The Flower Arrangement (11 page)

“Have you had your hormones checked? Are you taking vitamin B?”

“It's not me.” I hesitate. “It's Ben. He just doesn't want to anymore.”

Mia snorts. “Come on, Katy! Ben is crazy about you. He couldn't keep his hands off you tonight!”

When she was small, my sister used to cut the corners off jigsaw pieces to make them fit.

She starts telling me a story about a couple who put a bean in a jar every time they make love the first year they get together, then take a bean out every time they make love for the rest of their lives. I think the point is that they will never empty the jar.

But as I listen to my sister, I am lining Ben's tiny cardboard roaches up in neat rows along the windowsill. There are twenty-nine.

*   *   *

“I woke up and you weren't there.” Ben touches my shoulder.

I don't look up from the magazine I'm pretending to read. “I couldn't sleep.”

His hair is all over the place and he's wearing a gray dressing gown over blue pajama bottoms and a faded T-shirt that says:
I'm not perfect but parts of me are outstanding
. His eyes have a wary look. He puts a finger under my chin and tilts it so that I have to look at him.

I jerk my head away.

Ben looks down at the rose petals. “I'll get you more roses,” he says. He takes a strand of my hair and winds it round and round his finger. “I'm sorry about last night.”

“It's not about last night.”

I see his eyes drop to the windowsill, to the row of tiny cardboard cylinders. “What's all this?”

“You said you stopped.”

He blinks fast and I imagine the cogs in his brain trying to turn. “I haven't stopped completely,” he says finally, “but I've cut right down. Come on, don't you think you're overreacting? One little joint a day is not the end of the world, you know.”

But the thing is, I don't. I pull my knees up to my ribs. Beneath them I picture my heart like a power station. I imagine Ben and me walking around it, turning out the lights, one by one.

*   *   *

Ben is slumped in his chair, his head in his hands. It's the middle of the afternoon and he is still wearing his dressing gown. He has tried to talk me round. He has tried to kiss me. He has brewed coffee that neither of us has drunk. He has thrown his silver-foil-wrapped stash and his cigarette papers down the waste disposal and sworn that he'll never smoke again.

Pat has watched it all from his basket, his head low, his ears swiveling like antennae, his raisin-colored eyes darting from one of us to the other.

“If you loved me, you wouldn't want to change me!” Ben says tiredly, through his fingers.

“I don't want to change you. But we can't be together like this.” My voice is hoarse from talking and crying. “We need a break. Take time. Take three months. Write. Try and straighten your head out. Decide if you want us to be together—”

“Of course I want us to be together! We're soul mates!” Ben's face is angry, but his chin is trembling.

“We're flatmates, Ben,” I say.

“Fine!” He stands up. “I'll go, if that's what you want. But you can forget the terms and conditions, Katy. I don't do ultimata.”

I watch him storm back to the bedroom and I wonder where I will ever find another man who knows the plural of “ultimatum.”

*   *   *

On Monday, at work, I try to act like a person who has not spent the last thirty-six hours in a state of sleepless panic. When Maggie asks how my birthday was, I tell her it was lovely. Then Tony wants to know what Ben gave me and I mutter, “A locket.” His eyes go straight to my empty throat and I babble something unconvincing about having it resized.

At lunchtime, I wait for everyone to finish eating, then I sneak out to get a sandwich. While I'm queuing to pay, “Someone Like You” comes on the radio. I have to get out of there fast. I manage not to cry until I reach the door of the office. I make it as far as the lift, but when I get in, I can't stop myself. Tears are pouring down my face as the doors close, then they open again and the courier steps in.

He nods and we stand side by side in silence and wait for the doors to close again. He unzips the pocket of his biker's jacket and passes me a clean tissue. He gets out at the next floor without saying a word.

*   *   *

Ben moves in with his friend Diane, who has always been a little bit in love with him. We agree not to communicate at all for three months. It's the first time we have been apart for more than a few days since college. I feel as if I have had some obscure but crucial organ removed. One I didn't know I had and now apparently can't live without, like my thymus or my spleen.

Neither of us is sure that Pat will live through to the end of our break, so on Sunday evenings I go out and Ben calls around to the flat. Coming home is the worst part, finding Ben gone but the lights still on. The cushions on the sofa piled up where he must have sat. The remote control on the floor by Pat's basket, a John Steinbeck novel
facedown on the coffee table, a scrunched-up tortilla chip bag and an empty bottle of red wine in the recycling bin. I sniff the air for dope smoke and I check the camellia pot. Old habits die hard.

On the third Sunday, when I'm getting into bed, I find my cream silk slip, Ben's favorite, balled up beneath the pillow. I look at the empty space where he must have been lying an hour ago and I realize with a sickening jolt that we might never share this bed again.

I bury my face in the pillow, trying to find a trace of the musky cinnamon of his cologne. Pat is watching me from the door, his head cocked, his velvety forehead a concertina of concern.

*   *   *

Mia tries to make me do an audit of my relationship. She might not look like an accountant, but in her heart that's what she is.

“You're overreacting about this dope thing,” she says. “Half the people I know take Ecstasy. You need to put this in perspective.” She hands me a sheet of paper.

“Draw a line down the middle,” she says. “Write down why you love Ben on one side. And what this breakup is all about on the other.”

She puts a pen between my fingers and I stare at it. I imagine what I'll write. On the left:
I never really had a family before I found Ben.
On the right:
I can't have a family with Ben.

“It's not that simple.” I put the pen down. “It's not as simple as just drawing a line.”

Mia's blue eyes widen and she nibbles the inside of her cheek the way she used to when she was small. “Come on, Katy,” she says. “What can be so bad? Seriously?”

I wonder why all the things that really hurt us are hidden away. I never talk to my mother about the time she tried to gas herself. Or the fact that, as far as I know, there has been nobody in her life since my father left.

I've never asked Mia why all her relationships crash and burn after only a few weeks. Why a girl who can work out the tax liability on a
six-figure salary without a calculator has never learned the knack of counting on other people.

I've never told her that Ben stays up watching late-night films most evenings, pretending to take notes on three-act structure. That when he finally comes to bed, we lie back-to-back, like strangers, pretending this is some kind of normal.

*   *   *

My mother hasn't seen Ben for weeks and she's getting suspicious. Mia and I talk about the best way to break the news. For as long as I can remember, we have been managing my mother together, swapping notes on her emotional form, as if she is a highly strung thoroughbred horse.

Mia thinks I should tell her face-to-face, but in the end I chicken out and call her instead. “It's not a big deal,” I say. “Ben and I have a few things to work out. We're just taking a break.”

If she was a different kind of mother, she might make sympathetic noises. But the only noises she makes are hysterical ones. It takes me a full fifteen minutes to talk her down.

*   *   *

At work, I throw myself into puff pieces about “Perfect Party Favors” and “Maid of Honor Etiquette” and “Inspiring Centerpieces.” What Ben scornfully calls “the whole nine yards.”

I sort through picture files of Tiffany engagement rings and Giuseppe Zanotti sandals and I try not to picture myself alone at thirty and forty. Always the bridal magazine editor, never the bride.

I haven't kissed anyone except Ben since I was at college. The only other person who has seen me naked in the last seven years is my doctor.

I read somewhere that you should never have your hair cut when you're going through a crisis. I ignore this advice. The hairdresser, who has a shaved head, holds a frizzy foot-long curl under his nose like a Salvador Dalí moustache and says, “Are you ready to rock and roll?”

“Absolutely!” I keep my head bent over a copy of
OK!
, but out of the corner of my eye I glimpse drifts of my dark curls piling up around the chrome wheels of my chair.

“Don't say anything,” I warn everybody when I step out of the lift. I make for my cubicle, head down, trying to shut out the collective intake of breath.

“I like it.” Tony follows me into my tiny office. “It takes years off you.”

“You're right.” I run my fingers through my shorn hair. “I used to look like a twenty-eight-year-old woman; now I look like a twelve-year-old boy.”

Phil the courier appears and hands me a padded envelope. “You look like Joan of Arc.”

“Jo Novark?” Tony says when he's gone. “Is that a guy or a girl?”

“My point exactly.” I'm angry at myself for letting the hairdresser massacre me; I take it out on the envelope. “What is it with that bloody courier anyway? Every time I look up, he's hovering around in those stupid leather pants.”

Tony arches an eyebrow. “I think he looks pretty good in them.”

“I'm a pescatarian. I don't approve of leather pants.”

“Steady on, Katy,” Tony says. “Nobody's asking you to eat them.”

*   *   *

At some point my mother came up with the idea of having a remembrance mass for our father every year, though as far as we know, our father is alive and well and living in a suburb of Glasgow called Shettleston. Mia and I hate having to go, but boycotting it is not an option.

“Let us pray for the souls of the departed,” the priest booms. He begins to read a long list of the deceased. When he gets to “David Hughes,” Mia rolls her eyes.

“He left,” my mother hisses. “That's departing.”

My father departed when I was three. I have no memory of him at all, but I still have a father-shaped space in my heart. I look into it now,
as the priest drones on, and I wonder if my father is out there somewhere with a Katy-shaped space in his heart.

I try to call his face up from the framed photograph my mother keeps in the bottom drawer of her bedside table, but it is Ben's face I see.

It's been six weeks since
he
departed, and I'm not sure if I can take another six weeks of limbo. I wonder how my mother managed to get through all the weeks and months after my father went. For the first time ever, I think how hard that must have been for her.

After the mass, we have lunch in Roly's Bistro in Ballsbridge. Mia goes to the bathroom and my mother and I are left alone.

“I hope you know what you're doing, Katherine.” She has put her glasses on to read the menu. Her pale hair is carefully blow-dried and her makeup is beautifully applied, but her blue eyes look faded and lined behind the thick lenses. She leans across the table and strokes my bare arm. Alarm bells go off in my head. When Mum is affectionate, she usually has an agenda.

“Ben is a good man,” she says dramatically, sounding like a character witness in a court case. “And he's completely devoted to you. What more do you want?”

The truth starts to come loose like a wobbly tooth. Children, I think. I want children. But you have to have sex to have children. Quite a lot of it, apparently. I shake my head.

“Well, I hope you know what you're doing.” Mum sits back against the banquette, her back ramrod straight, her mouth set in a hard line. “Because there's nothing worse than being alone. I should know.”

You weren't alone, I think. You had us.

*   *   *

I found Pat the day my mother took it into her head to depart too. She had found out that my father was living with a woman in Glasgow, that they had a child together. She stayed up all night drinking the brandy that was meant to go into the Christmas cake. The next morning, when I got up, she was packing a bag.

I lurked on the landing sucking the end of my dressing gown belt and watching her stuffing neatly folded clothes into a suitcase, throwing cosmetics and jewelry and shoes in on top.

“Are you going away for long?”

She wouldn't look at me. “As long as it takes to find your father and have it out with him. We're his family.” She snapped the case shut. “He can't just walk away from us like that.” It was eleven years since he'd gone.

Mia was crying in our bedroom. It was the kind of crying that's meant to be heard, but my mother was in her own world and she couldn't hear it. I thought about crying too. Sometimes feeling sorry for us became bigger than feeling sorry for herself. But I was too old to act like a baby. I was fourteen but in dog years that's one hundred and twenty-four, which is about what I felt.

“I'll be back in a few days,” Mum said, stuffing her hands into the arms of her best coat. Her words were fuzzy at the edges. “Don't tell anyone I'm gone. You'll be okay, Katherine. Look after Mia. There's food in the fridge and money in the tin.”

After the door slammed and the taxi had driven away, I picked up all the dresses and skirts that had been thrown around the floor and hung them up in the wardrobe. I folded the nightdresses and sweaters and put them back into their drawers. Then I took a twenty-pound note out of the Coleman's mustard tin my mother kept hidden in the freezer and told Mia I'd take her to Penney's in the shopping center. Shopping always cheered her up.