You Had Me at Hello

by Mhairi McFarlane

  ‘You’re not happy?’

  ‘No, I’m not happy. Are you?’

  Rhys squeezes his eyes shut, sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Not at this exact moment, funnily enough.’

  ‘In general?’ I persist.

  ‘What is happy, for the purposes of this argument? Prancing through meadows in a stoned haze and see-through blouse, picking daisies? Then no, I’m not. I love you and I thought you loved me enough to make an effort. But obviously not.’

  ‘There is a middle ground between stoner daisies and constant bickering.’

  ‘Grow up, Rachel.’

  Rhys’s stock reaction to any of my doubts has always been this: a gruff ‘grow up’, ‘get over it’. Everyone else knows this is simply what relationships are and you have unrealistic expectations. I used to like his certainty. Now I’m not so sure.

  ‘It’s not enough,’ I say.

  ‘What are you saying? You want to move out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Neither do I, after all this time. It’s been quite an acceleration, from nought to splitting up in a few minutes. I’ve practically got hamster cheeks from the g-force. This could be why it’s taken us so long to get round to tying the knot. We knew it’d bring certain fuzzy things into sharper focus.

  ‘I’ll start looking for places to rent tomorrow.’

  ‘Is this all it’s worth, after thirteen years?’ he asks. ‘You won’t do what I want for the wedding – see ya, bye?’

  ‘It’s not really the wedding.’

  ‘Funny how these problems hit you now, when you’re not getting your own way. Don’t recall this … introspection when I was buying the ring.’

  He has a point. Have I manufactured this row to give me a reason? Are my reasons good enough? I weaken. Perhaps I’m going to wake up tomorrow and think this was all a mistake. Perhaps this dark, apocalyptic mood of terrible clarity will clear up like the rain that’s still pelting down outside. Maybe we could go out for lunch tomorrow, scribble down the shared song choices on a napkin, start getting enthused again …

  ‘OK … if this is going to work, we have to change things. Stop getting at each other all the time. See a counsellor, or something.’

  He can offer me next to nothing here, and I will stay. That’s how pathetic my resolve is.

  Rhys frowns.

  ‘I’m not sitting there while you tell some speccy wonk at Relate about what a bastard I am to you. I’m not putting the wedding off. Either we do it, or forget it.’

  ‘I’m talking about our future, whether we have one, and all you care about is what people will think if we cancel the wedding?’

  ‘You’re not the only one who can give ultimatums.’

  ‘Is this a game?’

  ‘If you’re not sure after this long, you never will be. There’s nothing to talk about.’

  ‘Your choice,’ I say, shakily.

  ‘No, your choice,’ he spits. ‘As always. After all I’ve sacrificed for you …’

  This sends me up into the air, the kind of anger where you levitate two feet off the ground as if you have rocket launchers on your heels.

  ‘You have not given anything up for me! You chose to move to Manchester! You act like I have this debt to you I can never repay and it’s bullshit! That band was going to split up anyway! Don’t blame me because you DIDN’T MAKE IT.’

  ‘You are such a selfish, spoilt brat,’ he bellows back, getting to his feet as well, because shouting from a seated position is never as effective. ‘You want what you want, and you never think about what other people have to give up to make it happen. You’re doing the same with this wedding. You’re the worst kind of selfish because you think you’re not. And as for the band, how fucking dare you say you know how things would’ve turned out. If I could go back and do things differently—’

  ‘Tell me about it!’ I scream.

  We both stand there, breathing heavily, a two-person Mexican standoff with words as weapons.

  ‘Fine. Right,’ Rhys says, eventually. ‘I’m going back home for the weekend – I don’t want to stay here and take this shit. Start looking for somewhere else to live.’

  I drop back down on the sofa and sit with my hands in my lap. I listen to the sounds of him stomping around upstairs, filling an overnight bag. Tears run down my cheeks and into the neckline of my shirt, which had only just started to dry out. I hear Rhys in the kitchen and I realise he’s turning the light off underneath the pan of chilli. Somehow, this tiny moment of consideration is worse than anything he could say. I put my face in my hands.

  After a few more minutes, I’m startled by his voice, right next to me.

  ‘Is there anyone else?’

  I look up, bleary. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard. Is there anyone else?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Rhys hesitates, then adds: ‘I don’t know why you’re crying. This is what you want.’

  He slams the front door so hard behind him, it sounds like a gunshot.

  2

  In the shock of my sudden singlehood, my best friend Caroline and our mutual friends Mindy and Ivor rally round and ask the question of the truly sympathetic: ‘Do you want us all to go out and get really really drunk?’

  Rhys wasn’t missing in action as far as they were concerned: he’d always seen my friends as my friends. And he used to observe that Mindy and Ivor ‘sound like a pair of Play School presenters’. Mindy is Indian, it’s an abbreviation of Parminder. She calls ‘Mindy’ her white world alias. ‘I can move among you entirely undetected. Apart from the being brown thing.’

  As for Ivor, his dad’s got a thing about Norse legends. It’s been a bit of an albatross, thanks to a certain piece of classic children’s animation. Ivor endured the rugby players in our halls of residence at university calling him ‘the engine’ and claiming he made a pessshhhty-coom, pessshhhty-coom noise at intimate moments. Those same rugby players drank each other’s urine and phlegm for dares and drove Ivor upstairs to meet the girls’ floor, which is how we became a mixed-sex unit of four. Our platonic company, combined with his close-shaved head, black-rimmed glasses and love of trendy Japanese trainers led to a frequent assumption that Ivor was gay. He’s since gone into computer game programming and, given there are practically no women in the profession whatsoever, he feels this misconception could see him missing out on valuable opportunities.

  ‘It’s counter-intuitive,’ he always complains. ‘Why should a man surrounded by women be homosexual? Hugh Hefner doesn’t get this treatment. Obviously I should wear a dressing gown and slippers all day.’

  Anyway, I’m not quite ready to face cocktail bar society, so I opt for a night in drinking the domestic variety, invariably more lethal.

  Caroline’s house in Chorlton is always the obvious choice to meet, as unlike the rest of us she’s married, and has an amazing one. (I mean house, not spouse – no disrespect to Graeme. He’s away on one of his frequent boys’ golfing weekends.) Caroline is a very well paid accountant for a large chain of supermarkets, and a proper adult: but then, she always was. At university, she wore quilted gilets and was a member of the rowing club. When I used to express my amazement to the others that she could get up early and exercise after a hard night on the sauce, Ivor used to say, groggily: ‘It’s a posh thing. Norman genes. She has to go off and conquer stuff.’

  He could be on to something about her ancestry. She’s tall, blonde and has what I believe is called an aquiline profile. She says she looks like an ant eater; if so, it’s kind of ant-eater-by-way-of-Grace-Kelly.

  I have the job of slicing limes and salting the rims of the glasses on Caroline’s spotlessly sleek black Corian worktop while she blasts ice, tequila and Cointreau into a slurry in a candy-apple red KitchenAid. In between these deafening bursts, from her regal perch on the sofa, Mindy is gifting us, as usual, with the Tao of Mindy.

  ‘The difference between thirty an
d thirty-one is the difference between a funeral and the grieving process.’

  Caroline starts spooning out margarita mixture.

  ‘Turning thirty is like a funeral?’

  ‘The funeral for your youth. Lots of drink and sympathy and attention and flowers, and you see everyone you know.’

  ‘And for a moment there we were worried the comparison was going to be tasteless,’ Ivor says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He’s sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, one arm similarly outstretched, pointing a remote at something lozenge-shaped that’s apparently a stereo. ‘Have you really got The Eagles on here, Caroline, or is it a sick joke?’

  ‘Thirty-one is like grieving,’ Mindy continues. ‘Because getting on with it is much worse, but no one expects you to complain any more.’

  ‘Oh, we expect you to complain, Mind,’ I say, carefully passing her a shallow glass that looks like a saucer on a stem.

  ‘The fashion magazines make me feel so old and irrelevant, it’s like the only thing I should bother buying is TENA Lady. Can I eat this?’ Mindy removes the lime slice from the side of her glass and examines it.

  She is, in general, a baffling mixture of extreme aptitude and total daftness. Mindy did a business degree and insisted throughout she was useless at it and definitely wasn’t going to take on the family firm, which sold fabrics in Rusholme. Then she got a first and picked the business up for one summer, created mail order and online sales, quadrupled the turnover and grudgingly accepted she might have a knack, and a career. Yet on holiday in California recently, when a tour guide announced, ‘On a clear day, with binoculars, you can see whales from here’, Mindy said, ‘Oh my God, all the way to Cardigan Bay?’

  ‘Lime? Er … not usually,’ I say.

  ‘Oh. I thought you might’ve infused it with something.’

  I collect another glass and deliver it to Ivor, then Caroline and I carry ours to our seats.

  ‘Cheers,’ I say. ‘To my broken engagement and loveless future.’

  ‘To your future,’ Caroline chides.

  We raise glasses, slurp, wince a bit – the tequila is quite loud in the mix. It makes my lips numb and stomach warm.

  Single. It’s been so long since the word applied to me and I don’t feel it yet. I’m something else, in limbo: tip-toeing round my own house, sleeping in the spare room, avoiding my ex-fiancé and his furious, seething disappointment. He’s right: this is what I want, I have less reason than him to be upset.

  ‘How’s it going, you two living together?’ Caroline asks, carefully, as if she can hear me think.

  ‘We’re not putting piano wire at neck level across doorways yet. We stay out of each other’s way. I need to step up the house hunt. I’m finding excuses to be out every evening as it is.’

  ‘How did your mum take it?’ Mindy bites her lip.

  Mindy understands that, as one of the two slated bridesmaids, she was the only other person as excited as my mum.

  ‘Not well,’ I say, with my skill for understatement.

  It was awful. The phone call went in phases. The ‘stop playing a practical joke’ section. The ‘you’re having cold feet, it’s natural’ parry. The ‘give it a few weeks, see how you feel’ suggestion. Anger, denial, bargaining, and then – I hope – some sort of acceptance. Dad came on and asked me if it was because I was worrying about the cost, as they’d cover it all if need be. It was then that I cried.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, it’s just, you never said …’ Mindy asks. ‘What actually caused the row that made you and Rhys finish?’

  ‘Oh …’ I say. ‘It was Macclesfield Elvis.’

  There’s a pause. Our default setting is pissing about. As the demise of my epically long relationship only happened a week previous, no one knows quite what’s appropriate yet. It’s like after any major tragedy: when’s it OK to start forwarding the email jokes?

  ‘You shagged Macclesfield Elvis?’ Ivor says. ‘How did it feel to be nailed by The King?’

  ‘Ivor!’ Mindy wails.

  I laugh.

  ‘Oooh!’ Caroline suddenly exclaims, in a very un-Caroline-like way.

  ‘Have you sat on something?’ Mindy says.

  ‘I forgot to say. Guess who I saw this week?’

  I’m trying to think which famous person is meant to be my top spot. Unless it’s someone I’ve done a story on, but I spend all day looking at people who are only ever celebrities for the wrong reasons. I doubt a sex attacker on the lam would provoke this delight.

  ‘Coronation Street or Man U?’ Mindy asks. These are the two main sources of famous people in the city, it’s true.

  ‘Neither,’ Caroline says. ‘And this is a quiz for Rachel.’

  I shrug, crunching on some ice with my back teeth.

  ‘Uh … Darren Day?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lembit Opik?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My dad?’

  ‘Why would I see your dad?’

  ‘He could be over from Sheffield, having a clandestine affair behind my mum’s back.’

  ‘In which case I’d announce it in the form of a fun quiz?’

  ‘OK, I give up.’

  Caroline sits back with a triumphant look on her face.

  ‘English Ben.’

  I go hot and cold at the same time, like I’ve suddenly caught the flu. Slight nausea is right behind the temperature fluctuation. Yep, the analogy holds.

  Ivor twists round to look at Caroline.

  ‘English Ben? What kind of nickname is that? As opposed to what?’

  ‘Is he any relation to Big Ben?’ Mindy asks.

  ‘English Ben,’ Caroline repeats. ‘Rachel knows who I mean.’

  I feel like Alec Guinness in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker turns up at his cave and starts asking for Obi Wan Kenobi. Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time …

  ‘Where was he?’ I say.

  ‘Going into Central Library.’

  ‘How about telling old “Two Legs Ivor” who you’re on about?’ Ivor asks.

  ‘I could be “Hindi Mindy”,’ Mindy offers, and Ivor looks like he’s going to explain something to her, then changes his mind.

  ‘He was a friend at uni, remember,’ I say, covering my mouth with my glass in case my face is betraying more than I want. ‘Off my course. Hence, English. Ben.’

  ‘If he was a friend of yours, why is Caroline all … wriggly?’ Mindy asks.

  ‘Caroline always fancied him,’ I say, glad this is the truth, if nothing like the whole truth, so help me God.

  ‘Ah.’ Mindy gives me an appraising look. ‘You can’t have fancied him then, because you and Caroline and taste in men – never the twain shall meet.’

  I could kiss Mindy for this.

  ‘True,’ I agree, emphatically.

  ‘He still looks fine,’ Caroline says, and my stomach starts flopping around like a live crustacean heading for the pot in the Yang Sing kitchen. ‘He was in a gorgeous suit and tie.’

  ‘A suit, you say? This man is fascinating,’ Ivor says. ‘What a character. I’m compelled to know more. Oh. No, hang on – I’m not.’

  ‘Did you and he ever …?’ Mindy asks Caroline. ‘I’m trying to place him …’

  ‘God, no, I wasn’t glamorous enough for him, I don’t think any of us were, were we, Rach? Bit of a womaniser. But somehow nice with it.’

  ‘Yep,’ I squeak.

  ‘Wait! I remember Ben! All like, preppy, smart and confident?’ Mindy says. ‘We thought he must be rich and then it was like, no, he just … washes.’ She looks at Ivor, who takes the bait.

  ‘Oh, rings a vague bell. Poser who was …’ Ivor flips his collar up ‘… Is it handsome in here or is it just me?’

  ‘He wasn’t like that!’ I laugh, nervously.

  ‘You lost touch with Ben completely?’ Caroline asks. ‘Not Facebook friends or anything?’

  Severed touch with him. Touch was torn in half, like chesting t
he ribbon at the end of a race.

  ‘No. I mean, yeah. Not seen Ben since uni.’

  And my seven hundred and eighty-one Google searches yielded no results.

  ‘I’ve seen him at the library a few times, it’s only now it’s clicked and I realised why I recognised him. He must be staying in Manchester. Do you want me to say hello if I see him again, pass on your mobile number?’

  ‘No!’ I say, with a note of panic not entirely absent from my voice. I feel I have to explain this, so I add: ‘It could sound as if I’m after him.’

  ‘If you were only friends before, why would he automatically think that?’ Caroline asks, not unreasonably.

  ‘I’m single after such a long time. I don’t know, it could be misinterpreted. And I’m not looking to … I don’t want it to look like, here’s my single friend who wants me to auction her phone number to men in the street,’ I waffle.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to put it on a card in a phone box!’ Caroline huffs.

  ‘I know, I know, sorry.’ I pat her arm. ‘I am so, so out of practice at this.’

  A pause, with sympathetic smiles from Mindy and Caroline.

  ‘I’ll hook you up with some hotness, when you’re ready.’ Mindy pats my arm.

  ‘Woah,’ Ivor says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Judging from the men you do date, I’m trying to imagine the ones you pass over. I’m getting a message from my brain: the server understood your request but is refusing to fulfil it.’

  ‘Oh, considering your rancid trollops, this is rich.’

  ‘No, it was that thundering helmet Bruno who was rich, remember?’

  ‘Aherm, he also had a nice bum.’

  ‘So there you go,’ Caroline interrupts. ‘Have we cheered you up? Feeling brighter?’

  ‘Yes. A sort of nuclear glow,’ I say.

  ‘More serious Slush Puppy?’ Caroline asks.

  I hold my glass up.

  ‘Shitloads, please.’

  3

  I met Ben at the end of our first week at Manchester University. I initially thought he was a second or third year, because he was with the older team who’d set up trestle tables in my halls of residence bar to issue our accommodation ID cards. In fact, he’d started off as a customer, same as me. In what I’d later discover was a typically garrulous, generous Ben thing to do, he’d offered to help and hopped over the tables when they’d complained they were short-handed.