The Love Market (5 page)

‘I’d happily have skipped mine,’ she says. ‘Remember Darren who wore the T-shirt that said I LUV LAXATIVES?’

I grin. ‘Did he really?’ I ask her. ‘Love laxatives?’

She chuckles, then says, ‘So I take it you’ve been thinking about Patrick again.’

The mention of his name after all this time is like a groggy regaining of consciousness to a life almost forgotten. ‘I wasn’t. No. But of course now I’m going to. Thanks.’

‘Divorce is like a death, Celine. You have to grieve the marriage but you have to move on too. There’s no point in moping. Divorce means a marriage is over, not a life.’

‘Who said I’m moping, Jacqui?’ My pace slows. ‘And of course I know my life isn’t over! But it’s only been a week. They say it takes two years to get over a divorce.’

‘That’s only when they’ve walked out on you when you’re three months pregnant. Or they’ve been displaying their willies on the Internet. When you’re the one that wasn’t happy, life begins the minute he’s down the garden path. In theory, I suppose.’

‘I don’t believe that. Not for one minute. Even if I wanted to run out and get someone else, I feel a bit like discounted goods now.’

She scowls at me. ‘That’s a thing to say!’

‘It’s true. It’s not exactly an attribute, is it: telling someone you’re divorced.’ I am only saying that silliness because I am feeling sorry for myself.

It’s stopped raining so I take off my nylon jacket and wrap it around my hips as we run, enjoying the April air on my bare arms. ‘Do you think that’s why I’ve never exactly cracked up, Jacq? Because I was so convinced it was what I wanted?’ I nip my dripping nose. The worst I’ve done when he first left was spill the milk when I was putting it on my cereal, because I was distracted by a moment of extreme missing him. ‘I mean, I’ve never totally lost the plot, have I? Never walked around Hexham market in my dressing gown, stockpiled Prozac in the garage, backed my car into a small person who I mistook for a street lamp… What’s wrong with me?’

Jacqui’s striking almond eyes latch onto mine. Even though we’re not real sisters—Jacqui being the daughter of my mother’s second husband—our thoughts and fears definitely seem to spring from the same well. We’ve even been told we look alike. Similar height—I’m an inch taller; similar body-types—slim enough, but prone to packing on ten pounds after two weeks of pigging out. At thirty-six, I’m already going grey and colour my long hair a dark chestnut brown, whereas Jacqui, two years my junior, has naturally mousey hair, and highlights it blonde, and wears it in a bob. When my mum married Len, his kids—Jacqui and Chris—had lost their mother to cancer. Somehow there we all were, a miscellany of identities put together under one roof, trying to be a family: a five-piece family in a doll’s house. I just thought that Len was a pervert, Chris a lame-brain, and Jacqui was always there, trying to be my friend. Maybe I’d not have resented her if she didn’t seem to have my mother’s approval in a way that I never did, even if it was just my mother sucking up to Len—who was there, earned good money, and wasn’t my father. That is, until he started going out in Chris’s shirts and coming home covered in love-bites, then ran off with a nurse, and became exactly like my father. Then Jacqui, Chris and I had a bit more in common. We all had absentee dads, and in a way we were all motherless: theirs had died, and mine was there in body but little else. Chris now lives near Hull with his high-maintenance girlfriend, and once in a while he’ll phone and we’ll end up talking for four hours then he disappears for two years. And Jacqui is the human equivalent of my ligaments, always holding me in place to prevent my dislocation.

‘You don’t have to have a public breakdown to prove to the world that you carry pain,’ she says.

I shake my head, feeling the tears build. ‘It’s just odd thinking of him being out there living a life without me. Him with someone else. Or me, with somebody who doesn’t share any of my history, who isn’t Aimee’s father. Who never actually stood there and shared that joy and amazement when she was born. How do you suddenly not have someone in your life any more when for thirteen years they literally were your life?’

Our pace slows a little more, until we come to a walk. Jacqui looks at me with that expression in her eyes, the expression of someone who will always want to protect me from my worst self. ‘This isn’t because you want him back, is it?’

‘I can’t be that messed up can I?’

‘It’s got definite Taylor-Burton elements to it. But where’s the law that says you can’t get back together again if you’ve made a mistake?’

I lean over and pant, realising that as I’ve not been running in about two months I seem to have become seriously unfit. ‘Yes, but we were never Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, were we?’ Jacqui will always confer romance on everything, and I’ve become so cynical that I don’t know whether she’s right to want to, or she’s mad to try to. ‘They had something indestructible that destroyed them. We were empty vessels who wanted the other to fill them.’

‘How do you know he’s not divorced and out there thinking about you?’ she asks.

I stand up straight again. ‘Are we talking about Patrick again by any chance?’ My sister is like a dog with a bone over this topic. After I told her about him all those years ago, Jacqui was the only one who seemed to fall under the spell of him the way I had. She was the only one who didn’t judge him, or me, when I told her what the problem was with Patrick. I could say things about him and she knew. As though she too had been his lover at one time. Plus she was the only one who ever tried to drill me with good advice about how to forget him. Which couldn’t have been brilliant because it clearly never worked.

We walk now, Jacqui strides it out employing both legs and arms, always putting the max into it, convinced she has to shed a few more pounds than she really does. ‘I don’t know anything about him, or what he’s doing. Do I?’

‘But the point is, you still wonder.’

‘Thanks,’ I tell her. ‘For being in my head.’ I peer at her strikingly pretty face. ‘But actually, I don’t. Not any more.’

‘Have you Googled him lately?’

‘I don’t do things like that.’

‘Why not? You did it before.’

She forgets nothing. ‘Once. Ages ago.’

‘But didn’t you look him up after you thought you saw him in London?’

I tut. ‘Okay, twice then. And it wasn’t him. We’ve been through this a million times.’

‘All because he was wearing sunglasses and you needed to see his eyes to be convinced. And you rang the hotel and they told you there was no guest by that name.’ Sometimes we will find ourselves talking about Patrick as though he wasn’t old news.

I remember how I snuck away from Mike to use the payphone, how my heart hammered as I dialled that number. How I was worried Mike was going to know just by my face. I was outside myself watching myself do it, disapproving but unable to stop myself. If it was Patrick I had to know. And I had to cope with whatever act of insanity I would commit when I found out. The fact that I was even contemplating a reckless act of insanity of course spoke volumes to me about my marriage, which depressed me for days. And that was a side-effect I tried to hide, but Mike had to see it and know.

‘Everybody wonders about somebody, Jacqui. It’s called the politics of disenchantment. But—I even researched this once—most reunions with old flames don’t work out. Not unless it was a war separation or something on that scale. The moral is, you have to live the life you’re living. Not some parallel life that you wish you could live.’

She pretends to play the violin. ‘Nice words. I’ve got some too. Life is short. Botox is just round the corner. You have to grab your happiness by the horns. Maybe seeing him three years ago meant you were on some parallel cosmic track. Maybe it meant you weren’t supposed to forget him.’

‘Well I’m sure he’s forgotten me. I mean it’s not as though he’s ever come looking for me in all these years, has he?’

‘Who knows? Maybe he really wanted to. Or maybe he did and you were nowhere to be found. If only you’d been a modern gal who keeps her own name in case old boyfriends try to look her up.’

I laugh.

‘Seriously,’ she says. ‘You’re thirty-six and gorgeous. You’re a good person, a great mother—even if Aimee doesn’t think so at the moment—and whatever you felt deep down, you were a good wife. So it’s guaranteed that you’re going to find another man. But there’s still this unfinished business in you. And even if he lives in another country, even if you’ve not spoken to him in fifteen years… who’s to say that there’s absolutely no way it can ever happen? What have you got to lose by looking him up? Really? When you think about it, Celine—nothing.’

I give her a sweaty hug. ‘You talk a load of pipe-dreams, but I love you nevertheless.’

~ * * * ~

I go home and Google breaking up. How did I ever exist before I used the Internet to find out how I’m feeling? There is so much written on divorce. All the distasteful puns by men about ex-wives taking them to the cleaners. Quotes from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Margaret Atwood. There’s “Wikihow” to cope with going solo again. Apparently God has a lot to say on the subject too. And best of all, there’s the jargon that sounds impressive, by the so-called relationship experts, but no one has a clue what it means. My favourite being:

‘When you and that person have changed to any extent, it is necessary to let go of the relationship, so that each of you can fulfill your life path.’

Life path. Wasn’t I on a life path? If I wasn’t, then what was it? If I wasn’t already fulfilling it, then what the hell was I doing?

‘Refusing to let go of the painful past will serve as a roadblock to love.’
Yes, and you’ll become just like my mother: one of those stung by life people who can’t exactly love themselves either.

‘Letting go of your old self and letting the new you emerge can be frightening. But by taking a leap of faith into the unknown, it might reveal what you are truly capable of becoming.’

The new me. A leap of faith into the unknown?

I think about this for a while, not minding this one, actually. Didn’t the old me used to be such a daring girl? I dove headlong into life, and the thrill of it was fantastic. Then marriage made everything feel a little too certain for my comfort level.

I click off there, and think of Jacqui egging me on to do this.

Then—madly—I type in Patrick’s name.

There are countless articles on him. Many of which I’ve seen before, because, of course I’ve Googled him way more than I’ve ever admitted to anyone, which always felt like a form of infidelity in itself. Would I have liked Mike looking up the same ex-girlfriend? Would I have been able to convince myself that it was enough that it was me he’d married? But then again, perhaps infidelity is not the worst thing that can happen to a marriage; it’s giving up.

I digest everything on him like it’s new to me. Wikipedia references. Career profiles. Something about him winning an Emmy for his coverage of Hong Kong being returned to China. A fascinating interview with him in Frontline magazine. But it’s the image results that spellbind me. So many of them I have seen before, when I combed over them to answer that one question: was it him I’d seen in London?

There’s a new one on. He’s wearing a khaki combat jacket, and is posing against a parched mountainous backdrop of some foreign warzone. It looks like it’s probably recent. It’s his most ‘close-up’ shot on here. The face is older: shockingly so; the cheeks fuller and softer with age, a flush of a suntan across the bridge of his prominent nose. His once fair hair is greying, and there is a sadness and seriousness that never used to be there in his eyes. ‘Wikipedia’ tells me his birthday—which I already knew. Patrick is forty-three now. ‘Journalisted’ catalogues every article he’s written on wars. And yet, I can’t find anything about his personal life. Nor is he on ‘Facebook’, not that I would have really expected him to be.

I type in the words “Patrick Shale, contact information”, and hold my breath. But all that comes up is the name of a literary and talent agent who, it seems, represents him. I try again, “Patrick Shale, email”, not expecting the result to be any different.

But hang on….

There is a Patrick Shale, with an email address, who lectures in the journalism school of Ryerson Polytechnical University, in Toronto.

My heart springs out of my body.

It has to be him.

I have to go down to Manchester for a Fake Date. To meet a potential client—a lawyer who was referred to me by one of my female clients, the sparkly and infectious Trish Buckham. Trish is a highly successful lawyer herself, even though you’d never know it by her micro-minis, funky hairstyle and foul mouth. She has been on a couple of coffee-meets, because she prefers the quick exit strategy, rather than the way I normally like it to happen—in a restaurant, where you’re forced to get to know your match for the time it takes to consume a civilised meal. She never sounds over the moon when I ring her about a possible match. So sometimes I wonder if her heart really is in meeting someone, or if she’s doing it just to convince herself—or others—that she’s trying.