by Claire Allan
I was moving towards the jacket to check its pockets and maybe verify my suspicions when my phone pinged to life.
I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in yesterday. I know you wanted space but I needed to see you. I want to be there for you, Kitty, to help you move on.
I felt my heart sink further still – oh God, this was a mess. A big, horrible mess.
Chapter thirty
Erin
I woke acutely aware that my neck hurt and that I was cold. I was not immediately aware of where I was but a quick fumble at least allowed me to ascertain that I was fully clothed. I sat up and stretched, rolling my head from side to side to loosen the tension in my neck. My hair was still a little touch-damp. Opening my eyes, slowly, visions of the night before came back to me in pieces.
We had indeed gone for pizza, Ian and I, walking along the waterfront, not talking about anything really serious at all – just reminiscing. Trying to remember details of a time long ago.He had held the door open for me and we had entered the restaurant and sat in a small booth away from the window. This was not a conscious decision but I suppose to the casual observer it could have looked as if we were skulking around – hiding in the shadows. We had nothing to hide, but outsiders would not necessarily have known that. Ian had ordered a bottle of red – not the cheapest on the menu and we had laughed at that. There had been more than one occasion when we had scraped together the last of our money for a bottle of the cheapest, vilest plonk the supermarket had to offer and joked that sure it all tasted the same when you were three sheets to the wind anyway. This offering was rich, full-bodied and expensive – not to mention delicious. It may have been the nerves of the situation but I downed the first glass a little too quickly, before our garlic bread (which we both pushed around the plate nervously) arrived. I noticed his glass was emptied as quickly as mine and it wasn’t long before a second bottle was on the table and we were laughing heartily about the wedding that never was.
“I got my suit in the Oxfam shop,” he said. “I thought I was being so totally righteous and that I was going to save the world. All I could think on the day I put it on, though, was that some old codger had probably died wearing it. Christ, it was hideous!”
“Well,” I said, laughing, “if you had stuck around you would have seen the Marks & Spencer finest summer dress I wore. I considered walking in barefoot but it was raining the morning of the wedding so I slipped on a pair of flip-flops.”
He laughed loudly – probably too loudly – the kind of laugh that only comes after the best part of a bottle of wine has been sunk and every bloody thing feels hilarious.
When we had settled down, eaten and paid our bill and established once again ad nauseamthat we were very foolish when we young, we set out strolling again along the riverfront – a little more uneasy this time. I’m not sure at what point he took my hand but after a while I noticed I was holding his. We were still talking but perhaps not laughing quite so much anymore.
“Tell me about him,” he said as we strolled.
“Paddy?”
“Yes, Paddy. Is he good to you?”
I paused, bit my lip and nodded. “He is. He always has been.”
“So he’s the one?”
“Would I marry him if he wasn’t?”
“You almost married me . . .” he said and the words hung there.
I dropped my hand from his.
“What’s different?” he asked.
My head was fuzzy from the wine – all the emotions, the fear, the worry, the stupid little niggly annoying obsessions with wedding favours and cars and the invitations bubbled up. In the cold light of day it would have been, almost, clear for me to see the difference but, a bottle of wine down and in the company of someone who reminded me of carefree, cancer-freetimes, it all felt a little hazy.
“He has cancer,” I said, the tears springing to my eyes. “And you don’t say no to someone with cancer, even if you aren’t entirely sure they aren’t going to hurt and leave you.”
He looked at me, cupped my face in his hands and kissed me gently on the forehead. “Not everyone is me,” he said. “Not everyone gets it wrong.”
It started to rain then and he grabbed my hand crossing the road to his hotel while the rain battered down on us. Again if this had been a Hollywood movie this is where we would have kissed and I’d have followed him into his room and we would have had mad passionate sex. “I can’t go in with you,” I said, pushing my hair back off my face.
“We need to clear the air some more,” he replied.
“The air’s clear. Between us anyway. We made a mistake then and if we aren’t very careful we will make one now. The mistake we made back then is one I learned to live with – I don’t want to live with this one.”
I thought of his words – that not everyone gets it wrong and I thought of Paddy who had only ever really loved me. Yes, he would give the most rampant Bridezilla a run for her money but he did love me. He’d never left me. And if he faced a battle where he might – sure wouldn’t he fight it to the very end? Or isn’t that what I had thought? It dawned on me that was why I was so angry at him. For just smiling and agreeing with Dr Glib and her “he probably had enough chemoto see him right”. ‘Probably’ wasn’t good enough – not when we were talking about the rest of our lives.
“I have to go,” I said to Ian, letting go of his hand.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said loudly over the hum of the traffic.
“He’s a lucky man,” he shouted to my back as I ran, breaking the heel on my new sexy patent shoes, towards a taxi stand and back home to where the man I loved would be waiting for me.
The house was in darkness when I got home. Glancing at my watch, it had gone eleven thirty. Ian and I had spent five hours chatting, reminiscing and flirting. The time had gone quickly but it had gone – and I was in no rush any more to get it back. I wanted to stumble upstairs, climb into bed beside Paddy and tell him that I loved him. I wanted him. I wanted him to fight for us and for himself. I wanted him to fight for theUs that used to be fun – that used to be even more fun than the fun I’d had with Ian when none of it was really real.
I closed the door, probably a little too loudly and, stumbling into the living room, switched on the light and flopped down on the sofa to take off the uncomfortable broken shoes. There was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the coffee table. We hadn’t had Jack Daniel’s in the house before that night I was sure, and yet there wasn’t much left in the bottle. Just one glass sat beside it, resting on a pile of RSVPs, leaving a condensation ring on them. Paddy wouldn’t like that I thought, moving the glass onto the table, sitting it beside a wedding magazine. It was unusual for Paddy to drink, especially since he had been sick – and especially to drink so much but still, I thought, things had been stressful lately he had every right to want a bit of a blow-out. Sure hadn’t I just blown out myself, spectacularly. I smiled and vowed to bring him up a pint glass of water when I went up and to tell him it was okay and, even though I would probably be horribly hung-over myself the following day, I would make him a bacon sandwich or fetch him a hangover cure of choice. Whatever he wanted – McDonald’s, Wotsits, Lucozade, ice cream – whatever the heck he wanted because I loved him so very much.
Feeling a wave of relief that my meeting with Ian was over and that I hadn’t been a stupid eejit and done something I would most definitely regret, I decided to send Jules a text – just to tell her I loved her and that I hadn’t messed up, or something equally drunk and cryptic that she would phone me about the following day to ask quiz me on. Lifting my phone from the bottom of my bag where I had hidden it I noticed a series of missed calls and a few text messages.
The first was from Paddy: Who are you with?
The second was also from Paddy: Erin, please call me.
The third was from Grace – something boring and work-related. My eyes were struggling to focus on the words in front of me as they filled with tears. This was
not good.
The next message was from Jules: Sis, WTF is going on? Paddy has been on to me asking if I know where you are or who you are with. Said his friend saw you with another man.
Oh shit. The bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table didn’t seem so much a blow-out any more. His disregard for the RSVPs (his Bridezilla persona would never have let them get wet) made sense. Oh Jesus . . . we had been spotted. Ian and I. Frig knows what we were doing at the time. Was it as we drank coffee? Was it as we drank wine and laughed madly together? Was it as we walked hand in hand along the waterfront or when he kissed me on the forehead – when that kiss almost turned into something moreoutside the hotel?
I felt sick to the very pit of my stomach. I grabbed my phone and looked at the messages, looking at the time at which they were sent. We would have been in the restaurant. I breathed a very small sigh of relief – as if I had done something wrong but not been caught out. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said aloud, to myself, to Jules, to Paddy who was more than likely passed out in an alcoholic coma in our bed – convinced I had been cheating on him.
How could I explain this and how on earth would he believe me that nothing had happened at all when I told him the man I was with was Ian? I was dishevelled and still dressed in a new dress and killer heels and looking very much as if it wasn’t just a night out with an old friend in a completely platonic way. You don’t dress like this for nothing. I felt ashamed and sick as I thought of how this would look to him.He would ask me, I knew he would, that if nothing was happening then why had I lied and told him I was going out with the girls? Why was I dressed to the nines? Oh shit. I couldn’t face this. Not now, not when I was drunk. Not when everything was hazy and I wasn’t sure how to explain anything. Pouring a stiff glass of Jack Daniel’s and swigging it back, I sat back on the sofa and tried to figure out exactly what I was going to say.
I woke up, still on the sofa and still not sure about what the hell I was going to say. The waves of worry swept through me in perfect time with the waves of nausea from the hangover.
The evening started to come back to me, slowly and painfully. Sitting forward with my head in my hands, to try and stop the room, and my world, from spinning, I heard Paddy on the stairs. I didn’t really want to look at him – nor did I want him to look at me. I imagined I looked properly shocking – like something that had been dragged through a bush and perhaps thrown up on.
“You came home then?” he asked.
His voice was soft but that wasn’t to say I didn’t recognise the tone from it. It was as accusing as if he had shouted at me.
“I was home at eleven thirty,” I offered. “I sat here. I had a drink. I must have fallen asleep.”
“Tired, were you?” he asked accusingly.
“A little drunk,” I said, nodding towards the Jack Daniel’s bottle on the table.Was it appropriate for me to make a joke about him getting off his trolley too? Probably not. I stayed quiet, trying to word what I was about to say next in a way that wouldn’t imply guilt when there was none to imply in the first place.
“It’s not at all what you think,” I offered, turning to look at him. He looked wretched, standing there skinny in baggy tracksuit bottoms and a faded T-shirt. He looked as if he hadn’t closed his eyes all night.
“You’re a writer, Erin. Could you not have come up with a less clichéd line than that?”
“There are only so many ways to say it’s not what you think,” I said, watching as he sat down. I wanted to hold his hand – to have him hold mine back and for the both of us to be very much assured that things were not going, spectacularly, tits up.
“You could tell me exactly how it was?” he said. “Because my version isn’t pretty. My version involves my fiancée, the woman I am set to marry in two months’ time, telling me she was going out with a drink with the girls from work. It then involves a friend of mine calling me and telling me that my fiancée is cosied up to some man eating pizza and drinking wine and occasionally holding hands. Is that not what happened, Erin?”
His eyes were pleading and I wanted to tell him straight away that of course that hadn’t happened at all and that his friend had been wrong. But to an outsider . . . of course it was different. Actually, even to me it was different.
“Well, it is . . .”
He stood up and made to leave the room.
“But let me explain, Paddy. It’s not as simple as that.”
“You lied. That’s simple. You were with someone else. That is simple.”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Well, that’s flipping big of you,” he said, continuing to the kitchen.
I stood up to follow him, my head still swimming. I was meant to be getting ready for work. I was already running late but I couldn’t leave it like this.
“Paddy, it was Ian,” I offered, hoping that he would realise it was nothing more than a little bit of laying some ghosts to rest.
He stopped, turned to look at me but didn’t speak. He grabbed his jacket from the worktop and his keys and while I stood there, waiting for the signal that it was okay to keep talking and to tell him exactly what had happened, he brushed past me.
“Go to work, Erin,” he called over his shoulder. “Just go to work.”
He left, slamming the door and I stood, rooted to the spot, unsure of what move to make next. I knew this was bad. I knew I should go to work. I knew I needed a long hot shower and a huge mug of black coffee. But more than all of that I knew that somehow I had to make it all better. I just didn’t have the first notion how.
Chapter thirty-one
Kitty
“The first thing you have to do is change the locks,” Ivy said, lifting the Yellow Pages from under the hall table and beginning to search for a locksmith.
“Okay,” I replied.
“Then you text him and ask him to return the key he does have – even though it will be useless. This will give him the very clear message that it is entirely unacceptable to visit someone else’s home without their permission.”
“Okay,” I said, lifting my phone with my hands still shaking.
“You’ll have to text Mark as well, just to let him know.”
“About James?” I baulked. The thought of telling Mark about James and what had happened with James – everything that had happened with James – made me feel a little woozy and not in a good way.
“Well, you can if you want, but I was thinking more about the keys. Technically it’s still his house as well. He should probably know if you have changed the locks.”
“Okay,” I mumbled, thinking that I would need to talk to James face to face – to tell him he had the wrong idea – that perhaps I had given him the wrong idea, that this had to stop and now. “Jesus, Ivy,” I said, feeling sick and making a mental note to check my underwear drawer and do an inventory of my existing quota of knickers so that I would know how many I had in the future and be able to monitor if any went missing. Feeling slightly sick I ran upstairs to where I had been sleeping so very peacefully an hour before and I didn’t feel secure and comforted any more.
Ivy followed and sat on my bed beside me.
“It’s a bit scary, isn’t it? I mean, if you want you can come and sleep at my house for a few nights, or I’m sure Rose and Dad wouldn’t mind you staying with them.”
“This is my home, Ivy, and this is my mess. I’ll text James now, arrange to meet. Tell him we need to talk. I know I led him on but I’ll put him straight.”
“You haven’t spoken to him before now? About this? About what happened?” She tried and failed to hide the look of horror on her face.
I shook my head, feeling embarrassed. “I didn’t know what to say. I . . . my head was just up my arse and I thought if I let it go he would get the message. I thought it would just go away.”
“And how’s that working for you?” she said with a sly grin.
“I know, I know,” I muttered. I thought of the jacket thrown so casually on my sof
a. He must have left it deliberately – he couldn’t have just forgotten it. And I thought of the dirty coffee mug. It was like he was marking his territory.
“Do you want me to come with you?” she asked, more softly this time.
“I think I need to do this on my own, but maybe, you know, if you could perhaps watch from nearby . . .”
“In case he turns out to be a complete nutcase?”
I thought of James and of all the years I had known him. He had never displayed any nutcase behaviour before. He had always been very nice to me. He had always been there for Mark. In fact it was only in the weeks since Mark’s departure that I had thought any of his behaviour odd at all. And, honestly, it had only been in the last few days since the whole sleeping-together mistake that his behaviour had started tomake me uneasy, but I couldn’t deny that I had made him think he was in with a chance.
“Yes, please,” I said, because at the end of the day I was a coward.
“I’ll do it.”
“Thanks,” I said, squeezing her hand.
“Now,” she said, “why don’t you go to work and get on with that whole living-your-life thing that we talked about last night and I’ll stay here and wait for the locksmith?”
“Are you sure you would be okay on your own?”
“Would you mess with this?” she said, pulling a face and mock-punching me. She had a point.