by Jane Fallon
In the end, I decide that I’m going to keep my cool. Give him the chance to come clean. I plaster a smile on my face. It’s just possible I look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Hi, honey, I’m home.
‘Hey!’ He pops his head out from the kitchen, arms wide. He looks so pleased to see me I almost forget what’s been going on. He swoops me up in a hug.
‘Mmm, you smell amazing,’ he says, burying his nose in my hair. Shit, I knew I shouldn’t have had another shower. Usually, I arrive after a long flight smelling of old food and other people’s fetid breath, with skin the colour and consistency of a radish. You might have picked up that I’m not a good traveller. I once caught chickenpox travelling on the train from Reading to London.
I mumble something into his chest that I hope sounds like an endearment.
‘Curry’ll be here any minute,’ he says, holding me at arm’s length. I struggle to make eye contact. ‘I can’t believe you’re here!’
‘Me neither.’
‘Mel’s going to be beside herself.’
I take my jacket off. ‘You haven’t mentioned it to her, have you?’
‘’Course not, you told me not to. I haven’t spoken to her for ages anyhow.’
‘Right.’ I don’t know what to say next so I try, ‘It’s looking very clean in here. Have you had the Hoover out?’ just to see what his reaction is.
He has the gall to look smug. ‘Couldn’t have you coming home to a dirty flat.’
Luckily, the doorbell rings so I’m saved from having to respond. Jack hotfoots it down the stairs to retrieve the curry, giving me a chance to have a look around. In the bathroom, all trace of the woman’s bits and pieces has gone and he’s made the effort to spread his own stuff out to fill the gaps and even got a few of my toiletries out from wherever he had hidden them away.
The bedroom is, of course, clear of her belongings. I have a look to see if Jack has changed the sheets, and I’m relieved to see he has. Even the duvet cover, which must be a first. The dryer contains the warm softness of the discarded ones.
I hear him thumping back up the stairs and I root around in the fridge and find a bottle of Prosecco.
‘One mushroom balti coming up,’ he announces as he comes back in. While I open the fizz and he heaps the hot food on to plates, I have a sneaky look at him. He looks tired – well, no surprise there.
He catches me staring. Smiles.
‘What?’ he says.
I feel tears rush to my eyes. Blink them back. Gulp like a frog swallowing a fly.
‘Nothing. Just great to see you, that’s all.’
‘You big softy. Come here.’ He pulls me in for a hug, kisses the top of my head.
Curry over, we polish off the rest of the Prosecco and I wait. Jet lag is making me sweaty and nauseous. I move from ‘I’m a little bit tired’ to ‘I’m going to fall asleep face first in my leftover pilau rice’ in the space of about two minutes. I’m desperate to go to bed, to sleep off my fug, to give my brain the chance to work out what exactly is going on. But I’m too scared to say so, in case he thinks it’s a proposition. And the thing about living so far apart from your partner is that you pretty much do have sex every time you see each other, so he’s bound to be thinking it’s a done deal. I consider allowing myself to pass out on the sofa. That might be the way to go.
‘Do you want a nightcap?’ he says now, and snakes an arm around my shoulders. I ignore the comment, which I know he thinks is flirty foreplay, and indulge myself in a big, gaping yawn.
‘God, sorry. It’s because I didn’t get any sleep last night.’
‘Last night? What were you up to?’
Shit, yes, he has no idea I came in overnight on the red-eye, that I’ve been hanging around in a hotel all day. ‘Just because I had to get up so early to get to the airport, you know. I ended up hardly sleeping because I was so afraid I’d sleep through my alarm.’
‘I know a way to wake you up,’ he says, nuzzling into my hair. I sit there rigid. Has he always talked in such horrendous clichés?
‘I think I might be too far gone,’ I say, moving away as gently as I can.
‘You can just lie there, let me have my wicked way.’ He laughs at how witty this is and I try to join in. I want to shout at him, hurl accusations, but my head is foggy and I know I need to keep my cool.
‘Sleep,’ I say, hoping Jack will get the message.
‘Come on, let’s get you into bed,’ he says, and then he laughs. ‘And I don’t mean that how it sounds.’
5
In the end, I sleep badly but I do sleep. At one point, I wake up and find I’m wrapped around Jack’s back like a loved-up clam, and then I remember what’s happened and I shove him away, not caring if he wakes or not, although he’s dead to the world.
I wake up again only when Jack nudges me, cup of tea in hand, at what turns out to be eleven o’clock. All I want is to get through the day, get through the party without ruining Mel’s night, and face whatever comes my way tomorrow. Jack, however, has other ideas.
‘So, I thought we could go into the West End and have lunch somewhere. Oh, and I need to get some new jeans, so maybe Selfridges?’
I take the mug of tea gratefully. My mouth feels like I’ve been eating sandpaper.
Usually, I realize now, I just go along with whatever he wants to do on my visits home. Such is my guilt at being the one who upped and left to go and work abroad. Funnily enough, I don’t feel so bad about that now.
‘I can’t face the West End. You go if you want. To be honest, I could just sleep all day.’
‘Well, I won’t go if you don’t want to come,’ he says petulantly. ‘I just thought it would be nice. We could get your ring resized. You’re always saying it’s too big.’ A few days after Jack’s proposal, we’d chosen a ring together. Simple. Understated. A tiny pink diamond embedded into a plain gold band. I had no interest in a big rock. I’d have been happy sticking with the ring pull. In fact, I think I still have it somewhere, nestled in its light blue box.
I know I have to make a bit more of an effort if I don’t want him to realize I’ve sussed him before tonight, so I reach a hand out and rub his arm. ‘Tell you what, let’s go for a walk later. I just need to sleep it off some more.’
He sits down next to me and pulls me towards him.
‘Shall I wake you again in an hour or so?’
‘Mmm …’ I say. It’s the best I can come up with at short notice.
In the end, we potter about locally, buying treats for tomorrow’s breakfast and browsing in the bookshop, sampling smelly cheese in the little deli. Ordinarily, this is exactly what I love to do whenever I’m home. The mundane stuff. The everyday normality that most people find boring. It’s what I miss. Today, I go through the motions.
I just want this day to be over.
6
Mel’s fortieth is being held in a room above a pub in Shoreditch. But it’s a pub that’s far more Parmesan crisps and flat whites than beer and peanuts. We’ve often spent the evening here, surrounded by fairy lights in the small, fragrant patio garden, if I’ve gone to meet Mel from work. I always check it’s just going to be the two of us before I venture down here, though. I find it a bit uncomfortable watching the version of Mel that she presents to her work colleagues, not that I would ever want her to know that. We all do it, over-exaggerate our past to the people who didn’t know us then, make ourselves sound more working or upper class, or cooler/nerdier/sportier. As if it’s not enough just to have been a normal, average child with a functional upbringing. But, for Mel, it’s an extreme sport. To hear her talk, you would think she had been a star in a previous life, or at least a professional. That her achievements weren’t just confined to our village, that it wasn’t all over by the time she was twenty. And no one ever questions it because, why would they?
She’s always dropping little references into her conversations with people who haven’t known her as long as I have. The odd ‘when I was modelling’ or ‘in
my acting days’, as if she’s an old Hollywood legend sharing her past with her adoring fans. It’s just Mel. She can’t help herself. I don’t think she even realizes she’s doing it.
She hates her job, which is doing something incomprehensively dull-sounding in an insurance office, and is about as far as it gets from the glamorous life she – and we all – envisioned for herself when she was young. I’ll be honest, I’ve sometimes envied her the regular hours, the security and the absolute lack of any requirement to think about work between home time and nine-thirty the next morning, but I have never wanted to swap places with her.
If St Augustine’s School for Girls had been the kind of place to indulge in these things, then Melissa Moynahan would almost certainly have been voted ‘Most Likely to be a Star’ in 1993. In the five years we had been at the school, she had taken the lead in every end-of-term play. Willowy, flame-haired and head-turningly pretty, she was every mother’s idea of the perfect daughter. She acted, she sang, she danced, all to perfection. Barely a week went by when the local paper didn’t list one of her achievements on its inside pages. (Thinking about it, though, it was a small place and they had about twenty sides to fill with news, so someone passing their tap exam with distinction or achieving their BAGA Grade 1 gymnastics was as good a scoop as anything.) She was also well turned out and polite and in the top third of the class in every subject. ‘Why can’t you be more like Melissa?’ was a lament heard by most of the girls in my year at some point or other, either from parents or teachers. Or, in my case, both.
She should have been easy to hate but, somehow, she wasn’t. She was sharp and funny and had just the right amount of eye-rolling disdain for the constant praise she received. And she could be badly behaved, too, something I always loved about her. Although she somehow got away with it, because no one could believe she would be capable of being anything other than perfect.
I was in awe of her, I’m not going to lie. She seemed to breeze through life without a care in the world, everything she touched turning to stardust. She lived in one of the neat three-bedroom houses on the neat estate on the edge of town, with weeping willows in the front gardens and dads washing their cars on the drives at weekends. She was an only child and had her own pink bedroom, I discovered when we became friends. With white furniture, and her own armchair, covered in a Laura Ashley floral. I shared a room with Nichola in our damp old cottage, painted magnolia as a compromise between our two contrasting tastes and therefore pleasing no one, the two beds practically touching. If we reached out, we could hold hands – not that we ever did. Nichola and I have never been close.
I have no idea how Mel and I became friends. One minute, I was admiring her from afar, quite content with my small circle of pals but convinced there was a soulmate out there for me somewhere, and the next she had turned the full force of her beam on me and I was being invited round for tea one Saturday afternoon. Later, as we stuffed in mini chicken kievs and pizza bites from Iceland (everything in my house was lovingly made from scratch and contained absolutely no E-numbers, so this in itself was a major treat for me), she told me it was because she wanted to rescue me from my circle of goody-goody friends, which should have been insulting but which I took as a huge compliment. She could tell I was different, she said.
After that, I would spend every spare moment in her pink-and-white bedroom or watching while she twirled or tapped or acted her way through her charmed life. I was her chief cheerleader. And I knew that was my role. I cheered, while she soaked up admiration from all sides. I worked steadily, while she effortlessly shone. It sounds one-sided. It wasn’t. What she gave me back was fun and friendship. Where I had the tendency to see the glass as half empty, she was the only person who could convince me it was overflowing.
Physically, we were polar opposites. Me dark-haired, brown-eyed, honey-skinned and sporty; her red-haired, green-eyed, skin a luminous white that was almost blue, and fragile-looking, although that belied her tough interior. We used to spend hours comparing our differences, as if we could only really see ourselves in the ways we contrasted with each other. Beside her, I felt ordinary. As if my own looks were ten a penny while everything about hers stood out from the norm.
Soon we had our futures mapped out. She was going to be a star. I had no such ambitions for myself. I had no desire to be in the spotlight. I was going to be successful at something boring but lucrative, I just hadn’t quite worked out what yet. Something that would leave me with enough time off so that I could travel around the world with her, having fabulous adventures.
I know from our many FaceTime conversations on the subject that tonight there are about a hundred people expected, that there will be a DJ playing mainly nineties hits, and that the pub are laying on staff to serve drinks from the small corner bar. Melissa has hired a catering company to provide a selection of mouthwatering-sounding canapés, along with two roving waiters. My contribution – because, obviously, she has no idea that I’m going to be there in person and neither did I when she first started planning it – has been to provide the cake.
‘It’s too sad if I have to choose my own cake,’ she had said to me one night. She was in the living room of the beautiful flat in Kingston that she and Sam had shared until a couple of months before. He was trying to pressure her into selling so that they could split the profits and both start again, and I knew that this, above all, was tearing her up. She loved that flat. They’d lived in it since before they were married – eight years – and she had decorated every inch several times and chosen pretty much every piece of furniture, too, because Sam had no interest in that kind of thing. He just stumped up the cash. That was Sam’s solution to everything, by the way.
‘I mean, what kind of tragic loser has no one to organize a surprise fortieth-birthday cake for her?’ Mel has always been obsessed with ageing, and her fortieth had taken on the significance of a religious festival. My own was coming up in a couple of months, and I wasn’t really bothered.
‘Maybe someone has but you don’t know about it. Because it’s a surprise.’
‘No. No one cares enough except you.’
I laughed, because she was being typically melodramatic. Everything is a performance with Mel. ‘Why don’t I do it?’
‘Oh my God, would you?’ she said, cheering up in an instant. She swept her hair up in both hands and pulled it back off her face. I could tell she was checking out how it looked on her phone. ‘Use the Hummingbird Bakery and get one with little flowers on. Or one of those topsy-turvy ones …’
‘If I do it, I’m picking everything. I don’t want any instructions.’
‘Okay. With raspberries …’
‘Shut up, or I’m not getting involved. The whole fun is that I get to choose. One more word and I’m not doing it.’
‘I wish you could come,’ she’d said, as she did pretty much every time we talked.
‘Me, too.’
‘I would, literally, uninvite everyone else if it meant you could be there.’
I’d checked on the cake yesterday and the small West End company I’d chosen had sent a photo of the finished product: one layer salted caramel and raspberry, Mel’s go-to flavour option on any dessert menu, and the other a sticky combination of chocolate, almonds and marshmallows in honour of rocky-road ice cream, her favourite during our long, hot, teenage summers. I have no idea if it all goes together but I know she’ll love the sentiment. The top was decorated with a flame-red-haired figure lounging on a chaise longue, champagne glass in her manicured hand. Piped around her were the words ‘Forty and fucking fabulous beatches’, which I knew would make her laugh. I had spent an unhealthy amount of time discussing the spelling of the word ‘beatches’ with the woman on the other end of the phone when I placed the order. She kept thinking that I was trying to say beaches and that the chaise longue should be a sun lounger. She asked me if I wanted a palm tree at least three times. I had to explain to her what it means but she was still getting over the fact I wanted the w
ord ‘fucking’ on there so she didn’t really take it in.
‘I don’t think I’ll be putting this one on our website,’ she’d said huffily as she wrote down my credit-card number.
Anyway, the wording looks perfect in the photo. I can’t wait for Mel’s reaction.
I know she’ll be feeling nervous setting everything up – I think she roped in a couple of work friends to help her with the finishing touches so, while I’m getting ready, I send her a text – ‘Hope all going okay. SO sad I’m not going to be there but you’ll have a blast. Don’t wake up anywhere you shouldn’t! Call you tomorrow xxx’ – and I’m rewarded almost immediately with a reply: ‘Won’t be the same without you! Xxx’
The sounds of ‘Parklife’ by Blur greet us as we head up the stairs to the function room. I remember dancing to this with Mel the first time she came to visit me at uni in London. Even though I was having the time of my life, and I loved all my new friends already, I’d missed her so much I felt as if I’d had a part of me removed.
Jack edges in ahead of me, hiding me behind him. The room is packed, a testament to Mel’s popularity. But it’s not oppressive. I know pretty much everyone and they all greet me like a returning explorer they thought they might never see again. Jack makes an elaborate show of sshhing them, and propels me along to find Mel. I want her to see me before she hears a rumour that I’m there.
And then I spot her. Red hair, bright orange top, skinny jeans and towering heels. She’s laughing heartily at something someone has just said to her, head back, perfect teeth gleaming white.
‘Hey, Mel,’ Jack says, and she looks over and greets him warmly with a peck on the cheek. She hasn’t noticed me yet.
‘Jack! Hi! Thanks for coming.’
‘Happy birthday,’ he says. ‘You’re looking well.’
‘For a forty-year-old,’ she says with a scowl. ‘For the rest of my life now, I’ll have to add a coda whenever anyone gives me a compliment.’