Chances (21 page)

The elderly thief returned to That Shop the next day. She chose her time carefully. It wouldn’t have done to have come in during a quiet period. The young woman would have felt obliged to chat about trees and coincidences. There couldn’t be burgeoning familiarity; formal introductions were to be avoided; the customary exchanging of pleasantries would suffice. The woman knew that the girl’s name was Vita – she’d heard the other man, the awful one, use it. He’d used it that day last year when he’d caught her taking a pretty thing. Vita! he’d said, I’ve got her! Get the door! Right, he’d said, you’re coming with me – or would you rather I got the police. Such ugly words,
get
and
got
. So unnecessary. It wasn’t about grammar, it was about talking
nicely
. People weren’t taught so, nowadays. The man the young woman had been with on Friday evening – he was a good one. She could tell. The eyes. And she’d seen him before, right there at Wynfordbury Hall.

Tea-time, school’s-out time – that was when she returned to That Shop. And though Vita felt relieved – almost joyous – when she showed up at the busiest time, she instinctively felt it would be wrong to greet her over and above the way she usually did. What she really wanted was for everything to be as it had been. And so, Vita simply said, Hullo, can I help you today? though she’d already noted that a biro in the shape of a miniature ice-cream cone was safely in the woman’s bag.

Then the shop phone went anyway and the lady could slope away without the need for polite come-again-soons.

‘That Shop? Hullo? Hullo?’

‘Is that Vita?’

‘Yes? Can I help you? Hullo?’

It had been a woman, but the line appeared to have gone dead.

‘Yes. I mean, I don’t know.’ She was back. ‘Who is this?’ asked Vita. ‘Hullo?’

‘This is Suzie.’

Vita glanced to the window, as if she might see her standing there again. But only two small faces, squashing up pig-like against the pane, stared back while their mothers chatted.

‘Vita?’

‘Yes. This is Vita. What is it that you want?’

‘I – I –’ The voice cracked.

Is she crying?

‘Hullo? Are you OK?’

‘No. I don’t know. I don’t even know why I’m phoning you.’

‘Is everything OK? Is Tim all right?’ Vita suddenly thought how she hadn’t heard from him at all, let alone seen him since that time in his car.

‘I just – I just. I’m sorry.’ In the background, Vita could hear Suzie trying to control her sobbing. ‘I wanted to know if it would be OK if I met you somewhere. I just wanted to ask you – if we could talk.’

In the early weeks following her break-up with Tim, Vita used to pray for such an opportunity. That’s why she’d honed those soliloquies, practised until word perfect in front of the mirror or out into the darkness of sleepless hours. There had been an acute contradiction between wanting to let this girl know that she was nothing and that Vita was everything to Tim – to telling this girl all the heinous details about him. Either way, back then, Vita’s driving force was to see her off and keep the road clear of obstacles for Tim to return to her, contrite, restored and on bended knee. Back then, though she knew she’d done the right thing by telling him to go – oh, how she hoped it might instigate his epiphany, to serve as the short sharp shock to inspire him to change his ways and return to her. Today, when the call had ended, Vita had dialled for the caller’s number. A load of digits were repeated back at her. Suzie hadn’t withheld her number. She wasn’t hiding today. Something significant had changed.

At Starbucks, faffing with the froth of a cappuccino, Vita waited for Suzie. All the old soliloquies were in a jumble. Though intensely curious and very uneasy, Vita realized that she needed to listen before she could talk. And then, hopefully, she’d know what to say.

Here she is.

Vita can’t help but feel just slightly deflated by her slim shapely legs in black leggings, the handkerchief vest-top revealing toned tanned arms. Vita makes a sizeable withdrawal from her Bank of Karma account when she notes, with some satisfaction, hair that’s been bleached too often, an ungainly nose and not very good skin. But she also sees anxious eyes brimming with distress and a hollowness to her posture which Vita recognizes at once. It’s a virus she once had. It’s doing the rounds.

‘Vita?’ Suzie has bought herself a bottle of water.

‘Did you want a coffee?’ Vita asks as Suzie sits down. She shakes her head and busies herself opening the sports cap and taking urgent sips.

‘Does Tim know you’re here?’

Again, Suzie shakes her head.

‘OK.’ Vita watches how Suzie’s eyes flit everywhere, anywhere, but to Vita.

‘Are you OK?’

She shrugs. Sips. Flits.

‘How can I help?’

Vita’s voice is soft, kind. She’s surprised herself in that she feels no satisfaction at this girl’s obvious distress. She’s partly curious – who wouldn’t be – but her overriding feeling is surprising; it’s empathy. She’s been there, she’s done it, she threw the T-shirt away.

‘What’s he done?’ Vita asks.

Now Suzie looks up and as she checks Vita’s gaze for any signs of malicious redress and finds none, her eyes brim with tears. She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I have no proof,’ she says. ‘I just have the strongest – vibe.’

Vita sighs. How often she had used the same sentence herself, to Michelle, to Candy.

‘It’s hard for me to tell you this,’ Suzie says.

Vita nods. ‘I can imagine.’

‘He says he’s coming over – then doesn’t show. His phone is off at odd times. He spends nights I don’t know where – but not at mine and I don’t think at his.’

‘Oh God,’ says Vita, remembering such scenarios and the acid anxiety she’d feel.

‘I know he did it to you,’ Suzie really can’t look at her for this one. ‘With me.’

The two women look at each other, eyes locked for the first time. Then Suzie hangs her head.

‘And you fear he’s doing it to you – with someone else?’ Vita asks quietly.

Suzie nods. She lowers her voice, as if ashamed. ‘I found something – on his phone. I found a text. A few actually. Between him and someone else. And at first, the name didn’t alarm me – it’s a man’s. But there were so many texts, I just thought I’d have a quick look.’ She looks at Vita. ‘You know, to put my mind at rest.’ Vita nods for her. ‘You know, to prove to myself I was just being a silly cow.’ Vita nods again for her. A tear drips down Suzie’s cheek and she sniffs snottily. ‘They were the kind of texts we used to send each other.’

Vita feels suddenly cold.

The women stare at each other again. On the worry lines on Suzie’s forehead, Vita sees guilt and regret writ large. ‘I’m sorry,’ Suzie whispers and she tiptoes her fingers over the tabletop to rest lightly on Vita’s. ‘I’m sorry.’ And then she pulls herself together, takes her hands back to her lap. She’s not here for Vita, she’s here for herself. ‘Whoever she is, he’s given her a code name,’ she says, hoarsely.

‘Dermott Hogan?’ Vita asks.

Suzie’s jaw drops. ‘How did you know
that
?’

‘That’s the name he gave to your number too. I discovered it when I felt beside myself – like you do now – when I felt I had no option but to search for clues.’

Suzie is stilled into silence. Dermott Hogan. It’s so premeditated, so underhand, deceitful, so sleazy that if Tim was to walk in right now she’d slap him across the face and yell, Fuck you. Then she slumps. Dermott Hogan exists; Tim’s invented partner in crime.

‘I’ve phoned the number,’ Suzie admits, ‘and it
is
a woman.’ She looks at Vita. ‘Do you think I should say something?’

Vita shrugs. ‘I don’t know how to advise you.’

‘I am caught between not wanting to ever see him again – and some stupid instinct to see this Dermott Hogan woman off and win Tim back.’

Vita shudders. It’s too odd – carbon-copies of all the emotions and utterly irrational theories she experienced at Tim’s mistreatment; now owned by her polar opposite and, until recently, her nemesis. Vita looks at Suzie. No doubt Candy would say, Revenge is justified, go for it – this is karma paying out for you. But Vita feels, now that she herself has mended, that there’s something about a fellow sufferer which makes her feel peculiarly compelled to offer only support.

‘How I wanted to hate you – you don’t mind me saying that, do you?’

Suzie’s expression – startled, amused, ashamed – says it’s OK.

‘I, too, wanted you to know that you were nothing and that I was everything to Tim,’ Vita says. ‘But at the same time I wanted you to know how morally inept he is. I wanted you to know that he proposed to me. I wanted you to know how derogatory he was about you when I found out. I wanted to tell you that if he couldn’t change for
me
– he certainly wouldn’t be changing for
you
.’

They both linger over Vita’s words. Strange as it seems to both of them, no offence was meant and none has been taken.

‘Now Dermott Hogan is back,’ Vita sighs, as if a bad penny has just turned up. ‘You see, if a man shacks up with his lover, a job position becomes available.’

‘But I love him!’

A tiny part of Vita still wants to automatically react, Oi! But she knows now it’s just habit, past conditioning, a reflex. ‘
Do
you love him?’ she asks Suzie. ‘Or is it the idea of taming him, the challenge and chance of winning the heart of someone like Tim?’

Suzie shrugs.

‘He’s set in his ways,’ Vita says. ‘When I found out about you I just sobbed at him,
It’s not about getting away with it, it’s about not fucking it up in the first place
.’

Suzie thinks Vita is so right, so clever. She didn’t realize how pretty, in the flesh, she is. She feels comforted – as if by a wiser, older sister. But what is she to do?

‘Suzie, whether he loves you – whether he loved me – he’s only capable of loving to a certain level. Which isn’t enough for you or me. Or anyone in their right mind and with basic self-respect, really. No one’s special to Tim, apart from Tim. He’s the most self-centred person – by that, I mean he has a quite staggering lack of regard for other people’s feelings. Are you content to mean only a limited amount to him?’

‘If he thought he was going to lose me, he’d change!’ But Suzie’s battle cry was brittle and Vita remembered how she’d clung to that very belief herself.

‘Suzie – what is it you want?’

‘A relationship.’ She answered quickly and with conviction.

‘One like this?’

Suzie thinks about it. Looks embarrassed as she shakes her head. ‘My mate Anna has some annoying phrase – Horses for Courses. She says you wouldn’t ride the Grand National on a donkey. She says Tim’s suited to the casual stuff but he isn’t made for more.’

‘Well, your friend Anna’s a genius,’ Vita says. ‘She’s spot on. Tim won’t give you more. It is not possible for him to do so. It’s in his make-up. Or not in his make-up. His ethics are very different – I think they’re fundamentally skewed. That’s not subjectively speaking – give anyone a list of Tim’s demeanours and they would define his behaviour as categorically wrong.’

‘People fuck up.’

‘They do. Of course they do.’ She looks at Suzie, all crumpled. ‘But it’s not a person’s mistakes which define them – it’s the way they make amends.’ Vita remembers how she’d written the phrase again and again on Post-its – initially, it was for her to access the forgiveness for which Tim was begging. Later, it was to strengthen her resolve. She shrugs at Suzie. ‘Tim’s possibly doing to you exactly what he did to me. He hasn’t changed his ways.’

Suzie is very quiet, very still, captivated by all Vita has said, knowing it’s pure common sense, aware now of the path any sensible self-respecting girl should take. She’s also frozen by a thought. She slumps a little. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this –’ Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll just make something else up. But after a pause, she shakes her head at herself. ‘I wasn’t going to ever tell you this, but do you know something – he keeps all the texts you send him. Even the dull-as-shit ones about till receipts and orders.’ Her eyes are filling again. ‘I think you’re the one he really loves.’

Vita broods on this for a while. It is slightly satisfying. But it changes nothing. ‘Tim’s “real” love isn’t sufficient for me, Suzie. I don’t think anyone should settle for so little.’ She thinks hard. ‘It wasn’t love – not in the true sense. On my part, it was neediness, insecurity, dependence, habit – desperate to feel loved by a man who was often so ambivalent towards me. I was caught in a vicious circle. But it wasn’t love.’ God, that feels liberating.

‘I wanted to move in with him,’ says Suzie, ‘and the less he wanted to talk about it, the more I wanted it. I wanted to feel he liked me enough to jump at the chance.’

‘Listen to me, Suzie. I have never been as lonely as I was when I was living with Tim.’ Vita pauses, sees how she’s struck a very strong chord with Suzie. ‘God – if I heard it once I heard it dozens of times from my closest friends – do not judge
yourself
by how Tim treats you. Judge
him
. You know, if my friends’ husbands are out of the room when their phones ring or texts come through, they think nothing of picking up and passing on messages. What is there to hide? Nothing. In a mutually trusting and wholesome relationship, there is nothing to hide; life is shared.’

Suzie nods. And rests, head bowed. And nods some more. And finally, when she’s ready, she looks up at Vita. ‘Thanks,’ she says. And Vita can’t believe she feels like doing this – but she reaches across the table, across the sticky smudges from someone else’s mochaccino foam and she lays her hand on Suzie’s. ‘You’re young,’ she smiles at her, ‘and
a stunna.
’ She says it in a funny accent but she says it with kindness. ‘You deserve someone you can trust, whose phone holds no fear for you, who doesn’t disappear, who is where he says he is. Someone who speaks respectfully about their ex. Someone who treats you well. Who’s kind. Someone who doesn’t know a Dermott Hogan. Ultimately, you simply deserve someone who leaps with joy at the end of each day at the thought of coming home to you.’