by Cathy Kelly
As she worked, she thought about Harry, about how he used to spend hours wandering around in his dressing gown, something which had irritated her beyond belief. He’d been such a slob. If he didn’t have to get up and go into work, Harry would slouch around half-dressed all day, phoning Hannah at work and asking her to buy milk/ fags/bread on the way home. And she used to do it, she remembered with shame. She’d been a bigger eejit than he was to let him get away with it. He never washed a cup or emptied an ashtray if he could help it, and she’d rarely remonstrated with him about it either. More fool Hannah.
Oh yeah, and the novel. Harry’s great opus. He’d been talking about it for years, how he was going to be able to give up the day job when it was written and how it’d win literary prizes left, right and centre. He was worse when he got drunk, telling her he’d be famous some day, famous and filthy, stinking rich. Oh yes, you mark my words, incredibly rich and famous. Thirty seconds later, he’d ask her for a loan of a tenner so he could run out to the twenty-four-hour garage and buy cigarettes and Pringles.
Donna was still at her desk when Hannah finally switched off her computer and tidied up the manila folders on her desk.
‘Fancy a drink?’ Hannah asked, suddenly overcome with the desire to talk to someone about Harry’s phone call. She liked talking to Donna: the other woman never judged, never jumped to conclusions and never breathed a word of their conversations to anyone else.
‘I’d love to,’ confessed Donna, ‘but I’m picking Tania up from a friend’s house in an hour and I’ve got some paperwork to finish first. Sorry.’
‘That’s fine, no sweat. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ve got an early start anyway, I don’t know why I’m even thinking about the pub.’ Hannah laughed. ‘See you tomorrow.’
As she walked out into the cool evening air, she didn’t notice the car parked opposite. She certainly never thought it might be Harry’s car. He’d driven a battered old Fiat that was verging on the antique it was so elderly. This car was a very respectable saloon with not a bit of rust in sight. Hannah barely looked at it. So she was astonished when the door opened and Harry got out, calling her name.
She stared at him, wondering if this was a mirage and knowing it wasn’t. For what felt like hours but was actually only a minute, she stared silently, unable to summon up an intelligent sentence. Then her brain reasserted itself.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she demanded.
‘I came to see you, Hannah. We have to talk,’ Harry said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to turn up on the doorstep of the woman you’d dumped a year and a half previously for a trip to find yourself.
‘You’ve seen me. Now fuck off,’ she replied, marching towards her car.
‘Hannah, don’t be like that. You can’t walk away from ten years, you know.’
She glared at him. ‘That’s supposed to be my line, Harry. You, if I remember correctly, were the one who walked away. Now you can do it again – out of my life, and don’t ever set foot near me again or I’ll report you as a stalker, got that?’
Boiling like Mount Etna, she reached the Fiesta, unlocked it, wrenched open the door and threw her papers in. Harry followed her and stood behind her. She knew he was standing with his hands falling limply by his sides: that was what he always did when he didn’t know what else to do. She ignored him, amazed at the rage she felt. It was as if he was Harry and Felix rolled into one, deserving of all the fury she’d directed at both of them.
‘Hannah,’ he said again, hesitantly this time, ‘please stop and talk to me, that’s all I want. Please. I’m sorry.’
It was the ‘I’m sorry’ that did it. At no time during his rapid departure from her life had Harry ever apologized. He’d never looked embarrassed as he bluntly told her he had to get out or he’d stagnate. He’d never asked her forgiveness, not even when she sat down on the end of their bed, her legs gone from under her with shock and weakness at his announcement. Even his bizarre letter from South America the year before had been full of inane chatter about what he was doing and lacking in any mention of their life together and how sorry he was he’d destroyed it.
Hannah put her handbag on the passenger seat before facing Harry.
‘You’re sorry?’ she said calmly. ‘Now? Isn’t it a bit late to be sorry? I thought the time for apologies was when you dumped me like a sack of old potatoes, not when you return nearly two years later, looking for…’ She put her head on one side and surveyed him with narrowed eyes. ‘What, I wonder. Somewhere to live, perhaps? Or a loan of money? You must be looking for something, Harry, if you’re back.’
He looked pained. ‘You obviously have a terrible impression of me, Hannah, to think I’d only come back for money or something like that.’
‘And you haven’t given me any reason to have a bad impression of you, is that right?’ she said caustically.
He lowered his eyes first. ‘I am sorry, Hannah, though you obviously don’t believe me. I know I can’t make it up to you, but I just wanted to talk to you, to explain.’
Weariness flooded Hannah’s limbs. She hadn’t the energy to fight with him any more. Let him try and explain what she found inexplicable.
Hannah knew there was nothing he could ever say that would explain what had happened. She’d recovered from it, though. She’d suffered and come out the other side, stronger – she hoped – than ever. But if he had to tell her, then so be it. ‘I’ll meet you in McCormack’s in half an hour,’ she said abruptly. ‘We can talk then, for about fifteen minutes. Then, I’ll have to go.’
Without waiting to see whether this suited Harry or not, Hannah jumped into her car, slammed the door and drove off down the street like a possessed Formula One driver with the rest of the grid on her tail.
There was nothing she needed to do that would take half an hour. But Hannah had needed some time alone to get to grips with Harry’s reappearance in her life. She drove quickly to the pub and then sat in her parked car outside, with the newspaper spread on the steering wheel in front of her. She was too tired to read and no matter how many times she stared at any particular paragraph her eyes glazed over and she saw Harry’s face instead of newsprint. When he’d suddenly appeared in front of her, she’d known what to say. Driven by pent-up fury, she’d bitten his head off. But now, after thinking about it all, Hannah couldn’t think of a word to say. All those missile-shaped words had deserted her. If only she’d taped the late-night drunken speeches she’d declaimed when she was on her own, ones where she’d told Harry exactly what he could do with himself. Fuelled by Frascati, they’d been eloquent, if tearful, and they’d be so useful now. She could simply press ‘play’ on her tape recorder and let him listen to a perfectly encapsulated, very emotional précis of how she’d felt and what sort of a bastard she thought he was. Thinking of Harry forced to listen to a drunken speech made Hannah smile for the first time in hours. He was looking good, she had to give him that. Still long on boyish charm, but his body had filled out and the sprinkling of fine lines around his eyes suited him. So did the tan. He’d always tanned well, going a coffee colour while Hannah’s freckles were merely joining up.
And he looked very presentable, not his usual slacker self in droopy trousers and some type of ancient sweatshirt that no self-respecting charity shop would let past the front door. In its place, he wore chinos and a cream cotton sweater that looked brand new. Stylish almost; very unlike the Harry she used to know.
Well, Hannah smiled grimly, if he was different, so was she. She wore a severely tailored Jesiré suit with a knee-length skirt to show off toned-up legs in barely black seven deniers. Nothing under the jacket – just a bra. And perilous fuck-me stilettos from Carl Scarpa. Her hair, instead of the taut knot she’d worn during the Harry years, was a glossy shoulder-length mane that swung when she walked. She’d finally dumped the granny glasses for contacts and her lips gleamed sexily in strawberry lipgloss.
This look of restrained, business-like sexuality still drov
e men mad. Let Harry suffer a little, Hannah decided, getting out her strawberry gloss to give her mouth that PVC look.
When she saw Harry drive up in his distinctly unrusted car, she hopped out of hers and ran inside, grabbing a table at the back. Immersed in her newspaper, she pretended not to notice Harry’s loping progress towards her until he said her name.
‘Oh,’ she looked up in astonishment, as if she’d completely forgotten she was to meet him. ‘Harry. I’ll have a soda and lime with ice.’
He returned with their drinks and sat down heavily, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. ‘Thanks,’ Hannah said cheerily. She’d decided that emotionally she wasn’t up to a huge row with yelled recriminations that could be heard half-way across the bar. Far better to behave like a benevolent friend talking to a younger pal who’s always in trouble. A sort of ‘You scamp, what have you done this time?’ type ploy with a smattering of ‘I couldn’t care less, really,’ thrown in for good measure.
‘You look wonderful, Hannah,’ Harry said earnestly.
Her savoir-faire took a direct hit and she had to grind her teeth hard not to screech that break-ups were good for the figure on account of all the stepping you had to do in the gym to pound your ex out of your mind.
‘Thanks,’ she replied evenly. ‘Harry, I haven’t got all night. Can you get to the point?’
‘You’ve got a date, then?’ he asked idly.
She blinked at him steadily before replying: ‘None of your business, OK?’
‘Fine, fine, I was just wondering…’
‘Stop wondering. Why are you here? I thought we didn’t have anything to say to each other any more.’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I wanted to apologize, Hannah. I’ve thought about you so much, about the fun we had together. I feel,’ he hesitated, ‘that it’s all unfinished. That we shouldn’t have done it, do you understand?’
‘No.’
‘But you must – you said yourself, Hannah, we were good together.’
‘Harry, if you remember correctly, you’ll remember that I said that when you were collecting up the CDs you were afraid to leave in the flat. I was telling you we were wonderful together and you were scanning the room for valuable personal objects I might destroy in a rage when you’d gone because you’d dumped me. Things have changed since then.’ Harry looked as if he was about to speak but Hannah kept going. ‘You have had eighteen months of adventure where you could occasionally think fondly of the girl you left behind,’ she said with heavy irony, ‘because you did the leaving. You had what the Americans call “closure”. You made the choice to leave and you did. I, on the other hand, didn’t have closure because I was the person to whom it all came as a big shock. A massive bloody shock. Since then, I have got over it, over you, and have reached, acquired, whatever the damn word is, closure. So why exactly do you think I’d welcome you with open arms? Was I really that stupid that you’d imagine I’d be thrilled to see you?’
He grabbed her hands with his. ‘No, you’re the least stupid person I know.’
Hannah pulled her hands away roughly. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she said.
The couple at the table next to them looked round. Harry flashed them an apologetic half-smile. Hannah resisted the impulse to slap it off his stupid face.
‘Are you here to convince me to go out with you again?’ she asked bluntly.
‘No. Yes. Sort of. I want us to be friends,’ he said lamely.
‘I have enough friends,’ Hannah announced. ‘I don’t need any more.’
She was about to grandly throw her untouched soda and lime all over him when some inner force made her look up and she saw Felix approaching the table.
There must be hallucinogens in the air-conditioning unit in work, Hannah decided, her mind in slow-motion, as she watched Felix coming nearer. There really was no other explanation for today. I mean, to meet one ex-boyfriend was misfortune, to meet up with two…
‘Hello, Hannah,’ Felix growled, looking at Harry with dislike. ‘I hoped you might have come here for a drink after work because you weren’t at home when I phoned.’
‘Hello, Felix,’ she said calmly, as if she hadn’t just spent the past month in silent misery over him, wondering where he’d got to and asking herself if she should buy one of those self-help books for women who love bastards.
She peered around as if expecting a Candid Camera host to appear suddenly and tell her she was the star of the latest show. The coincidences that were piling up were way off the Richter scale and there had to be a reason.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ Felix said, sitting down on Hannah’s other side, quite clearly not giving a damn if he was interrupting anything. In fact, he was pleased to be interrupting it, Hannah deduced, if the cool smirk he’d directed at Harry was anything to go by.
‘What brings you here?’ Hannah asked. ‘I didn’t know you were back in Ireland.’
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’ Felix said, ignoring her question and placing substantial emphasis on the word ‘friend’.
Hannah ground her teeth some more. ‘Harry Spender, Felix Andretti,’ she said.
‘How do you know each other?’ said Harry pointedly, looking at Felix as if he were Hannah’s father and Felix was a particularly unsuitable boyfriend who’d just rolled up.
‘We went out together, Harry,’ Hannah explained kindly. ‘But it didn’t last.’
‘Oh,’ said Harry, pleased. He reached for Hannah’s hand again.
She moved out of his reach and encountered Felix’s long, muscled thigh against hers. He stared at her, smouldering in his own special way. If smoulderability could be marketed, Felix would be a billionaire.
‘How long since you broke up?’ asked Harry, piqued.
‘We haven’t,’ hissed Felix.
Hannah arched an eyebrow. Talk about l’embarras de richesses. One minute, she had no man on the horizon. Suddenly, she had two and they wanted to fight over her, like medieval knights jousting in a tournament for the hand of the fair lady. Well, she had news for them: the fair lady had to be game before there was any point in jousting for her hand. And this lady wasn’t keen at all. She’d finished with both knights and they could get stuffed.
‘Enough chitchat, boys. I’m afraid I have a date and I’ve got to go. Nice talking to you, Harry, and you too, Felix.’ She gave them a bright smile and got up.
Both of them looked dismayed, although on Felix’s handsome face, dismay was wedded with displeasure.
‘You can’t go,’ he said, flicking back his golden hair, his trademark gesture.
The little creature who stoked Hannah’s inner rage got out the bellows and gave things a huge blast of air. She felt the fire inside her grow into an inferno of fury.
If she thought she’d been irritated to see Harry, that was nothing to what she felt at the sudden reappearance of Felix. A month and nothing. At least Harry had actually dumped her. Felix had just vanished and his mobile number had bleated that it was no longer valid when she’d rung it in tears. And here he was again, behaving as if nothing had happened despite his mysterious absence.
‘You’ve got a date?’ Felix said hotly, as if he disapproved of this idea.
Etna erupted.
Hannah turned on him. If the eyes were the window of the soul, she hoped he’d see flames in hers.
‘What I do is none of your business, Felix,’ she breathed. ‘Don’t forget that. I’m leaving, goodbye.’
She stormed out, daring either one of them to follow her. If they did, she’d kill them with her bare hands, so help her God.
The rage left her before she reached home and by the time she was sticking her key in the lock, she was grinning at the lunacy of the whole thing. It was official: she had yo-yos for boyfriends. They kept coming back, in spite of their best efforts to keep away.
Within an hour, Felix yo-yoed back again. He rang the doorbell continually for ten minutes and, when Hannah stuck her head out
of the window and told him to piss off, he started ringing everyone else’s doorbells. Finally, she stomped downstairs and let him in.
‘What are you doing here, Felix?’ she demanded as he followed her up to her flat. She was irrationally pleased that she hadn’t changed out of her work clothes, which meant that Felix was getting an eyeful of swaying hips and long legs as he walked behind her.
‘To see you, Hannah. We need to talk.’
Déjà vu or what? she thought grimly, remembering Harry saying those very words to her only hours before.
‘Is this International Ex-Boyfriend Day?’ she enquired. ‘Was there something about it on the news? No, don’t tell me. You were stuck in a time machine for four weeks and have only just come back to this century. Am I right?’
‘I’ve been so stupid, Hannah,’ murmured Felix. While Harry had relied on verbal reasoning to put his case for disappearance, Felix used much more carnal means. He slid his arms round her waist and began to kiss her, his soft lips scorching hers. Hannah felt her stomach contract with sheer, animal lust. Felix was a superb kisser. If he ever decided to leave the world of acting, he could undoubtedly make a fortune as a gigolo.
Momentarily, she let herself sink into his kiss, leaning her body against him, feeling his hips grind against hers erotically. It was wonderful, glorious, so sexy. After a month without him, Hannah felt like a thirsty Saharan traveller faced with a rippling, icy-cool stream. Her hands roamed eagerly over his back, one pulling his head down to hers, the other moulding him closer to her. And then she stopped. What was she doing? If she wanted cheap sex with no strings, all she had to do was hit the nightclubs and pick up a bloke who’d hidden his wedding ring in his back pocket. Why succumb to Felix when all he was doing was lulling her into a false sense of security? He’d have her eating out of his hand again and then, when he felt like it, he’d leave. Dump her. Like Harry had.
She imagined them sharing notes once she’d left the pub. Stupid Hannah, what a pushover.