No, We Can't Be Friends: A totally perfect romantic comedy

by Sophie Ranald

  Bianca: And she’s my friend. That makes this even worse.

  I felt a churning surge of nausea reading their words: an overwhelming sense of loss and misery and – absurdly – shame. This had been going on behind my back – never mind that, practically under my nose – for how long, without me having a clue? It had taken Bianca’s own heavy-handed hints to shake me out of my oblivious, false security. I thought Myles loved me. He said he did. Okay, we had our ups and downs – recently, rather more downs than I’d have liked – but I’d never stopped believing in his love.

  And there it was: that cold statement of fact. I never loved her.

  Who, besides my husband and… that bitch, who I’d thought was my friend, knew about this? Did Michael know? Did Myles’s football mates know, and promise to cover for him when he sneaked off to see her? Imagining that, imagining the pity and contempt they’d feel for me, imagining them saying, ‘Poor Sloane. The wife’s always the last to find out,’ felt like a dagger sliding under my ribs and straight into my heart. There was a huge, choking lump in my throat and my eyes stung with tears, but I didn’t let them fall. I’d never been much of a crier – I thought I was too tough for that, tough enough to deal with whatever life threw at me, pick myself up, dust myself off and carry on, stronger and wiser. But I felt like I could never recover from reading those words. I felt like the entire foundation of my life had been torn away. I felt hollow, bereft, the pain so intense it was almost like numbness – almost too huge to comprehend.

  It was like the pain I’d felt all those years ago, when Dad had sat me down next to him at the kitchen table in the house in Sparwood and explained gently to me that the police had done what they could, but they hadn’t traced Mom. That she was an adult, and if there was no sign that anything bad had happened to her, we would have to accept that she’d made a choice to leave – to disappear. And we’d have to accept that she might never come back.

  Then, I’d still been a little girl, without much concept of what ‘never’ really meant. Mom was gone – that itself was too big, too devastating, for me to grasp properly. But now its meaning was all too clear.

  I looked down at the screen again, but it had turned itself off and I had to enter the password again to torture myself with those words once more. I never loved her.

  Which must mean he loved Bianca.

  It wasn’t just a flirtation, a passing crush, even a reckless drunken snog after too many tequilas. I could have dealt with those things (not that the last would happen, not with Bianca, who was virtually teetotal). It was serious. So serious that they were having in-depth discussions about how to tell me.

  I looked down at the phone again. My hands had started to shake violently. And I was sweating, too, I realised – I could literally smell the panic coming off my own body.

  I transferred the phone to my left hand to wipe my right one on my skirt, but it slipped right through my clumsy fingers and fell to the wooden floor with a hollow crash. My head was full of a sound that wasn’t there – a kind of roaring, like waves on a beach. I wondered if I was going to have a stroke or something, and drop dead right there.

  I almost wished I would.

  And then Myles walked in, naked except for a white towel around his hips. He smelled wonderful – of the Tom Ford cologne I’d bought him for Christmas.

  He must have finished his bath, had his shave, filed his nails – done all of that stuff, while I was sitting there, reading those messages, feeling our marriage come crashing down around me.

  ‘Hey, darling, that feels better. Bathroom’s all yours if you want it. We could go out later, maybe, try that new Peruvian place that’s opened up the road.’ He stopped and looked down at the floor by my feet, his expression suddenly guarded. ‘Did you knock over my phone?’

  I didn’t say anything. I felt like a tight band was constricting my ribs.

  ‘Sloane? Are you okay?’

  Maybe the sensible thing to do would have been to wait. To prepare myself for confrontation, rather than rushing headlong into it. I could have said I was fine, only I had the beginnings of a migraine, or bad period pains, or hay fever or something – anything – and I should have got up and walked out and gone to bed. I could have taken a sleeping pill and then, in the morning, assessed my situation rationally and calmly. Maybe that would have meant talking to Bianca. Maybe it would have meant seeing a solicitor. Maybe it would have meant going round to see Megan and pouring my heart out to my friend.

  But I didn’t do any of that. I couldn’t. The new knowledge I had was so huge and horrifying there was no way in hell I could keep it bottled up inside of me for even a second longer. The feeling of compression around my chest was so strong now it was like I might burst with the agony of it, and there was only one way to let it out.

  ‘How long have you and Bianca been fucking?’

  ‘What? Bianca and me… What? Are you mad?’

  ‘You heard me. Answer the question.’

  ‘Sloane, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes, you do. I’m talking about you sleeping with Bianca. I want to know how long it’s been going on for.’

  He stepped towards me, and the towel sagged to half mast and then slithered to the floor, releasing a further waft of clean fragrance. His penis was just about level with my chin. For a brief, deranged moment, I thought about hurting him – grabbing his balls in my hand and squeezing the truth out of him, making him feel some of the white-hot pain I was experiencing.

  But the idea vanished from my mind as quickly as it had appeared, and anyway I wouldn’t have had the chance, because he said, ‘Hold on,’ turned around and went into the bedroom, reappearing seconds later in boxer shorts and a T-shirt.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s sit down together in the bedroom and talk this through calmly.’

  I stood up. ‘I. Am. Not. Calm. And I’m not going anywhere near a fucking bed with you ever again, you cheating shit.’

  He reached out and wrapped his arms around me, holding me tight. My entire body was rigid, my hands clenched into fists by my sides, so tight I could feel my nails digging painfully into my palms. But at the same time, the proximity of his body, the scent of him, the hardness of his chest pressing against my cheek, the warmth of his embracing arms, almost made me weaken. Almost, but not quite.

  ‘Let go of me.’

  He did. He took a step back but kept one hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off.

  ‘Sweetheart. Please, let’s talk about this. I don’t know where you’ve got this idea from, but I do know you’ve been under so much stress lately. You need to calm down. I promise you, absolutely faithfully, that I’m not sleeping with Bianca. I’m not. Never have and never will. Scout’s honour.’

  ‘Right. Then how exactly do you explain those messages on your phone? On Slack?’

  I was looking right into his face, even though meeting the eyes of the man who, just an hour earlier, I’d believed loved me – held my heart in his hands – was just about the hardest thing I’d ever done. And I saw his expression change from concern to panic, like a black cloud passing over the sun, and then to total blank impassiveness.

  ‘You looked at my phone.’

  One of us here was lying, and it wasn’t going to be me. ‘Correct.’

  ‘What the fuck? Why would you even do that? I thought we trusted each other.’

  ‘So did I. Until I read those messages. I guess at least one of us doesn’t trust the other one any more.’

  ‘Jesus, Sloane. What were you thinking? What’s happened to you? I can’t believe you’d invade my privacy like that.’

  ‘Fuck your fucking privacy! What about our marriage?’

  ‘Our marriage isn’t worth the shit on my shoe if my wife thinks it’s okay to snoop around like some bunny-boiling psychopath. I thought you were better than that. I thought you were a fucking adult.’

  His sudden rage shocked me. I don’t know what I’d expected from him
, but I guess I’d been hoping for a totally plausible explanation at best, or abject contrition at worst. But what I’d got was my husband managing to make me feel like this whole ugly scene was my fault.

  ‘What can I have that’s private from you? Huh? The accounts for my business? Me taking a shit? Having a wank? What, you want one-hundred-per-cent, twenty-four-seven access to every last aspect of my life? If that’s how you see our marriage I suggest you tell me now, because I’ll be out so fast you won’t see me for dust.’

  Maybe there are some women who’d have responded to that with, ‘Off you go then, and don’t let the door hit your ass on your way out.’

  Up until that day, I’d have said I was one of them.

  But I was so blindsided, so reeling with shock at what I’d seen and how he’d reacted, that there was no fight left in me at all.

  ‘Myles, this isn’t my fault. I can’t help what I saw.’

  ‘You could. You could have respected my privacy and not gone grubbing through my personal business.’

  ‘But our marriage is my business.’

  ‘Right now, I’m not sure we even have a marriage.’

  He gave me a brief, cold stare, then turned and went into the bedroom, closing the door firmly behind him. I stood there, alone and appalled, totally unequipped to deal with what had just happened, for a few seconds, until my legs lost the ability to hold me upright and I flopped back down into my chair. That was it. I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t even lift a hand to brush my hair off my face.

  I could hear Myles’s footsteps in the next-door room, brisk and purposeful, moving back and forth. Soon, their sound changed and I knew he’d put shoes on. Then the door opened again and he stepped out, dressed in jeans with a cream linen shirt over his T-shirt, carrying his leather overnight bag.

  ‘You need to think about what you’ve done. I’ll be spending the night in a hotel,’ he said, each word like a cube of ice dropping into an empty glass.

  Twelve

  The persistent bleeping of my alarm dragged me out of a deep, chemical-induced sleep. My head was pounding and my throat felt raw and sore. My whole body ached, like I’d been run over by a bus. I rolled over, instinctively reaching for Myles, but there was only emptiness where his body should have been.

  My eyes snapped open and, with the blinding sunlight, my memory of the previous night rushed back. The messages I’d seen. The horrible row we’d had. His cold words as he left the house, slamming the door behind him. I closed my eyes, as if that would shut out the memory, but of course it didn’t.

  And anyway, even though I felt like I was dying – worse, like my life was already over, and I was just trapped in a kind of limbo waiting to be released – I had to work.

  Any other job, I might have considered calling in sick. But Ripple Effect wasn’t just a job – the business was half mine and the other half was off on maternity leave. It was my livelihood, my future. And now, with my marriage in crisis, I needed it more than ever.

  I pushed the duvet aside. The sheets were damp with sweat; I must have gone out like a light after the two sleeping pills I’d taken, not noticing that the night had been far too hot for our bedcovers. Since long before I met Myles, I’d been plagued by insomnia, and while I’d learned to live with it for the most part, I still kept the big guns in reserve: the sleeping tablets I persuaded my reluctant GP to prescribe or stocked up on for trips abroad. I couldn’t remember how long I cried for, after Myles had left. I remembered wanting desperately, more than anything, to turn back the clock, to make what had happened unhappen, but I knew it never would. It was like when the builders started work on our house, and I’d watched in horror as they swung a mallet repeatedly at one of the walls until it collapsed in a pile of rubble. I felt like I’d done that, only to our marriage, and all that remained to be seen was what, if anything, could be salvaged from the wreckage.

  Well, I needed to make sure that Megan’s and my business would survive, at any rate. And that meant hauling my ass out of bed and getting ready to face the day.

  Just walking to the bathroom felt like an arduous challenge. I had to force myself to pick up each foot in turn and place it down again. When I made it, I flopped down on the toilet like I needed a rest as well as a pee. My toothbrush felt like it weighed a ton. The water in the shower was like needles on my body, either boiling hot or freezing cold, but never soothing or cleansing.

  When I was twenty, I thought I’d experienced the worst grief I ever would – enough loss and shock and trauma to last a lifetime. And since then, I’d survived all the usual brickbats that life throws at us all. But this physical pain – this leaden exhaustion – was new. I wondered if I was coming down with flu, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. It was as if my brain was so soaked in misery, it had forgotten how to make my body work.

  Well, it was going to have to remember pretty damn quick.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Sloane,’ I told my reflection in the mirror. ‘Get through today and you can come home and cry.’

  And I did. I went through my skincare routine on autopilot, and made up my face, slathering on illuminating concealer to hide the black rings under my eyes and tipping in eye drops to try to erase their angry redness. I tapped liquid blush onto my cheeks, hoping to achieve a healthy glow. I used waterproof eyeliner and mascara, because the choking tightness in my throat warned me that I could cry again at any second.

  My hair had frizzed horribly in the heat and I couldn’t summon up the energy to style it properly, so I ran my straighteners ruthlessly over it on too high a setting, even though I knew I’d pay for it later in rebound frizz and split ends.

  After fifteen minutes in front of the mirror, I reckoned things weren’t going to get any better. I needed to put some clothes on, drink some coffee, and get the hell out, or I’d be late.

  But I couldn’t. I sat down on our bed and put my head in my hands, a numbing tiredness overwhelming me. More than anything else in the world, at that moment, I wished my dad was there to give me a hug, instead of being thousands of miles away.

  When I was at boarding school, Dad sent me a letter once a week, regular as clockwork, however busy he was, wherever in the country work had taken him. Back then, email had only just become a widely used thing and, although I knew Dad had it at work, when he wrote to me it was the old-fashioned way, on textured pale-blue paper with almost invisible white lines on it, in his scribbly, scientist’s handwriting.

  I rarely wrote back. Maybe I averaged one short, scribbled note to every four of his painstakingly detailed letters – more if I wanted something, like money to buy the new Shania Twain album or tickets to a hockey game. I told him school was fine, I was studying hard, a friend had asked if I could spend Labour Day weekend with her family and was that okay. At the time, I barely thought about the effort those letters must have taken him to write, the weight of guilt the necessity of sending them must have brought down on him, because I was his only child and I was so far away.

  And it was only much later, when I went back home for a visit a couple of months before I met Myles, that I told him how much I’d treasured each one, reading it over and over, even pressing my nose to the page in case there might be a whiff of Dad on it, a ghostly memory of home.

  ‘Of course you did, honey,’ he’d said. ‘I did the same, when I was away at school. Why do you think I wrote them?’

  And we’d had one of those massive, squeezy hugs you sometimes have that transcend time and silence and distance, his beard tickling my face. I’d told him he was the best dad in the world and he’d got too teared up to reply.

  Anyway, I looked forward to Dad’s letters far, far more than I could ever admit to anyone – not my classmates, not him, not even myself.

  It was a Friday in October – Halloween fast approaching, the leaves long turned into their autumn colours, cladding the playing fields in amber and gold – when I received a letter from Dad that must have been incredibly hard for him to write. I’d
planned to save it until after my friends and I had been out to town for a burger and a movie, so I could savour it in bed, alone, reading it over and over until the gentle timbre of his remembered voice soothed me to sleep.

  But just as the bus was pulling up to take us off for our Friday treat and Janine was saying, ‘Come on, Sloane, if you put on any more lip gloss you’ll stick your mouth together!’ I saw the envelope lying there on my pillow and for some reason it felt really important for me to read it right then.

  I said, ‘Actually, I’m staying in tonight. I don’t feel great. You guys have fun.’

  And in spite of my friends’ protests – Carla even brought out the big guns and reminded me that hot Pierre might be working in the burger bar that night, and he’d come this close to asking me out last time we went there – I held firm. As soon as they were gone, I pulled off my sequinned combat trousers and Nirvana T-shirt, put on my pyjamas, got under the bedcovers and opened Dad’s letter.

  Hi, Sloane honey,

  I’m writing this in a motel room in Red Lake – they sent me up at short notice last week and I reckon I’ll be here for another month. It’s pretty cold already, but the sunsets are sensational and some of the guys have invited me to go fishing on the weekend, so it’s not all bad! I hope your chemistry test went okay – I was thinking about you on Thursday and hoping to channel everything I know about the periodic table directly into your brain! Maybe it got there – or maybe you aced it on your own.

  There’s a slightly complicated reason why I’m writing this letter – as well as wanting to touch base with my girl as usual. Yesterday I got a call from your mom.

  I know this is going to come as a shock to you. It’s been seven years now and we’ve heard nothing – the police did what they could to trace her in the beginning, but when there was no sign that anything bad had happened, they came round to the view that she’d decided to take off on her own. As she was an adult, they couldn’t really pursue her and make her come home to us if she didn’t want to.