I haven’t.
Please, please say I haven’t….
But I have. It’s a nightmare, right in front of my eyes. I’ve smashed the raven. Matt’s precious, beloved work of art. Only one fragment remains on the wall; the rest is pulverized. There’s a broken piece of wing and a human tooth right by my foot, and I shrink away with a shriek, part revulsion, part dismay at myself, part just anguish.
Could I mend it? But even as the thought passes through my brain, I know it’s ridiculous. As I pick up the putter and survey the black smithereens scattered across the floor, I feel utterly sick. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to…
Then my stomach heaves as there’s the sound of a key in the lock. The front door is opening, but I can’t move. I’m paralyzed, clutching the putter, like the murderer at the crime scene.
“Ava,” Matt greets me—then stops dead. His eyes widen and darken as they take in the scene of carnage. I hear him emit a tiny sound of distress, almost a whimper.
“I’m sorry,” I gulp. “Matt, I’m so sorry.”
Slowly, his aghast eyes travel to the putter in my hand.
“Jesus.” He wipes his face. “You…you did this?”
“Yes,” I admit in a tiny voice.
“But how? What were you doing?”
“I was…angry,” I begin in faltering tones. “Matt, I’m so sorry….”
“You were angry?” Matt’s voice rockets in horror. “So you destroy a piece of art?”
“God! No!” I say in equal horror, realizing how I’m misrepresenting myself. “I wasn’t aiming at the art. I was hitting the footstool! I just…I don’t know how it happened….” I trail off in misery, but he doesn’t respond. I don’t think he’s even listening.
“I know you didn’t like it,” he says, almost to himself. “But—”
“No!” I say in dismay. “Please listen! It was an accident! I was in a state! Because I get back here from the expo and the doorbell rings and who is it? Your former girlfriend, Sarah. Or should I say Lyric? I had no idea who she was, and I felt like a total, utter fool—”
“Sarah?” Matt looks shattered. “Sarah was here?”
“Didn’t you bump into her? She only just left.”
“No. I didn’t.” Looking shaken, he sinks onto the same leather footstool that I was whacking five minutes ago. “Sarah.” He closes his eyes. “I thought she’d disappeared. Moved to Antwerp.”
“She’s engaged. She came here to gloat, basically.”
My eyes feel hot and I blink a few times. I know he has the moral high ground right now. But don’t I have it too? Just a bit?
“Engaged.” He lifts his head a smidgen. “Well, that’s something.”
“So, you were with her in Italy.” I look away, hunching my shoulders. “Did you sleep with her right before you slept with me?”
“No!” Matt raises his head, looking appalled. “God, no! Is that what she said? We weren’t together by then. She stalked me! She just turned up on the martial-arts course. I hadn’t even told her I was doing it. I still don’t know how she found out. She wanted to get back together; I kept telling her it was over….” His eyes suddenly flash with memory. “Remember when I did my monologue about trying to escape someone? How a person wouldn’t leave me alone? That was her! That was for her!”
I remember Matt lashing out furiously, unable to articulate his frustration. I mean, it makes sense.
“But why didn’t you tell me?” I say, feeling like a broken record. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“Because we weren’t talking about exes!” Matt lashes back hotly. “Remember? Then we got back here to the UK and I hadn’t heard from her…and you reacted so badly to Genevieve….” Matt rubs his face. “Sarah was gone. I thought she was gone.”
“But she wasn’t gone, was she?” I say slowly. “Because baggage never is gone. You can’t just pretend it is. It catches up with you.”
I’m feeling a kind of ripping sensation inside. Like all my thoughts are tearing apart, exposing how badly they were joined together in the first place. I’ve been wrong. Wrong about everything.
“God, I’m stupid,” I say in despair.
“No you’re not,” says Matt, but he sounds automatic rather than convinced.
“I am. I thought we could have a relationship without baggage. I thought it would be all light and free and wonderful. But Topher’s right, it’s impossible. When I look at you, Matt, I can see suitcases all around you.” I wait until he raises his head, then gesture with my arms. “Heavy, bulky, awkward suitcases everywhere, all in a mess, spilling out crap. Japan…Genevieve…your parents…Lyric…And you don’t take ownership of them,” I add, with rising agitation. “You don’t even look at them. You just go and putt golf balls and hope they’ll sort themselves out. But they won’t! You need to sort your life out, Matt. You need to sort out your own life.”
There’s silence for a few seconds. Matt is staring fixedly at me, breathing hard, his face unreadable.
“Is that so?” he says at last, his voice ominous. “Is that so? You think I’m the only one who needs to sort their life out? You want to hear about your suitcases, Ava?”
“What do you mean?” I say, startled.
“You’ve got so much shit in suitcases, I don’t know where to start.” He counts off on his fingers. “Novel. Aromatherapy course. Rescue furniture. Fucking…batik. Dog who won’t do what he’s told. Unsafe windows. Unpaid bills mixed up with, I don’t know, horoscopes. Your life’s a mess. It’s a bloody mess!”
My life’s a what? Somehow, through my shock, my brain pieces together a reply.
“I have a portfolio career,” I say in my most lacerating tones. “Which might be challenging for you to comprehend, Matt. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand how I live, because you have a very closed mind.”
“Well, if you ask me, Ava, your mind’s too bloody open!” Matt explodes. “It’s open to every flotsam-and-jetsam piece of crap out there! You make a new plan every week. But you really want to achieve any one of these aims you claim to have? Then focus. Focus on one of them. Finish the aromatherapy course, find some clients, and be that. You’d be great. Or do the podcast. Or write your novel. Pick one and make it happen. Stop explaining how impossible it is, stop making endless excuses, stop faffing around…and just do it!”
Blood is beating in my cheeks as I stare back at him. I don’t make endless excuses. Do I?
Do I?
“You’ve never…” I pause, trying to keep my voice steady. “You’ve never said that before.”
“No. Well. Sorry.”
He doesn’t sound remotely apologetic. He sounds matter-of-fact. Like he’s saying real stuff. Like he’s finally saying what he thinks instead of what he thinks I want to hear.
“That’s what you’ve thought of me all this time?” I say, my head feeling hot. “That I’m a flake?”
“I haven’t thought you’re a flake,” says Matt. “But I’ve thought it’s a shame. You could get somewhere, you know?”
The remaining piece of sculpture falls off the wall with a little crash, and we both jump, then stare at it lying on the floor.
“It was an accident,” I say yet again, but my voice is hopeless, and I’m not sure I even believe myself.
“There are no accidents,” chimes in Topher, whizzing into the hall on a child’s scooter, then stopping abruptly as he sees the damage. He glances swiftly from me to Matt, and I can see him taking in the situation. “I mean, there are,” he amends. “There are accidents that are just accidents. They have no other significance.”
“Huh,” says Matt gruffly. I can’t even bring myself to answer. Topher looks from me to Matt and back again, his expression suddenly stricken.
“Don’t break up, guys,” he says quietly, and he sounds more sincere than I
’ve ever heard him. “It’s not a breakup thing. Whatever it is.”
I don’t move a muscle in response, and neither does Matt. My eyes are locked on his. We could be in a martial-arts ring.
Without saying another word, Topher backs his scooter out of the hall, and a few moments later there’s the sound of his bedroom door closing. And we’re still staring each other down.
“Is this a breakup thing?” says Matt at last, his voice flat. “Because I don’t know what the fuck the rules are.”
“I don’t have any rules,” I say, feeling instantly prickly.
“You don’t have any rules?” He stares at me with scathing incredulity. “Ava, you have nothing but rules. Jeez! ‘We’re not telling each other anything. Now just one fact. Now five questions.’ I can’t keep up. I don’t know where I am.”
“You don’t know where you are?” I feel white-hot with rage. “You don’t know?”
I’m fighting two strong impulses. An impulse to make up and an impulse to hurt him the way I’ve been hurt. I guess the hurt impulse is just more powerful.
“I thought I didn’t have any deal-breakers.” My words burst out of me in a wounded stream. “I didn’t even believe in them. But you know something? If I was looking at an online profile and it said, ‘By the way, I’ll lie about my ex-girlfriend and plan to move to Japan without mentioning it,’ that would be a deal-breaker. Sorry to be blunt,” I add, with an edge to my voice. “But that’s just how it is.”
Matt’s eyes move slowly around the hall, over his ravaged art, and back to me.
“Well,” he answers tonelessly. “If I read, ‘I’ll smash up your art with a golf club,’ that would be a deal-breaker for me. I’d click on to someone else like that.”
He snaps his fingers, and the sound is so dismissive, my heart spasms. But I manage to keep my face steady.
“OK.” Somehow I find a shrug. “Well, I guess we know the truth now. We didn’t fit all along.”
“I guess we do.”
I want to cry. My throat is so tight, it’s painful. But I would die rather than dissolve into sobs. Carefully, I place the putter on the leather footstool.
“Sorry about the art,” I say, my voice barely a husk.
“No problem,” says Matt, almost formally.
“I’ll get my stuff.” I stare at the floor. “And I’ll clean up this mess, obviously.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“No. I insist.”
There’s a short silence and I survey the scuffed toes of my shoes in a weird, surreal daze. My life just shattered, but somehow I’m still standing upright. So. Silver lining.
“So, what, are we breaking up?” says Matt, a harsh heaviness to his voice. “Or ‘having some space’? Or what?”
“You’re planning to go to Japan, Matt,” I say, feeling suddenly bone-weary. “You’re planning to live on the other side of the world for a year. What difference does it make what we call it?”
Matt draws breath to make some response but seems to change his mind. At that moment his phone rings, and he glances at it in irritation—then his face jolts.
“Hi,” he answers, looking confused. “Matt here.” He listens for a minute or so, then winces. “Shit. Shit. That’s…OK. She’s here.” He offers the phone to me, looking grave. “They couldn’t get through to your phone. It’s Maud. Nell’s been taken to hospital with chest pains. They think you should go. Right now.”
“Oh God. Oh God…” My heart thumping in panic, I make to grab the phone, but Matt puts a hand on my arm.
“Let me take you,” he says. “Please. I’ll go with you. Even if we’re not together…” He stops. “I can still…”
His face is so grave, so honest, so exactly the face I wanted to love, that I can’t bear it. I can’t be near him. I can’t even look at him. It’s too painful. I have to leave. Now.
“Please don’t bother yourself, Matt,” I say, swiveling away, each word like a needle in my throat. “It’s not your problem anymore.” As I reach the door, I shoot him one last glance, feeling my heart implode with sadness. “It’s not your life.”
Twenty-Four
Seven months later
A shaft of afternoon sunlight is falling on my table as I type my final words. The days are getting longer, the air warmer, and spring flowers are everywhere in the olive groves. Spring in Puglia is enchanting. Scratch that—every season is enchanting.
Winter had a few bone-chillingly cold days, to be fair. And some wet spells. Rain clattered down outside while I wrapped myself in blankets and lived in my sheepskin boots and huddled by the fire every night. But it was still magical. And it was worth it. It’s all been worth it for this moment.
The End, I type carefully, and feel a knot of tension unravel deep within me. I rub my eyes and lean back in my chair, feeling almost numb. Eighty-four thousand words. Six months. Many, many hours. But I’ve done it. I’ve finished a first draft. A rough, scrappy, patchy first draft…but still.
“Finished, Harold!” I say, and he gives a celebratory bark.
I look around the room—the monk’s cell, to be literal—that’s been home ever since I arrived here, back in October. Farida was waiting at the monastery door to welcome me with a tight hug and encouraging words. Since then, she’s kept me constantly nourished with food and warmth and inspiration, not to mention a few bracing pep talks whenever I’ve lost motivation.
I’m not the only participant to have come back for what Farida calls an “extended self-guided writing retreat.” There was a guy here before Christmas, working on an updated edition of his anthropology textbook, in a room across the courtyard. But we didn’t chat. Or eat together. Or even communicate, really. We both just got on with it.
I’ve never felt so immersed in anything in my life. I’ve spent seven days a week thinking, writing, walking, and just staring up at the sky. The sky can take a lot of staring at, I’ve discovered. I’m the first guest to have spent Christmas at the monastery, and I think my request to stay here took Farida by surprise.
“Don’t you have…?” she began delicately, but I shook my head.
“I’ve got no family, really. And, yes, my friends would love to see me, but I think they’d love it even more if I stayed here, kept going, and achieved what I want to achieve.” At which she clasped my hand and said I’d be very welcome, and it would be a quiet Christmas but a rewarding one.
It was after Nell got out of hospital and was safely home that I finally tackled the question burning in my soul. She was still on the fragile side and quite stroppy about needing lots of rest, but none of us minded her irascible outbursts. We were just so relieved that her attack had been diagnosed not as a potentially fatal cardiac arrest (OK, maybe that was just my fear) but as some sort of heart inflammation with a lengthy name and treatment plan.
It had been a long seven days, during which time I’d been processing not just the Nell situation but the whole Matt situation. The whole life-feeling-like-it-was-over situation. The whole big-black-hole-of-despair situation. To be fair, a hospital is a good place to be if all you can do is keep dissolving into tears. People leave you alone or steer you gently to a chair.
(Except that hospital chaplain who kindly started chatting, got the wrong end of the stick, thought I was grieving for a dead husband called Matt, and started praying for his soul. It was all very awkward, and thank God for Maud coming along at the right time and asking if he knew anyone in the Vatican, because she had a tiny little favor she wanted to ask.)
So anyway. Nell was back home and one night it was my turn to stay over. We were watching TV on the sofa with Harold when I drew a deep breath and said, “Nell. D’you think I’m flaky?”
“Flaky? No,” said Nell at once, in forthright tones. “You’re the most reliable friend in the world.”
“No, that’s not what I mea
n. D’you think I’m flaky about my career? Or, like, all my plans?”
This time there was silence as Nell stroked Harold’s ears and considered.
“I mean, you’re scatty,” she said at last. “You’re capricious. Changeable. But that’s why we love you. You always have a new idea, and you’re so passionate about them all.”
“But I never see them through,” I said, and Nell propped herself up on her elbow to stare at me.
“What is this? Ava, don’t beat yourself up! It’s who you are, sweetie. It’s lovely! It’s you!”
“But that’s not who I want to be,” I said, with a sudden fierceness that surprised even me. “I want to finish something, Nell. Really finish it. I started a novel, I went to Italy, I had a plan. But I got distracted. Like I always do.”
Then there was another silence, because we both knew what had distracted me in Italy, and we weren’t going there.
“I want to finish something,” I repeated, staring ahead, my jaw set. “I want to get something done. For once.”
“Right,” said Nell slowly. “Well, good for you. How are you going to do that?”
“Don’t know yet.”
But already the idea was taking shape in my mind.
The next night, after I’d eaten supper, I sat at my kitchen table. I did some sums. I looked up pet passports. And I thought. I thought for about three hours, till my legs ached and my shoulders had frozen and my chamomile tea had gone cold and Harold was whining to go out. But by then I knew. As I walked him along the chilly midnight street, I was smiling, even exhilarated, because I had a plan. Not a little plan: a huge, ambitious, drastic, exciting plan.
And once I told the others about it, they embraced it even more enthusiastically than I had. I mean, you’d have thought it was Maud’s idea in the first place, from the way she reacted.
“Ava, my darling, of course you must go!” she exclaimed. “Of course you must. And don’t you worry about a thing. You’ve done so many favors for me over the years, it’s payback time. I’ll keep an eye on your flat, water your plants, upcycle those bits of furniture I’ve been meaning to do, keep it tidy, that kind of thing. I love playing house with other people’s things,” she added with a beatific smile.
Love Your Life Page 29