Seeing Other People (3 page)

‘That’s because I didn’t introduce you,’ Sara butted in. ‘I only came over to tell you that Fiona has changed her mind. She wants to go back out with you. She’ll be up the weekend after next to stay with me so if you know what’s good for you, you’ll meet her outside my halls first thing on the Saturday morning.’

This was all too much. I wanted to cry. To shed actual man tears that would express the level of desperation I felt. Fiona was like the serial killer in a horror film who just wouldn’t die and stay dead.

‘But I—’

‘But you what?’ demanded Sara. ‘You want me to pass on some message to Fiona that we
both
know will make her angry? No, if you have something to say to Fiona, say it to her face when she gets here.’

Fizzing with frustration at the thought of falling into my ex’s clutches once more I nursed bottle after bottle of Newcastle Brown in an effort to build up a head of steam sufficient to propel me to call Fiona’s parents in the hope of obtaining her number in Southampton. I was going to stop this madness – which I was pretty sure it would be – before it started if it was the last thing I did, but as I reached the wall of payphones that lined the lobby of the union I noticed Sara’s friend standing next to one. She seemed upset.

‘Hi, you’re Sara’s friend aren’t you? Are you OK? Anything I can do?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just leave me alone.’

The tears. The telephone. It could only be one thing.

‘Boyfriend trouble?’

She nodded. ‘Am I that obviously pathetic?’

‘Not at all, it’s just . . . look, are you really OK?’

‘It’s silly, really. We were finishing the call and I told him that I missed him and he didn’t say it back, and when he finally did say it I knew he’d only said it because I’d made him say it.’

I winced. ‘The insincere “miss you” is the worst kind. What you really want is someone saying: “All days are nights till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.”’

The girl looked at me in awe like I’d just grown a foot in height right in front of her. ‘That’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘What’s it from?’

‘One of the sonnets, I forget which,’ I lied. ‘For some reason those lines always stuck in my head.’

The girl grinned. ‘I’m Penny, Penny Morrison.’

‘Nice to meet you, Penny Morrison, I’m Joe.’

We stayed up all night, Penny and I, listening to music in her room and talking about what we hoped to do with our lives. Penny told me that she wanted to change the world and work for a campaigner like Greenpeace while in turn I told her that I wanted to be a writer and move people with my words. When we finally kissed at dawn watching the sun rise over the self-catering accommodation block and I told her that even if I lived to be a hundred I would never forget this moment she smiled and told me she felt the same.

By the time Fiona arrived on campus a fortnight later Penny and I were practically living together. Although Fiona’s friend Sara was well aware of this fact she clearly hadn’t wanted to be the bearer of bad news and I’d been so wrapped up in Penny that I hadn’t given Fiona a second thought, which was why I was so surprised when I came face to face with her in the union bar while waiting for Penny to come back from the toilet.

‘Fiona, what are you doing here?’ There was genuine fear in my voice at the thought of how this whole situation might play out.

‘Looking for you,’ she replied tersely as she coolly played with the zip of her snow-washed denim jacket. ‘Didn’t you get my message? You were meant to meet me this morning. Why didn’t you call me instead of making me track you down round this dump? I don’t know what gets into you sometimes. You obviously need me to organise you. Anyway, we’re out of here, so get your things. Sara knows a good place in town that’s doing cheap shots until ten.’

‘No,’ I said firmly and Fiona stepped back in surprise. I’d never used that word to her before.

Her eyes widened. ‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I mean, I’m not going out with you tonight, I’m not going out with you at all. I’ve moved on. I’ve got a new girlfriend.’

Fiona took a menacing step forward and jabbed me in the chest with her index finger. ‘You don’t get to dump me. I’ll be the one who does the dumping around here so consider yourself dumped. But just remember this, Joe Clarke: I was the best thing that ever happened to you and one day you’re going to look back at this moment and regret how you’ve treated me.’ With that she was gone and it was the last I ever saw of her.

2

I felt distinctly odd as a week later I walked up the front steps of St Thomas’s Church in Swindon dressed in a dark-blue suit and black tie. I had been in two minds about the virtue of attending Fiona’s funeral – I just couldn’t begin to imagine how exactly any good could come of it – but Penny was firm on the matter. ‘You have to go,’ she said. ‘As odd as it is that she put your name down on her special list we have to believe it was because she wanted you to be there.’ I’d tried to explain that it was probably part of some evil practical joke from beyond the grave but Penny wouldn’t budge. She even offered to take the day off work to come with me but I couldn’t see any point given the logistical conundrum of arranging childcare.

In the porch of the church resting against an easel was a large framed photograph of Fiona. It was hard to connect the Fiona in the picture with the girl I had known. In the picture she looked grown-up, calm, confident and self-assured like a newsreader or a politician. She had remained attractive but in the same hard and unyielding manner as when I knew her, only with much less eyeliner.

Breaking away from the photograph’s unsettling gaze, I made my way inside the church and took a seat on one of the pews at the back, partly because I wanted to be able to make a quick escape once it was all over but mostly because I was afraid that it might be an open casket affair: I wouldn’t put anything past Fiona.

The service kicked off with a couple of stirring hymns followed by a reading and then the eulogies. The first came from Fiona’s elder brother Frank who had an unfortunate tone of voice, which made him sound bored even though he was obviously devastated. He was followed by Fiona’s boss who used the opportunity to recite some incredibly bad poetry that he’d written over the weekend (lots of stuff about her being ‘a shining star’ and heaven having ‘one more angel’; it was mortifying). He was followed – rather oddly I thought – by the head of the tennis club committee where apparently Fiona spent a lot of her spare time and was ‘admired’ by all who came across her and finally, because Fiona had been resolutely single for many years, the last speaker wasn’t her partner but rather her dad, Peter Briggs, who was just as tall and world-weary as I remembered back when Fiona and I had been together. Mr Briggs barely uttered three words before he was crying. It was awful stuff to watch. Terrible. I felt guilty for even daring to think a bad thought about his daughter. Maybe she’d changed in the course of the last twenty years. Maybe she’d learned her lesson and become a decent human being somewhere along the way. It wasn’t impossible was it? People changed all the time. Mr Briggs concluded his eulogy with a story about how the week before Fiona died he’d noticed how tired she was and had asked her why she didn’t slow down a bit. Apparently she’d laughed and said, ‘You have to make every day count because you only live once.’ To some degree it was a pretty tactless thing to say because you could argue that if Fiona had been just a little less ‘seize the day’ she might have gone for a lie-down after getting hit in the head rather than soldiering on with the game for the sole purpose of thrashing her opponent three sets to two. I don’t know whether it was just because I was having a bad day or simply because funerals always make you think about your own mortality but somehow this stupid, cheesy, piece of homespun wisdom moved me more than I ever could have imagined. So much so that when I accidentally brushed a hand against my cheek as we stood up to sing Fiona’s favourite hymn, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, I noticed it was wet from tears.

That night, lying in bed next to Penny, my mind was plagued with so many thoughts about Fiona, mortality, and the search for life’s meaning that I barely got any sleep at all. I couldn’t seem to let go of this idea that I was drifting through life like a ghost barely registering with anyone. Penny was absorbed in a demanding job, the kids were busy missing their mum, and I was just going through the motions in a job where no one really appreciated me. I felt like I was sleepwalking through life and crossing my fingers in the hope that somehow it would magically get better all by itself. If Fiona was right, if you really did only get one life, surely this was no way to live it.

Fiona’s death was the last thing on my mind however as I entered the lobby of the
Correspondent
on the following Monday morning. It couldn’t be. I had too much to do, chiefly making last-minute preparations for the photoshoot that was happening that day for
The Weekend
’s alternative Father’s Day issue.

As feature ideas went it was hardly the most original: corral a selection of photogenic, professional, recently separated fathers together into a photographic studio along with their adorable kids, get in a decent snapper, make-up artist and stylist to transform them into eye candy for the female readers and then once the shoot was in the bag, interview them making sure to gather plenty of background colour and tear-jerking anecdotes about their internal emotional states as they approached this, their first Father’s Day as single parents. The title of the piece (which had come to me in a flash as I’d pitched the idea at the weekly features meeting) was ‘The Divorced Dads’ Club’, and my boss, Camilla, had loved it so much she decided on the spot that it would be the cover story. To be honest I’d been more than a little surprised she’d gone for it in such a big way, but after the meeting she’d explained in her own inimitable way. ‘Truth is Joe, our readers never get tired of seeing good-looking guys who have made a mess of their lives.’

At the time it had sounded like the easiest brief in the world. As a journalist working in the high-pressure environment of a national newspaper I knew a lot of guys who had made messes of their lives – in fact if I had closed my eyes and thrown a stick across the office it couldn’t have failed to hit a divorcee, recovering alcoholic or budding gambling addict – and some of them were actually not bad-looking. Yet while these guys were ruled out of my search by dint of working on the paper I’d felt sure that they’d all have enough good-looking but emotionally damaged friends of their own to make the feature a slam dunk. But the more I began to investigate the clearer it became that none of the potential interviewees I dug up quite fitted the bill. I could find good-looking guys who had separated from their partners in the last few months but had no kids; I could find good-looking single dads who had separated from their partners years ago and remarried; and of the three guys who fulfilled the first two criteria, one had a bitter ex-wife who wouldn’t let their kids appear in the feature, the second couldn’t make the day of the shoot because of work commitments and the third turned out to be living in Seville and it simply wasn’t worth the expense of booking flights and hotels just to make up the numbers. And so with the clock ticking I had resorted to the tactics of the truly desperate hack: social networking sites. The message read as follows:
Journalist for national newspaper requires recently separated fathers and their children for feature (must be free for shoot on Friday morning). Reasonable expenses will be paid
.

I just needed them all to be up to scratch.

As the lift doors opened I nodded to the receptionists and was about to head over to Carl Smith,
The Weekend
’s art editor, who was co-ordinating the shoot when a young female voice called out my name from behind and I turned to see a woman in her mid-twenties looking back at me. She had dark brown hair piled on top of her head in the fashionably untidy manner that seemed to be all the rage these days and was wearing a black jacket and skirt with a cream top and knee-high boots. Her eyes were a deep brown and there were a light scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She looked oddly familiar but I just couldn’t place her.

‘You’re . . .’

‘Bella Rhodes,’ she replied. ‘We met last week. Dave Walsh on the arts desk introduced us.’

‘Oh, that’s right,’ I replied. As a rule of thumb I tried my best to avoid interns on the grounds that if you paid them the slightest bit of attention they’d rope you into critiquing articles they’d written for their student paper and this one was no different.

‘I remember now. How are you getting on? Settling in well?’

‘Really well. I’m loving it.’

‘So what can I do for you?’

She smiled, seemingly embarrassed by whatever it was she was about to say. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you like this, Mr Clarke, and you’re going to think I’m a complete stalker, but there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask since we were introduced.’ She reached into her bag and took out a well-thumbed paperback. I recognised the book’s cover immediately. It was
Hand in Glove
, the novel I’d written two years out of university which was based, give or take a few embellishments and a stock ‘the bleaker the ending the more serious the writing’ conclusion, almost entirely on the early days of my relationship with Penny. While not exactly a huge seller it had been a minor critical success, garnering praise from the literary pages of a few broadsheets, and at one point (long before I’d secured my staff job) I was even included on
The Weekend
’s Hot Young Things page along with a theatre director who’s now an Emmy-award-winning screenwriter and a male model who presents Saturday night entertainment shows on ITV. Having long since boxed up in the loft the two dozen copies I’d been given by my publishers along with my rowing machine, video recorder and all the other things I own, don’t use but haven’t yet got round to selling on eBay, I hadn’t seen a copy of
Hand in Glove
outside the shelves of a charity shop for at least a decade, let alone met someone who had actually read it.