The Wish List

by Jane Costello

  Sightseers clambering onto coaches. Engines springing into life. Guides shouting instructions. I know they’re happening but can hear none of it over the thunder of my racing heart as our lips meet – almost.

  ‘Guys!’

  Matt pulls away with a start. ‘Look,’ he says.

  I gaze up at the sky and there they are. The lights aren’t as bright as I know they can be, but they’re definitely there: a pale green swirl dancing in the blackness like a silk scarf.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Matt smiles. ‘Not the strongest display but . . . hey, you’ve seen them. This trip was worth doing after all.’

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper, glancing at him. ‘It was definitely worth doing.’

  Chapter 58

  There is only one thing to do when I get back to the room: shave my legs.

  I dive into the bathroom and flip open the lid of the bin, only to realise that the maid has been in and emptied it.

  ‘Noooo!’ I shriek, in a way that would be justified from someone whose village had been burned to the ground by marauding outlaws.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Matt asks through the door.

  ‘Oh . . . um – yes. I won’t be long,’ I cough, rifling through my cosmetic bag in desperation.

  I am in luck. Sort of.

  There is a razor that’s been used several times already and should’ve been discarded long ago; it’s rusting at the edges and boasts several stray hairs sprouting out of the side.

  ‘I’ll go down to the bar to get us a drink before it closes,’ Matt says. It is now one thirty in the morning.

  ‘O-kayee!’ I reply, just as the door shuts.

  Now, I’m not an obsessive reader of beauty pages, but I’m absolutely certain that hair removal with an implement that boasts a percentage of corrosion similar to that found in a scrap-metal yard is not recommended practice.

  Every movement makes me wince. No matter how slowly I take it, this is doing my skin no good at all. So, with nothing to lose, I decide to adopt the approach recommended when removing a plaster – doing it as quickly as possible in a hope that it lessens the pain.

  It doesn’t. The result is that, as I tug on my skinny jeans, the limbs underneath belong in a scene from Reservoir Dogs.

  Dinner last night was strange and I can’t say tonight’s nightcap is entirely normal either. But in a totally different way. I can’t think of a single day I’ve spent in the company of another human being that I’ve enjoyed more.

  It’s as if all the best bits of the time we’ve ever spent together – the coffee, the play times with the kids, the barbecues – have been condensed into this perfect, distilled twenty-four hours.

  So why is something so enjoyable so weird? It’s weird because as I sit here laughing, chatting and having the time of my life, it’s in the knowledge that I’m letting myself fall for this man, if I haven’t already.

  And, despite how bad and mad that is – in the light of the fact that I have a boyfriend – the experience is so intoxicating I can’t stop myself.

  ‘Will you go out again tomorrow to see if you can photograph the lights?’ I ask Matt as we sit in the bar next to a flickering fire.

  ‘Yep – they weren’t really strong enough tonight, so I’ve got another six hours on a freezing coach. Lucky old me.’

  ‘Ah, you’ll cope,’ I laugh.

  ‘I’m sure. I’m certainly having more fun than I had last time I was here,’ he says, then stops suddenly, as if he’s blurted out something he shouldn’t have said.

  I glance at him awkwardly. ‘Oh?’

  He picks up the cocktail menu and scans it, clearly trying to work out how to avoid continuing. Only, now I want him to continue.

  ‘What happened last time?’

  He swallows. ‘I was here with Allison. It was when we weren’t getting along so well.’

  I bite my lip and scan my cocktail menu. ‘Is your divorce close yet?’

  ‘It’ll be a few months before it’s finalised,’ he replies.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,’ I mutter, trying to think of something to lighten the mood.

  ‘It’s fine . . .’ he says, taking a sip of his drink. ‘I mean, it’s fine you asking about it. It’s not fine generally.’

  I’m unable to think of anything to say. He registers my unease.

  ‘Sorry, Emma, but . . . well, as you know, I didn’t want any of it to happen.’

  I hesitate before asking, ‘What happened, Matt? You and I have been friends for months but we’ve never really talked about it – apart from briefly after your barbecue.’

  He takes a deep breath.

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘No,’ he says, putting his hand on mine. ‘I want to tell you.’

  I gaze into his eyes, and they’ve never looked more sorrowful. Then he pulls himself together and speaks calmly, almost as if he’s talking about someone other than himself.

  ‘Allison and I had been together since we were teenagers. How often do people say that these days?’

  ‘Not often,’ I concede.

  ‘We sat next to each other in sixth form – we both studied geography. I was infatuated, but never thought for a second she’d be interested in me.’ He takes a sip of wine. ‘I’d had girlfriends before – a few, actually – and, laughably, had a bit of a reputation.’

  ‘Laughably?’

  He thinks for a second. ‘I suppose it wasn’t laughable at the time. I’d done a fair bit of . . . skirt-chasing,’ he says with a grin. ‘When I was much younger, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ I smile sarcastically.

  ‘The point is, the second I met Allison that changed. I was seventeen years old and haven’t been with another woman since.’

  ‘Not one?’

  ‘I came close with you,’ he smirks.

  I blush furiously.

  ‘Anyway, we fell madly in love. We went to university together, got our first house together, got married at twenty-four, had our first child at twenty-six, then followed that up with two more. All by the age of thirty. It should’ve been perfect. By the end . . . it was far from that.’

  ‘What do you think went wrong?’

  ‘Apart from the other man?’

  ‘Sorry I—’

  ‘No, it’s a good question.’ He sighs. ‘I ask myself that every day and have singularly failed to come up with a satisfactory answer. Maybe we were just too young.’

  ‘You sound as if you don’t believe that.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Not for a minute. Not for me, anyway. Although I suppose one thing I’ve discovered is that Allison is different from me. I would have happily continued until we had ten kids – I loved it. But I think that when we had children she kind of felt . . . well, as if she lost her identity a bit.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, she loves our children, she’s a fantastic mother. But she gave up work completely and that was a mistake, with hindsight. I think part of the reason for the affair was that she needed to remind herself that she was the same Allison as before. Fun-loving, funny, desirable.’

  He looks at his napkin and I realise his knuckles are white. ‘I found out about Guillaume from an email on her laptop. She’d left it on and I went to check the weather forecast before a day out with the kids.’

  ‘Oh Matt,’ I say, unable to think of anything else.

  ‘The short story is, after tears and recriminations . . . I forgave her and said I’d take her back.’

  ‘That must have been so painful.’

  ‘Not as much as her response,’ he replies. ‘She didn’t want to come back. She wanted to stay with Guillaume.’

  ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘Somewhere fairly rural in France – Aquitaine, I think. But he’s lived in the UK for years. Now he lives in Woolton, of course, just a few streets from her. And my children.’

  I swallow. ‘How horrendous for you.’

  ‘It is. To see your kids be
ing around another man . . .’ He takes a deep breath. ‘It doesn’t help that they’re not particularly fond of him.’

  ‘I guess that was always going to be the case under the circumstances.’

  ‘I guess so. Josh, in particular, hates him. I think he’s scared of him. Part of me wonders whether that’s why he’s wetting the bed again.’

  ‘At least they don’t live together.’

  ‘Hmm. Yet.’

  He closes his eyes momentarily, as if he’s about to make a confession. ‘I can’t help wondering if this situation is ever going to feel normal. Sometimes I wake up and expect to roll over and find Allison next to me. It’s been nine months and that’s still happening. I don’t know when it’s going to stop.’

  ‘It will,’ I assure him. I reach over to touch his hand before I can think about it and we both sit, looking at it briefly, before I take my hand away.

  ‘I hope so,’ he continues. ‘I’ve come to accept now that she’s never coming back. She’s gone, out of my life . . . only not. The ghost of my wife is still there, every time I drop off the kids or she phones me about some school play. I have to look into her eyes – this woman I love so much – and try desperately to stop myself from begging her to come back.’

  ‘You still feel like that?’ I ask, realising my voice is croaking. ‘After everything, you’d still have her back?’

  He looks at the fire. ‘She’s all I’ve ever known, Emma. The life I had with her, with our children, that was all I’ve ever known – and that was how things should have been. For ever.’

  We go up to the room shortly after that. I pull on my pyjamas in the bathroom, and when I emerge, Matt has stripped to his trunks and a T-shirt. He brushes his teeth and is about to crawl onto the sofa cushions on the floor, when I feel a sudden urge to reach out for his hand.

  I’m not driven by the heat that’s roaring through my body. I’m driven by something else: the simple need to reach out to another human being and tell him he’s not alone.

  He stops and hesitates, then clutches my hand tightly. For a second I don’t know what will happen and neither does he. So I take matters into my own hands. I turn and lead him to the bed and we sink into it, and into each other.

  My heart is still hammering as his arms wrap round my thin nightclothes and I switch off the light. His cheek presses against my neck and we lie, still and silent, holding each other in the darkness.

  I try to empty my head of thoughts and escape into sleep. But, as he squeezes me tighter, a soft pool of his tears gathers against my skin. And I know my mind will be alive with thoughts for many hours to come.

  Chapter 59

  I arrive back in the UK with several facts at the forefront of my mind.

  Facts that crystallised when Matt said goodbye in Iceland and I sat on the bus to the airport, thinking.

  The first fact is this. I have feelings for Matt that I now can’t suppress. Exactly when things changed between us is hard to pinpoint. All I know is that the growing affection I’ve felt for him over the last few months exploded this weekend, and I know without question that there’s no going back.

  I’ve never felt like this. About anyone. The do-I-don’t-I? question I constantly asked myself with Rob isn’t showing even the remotest signs of appearing. What people have been telling me for years – that you just know – has happened.

  Which brings me to fact two. And this is the real bugger of the piece.

  There is absolutely no doubt that this feeling is not reciprocated, for reasons Matt spelled with perfect lucidity last night.

  He’s still in love with Allison and he always will be. Although there were times when I thought he was attracted to me, that, really, was an optimistic interpretation – a fact underlined by him spending seven hours clutching me in bed without it leading to anything. Nothing at all.

  Despite all this, despite the futility of my surge of emotion towards Matt, I know something else for certain. I hate myself for it, but it was inevitable from the day Rob and I got back together – as much as it makes despair rush through me just thinking about it.

  I made a mistake, one I can’t undo, one I can’t turn time back to fix. But one I’ve got to act on.

  I can’t be Rob’s girlfriend any more. What I feel for him isn’t going to grow. It isn’t going to change. As lovely as he is, I am not in love with him. It’s as simple as that. And, as horrible as this is going to be, I need to end it. Now.

  Chapter 60

  I have the noblest of intentions regarding Rob, honestly I do. Despite my urgent need to prepare for the new career on which I’m embarking in twelve hours. Despite the desperate overhaul required for my skin, feet and hair, the latter of which looks as though I’ve put it on a boil-wash then attempted to tumble dry it. And despite the fact that I am so exhausted from the trip I’m considering prodding myself with a fork to avoid slipping into a coma.

  My intentions remain steadfast, as I spin round the flat, depilating, plucking, fake-tanning and laying out my one and only killer work outfit (we didn’t do the tailored look in kids’ TV).

  I’m midway through packing my bag, when my phone beeps. It’s a text from Rob.

  Can I come over? SO want to see my gorgeous girlfriend tonight. xxxxxx

  My heart sinks.

  And that very fact – that this is how I react to seeing my boyfriend after nearly three days apart – confirms what I’ve got to do. What any woman with an ounce of decency would do. I pick up the phone and dial his number.

  ‘I love you!’ he blurts out, as if confessing to having tried on my underwear.

  ‘Oh! Um . . . how was Barcelona?’ I ask.

  He hesitates, taking in my response. ‘Good. Exhausting. We didn’t take in much art.’

  I laugh.

  ‘How was your trip?’

  ‘Lovely,’ I reply. ‘Really good. Yep.’

  He pauses, clearly waiting for me to expand on this.

  ‘Can I come over?’

  I swallow. ‘Oh . . . I’m shattered. And I’ve got to get ready for tomorrow. I’m as nervous as hell and—’

  ‘I could give you one of my massages. You loved the last one.’

  The last sentence drips with innuendo, and I can feel myself physically cringing. Not that I can deny it – I did enjoy it. There was a point, before things became so complicated, when I was more than happy to let a gorgeous bloke strip from the waist down and get to work with enough strawberry oil to leave me whiffing of Müller Light.

  But things have changed. It would be much easier if they hadn’t, but they have – and there’s nothing I can do except take the bull by the horns.

  I take a deep breath, focus and attempt to muster the words required.

  ‘How about I give you a shout tomorrow?’ I wonder if I’ll ever stop being such a wimp.

  Chapter 61

  You know how, when you start a new job, you’re always really nervous – but certain you’ll be fine once you get there? That’s exactly what I told myself as I caught the train to Manchester for my first day at Loop Interiors.

  I’m not convinced I was right.

  ‘Hi!’

  I look up from my desk and Dee, who sits opposite, has a bright smile as she peers over her computer.

  Dee has a perfect snub nose, flawless (if slightly overdone) make-up, and is impeccably turned out in the most painfully sublime outfit I’ve ever set eyes on.

  For five hours, she’s sat finishing-school-straight at her desk, tapping away delicately at her keyboard and studiously refusing to recognise my presence, apart from when she’s ready for a cup of tea. And getting it is apparently my job.

  ‘I think it’s tea time!’ she trills, handing over a bone-china cup. ‘Less milk this time, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Sure. No problem.’ I take it from her and stand up.

  The worst thing is, I’m glad to be making tea. Making tea is the most excitement I’ve had all day. Compared with any other task I’ve undertaken, filling the
kettle is as thrilling as a trip on the Orient Express followed by a scuba-diving session in the Great Barrier Reef.

  Because it involves doing something. Admittedly, it’s not interior design, but it’s significantly better than the brain-deadening boredom I’ve experienced sitting in front of a computer for which nobody has given me a login yet.

  I go to the kitchen and flick on the kettle, savouring the moment as I choose the tea bags, for I know this flurry of decision-making will be the equivalent of an intense morning of debate at the Hague – and as demanding as work will get for the next few hours.

  I take a deep breath and force myself not to be negative.

  No. I need to be something quite different from negative. I need to be pro-active. That’s what you’re meant to be if you want to get on in life these days, isn’t it? Pro-active. The alternative, presumably, is sitting on your arse all day waiting for something to do, then grumbling vociferously when it actually arrives.

  Well, that’s not going to be me. In fact, it isn’t me. I’m used to an office that’s buzzing with creativity, one where people dash about trying to hit deadlines and, when things get really stressful, each other.

  I strain the tea bags and take the cups through to the office. I wish I could say the problem was only with Dee, who appears to have been born with a rod shoved so tightly up her backside it’s a wonder she ever learned to walk. But I suspect it isn’t.

  What I was too flustered to notice on the day I came for my interview was that this office has about as much atmosphere as the cold chamber of a morgue.

  There is no banter. There is no joke-cracking. And as I discovered the first time I was sent to make the tea, there are definitely no Hobnobs. This is because – with the staff’s encouragement – an office-wide prohibition on all foodstuffs containing more than 1.5g of fat was apparently implemented last year. Dee told me this, before removing a celery stick from her bag and taking a dainty nibble.

  I walk back to the desks, suppressing an almost overwhelming urge to pluck one of the strings on the harp just to see what everyone does. Then I place Dee’s cup on her desk. She pauses from typing and examines it, checking it has the optimum level of milkiness – something I’ve so far consistently failed to achieve.