Rhys nods. ‘Yeah, I didn’t think you would come, but always nice to be asked, right?’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Really nice.’ I don’t know if I’m disappointed he gave in so quickly. Perhaps Ben was half-right about it not being genuine – but if it was a gesture, it still meant something to make it.
‘So what are the plans?’ I ask, perky. ‘All back to Piccadilly 21s?’
‘Town Hall for the ceremony’ Rhys says, slightly embarrassed. ‘Like us.’
‘Ah!’
‘I’d say bad karma but we never actually got there.’
‘Hah. Yes. Its vibes are clean.’ It’s good we’ve done this face to face. In type, that could look like a dig. In person, I can see Rhys is being friendly and making light of it.
‘Then reception is the Great John Street Hotel.’
‘Lovely!’ I say. I actually have no idea what it’s like but positivity seems only polite.
‘Yeah, Claire’s sorted it all. She’s good at that stuff. I’m just along for the ride,’ he smiles and I think: wow, radical departure from our years. My guess is his band aren’t playing, and there was no fight about it. Well, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
‘How’s it going with Zac Efron?’
I guffaw so loudly that people nearby glance over. ‘Hahahaah! Hardly, isn’t he about fifteen? Zac Efron’s dad, maybe. Good, thanks.’
Rhys smiles, pleased to have amused me.
‘Actually he’s not him, he’s the spit of the fella in that crap spanking film, isn’t he? Fifty Shades, that’s it. Claire fancies him. The actor, I mean.’
This casual remark tells me Rhys is truly, truly content with Claire. There’s so little residue of resentment he can cheerfully admit she crushes on a man who resembles my hitherto-despised boyfriend.
‘No plans to get hitched on your side?’
‘No,’ I twiddle the spoon in my latte and think he’s been open, so I can be too. ‘I don’t think it appeals to Ben, as a divorcé.’
‘That’s a shame. Always thought you’d make a cracking bride.’
‘Aw. Thanks.’
‘You’ve got the fresh face for it, haven’t you? And y’know, no tattoos.’
I laugh. ‘Actually I’ve got one with my date of birth in Roman Numerals and Distilled In Hell across my back.’
‘Ah nice. Font?’
‘Art Dystopia. It’s a jaggedy heavy metal one that looks evil.’
Rhys smiles.
‘As long as you’re happy, that’s the main thing. I really want you to be happy. Y’know that?’
I nod and mumble thanks and you too. Rhys was never this emotionally open when we were together. It’s like meeting someone after they’ve come back from a Yogic retreat, full of meditative calm instead of spiky barbs.
We discuss respective house purchases and find soothing refuge in neutral trivia and facts and figures and the fluctuating fortunes of various Manchester postcodes.
‘Ah, guessed you and him would be somewhere cool,’ Rhys said, ‘We’ve thrown the towel in on cool. I want a big garden for the kids.’
I smile and we don’t follow that line of conversation, my recent purchase making it clear there’s no news of mine on that score. It’s also the only moment he needles me. Rhys’s choices are the only correct choices. I know Rhys will be running down Chorlton to Claire later. ‘It’s the kind of place where you’ll slip on an avocado skin. Too rich for my blood.’
We drain our cups and leave.
‘It’s weird, isn’t it,’ Rhys says outside. ‘We’re both happy. Seeing each other is still a happy-sad, but we don’t know what we’re sad about, if we’re happy in our lives. Not that I don’t miss you. Sometimes. When I see custard doughnuts on offer in the supermarket, like.’
I laugh. ‘A valid alternative to jam!’
‘They’re like bursting a zit,’ Rhys says, in very possibly the last time we’ll revive this double act.
‘It’s happy-sad, but I’m so happy for you,’ I say, voice thick, thinking, don’t cry, don’t cry. ‘We had some good times.’
‘We did.’ He beams.
Claire has worked miracles on Rhys. Hats off to the woman.
‘You’ll always be my mate, Rachel,’ Rhys says.
‘Same here. Forever friends,’ I say. ‘I don’t mean the teddy bear thing.’
Rhys claps me on the shoulder, then leans over and squeezes me hard, and disappears fast into the lunch-hour crowd.
I walk back to work, lost in thought. I nearly married Rhys, and look how wrong for both us that would’ve been. There’s relief and this terrible irrational melancholy, too. I don’t want to be with him, but part of me will always miss him. Christ, perhaps I’m just pre-menstrual.
As I arrive back into court, Pete Gretton calls: ‘There she is!’ I turn and see him skulking with Owen, who’s making ‘rescue me’ hostage eyes.
‘Woodford, my girl, you’ve been caught red-handed.’
‘Have I?’
‘How have you spent your lunch hour?’
‘Buying …’ nah, not alluding to my uterus around Gretton. ‘… Shopping, why?’
‘NEH-UHH,’ Gretton makes a gameshow buzzer wrong answer noise. ‘Consorting with dark and mysterious strangers, more like. Itchy feet, is it? Your flash young whelp not satisfying you?’
‘Oh, you mean Rhys?’ I say. ‘Rhys is my ex-fiancé. He’s marrying someone else.’
Gretton looks momentarily deflated. ‘I see … and you still get along, do you?’
‘Yep. Sorry, Angela Lansbury. You do look like her actually. Murder, He Wrote. Or a senseless brutal slaying, as you’d call it.’
Pete scowls. For someone who dishes it out harder than the Salvation Army at Christmas, he’s got a very thin skin.
‘It wasn’t me who saw you, actually, sugartits, it was Paddy Pantsdown here.’
Owen looks sheepish. ‘I happened to mention I saw you … that was all …’
I smile and shrug and think: Ben might have been right about Owen taking a special interest in my significant others.
Ben is making a bloody annoying habit of being right.
8
Last year, my friend Caroline took her husband Graeme back after finding he’d had a prolonged fling. It didn’t make huge sense to me, but then Graeme as a husband never made sense to me in the first place, so I’d kept quiet and stayed supportive. She’s the most sensible person I know but might’ve been too sensible in her choice of partner, if you know what I mean.
Then, six months after they reconciled and started counselling, Caroline’s dad died. They were very close and it was a huge shock: apparently in fine fettle, he keeled over with a giant heart attack while gardening, aged sixty-eight.
As Caroline said on the first night, when I stayed up till dawn with her, it seems impossible that a person can just end. Then she got back from the wake and finished with Graeme. Calmly, with no fuss.
‘I had to ask myself, Rach,’ she said, ‘if I was struck down with a giant coronary doing the weeding, had I spent my time wisely? I couldn’t avoid the fact my marriage didn’t qualify as one of the things to be proud of. All those reasons I gave you for staying with Graeme, about not giving up the lifestyle we’d built together, they were shit reasons. I was scared of change. Now everything’s changed anyway.’
She sold the big house in the suburbs, and started renting an incredible apartment in the city. (‘Graeme was more upset at my lack of re-investment in the property market than he was at me telling him I was leaving him.’ And by that, shall ye know Graeme.)
Caroline was the one out of the four of us at university with life mapped out: she wanted the high-earning job, the husband, the kids, the Labradors, the second home and the Land Rover Explorer by forty. She’d already got the gilet. Yet to everyone’s astonishment, including Caroline, she absolutely loves being single. She says she might never bother with a serious live-in relationship again. Bunk-ups only.
‘Unless someone’s absolutely extraordinary, I honestly don’t see why I’d want to Cif their pubes off the toilet. I don’t need to. If you’d told me a few years ago I’d have split with Gray a week after my Dad died, I’d tell you that you were mad and I’d never have coped. It’s very powerful to know you can cope. You can do anything after that.’
Ivor said: ‘Alright, Khaleesi,’ and pointed out she could turn it into a series of inspirational memes, set against sunsets.
But we were all very impressed, and pleased for her. Even a shortlived foray on to Tinder didn’t rattle her. ‘All I learned was not to check it while I’m waiting for the train to work. Loads of attractive men in my area, minutes later they’re in Stockport.’
Anyway, one of Caroline’s ‘New Her’ habits is an early morning run on Saturdays. She jogs from town to Platt Fields Park at dawn, and back again. I coughed on my wine when she told me and asked why on earth she’d do that to herself.
After she extolled the mental and physical virtues of it with the devotion of a cult member, I found myself saying: ‘Can I come?’ (Mindy instantly opted in. ‘If you two are doing it then I have to do it too. That’s the law. I can’t be left out.’)
Ben is nauseatingly naturally sporty and I enjoyed surprising him with the news, all super casual.
‘Really?!’ Ben said, grinning. ‘Well well. Tell Caro to schedule in a little vomit in the bushes if you’ve been on the Crabbies with the reporters the night before.’
I tutted loudly, but then the first morning we did it, I was so hungover I thought I might actually die.
Ivor wasn’t to be won round to joining in, however.
‘Pounding the streets in purple Lycra posing pants? With three women? Whither my dignity.’
‘You don’t have to wear budgie smugglers,’ Caroline said.
‘Budgie smugglers! You’d be calling mine Crow Smugglers. That’s right. A massive crow.’
He waggled his trademark thick-rimmed glasses. Ivor looks like a bulked up Moby.
‘You forget you can’t make these claims these days, babe,’ Mindy said. ‘One of us here has had eyes on the prize.’
At which point both myself and Caroline put our fingers in our ears and said NOPE NOPE NOPE, NO THANK YOU.
‘See, they don’t want to know. The perfect crime,’ Ivor said.
Instead, we arranged that at the end of our runs, we’d meet Ivor for breakfast. The carrot and the stick.
This is why a prawn-pink, sweaty trio of women are arriving at hipstery brunch bar Moose Coffee, where a bespectacled Ivor sits with coffees and menus ready. I’m planning to terrorise a big plate of hash browns, jalapenos and eggs, which no doubt replaces all the expended calories and then some, but I refuse to care.
While we’re debating Mindy putting Caroline on My Single Friend – ‘And you need to get rid of your Emma Bridgewater pottery.’ ‘I like my spotty mugs!’ ‘It says nesting, total boner killer.’ – I see a gorgeous, auburn-haired woman sitting alone near the door with a coffee and an omelette.
At first I notice her simply because she’s beautiful, long rust-coloured hair pulled up on her head, sylph-like and cool in a summery dress and ankle boots, wrinkling a perfect small nose while reading the Times.
I imagine I’m free to covertly stare, except that while I’m recognising Ben’s workmate Esther from last night’s online snoopathon, I quite clearly see her glance over and recognise me, in return.
I’m positive I haven’t imagined it. Her startled Oh, It’s You expression over her flat white reads perfectly clearly. Spooked, I hastily pretend to have been simply scanning who’s coming through the door next to her and return to my menu, giving my order.
Esther might have noticed me around court, I suppose. Just because I haven’t seen her doesn’t mean she hasn’t seen me: although the people on the press bench are the spectators and the solicitors are the players, so it’s more likely to happen in reverse.
Hmm, no. It was a look of particular interest, and MEN reporter personnel like me aren’t automatically fascinating.
I suspect she knows who I am for the same reason I know her: she’s done some internet stalking. Ben’s got a Facebook page he never uses with virtually no photos, so even if they’re friends, I won’t be familiar from that. Argh. She knew my name, did she look me up to get a measure of the competition? Whenever you do some spying, you never imagine you’re being spied upon. I wish life involved less karma, frankly.
And of course, in person I’m drenched in sweat, wearing a baggy old t-shirt, a sports bra that binds me so hard I could play a boy in a Shakespeare play, and a pair of joggers with a saggy behind.
When the food arrives, I fork it much more daintily than my appetite demands, in case she’s taking covert photos and SnapChatting them to a hostile group: ‘His girlfriend = The Cookie Monster.’
‘Isn’t it weird how “late breakfast” became commoditised,’ Ivor is saying, ‘All these subway tiles. I am nostalgic and patriotic for the days when it was either a greasy spoon or a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin.’
‘You look very nostalgic and patriotic, with your huevos rancheros,’ I say.
‘Harking back to the grand English tradition of McDonalds,’ Caroline agrees.
I risk a glance over to Esther and she’s been joined by a female friend. My stomach does a forward roll as I realise she’s busy telling this friend who I am.
The friend looks right at me, then looks away, embarrassed to be seen seeing. Esther was also looking and then does a gloriously unsubtle ‘hand pressed to temple’ gesture designed to shield your eyes, as if she wasn’t.
Curse her, and curse bottomless coffee refills that mean she’s still there by the time we leave, so I have to walk my pouchy bottom past her.
When I get home, Ben’s laying the table for lunch in the dining room. We’re having my parents over from Sheffield. (If you’ve done a run you can do big breakfast and big lunch, as any fool knows.)
‘I saw Esther at the café this morning,’ I say.
Ben says: ‘Oh, right,’ uninterestedly.
‘She seemed weirdly preoccupied by me, pointing me out to the friend she was with and so on.’
‘She recognised you from court, I guess. Do we have four glasses like this that match?’
‘Yes, in the cupboard above the sink. I’ve never seen her in court.’
Ben bangs around finding the extra glasses, comes back and says: ‘She could’ve still seen you? I think, given you virtually share an office when she’s in court, this isn’t Twilight Zone eerie, Rach.’
‘Know what I think?’ I say.
‘No! What?’ Ben says, doing a ‘oh, God’ beaten-down grimace which I refuse to laugh at as it’ll undermine the impact.
‘I think she looked me up online as a person of interest, as I’m seeing you.’
Ben shrugs. ‘Who can say? Who, in a very real sense, cares? Are you going to get changed?’
I look down at my kit. ‘No, a spritz of Britney Spears’ Curious and I’m good.’
‘Hmmm,’ Ben says.
‘What?’
‘Just …’ he scratches his neck, mumbles: ‘… wondering whether Esther would … standards …’
I shriek and flap my hands and Ben laughs and tries to nuzzle my neck while I push him away. I stomp upstairs to shower and change.
The Saturday lunch tradition is a good one. I prepare most of it the night before, and Ben is on ‘putting lump of meat in oven at appointed time’ duty. We feed them, then my mum drags my dad off for an afternoon looking round House of Fraser.
I hear them arriving as I’m de-clingfilming potato salad and setting it out. My mum is exclaiming and cooing, even more effusively than usual. Did I mention they love Ben? They’re more smitten than me. My dad likes to say that if we split up and they had to choose, they would stay in touch with him.
Ben had a tough introduction, too: my mum was still mourning the departure of Rhys and fretting over the certainty of my old maidhood.
They’d both met Ben at a family friend’s wedding, when he was with Olivia. ‘I’ve taken up with that married man’ wasn’t music to their ears, but more ‘the downward trajectory continues’. Then they met him. Love at first sight.
‘I’ve got some of that whisky you like,’ Ben’s saying to my dad. ‘You can take it with you, given the M67 and Lagavulin don’t mix.’
‘Ben, you always look so nice,’ my mum says, taking in his light blue preppy boy shirt, then glancing at my attire. ‘And my daughter looks like she lives in a hollowed-out tree. You are a very patient man.’
‘Mum!’ I say, looking down at my lightly cat-hair-dusted navy dress. God, it was from Cath Kidston as well. No pleasing some people.
The meal goes well, as we have our formula down, both in terms of the food and the conversation. Ben being a lawyer is hugely popular with them: solid, respectable profession with prospects. He’s so bloody charming, without smarm. I’m 90% pride and 10% how can it always be so easy for you.
Things only go off-kilter during the trifle I’ve made for dessert (and it’s not the trifle’s fault, killer Nigella recipe).
Ben’s discussing a case that my parents have seen on the national news. They mention an aspect of it and Ben gently corrects them: ‘That was given too much prominence in the story. He had those guns, but a lot of them belonged to his brother, only he couldn’t prove it.’
‘What!’ I chortle. ‘He had a proper “end of the world” firearms stash, he was an apocalypse nutter. Owen did that story.’
Ben says, curtly: ‘Nutter: a catch-all journalistic term of abuse for anyone you don’t understand.’
‘Are you saying you do?!’
‘A colleague covered that case and thought he was a sad, damaged sort.’
My parents nod sympathetically, spooning up their custard.
‘A colleague …’ I say, ‘Ohhhhhh, that was the famous Esther Cowley’s client, wasn’t it? Nice she can find sympathy for someone who was pointing guns at kids. When he’s paying her costs.’
‘All right, Miss Hang ’Em and Flog ’Em! Next stop, the Sun, then?’
After Hello Page 4