The Break

by Marian Keyes

  Saturday, 8 October, day twenty-six

  Saturday morning, I’m awake in the darkness, and even though I’d drunk no alcohol last night, my head is pounding. Probably a sugar hangover.

  Sugar isn’t my usual thing. I’m more of a savoury person. I get frenzied around sausage rolls – but, anyway, last night I started in on the Haribo Starmix, then moved on to chocolate and, by close of business, I was tearing the cupboards apart, looking for biscuits.

  And there had been no one there to stop me because Neeve, Sofie and Kiara were out – babysitting Posh Petra’s pair of horrors.

  To my shock, I hear another person breathing – someone’s in bed with me! Who? My hand shoots out and lands on an arm, a slender one, too slender to belong to Hugh – so he hadn’t arrived home in the dead of night and sneaked into bed to surprise me. I know it’s unlikely but, God, that painful dart of dashed hope …

  ‘Oh, my good Christ,’ Neeve intones into the darkness. ‘Those fucking twins.’

  Despite everything, I giggle.

  ‘You might have warned us,’ she says.

  ‘I did warn you.’

  ‘Sofie is traumatized.’

  ‘They didn’t do the –’

  ‘The baked-beans thing on her head? They did.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  I’d thought that Neeve’s toughness and Kiara’s sweetness would be a match for the twins of Satan. I wasn’t sure about exposing Sofie to them, but because she’s here so much, it’s natural to include her in all family activities.

  ‘You should have seen Posh Petra when she got home,’ Neeve says.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Scuttered. So drunk she couldn’t walk and had to be carried into the house between Posh Peter and the taxi-driver. Like a wounded soldier! And, hey, no judgement, if those kids were mine, I’d be doing time for a double homicide. Are you awake now? Okay, I’m going to my own room. I need more sleep.’

  She leaves. I’m not sure what she was doing here in the first place, but we often play musical beds, and I check the time: 4.37 a.m. On a Saturday. I’d get up but what would I do?

  I remember the days when I’d have joyfully gone back to sleep. Oh, how I loved my bed. I used to tumble so gratefully into its welcoming arms, but since Hugh went, it’s the place I miss him the most. Late at night and first thing in the morning are the worst. I guess they’re the times when there aren’t enough other thoughts rushing around to mask the truth. And weekends are the worst mornings of all. All the other days, I’m getting the girls to school or else I’m haring to the airport or across London.

  But on Saturday and Sunday mornings, I’m allowed a lie-in and, right now, time on my hands is just something to kill and I’m finding the social stuff almost impossible. I keep trying, showing up with fake versions of myself, then having to retreat, exhausted, into solitude and online shopping.

  I despise myself for not ‘doing’ more with this unexpected hiatus. But I can only do what I can do and, in my defence, I’m showing up for the important stuff, like work.

  I get my iPad and, once again, I check Hugh’s Facebook page – no posts, no activity, nothing. Everything’s frozen. It’s what I’d asked for, but it’s still incredibly strange, almost as if he’s dead.

  I’d nearly prefer to see a picture of him sitting on a tropical beach, drinking a beer, surrounded by fresh young friends, just to know that he’s okay. Missing him is getting worse, not easier. It’s like torture. For what feels like the millionth time, I get my phone and fantasize about calling him. I stare and stare at his name. I could just touch the screen and listen to the ringing noise, then the click as he picked up, and the thought – oh, the thought! – of hearing his voice, of hearing him say, ‘Amy?’

  The astonishing wonder, the aching longing, of how close he is. Just one press of my finger would make it happen. ‘Come home,’ I’d say, and he’d say, ‘Okay.’ Then everything would be fixed.

  44

  Monday, 10 October, day twenty-eight

  Okay, Monday mornings are never a reason to have a parade but, today, no sooner have I arrived at my desk than an email arrives from Richie Aldin. What now? A quick read establishes the facts. The cheeky bastard! He’s invited me to a charity ball!

  I make an outraged little sound and Alastair looks up. ‘What?’

  ‘Richie Aldin has invited me to a do next month.’

  Alastair looks confused. ‘Who? Oh! The Richie Aldin you were married to when you were eleven? What’s brought this on?’

  I cast a furtive glance over both shoulders. ‘Where’s Tim?’

  Alastair assumes a matching conspiratorial air and mutters, ‘Out.’

  Good. I don’t like talking about personal stuff in front of Tim. ‘Richie wants me and him to be friends. Because of Hugh leaving, he says he realizes how I must have felt when he left me.’

  ‘But Hugh hasn’t left-left.’

  Unless he has. ‘You know, Alastair,’ I exclaim, ‘I think there’s something wrong with Richie. For whatever reason, guilt has finally caught up with him and he doesn’t like it, so he thinks he can magic it away by bulldozing me into friendship. But he can’t just decide that we’re going to be friends, can he?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want it.’

  ‘He’s so used to life going his way that he thinks the force of his will is enough to make anything happen. But I don’t have to oblige, do I? It’s like he’s telling me, “I hurt you and now I feel guilty, so I’m going to make you be friends with me. I know you don’t want to, but my wishes will prevail.” ’

  But now Alastair is wondering why I’d married such a man and, unexpectedly, I say, ‘I was crazy about him. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone the way I loved him. Not even Hugh.’

  ‘First love.’ Alastair is unimpressed.

  I get a sudden flashback to how sexually combustible I was with Richie – aged seventeen and insatiable, I was constantly borderline orgasmic.

  ‘What?’ Alastair asks.

  ‘Before we got married –’

  ‘What age were you?’

  ‘Nineteen. Madness.’

  ‘And your parents let you?’

  ‘Mum was in hospital again and Dad’s eye was off the ball. I took advantage of that. They went bananas when they found out. But before that Richie and I were both living with our parents and the opportunities for sex were limited, so one time I literally pulled him into a cupboard so we could, you know, do it. And another time I made us steal a little boat from Greystones harbour and row it out a few hundred yards just so we could fuck in it.’

  Alastair is eyeing me in a speculative fashion.

  ‘I’ve never had sex with anyone like the sex I had with him.’

  ‘Nobody ends up with their best-sex person. It always happens with the wrong person because there’s an element of hate-sex in it.’

  ‘I didn’t hate him,’ I say. ‘I’ve never been so crazy about anyone.’

  We’d fallen in love during our last year in school, and while everyone else’s future was unknown, we mapped out ours with precision: he would be a First Division footballer and I’d be a dress designer, and we’d be together for ever.

  I was only nineteen when I ran away to Leeds and married him in a registry office, but I didn’t feel young: I felt in the right place, in the right life.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Alastair asks. ‘About his charity ball?’

  ‘Ignore the email.’

  ‘He might take it as a yes.’

  Alastair was right: he might. So I bang out, ‘No, thanks,’ hit the Send key a clatter, and hope my resentment comes across.

  ‘Can you babysit Pop tonight?’

  ‘Mum, I’ve to oversee the girls’ homework, and tomorrow morning I’ve to be up at five to go to London.’

  ‘I’ll be home by eleven.’

  She won’t. The last time it was closer to midnight and then I had a half-hour’s drive home.

  ‘Why can’t Dominik do it?’
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  ‘Dominik –’ her tone is almost bitter – ‘has a regular “gig” – that’s the word he says, like he’s Bruno Mars – on a Monday night, minding some cracked oul’ hag in Ballybrack so her son can go to Zumba. And if you’d believe that, you’d believe anything.’

  ‘Mum, it sounds plausible.’

  ‘A man? Doing Zumba? Oh, please! Anyway, everyone knows Zumba is over.’

  I’m worried about her. The stress is obviously too much. ‘Mum, where do you go to on your nights out?’

  ‘I go out, Amy, that’s where I go when I go out. Out!’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Friends.’

  ‘What friends?’

  After a long pause, she says, choosing her words carefully, ‘On a Thursday morning, me and Pop, we go to a thing with other old people who are gone in the head. We sit in a circle and sing songs from our youth. It’s desperate. The living end, as you’d say. Well, me and some of the other carers, the ones who aren’t gone in the head, we’ve palled up. We go for gin-and-tonics and talk about wanting to kill our person. It’s marvellous, Amy. It gives me life.’

  What can I say? ‘I’ll be over at seven.’

  45

  Friday, 14 October, day thirty-two

  We can talk of nothing else but the latest twist in the divorce of Ruthie Billingham and Matthew Carlisle. She’s a British National Treasure actress while he’s a narky-arse serious journalist who grills lying politicians. (‘The thinking woman’s Jamie Dornan.’)

  Until a couple of months ago they’d lived a shiny, happy life with their two adorable-looking children when, out of a clear blue sky, they announced they were getting divorced. No reason was given but murky rumours circulated that Matthew had been riding rings around himself. A few weeks back Ruthie seemed to confirm the speculation by saying in a radio interview, ‘One day my perfect life just blew up in my face.’

  But on Tuesday this week, Ruthie popped up on the sidebar of shame having a furtive snog with a new man – Ozzie Brown, from Game of Thrones. (If you ask me, he seems like a lightweight compared to her narky-arse husband but maybe lightweight is all she’s able for right now.)

  The grainy photo of the snog prompted outraged opinion pieces, the gist being that it was too soon for Ruthie to be jumping into bed with someone else – people tend to treat her like their little sister. Ruthie made it’s-very-early-days noises, but the mood music remained judgy. Now she’s trying the would-you-begrudge-me-a-chance-at-happiness card and still the snarky stuff continues. (Headlines such as ‘Ruthie, Think of Your Kids’.)

  But today – Friday – thrillingly terrible allegations have surfaced that Matthew has been having an affair with the family nanny, a South African beauty called Sharmaine King, who looks like a younger version of Ruthie. There’s no actual proof – it’s all ‘sources close to Ruthie’ stuff. And, even though both Matthew and Sharmaine muttered panicked denials as they battled their way through the throngs of journalists outside their respective homes, the world is up in arms.

  Apparently Sharmaine has been sacked and both she and Matthew are in (separate) hiding and getting death threats on Twitter.

  Matthew is well able to look after himself but Sharmaine King will be needing some image management down the line, and past experience is telling me that Tim will suggest that Hatch ‘reach out’ to her.

  I very much do not want to ‘reach out’ to her. I want nothing to do with this story. Cheating husbands do not gladden my heart.

  And, on that subject, Richie Aldin emailed me again yesterday, trying to persuade me to go to his wretched ball. What is wrong with him?

  46

  Fifteen months ago

  ‘So where would it happen?’ I asked Derry.

  ‘Druzie’s?’ She sounded doubtful.

  The idea of bringing Josh Rowan to Druzie’s spare room for illicit sex felt all kinds of wrong. ‘No.’

  ‘His house?’

  Marcia’s home? Be in her space? Possibly see her wood-burning stove? ‘No way.’

  ‘Then it has to be a hotel.’

  ‘That feels tacky. Sordid.’

  Derry stayed silent for a moment and let my words settle. Tacky. Sordid. ‘That’s the reality of getting into a thing with someone else’s husband when you’re married yourself.’ Quickly, she added. ‘I’m not being judgy. Just … ’

  My resolution to stay the hell away from Josh Rowan hadn’t lasted. In fact, no later than two days after the awards ceremony I’d clumsily introduced his name into a working breakfast, trying to solicit information.

  Since then, at every meeting with a member of the British press, the conversation was soon steered – sometimes awkwardly enough to induce whiplash – to Josh.

  ‘… so, he’s a good boss, is he?’

  And ‘You’ve met the wife. What’s she like?’

  And ‘Up to? Me? No, nothing. Just, might have a client considering working for him and I like to know who I’m getting into bed with. Not that I’d be getting into bed with him. Only a figure of speech, right?’

  A few suspicions were aroused but I’d gleaned plenty. Marcia, apparently, ‘gave as good as she got’. Which chimed with my online stalking – she seemed ballsy and confident. From admittedly scanty information, I constructed a picture of their marriage: they were one of those couples who clashed a lot, who had shouty disagreements and ping-ponged between conflict and passion.

  More distressing was when, under my clumsy questioning, a female journalist confided that she knew Josh had had a thing with a twenty-eight-year-old from a rival newspaper. It wasn’t just the confirmation that he was a cheater – which had upset me plenty when he’d told me – but how could I compete with a woman in her twenties?

  However, he’d ended it because – and my confidante said, ‘This is a direct quote – “You’re a great girl but you’re too optimistic for me.” ’

  A bark of astonished laughter issued from me. ‘What does that even mean?’

  ‘You’ve met him, Amy. He’s not exactly Mr Sunshine.’

  In fairness, he did look like he was nursing a secret sorrow. But that was just fanciful talk, the sort of thing a woman who was spending too long in her own head, running romantic scenarios, would think. I mean, most of the human race probably look like they’ve stuff on their mind. We can’t all be the Dalai Lama.

  Then Josh invited me to lunch.

  I liked the idea of lunch. It was safe. Un-date-like. Nothing to feel guilty about. And yet it was a chance to show up as the very best version of myself and see if I had any power left – power as a woman. I got to flex that muscle, perhaps for the last time.

  We met in a small, cosy place in Charlotte Street, where Josh asked question after question about me, and I spilt out all kinds of random opinions, like how I disliked the modern world’s insistence that we have dinner a certain way.

  ‘First we have to sit upright at a table and that usually feels like a punishment. Then the food arrives and I’m obliged to stare at the plate for at least eleven seconds. Then my sense of smell gets involved. And when it’s eventually okay to eat, only tiny forkfuls are permitted, which must be chewed super-slowly …’

  He was smiling slightly at this – just the right side of his mouth quirked upwards.

  ‘I like to eat my dinner curled up on the couch, looking at the new arrivals on net-a-porter and shovelling food into me like they’ve just declared a famine. That’s what makes me happy. And yet I’m perpetually dogged by the sense that I’m failing life.’

  ‘Aye.’ He’d managed to speak volumes with one word and his smile had vanished.

  But he thawed again when I told him about the one-day mindfulness course that Alastair had persuaded me to go on. ‘We had to spend half an hour eating a single raisin. Then an hour appreciating a flower. The thing that these live-in-the-moment merchants don’t seem to get is that I can appreciate things speedily. I can see a flower and think, Ooh, that’s pretty. Right, moving on. I don’t have to stop in
my tracks and, like, lick every individual petal.’

  That drew a proper smile from him, a full, symmetrical, white-teeth dazzler, and it felt like winning a prize. ‘What’s your favourite movie?’ he asked.

  I put my head in my hands and groaned. ‘Stop. Don’t. We’re not kids. Next you’ll be making me a mix-tape.’ I peeped through my fingers. He looked hurt.

  ‘I’m just trying to get to know you.’

  Quickly I’d said, ‘I love Wes Anderson’s films.’ Slightly defensively I added, ‘I know they’re more style than substance, but I love their atmosphere.’

  ‘At least you didn’t say something starring Jennifer Aniston.’

  ‘I like Jennifer Aniston too.’

  When he gave me a you’re-joking look, I said, ‘I do.’

  ‘Oh-kay.’

  ‘So what about you? What’s your favourite movie? No! Let me guess.’ I ran through the usual suspects – The Godfather, Raging Bull, Citizen Kane … Suddenly I was utterly certain. ‘The Lives of Others.’

  His face went quite blank. A beat passed, then another. ‘How did you know?’

  It wasn’t that hard. Most of the men I knew would have that on their list. (Mind you, Hugh’s favourite was It’s a Wonderful Life.) ‘Just,’ I said. ‘You know …’

  ‘Wow.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a great movie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Um, I haven’t seen it.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He’s appalled. ‘That’s a crime.’

  ‘Movies are your passion?’

  ‘My passion?’ He lingers on the word while looking me in the eye. ‘One of them. Script-writing, yeah, I’d have loved …’ He changes the subject. ‘What about art? Your favourite artist?’

  ‘Everyone probably says Picasso or Van Gogh, and I do like them …’ I hesitate before saying any more.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t go to third-level education. I’m a bit touchy about it – people act as if you were brought up by feral dogs – and I’m worried you’ll judge me.’

  ‘I didn’t judge you for the Aniston thing.’

  ‘Ah, you did, a bit.’ I smile at him. ‘But you definitely won’t have heard of my favourite artist. A Serbian woman called Dušanka Petrović.’