His Other Lover (7 page)

When we got home I was tired and wanted to go straight to bed, but I knew that was probably what he wanted me to do so he could text or call her. It had seemed a good idea, getting him to myself for a few hours, but it had achieved nothing, merely delayed everything.

I couldn’t leave him alone downstairs. We sat silently
watching TV. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do, but neither of us felt like doing it. When I started to fall asleep on the sofa, he woke me up with a little nudge and gently told me to go to bed.

“Will you come too?” I rubbed my eyes sleepily.

In a bit, he said firmly, he just wasn’t quite tired enough and Gloria needed a wee.

I had no choice. I trailed upstairs and got into our cold, big bed. I sat hunched up, clutching my knees to my chest, craning to see if I could hear talking or not. I barely noticed when my own mobile rumbled on the bedside table next to me. It was a text from Clare:

Then I noticed I had another text, this one from Lottie:

I barely registered them as I put the phone back on the table. I managed another five minutes before I crept noiselessly downstairs again and waited for a second behind the closed sitting-room door, listening. I couldn’t hear anything, so I opened the door.

Pete jumped and looked up, startled. I wasn’t looking at him though—his phone was beside him on the sofa. It hadn’t been there when I’d left.

“You all right?” he said.

I couldn’t help myself. I shook my head and, to my disgust, up came the tears
again.
I opened my mouth to say, “I can’t do this. I can’t act like I don’t know.” I wanted to say it, but I couldn’t get it out.

He jumped up and said, “Hey! Hey! It’s not that bad!”

“Not that bad!
Not that bad?!”
I exploded at him. “My whole fucking life has been ripped apart. I don’t know what to do, I don’t feel safe…I don’t know where to put myself…” My voice was heaving with jumbled words and hiccups.

He clutched me to him and said, “Shh! I’m here. You
are
safe. I’m such a dickhead! Of course you don’t want to be upstairs on your own! And you’re ill, too. I’m so sorry. I’ll come to bed now.”

He reached for his phone and switched it off. Then he flung it on to the sofa.

I watched it sitting there dead and still as he rocked me again for what felt like the hundredth time—and a tiny flicker of spirit sparked somewhere in me.

Fuck you, Liz, he’s coming to bed with me,
I thought savagely as I looked at the lifeless mobile, no merrily twinkling lights or buzzing exciting messages. That thought made me feel a little calmer as I allowed him to lead me upstairs like an invalid.

We talked for a bit about the mess everywhere and he stroked my hair softly, which, oddly, made me feel not soothed at all, although I did a happy little sigh anyway.

“Is that nice?” he asked, smiling at me. I nodded gratefully and then felt disgusted with myself for being so limp and useless, so I lay there, tried not to think at all and just closed my eyes. I
tried just to enjoy him stroking me. It didn’t last long though, he drifted off pretty quickly.

Not that it really mattered anyway. All I could think about was his phone lying downstairs on the sofa and what he’d sent her and what she’d sent him. I waited until I was sure he was asleep and then I quietly slipped out of bed.

S
ilently picking up his mobile, I took it into the downstairs loo, locking the door behind me and switching it on. I started to scroll through his messages, but before I had the chance to look for her, she came to me. The phone rumbled in my hand as three new texts delivered.
Three!
The first one said:

Fine thanks, you whore.

The next one was:

The bitch. What a stupid, selfish, self-obsessed little bitch. As far as she knew his house had been wrecked. Bit more important than her shit show.

Then the last one said:

Oh, she had
no right
to be thinking about him, texting him, doing
anything
! I felt insane with anger.

But then, to my horror, the phone buzzed in my hand again. New message:

That had almost made me roar out loud with rage. The sheer force of the anger the words unleashed in me was frightening. I’d started to fumble with the keypad, trying to call her back to tell her to get out of my life and to leave my boyfriend alone, but I was so angry my fingers couldn’t hit the right buttons. She had no right to need him—he wasn’t hers to need.

The phone rumbled again.

I’d stared furiously at the phone. Five messages in the inbox.
Five!
Fucking obsessive.

Then it had occurred to me that they were five messages he was going to know I’d seen. I couldn’t just switch it off and go back to bed…but I couldn’t just delete them either, she’d have a delivery report to show him. It would be impossible to explain away five texts. One was coverable, but five…

I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. I had no choice but to break the phone.

I deleted his inbox—all of it. I checked his sent mail, nothing there at all. Switching it off, I crept into the kitchen and turned on the light. Gloria had sat up and eyed me with interest, pleased to see that I’d come to play. I got her half-opened tin of food out of the fridge and dipped Pete’s phone in it. Then I held it out to Gloria.

She looked at it, sniffed it and then curiously touched the tip of her tongue to it.

“Don’t lick it, you prat,
chew
it,” I hissed at her.

I had to wiggle it around a bit before she got the idea, but finally there were some evident tooth marks and a cracked screen. Before she cut herself I took it away, rinsed the food off and dried it carefully. I removed the back and dropped the SIM card in Gloria’s water bowl. Then I pulled it out again because I wasn’t really sure if it could still work having been dipped in water, so to be on the safe side I pocketed the card, put the battery under the blanket in Gloria’s basket and the actual phone by it. She sniffed it once or twice and then ignored it. Which was good because I didn’t want her to chew it once I was back in bed and die or anything.

After I washed my hands, I eased exhaustedly back into bed beside Pete. My head ached dully with tiredness and my eyes hurt from my earlier crying but the satisfaction of knowing he wouldn’t be calling her in the morning was immense. I imagined her pouting sulkily by the phone, kicking her chair and twisting her hair…
five fucking texts
…and “crap show could do with a chat,” as if her bloody play was important—who gave a shit? I shivered with anger. I’d outwitted her. I didn’t have to just roll over, I wasn’t just helplessly stuck. I could fight.

But then I saw myself in my mind’s eye, pathetically crouched next to Gloria’s basket in the dead of night in my dark kitchen, desperately trying to make her leave teeth marks on the phone screen. How was that fighting? That was just mad. What had this person done to my life? She had me creeping round my own house…I was a grown woman! I had a good job, nice friends, a family whom I loved. Was I really going to be forced into behaving like a lunatic who was losing control? I had to have faced—and beaten—worse in my life than this girl, surely?

It was then, with a sickening thud, that I suddenly thought of Katie.

And, for the first time ever, I wondered if all those years ago she had been telling me the truth.

T
he first time I met Katie properly was at a First Holy Communion class when we were five years old. She was perched on the edge of Sister Ann’s stiff sofa cushions in a sitting room that smelled faintly of boiled cabbage. She was wearing a deep-blue pinafore dress with a red roll neck under it, and her feet couldn’t quite touch the ground. She had her Silver Book clutched tightly to her chest and a small, furry, neon-pink pencil case next to her. Just by looking at her I knew that in that pencil case there was going to be a full selection of neat, non-chewed felt-tip pens with the right lids on them. And none of them would be dried up.

I also noticed, with admiration and envy, her earrings glinting. I wasn’t allowed my ears pierced as my mum said it was common on little girls and that I had to wait until I was twelve.

I must have been staring, because finally Katie said to me, “You’re at my school, aren’t you, in Mrs. Piper’s class? I’m in Mrs. Tundal’s. I read up to page seventeen of the Silver Book already, the bit on loving your neighbor. How far did
you
get?”

I teased her about that for years later. So typically Katie; competitive from the word go.

Despite that first meeting, we didn’t really spend much time together at primary school. Different classes back then were different worlds, we just occasionally went round to each other’s houses for tea.

It all changed when we went to secondary school. We stuck together nervously on our first day because we sort of knew each other, her in her pristine long white socks and slip-on shoes, me in the brown T-bar monstrosities from Jones the Bootmaker that my mother had insisted on making me wear because my feet rolled in. I looked like I was wearing a giant shit on each foot. But Katie stuck by me and even stood up for me when I got teased about the shoes
and
my A-line skirt and tight cardigan.

“She can’t help it,” Katie would say, her pencil skirt pulled tight as she stuck one hip out defiantly, baggy cardigan slipping off her shoulder, “her mum makes her. It’s not
her
fault.”

I got teased mercilessly about those bloody shoes. I was sent to deliver a message to a teacher who was teaching a sixth-form class and the whole room fell silent when I walked shyly in.

“Oh my God!” cried a girl with spiky hair and electric-blue eyeshadow. “What
has
that first year got on her feet?” Twenty pairs of eyes swiveled to look at me and then the whole room fell about laughing. I felt my face flush bright red and I tripped slightly in my haste as I stumbled out of the room. “She can’t even stand up in them!” someone else shouted as I desperately tried to close the door behind me. I cried for hours in the loos afterward with Katie patiently holding out tissues. “They’re all stupid,” she said helpfully. “Ignore them. I could help you look better…if you like.”

“You know, you could be pretty,” she said in her bedroom several days later. We were sitting on her bed, ready to commence
my makeover. “You look a bit like her,” she went on, pointing to a girl dressed in a tartan puffball skirt in the latest
Jackie
we were flicking through. It had been a satisfying day of messing around with Katie’s mum’s hundred bottles of different-colored nail varnishes and going through her jewelry box, followed by us recording ourselves doing a pretend radio show on Katie’s cassette player, before Katie had decided it was time to get down to business. “You’ve got nice hair, but it’s too long,” she said knowledgeably. “You should get it cut, and maybe perm it.” She looked at my dead-straight, thick brown hair thoughtfully. “That would be cool.”

“My mum wouldn’t let me,” I protested.

“How comes your mum is so strict?” Katie said, reaching for her makeup bag and pulling me to the edge of the bed. “I’m going to do your eyes first. Browns or blues?”

“Blues, please. She’s not strict really. Although I wish she’d let me go to the cinema with you and watch
Ghost
!”

“Yeah, it was good. Keep still.”

“Mum said it wasn’t suitable.
Oww!
”

“Hmm. I think these eyelash curlers need a new rubber bit—did I pinch the skin?”

“A little bit.” I winced, my eyes watering. “Okay—I’m all right now.”

“So do you think it’s cos you don’t have a dad?”

I kept very still. “I don’t think so,” I said slowly.

“Mum says your dad lives in another country now with new children.”

I didn’t say anything, I just sat there silently hating Katie’s mum more than I thought possible.

“I wish my dad would go and live in another country,” Katie sighed. “He’s grumpy, fat and we never get to watch what we
want on TV. I think you’re lucky.” She smiled at me. I smiled back and suddenly it was all okay again. “So,” she said, reaching for the frosted-pink lipstick, “if you had to choose between New Kids on the Block Joey or Jordan Knight, which would it be?”

In the second year, Katie continued my conversion from geek to Little Miss Popular by taking me to Freeman Hardy Willis and helping me choose a pair of white plastic slip-on shoes which I proudly changed into at the end of my road every day. My poor mum never was any the wiser and remained utterly confused as to why my feet continued to roll in.

It was Katie who showed me how to roll my skirt up. It was Katie who eventually persuaded my mum to let me have my waist-long hair cut to shoulder length and Katie who held my hand when I finally got my ears pierced. Katie who I made up a dance routine to Madonna’s “Vogue” with—that I can probably still do. Katie who used to wait outside McDonald’s for me so we could hang around town aimlessly every Saturday. Katie who I went to my first disco with. Katie who told me about her first kiss in lurid detail, Katie who I made laugh so much once she was actually sick. Katie who held my hand when I puked everywhere after first getting drunk on Taboo. Katie who I went on holiday to Ibiza with after our A-levels. Katie who helped me choose my uni course and Katie who broke my heart twice over by purposefully going to bed with my then boyfriend Dan.

I can remember it like it was yesterday, running breathlessly and excitedly up the stairs in Dan’s halls of residence, the straps of my overnight bag digging into my shoulder. Ringing the doorbell, one of his friends opening the front door and going, “Mia? Er…” his eyes darting nervously toward Dan’s closed door, “he’s not in right now.” Me saying confusedly, “But I can hear his stereo.” Him looking embarrassed and me suddenly realizing
there was something in that room I wasn’t meant to see. Pushing past him, calling, “Dan? Hello? It’s me!” and shoving the door open. Dan’s horrified face as he reached for his T-shirt, shouting “Mia! Don’t! It’s not what it looks like! We just got drunk and fell asleep!” Me realizing someone was in bed with him and somehow getting across his room while Jay-Z blared out “Hard Knock Life,” my bag slipping off my shoulders and my train ticket falling from my fingers as he scrabbled out of bed, knocking over a can of lager and an ashtray, still in his jeans, the stale smell of cigarettes and musty boys’ clothes in the air. Me shouting, “What’s going on?,” hot tears springing to my eyes as I tried to pull back the duvet cover while this girl clasped it tightly around her. Dan’s arms around me, attempting to hold me back, me wriggling free, him going “Shit! Oh shit!” as I tore desperately at the duvet and ripped it back…to reveal Katie’s frightened face.

The funny thing is I can’t remember how on earth I got back to university after that. I just remember walking back into the student kitchen in our halls and Louise looking up from the magazine she was reading and exclaiming, “You’re back? Wasn’t he there?” as I promptly burst into tears.

I cried solidly for about twenty-four hours with Louise and Amanda sitting beside me, fending off nosy parkers on our corridor and random people knocking on my door shouting, “phone call.” Louise finally went down when Katie rang for the hundredth time and told her I never wanted to speak to her again and that she was a fucking bitch. Amanda shouted, “You’re a two-timing lying shit!” out of the window when Dan imploringly shouted up, begging to be let in, saying that he’d traveled all the way from Newcastle to see me—that he had to see me, had to explain, needed me to take him back. Amanda chucked some cold noodles down at him and he gave up in the end and went home.

I never saw Dan again after that, apart from once in Birmingham New Street Station, of all places, about four years later. I glanced up and there he was in a suit, clutching a newspaper, a couple of platforms away, just staring at me. It was one of those weird moments that feel like everything and nothing all in one go. I looked at the first boy I ever had sex with and who had passionately kissed me for a whole afternoon once, only pausing to tell me he loved me and that we’d be together forever—and he smiled politely. He half waved and I half waved back. Then my train pulled in and that was it.

As for Katie, I didn’t see her at all for five years after that afternoon. It was quite easy to avoid her. I stayed in when I went home for the holidays and got used to hearing my mum say, “She won’t come to the phone, Katherine, I’m afraid.” I took a year out after university that I spent traveling and when I finally moved back to England, penniless and desperate for a bed that was clean and in one place, I built my social life in London with my old uni friends. Our paths simply never crossed.

Until one day I walked into a café to get a coffee and, bizarrely, there was Katie, sitting on her own, reading a magazine. She looked up as I walked in and saw her and we both froze.

Neither of us spoke for what felt like forever, until she finally said, “Well, what a small world. Or fate. One of the two. Why don’t you join me?”

I think I was so stunned to see her after all this time that I did as I was told. We talked about where she was living, how her mum and dad were, where I worked, what I was up to. Everything but what had happened all those years ago.

We carried on for about half an hour like that, politely trading stories and inconsequential details when she suddenly blurted, “I never properly slept with him, you know.”

The air sucked out of the space around us and I looked at her directly. “I saw you in his bed. I was there, remember?”

She looked at me pleadingly. “I really didn’t set out to do anything. I just went up to see him, he was my friend first if you remember. We all went out and got trashed, came back blind pissed and I slept in his bed. I woke up to find him kissing me.”

“So it was his fault?”

She sighed. “No, it was my fault too. I should have told you I was going up there. Neither of us should have got pissed. I should have told him to get off…”

“But you didn’t,” I said quietly.

There was silence.

She looked at the table. “I should have done. I’m sorry.” Reaching for a sugar wrapper she began to play with it. “It’s not like you would have stayed with him anyway,” she said eventually.

“How do you know?” I said quickly. “I might have.”

We fell silent again.

I picked up a ketchup sachet and fiddled with the corners of it as I stared at the table and thought about Dan. “Suppose it had all happened differently.” I looked up at her challengingly. “If I hadn’t come up for that weekend to surprise him, would I ever have known? Would you ever have told me?”

She looked back at me unflinchingly. “Probably not. Because it meant nothing.”

“It didn’t mean nothing—it meant everything! I lost my boyfriend…and my best mate.”

She went quiet for a moment. “I lost you, too.” She ripped fiercely at the sugar wrapper and stared at the table. “And I really missed you.”

Then she looked up. “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “Can you forgive me?”