The Break

by Marian Keyes

  Steevie’s Lee left her for his assistant. Four days before Jana was due to get married, her fella called it off. Tasha Ingersoll ‘stole’ Neil O’Hegarty from Siobhan O’Hegarty, then Neil escaped and went back to Siobhan. Mo Edgeworth’s boyfriend was married and she didn’t know. Then there’s me …

  I should have checked who’d be here. I thought I’d done well by insisting to Steevie that Genevieve Payne couldn’t come. But in the relief of that victory my eye was off the ball and it’s too late now. Everyone greets me with the ‘Full Heart Stare’ where they take my hands, gaze into my eyes and flex a compassion muscle. It’s the look I give people when they’ve had a bereavement or a cancer diagnosis, and it’s only now that I see how humiliating it is to be on the receiving end. I’ll be more careful in future.

  ‘The moussaka is ready.’ Steevie sounds wounded and snippy.

  We sit at the table and I swig my wine, aware that there’s a danger of overdoing it.

  ‘So!’ Tasha says. ‘How have you been coping?’

  ‘Honestly, I’m fine.’

  My answer is received in rancorous silence.

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Busy, you know, work is all go. Took on a new client on Tuesday. Guess who he is. Hint, he’s a bit fabulous!’

  ‘Hugh Jackman?’

  ‘Not that fabulous. Works for the BBC.’

  ‘Bruce Forsyth.’

  ‘Ah, come on.’

  ‘Who is it, Amy?’

  ‘Matthew Carlisle.’

  ‘The nanny-shagger!’

  ‘He’s not –’

  Then Tasha says, ‘I think he looks like Tom Ford,’ like it’s a bad thing!

  ‘Anything else?’ Mo prompts.

  ‘Spending quality time with my girls. Sofie has moved back in, which I’m delighted about!’

  But tales of my daughters don’t cut the mustard in this particular milieu. At the very least I should confide that I’ve just joined Whiskr, or whatever the name of the site is, that matches beard-loving ladies with beardy men. In the ensuing silence I eat too much moussaka to offer a blatantly dishonest display of gratitude for this grim get-together.

  ‘So? Any men?’ Steevie asks Tasha, and I want to stand up and leave. Only the promise of the fancy cheese restrains me.

  Tasha launches into a grisly tale of some dreadful man who had a ninety-degree bend in his penis and that was the least bad thing about him. I’m drinking steadily but heavily. Tasha ends her epic with snarky side-eyes and, ‘All ahead of you, Amy.’

  It’s not all ahead of me. I say, ‘We’re failing the Bechdel Test in spectacular fashion.’

  Steevie glares, actually glares, then jerkily clears away the plates, and I realize I’ve eaten about seven times as much as anyone else. And here comes the pavlova. Just this course to get through, then the cheese, and then I can go.

  I’m never coming to another of these gatherings. I can’t. Then Steevie will take umbrage. So I’m looking an unpleasant choice straight in the face: either I please Steevie or I protect myself – and in the process damage an important friendship. I don’t want this to happen. But that’s personal growth for you. The circumstances that beget it are always unpleasant and so is the actual process. Some day down the road I might feel smug and wise but it’ll be a while coming.

  I accept a plate of chocolate pavlova and horse in, barely tasting it.

  ‘Wooh! Watch that girl eat her feelings!’ Tasha says.

  I’m appalled by her bitchiness but my riposte is a great phrase that Neeve taught me: ‘Ouch. Rush me to the burns unit.’

  ‘Wait till you see her when the cheese arrives,’ Steevie says – oh, no! We’ve just jumped from pass-agg snarkiness to open mean-girlery.

  For a second I contemplate throwing my napkin on the table and leaving, but I’m too scared. Instead I tip half a glass of wine down my gullet.

  ‘So, hey, Amy, while Hugh is away, have you a bucket list?’ Jana is trying desperately to resuscitate things.

  ‘Aaaaah, travel?’ I blag. ‘Macchu Pichu?’

  ‘Do the three-day trek?’ Jana asks.

  ‘Isn’t there a train? Not hiking for three days, don’t wanna see it that much.’ You know, I’m a bit pissed.

  ‘Dolphins?’ Jana again. ‘Swimming with them?’

  ‘I worry about the whole dolphin thing. They’ve been tolerant of us until now, but I sense they might turn.’ I really am quite pissed. ‘The only thing I really love is clothes.’ I’m slurring – ‘clothes’ is one long slide of a word. ‘If I could, I’d spend my days scouting second-hand shops.’ God, waaaay too many Ss in that sentence. ‘Tracking down beautiful vintage pieces. I’d have my own shop.’ I’m making a big effort to enunciate clearly.

  ‘You should do that, Amy.’ Jana is encouraging. Tasha is actually checking her phone.

  ‘Ah, no!’ I wave away Jana’s enthusiasm. ‘No illusions. Isn’t a career. You might look at two hundred dresses, all of them just cheap old rags. Cheap. Old. Rags.’ I focus on Tasha as I say those words and a desire to laugh bubbles up in me. ‘People would get cross because a dress costs a fiver, when the dry-cleaning cost me a tenner. And I could sit there for three days and no one would buy anything and I couldn’t pay the shop rent. Then I’d be evicted.’

  On this cheery note, Tasha stands. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘So do I,’ I say.

  ‘You haven’t had your cheese,’ Steevie says.

  I look her in the eye. ‘I don’t want any.’ It’s bad. Bad, bad, bad. Hard to know how this happened but we’re at war. It’s terrible and I’m afraid.

  ‘One thing you should know,’ Tasha cuts across us. ‘When Genevieve brought that casserole over to you, she was only being nice.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Please don’t swear at me.’ Tasha has gone super-prim.

  ‘My apologies.’ Sarcasm. Blistering. ‘Most abject. Genevieve was just being a disaster-tourist.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’ Steevie asks coldly – the same Steevie who knows exactly what Genevieve is like.

  ‘You think Genevieve fancies Hugh.’ Tasha is scathing.

  I’m saying nothing.

  I could tell the story of when Hugh got his new car, a second-hand Volkswagen, and Genevieve cooed, ‘Cool wheels,’ then asked if he’d take her for a drive in it, like it was a Porsche.

  I could.

  But I don’t.

  ‘She does fancy him,’ Mo interjects. ‘Genevieve told me.’

  So Mo is friends with Genevieve as well? They’re all her friends! I’m in a snake-pit of Genevieve Payne lovers!

  ‘Well …’ Poor Jana is flailing around, trying to reconfigure this into something blameless. ‘Well, maybe she does fancy him because, yeah, Hugh is pretty hot!’

  55

  I can’t drive home, I’ve had far too much to drink, so I set off on foot in my too-high shoes. When I’m safely away from my Bechdel-Test-failing lunch companions, tears start streaming down my face.

  I handled that really badly. I’m ashamed but I’m also resentful. I’m defensive but I’m also sad. Steevie and I have been friends for a long time and suddenly it’s gone to shit. Is everything going to fall apart? Is Hugh’s leaving the start of a major life unravelling?

  I hate confrontation, I hate ill-feeling, and I’m shaky and nauseous.

  I hobble on in my wrong shoes and, passing Marley Park, I decide to give my poor feet a break, maybe even sober up.

  There’s a bench near a huge big tree – it might be an oak – and I sit down for a few minutes. Before my eyes, a leaf detaches from its branch and eddies to the ground. Game over for that one. And here’s another, already dark and crisping. And another. And another. All of them dying, like it’s raining leaves, raining death, and I miss Hugh, I miss him so much. I’d give all that I own just to go home and find him there, just knocking about the house, reading the paper, listening to music.

  Hugh would provide an antidote to the snarly me
ss with Steevie. He’d pull me on to his lap and hug me, offering the warmth of his body to counteract the coldness in my gut. He’d let me rant, and he might even offer a calm counter-argument. But he’s not here.

  And it’s a lot longer than six weeks that he’s been unavailable to me. It’s suddenly obvious that when he got the news his dad was dying, in August of last year, he checked out.

  I’d found him in our bedroom, sitting stiffly on the bed, and the look on his face – strange and cold – made me think, He’s found out about Josh. Even though it was over a month since I’d ended things with him, my guilt was never far from the surface.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Dad. He’s sick.’ Hugh’s expression wasn’t coldness, but shock, terrible shock – my guilt was distorting reality.

  ‘What kind of sick?’

  Cancer. I knew before he even said it.

  ‘His lungs. It’s bad, Amy.’

  ‘But chemo –’

  ‘No. He’s … dying. He’s going to die.’

  This wasn’t a time for platitudes. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Three months.’

  ‘It could be longer – doctors often get it wrong.’

  ‘In three months my dad will be dead.’ Hugh frowned and muttered, ‘Twelve weeks’ time. That’s weird.’

  When his mum, Sandie, had died eight years earlier, it had been a bitter, bitter thing. She’d been sixty-two, which was shockingly young, and she’d been such a wonderful person – warm, sensible, solid. She’d really been the heart of their home.

  But within a year or so, the Durrants had rearranged themselves around her appalling absence, forming themselves into a new unit, possibly even tighter than before, always acknowledging their loss, but a family once again.

  It might be odd to say but Hugh grieved his mum perfectly: he cried often; he had outbursts of inexplicable rage, which, aghast, he immediately apologized for; he looked at old photos and related fond memories of her. We grieved together, because I’d loved her too. In fact, the death of Sandie seemed to affect me more than it affected him. It felt like a small earthquake at my core, as if tectonic plates were shifting and collapsing, stopping me sleeping, propelling me to overeat and plunging me into a spell where everything seemed meaningless. It passed, but the aftershocks continued for a couple of years, and every now and then I’d have three sleepless nights in a row.

  However, a powerful instinct was warning me that it would be different for Hugh this time. Maybe because this was his sole surviving parent. Whatever the reason, this time would be darker, uglier, scarier. And I needed to be there for Hugh. Fully present. Not frying rashers in my bra, daydreaming about Josh Rowan. That I’d ended things with him felt like a clean relief. ‘We have to make those three months wonderful,’ I said.

  But there was no opportunity to fill Robert’s final days with pleasure, no chance to tick off a few items on his modest bucket list. Right from the start he was grotesquely sick. He survived for two months and his suffering was shocking. Every morning I sent out a silent invocation to the universe: Please let him die today. Witnessing another person in excruciating pain, standing helplessly at their bedside, hearing them plead for morphine, was gruelling and surreal.

  Hugh’s brother Carl articulated what we were all thinking: ‘Can’t they do something? To … end this? Take him to that place in Switzerland? What do you think, Hugh?’

  Stiffly, Hugh shook his head.

  ‘No,’ Carl admitted tearfully. ‘I only said it out of …’

  ‘Desperation,’ I supplied.

  ‘Yeah.’ He gave me a grateful look but Hugh was no longer engaged. He’d closed up tight. He barely spoke to his brothers – and, to my surprise, he rebuffed my attempts to persuade him to talk. ‘Don’t, Amy. Let’s just get through this.’

  Finally, on a squally day in October, Robert was allowed to leave his body and my relief was so great that it took me a while to realize that he was dead. Then I cried and cried, because he’d been so nice, with his toolbox and his bad puns.

  Just as Robert’s death had released Robert, I thought it would release Hugh too: he’d shut down to endure his dad’s suffering and now we’d move into a new phase of grief, a healthier, more cathartic one. But he remained shrink-wrapped and unreachable in unuttered thoughts and feelings, far, far away from me.

  Sometimes it seemed there might be an opening – like the evening he announced, in the middle of Game of Thrones, ‘He was seventy-three. No age.’

  ‘It’s far too young.’ I grabbed the remote, all set for a heart-to-heart, but Hugh stood up and left the room.

  Then there was the night in bed when he voiced, into the darkness, ‘I’m next.’

  ‘For what?’ But I knew. His silent preoccupation with death was saturating everything.

  ‘Sweetie …’ I tried wrapping my body around his, but he lay tense and unresponsive.

  I switched on the light and he switched it off again immediately. ‘Night, Amy.’

  ‘Hugh …’ But he’d turned his back on me.

  The time since Robert had got his diagnosis has been … lonely, I suppose is the word. But I hadn’t fully faced it because Hugh and I still had the infrastructure of a shared life. He was still here in body and we had our routine and were civil to each other.

  And all relationships go through good spells and bad spells – I get that, I really do. Not just marriages, but me and Derry, me and Alastair, me and everyone. There are times when your heart is bursting with love for them and there are spells when you tense up at the sound of them entering the room. That Hugh and I were going through a disconnected patch had been flickering in my subconscious. It had happened a couple of times in the past: when Hugh turned forty, he disappeared deep inside himself for a couple of months. Five years ago, when I was made redundant, there was a bleak three-month period when I felt detached from everyone, even Hugh. Eventually, though, we’d always bonded again. But this time we didn’t.

  56

  Tuesday, 25 October, day forty-three

  The key to getting people to do something they don’t want to do, is first to offer them options that are far, far worse.

  ‘So!’ My smile is bright, as I look at dreamy Matthew Carlisle, then at his considerably less dreamy brother. ‘I’ve had calls from the producers of I’m a Celebrity and Celebrity Big Brother.’

  I have had calls from them. Not in relation to Matthew. And not recently. But technically I’m not lying …

  It’s Tuesday morning and I’m in Dan Carlisle’s kitchen.

  ‘I’m a Celebrity?’ His voice is sharp and he actually stands up to show his displeasure. ‘Making him eat emu toes? This is your masterplan?’

  I radiate control and seek the special voice that makes people do what I want. ‘Not for a second. It’s simply to illustrate that there’s a lot of interest in Matthew.’

  Matthew barely reacts. He’s staring at his big, sexy hands, which are resting on his brother’s kitchen table; his handsome face is pale and sad.

  The nerve of those bitches on Sunday not being impressed that he’s my client. Oh, shite, I shouldn’t have remembered that lunch – the memory makes my stomach lurch. On Monday morning, I’d had to sneak over to Steevie’s before work, to retrieve my abandoned car. Steevie’s Mini was still in her drive: there was a good chance she’d open her front door, come marching out in her suit, and spot me. Crouching low, I scurried furtively car-wards but part of me was hoping to see her. Face to face, we’d stand a better chance of getting past whatever weird shit had gone down. We’d probably hug and both apologize and laugh a little and cry a little and then we’d be grand. We’ve had scraps in the past, of course – we’ve been friends a long time – but this felt more rancorous than any of our other bust-ups.

  I drag myself back to the present, where Dan Carlisle is giving me the full sarcasm. ‘Let me guess,’ he says. ‘You’ve signed him up for Strictly Come Dancing?’

  Frankly, that would be bloody fantastic.
Something tells me that Matthew can’t dance but would try very hard to learn – the combination of leading man looks, clodhopper feet and earnest, furrowed diligence would get him as far as Hallowe’en, maybe even to Blackpool. I could see Bruno in convulsions at Matthew’s salsa, saying, ‘My darling, you are truly terrible, but you gave it your all!’ Then collapsing into more paroxysms and awarding him a six out of pity.

  He’d be the darling of the nation by the end of week two.

  ‘It’s nearly the end of October,’ I say to Dan. ‘Way too late for Strictly. Now, please sit down.’

  Dan Carlisle’s kitchen, a super-sleek white lacquer and steel affair, is my worst nightmare. It’s cold and hard and repellent. Just like Dan himself, in fact.

  Gently I say to Matthew, ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. It’s not my plan to dumb you down.’

  He looks at me gratefully.

  ‘You enjoy cooking,’ I say. ‘In your comfort zone? How about Celebrity Masterchef?’

  He nods. ‘That might be all right.’

  ‘Great.’ I smile broadly. ‘So you’d be okay if I contacted the producer?’ No need to tell him I’ve already been on to her.

  ‘I’d better start practising.’ Matthew is suddenly energized.

  ‘No need, you don’t want to be too good – people don’t like that. Being okay, then improving, that plays a lot better.’

  ‘This is all so cynical,’ Matthew says, once again mournful.

  ‘Coming from the man who spends his time with politicians.’ I smile.

  ‘Yeah.’ He grins back with unexpected cheer. ‘This is far worse.’

  ‘What else have you got?’ Dan interjects.

  Addressing Matthew, I say, ‘You love dogs.’

  ‘But Ruthie’s allergic.’

  I fight the urge to sigh. ‘A dog might be a comfort to you now.’ I’ve already made contact with a production company to gauge their interest in making a half-hour documentary about Matthew Carlisle and his new puppy.