The Love Market (10 page)

‘Can you stub it more quietly next time?’

‘I’m sorry.’ She looks at me now. ‘Can I take you back to your room?’

‘Why? Has it moved?’

I get off the bed and go and give her a quick kiss. ‘Can I ask you a question though, before you go?’

‘Hum?’ She rubs her eyes, vigorously, with her knuckles, like she used to do when she was little.

‘Aimee, you didn’t look up Patrick on the Internet and send him an email did you?’

Her eyes go from me to my laptop again and she blushes. ‘No,’ she finally says. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe because you knew I’d been Googling him. Maybe you found his email, intended to type something, got distracted, and the message accidentally got sent anyway?’ I am trying to give her an “out”.

She looks at me like I’m raving. ‘Mum? Are you sure you don’t think that’s a really strange question? Why would I want to email your old boyfriend?’

‘I don’t know, Aimee. You’re right. Forget I asked.’

 She nods and I watch her traipse back to her room, not plod-plodding her feet this time like a herd of pet elephants—something she has taken to doing lately. Right now she’s too tired. Her nightshirt is stuck in her knickers; a milky white bottom cheek peeking out. ‘Aimee,’ I say, before she disappears into her room. ‘You didn’t tell Aunt Jacqui that I’d Googled him did you? You know, the other day when she took you to get your hair cut?’

Jacqui would employ all her wiles to find his email, I’m sure, if she got the sudden urge to try to reunite us. Too much of a coincidence that the message was sent when I was in Manchester, when Jacqui was staying here with Aimee.

She turns, rubs her face again. ‘No,’ she says, tiresomely. ‘Now can I go back to bed?’

I stare at his name for about ten minutes, and the blank space where he could have written something but didn’t. Why reply at all if he didn’t want to say anything?

Feeling he’s even this tiny step back in my life is electrifying. That he’s actually out there, alive, on the other side of this mindboggling piece of technology. I click on REPLY. Then I suddenly overheat, my palms, feet, back and chest breaking out into a hot flush. Now what? I stare at the blank screen and ponder a few scenarios which all sound equally contrived, desperate, or just plain mad.

Then I find my fingers typing…

Dear Patrick,

I have a very odd family who think it’s funny to meddle in my personal life.

Honest, at least. A start.

The truth is, I don’t know how either my sister or my daughter (not sure who is the culprit yet, but I will find out) found your email address, or why they went looking for it in the first place, or why they decided to send you a blank message. I’m sorry for this. I’m sure you were as surprised by it as I was getting in your reply. Sorry again.

All the best, Celine.

I press “send”.

Dear Celine,

I’m not sorry to have received your email—quite the opposite. But yes, it did come as a surprise. And the main reason I emailed you back without writing anything was, to be truthful, because I really didn’t know what to write after all these years. But other than having that lame excuse, it was a pretty dumb thing to do.

I looked you up when I got it, and I found your website, and I see you run an introductions service, and you called it The Love Market. You can’t imagine how that touched me, or how it took me back. Although you probably won’t believe this, but I thought of you just recently. I was sorting through some boxes in my apartment and I came across the Dictaphone I used in Sa Pa. Remember? When I stood by the window and you sat there watching me?

He means, when I sat on the end of the bed naked, and watched him by the window trying to work. But he couldn’t concentrate on what it was he was saying, because he was too busy concentrating on me. ‘You’re distracting me,’ he said, looking at me compulsively, until he finally gave up.

I hope the last fifteen years of your life have been good ones. I always imagined you would have married a great guy, and ended up settling and having a good life in that village you loved to hate. Looks like you have a daughter too... I am happy for you.

Patrick.

~ * * * ~

The shades of green and grey and mauve moorland don’t change the longer you sit at the kitchen table and gaze out of the window.

I am paralyzed by his email.

I’m so paralyzed that when the phone rings, I pick up without bothering to look at my call display, thinking it’ll be Kim on the case of her refund.

‘Hi.’ I hear a voice say. And then, after a pause, ‘Do you know who this is?’

The voice has an accent. I’m about to say ‘No. I don’t talk to telemarketers, or anyone ringing to tell me there’s a dead billionaire with no relatives who bears my last name.’ But all that comes out is a rather strangulated ‘eu-oooh,’

Because I know who it is almost immediately.

Butterflies have colonized my stomach. ‘Sorry,’ he says, amused.

Patrick says.

‘I just saw your phone number on your website, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of talking to you.’

Patrick’s words in my ear.

Silence. Perhaps I’ve died.

‘Are you still there?’ he asks.

‘I, erm…’—have to remove the hand from my mouth because I’m biting my palm and it hurts.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing how easily you can find people when you suddenly go looking for them. But then you know that already.’

Mischief in that voice? ‘I didn’t go looking for you, Patrick.’ Seems I’ve found my tongue. ‘It was my sister who—’

‘—Can’t you just say it was you?’ he says, disarmingly. He always had the power to blindside me with his directness and his ability to place an innocent few words onto a charged, higher level.

‘But it really wasn’t!’ I’m almost too stunned to have a sense of humour. The butterflies have turned to nausea. That wobbly stomach I’d get with just the memory of sex with him. It’s back.

‘You’ve changed,’ he says after what seems like a very long silence. ‘I mean that in a good way. I saw your picture on your website. I can’t stop looking at it. In fact, I’m looking at it right now.’ A definite smile in his voice. Patrick had a way of coming close to intimidating me with something very simple that he’d say, in the sexiest, yet most unnerving way, and it seems like it’s fifteen years ago all over again; nothing’s changed. To think he’s sitting there looking at my picture is wild.

It’s the one Jacqui took in our garden. A medium close-up. My dark hair cut into flattering long layers, slightly falling in my eyes. My black and white stripy halter-top looking very glam with my two-week old tan from our holiday to Cyprus.

We must have taken hundreds getting me to look—as she insisted—wise and insightful, like someone who you’d trust to make a sound decision about your personal life, yet a fun girl with her finger on the zeitgeist. ‘Bloody cooperate!’ she said. ‘They want Jennifer Aniston-cum-Oprah Winfrey as their matchmaker, not Martha Stewart.’

‘You suit being in your thirties, if that makes any sense. It’s like the age that was meant for you.’ He sounds as though my picture has touched him.

‘Patrick, I...’ I laugh, nervously. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say.’

‘Just don’t hang up on me, okay?’

I laugh again. ‘Okay. But this is too weird that I am actually sitting here talking to you!’

‘I know. Isn’t it? I can’t believe I’m talking to you either,’ he says, quietly. Deliberately keeping his voice down?

‘Where are you?’ I ask him, lowering my voice to match his. ‘I mean, what far-flung place?’

‘Not that far-flung. Toronto. I’m based here now.’

‘Oh. So you don’t work overseas any more then?’

‘Well, yes and no. They pulled me out of the Middle East some months ago and I’ve been doing what they call parachute journalism since then. They literally drop me in wherever there’s a story to be filed, whether that’s the war in Iraq or the European Cup; it can be anywhere, or anything.’

‘I often wondered where you’d be, you know. If any harm had come to you, even if you’d died. You know you hear in the news, so many journalists…’ Why am I telling him I’ve thought he might be dead? But the truth is, whenever Mike and I were watching the news, and a foreign report came on, I always half expected that one day I’d see Patrick’s face. And I often wonder if Mike thought that too.

‘It’s okay. I’ve always been a pretty lucky guy. Although I might have come close a few times.’ I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘You needn’t have worried, but I’m flattered and touched that you did.’

His voice is strange to me: the one thing about him I may have forgot. The drawn out vowels and rounded ‘o’ of the Canadian accent striking my eardrum on a plane I’m not used to. His sibilants like a whisper around my face. Memories of our intimacy filling whatever blanks in me exist, because it was always there; beneath the sex and the closeness with Mike, I would be wanting, in the worst way, to feel more.

A dart, now, of the memory of how well we worked together.

‘Are you still there?’ he eventually asks.

I chuckle again, nervously. ‘I’m still here I think!’

‘You’re shocked,’ he says. ‘Can I ask you one thing, though? You said your family likes to meddle in your personal life…’

Patrick never did beat about the bush. ‘I’m divorced.’

Do I catch a draw of breath? ‘Recently,’ I add. ‘I’m still not even used to the idea.’

‘I’m sorry it didn’t work,’ he eventually says. I can almost hear his brain computing the new information. And I compute him computing me. And the incredulity is ever there, skipping away along with my heart, that this really is Patrick on the phone. Patrick has rung me.

‘And you?’ I venture.

‘Same,’ he says. ‘Divorced. A long time ago.’ Then after a while of me not speaking, ‘ Look, I’m sorry to have just called out of the blue. I never saw myself getting up the courage to call you, even though…’

‘Even though what?’

‘Well, I looked you up about three years ago on the Internet. I was thinking back, and wondering about you. But I couldn’t find anything.’

Three years ago. When I thought I’d seen him in London. What did Jacqui jokingly say about us being on some parallel cosmic track?

‘I changed my name when I got married.’ I think of what Jacqui said about this too. She has a way of always being right.

‘I thought that might be why. I still had your mother’s address, where I sent that letter to, remember? I thought about trying to contact you through her. But I didn’t know how she would feel about that. If you were married with a family… And after such a long time I didn’t know if you’d even want to be contacted.’

‘I’m sure it wouldn’t have been a very good idea,’ I say, once I’ve momentarily recovered from my surprise at hearing this, wanting, inexplicably, to shed a tear. Our timing has been all off.

‘No. But it still didn’t stop me wanting to.’

‘You sound like the same Patrick.’ I smile.

‘I am the same Patrick,’ he says.

I try to imagine what would have happened if he had sent a letter, via my mother. What I’d have done. What could I have done?

Finally, he says, ‘Celine, all I can really say after all this time is it’s fantastic to hear your voice. And what’s weird is that now we’re actually speaking it doesn’t feel like fifteen years since we last did.’

‘You’re right. It really doesn’t.’

‘Can I tell you something? I feel I just want to say this. I mean, I hope you know this already, but when I left you that morning, I didn’t just walk away and forget everything. I had to consciously block you out of my thoughts for a very long time. The truth is—and I know we all make mistakes but some of us make bigger ones, with bigger regrets and bigger consequences—I should never have let you go.’

It’s only when we have rang off, and I process all that has just happened, that I realise my body is doing a cataclysmic tremble.

Jacqui is stunned.

Either that, or she’s a very good actress.

‘What’s he like?’ she asks. I’ve met her down at Newcastle’s Quayside, in her lunch break. She works as an architect for a firm in the City Centre. She sometimes bends the rules and takes an extremely long lunch break just for me: her reward, she says, for working such long hours, giving so much of her life in the pursuit of ambition. We sit on a bench in front of the law courts and a fancy hotel, staring across the Tyne river, finishing off a sandwich. From our position we can see all the way south over the city to the distinct and charming hodgepodge that is Newcastle architecture. Elegant grey-stones converging with 60’s slab blocks, modern lofts, half-timbered houses, and the world’s only tilting bridge—the Winking Eye—that Jacqui raves about. It’s too summerlike to rush. I could sit here with my face to the sun all afternoon.