The Little Vintage Carousel by the Sea

by Jaimie Admans

  ‘It wasn’t like that. I wanted to send the phone in the post, but Zinnia thought … and when we talked that night, I felt like we had a connection, and I wanted to meet you, and—’

  ‘You’d already written this by then!’ He touches the screen again and goes back to part two. ‘And this was written last week. Last week, Ness! It’s dated last Sunday, the day after we climbed up that cliff. The day after I told you stuff I’ve never told anyone in my life before. And you still wrote this.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be like this. I didn’t know anything about that picture. I didn’t want to write it, Nath, but I was going to lose my job if I didn’t.’

  ‘What job? I thought you were a fact-checker.’ He shakes his head. ‘Well, you said you were hoping your boss would let you write articles one day, and I was the perfect foot in the door, was I?’

  ‘This story was her big break,’ Zinnia intervenes. ‘You said you love her, surely you’re happy to help her get what she wants in life.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve helped a few people get what they want in life over the years. It’s a shame that no one has ever been interested in helping me and what I might want. I thought Ness was different.’ He gets up from the sofa and hands the iPad back to Zinnia. ‘Thanks for that, it’s been very enlightening.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I say again. ‘We talked that first night and I loved talking to you, and—’

  ‘So, what, you went and told your boss about it? Pitched it as the next big idea?’

  ‘I told my best friend and Zinnia overheard,’ I say, despite the fact she’s still in the room. ‘I never pitched it. I never wanted to write it.’

  ‘I knew that no boss would let you have three weeks off in Pearlholme just to return my phone.’ He lets out a groan and shoves a hand through his hair as he leans forward, tension clear in his taut shoulders. I can see the cogs turning in his mind. ‘Are you in love with her yet?’ He repeats Zinnia’s earlier question in her accent and I can see the moment it dawns on him. ‘You didn’t come here to return my phone. You didn’t come here to meet me, or because you thought there was something between us. You came here to further your career, no matter who or what you had to use to do it.’

  ‘No! It was never about that—’

  ‘Right, I’m not going to stand here and watch you two have a domestic,’ Zinnia announces. ‘Vanessa, if you’re not back in the office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, and I don’t have a finished copy of part three and a good chunk of part four on my desk by ten, you’re fired. You can already forget being given any more features, ever, and covering Daphne’s maternity leave is long gone. You’ve done nothing but prove yourself unreliable and incapable of following instructions. The sea air is obviously getting to me because I haven’t fired you from fact-checking yet. I’m going home, but first I’m going to hope that dreadful-looking little pub serves a very large gin.’

  I should see her out but I can’t make myself get up. I can’t make myself leave Nathan.

  We sit there in silence as we listen to her car door slam and the engine start up as she pulls away and zooms down the promenade.

  The rumble of the engine is a distant memory before either of us plucks up the courage to speak again.

  ‘So all those times we’ve smiled at each other over the months … were you already planning to exploit me then, or was it only when you saw my phone?’

  ‘Nath, it was nothing like that. I smiled at you because I got bloody butterflies every time you looked at me. We had a connection—’

  ‘No, we didn’t. The butterflies and whatever the hell I thought I felt with you … they were all part of your story.’ I can see him closing himself down. The light in his eyes goes out. They’re so dark brown that they’re almost black now. There’s no cheeky glint, no smile, no mischievous raised eyebrow, no laughter lines playing around his mouth that make him look like he’s permanently about to burst into giggles. He looks tired and drawn and like he is one hundred per cent done with this conversation. And with me.

  ‘This all sounds so much worse than it is, Nath,’ I try again. ‘I didn’t mean to lie to you. I was supposed to be writing an article but I couldn’t do it once I got to know you.’

  ‘And yet, conveniently, your boss doesn’t know that.’

  ‘Only because I was too much of a coward to tell her.’

  He laughs, a sharp and bitter sound that’s nothing like his usual laugh. ‘Oh, come off it, Ness. Everything has been in aid of your article. You’re not interested in me, not in the carousel, nothing. You must’ve been bored to bloody death listening to me prattle on for weeks. You’ve earned your promotion just from having to suffer through that.’

  ‘That’s not true. Nathan, please, I’ve loved every second I’ve spent with you. I’m in trouble with my own work because I love spending time with you so much.’ I reach over to touch his knee but he jumps away so fast that he nearly falls off the sofa.

  I pull my hand back, surprised at his reaction, but as I sit there holding my fingers like he’s the one who’s burnt me, I wonder why I’m surprised. Of course he’s hurt. I knew he would be, that’s exactly why it was so difficult to tell him, and it got harder the longer it went on.

  I can feel him slipping away. I can feel the coldness coming from him, like a big security fence has just sprung up across the living room, separating me and him. I know he’s been hurt before, and I know how much it took for him to let me in, and now he thinks I was just using him.

  I swallow hard and wet my lips a few times to make the words come out. ‘Please let me explain.’ I feel sick and my hands are shaking, but he’s silent so I grab the opportunity. ‘Nothing I’ve said to you has been a lie. Everything I’ve felt for you is true.’

  ‘I’ve heard that before.’

  ‘I’m not your ex, Nath. I’m not using you. This only got as messy as it did because I was trying not to hurt you.’

  ‘You lied to me point blank. I asked you why you were here, what you were doing, I’ve asked you about the stories you’re working on, the facts you’ve had to check, and not once have you said that you’re writing an article about me falling in love with you!’ His voice breaks and he gets to his feet and paces across the living room.

  I watch him face the wall and take a few deep breaths.

  ‘Everything we’ve shared has been because you needed an ending for your story.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t.’ I feel my lip wobble. People always say that your bottom lip wobbles when you’re about to cry but I’ve always thought it was a myth until now.

  ‘And I was stupid enough to give you one. I was stupid enough to fall for it.’ He shakes his head, seeming more annoyed at himself than at me. ‘I thought I was different now. I thought I was strong enough to never trust anyone again. I shut myself down on that day – that day I told you about, the one where I vowed I’d never feel anything for anyone ever again, the worst time of my life that I’ve never shared with anyone until this week – and you got inside my walls and all my emotions came back and I felt like you’d woken me up for the first time in years, and it was all for this. You were just using me to get what you want—’

  ‘I’m head over heels in love with you, Nath.’

  He spins around and the hard set of his jaw, the red under his eyes, the rawness in them is so heartbreaking that it makes another wave of tears threaten to pull me under because he looks so broken that he’s almost a different person to the smiley, funny guy I’ve got to know.

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re head over heels in love with a promotion.’

  ‘No, I’m no—’

  ‘You came here to make a story out of something that doesn’t exist. You came to make Train Man fall in love with you. Well, congratulations, it worked.’ He takes a deep breath and strides across the room, plucks his phone from the coffee table and shoves it into his pocket. ‘Thanks for bringing my phone back. You can see yourself out.’

  I sob as the front door slams behind h
im.

  I don’t know how long I sit there for. Long enough for the sun to move across the sky over the beach behind me, casting shadows that are different than the ones that were here when he left. I don’t even know why I’m still sitting here. Hoping he’ll come back willing to listen, or that I’ll suddenly think of the perfect, magical thing to say to make him realise I didn’t want to hurt him and this all got way out of hand and I’ll run down to the carousel and tell him and he’ll take me in his arms and we’ll kiss again.

  The reality is that I’m sure he’s staying away until he knows for certain that I’ve left, and what good am I doing by staying? What else can I say that I didn’t try to say earlier? I could go back to the hotel and hope he calms down enough to listen, but I know it won’t make any difference. He wasn’t angry. He doesn’t even blame me – he blames himself. Trying to force him to listen to me, telling him to trust me when I’ve spent the last three weeks lying to him, repeating that nothing I felt for him had anything to do with what I was supposed to be writing … all of that would only make him hate me more.

  I haul myself off the sofa and start gathering up my things. I shut down my laptop and shove it back in its bag. I go round the side of the house to collect my washing off the line, back upstairs to grab my suitcase from Nathan’s bedroom, which I kind of didn’t move out of after my parents left …

  I sob as I think about last weekend. Mum is going to kill me for hurting him. Things have gone so wrong in the few days since we waved them off. It’s my own fault, and I have no idea how to fix it.

  And I would do anything to make this better, because what I felt for Nath was so much better than anything I’ve ever seen in any romantic movie. It was the kind of love I’ve always dreamed about but convinced myself doesn’t exist in real life.

  Maybe it’s easier to believe that. I scrub my hands over my face and throw my last few belongings into my suitcase. There’s no such thing as love, or romantic, fated coincidences, or magical connections, or butterflies. Those things are fictional and should stay in the movies, where they belong. I’m no Gwyneth Paltrow. I didn’t split in two on a tube train while one part of me stayed in my dull, boring existence and the other part of me followed Nathan to Pearlholme and found happiness. We’re not two souls destined to meet each other through every lifetime. We’re just two strangers on a train who should’ve stayed that way.

  Chapter 21

  ‘What the hell am I going to do?’ I’m sitting at Daph’s computer in her office because my cubicle has been taken over by the freelancer Zinnia has hired in my place, while she’s lying on the executive two-seater sofa with her feet up, fanning last week’s issue of Maîtresse in front of her face. She’s got a few days left before her maternity leave starts, as she keeps reminding me. I think she’s under some mistaken impression that if I nail this article and have it on Zinnia’s desk by ten o’clock, I’ll still get to take over her job when she leaves.

  I don’t even know how I managed to drag myself here this morning, let alone back from the North Yorkshire coast on the only train yesterday afternoon. I don’t remember the journey back; it was like it was happening without me. I don’t think I woke up from the nightmare until I burst into tears on the tube this morning because the last time I got that train, Nathan was on it.

  But with Daph’s encouragement, and patient phone calls late into the night, I’ve decided that the only thing I can try to salvage from this is my fact-checking job, which will obviously never be anything more, and that’s okay. I’m clearly not cut out for feature writing.

  It’s now quarter past nine, and the first line problem is back with a vengeance. I have forty-five minutes to write the most anticipated story Maîtresse will publish this year, a story about falling in love with someone who will never speak to me again. If it seemed impossible in Pearlholme, it’s even more impossible now. I try to find some emotional distance, to write it as if I was writing a novel, a fictional story about characters who don’t actually exist, but it doesn’t work. I’m still picturing Nathan’s smiling eyes and ever-present grin, and I don’t even realise that my eyes have started watering again until Daph shouts at me.

  ‘Ness! For God’s sake, read out your first line and we’ll go from there.’

  ‘Once upon a time …’

  ‘That’s it?’ She groans and increases the magazine flapping.

  I pick up one of the print-outs of the first two parts of the article that are strewn across the desk. Thankfully the article hasn’t made it into the print edition yet. ‘How did I ever get into this? From the word go, I knew I’d be exploiting him. Even if I could’ve kept him anonymous, I was still using him for my own personal gain. I should have just invented a Train Man and used a model to play him. No one would’ve been hurt then.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have encouraged you,’ she says. ‘It was just an excuse to get you to go because you liked him, and I haven’t seen you like a guy, really like a guy, in years. And with the dropped phone and everything, and then Zinnia came in, and you talked to him that night and you clearly wanted to go. And the coincidences, the food on his shopping list, the carousel pictures and your love of that film … That sort of thing doesn’t just happen, right? I thought it was a genuine Sliding Doors moment. You deserved the chance to chase it up and find out.’

  She fans Maîtresse in front of her face again, and I get up and take the battery-operated fan on her desk over to her.

  ‘You can’t hit me, I might go into labour.’

  I laugh as I take the magazine from her hand and replace it with the fan. ‘Don’t blame yourself. I didn’t go to Pearlholme because of the article, I went because I loved the conversation we had on the phone. I didn’t feel butterflies because of the article, I felt them because of him. This is my mess because I should have walked up to him and told him exactly what I was doing there, and I didn’t, and now he thinks that nothing I’ve said in the past few weeks is true and I was just using him to get a story.’ I go back and throw myself down into Daph’s desk chair with a huff, annoyed at myself because I could see exactly how this was going to turn out, and I still didn’t do anything to change it.

  ‘I thought you might hate me because I pushed you into it as much as Zinnia did.’

  ‘How could I ever hate you? You’ve been my best friend for fifteen years.’

  ‘And you’re not going to withhold babysitting services?’

  I spin around in the desk chair twice, coming to a stop and staring at the wall behind me. ‘As if. I can’t wait to be a best-friend aunty.’ I spin the chair back around and lean over the desk, the print-out of ‘The case of the missing Train Man’ staring back at me. I run my fingers across the blurry picture of Nathan in the distance on a carousel, the one that was never supposed to be used. Blurred out or not, he’s recognisable. Anyone who knew him would put two and two together and know who he was.

  ‘I should never have transferred that photo,’ Daph says. ‘I’ve worked with Zinnia for years now, I should’ve known she’d use it.’

  ‘I’m the one who hurt him.’ I put the page down and stare at the blank screen again. ‘I let him open up to me, and I knew how he’d feel when he found out about the article, and I still didn’t have the courage to tell him. I didn’t even have the courage to tell Zinnia where she could shove her article.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, I never agreed with writing about a pretend search for a man you’d already found. Our readers aren’t that stupid. But you’ve got to admit it was a great story. It really captured the public imagination. No wonder people are waiting for the next part.’

  ‘Yeah, well, at the rate I’m going, they’re never going to get it.’ I stare at the cursor blinking on the blank screen in front of me, a familiar sight lately. ‘I can’t do it to him. There aren’t that many carousel restorers in the country. Everyone will know who he is, no matter how much I fictionalise this article. He’s quiet and he keeps to himself. He hates crowds and he hates people looking a
t him. No matter how far removed I can make it, it will hurt him even more. It’s not worth it.’

  I realise then and there that it’s really not. I don’t even like this job, I certainly don’t want to hurt Nathan even more to save it.

  We’re silent for a while. My eyes are on the carousel horse in the picture with his foot on one of the printed pages, and Daph’s watching the clock, waiting for ten o’clock to roll around when Zinnia will inevitably come in and fire me, and undoubtedly get someone else to continue the fictional story anyway. She’s not going to give up those page views without a fight.

  ‘You’re in love with him, aren’t you?’ Daph says quietly. ‘Like, really truly all-consuming, ridiculous, inconvenient love?’

  Tears fill my eyes again, blurring the photo even more. I don’t need to answer her.

  She nods. ‘You were happy up there. Happier than you’ve ever been. Isn’t that worth fighting for?’

  I nod again, and this time, she starts crying too, and it makes me smile through the tears. ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Because I’m pregnant – I’ve been an emotional wreck for months.’ She laughs despite the tears. ‘And because I don’t want you to move out of London, and if you go and win him back, you’re obviously going to stay there, and it’s so far away.’

  I shake my head. ‘You don’t know him. You don’t realise how hurt he was. How can I win him— That’s it!’

  ‘What’s it?’ She sits up straight. ‘You’ve got ten minutes left before Zinnia fires you.’

  I leap out of the chair. ‘Stall her, Daph! You owe me one for transferring that photo! I’ll repay you in babysittings!’

  ‘She’s never going to let you keep your—’

  ‘I don’t care about the job! I don’t want this job! I just want her to publish the conclusion of this article for me! I have to do something for Nath. I have to show him that I care about that carousel as much as he does!’