but she could feel his eyes on her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she choked out, ‘that I didn’t give you a chance to explain. I did think about it, but all I really wanted was for it not to be true and I couldn’t see any way it couldn’t be true and I was so worried you would find a way to talk me round.’ She gave another gasping, juddering sob. ‘We never actually did have the conversation about whether or not we were boyfriend and girlfriend, and spell it out that we weren’t going to see other people. And,’ she wiped her face absently, ‘as shallow and horrible of me as it was, I was a tiny bit embarrassed about the fact you were younger than me, you know how that stuff seemed to matter back then, and I was mortified that my “toyboy”,’ she mimed quotation marks, ‘had cheated on me.’
‘I did notice that my age bothered you,’ Rik said.
She sighed. ‘It did a bit. But I had decided it wasn’t an issue any more because you and I were just obviously meant to be.’
She waited for him to counter her, to tell her she had indeed been naïve and romantic in thinking that anything could be ‘meant to be’ at such a young age but once again, he didn’t say a word. Once upon a time Rik knew the exact right thing to say to me to make me feel better, she though hopelessly, now he knows exactly when not saying anything will hurt the most.
‘You do believe me, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I believe you.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Why didn’t you at least say you just wanted to go back to being friends?’
‘How could I?’ Faith asked. ‘How could I go back to being friends with you after that? Could you?’
There was another long, long silence.
‘Well.’ Rik sounded defeated. ‘I guess we’ll never know.’
But we could, she thought, a tiny flash of hope through her misery. We could now.
‘Do you think it’s too late,’ she said in a very small voice, ‘to say I want us to go back to being friends now?’
He made a dismissive sort of noise.
‘You obviously came back here for a reason, Rik,’ she said. ‘And so did I,’ she added hastily, wanting to be honest with him. ‘One of the reasons I came back was in the hope I might get some answers out of you. Losing somebody who was such a big part of my life really affected me. I wondered what I did, or didn’t do, to deserve that kind of treatment from my best friend and it still bothers me now. Or it did,’ she admitted, ‘until a few days ago.’
Rik laughed humourlessly. ‘I hoped I’d get some answers out of you too. Instead I came back to you acting all weird and seeming like you were actually pissed off with me and wondering what that was all about. At least that makes a bit more sense now.’
‘Likewise,’ Faith said, glad he seemed to be willing to be open with her too. ‘Much more sense. I can completely see why,’ she said, reaching out to touch his arm tentatively. ‘I do get it now, and I totally understand why you’ve been so distant.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, sounding resigned. ‘I get it too. A bit. I think.’
‘But look, Rik,’ she tightened her grip on his arm and he looked down at her hand. She dropped it abruptly. ‘Now we know — now we both know what the situation is, or was,’ she was aware she was making a hash of this but carried on regardless, ‘don’t you think maybe we could try and put it behind us? At the end of the day neither of us really did anything wrong, it was just a horrible set of circumstances and if we take that part away, we’re left with the fact that we used to really care about one another.’ She hoped he wouldn’t think she was suggesting anything untoward and added quickly, ‘I mean we were such good friends. And I missed you,’ she said candidly, thinking that she at least owed him that. ‘I’ve often wondered what you’re up to, what you’re doing with your life. It would be nice if we could be,’ she thought hard about how best to put it. ‘If we could at least acknowledge each other’s existence, without accompanying bitterness and resentment and accusing glares and blank stares.’
She studied his face for a moment. He was looking down at the ground and his brows were drawn together, his long eyelashes lowered. Without the stubble, she would be able to see spiky shadows of them on his high cheekbones. He’s thinking right now, she thought. He’s thinking about what to do and he’s wondering if whatever we had is worth opening up a can stuffed to the brim with worms, if he can get over all the anger and sadness and betrayal that I once thought I could never see the end of. He’s wondering if whatever is at the bottom, is worth the effort.
He’s going to say no, she thought with anguish. He’s going to say it’s been too long, too much time has passed, he accepts my explanation but it’s all ancient history and that’s where it should stay and that will be it for this summer, that will be it for me and Rik forever…
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘I’m here now.’
He looked back up at her and she could see resignation in his eyes, and irritation, and sadness, and something else too, something else very familiar that she hadn’t seen in him so far, until now.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Looks like I’m here too.’
Chapter 10
After her conversation with Rik Faith knew she didn’t have anything left in her. She felt as drained and depleted as the now-empty pond, and about as fragrant, thanks to all the digging and the mountains of bags stuffed full of rancid slurry she had to get to the skip.
She couldn’t carry on without some form of help. Firstly to shift the bags, but mainly with Rik. The cocktail of memories and emotions and new and shocking revelations was simply too much for her to handle by herself. She could just about manage it, she decided, if she had at least one other person with whom to share it all. And that had to be Rik, as he was the only other person involved here and she didn’t feel like going over the whole scenario with Minel, or Sara, or anybody else who would be coming in cold.
He was always in it with me, she thought, and like it or not he’s in it with me again now. This has been as big a shock to him as it was to me. He’s the only one who can move forwards with me now.
And if he chooses not to, if he decides to write it all off and pretend it never happens, if he continues to look right through me and act like the only purpose of my existence is to cause him irritation, then I just can’t stay here.
If that cynical, dismissive person is who Rik really is now, then I’m out. I can’t watch somebody who looks so much like somebody I used to love act like a callous, bitter stranger.
I’ll have to tell Minel I can’t handle it and she’ll be disappointed and let down and have to find somebody else and I’ll have to go back to work and put up with staying with my parents and commuting to London, spending hours on end on a train staring blankly out of a small window.
And even that stultifying little scenario was better than the thought of a summer here without anything other than ambivalence or moderate hostility from Rik.
I have to move on, she thought regretfully. At least we both know the truth now, and that’s got to be better than not knowing, surely.
GT, as if reading her thoughts, snuffled approvingly and nudged her ankle hopefully. She nudged him right back, and he growled then adjusted himself so his other side was in the sun and went back to sleep.
Two days
had crept past since their soul-sapping conversation on Monday, and in that time she’d chosen to leave him be, thinking that as she’d had a weekend to digest the new information before she acted on it, she’d extend him the same courtesy. But that had meant avoiding the site and not asking Paul or the teenagers for any help, which meant the bags of slime were rising to unmanageable levels, and so today she would have to go round to the site and get some of those teenagers to shift them for her.
Time to test the water. Again.
She pushed her shoulders back and marched across to the site. Paul was roaring at one of the boys, a chunky-looking youth who had paused with a handful of crisps halfway to his mouth. ‘Put them away,’ Paul was yelling. ‘Doesn’t your mother feed you? What do you want?’ His gaze had fallen on Faith, hovering at the edge of the site.
‘I need some help,’ she said. ‘Moving bags of stuff from the pond.’
‘Why can’t you move them?’ Paul was clearly not in an obliging mood.
‘There’s too many of them and they’re really heavy. I only need to borrow a couple of this lot for a few minutes.’
Paul grumbled something under his breath.
‘Sorry,’ Faith said. ‘I didn’t catch that.’
‘It was pretty unrepeatable.’ Rik had overheard and he was shaking his head. He was covered in cement dust and his hair was sticking upwards in a messy sort of quiff. She felt her insides squirming, then they turned weak with relief as he smiled at her and gestured to the two teenagers nearest to him. ‘Come on, you can both help too.’
Oh thank you god, she thought, and thank you Rik. You’re not going to spend all summer hating me after all.
He fell into step next to her and they wandered back to the pond. ‘Here,’ she announced, pointing towards the bags and buckets she had filled with the pond slop. ‘I need that in the skip.’
The teenagers were shoving each other and giggling more than ever.
‘Why are they doing that?’ Faith asked Rik warily. ‘Do I have a phallic-looking mudstain on my forehead?’