by Tracy Bloom
Dave stood speechless, glancing from Suzie to Jackie whilst Lenny’s ears got coated in cement dust brought home from whatever building site Dave was working on as a bricky. This was a job he endured not for the love of architecture, but to pay the bills and allow him to indulge in his true vocation, that of lead guitarist and slightly off- key backing vocals in a tribute band named appropriately Cheap Purple.
His gaze finally rested on Suzie for an explanation.
“I didn’t actually do a Bobbitt,” defended Suzie.
“What are you talking about?” demanded Dave.
“Suzie got dumped by Alex and she got her own back by threatening him with a Bobbitt,” said Jackie.
“Good God Suzie,” exclaimed Dave. “And I’ve always considered you to be the wisest and loveliest of my wife’s friends.”
“You called her a hysterical old spinster the other week,” shouted Jackie over her shoulder as she walked over to load the dishwasher whilst simultaneously burping Troy.
Suzie looked at him accusingly.
“That was only when you were on the phone crying because you’d just discovered Ben Fogle was married,” said Dave.
“Yeah, well I’ve turned over a new leaf,” she said carefully storing the words hysterical and spinster in the insecure part of her brain. “I’m off men now. In fact I’m so off men that I’ve changed my advice column into a revenge column and I’m tracking down ex-boyfriends who broke my heart to get my own back.”
“Isn’t it brilliant,” shouted Jackie.
Dave was still standing with his mouth open.
“And this is one of the poor sods is it?” he said pointing at the computer.
“Yes,” replied Suzie. “Patrick was my first ever boyfriend when I was fifteen.”
“Fifteen,” exclaimed Dave his voice rising very high. “You are going to go and find a lad who you haven’t been out with in twenty years and threaten to cut off his …?” He stopped and manoeuvred Lenny behind him so that he formed a protective shield.
“No I’m not going to do that again. Old hat now,” said Suzie.
“Old hat,” spluttered Dave. “What about the fact that you might appear to be some lunatic, vindictive bitch and they could throw you in a mental hospital?”
“Exactly,” said Suzie undeterred. “Random, violent acts allow them to be the victim which totally defeats the object. I have to be a lot cleverer than that Dave. I’ve got to make them feel how I felt or else there’s no point in doing it. They have to learn some kind of lesson.”
“Crikey Suze, I didn’t realize you put so much thought into it?” said Jackie wandering back over. “And there was me about to suggest suit slashing or something.”
“Way too obvious,” replied Suzie. “I need to somehow make Patrick feel totally rejected and humiliated.”
“Well that’s easy,” said Jackie. “His Facebook status says he’s single so you’re free to reject and humiliate him at will. All you need to do is pull him, let him fall for you and then drop him from a great height in some spectacular fashion. Job done.”
“I cannot believe I’m hearing this,” interjected Dave. “It was over twenty years ago, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It does,” said Suzie and Jackie in unison.
“It matters to me,” said Suzie.
“It matters to her,” said Jackie at the same time. “I’m with you Suzie,” she said putting an arm around her. “I’m with you all the way. Do it for me and for all the things I wish I’d said and done to Craig and never did. You could pull Patrick easily. I know you could.”
Suzie wondered if she could. Could she put herself through that and would it be worth it? She remembered the broken sixteen-year-old who had cried the whole day of her birthday following their hideous break-up. She looked at the gruesome photograph of Patrick on his Facebook page, groping naked breasts in a nightclub. Yes she could she decided. Here was a man who needed to be taught a lesson and she knew she was exactly the right woman to do it.
Chapter 8
Drew had been staring at his inbox for the last half hour. He liked to keep it empty. He didn’t like loose ends lying around. He didn’t like questions to suspend unanswered in cyberspace. He dealt religiously with his inbox first thing in the morning and last thing before he went home ensuring all questions were answered and all correspondence filed leaving him with a clean slate. He liked his inbox like his life. All ordered and accounted for.
Unfortunately a rogue message had violated his system. The sort of message that hangs around waiting for attention but which you choose to ignore until it becomes absolutely critical. By this time of course the amount of effort required to solve the dilemma it contains has grown by epic proportions. Drew normally dealt with such messages swiftly, thereby preventing any probability of escalation. He hadn’t dealt with this one. The probable reason was that it wasn’t in his inbox demanding administration. It was somewhere loitering in his head, where it had been buried for a long time. Now it had pushed its way forward to demand an answer.
Did he really love Emily?
Such was his distress that he’d rung his mother that morning. Her shock at a mid-week, mid-morning phone call did not help the flow of what in any case would be a difficult conversation. He’d asked how she was and what she was doing and then didn’t know what to do with the expectant silence that followed. He could hardly come right out with it and ask her what being in love felt like. Asking how she’d felt three months before she got married would have been just as alien and so he’d made his excuses and asked her over for lunch on Sunday.
He was still staring at his empty inbox when Suzie arrived back with coffee, wanting to show him her first boyfriend’s profile on Facebook.
“I actually thought you were joking the other night when you said you were going to find your ex-trolls,” he said glad for some distraction. The trolls had been re-instated on the desk for the purpose of Suzie’s current exercise. All that is except the Alex troll who had been dumped in the canal.
“Why would I be joking?” asked Suzie.
“Well for a start didn’t you say the first one was whilst you were at school?” he said. “You were only teenagers weren’t you?”
“Don’t you start,” she said. “That is exactly the point. We were only teenagers. The time when falling in love is the most brilliant, exciting, wonderful thing on the planet. And he ruined it. I would have thought you of all people Drew would understand that. You must remember what a rush it was, falling in love when you are so young. It never feels as good as that again believe me.”
Drew stared at Suzie for a moment and contemplated how he could use this situation to ask the question he so badly needed the answer to. He winced with his whole body as he forced out the query.
“So how did it feel then?” he asked, “with this guy.”
“Oh God I can remember it as if it was yesterday.” She flopped back in her chair. “My entire world revolved around Patrick and how much I wanted him. He used to go to this monthly disco in the next village and I lived for those nights,” she said closing her eyes as if she was actually picturing it. “The anticipation of whether he was going to be there and the sheer romantic potential of the evening used to make me feel physically sick.” She opened her eyes and leaned forward. “And the preparation was epic. My outfit planning, make-up practicing and shoes buying would take the whole month to perfect until the night in question arrived.” She stopped and took a sharp intake of breath, staring manically at Drew. “The entire day would go in slow motion until the two-hour time allocation for getting ready began and then suddenly it went into fast forward and there I was standing at the door of the hall on the precipice of a new dawn of impending love.”
Drew stared at her unable to recall any such drama from his own experience. He could remember thinking as he arrived at university having left the chaos of his parents’ marriage that falling in love was an inconvenience that needed to be got out of the way as quickly as po
ssible. That night he’d put on his best Blur T-shirt and gone down to the student union and checked out his fellow freshers.
“Me and Jackie would get there early so we could down a few Cinzano and lemonades,” Suzie continued. “Not to get drunk of course as it’s a physical impossibility to get drunk on weak Cinzano out of plastic cups. Believe me we tried. Then we danced. Oh did we dance, the only time in your life when you dance just because you want to, not because you’re drunk. I thought it was the happiest, most romantic place in the world when I was under that glitter ball dancing around my white patent leather handbag.”
Drew recalled that the student bar was smoky and grimy and he’d been initially unimpressed by the students-in-training, drinking real ale, dancing miserably to music they had never heard of and getting mindlessly drunk before sucking the lips off someone ugly they had barely said two words to.
“I can remember my whole body shook with excitement when Patrick walked into that hall,” said Suzie.
He remembered that on day five he’d spotted Emily sitting calmly in a corner next to a girl in floods of tears. She was nodding patiently, her neat blond ponytail swaying gently.
“Month after month I plotted my toilet trips to coincide with when he went outside for a fag in the hope that we might just bump into one another, and if we bumped into one another then he might just talk to me, and if he talked to me and if I timed it exactly right at the beginning of the slow dances then he might just ask me to dance and then if we did slow dance then of course we would kiss because that was the only reason a boy ever asked you to dance right?” said Suzie breathlessly.
“I guess so,” said Drew recalling that he’d walked over to Emily straight away. “Can I borrow you a minute?” had been his killer chat up line. She’d blinked at him, confused by his familiarity before realising what he was up to. Then gracefully she got up and told the girl in tears to go and call her boyfriend before following him outside. She explained that her roommate had got off with someone the previous night and now she didn’t know what to tell her boyfriend of four years back at home. The next thing she said was music to his ears.
“I don’t like crying. Such a waste of energy. If something goes wrong you put your efforts into doing something about it. Not weeping hysterically hoping a solution is going to pop up out of nowhere.” She shook her head and took a very small sip of white wine out of a plastic glass. A woman who didn’t like high emotion or crying. A rational woman. He knew instantly that he’d found her. The woman he would fall in love with. He thought it was exactly the sort of love he had been looking for. Not the love he’d grown up with full of deceit and lies and pathetic pointless hope. No, he was convinced that it was going to be the right sort of love. Love that would grow slowly and quietly without pain or any need for female tears.
He was brought out of this reverie by the sound of Suzie singing.
“What on earth is that?” he asked.
“Never gonna give you up, Rick Astley,” Suzie declared. “It was playing when we first kissed outside the ladies’ loo.”
“How … romantic?” said Drew.
“It wasn’t actually,” said Suzie.
“Wasn’t it?”
“No,” she said. “He kissed like a washing machine then took me around the back of the hall and tried to take my bra off.”
“Nice,” said Drew. “So that was the end of that then?”
“Don’t be stupid. I sat at home and waited for him to call of course. Crap kissing and incessant mauling didn’t put me off. And to be fair he did call and we went out over the school summer holidays. It was total bliss. I thought I was in heaven.” She paused as her face clouded over. “Then on the first day back at school I went rushing over to him. He was standing in a crowd with his mates. He was acting all weird but I figured it was just because he wanted to chat to his friends so I told him I’d see him at lunchtime. He turned to me in front of everybody and said that he wouldn’t be seeing me at lunchtime because we weren’t going out anymore. He said he was bored with me now. He said he only went out with me because his best mate Martin had gone abroad for the entire summer and he needed something to do. But Martin was back now so he didn’t need me anymore. It was a week before my sixteenth birthday. I cried the whole day.”
Suzie looked like she was about to cry. Actually cry over someone she had loved over twenty years ago.
“Do you know what the really sad thing is,” she said sniffing loudly. “I never felt my heart leap like that again when a man walked in the room. That’s why you’re so lucky,” she said. “Your love started with heart leaps. Pure teenage heart leaps. How amazing is that.”
At no time did he ever recall heart leaps. What was that all about? No-one had ever mentioned heart leaps. Nothing so energetic for him and Emily. They’d merely eased themselves into a comfortable relationship devoid of any of the drama or stress that they self-righteously observed in their friends’ relationships. They cruised through university with barely a hiccup and bought a house a week after they graduated allowing them both to concentrate on their careers. When he got made senior reporter and as Emily fast approached partnership at the law firm it seemed like the logical time to get married. Logical. Just how he liked it. Now for some reason as the wedding loomed he was bombarded with illogical thoughts. Thoughts he was struggling to make rational.
“So that is why I am going to make Patrick fall in love with me,” said Suzie grabbing football troll off her desk and throwing it in the air. “Then I’m going to drop him from a great height. Make him feel exactly how I felt.”
What was she saying now thought Drew. That she was going to make some guy she had not seen in how long fall in love with her just like that? Is that how it worked? He so didn’t understand any of this.
“Don’t you think it’s a good idea?” she asked.
“Guess so,” he said totally bewildered. “Can you really get Patrick to fall in love just like that?”
She went quiet, blinking rapidly back at him.
“You don’t think I can get him to fall in love with me do you?” she said, a slight accusing tone in her voice
“No. No I didn’t say that.”
Suzie looked away, hiding her face.
“Thanks,” she muttered before reaching for a tissue and blowing her nose.
Drew spotted her brimming eyes.
“What? Why are you crying?” he asked.
“I’m not,” she sniffed.
“Don’t say that,” he said. “You’re crying. I can see you.”
“No honestly, it’s just … it’s just you know, you said … that it would be impossible for anyone to fall in love with me.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did,” said Suzie burying her eyes in her tissue.
“When did I say that?”
“Just now.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did. You said you didn’t think I could get Patrick to fall in love with me.” A fresh flow of tears erupted.
How had this happened? This was why he avoided love. You start talking about love and sure enough female tears appeared out of nowhere, guaranteed. He didn’t know what to do. Emily didn’t do crying. If something bothered her she sat him down calmly, explained clearly what he had done wrong, asked him politely to apologise and then laid out how he could avoid the situation arising again. Sometimes it made him feel like a school boy who’d been called to the headmaster’s office but he would rather have that than tears any day. Making a girl cry didn’t make him feel good. It reminded him too much of waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of his mother sobbing in the next room.
“Please stop crying,” he begged. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you honestly.”
He looked round desperate for an escape route. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be thinking or talking about love and he didn’t want to be sitting next to Suzi
e crying.
“It shouldn’t be that hard,” she mumbled, discarding her tissue and shuffling her mouse until a photograph appeared on her screen. “Look, he’s obviously a letch. Just need to wear a low cut top.”
Drew looked at the photograph and was distracted from the semi-clad blonde by something dearer to his heart.
“Well he can’t be all that bad,” said Drew.
“Why?” exclaimed Suzie.
“Well he supports Man City.” Having spotted Patrick was wearing a home shirt he grabbed the mouse off Suzie. “Let’s see if he’s got anything to say about last night’s woeful performance.”
He clicked onto Patrick’s homepage and scanned down for comments on the previous night’s game. “Knows his stuff,” he said nodding when he found some highly insightful remarks. “Smart guy.”
“What are you doing?” said Suzie who looked almost as upset as when he allegedly accused her of being unlovable.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Drew leaping back. He’d forgotten himself for a moment there. Football had lead him to a safe place away from his inner turmoil but made him forget why Suzie was looking at Patrick’s page in the first place.
“You can’t get between a man and his football,” he said by way of some kind of half-hearted apology.
She frowned and he prayed she wouldn’t start crying again.
She didn’t.
She started to smile instead. A huge smile that you can only respond to by reciprocating.
They sat there grinning at each other. Drew had no idea what he was smiling about.
“You are a genius,” she said jumping up and hugging him.
What the hell he thought. He’d never in thirty-four years had a more confusing morning.
“You will help me won’t you?” she begged pulling back. “I need to pick your brain on this one.”
“What are you going on about?”
“Football!” she cried. “I need to know all about football. Come on I’m buying you lunch and I’ll fill you in.”
She beamed at him, looking deliriously happy. Thank God. She’d already put her coat on and was thrusting his at him. He got up. Lunch and football couldn’t be turned down. Anything was better than spending any more time alone with love and his mixed up head.