Jayne couldn’t help laughing at the sheer audacity of the greying musician, who was now sitting opposite her, arching one eyebrow comically. ‘Quick wit and repartee? I fear it would be wasted on me. I’m in the middle of one of the worst days of my life.’
‘Granted unknotting fairy lights is not the best use of a young person’s time on a sunny July day, but there’s no need to be dramatic about it.’
‘Funny. That’s what my fiancé,’ she paused, ‘ex-fiancé, used to say to me.’
‘He sounds like a wise man, except he doesn’t because he’s your ex. Stupid, stupid man.’
‘My thoughts exactly. Stupid, stupid man.’
‘Stupid is as stupid does.’
‘If there was a town called Stupid, he’d be the mayor of it.’
‘Chief Stupid of StupidTown.’
They broke into big grins. ‘I’m Jim.’
‘Jayne. So, Jim, you’re a trumpet-player.’
‘Actually no, I’m a history teacher. Who plays the trumpet in pubs and village halls. I need the outlet for my creative expression. And the money.’
‘I teach English, so I know what you mean. On both counts.’
‘You’re a teacher too? See? I knew you were a kindred spirit the first time I saw you.’
Jayne rolled her eyes. ‘Are you like this with every unsuspecting girl who wanders into your path?’
‘Like what? He asked innocently, eyes and arms open wide.
‘Alright James O’Malley?’ sang Abi as she sauntered in, weighed down by tupperwares filled with triangular sandwiches and sausage rolls. ‘See you’ve met my friend, Jayne. Didn’t take you long to sniff out some new blood in the town.’
Jim held his hand to his chest, ‘I’m wounded, Abigail, wounded I tell you. If you’d only accepted my proposal back in high school I wouldn’t need to fill the void you left in my heart.’
‘Be off with you, you crazy eejit.’ She stooped and kissed his cheek with obvious affection, ‘I saw you last night at Matt Malloys, but you were either up on stage or chatting up some poor woman, so I didn’t come over.’
‘Poor women, my arse, they were fans, Abigail, fans. It’s tough being this gorgeous to the opposite sex, that it is.’ They all shared a smile. Jim with his small, but noticeable, paunch and long, messy hair, which had gone beyond the salt-and-pepper stage into full-blown grey with a few strands of brown, could never be called ‘gorgeous to the opposite sex’ in the traditional sense of the phrase, but his humour and self-confidence were obviously compelling to the long line of women he’d evidently snared. Including, Jayne realised, her best friend, who was exhibiting the common signs of being in the company of an ex-sleeping partner – hair flicks, coy giggles and intermittent arm-touching. Poor Bernard, she thought, what has he got himself into?
Jim made his excuses after a short while and jumped up on the small stage to join the rest of his band mates. ‘Well?’ Jayne said to Abi as soon as Jim was out of earshot.
‘Well what? He’s an old friend.’
‘Not him, I can see what he was,’ Jayne rolled her eyes, ‘What did Rachel say?’
‘You’ve got it all wrong.’
‘See!’ Jayne shrieked, ‘I knew this would happen. You’d speak to her, buy into whatever rubbish she’d tell you and then convince me to go back. Well the evidence is pretty compelling.’
‘It’s actually really not. Call her. Call her now and listen to what she has to say. And then, for God’s sake call Will and sort this out, because they’re both going out of their minds and you all need to talk.’
‘No.’
‘Jayne, you’re being stubborn.’
‘Me?’ Jayne yelled, before seeing all the other helpers in the hall turn to look. ‘Me?’ She had lowered her voice to an irate whisper, ‘I’m now the bad guy? I’m not the one with my tongue in Barbie’s ear. How did I become the bad guy? I actually did call him this morning before I knew about his bed-hopping and his phone was turned off, so obviously he has no interest in talking to me. I don’t want to talk about this any more. Are you going to help me with these lights or what?’
‘I’ll help you only if you promise to call them tomorrow. It’s fine that you don’t want to do it today with everyone around, but tomorrow, when it’s all calmed down, you’ll call them?’
‘Fine.’ Tomorrow was far enough away for her to put it out of her mind. Except that she couldn’t.
Even though she’d never been to Ireland with Will, even though he’d never met any of the people in this town, everywhere she looked there was something that reminded her of him. God, even seeing Abi’s dad polish his shoes before they left for the party reminded her of the little canvas bag of polish, duster and brush Will had tucked away inside his wardrobe that came out before a big TV appearance. The only time she’d seen the shoeshine kit before he became famous was on the morning they were going down to Torbay to meet Granny for the first time. She remembered being really touched that he thought the occasion special enough to warrant exchanging his trusty Converse for proper shoes, and to even polish them beforehand. But then he was thoughtful like that. Before he went to a nightclub to celebrate his supposed new-found singledom. That wasn’t very thoughtful.
The little village hall was crammed with well-wishers. Kids in their party clothes ducked squealing between legs, sliding across the dance floor on the seats of their newly pressed Sunday best. Family and friends holding paper plates brimming with titbits from the buffet table that ran the length of the room were noisily catching up. The laughter and chatter were almost as loud as the chirpy jazz tunes coming from Jim and his buddies on the stage.
Seeing her glance over, Jim tipped his brown felt trilby at her and winked. Why couldn’t she be more like that? Topping up what he lacked in aesthetic appeal with self-confidence? If she were more like Jim she’d never have found herself in this mess. Who were her bullies, anyway? They were bored, lonely women huddled in front of a computer with nothing or nobody to occupy them. Screw them. Screw them all.
Now that she didn’t have a task to occupy her with apart from ‘having a good time’ a blanket of pure misery had descended over her. She stood with her back to the wall looking out at everyone else having fun. Abi was being twirled around by one of her brothers, doubling over guffawing as they got their arms entwined together. What she lacked in rhythm she made up for in enthusiasm. It reminded her of the tango lesson she and Will had taken, not realising at the time of enrolment how austere and serious tango was. They’d heard that it was the dance of sex and passion, so thought they’d give it a go, but their teacher had yelled at them to stop smiling as it was ruining the dance, which made them giggle even more. They’d ended up cutting the lesson short and finding a hot and sweaty Latin club in the basement of an Argentinian restaurant, where they could laugh and thrust their limbs together as much as they wanted.
Jayne tried to make herself look as inconspicuous as possible, dreading the moment when Mrs Sheeran would coerce one of her sons or many nephews to ask her to dance. The moment was coming, she just knew it. Jayne cemented a small smile on her face and started tapping her toe along with the music, to try at least to give the impression she was enjoying herself.
As the song ended, Abi’s father gave a nervous little cough into the microphone. ‘Ladies and gents, friends and family, Maureen and I would like to thank everyone for coming today to celebrate with us as we reach the milestone of forty years of marriage. Someone said to me tonight that serial killers get less time than that, which I thought was nice.’ The room laughed with him. Jayne didn’t think she’d ever heard Abi’s dad say so much in one go before, but then with a house filled with seven children, all just as talkative as Abi, and a wife who had the right words on tap for every occasion, why would he need to add to the noise?
‘Some of you here tonight were there the very night Maureen and I met. We were at an open-air concert in the city. She came right up to me and my friends,‘ he nodded to a couple of old men
near the front, ‘and she said to me, I’m waiting for my friends, can I sit with you until they come? We said sure, and she sat down, drank our beer, ate our food and then said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute’. Well, I watched this little slip of a girl weave her way through the crowd, a few thousand people were there that day, and I watched her walk right up to the front of the audience, and start walking up the stairs to the stage, just as the man on the microphone introduced the next act. I couldn’t believe it. What is she doing, I wondered? Then, to my surprise and delight, she took the microphone from him, the band started, and she began to sing. Well I have never heard anything like the birdsong that came from her mouth. With every note I fell more in love with her and she searched my eyes out in the crowd until they locked with hers and sang the rest of the song to me.’
He paused in the story to wipe a small tear from his cheek as Mrs Sheeran slipped her arm around his waist, ‘and we’ve been inseparable since that day. We married six months later and, after seven children, we’re as happy now as we were on that day in the park.’ The room erupted into spontaneous applause and whistles, which grew even wilder as Mrs Sheeran took the microphone from her husband, gently kissed his forehead and started singing Billie Holiday’s It Had to Be You.
Her smooth voice cracked with emotion as she faced the man she’d woken up to every morning for forty years, the man she had eaten dinner with every night, given birth to seven of his children with, while he held her hand and cheered her on. The man she’d given up her dreams for, knowing that the life they would have together would mean more than a fleeting moment of success. They held hands as she lovingly sang the words that Jayne found so touching, so raw and powerful she couldn’t do anything but sob, and for the first time, she wasn’t even thinking about who was looking.
‘I’ve wondered around, finally found
somebody who
Could make me be true
Could make me be blue
And, even be glad just to be sad thinking of you,’
I need to call him, I need to speak to him and tell him that he screwed up, but it’s okay, we’re going to be okay, Jayne thought as she blindly pushed her way through the crowd to the door at the back of the hall. I need to hear his voice and he needs to hear mine.
The car park was bathed in a half-light, the summer’s evening was closing in and the only sound outside was the intoxicating melody emanating from the hall. She half-ran, half-walked along the lane back towards the housing estate. A fierce determination had set in, surpassing the sense of self-pity that had dominated for most of the day. She just needed to get to her phone, which she’d wilfully slammed in a drawer seconds before leaving for the party – an act of defiance that no one but her knew about, but had made her feel good at the time.
With trembling hands she opened the drawer and her heart gave a jolt as she saw the volume of missed calls from Will and Rachel. For a horrible moment, as she had taken the stairs two at a time, she considered how deflated she would be if a blank screen had greeted her. Which one should she call first? Will, it had to be Will. Rachel would understand why. This time he picked up on the second ring. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he shouted. As a greeting, it was unexpected. Jayne was prepared for crawling remorse, not anger.
‘Where have I been?’ This wasn’t the conversation-opener she’d been hearing in her head all evening. It flipped a switch and whatever graciousness she was planning to impart immediately vanished. ‘Where have you been, more like! Oh no, don’t tell me, sticking your tongue in Kyra’s ear, that’s where!’
‘Grow up, Jayne. Abi’s told you what really happened, you can’t seriously still be pissed off about it now?’
‘Abi hasn’t told me, actually,’ Jayne replied, affecting an air of superiority, desperately grappling for the upper hand in the conversation. ‘I told her that I didn’t want to hear your excuses for what is actually pretty obvious.’
‘Yes, yes, you’re right, Jayne, of course, you know best. I mean, why could you possibly want to know the truth when the story you’ve concocted in your head is so much juicier? Why am I always the bad guy in these scenarios that are actually pretty innocent?’
‘I fail to see how nuzzling my sister’s best friend is innocent, but there we go, maybe we have different interpretations of the word innocent.’
‘Can you just get down from your high horse for one minute and listen to me? Or call Rachel and get her to explain what was really going on.’
‘Rachel? You mean my sister, who thought you getting off with Kyra was funny? You mean that sister?’
‘You have this so wrong, Jayne, so wrong. But then, that’s fairly typical of you at the moment, isn’t it? Just making up stories about people and believing your own version of events instead of seeing things that are right in front of your face.’
‘Billy, I–’
‘I’m not Billy! Jesus, Jayne, I haven’t been Billy for nearly twenty years. I’m Will. Will Scarlet. If it’s Billy you want to be with, then you’re going to be pretty lonely because he doesn’t exist.’
‘He does! He’s just been taken over by this megalomaniac, who’s starting to believe his own hype. And as soon as Billy realises this he’ll be back.’
‘Is that what you think? That I’m a megalomaniac? You seriously believe that it’s me who’s changed? I’m not the one who’s turned into a neurotic agoraphobic who refuses to leave the house! Who spends every minute, when she thinks I’m not looking, trawling through the internet looking for reasons to be even unhappier! Where’s the fun, carefree woman I fell in love with?’
‘You want to know where that Jayne has gone? Do you?’
‘Yes, yes, I do.’
‘You killed her, Will.’ There. She said it. And then there was silence as the phone went dead.
Chapter 24
She had sat doubled over on the side of the bed with her head in her hands for almost ten minutes. How had that conversation even happened? He was meant to be remorseful and repentant, apologising for causing the misunderstanding – she was supposed to be empathetic and forgiving. Instead they’d had the worst argument they’d ever had, flinging words at each other like weapons that could never be recalled. She didn’t even recognise this couple that they’d become, who Billy had become. Well, screw him. Screw him and Kyra and Rachel, and all of them. Jayne stalked over to the petite pine mirror on Abi’s dressing table that had small pictures of Ronan Keating cut out from magazines tacked all over its frame and calmly picked up a bright-coral lipstick and ran it over her lips. Screw them all.
**
‘There you are!’ A flushed Abi threw herself at Jayne as she walked back into the hall. The party had been turned up a few notches since she had left and the dance floor was crammed with sweaty bodies pulling and pushing each other, twirling and jumping and clinging onto each other. ‘Come and dance!’
‘I need a very large drink first. Or lots of very small ones.’
‘You, lady, are talking my language!’ Abi grabbed her arm and wove through the crowd to the two trestle tables disguised as a makeshift bar that Abi’s underage cousins were taking it in turns to man. ‘Six jaeger bombs, my good man. We’re on a mission, and it’s not going to be pretty.’
**
This wasn’t Abi’s bedroom. Jayne’s eyes widened as they darted around the room, her body lying deathly still. Where curtains should be was a large blue-striped bedspread tacked up to the window with a sentry line of tarnished drawing pins. Her nose wrinkled; tobacco mixed with booze combined with sweat and dirty laundry baskets. Her head pounded, and yet she had to try to move it, she had to confirm her worst thoughts. Straining her eyes as far left as they could go without moving her neck too much she could see unkempt grey hair spilling over the pillow next to her.
Moving her hands millimetres at a time under the covers, desperately trying not to make ripples in the duvet, or any sudden movement, she ran her hands slowly down her body. The relief she felt at touching the fabri
c of her clothes was overwhelming. She couldn’t believe she had got herself into such a state that she wouldn’t have been surprised to find herself naked in a strange man’s bed. Now how could she leave without waking him? Or sneak back into Abi’s house with no one seeing? Ever so gradually, she started moving one leg towards the edge of the mattress, sliding it over the bobbly lint-ridden sheet until it was outside the cover. Gently lowering it to the ground, she began softly sliding the rest of her body out too. Jim shifted in his sleep, gave a loud fart and drifted off to sleep again.
She had no idea what time it was, but guessed by the number of cars on the road and the fact that the shops were already open that it was around nine or ten, which would make sneaking back in to the Sheerans unnoticed impossible. She could pretend that she had got up early to go for a jog? In her best friend’s brother’s girlfriend’s sequined party dress. Or, she could have got up early to surprise the family by buying them breakfast and she had merely flung on the nearest clothes in which to do it? Yes, that will have to do, she thought, as she hurried into the bakery and bought all the pastries they’d baked that morning.
Ignoring the front door, which was never used, Jayne went round to the kitchen door. It had a mat outside it with the words Back-door guests are best printed on it. She’d found this so hilariously smutty on her first visit to Ireland a decade ago it had stuck in her mind ever since and she’d regaled a delighted Will with the recollection a few years later. They’d scoured online stores and every bric-a-brac shop they’d ever passed for one for themselves, but never could find a replica. The fleeting thought of Will jarred in her chest and she had to steady herself before turning the handle.
As the warm air of the house rushed to greet her she gasped. Sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs Sheeran and Abi was Rachel. But this wasn’t the Rachel she’d left behind, this Rachel was barefaced, devoid of the war paint she’d perfected over the last twenty years. Her hair was scraped back from her face and as she looked up at the opening door, Jayne could see dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. Her sister leapt up and flew at her. For a second Jayne thought she was going to slap her, but instead she flung her arms around her and buried her head in Jayne’s neck. ‘Oh my God, Jayne, I’ve been so worried. Where the hell have you been?’
Me, You and Tiramisu Page 24