The Man I Loved Before: A completely gripping and heart-wrenching page turner

by Anna Mansell

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘But hopefully I can help a little, too. You know, I don’t know exactly what he’s going through but I get some of it, don’t I?’

  ‘’Course.’

  ‘And we talk. It’s easy. We have a laugh, which is good. I need that and I’m certain he does too.’

  ‘That’s nice then.’

  ‘Yeah. And hey, guess what I did today?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I messaged Kate.’

  ‘Kate, Kate?’

  ‘Yeah. Mitch persuaded me it would be a good idea. All part of the new me.’

  ‘I like the old you. So should he.’

  ‘He does. I think. And the new me is very similar to old me, she just feels less guilt.’

  ‘Is this about Ben again? It better not be about Mitch, he’s got no place to be laying any guilt on you!’

  ‘No! He’s not. It’s all me, just getting my shit together. And with Kate, I just want to own the fact I let her down.’

  Leanne and Kate never really got on. Leanne always thought she was snooty. A bit above herself. I think I used her judgement to justify my behaviour.

  ‘I know you feel you let her down, perhaps you’d have been able to talk to her if things had been different. Kate isn’t perfect either, remember.’

  ‘I know. None of us are. But I would like to see her.’

  ‘Fair enough. What’s that, Harley? You’ve dropped a sock down the toilet? Jesus.’ She mutters the last bit under her breath. ‘Look, I’d better go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Love you.’

  ‘Love you, bye.’

  I reach for my book, smoothing the page out where I’d got to. It’s warm out, the beer garden is busy, despite it being a Tuesday. It means the lounge is quiet and a bit fusty. Which I quite like. It feels secure. I read, sipping at my wine, feeling almost content.

  ‘Now then, Jem. How are you?’ I look up to see Mark, the landlord. ‘Bet your head was banging this morning, wasn’t it?’ He laughs and his paunch lurches up and down, the buttons on his shirt straining on a par with the shame I feel but don’t quite understand. I’m about to ask what he means when he diverts his attention to a punter. ‘Yes, mate,’ he says, grabbing a pint pot and chatting as he pours before disappearing out the back.

  I knock the last of my glass back, saving the page in my book until I get home later. Getting up to leave, I scan around where I was sat to make sure I’ve not left anything behind, walking into someone as I leave. ‘Oh, sorry!’

  And there she is. Stood in front of me for the first time in a year. Kate Pinkerton.

  25

  ‘Oh wow! Kate!’

  She stares at me, lips pursed, dimples hidden.

  ‘How funny, seeing you today of all days. Well, ’cos I messaged you earlier on. Don’t know if you saw it or not? It was on Facebook, I know sometimes life happens and we miss messages on there. I just don’t have your mobile number any more.’ I colour because I only don’t have it from deleting it in a fit of spitting my dummy out. ‘I lost loads of numbers. A few months back. You know how it can be…’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She moves past me to let one of her friends get through the door. ‘Lime and soda please, Sue.’

  ‘Wow, it’s so nice to see you. You look amazing.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I look down at my book, noticing she too carries a book. ‘I was just having a read, with a drink. Bit of peace and quiet, you know?’

  ‘Right. Sure.’ I look at her book again, hoping we might find some common ground. ‘I’m out with my book club.’

  ‘Oh! I’d love to join a book club.’ She nods at me tightly. I wait, hopefully, for an invite to join them. I’m nothing if not optimistic. ‘What are you reading?’ I try, eventually.

  ‘Hollywood Wives.’

  ‘Oooh, Jackie Collins? I used to love a bit of Jackie Collins.’

  ‘We always read Jackie Collins.’

  ‘Oh, that sounds amazing. Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper, my teenage favourites. Do you remember that time I asked for Polo for my birthday and Dean Summers bought me a piece of paper with a Polo sellotaped on, with a note beneath it, Jilly Cooper’s Polo.’ The memory makes me laugh almost as much as it did the day I opened it. ‘Gosh, Dean Summers. What a crush I had on him. Haven’t seen him for years.’

  ‘No.’

  She’s still staring. She’s rigid. I’m flailing. ‘Right.’

  ‘You said you messaged me,’ she said, with a sigh.

  ‘Right, yes, I did. The thing is, you see, well, it seems an odd thing to say now that we’re stood here like this, but I was kind of hoping we could have a drink, a coffee, a catch-up.’ She frowns at me as if I’ve just made the most ridiculous suggestion. ‘I know, it’s been ages. And I guess… oh, sorry, excuse me.’ I move out of the way for someone else coming through the door, the woman smiles at Kate who points to where her Jackie Collins mates are sat. ‘It’s a big group,’ I say, smiling over at them.

  ‘Yeah. It is.’

  ‘I guess – what’s not to love about talking all things Lucky Santangelo whilst drinking wine with your mates?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Well.’ I gaze around the pub, now under no illusion about her mood. ‘I wouldn’t want to keep you from the group, you know…’

  She lets out a spiteful laugh, one of those that suggests I’m not about to leave unscathed. ‘What? Is that it?’ I go to say something but realise I’ve opened my mouth without any idea of what words might come out of it. Kate on the other hand… ‘We don’t see each other for a year. The last time we spoke was to arrange the final fitting for your bridesmaid’s dress.’ I wish the ground would open up. ‘A fitting that you didn’t turn up to.’ It wasn’t really supposed to go like this. ‘But I suppose that didn’t matter seeing as you had no intention of turning up for the wedding either, did you?’

  This was a bad idea. I mean, I probably definitely deserve every word, every ounce of her anger and upset; her eyes glisten and that makes me feel even worse yet. All I want to do is run away. Fast. And not look back. And possibly never read Jackie Collins again. In fact, that coffee seems like a really stupid, terrible idea. Why did Mitch encourage me? Why did I go along with it?

  ‘Were you ever going to let me know?’ she asks, her voice small.

  I could have avoided this if I’d just stayed at home.

  ‘I can only assume not, since I heard nothing. I just had to guess the fact, given that you stopped taking my calls. And my texts. And even when I rocked up at your place because I was genuinely worried that something awful had happened, that you’d done something awful…’

  I remember her coming round. I remember how I felt that day. I remember the guilt.

  ‘… you couldn’t even be bothered to answer the door. I saw you, Jem. I saw you shift out of view when I came to the window. Which is essentially the only proof I had that you weren’t hanging somewhere, or bleeding out of your gut surrounded by packets of paracetamol.’ Ouch. ‘Seeing your panda socks sneak out of view is the only reason I knew you weren’t lying at the foot of a bridge on the A61 somewhere up near Gunstones.’ She stares at me. The glassy eyes and sadness has been replaced the more she talks. A sort of cold anger has taken over as if she’s remembered exactly what I put her through, and exactly how she felt. If hatred had a look, I’d say it was this one, now, the look in Kate’s green eyes as she burns a hole in my resolve. ‘Hey, girls,’ she shouts across the pub, taking me by the hand and dragging me across to them. As if things weren’t already really, really, awful. ‘Do you remember I told you all about the bridesmaid who ghosted me just before the wedding?’ They each nod, staring at me with a mix of looks that range from confused to accusatory. ‘Well, this is her. This is Jem Whitfield.’ She holds my arms up like I’m a winner. I feel nothing like a winner. ‘We were really close. Had been for years. She was going to be my chief bridesmaid. The one person I could rely on, on my big day.�
�� She lets go of my arms and it’s a split second before I realise, leaving me standing, arms aloft, midriff exposed, no Jackie Collins book in hand. ‘The same woman who decided she didn’t have enough about her to tell me she no longer wanted to be there for me.’ Her anger splits and, for a second, I’m fairly sure she wants to cry again. ‘On my big day,’ she says to me.

  My throat goes sore as I try my very hardest not to cry. And not just because everyone in the pub has surely seen my flabby belly.

  ‘I got your message earlier today, Jem. And thanks, but no thanks. I have no interest in meeting you for coffee. I have no interest in hearing whatever lame excuses you’ve come up with to justify your behaviour. You let me down in the biggest, most unforgivable way possible and there is nothing you can say or do to make that better. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ She sits down amongst her friends, sitting upright as the one to her left reaches out and squeezes her arm whilst scowling in my direction. I hug my book into me, working up the muster to turn and leave even though somehow my legs have stopped working. ‘You’re a leech, Jem Whitfield. You suck up peoples love for you, you suck up all their good faith, you take every last bit of patience and you spit it out without a care for how it makes them feel. I was done with you then and I am done with you now.’

  She runs out of steam for that final sentence, leaving her to take a sharp breath in before biting her bottom lip. I can see how hurt she is and can only imagine it’s as hurt as I feel now. I stand and stare, somehow unable to move away, until somebody else arrives at the table, and I’m forced to move to let them sit down. So I turn, aware that of the few people now in the bar, all are trying not to stare at me, but totally watching my every move. I do my best to hold my head high and leave with any shred of dignity I may have left. And I walk like that until I get into the churchyard over the way and, pulling my T-shirt down, casting my book to one side, I collapse onto a bench in frustrated tears.

  26

  Oh God, oh no, oh God. I’m sat on a bench in the bit where they keep people’s ashes after a ceremony in the church and a trip up to Hutcliffe Wood Crematorium. Somewhere amongst the markers and flowers, Kate’s grandad’s ashes presumably lie, maybe with some carnations left by her mum, because I seem to remember her saying they were his favourite flower when I stood here with Kate, on the day of his funeral. She held my hand, sobbing, unable to breathe and I just waited until she was ready to say how she felt. Then I gave her a Trio, like the ones we used to nick from his biscuit tin on our way home from school, and she cry-laughed then ate it. I don’t suppose a Trio would help now. Even if I could track one down. It’s a crime they ever stopped making them. Especially when you can still buy a Blue Riband.

  Was her anger justified? I mean, I know I’m an idiot. I know I messed up. But did I deserve a slating like that, in front of everyone? Even if I did deserve that, nobody deserves to have their muffin top exposed for all to see.

  I’d like to ring Leanne but one mention of what Kate just said and I’m pretty sure she’d jump in her car and come kick her head in. Which would be embarrassing for all of us because she’s a lover not a fighter. And I’d like to ring Mum but she’s knackered and stopped fighting my fights in the playground when I was seven owing to an unfortunate incident with a boy called Neil. And I can’t ring Mitch because I only spoke to him earlier on and I don’t exactly know what’s going on with us yet, but I’m fairly certain that at my age I should be able to handle myself with a little more dignity than was just displayed.

  It’s at times like this, I’m reminded how nice it is to be at home. There’s something about my childhood box room that feels comforting. That I can’t quite stretch out in my single bed is unimportant. That I can’t fit all my clothes in the sliding-door wardrobe Dad built when it was my nursery. After they’d wallpapered the room, ceiling and all, in flowery paper just because it was called ‘Jem’. Wallpaper I painted over with Denim Blue when I was thirteen and thought I knew better. Turns out I didn’t. And Denim Blue paint takes about fourteen layers of Dulux Wheat Dream before it stops showing through.

  Still. Wheat Dream walls and sliding cupboard doors. It’s mine. It’s always been mine. And nothing and nobody can deny me that.

  Unsteadily, I get up, winding my way through the path, down the steps and out the other side of the churchyard so that I don’t have to walk past the pub again. In fact, I may never go there again. Which makes going to Dronfield pubs tricky, since I was kicked out of the Sidings for cheating in the pub quiz and an ex-boyfriend still works in the White Swan. I make my way home, past my old infant school, where I was best mates with a girl called Philippa until she moved away and for some unfathomable reason, not long after Dad had gone, I told everyone she’d died. Now she’d have a valid reason to shame me in front of a full pub.

  I walk along Scarsdale, past Kate’s grandad’s old house. I nip up Wilson Street remembering Rachel. My best mate – after Philippa – in the Juniors. She had a dog called Dina and her mum used to send us to the corner shop for milk and cigarettes. I dropped Rachel when I got to senior school and found new friends that I thought were much more interesting and exciting than her. Kate was one of them. I walk up a little side street, thus avoiding the house on Hallowes Lane that a friend of a friend had a house party in. I drank her parents’ home brew before vomiting all over the daffodils, because I was fifteen and could no more handle home brew than the Mad Dog 20:20 my mates were drinking. I pass the house I used to babysit at and steal the kids Easter eggs. I pass the back road I used to kiss somebody else’s boyfriend in. I pass the shops where Vic lives and the post box that never had that bloody letter in it anyway. By the time I get home, I have relived so much of my youth I can barely breathe for self-loathing and reach for a bottle of sloe gin that Mum put to the back of the cupboard when she realised neither of us really liked it. Everything hurts. My heart hurts. And I don’t know how to stop this. I don’t know how to make things right. I don’t know why I made all those awful choices. Mum always blamed Dad. She said that his rejection started it. I was about eleven. No age is good for a parent walking out but eleven was particularly crap. Hormones were kicking in and everything felt confused and frightening. Not helped by the fact that after he’d gone, somehow he worked it so that his parents wanted nothing to do with us either. Mum always said it was her they cut out, that they’d always disliked her, but whatever their reason, it hurt me as much as Dad leaving, if not more. It vindicated him. Mum always tried to make up for it. She worked so hard to be Mum, Dad, grandparents, her own parents long dead. She tried to fill the gap I felt each birthday. Each Christmas, when friends would reel off the list of gifts they’d been given from every member of their family, from siblings, to grandparents, to aunty and uncles twice removed. Each weekend when she was working, she’d pay for me to do exciting things: workshops and day trips, anything to fill the void. But I don’t think it helped. I didn’t want any of those things, I realised years later. I just wanted to feel loved. And when you feel unloved, you do more to get attention, and the more attention you seek, the more unlovable you become. A self-fulfilling prophecy dictates your past, present and future. Somehow, Mum’s love alone, was not enough.

  Yet now, I don’t think I could live without it.

  27

  When I wake the next morning, an empty bottle of sloe gin is the first thing I see. I can’t quite focus, the time on my phone fuzzes in and out of view. I think it is 9.45 a.m? Thank God I don’t have a proper job that requires actual timekeeping. There’s a knock at the door. I wait, listening out for Mum’s footsteps. The doorbell goes again and there’s still nothing from Mum. The radio isn’t on. She always has the radio on, wherever she is in the house. Peak FM is permanently singing out a combination of Pink, John Parr and one of several songs by runners-up on the X Factor, Mum usually singing along, badly. Not least because she knows none of the words for anything except the John Parr one. She met him once. Got his autograph on a serviette in the Hobby Horse pub up
near Meadowhall. Apparently their mac and cheese is to die for.

  Mmm. Mac and cheese.

  The doorbell goes again, but by the time I’ve overcome the swell of morning after the night before, the postman has gone. There’s a load of letters on the mat, a ‘Sorry you were out’ card on the top. I scoop them up, sorting them into a pile on the phone table before a rise of bile swells up in my chest at the sight of a blue Moomin envelope. Returned to sender. Unopened. And I can’t tell what’s worse – that he sent it back, meaning I needn’t have gone all that way to Cornwall after all, or that he thought so little of me, he couldn’t even be bothered to read it. We met. We talked. Was that still not enough? Except it’s not my right to judge or be hurt, not really. I didn’t write it for his forgiveness, I wrote it for my own. That I’m not there yet, that’s not his fault, is it?

  Sun streams through the window, highlighting an old school photo. I see fifteen-year-old me, newly permed hair because I wanted to look like Gloria Estefan except that I never looked like Gloria Estefan. I suppose it could have been worse, I also liked Sinead O’Connor. I see Kate with long bob and straight fringe, the girl I used to hang with when we were teenagers. So much of life has happened and I can’t imagine fifteen-year-old us having any clue how things would pan out. It seems such a long time ago. She seems such a long time ago, even though we only fell out a year ago.

  Mitch texts me with the name of a song he was trying to remember when we were talking yesterday and to see his name on my phone makes me smile for the first time since I left the pub last night. So I text him back.

  What you up to? Do you fancy a walk?

  * * *

  ‘So what? She just laid into you?’ asks Mitch, throwing a stick for Pip, his mum’s dog as we wander through Kitchen Wood. ‘In the middle of the pub?’