How to Fall in Love (8 page)

‘Broken relationships,’ I offered.

‘You left yours. I was left. Doesn’t count.’

‘Don’t take my leaving my husband personally.’

‘I can if I want.’

I sighed. ‘So tell me about you. Maria said you’d lost your spark over a year ago, which was a comment that has really stayed with me.’

‘Yeah, that has stayed with me too,’ he interrupted, with false animation. ‘I’m wondering if she’d realised that before or after she fucked my best friend, or perhaps it was during. Now wouldn’t that be a fine thing?’

I didn’t respond to that, allowed him to have his moment. ‘What were you like when your mother passed away? How did you behave?’

Maria had also revealed that detail over the phone, disclosing much of Adam’s life and his problems as though I was a long and trusted friend who knew all of this information anyway. I’m sure she would have been far more careful with her words had she known the real situation, but she didn’t, it wasn’t her business, and so I’d let her talk; her rant an attempt to justify her actions and also a way for me to be enlightened on aspects of Adam’s life that perhaps he wouldn’t have shared with me himself.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s helpful to me.’

‘Will it be helpful to me?’

‘Your mother passed away, your sister moved away, your father is sick, your girlfriend has met someone else. I think that your girlfriend leaving you was the trigger. Perhaps you can’t deal with people leaving. Perhaps you feel abandoned. You know, if you can recognise your triggers, it can help with being aware of those negative thoughts before you drop into the downward spiral. Maybe when someone leaves you now, you connect with how you felt when you were five years old.’

I was impressed with myself but I seemed to be the only one.

‘I think you should stop playing therapist.’

‘I think you should go and see a real one, but for some reason you won’t and I’m the best you’ve got.’

He was silenced by that. Whatever his reasons, that didn’t seem to be an option. Still, I was hoping I’d get him there eventually.

Adam sighed and sat back in the chair, looking up at the chandelier as if it was that which had asked him the question. ‘I was five years old, Lavinia was ten. Mum had cancer. It was all very sad for everyone, though I didn’t really understand. I didn’t feel sad, I only knew that it was. I didn’t know she had cancer, or if I did I didn’t know what it was. I just knew she was sick. There was a room downstairs in the house where she stayed that we weren’t allowed to go into. It was for a few weeks or a few months, I can’t really remember. It felt like for ever. We had to be very quiet around the door. Men would go in and out with their doctor’s bags, ruffle my hair as they passed. Father would rarely go in. Then one day the door to that room was open. I went in; it had a bed in it that never used to be there before. The bed was empty but apart from that the room looked exactly the same as it used to. The doctor who used to tap me on the head told me my mother was gone. I asked him where, he said Heaven. So I knew she wasn’t coming back. That’s where my grandfather went one day and he never came back. I thought it must have been a fun place to go to never want to come back. We went to the funeral. Everybody was very sad. I stayed with my aunt for a few days. Then I was packed off to boarding school.’ He spoke of it all devoid of emotion, totally disconnected as his defence mechanism kicked in to block out the overwhelming pain. I guessed for him to connect, to feel the pain, felt too much to bear. He seemed isolated and disengaged and I believed every word he said.

‘Your father didn’t discuss what was happening to your mother?’

‘My father doesn’t do emotion. After they told him he had weeks to live he asked for a fax machine to be put in his hospital room.’

‘Was your sister communicative? Could you talk about it together, in order to understand?’

‘She was sent to a boarding school in Kildare and we saw each other for a few days each holiday. The first summer we were back at the house from boarding school she set up a stall in town and sold my mother’s shoes, bags, fur coats and jewellery and whatever else was of any value and made herself a fortune. Every single thing was sold and couldn’t be bought back by the time anyone realised what she’d done a few weeks later. She’d spent most of the money already. She was practically a stranger to me and even more so after that. She’s made of the same stuff my father is. She’s more intelligent than me, it’s just a pity she didn’t put her brains to better use. She should be taking Father’s place, not me.’

‘Did you make good friends at boarding school?’ I was hoping for some kind of circle where little Adam had love and friendship, I wanted a happy ending somewhere.

‘That’s where I met Sean.’

Which wasn’t the happy ending I was hoping for, as that trusted person had betrayed him. I couldn’t help myself, I reached out and placed my hand over his. The movement made him stiffen and so I quickly removed it.

He folded his arms. ‘So how about we drop all this mumbo jumbo talk and get straight to the problem?’

‘This isn’t mumbo jumbo. I think that your mother passing away when you were five years old is significant, it affects your past and current behaviour, your emotions, how you deal with things.’ That’s what the book said and I personally knew it to be true.

‘Unless your mother died when you were five years old, then I think it’s something you can’t learn from a book. I’m grand, let’s move on.’

‘She did.’

‘What?’

‘My mum died when I was four.’

He looked at me, surprised. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So how did it affect you?’ he asked gently.

‘I think I’m not the one who wants to kill myself on my thirty-fifth birthday, so let’s move on,’ I snapped, wanting to get back to talking about him. I could tell from his surprised expression that I had sounded a lot angrier than I had intended. I composed myself. ‘Sorry. What I meant was, if you don’t want to talk, what do you want from me, Adam? How do you expect me to help you?’

He leaned forward, lowered his voice, jabbed his finger on the table to emphasise each point. ‘It’s my thirty-fifth birthday on Saturday week, I don’t particularly want to have a party but for some reason that’s what’s being arranged for me by the family – and by family I do not mean my sister Lavinia, because the only way she can appear in Ireland without getting handcuffs slapped on her wrists is on Skype. I mean the company family. The party is in City Hall in Dublin, a big do, and I would rather not be there but I kind of have to be because the board have chosen that day to announce to everyone that I’m taking over the company while my father is alive, kind of like being given the seal of approval. That’s twelve days away. Because he’s so ill, they had a meeting last week to see if my birthday party could be moved forward. I told them it’s not happening. Firstly, I don’t want the job. I haven’t worked out how to fix it yet, but I’ll be announcing somebody
else as the new head that night. And if I have to walk into that bloody room, I want Maria back, by my side, holding my hand the way it should be.’ His voice cracked and he took a moment to compose himself. ‘I thought about it and I understand. I changed. I wasn’t there for her when she needed me, she was worried, she went to Sean and Sean took advantage of her. I went to Benidorm with him when we finished our Leaving Cert, and I’ve partied with him every weekend since I was thirteen – believe me, I know what he can be like with women. She doesn’t.’

I opened my mouth to protest, but Adam lifted a finger in warning and continued.

‘I’d also like to get my job at the coast guard back, and for everyone in my father’s company who’s worked there for the past one hundred years to get off my back because I was chosen to take Father’s place instead of them. If I had my way, I’d rather any of them got the bloody job. Right now it doesn’t look likely, but you’re going to help with that. We need to undo my grandfather’s wishes. Lavinia and I can’t take over the company, but it must not fall to my cousin Nigel. That would be the end of the company. I have to work something out. If none of those things are fixed then I’ll drown myself in a bloody stream if I have to, because I’m not living with anything other than that right there.’ He jabbed the table with a butter knife to emphasise the final two words. He looked at me wide-eyed, wired, threatening, daring me to walk out, to give up on him.

It was tempting, to say the least. I stood up.

His expression turned to one of satisfaction; he’d managed to push another person away, leaving him free to get on with his plan to demolish himself.

‘Okay!’ I clapped my hands as if I was about to start a clear-up of the area. ‘We’ve a lot to do if we’re going to make this happen. Your apartment is out of bounds now, I assume, so you can stay with me. I need to go home and change, I need to get to the office to pick up some things and I need to get to a shop – I’ll explain what for later. First, I have to get my car. Are you coming?’

He looked at me in surprise, at my not leaving him in the way he thought I would, then he grabbed his coat and followed me.

Once we were in the taxi my phone beeped.

‘That’s the third one in a row. You never check your messages. Not very encouraging for me for when I’m hanging off a bridge somewhere looking for a pep talk.’

‘They’re not messages, they’re voicemails.’

‘How do you know?’

I knew because it was eight a.m. And there was only one thing that happened as soon as it hit eight a.m.

‘I just know.’

He studied me. ‘You said no secrets, remember?’

I thought about it and out of guilt for having read his ‘proposal’, which was currently in my pocket, handed him my phone.

He dialled and listened to the messages. Ten minutes later he handed the phone back to me.

I looked at him for a reaction.

‘That was your husband. But I think you already know that. He said he’s keeping the goldfish and he’s getting his solicitors to draw up paperwork to ensure you’re legally never allowed to own a fish again. He thinks he might be able to prevent you entering a pet shop too. He’s not sure about winning at funfairs but he’ll personally be there to beat you and make sure you don’t win.’

‘Is that it?’

‘In the second message he called you a bitch twenty-five times. I didn’t count. He did. He said it was twenty-five times. He said you were a bitch multiplied by twenty-five. Then he said it twenty-five times.’

I took the phone from him and sighed. Barry didn’t seem to be cooling down at all. In fact he seemed to be getting worse, more frantic. Now it was the goldfish? He hated that goldfish. His niece had bought it for him for his birthday and the only reason she’d bought him a fish was because Barry’s brother hated fish too so it was technically a gift for her, to be stored in our home for her to look at and feed when she visited. He could keep the damn fish.

‘Actually,’ Adam snatched the phone back from me with a mischievous look in his eye, ‘I want to count, because wouldn’t it be funny if he got it wrong?’

He listened to the voicemail again on speakerphone and each time Barry spat the word out viciously, with venom and bitterness and sadness dripping from every single letter, Adam counted on his hands with a big smile on his face. He ended the call looking disappointed.

‘Nah. Twenty-five bitches.’ He handed it back to me and looked out the window.

We were silent for a few minutes and my phone beeped again.

‘And I thought I had problems,’ he said.

8

How to Sincerely Apologise When You Realise You Have Hurt Someone

‘So this is him?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered, sitting in the chair beside Simon Conway’s bed.

‘He can’t hear you, you know,’ Adam raised his voice above the norm. ‘There’s no need to whisper.’

‘Shhh.’ I was irritated by his disrespect, his obvious need to prove that he wasn’t moved by what he saw. Well, I was moved and I wasn’t afraid to admit it; I felt raw with emotion. Each time I looked at Simon I relived the moment he shot himself. I heard the sound, the bang that left my ears ringing. I ran through the words I’d said leading up to him putting his gun down on the kitchen counter. It had been going well, his resolve had weakened, we had been engaging perfectly. But then my euphoria had taken over and I’d lost all sense of what I said next – if I’d said anything at all. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember.

‘So am I supposed to feel something right now?’ Adam interrupted my thoughts, loudly. ‘Is this a message, a psycho-babble way of telling me how lucky I am that I’m here and he’s there?’ he challenged me.

I threw him a dagger look.

‘Who are you?’

I jumped up from my chair at the sudden interruption by a woman in the room. She was mid to late thirties and held the hands of two little blonde girls who looked up at her with large blue wondering eyes. Jessica and Kate; I remembered Simon telling me about them. Jessica was sad her pet rabbit had died and Kate kept pretending she would see him when Jessica wasn’t looking, to make her feel better. He had wondered if Kate would do the same thing about him when he was gone and I had told him he wouldn’t have to wonder, wouldn’t have to put them both through that if he stayed alive for them. The woman looked shattered. Simon’s wife, Susan. My heart began to palpitate, the guilt of my involvement wracking my body. I tried to remember what Angela had said, what everybody had said: it wasn’t my fault, I had only tried to help. It wasn’t my fault.

‘Hello.’ I struggled with how to introduce myself. It may have been seconds of silence but it felt as though it stretched on for ever. Susan’s face was not inviting, it was not warm and it was not reassuring. It did nothing to help my nervousness and worsened the sense of guilt I felt. I sensed Adam’s eyes on me, his saviour, now floundering in my lesson in self-belief and inner strength.

I stepped forward and extended my hand, swallowed, heard the shake in my voice as I spoke. ‘My name is Christine Rose. I was with your husband the night he …’ I glanced at the two little girls looking up at me wide-eyed ‘… the night of the incident. I’d just like to say that—’