When I open the door, the man standing on the doorstep asks my name and then quickly thrusts a clip-board at me, matter-of-factly telling me to sign and initial for the parcel he offers me with his other hand.
Staring at my name written on the front of the brown parcel, trying furiously to figure out who on earth can not only have tracked me down so quickly but will also want to send me anything, I retreat into my own bedroom and sit on the bed.
A feeling of dread overcomes me as it suddenly dawns on me who it’s from. I turn the parcel over in my hands, and not finding a return address that would confirm my fears, I rip off the top of the parcel and empty the contents on to the bed.
A single cassette tape lands on my pillow, the words “Dear Andrew, Please listen to this. Love Kate” written in blue ink on the inside sleeve of the cassette box.
I stare at it, not daring to touch it or move it, my heart beating faster and my breathing growing deep and slow. I feel slightly ill. A mixture of emotions wells up within me, the most prominent being anger: “Why won’t she leave me alone?”
I look briefly around the room, as if looking for guidance on what to do next. Then the answer comes to me and it is so simple. Getting up from the bed, I pick up the cassette tape and drop it into the wicker waste-paper basket under my desk. Problem solved.
..
Chapter Nine
Saturday Evening
..
..
“This,” Guy is explaining to me, “has got to be the best bar in Britain.”
The reason why is self explanatory. I think it would be impossible to find somewhere with a more impressive view than the one you have from the deck of the “Tattershill Castle”, an old steamer docked against the Embankment on the Thames, directly opposite the London Eye, and only several hundred yards from Big Ben and Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. The sun is shining, the air is warm, and the deck of the boat is alive with hundreds of smartly dressed young people. There is a tangible feeling of excitement in the atmosphere, an air of expectation that is shared all across the capital as the beautiful people of London leave their houses and throng into streets, the pubs and clubs, and open air beer gardens, starting their evening with a relaxed drink and wondering where the evening ahead will take them, what they will see, what they will do and who they will meet.
It’s just the three of us tonight. Guy, Sal and myself. At first I can’t help but feel a little like a gooseberry, but by the time the first beer is almost empty, we are enjoying ourselves too much for me to still feel unwanted.
After another drink Sal decides to take us to her favourite sushi restaurant in London.
We eat too much. We laugh. We drink too much saki.
And it feels good. To be enjoying ourselves. To be in London on a Saturday night. Alive, happy and amongst friends. I realise now just how much I have missed Guy, and how glad I am to be back in the fold.
And the night is still so young…
..
Chapter Ten
The Morning after the night before
..
..
The next afternoon I wake with the biggest hangover I have had in years. I spend the rest of the day in bed, regretting profusely having moved from restaurant to pub to nightclub, and from saki to beer, and then onto cocktails.
It’s just before nine o’clock when I manage to sneak into my seat at work on the Monday morning, adopting the lowest profile I can manage. I still feel like shit, my mouth still taste likes shit, and I’m sure I look like shit. Whereas the headache from last night has mostly worn off by now, my body is still suffering from what I am sure can only be described as severe alcohol poisoning. My hangover has now officially become the second worst hangover of my adult life, eclipsed only by the infamous Hogmanay Hangover of 1998, which took the prize for suffering mainly due to the copious number of times I had to pay homage to the porcelain bowl on the morning of the 1st January. The worst beginning to any new year that I can ever remember.
How I got so drunk last night I can’t exactly remember, but the “why” is more obvious to me.
Kate.
To dull the pain and make her go away…
..
Unfortunately, my delicate condition soon becomes the butt of humour for the whole department, when during the morning’s marketing meeting I stupendously fail to stay awake. Upon being rudely awoken by a sharp elbow in the ribs from one of my colleagues, I find that my boss has just asked me a question that I have not heard.
“Sorry, I was just thinking about something else…” I blurt out in apology.
A round of laughter. James looks sternly at me, then moves on to ask someone else. After the meeting he asks me to stay behind for a moment. I am expecting the Spanish Inquisition, but surprisingly I don’t receive it. Instead he just looks at me silently for a little while, asks me if I am okay, and reminds me that the customer presentation I am working on needs completing by tomorrow morning.
Nothing else is said, but when I leave the room I know that I have just been warned. A lesson quickly learned. Saturday night was a rite of passage into London life that I won’t be doing again, …at least not any time soon.
..
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..
At lunchtime I bump into Gail in the company canteen, the girl that I met in the Lemon Tree last Friday at the end of my first week at work. Laughing, she asks me if it is really true that I fell asleep during James’s meeting, informing me that I have become a Euro.com legend, and that everyone in the company has heard through the grapevine what I did.
“Ouch. That’s perhaps not the best impression to make in the first month of a new job,” I reply.
“Don’t worry about it. At least everyone has heard of you now. There’s no such thing as bad advertising, right?”
I smile at her. Maybe she is right.
“So, are you coming to the Lemon Tree on Friday again?” she asks.
“Maybe. Is it a regular thing?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty much every Friday night. It’s not always the same people, but everyone knows that come Friday night, as soon as it’s five o’clock, it’s time to get there quick for Happy Hour and you can be sure of some good company. It’s fun. You should come this Friday too. It’s a good way to meet people.”
“Thanks. I suppose I should meet some new people. After last Saturday night, it’ll be a while before I trust my flatmate enough to take me out for a drink again.”
..
--------------------------
..
“Your sister called,” Guy shouts at me as I walk in through the door, dumping my laptop bag on the floor and walking into the kitchen to grab a drink of water. It’s really hot outside today, and the train back to Clapham Junction was packed, full of people sucking on bottles of water and trying not to melt in commuter hell. I could only look on enviously, taking a mental note that in London a bottle of water is a fundamental travel aid that one cannot live without.
Walking back into my room and lying on the bed, I wonder if I should call her back tonight. Having a big sister is great. I love her to bits. I do. But, I’m pretty sure that anything she wants to talk to me about just now is probably Kate related.
“Hi Hannah. So how are you?” I ask, giving in, as I always do.
“Fine. So, have you heard from her?” she asks, getting straight to the point.
For a moment I consider lying to her. It would be far simpler just to bend the truth a little. To avoid what will come next if I say yes. Better to say no.
“Yes,” I hear myself replying.
“So what did she say?” she asks.
My eyes stray to the basket underneath my desk where I can just make out the corner of the cassette box poking out from under a few pieces of crumpled paper.
“I don’t know,” I hesitate. But with Hannah, as always, the truth will out. “She sent me a tape. An old-fashioned cassette. And a short note, telling me to listen to i
t.”
“And did you?”
“Obviously not, otherwise I would know what she said,” I reply sarcastically.
“Why not?”
“Come on Hannah. Give me a break. I don’t want anything more to do with her. I never want to speak to her again. Every single second spent thinking about her is a second stolen from getting on with the rest of my real life.”
“Andrew. Stop being stupid. Listen to the tape, and give me a call back when you’ve done it. Okay? I love you.” And she hangs up, the pips ringing in my ears.
I drop the handset on the bed, lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling. I hate my sister.
---------------------------
..
Guy has gone round to Sals, the flat is empty, and I am just finishing off the last few mouthfuls of a particularly spicy vegetable curry take away.
The inevitability of what is going to happen next really bugs me. I know that Hannah is right. She’s always bloody right. I have to listen to the tape, because if I don’t I will always wonder what Kate had wanted to say to me. I’m mad because Kate has chosen exactly the right way to force me to listen to her. If she’d written me a letter, I could have sent it back, or burnt it. If she’d called me, I could have just hung up, although she doesn’t have my number so there’s no danger of that happening. But by sending me the tape she is forcing me to listen to her, to give her the time of day that she simply does not deserve. I resent the power the stupid cassette has over me, it now compelling me to do exactly what I don’t want to do.
I close my bedroom door and switch on my desktop light, pulling the wicker basket out from under the wooden table. Picking out the tape from underneath the rubbish, I sit on the edge of my bed, staring at the harbinger of confusion that is in my hands. It takes ten minutes before I have the courage to lean across to my newly purchased Denon hi-fi deck and flick open the cassette tray, remove ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and flip Kate’s tape in. I push play, switch off the light and lie back on the bed in the dark, the room lit only faintly by the blue LCD lights flickering on the hi-fi amplifier. My heart is thumping even harder in my chest now and my forehead is clammy. I take a few deep breathes trying to regain control of my emotions.
Hearing the sound of her voice makes my heart beat even faster and I suddenly feel butter flies swarming in my stomach. A picture of Kate appears in my mind’s eye.
“Andrew,” her voice is soft and quiet. As she speaks I can hear her words quivering with emotion, and in my mind, I can see that she has probably just been crying. She sniffs. Probably wiping away another tear.
“Andrew…I’m really sorry…I’m so very, very sorry. I didn’t want it to end like this. Not like this.”
There is a slight pause, during which I think to myself, ‘Aha…but you’re admitting that you did want to end it?’, before her voice continues.
“I love you Andrew, very much. I always have. And what happened between me and Mike didn’t mean anything. If it helps, I haven’t seen him again, and I’m not going to. I’m not seeing anyone now, and it’ll be a long time before I will even think about anything like that…I love you.”
She hesitates, her voice quivering again, and I can hear the tears beginning to flow. Pathetically, I am crying now as well. Quietly.
“This is really hard…I’m hoping that you are listening to this, and I’m sorry that this is the only way that I can talk to you. I would really prefer to sit down with you and talk face to face, but…Andrew, I never meant to hurt you…” Sobbing. A lot of tears. Mostly mine. I breathe in deeply and swallow hard. This is exactly what I didn’t want. Her voice is reaching into me and stirring it all up again. Bringing it all back. Making me weak. Bastard! I’ve got to stop this…
I sit up on the edge of the bed and reach out to touch the ‘Stop’ button, but don’t quite make it before her voice carries on and stops me in mid-movement.
“In a strange way, I’m glad I did it though,” she says. “Because it brought us closure.”
Closure?
“It’s like our relationship was dying, and we were just clinging on to something that shouldn’t really exist anymore. You didn’t trust me and it’s almost seemed as if you wanted me to do something really bad. So subconsciously, maybe I just obliged, knowing that once I did, it would be over between us for good. Not that I really planned to sleep with anyone else. It’s just that it couldn’t really go on like it was, and your lack of trust in me was driving a wedge between us. It’s almost like you couldn’t accept that a woman could ever love you as much as I did, so you deliberately started to push me away. No...no, we’ve been over this a hundred times before. Come on Andrew, it wasn’t my fault….Sorry, I mean, yes, it was my fault. It was me that slept with someone else, but it’s almost as if you were deliberately pressurising me do it!”
Suddenly I am furious. How the fuck is it my fault that she slept with someone else? How the fuck is it my fault that she was unfaithful, and how the fuck can I be the one that drove her away…?”
“...Andrew, you killed us. Not me. No, we killed us. Both of us, I mean, it wasn’t just my fault”
I am staring at the tape machine now, past the cassette deck and the tape endlessly winding on and on, my fingers digging deeply into the soft covers over the edge of my bed, when from out of nowhere another random image of Kate appears in my mind, this time smiling at me.
“How the hell did I drive you away?” I cry aloud. “How?”
“Andrew, I know you’re probably wondering why I had to talk to you, and you’re probably thinking that I’m going to beg you to take me back. But I’m not. I do miss you. A lot. Since you walked out of the door and slammed it shut after you, I haven’t been able to sleep properly or stop thinking about you at all. With you gone, it’s like my right arm has been cut off. I can’t function properly, …because you are not here. But I know it’s over. And I know that you won’t come back. But I love you, and for your sake, and because I love you, I have to tell you that you HAVE TO START LEARNING TO TRUST WOMEN! You have to have…”
A fury erupts within me and I jump to my feet, punching the air and screaming aloud.
“Trust? Trust women? What the fuck are you talking about? How fucking rich is that coming from you! You slept with some fucking random guy from a night club, whilst we were LIVING TOGETHER, and you say I should trust women? Are you fucking MAD?”
As I reach forward to the tape deck my hands are shaking uncontrollably with anger, the last thing I hear her say before I whip out the cassette and start to pull out the thin brown tape, loop after loop, forming spaghetti all over my bed, is … “and I can guess why you’ve gone down to London, and I think it’s the right thing to do. It’s probably the best thing you’ve ever done. I just wish you had done it before, then maybe you and I would still be...”
..
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..
I lie in the dark for a long time. It takes a while for my heart to stop pounding, for the adrenaline to run its course, and for the tears to eventually stop. Men don’t cry much, but when they do, they don’t mess around. Except I don’t just cry. I sob my heart out; my shoulders shaking violently as an almost primordial release of emotion wells up within me, overflows and explodes on the apathetic world around. At first I am sobbing and crying along with my own tears, but then I begin to feel strangely distant from myself, and I am like an impartial observer watching the rising and falling of my own chest and listening to the cries pouring out of my own mouth. Amidst it all, I feel strangely in control, as if I could stop myself from dissolving at any point, but I realise that this is good, that this is healthy, that this is what I should I have done a long time ago. And so I go with the flow, sink back into myself, and cry along with my tears. The healing has begun.
When I am finished, I am exhausted. My hands, I realise, are lying palm up on the bed beside me, and I am lying with my head to the side, staring at the static blue light on the front display of
my hi-fi.
I feel strangely relaxed. Almost good.
I am no longer angry with Kate. For a moment I wonder if I am disappointed that after all my running away from her, worried that she might try to track me down and find me, that in fact she only wanted to say good bye and give me some advice. Perhaps I knew all along that she wouldn’t want me back. Perhaps the running away and hiding was just a stupid, childish way of trying to regain some control over the whole, fucked up, mess.
And then I start to think about what she said.
Was it really all my fault? Did I really push her away? Did I honestly drive her into the arms of another man, even whilst she was still in love with me? Is there any sense to be had from all this, or is it just the inevitability of all relationships, that eventually they all just break down and collapse into a mire of confusion, mind-games and pain? When two people both speak the same language in words that neither person understands?
I feel a softness brushing against my fingers, which then curl in childish reflex around the expanded spaghetti that was until a few minutes ago the voice of Kate. A pang of regret hits me as I remember her last words, and I wonder what more she would have said to me if I had not destroyed the cassette.
Leaning over to my lamp, I switch on the light and stare at the remnants of the tape, inspecting it to see if there is any way I could resurrect her voice from the destruction I have wrought. Sadly, I realise that as ever I have been customarily thorough in my vandalism. I shall never know for sure the exact words she wanted to say, but actually, I know that it’s not so important after all: somehow I know what she was going to tell me. She knows exactly why I’m here in London. And perhaps she is right. Perhaps, if I had come to London when I first knew, then perhaps emotionally I would be in a different place now. And perhaps, just perhaps, Kate and I would still have been together.
The Sleeping Truth : A Romantic Thriller (Omnibus Edition containing both Book One and Book Two) Page 4