by Beth O'Leary
I can’t believe the man who wrote Cherry all those terrible poems was Rodney. I hope my poems are better than his; I hope Addie didn’t read them all and secretly think I was a total Rodney.
I turn over; I can’t sleep. This is not an uncommon problem. I start to spiral, that’s the issue. I have one thought – for instance, I wonder what Addie thought when she read my poems – and then I’m away, following the natural steps down that path, coming to the conclusion that oh, God, I still love her, I know I do. I feel like I never won’t. Everyone says there’s no such thing as The One and there’s plenty of fish in the sea but every time I meet one of those fish, I just miss Addie more. I’ve given up on winning her back, and still that doesn’t seem to be enough to forget her – you’d think the agony of unrequited love would be sufficient to put your brain off the whole affair, but it seems not.
I get up. There comes a point where lying in the darkness becomes unbearable, and very suddenly, that is precisely where I am. I tiptoe to the en suite, passing Deb and Addie in the double bed, two indistinct, quiet shapes. The Gilbert sisters, as inseparable as ever. I used to think Marcus and I were just like them.
There’s not much to do once I’ve been to the loo – normally if I can’t sleep then I wander about, maybe read something, even write. But there’s nowhere to go here, except the car park outside, and I am one of the few members of my friendship group who is not quite eccentric enough to roam around a Budget Travel car park in my pyjamas.
Instead I look at myself in the mirror above the sink. There have been times, in the last year and a half, when even meeting my own gaze like this has been hard. Now I just see a sad, tired man who made bad choices, which is a step up from what I used to see.
I splash my face with cold water, letting it drip from the ends of my hair. I straighten up and let out a noise, then stop myself – the instinct to be quiet is still at the front of my mind. The door is opening; I forgot to lock it.
It’s Addie. She jumps when she sees me, but she’s quiet too, just letting out a little gasp, clutching a hand to her throat.
‘Sorry,’ we both whisper at the same time.
‘I’ll . . .’ I start moving towards the door.
‘No, I’ll go,’ she murmurs, hand on the doorknob. ‘I don’t even need a wee, I just needed . . .’
‘Out?’
‘Yeah.’ She smiles ruefully. ‘You’re still a bad sleeper, then?’
Worse, now – I never slept so well as when she was in my bed.
‘Rodney’s not helping,’ I say.
Addie clicks the door shut behind us, blocking out the sounds of three heavy sleepers.
‘The snoring? Or the creepiness?’ she asks.
‘He’s just so tragic,’ I say. ‘I read some of the poems he sent Cherry, you know.’
‘The one about how her vagina was like a strawberry?’
‘What? No?’
Addie covers her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh.’
‘In what way?’
‘Hmm?’
‘In what way was it like a strawberry? Because if it was the colour he was referring to, I’m not sure that’s . . .’
I trail off and Addie starts laughing, hand still at her mouth to stifle the noise. She bends, shoulders shaking, one hand gripping the counter by the sink.
‘Oh, God,’ she says. ‘We’re all idiots, the lot of us.’
‘And you think he’d go cherry rather than strawberry,’ I muse, ‘given her name.’
She laughs harder, and I feel myself grow taller. There’s nothing lovelier than making Addie laugh.
‘Dylan,’ she says.
I don’t know if she does it on purpose. She shifts her hand on the counter and suddenly it’s on top of my hand, on the edge of the sink, and she’s looking up at me, eyes bright with laughter. My heart is beating everywhere, right down to the fingertips beneath her hand. I can feel the joy growing, a great nuclear explosion from the centre of my chest, and gone is the idea that I ever stopped hoping she might love me again, because look, look how quickly it came back to me. It was never really gone.
She moves her hand. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, no,’ I begin, clenching my fist to stop myself from reaching out for her.
She lifts that hand to her face, lying it flat against her cheek, her forehead.
‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve tried so – I’ve . . .’
‘Addie?’
She’s crying. I step forward tentatively, and she moves too, into my chest, and as my arms close around her we’re two jigsaw pieces slotting into place. She fits perfectly; she belongs here.
‘Addie, what’s wrong?’ I ask. It takes all my energy not to dip my head and press my lips to her hair, the way I would when she was sad, when she was mine.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Shh. It’s OK. You’ve nothing to be sorry for.’
Her fists clutch the fabric of my pyjama top; I can feel the wetness of her tears against my chest, and I hold her tighter.
‘You make it look so easy,’ she says, her voice muffled, vibrating against me.
‘Make what look so easy?’
‘Forgiving me,’ she says, so quietly I almost don’t catch it.
‘Forgiving you?’ I rub a hand up and down her back, slowly, carefully.
‘I don’t know if I can do that the way you can.’
‘Addie . . . I don’t expect you to forgive me. I understand how hard that is.’
‘No,’ she says, shaking her head into my chest. ‘No, you don’t . . . I don’t mean I can’t forgive you, Dylan – God, I forgave you months ago, right away, maybe, it’s . . .’
She trails off, quivering in my arms, and I’m feeling too many things at once: hope, sadness, the loss of what we had—
The bathroom door clicks open. We freeze.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ says Marcus. ‘I should have bloody known.’
Addie
I flee the bathroom, shoving past Marcus. I can hardly see through the darkness and the tears. I wake Deb by kneeing her in the shin as I try to climb back into bed.
‘Addie?’ Deb whispers.
I burrow under the duvet.
‘This is absolutely classic,’ Marcus is saying in the bathroom. His voice is so loud. I bet Rodney is sitting up in his sleeping bag now, woken by all the noise. I clench my eyes tight shut and try to focus on my breathing, but it’s coming too fast.
‘We should have bloody well walked to that godforsaken bit of Scotland; I should never have let you get in the car with her!’ Marcus’s voice is rising.
‘He was the one asking for the lift,’ Deb says. She ducks under the duvet with me. ‘Ignore him, Addie. You know he’s hell-spawn.’
‘Be quiet,’ Dylan says to Marcus.
Deb and I both startle. It’s a tone I’ve never heard Dylan use before. Not when we argued, not on the night when he left me.
‘Just. Be. Quiet.’
We lie still. I can’t see Deb, but I can feel her gaze.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. And I won’t have you speaking about Addie like that.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘What’s going on?’ Rodney says from the other end of the room.
‘Why do you keep saying I don’t know what I’m talking about?’ Marcus is yelling now. ‘Why does everyone keep saying shit like that when I am the only person who knows what I’m talking about around here? I took the fucking picture, Dylan. I saw her in his office letting him run his hand up her thigh like—’
There’s a scuffle – Deb reaches across and grips my good hand tight, so tight it hurts, and inside me I feel the desperation again, rising up my gullet, and I tear my hand free from Deb’s and throw myself out of the bed and
through the bathroom door right into Marcus and Dylan who are locked together, roaring, fighting, and I push through the tangle of messy limbs and rage and get to the toilet just in time to vomit.
THEN
Dylan
I’ve never seen Marcus like this before. There’s vomit in his hair, crusted to his curls, and his eyes are so vacant he looks like a zombie. The living room of his house is filled with takeaway boxes and every surface looks sticky, fetid; there’s a circle of Fanta spreading slowly across the carpet. He must have freshly kicked it over on his way to answer the door.
‘Marcus,’ I begin, and then I catch him as he stumbles forward into me. I try not to turn my head aside at the smell of him. ‘Marcus, what the hell happened?’
It’s been three months since I left our anniversary dinner and found Marcus drunk in the middle of the road outside his house, staggering through suburban Chichester with a bottle in one hand and his phone in the other, a portrait of dissolution. Ever since then I’ve spent as much time as I can with him, but it isn’t enough – he needs real help. Luke came to stay for a couple of weeks in September, and, actually, Grace has been here more than I would have expected – she’s good with Marcus, too, he’s calm with her – but neither of them can be on-call with him. Grace lives in Bristol now, trying to get herself away from the London modelling scene, and Luke’s back in New York with Javier.
The days get shorter and darker and Marcus behaves more and more strangely. Last week I found him outside our flat – somewhere he’s refused to come lately – trying to climb on top of our dustbin, and when I asked him why, he just kept tapping his nose. ‘All in good time, my friend,’ he said, a crisp packet from the bin flapping butterfly-like against his T-shirt. ‘All in good time.’
Tonight I’m supposed to be taking Addie back to Wiltshire when she finishes at school, so she can finally meet my parents. I can hardly bear to think about the argument we’ll have when I tell her we have to cancel again, but there’s no way Marcus can be left alone.
‘I knew you’d come,’ he says, as I lever him upright and lead him towards the sofa. ‘I knew it.’
‘Yeah, I’m here,’ I say wearily, setting him down on the sofa as best I can. ‘Are you going to be sick again?’
‘What? No! Fuck off. I’m not going – not going to be sick.’
As if there isn’t already an acrid scent of vomit clinging to everything in here, including me, after helping him towards the sofa. I sit down in the chair opposite him and look at my feet. I feel bodily exhausted; a poem tugs at me, something about the ache of giving and its quiet void, but I’m too tired to humour the urge to follow its thread.
Starting the Masters has been intense – even part-time, it seems to take up every spare hour, and I’d forgotten how hard learning can be. I haven’t exercised that muscle in far too long. All that time spent swanning around Cambodia reading modern novels and suddenly the texts I knew inside out for my finals – Chaucer, Middleton, Spenser – are foreign again, locking me out.
The evening bar work was manageable over the summer, when I was just spending my days at home with Addie, but the late nights are making it harder and harder to get up early and study. And every so often there comes a message from my mother, testing the water, seeing if I’m desperate enough to go begging to my parents yet.
My hope is that taking Addie home will be read as a peace offering; quietly, in the back of my mind, I never thought my parents would really cut me off for ever. They’d come around to the Chichester plan, I thought, and the gifts and monthly payments and credit-card pay-offs would resume. Realising this about myself is not pleasant, and besides, it’s starting to look as though I was wrong.
‘I’m going to save you, my friend,’ Marcus says, waggling a finger at me. ‘All this, all of it, it’ll all make sense when you know. When you know.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I say sharply, more sharply than I should – he’s barely able to form words, let alone make sense.
‘I’m going to show you. How bad she is. How bad for you. Addie is. I mean, you think I need help, you think I need help, you . . .’
He rants at me about Addie all the time now, telling me to leave her, telling me to end it, telling me everything was better before she came into my life. I can only believe that this fixation on Addie is a symptom of his wider disease – alcoholism, I assume, maybe something else too – but it’s awful, and as much as I try to shield Addie from it, she knows he despises her. I can’t bear to hear him talk about her like this; I get up and head for the kitchen, stepping over a plastic container of Chinese food, noodles spilling out of its side like entrails. He needs water, if he can keep it down.
The kitchen is even worse than the living area – there are no clean glasses, and I wash two with hand soap because there’s no washing-up liquid.
Marcus hasn’t been this bad since India left Joel. I wake constantly in the night wondering what it is that’s set him off so drastically, what’s changed in him, what’s made him so desperate he’d lose himself again. Marcus’s dad has now cut him off, and India too, so he needs me more than ever – it’s sickening, the things he’s doing for rent and booze money. A few weeks ago, picking his phone out of a puddle of sticky hot sauce from the takeaway, I discovered his profile on an escort website.
‘Drink this,’ I say, passing Marcus the water. ‘I’m going to go out and get you some proper food. Something nutritional.’
‘Will you come back afterwards? And eat with me?’ Marcus asks, looking up at me with glassy eyes.
‘Yeah, I’ll stay.’
He smiles. ‘Good,’ he says, flopping back on the sofa. ‘Good.’
Addie
‘Addie, calm down . . .’
I clutch the phone to my ear, sobbing. I’m sat in a cubicle in the staff toilets, doubled over with my hair in my face. I have to cry quietly. I can’t risk another teacher hearing me. And I only have ten minutes before the bell rings and I have to go inspire a roomful of moody teenagers to write their own accounts of the bloody Battle of the Boyne.
‘I can’t do this any more, Deb,’ I whisper. ‘I feel like it’s driving me insane. I’m someone I don’t want to be. You know the other day I thought I saw Marcus going through our bins?’
‘What?’
‘But when I got downstairs there was just the guy from next door. And I felt fucking mad.’
‘You’re not mad. This whole thing with Marcus has just got very messy, somehow.’
‘Do you think that he’s trying to break up me and Dylan?’
There’s silence on the other end of the line. I clench my eyes shut so tight I see little red dots when I open them again.
‘Do you think that?’ Deb asks eventually.
‘I do. I really do. Clearly the guy has issues, like he drinks whisky for breakfast and stuff, and it’s so sweet that Dylan is trying to help him, but I kind of feel like he’s . . . evil. I think he’s got it in for me. I think he’s following me.’
‘Following you?’
‘Or maybe that’s just like the bins, me being totally paranoid. I don’t even know any more. But Dylan’s there now, and there goes our trip to Wiltshire again . . .’ My shoulders shake as I sob. I brush the tears off my skirt. At least it’s black, so they won’t show too much when I’m stood in front of the class again.
‘That in itself is pretty suspicious,’ Deb say. ‘How many of those trips to Wiltshire have you missed because of Marcus?’
‘Four,’ I say, without pause. I know that number like it’s engrained on the inside of my brain. I think about it all the time.
‘Well. There’s something solid you can’t deny.’
‘And Marcus never seems to have a meltdown unless I’m spending the evening with Dylan.’ I glance at the time on my phone screen. ‘Oh, God, I need to pull myself together.’
‘Are we sure this i
s about Marcus, Ads? Not Dylan?’
I blow my nose. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He doesn’t have to go and see Marcus. Does he?’
‘He’s a good friend,’ I say, wiping my eyes. ‘That’s the whole bloody problem.’
‘Right. Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
‘Or maybe he uses Marcus as an excuse.’
I go still. ‘Do you think so?’
‘I really don’t know. But it is pretty strange, this whole situation, and I find it hard to believe the whole mess is all Marcus’s making. I know you think he’s evil, but that does seem a bit simplistic, doesn’t it?’
I know what she means. I’m putting all the problems of my relationship on Marcus because it’s easier than being disappointed in my boyfriend. I’ve thought that before. But then Marcus writes something barbed on his Instagram and I can’t help thinking it’s about me. Or he has a meltdown just when me and Dylan have got through an argument and things are better. Or Dylan comes home from seeing him and looks at me in that weird, wary way and won’t touch me for a little while. And I’ll think, This is Marcus’s doing.
‘I have to go, Deb,’ I say, checking the time again. ‘Thank you for talking me down.’
‘Come over this evening, if you want to. We can play board games with Dad.’
I close my eyes at the thought of it. The comfort of home.
‘Yeah. I’d love that. Thank you.’
When I walk out of the staff toilets, Etienne’s there. I almost go right into him. My heart does a little hiccup as I look up at him.
‘Are you all right?’ he says.
It’s the worst thing he could choose to say right now.
‘Yes.’ My lip is already quivering. ‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks. Just heading to . . .’
He takes my arm. ‘Addie,’ he says.
His voice is deep and sympathetic, and it tips me over the edge. My shoulders start shaking again.