by Hannah Pearl
As soon as Matt disappeared George had taken my hand and kissed it. He put a smile on my face and a lot of questions in my mind. Of course I didn’t ask him any of them. I was too scared that if I did I wouldn’t like the answers, so I walked home through the snow, holding his arm and following his lead. Mum had hung some mistletoe above our door. I’m not sure who she meant it for. Matt and I made throwing up noises whenever she got my dad under it.
George though looked up, smiled, and without a word kissed me until I was breathless again. I opened the door and dragged him inside. Pushing him onto the sofa, I climbed on top of him and kissed him until he laid me down and started unbuttoning my blouse. As he undid my bra, I came to my senses and sat back.
‘I think we need to stop,’ I said, pulling away. He kissed my neck and ran his fingers across the lace of my bra.
‘If you’re sure,’ he muttered, nibbling my collarbone. I kissed him again, and he slipped a finger into the waistband of my skirt, reaching for the zip. I pushed his hand away and stood up.
‘No, I really do need to stop,’ I said, panting hard. It was the furthest I’d ever gone, and though I loved how he felt pressed against me, I had neither the confidence to test what we’d do next, nor the will to follow through without knowing whether I would see George again afterwards if I did.
He got up and straightened his clothes, not that he could disguise the fact that his trousers would no longer lie flat. He blew out a sigh and got up. I let him out, he kissed me goodbye but didn’t say another word. I wondered what on earth I had been thinking. Maybe I’d just been enjoying myself. Maybe that was okay. What wasn’t okay was the way I felt about myself the next day, when I began to feel lost, not knowing whether his lack of communication was because he was annoyed with me for leading him on and then stopping, though I had every right to, or anger at myself for letting him react in that way without calling him out for it. I swore off him, and this time held to my word for six months before I’d fallen under his spell once more.
So I was in no rush to visit him to continue tracking down my past. I wasn’t sure whether I was more angry with myself that I had fallen for him repeatedly over the years, or whether I was pissed at him for spotting when I was vulnerable and taking his chances. Regardless, given that we had been destined to reconnect several more times over the next few years, I told myself I wasn’t chickening out by saving that task for the future.
Charmaine let out a gentle snore, and I turned over and tried to copy her, but my mind wandered back to the next man in my little black book.
Chapter Eight
Wandering around a craft store in town, I found the resources I needed for my class the next day. I’d wanted to find a range of card so that my kids could take inspiration from different styles of decorative papers to make covers for diaries and books, to see how it affected their writing. I filled my basket and headed towards the cash desk to pay.
Where in a supermarket they have chocolates and sweets to tempt you into making impulse purchases, these tills were surrounded by beautiful craft kits to entice you to make your own candles or stained glass panels. They had a home baking set that had a cute yellow apron and chef’s hat inside. The girl in the picture on the box had curly hair just like Alice, and I found myself adding it to my basket too.
Afterwards, I wasn’t sure why I’d bought it. I hoped Bea wouldn’t think I was odd dropping round a gift for a child I hardly knew, but once I’d paid for the box there was no point in keeping it. I knocked on the door and Jake let me in. He seemed pleased to see me at least, and I stopped feeling so silly.
‘Come in,’ he said, stepping back so I could enter.
‘I saw this and thought of Alice,’ I said, handing over my purchase.
‘That’s really kind, thank you. Alice will be so excited, though I’m not sure Bea will want me helping her to bake again any time soon.’
I grinned, and he touched my arm and pointed to a chair. ‘Fancy a glass of wine? Bea might be a little while still. I accidentally let Alice have a nap this afternoon and she was still bouncing when she went up. I’m not sure I’m in their good books right now.’
‘I’m sure you are in Alice’s, if not your sister’s.’
He laughed. I asked how Jake’s job-hunting was going, and he told me about the design firms he had sent his CV to that week. Half a glass of wine later Bea came downstairs. She looked exhausted. ‘Uncle Jake, Alice is still awake and is now asking for you.’
‘I’ll head off,’ I said, standing up too.
‘You don’t have to go,’ Bea said, as Jake showed her the gift I’d brought. ‘I’ve been reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar on repeat for the last half an hour and I would love some company while I have a glass of wine. In fact, I plan to have two, and it would feel sociable rather than an unhealthy coping technique if you were to join me.’
I accepted her kind offer.
‘I promise I’ll try not to let her nap tomorrow,’ Jake said, grinning and heading upstairs to take a shift.
‘He’s a great uncle,’ I commented.
‘He really is, even though today is going to be such a late night for her. I’ve been glad to have him around at the moment, that’s for sure.’ She topped up our wine and showed me into the living room. We curled up on her sofa, and she told me a bit more about her divorce. It sounded like she was still in shock, though Alice seemed to be coping remarkably well. I guess having her uncle around for distraction was probably helping with that.
‘How about you? Are you seeing anyone?’ she asked me.
I shook my head. ‘No. Nope. No way.’
‘That’s a pretty strong reaction,’ she remarked.
‘I’ve come to realise recently that I’ve had a few lucky escapes in the past. I’ve decided not to date for a while until I get things a bit straighter in my own mind,’ I explained. Bea wanted to know what I meant, and I found myself telling her about the challenge I’d set myself. I wasn’t sure why I was opening up so much to her, but at the same time I couldn’t stop myself talking. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps we both needed a friend, because Bea seemed to talk as freely as I did, and I wasn’t sure this was her usual approach either. ‘I hope that by the time I work my way back through my dating history, I’ll have more of a sense of why I’m still single, and why the guys that I have been interested in have all ended up being utter plonkers.’
‘If you get any answers please do let me know,’ she replied. ‘I’d quite like to find out what happened in my marriage too.’ She poured the last of the bottle into our glasses. It had disappeared all too quickly, and I explained the reason why I’d originally knocked on her door, and how quickly I’d run from the butcher’s shop once I’d set eyes on Bill Banks.
‘So who will you be looking up next?’ she asked.
I didn’t want to explain about skipping over George, so instead I told her about the trip I was thinking of making. ‘I don’t have any way of contacting the next guy on my list. Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure that I even spelt his name correctly in my book.’
‘So what are you going to do to find him?’ Bea said, resting her head against a cushion.
‘I thought that perhaps instead of looking up the guy himself, I’d go back to where I met him and see how I feel once I get there.’
‘And where is that?’
‘Dublin,’ I said, with determination. Charmaine had looked at me like I was crazy when I had told her my plan. Even though she supported me, she wasn’t sure that the expense of travelling to Ireland would help me feel more at peace.
‘I thought I’d visit my family, and go back to a few of the places that I visited when I was a teenager, try and recapture that youthful energy,’ I said. ‘My gran and quite a few of my cousins still live there.’
Bea looked pensive. ‘I can imagine how it might feel to go back to a more carefree time. Sometimes I can’t quite believe how my life has turned out. Ted and I were together for so long. I never thought I’d end up as a single mum.
But I wouldn’t swap Alice for the world so I wouldn’t go back and change my past, even if I could.’
‘Oh, I’m not after changing the past,’ I assured her, ‘or even reliving it. I want to learn from it. I got engaged last year but we’d split up within six months.’ I spared her any more details about how unpleasant that experience had been. ‘I don’t know why my previous relationships haven’t worked but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on my own. So, next weekend I’ll be flying to Dublin.’
‘Dublin?’ said a voice behind me. I turned and saw Jake standing in the doorway.
‘I sang to her and she fell asleep,’ he told Bea. She looked relieved to know that Alice was down and that she wasn’t going to have to deal with an over-tired and cranky toddler tomorrow. ‘Yup, I started off with ninety-nine green bottles hanging on a wall, she was asleep by the time I got down to the last four bottles. I finished the song though, I don’t like to leave a job half done.’
Jake winked at me, and I felt butterflies in my stomach. Where had those come from? I took a mouthful of wine and hoped it would settle them.
‘What did I miss?’ he asked.
‘Evie was just telling me that she’s going to Dublin next weekend,’ Bea told him.
‘I’ve never been, always wanted to go. There’s a fantastic modern art museum,’ he said, sitting next to me. The sofa was small and dipped under his weight so that I ended up pressed against him. I picked my glass up and swallowed the rest of the wine. ‘It would be useful for me, actually. There’s a piece I wanted to look at, I’ve got something based on it in my portfolio but I’ve only ever seen photographs of it. You don’t mind if I come too, do you?’
How could I say no to that?
Chapter Nine
‘Thanks for letting me come along,’ Jake said, as he put his elbow on my armrest.
‘No problem,’ I told him, though truthfully I still felt slightly thrown that we had arranged for him to come with me. I blamed the wine. Charmaine had been hoping to come too, but at the last minute she’d been called in to work all weekend. Her team was catering a huge event and she was likely to be running herself ragged whipping up gourmet meals for a hundred people. And to top it off, we’d been planning to stay with my gran, and Jake, having little extra cash to spare whilst he was unemployed, seemed to think that this was open to him too. I hadn’t had the heart to say no. So now Jake and I were sat on the plane, eating tasteless sandwiches that we’d bought in the duty free. I tried not to remember how it had felt to be sliding into him on the sofa.
Jake read through his guidebook, pointing at every other page to a place he wanted to visit. He was so excited to see the museum of modern art it was like being next to a kid
‘We’ve only got two days,’ I reminded him.
‘We’ll have to walk quickly, pack a lot in,’ he said, turning the page and showing me another place of interest.
‘I’m not sure you’ve got the hang of Ireland,’ I said, smiling. ‘My plan is to drop our bags off at my gran’s so we get a chance to spend a couple of hours with her, then go into the city to tour the Guinness museum, and if you still feel like walking a lot after that, then you’ve not had enough of their wares.’
Jake laughed, and I found myself smiling at him again. He kept reading the guidebook but he stopped pointing pages out to me. I closed my eyes and sat back, daydreaming about the trip that Charmaine and I had taken nine years before.
I’d been so fed up after kissing George, again, and hearing nothing from him, again, that I’d persuaded my dad to pay for a trip for us both to visit our gran so that we could get away. I’d wanted to know that I was going to have a few days where I ran no chance of bumping into him in the street. Dad was happy that Gran would have some company from our branch of the family and it meant that he could save his trip home to see her at Christmas, so he agreed. We were young enough that the chance to travel on our own felt exciting, even though the flight itself was only a little over an hour and we’d spent half of our holidays there as kids.
We’d spent most of our trip visiting aunties and uncles and being fed and given endless cups of tea. On our last day we’d pleaded for a few hours to sightsee, we’d walked by the river and followed the trail of tourists until we’d ended up at the Guinness museum.
Charmaine had been fascinated by the machinery, the tanks and the mechanisation that had crept into the production. I was grabbed by the history, and the photographs of the people who had made the drink famous. We both agreed that the museum was amazing, made perfect by the bar that sat at the top of the glass-shaped building, with a view that looked out over the old factory.
We’d stopped up there for a couple of drinks, and Charmaine soon caught the eye of a gorgeous bloke who was hitchhiking round the country as he wrote his PhD about Irish folk music. He’d sung to her in the bar, bringing the room to silence and melting her instantly. When he finished she led him to the corner and started snogging him. I’d sat on my own with my drink for half an hour before another young man took pity on me and came over for a chat. I’d made him laugh with stories of scrapes that Charmaine and I had got up to before, and after a couple more pints and an hour of us chatting, sat pressed against each other in the busy bar, I plucked up the courage to lean forward and kiss him.
We both knew it was just a quick holiday flirtation. Neither of us made any mention of swapping mobile numbers or email addresses. There wasn’t really any way that I would re-connect with him just by going back to Dublin, but I felt the call to go to my roots, and hoped that by going back I might find a taste of the courage that had led me to lean forward and make the first move for the first time. It had felt like an intoxicating power, even though I never felt able to wield it as surely as my cousin did.
The flight was bumpy. Jake grinned like a little boy but I had to stop myself holding onto his hand as we landed. My cousin Aiden picked us up from the airport and drove us back to my gran’s house. Aiden’s hair was the same vivid ginger as mine, but he had his hidden by a baseball cap labelled with his favourite football team. He’d spotted Jake’s Arsenal T-shirt under his jacket and spent most of the journey teasing him about their dire season. I sat looking out of the window, feeling that I was both coming home, yet still feeling lost at the same time.
My gran’s two up, two down house was as filled with knick-knacks on every surface, lace doilies and pictures of various saints as it had ever been. I wondered whether she’d expect us to go to mass with her the next morning and hoped she didn’t ask how long it was since I’d last been to confession. I thought her favourite priest would have had a heart attack if he’d read all the details I’d recorded in my notebook.
My gran fussed over us, feeding us tea and her home-made soda bread. She fetched old photo albums and embarrassed me by showing Jake the books from the trip when I’d been three and going through a phase of refusing to wear many clothes. I decided it was lucky that he’d been spending some time with his niece and understood the strong opinions held by small children, otherwise he might worry that I was crazy. Instead he seemed completely at ease, chatting with my cousins and hearing all about my childhood holidays.
It was me who was growing restless, stuck inside my gran’s small house with the net curtains and too many cushions. When she commented on what a lovely couple Jake and I made, I hurriedly corrected her, then announced that we were going out to do some sightseeing. We had two hours left before the Guinness museum closed, so we decided to go straight there.
Jake read every noticeboard and studied every photograph on display, and I grew irritable waiting for him to finish up and come up to the bar. I tried to distract myself by looking at the old photographs that had intrigued me so on my previous visit, but today I could hardly concentrate.
Eventually Jake gave up looking around and announced that I must be truly desperate for a pint to be quite so antsy all the way around the museum. I led him upstairs where we found that with only half an hour left before closi
ng, the bar was packed. There were no seats, and we were pressed up against each other as we ordered our drinks.
Jake carried our glasses and threaded his way through the crowd until he came to a quiet corner, the same one where Charmaine had spent the afternoon snogging her singer last time. He clinked my glass and said, ‘Slainte.’
I took a deep swallow, and felt the black liquid cool and soothe my churning stomach.
‘This is a good pint,’ Jake said, wiping foam from his lips.
‘Well, if they didn’t know how to pour it correctly here they’d be in trouble,’ I pointed out.
Jake took another drink and set his glass down on the ledge next to us. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s really going on now?’ he asked.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I blustered.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’ve been wound tighter than a spring since we got here. I might not know you very well yet, but this doesn’t seem like the woman who had endless patience with an incompetent cook and an energetic child.’
I took a deep drink from my glass and decided to tell him about my plan. Bea had understood, and it might be nice to get a guy’s perspective on where I was going wrong. I made a second trip to the bar though first to give me a little more time. Plus hopefully the alcohol would help give me the courage to open up.
‘So you’ve flown all the way over here because when you were eighteen you kissed a guy at the bar, even though you knew you wouldn’t see him here again?’ Jake said, after I had explained. ‘I thought you were coming to visit your gran?’
‘I have come to visit her too,’ I said, feeling a little self-centred now that I had revealed the main reason for my trip.
‘And how do you feel now that you’re here?’ Jake asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t think I have the same self-assurance I had then. I can’t imagine making the first move and kissing a guy at the moment.’
A lady, who was standing behind Jake, moved her bag, knocking into him and pressing him against me. ‘Why not?’ he asked, tucking a flyaway strand of hair behind my ear. ‘You’re beautiful.’