by Bloom, Anna
I gagged again. Answer enough in anyone’s opinion.
“I’m not like this at work.” I straightened back up and wiped my hand along my forehead, leaving a snail trail of sweat on my wrist. “I wouldn’t even be like this if you’d just let this go. I don’t see why I had to come.”
“Because it’s the reunion, and we made a solemn promise to ourselves when we met that we would be one another’s wing woman until the day we died. That’s what best friends do. And frankly you’ve sucked at that promise. Badly. Like if you weren’t almost a sister to me, I would have dropped your arse long ago.”
She’s right, I have sucked. I was a one-winged wing woman.
“Mm. Thanks.” I took in the sight of myself in the reflection and poked at the bags under my eyes. They were getting worse. I couldn’t even focus on the crow’s feet etched from the corners of my eyes. Finding those had been a trauma. One day, I glanced in the rear-view mirror of the car and they’d just been staring back at me like I’d walked into a cobweb and it had scarred my skin.
“Just say it, Ronnie.” Ange pulled my attention back to our circling conversation. “And then come out of the bloody bathroom so I can do something with your face.”
“What’s wrong with my face?”
“Nothing. It just needs a dash of colour that’s all.”
“I’m not coming out if you plan to treat me like an overgrown Barbie. I thought we stopped doing that years ago?”
“We only stopped because you’ve been going through a dreary ‘earth mother’ stage since Paul… well, you know. Died.”
My chest sagged. I stood and unlocked the door. She watched me, her expression deeply critical.
“Everyone is going to stare at me, Ange.”
My red-lipped—harlot-red, according to my mother—friend scrunched her brows. “Ronnie, it won’t be that bad. Do you know how many people from our year are divorced by now—”
“But I’m not divorced, am I?” I could feel the wild-eyed, frayed around the edges look I’d perfected whenever conversation went this way, seeping onto my face.
“No, you aren’t. You had a perfectly legitimate reason for your boring-as-fuck marriage to come to an end.” Ange peered over my shoulder and pouted into the glass wall of the bathroom.
“Ange! You can’t say things like that.” I held in a growl of frustration. “This is easy for you. You’re ‘Angela’.” I air quoted her name. It’s just her: Angela. “You slept your way through university and revelled in it. Hell, there wasn’t a person on campus who didn’t know who you were.” Ange smirked at me, but I didn’t give her a gap to launch into a sordid tale I probably didn’t want to know. “I wasn’t like that, was I? Remember? I was the shy one who never put her hand up.”
“No… You were the one who spent three long, and can I say fucking repetitive, years obsessing about the same guy.”
She doesn’t mean to do it, because she doesn’t know, but her words punched into the depths of my Matthew vault.
Matthew.
Matthew.
Him.
With an excruciating lungful of air, I stood, and then blew it in another misted breath on the glass in front of the hotel bathroom mirror.
Then I said it, “He will be bald and fat.” I didn’t just say it. I almost shouted it. I made it rattle in my soul hoping that the words would imprint on my psyche, lest I should ever forget the possibility that he could be bald and fat now.
“Ha! See, and even if he isn’t, it shouldn’t bother you. It’s been fifteen years for Christ’s sake.”
Wincing, I lifted the edge off my memory box. “I’m not an expert on such things, Ange. But I don’t think he was built to go bald and fat.”
“Are you kidding me? With that hairline he’ll be lucky if he’s not sporting a full peninsula by now.”
Bless her, she tried to make me feel better, but her little white lies just made it worse. Last time I saw him he was twenty-one and so beautifully perfect he somehow imprinted himself onto my retina so that all I could ever see was him.
“You’ve got that look on your face again.”
“What look?” I glanced in the mirror, only seeing fine lines and under eye bags.
“The ‘Matthew and me’ look.”
“Shut up. I have not.”
You see, you can whittle the problem about Matthew and me down to one painful and desperate truth. That there was never a Matthew and me.
It went something like, ‘Matthew and… oh look there’s his sad side-kick, Ronnie’.
Just him.
It was a depressing truth of my life. The problem of Matthew and not me.
Ange laughed and then pushed me out of the way of the mirror and smoothed her fingertips over her perfect skin. “Exactly! He wasn’t even there last time. He was too busy living his corporate high life. I don’t know why you’ve got your panties in such a twist.” She paused and pouted her scarlet-stained lips at the mirror. “I really need a cigarette. You’re killing me here. I’ve only had five smokes all day because you’re a certified flight risk.”
“It’s about time you gave up. The day my mother expresses her concern, you know it’s bad.” I extended the truth. I think the words had been, ‘Hopefully she will smoke herself to death’.
“This reunion is a waste of our time. We could have been out having some real fun. I hardly get to see you these days.” I crossed my fingers behind my back. Since Ange had moved to Scotland for work, our girls night outs had whittled to monthly instead of fortnightly. This would get me out of the reunion if nothing else would.
She laughed in my face. “Oh no, I’m not falling for it.” For a moment her face dropped into a rare serious expression and her hands landed on my shoulders. “Ronnie. You need this. You’ve been living in the past for too long.” She peered at me closer and I cringed a little. Sometimes I thought she could read my mind. Her and Ma were similar in more ways than I’d like to admit. “I don’t know what it is,” she peered closer until we were almost nose to nose (mind reading positioning at its most efficient), “but Paul died and then this ridiculous thing you’ve always had for Matthew came back worse than ever.”
“Ange…”
“Darling, you need to see him so you can realise he’s an utter spineless dickhead and then you and I can get back to our normality.”
I stretched a smile on my lips. “What’s normality?”
“You doing whatever it is you do in that office of yours.”
“You don’t even know, do you?” A laugh built up in my throat.
“You draw pretty pictures and look at that fit Fred’s arse?”
“That is nowhere even close, and please don’t objectify Fred. I have a gender-neutral office.”
Ange laughed. “Remember when you explained to your mother that you were only having one set of toilets for the staff to share?”
“Yep.” I shook my head. “I still don’t think she’s recovered.”
“Sooooo we are doing this. You are going to be in the same room as Matthew Carling, discover he is bald and fat and then all of this will be over.”
I cringed but didn’t let it show on the outside. If I so much as flinched, I’d reveal the truth. The truth was too brutal and disgusting for me to tell anyone.
Most times I didn’t want to acknowledge it myself.
I held firm while her sharp pale-blues’ bored into my brain. “If this is a disaster, I will blame you,” I said.
Not a sound came from her. Then her shoulders began to shake with repressed laughter. “Ronnie, I hate to be the one to tell you, but A) he won’t be there. B) if he is there, he will be bald and fat, and C) I don’t think he will make himself puke with fifteen years’ worth of pent-up anticipation.”
My eyes flitted over my reflection, scowling at what I saw. “I know.” And I did. I knew it more than I wanted to. It hurt me. But my stupidity hurt me more. Fifteen years, including a marriage, bereavement, and parenthood, was a long time to hold a torch (totall
y sounded like my mother there) for someone who the last time you saw them was offensive and rude to you. It was stupid, reckless, and frankly pathetic.
Bald and fat. Bald and fat.
“Good. Let’s do this then.”
I stared with panic at the door to the hotel room. The only thing I could hope for now was that Angela would have a sneaky cigarette and burn the whole place down.
“Do you want a smoke?”
* * *
Ange was raising her hand to rap on the bathroom door, her nose almost against the wood, when I pulled it open. Her eyes appraised my outfit. “Nice choice.”
“Thanks.” I offered a tight smile. “I need wine.”
“I know. I thought of getting us a bottle to share while we got dressed.”
We glanced at one another and then both began to laugh. The giggle in my chest broke through the tightness; light and airy, oxygen on my tongue. “We want to make it out though, right?”
Hooking her arm through mine, she grinned. “Remember the Christmas Ball second year?”
“The Christmas Ball that cost us fifty quid each and we never made it to the door?”
“What a night though, hey?”
Shaking my head, I squeezed her arm. “Thanks for making me do this, Ange. You’re right. I need to let this go. There’s so much of my life left to live. It would be a waste to spend it thinking about a man who didn’t have the decency to even wish me goodbye.”
“Chick, that’s what I’ve been telling you.”
“I know. Come on. Let’s get some wine.”
“And tequila!”
Oh God.
Grabbing our purses and pushing all our stuff off the bed—old habits die hard, this way we could land face first when we got back—we double checked Ange’s straighteners were off and then headed for the door.
As we walked down the hallways towards the green exit sign, my legs shook so bad my tights burned my knees.
“You look beautiful,” Ange whispered as the doors to the lift pinged.
“Thanks. Why are we whispering?”
“I don’t know. It’s really quiet here. I wonder if other people from the reunion are staying here?” For a moment, I thought I caught a flutter of nerves behind her calm facade. I shot her a smile. She couldn’t be nervous. I needed her to do all the talking for us so I could lurk behind her like an undersized and slightly rounded shadow.
Re-uni-on.
Why were we doing this?
The doors opened and my stomach hollowed with the fine scoop of a silver teaspoon.
My knees, knocking like Bambi being hunted by men with automatic air rifles, wobbled an unsteady tremor.
Because it was him.
Him.
Him.
And he wasn’t bald or fat at all.
Re-Uni-Not
Ange glanced up, her eyes meeting his. They widened a fraction before switching back onto my startled expression.
There was another shape in the lift, but I couldn’t make my eyes move to look. What if it was his ‘her’?
Oh fuck. Shit.
There was no air.
Where had the fucking air gone?
The black blob on the corner of my vision coughed. A man’s cough.
Breathe.
Breathe, Ronnie.
Our eyes met.
“Nope.” The word forced itself out of my mouth. “Sorry, Ange.”
I wish I could say the events of the night before had cleared my mind, but they hadn’t.
I’d run away.
I hadn’t spoken to him. Laughed with him. Told him I still thought about him at the minimum six hundred and seventy-two times a day (tally chart authenticated).
I didn’t tell him there were so many things I wished I’d said. So many times, I wished I hadn’t deleted his number from my phone that one stupid night.
So many times, I wished with all of heaven and earth that I wasn’t me, that I was someone better, braver. Maybe like Angela who could go marching into that lift, all “Hello, boys.” I did nothing.
Nothing.
Which is the story of my life.
Sleep was nothing more than a few snatched minutes of painful dreams. Since then, I’d been staring at the dawn rising through the window and wondering what if.
“Morning, darling. You came home early.” Ma sat at the kitchen table in her chair, her glasses pinching the end of her nose as she squinted at a crossword. I slouched my way in, hoping that if I made myself super small, she might not question my evening.
“Nice time? Everything that Angela promised it would be?”
Ma’s laser beam ate through my shoulder blades.
“Wonderful.”
“You were home at eight-thirty.”
“Well.” I pulled my mug out of the cupboard and plopped a tea bag in before changing my mind and fishing it back out again.
“Coffee kind of morning, is it?”
“Every morning is a coffee kind of morning, Ma.” I smirked at her over my shoulder.
“So, how was Angela? Brash and inappropriate I’m guessing.”
Sighing, I spun like a spinning top. “Ma, cut it out.”
It was her turn to smirk. “Wipe that splash up, darling, you know I don’t like sticky sides.”
I grabbed the cloth out of the sink and contemplated how she’d react if I wiped her face with it. “How was Hannah last night?”
“Fine, fine. On that thing again.”
“Thing? Crack? Speed? Pogostick?”
“Don’t be smart, darling, it ages your face.”
I bit my tongue until the taste of blood tanged against my taste buds.
“On that phone. What’s it called, Flixing?”
“Netflix?”
“Yes, that. And that other thing… what’s that awful one when they film themselves pretending to sing?”
“Oh, that one sucks.”
“It doesn’t suck, Veronica. It’s not a vacuum cleaner. And yes, it was trying on my nerves. She kept launching herself up and down the upstairs hallway like she was on a catwalk.”
I turned to Ma. Was she being serious? “Hannah came out of her room?”
“Sadly for my headache, yes.”
“Ma, come on, you’ve got to show support. I think I should take her to talk to Dr Michaels.”
“No need, darling. It’s just a phase, that’s all. You went through one too.”
My mouth popped open. Phase? I was still bloody in it, woman. I went to say something along those lines, but instead said, “How’s the crossword?”
“Six letters, from one place to another.” She glanced at the paper closer and then with a scowl she put down the paper and slid the coffee pot across the table. “Why do they make these things so damn abstract?”
“That’s an unanswerable question, similar to my question of when will you get Varifocals?”
She sent me her most deadly glare. I held a hand to my chest and pretended to die over the sink.
“Yes, please over the sink, I don’t want you making a mess over the floors.”
I straightened and carried on making my coffee. “Thanks for last night. Sorry about the headache.”
“Mm.” She nodded like the queen. “You’re welcome.”
She lied, badly.
“So come on, tell me how it was. Were the men all bald like Angela promised?”
I shivered, not easy to hide. “No.”
“Veronica?”
She wouldn’t let it go, I knew that. I slumped a little and shoved my hands into the deep pockets of my cardigan. “I didn’t go okay, Ma. I didn’t go.”
I shoved a piece of bread into the toaster with the same brutality one would try to bury a dead body. I shoved it in that hole so hard it would have been a miracle for it to pop back up again.
“Oh. Angela let you down, did she?”
“Ma, stop it. Please. For God’s sake, just leave it.”
I’d seen him. It had only been for a split-second, the swish of l
ift doors opening and closing, but I’d seen him.
I leant over the sink and ran the tap while I gagged. The newspaper rustled and for a cold-sweat-filled moment I thought Ma had headed over to rub my back. No, she’d just adjusted the crossword so she could see it better.
I glanced up at the kitchen clock. Eight thirty. Hannah wouldn’t be up for hours yet. Thirteen-year-old girls didn’t wake up before eleven.
“I need to work. I’ve got that pitch tomorrow.” From the corner of my eye I saw Ma’s shoulders drop. “It’s a bridge, Ma.”
“Pardon?”
“Six letters from one place to another. Bridge.”
I flashed her a smirk which she studiously ignored as she fitted my letters into the relevant boxes.
“Oh yes.”
“I can’t help that I have a superior intellect.” I smirked, just because I loved watching her try to frown and smooth her wrinkles out at the same time.
“Inherited from your dad.” Her eyes glazed over with that wistful thing she did whenever she mentioned my dad just like they had for the last five years.
I sighed. It wasn’t breakfast in Ma’s house without a side serving of guilt or grief. I leant over and squeezed her shoulder through the thin silk of her cream blouse. “I miss him too, Ma.”
Ma rubbed at the end of her nose and straightened her shoulders, her slender back ramrod straight. She waved away my words with her hand. “You’ve had your own mourning to do, Veronica.” Her wave of the hand transformed into a stern wag of her index finger.
“Now listen.” She patted the table, and I sat on the chair next to hers. “I’ve been speaking to Phyllis Elridge, and her son Adrian has just got divorced. Nasty business I believe. Taken to the cleaners he was, lost all his pension fund and everything.”
“Not his pension fund!” I clasped my hands to my mouth.
“Veronica.” I sat up straighter. “Anyway, he is passing through, and I thought it would be lovely for you to go out for dinner.”
I blanched and gripped the table tight. “Ma, you can’t matchmake for me. It’s wrong.”
“Don’t be silly, darling. I introduced you to Paul, didn’t I? You can thank me for the wonderful years of marriage you had.”