What She Left: Enhanced Edition (19 page)

‘What’s he like?’

‘Nice.’

‘Is that the best you can do? Nice. You’re a journalist, woman!’

‘OK, extremely nice.’

Meg was in town for a meeting so we were grabbing a pizza. Chief subject of conversation: Luke.

We’d had exchanges like this since we first got interested in boys. Sometimes her asking the questions, sometimes me. I showed her his Facebook avatar. ‘Looks a bit like David Tennant, wouldn’t you say? Without the Tardis, obviously.’

‘Is he keen? How often does he text? Once a day or more than once a day?’

‘More. Five, six times … sometimes more.’

‘Oh my God, he’s a psychopath!’

As if on cue, a text landed. We both laughed. I explained he works in software – not the geeky end, project management, people management – and how he comes across as a bit of a lad on first impressions: he’d turned up for our second date with a black eye from rugby, but that was all show. ‘He’s a fantastic listener, too.’

‘Remind me, how many times exactly have you seen him?’ Meg asked. ‘You sound as if you’ve known him forever.’

‘Twice. Three times if you count when we met.’

Luke reckons it was me who started chatting to him in the Porterhouse, but it was definitely the other way round. ‘I’m hoping you’ll give me your number,’ he’d said, and I’d had to call it out three times because it was so noisy. He’d dialled it on his phone, pressed ring and I saw my phone light up briefly in my handbag. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Got you now.’

For our first date we went for drinks in Clapham Junction and Balham, then last weekend we went to the cinema because that’s second-date law. At one point he referred to a skiing holiday and said ‘we’, but that needn’t necessarily have meant a woman, that could have been friends. Then he just out and said he’d been seeing someone, Amy, last year and asked when I last dated.

‘I’m practically a nun,’ I told him.

‘My last relationship didn’t exactly end brilliantly,’ he said.

‘They never do,’ I replied, recalling how I’d dumped Ben with a flush of shame. But everything before now is irrelevant; it’s history. Yes, it had got pretty bad last year – I’d ended up going to the doctor and, because I’ve been prescribed antidepressants before, he asked the mandatory ‘How do you feel?’ question, but it’s a nothing question;
journalists and TV presenters use it all the time. It’s lazy. Then when I said ‘fine mostly’ he suggested I made another appointment. And when I walked back out through the waiting room I saw young mums, and figured maybe that wouldn’t ever be me, and geriatric grannies, and figured that also probably wouldn’t ever be me, and there was a screen explaining how they’re giving out fewer antibiotics because they’ve handed them out so liberally we’re all going to die through lack of resistance, and I half considered going back and telling the doctor that that’s what it was like, that sometimes it felt as if I had a lack of resistance to the entire world. But erasing the past, it’s as easy as rolling your finger over the wheel on the mouse, block-highlighting emails and hitting delete. Gone. Sitting in the cinema with Luke – we ended up opting for
Robin Hood
– I’d realized this could be a fresh start. I’m seeing him tomorrow, too. The theatre, daaaarhhhling. It’s lovely, this sense of anticipation, optimism. I’m happy. And please note: No artificial substances were used in the making of this diary entry!

Going home from the Porterhouse, I’d looked at his number and wondered how long it would stay in my phone: whether it would merely be a ‘recent’, moving down until it dropped off the bottom, or if I’d save it into contacts. Contemplated if it would become one I’d eventually know off by heart.
Stop it, Alice
, I’d told myself.
Don’t get carried away. You’re building yourself up for a fall.

Because pretty much the only thing I’ve been certain of up to now is that being me isn’t enough. Like, I’ve always wanted to run a marathon, but the other week standing outside Balham Bowls Club, I thought:
This is the me I want to be
, the one who’d just been passed her third glass of wine and was puffing on a Marlboro Light.
Sod training for a marathon
, I’d thought,
you’re only young once, life’s like Scrabble, you shouldn’t save your good letters, you’ve got to use them as soon as you get them
. But on the train heading home from Covent Garden, it felt enough.

Maybe you’ve come along just in time, Luke.

Everything’s changing. I’m getting a promotion at work. I’ll be a senior reporter, no less. I like my job. I like the person I am there and, yes, I might have to interview crazies and listen to psychos protest their innocence, but I get to meet incredible kids who’ve got cerebral palsy but are still determined to go to uni, or lovely old ladies reunited with long-lost relatives after half a century. I’ve got the hang of this career business, just as I got the hang of being a student, the niceties and nuances of my profession: the intros and paras and bylines, the NIBs and briefs and DPSs. Our language.

Everyone’s changing. Meg’s determined to quit PR and considering returning to full-time education, Alex has got a new girlfriend, Soph’s got a new boyfriend, Robbie’s landed himself a partnership. Even Rusty has disappeared. I kid myself he’s moved on, but he’s probably dead. He had fun while it lasted. He gathered his rosebuds. Where have I heard that expression before? That’ll niggle at me now, like a word on the tip of my tongue.

I finish my camomile tea. That girl Luke mentioned he was seeing last year, I wonder if he meant he was seeing her during last year – or had been seeing her for longer and it only ended last year. The former, I hope.

Dating, that can be my word for this diary entry. Yes, that sounds good.
Dating
.

There is some truth in what Meg said. I do feel as if I’ve known Luke forever.

It was never my plan to confront you by the river.

I’d been trying to get you on your own all evening, watched you in every pub you went in, but you were never
not
with someone. I’d nearly had an opportunity when you went to the loos in one, but you started gassing to some old boy. God knows who he was. He stood out like a sore thumb in a tweed jacket; maybe he owned the place.

Initially I’d searched all over, then it had dawned on me. Facebook and Twitter. ‘Started working on tomorrow’s hangover,’ you’d tweeted at 4.12 p.m. ‘Nando’s it is then,’ at 5.20. ‘Soton rocks,’ at 6.12. I’d flicked back through earlier tweets. 1.41: ‘Do we ever really know anyone?’ 1.51: ‘Going to get blitzed.’

You did a double take when you eventually saw me. It was as if you didn’t trust your own eyes. ‘Luke,’ you said. ‘
Luke
.’

‘Hey, Al. Surprise! Came to see you.’

‘Don’t want to be seen.’

We were by the river and you were on a bench. ‘You’re like buses,’ you said and laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh.

‘You’re drunk.’

‘Who are you, my dad?’

It was dark and a few flakes of snow began to fall. ‘Look, snow,’ you said, except it sounded like ‘lukesnow’. ‘It’s a long way down when you fall, isn’t it?’ you said, taking a swig from a can of gin and tonic. You started sobbing and I reckoned your drink could have been spiked and the notion of you, my beautiful Al, out there drunk with men prepared to do that to you and all because of me made me furious. All it would have taken would have been for you to have stood a
few feet further along the bar in the Porterhouse, a thirty-second delay on the Victoria line, my four thirty meeting running on by a few minutes: a colleague asking one more question under AOB. Any of these and you wouldn’t have ended up with me. ‘Been trying to call you all evening,’ I said.

You started frantically patting your jeans pockets. ‘Lost my phone.’

‘No you haven’t, sweetheart, it’s here.’ I picked it off the ground and handed it to you. It must have clicked on when it hit the ground because music was playing, one of your favourite bands, The XX. ‘You look cold,’ I said.

‘Cold hands, warm heart.’

Your face was red, hair all over the place: it reminded me of you after sex. Maybe sleeping with you would fix this – breaking ourselves down into random parts, then when we came back together we might be different and I might not be such a dick. I reached out to take your hand but you pushed me way. ‘Who’d have thunk it, huh, my mum!’

‘What are you on about, Al?’

I got an image of her, pouring coffee and enquiring about my job. ‘Bet she was gorgeous a few years ago,’ I’d said after we’d been introduced, ‘definite MILF,’ and you’d said, ‘Oi, enough of that,’ then that she still was. Gorgeous, that is, not MILF!

‘What about the lemmings?’ you said. ‘You never replied to the lemmings email.’

Course I hadn’t, I hadn’t seen it at that point. You were talking gibberish as far as I was concerned and frustration fired up in me. ‘Me and you, Al,’ I said. ‘It was going to be me and you against the world.’

‘Me and you and a girl in Prague!’

Mention of that place was like a fresh blast of cold air.

‘Why can’t I stop feeling like this?’ you said.

‘Like what?’

‘Like
me
.’ Except it sounded a bit like ‘smee’.

There were wet patches on your shoulders, I’d have given you my coat if I’d had one. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re perfect.’

‘Perfect people don’t end up here.’

I saw an ice-cream hut, steps down to the water, the bridge.
We’re both seeing the same things
, I thought,
but it doesn’t help
. ‘Being on your own is shit.’

‘Being with someone shit’s shitter. You don’t get to choose which bits of me you like and which you don’t. That isn’t how it works. I’m not some sort of pick-and-mix. You should care about me whatever; you said you
would
.’

‘I do.’

‘You do when it suits you, when it’s easy, but what about when it’s hard? Because that’s what counts. Asked you to give me more time, why’d you ignore that?’

I wondered how we’d remember this. Piecing big nights out together had been a regular morning-after occupation for us, and I loved those nights, but recently the ones I’d liked best were the quiet ones, the ones when we were sober, when it was just us. I recalled watching you undress one night shortly after we’d met, seeing you taking off your make-up, and how it had come to me as a revelation: I didn’t
have
to be a shit boyfriend. ‘I do love you,’ I said.

‘Do you never want to swim away from it all, Luke? Because I do. I don’t know who I am any more.’

‘You’re Alice.’

‘Good one,’ you said, as if I’d cracked a joke. Then: ‘Who is that? Who is Alice?’

A police car went by and it was as if the noise of the siren opened up a hole in the seal around us and another wave of
drunkenness crashed over you. ‘Want my friends,’ you said. ‘Want to go home. Where is home?’

‘Balham,’ I said. ‘You live in Balham.’

‘Not there,’ you said. You shivered and put your arms round yourself, rubbed yourself. Tiny arms, bones with a thin covering of flesh. ‘Don’t sleep. Winds on snow.’

‘What are you on about, Al?’

‘Am wrong,’ you said. ‘S’diamond on the snow. Gotta get it right.’

An ambulance raced by, lights and sirens on.

‘Someone’s evening’s ended badly,’ you said.

You’d often do this – have moments of near sobriety in drunkenness, as if you were coming up for air. You brushed a few flecks of snow off your lap and it occurred to me you must have bought these jeans since I’d last seen you. What else had happened in those eight weeks? This is how it happens, how couples split up, they simply
let
it happen and I thought,
Fuck it, why not, there’s probably never a perfect – or rather, entirely wrong – time
, and dropped on to my knees. ‘You’re the one, Alice,’ I said.

But you must have thought I’d slipped because you burst out laughing. ‘Stand up, man,’ you said. ‘Man up, man!’

I pulled myself up, anger suddenly punching through me. I tried to control my breathing, made myself stare at the plaque on the bench, something about a dead woman.
She’d often sit here and watch the world flow by
. You lit a cigarette, had two long drags and blew the smoke up in my face.

‘Don’t make me hate you,’ I said, which wasn’t what I’d planned.

You had another swig of drink, another drag.

‘Don’t fuck with me,’ I said.

‘You’re the one who fucked around.’

‘Once, Alice, once. Since when did
once
constitute fucking around?’

‘Once more than I cheated on you. I’m more shat upon than shitting,’ you declared, laughing. ‘S’Lear.’

A group of men bowled by in the distance singing. ‘Why can’t you all stop following me?’

I wondered if you meant that guy you’d been flirting with in All Bar One? You were virtually on his lap. I’d stared in through the glass, the way we had at those sharks in the aquarium, and had to stop myself charging in. Maybe there was some history there – you hooking up with an old flame, getting back at me for Prague. I deserved it. Jealousy’s like grief: it multiplies up and out, spreading hate and hurt, but all I want is to go back to how it was. You, coming round for
Live at the Apollo
. I’ll even let you watch
Wallander
. Coming and complaining about the piles of dishes and the three-day-old pizza boxes, running back to my room from the shower, shivering and dripping water, then saying it wouldn’t be massive and it might not be the poshest burb, it might end up being Tooting or Brixton or Elephant, but we could just about afford to rent our
own
flat if we pooled resources.

‘Was honest about how I feel,’ you said. ‘Love’s not like a tap, you can’t simply turn it off. Wasn’t it enough for you – me baring my heart and soul in an email? Can’t believe you ignored it.’

‘You look like you need a hug.’

‘I do, but not from you, not now.’

A nugget of resentment formed in me. I was on repeat, destined to keep messing up like some awful
Groundhog Day
parody.
I’m twenty-seven
, I thought.
I’m too old for this
.

‘Remember when we went skinny-dipping?’ you said. ‘Let’s do it now.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s snowing.’

‘You’re the ridiculous one, shagging around.’

That nugget of resentment hardened so I tried to count to ten before speaking, heard water tumbling over the weir in the distance, but at about six I heard myself say: ‘Look at the state you’re in. You’re an embarrassment.’

‘You’re no better. We’re as bad as each other. You, me, even my mum.’

The urge filled me to get wasted. I’d had six or seven pints, but all I felt was half – half sober, half drunk, half empty, half full, half what we had been. I needed to get so shit-faced I wouldn’t even know how much I was messing up. ‘Can I have some of that?’ I asked, nodding at the can.

‘S’gone,’ you said. ‘All gone.’

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was going to propose and I wasn’t planning to hurt you, I’d done that enough, but I could feel anger mushrooming in me, musty and sour and spiteful. A new feeling that wasn’t love: barbed and uncontainable. ‘Come back to my hotel.’

‘Rather sleep on this bench.’

You focused dejectedly on the dead-woman plaque, then squinted at my trousers. ‘They your keys or you just glad to see me?’ you asked, giggling.

I cast my eyes down to the outline of a small jeweller’s box. I’d even got proposing wrong. You’d made me get it wrong. I’d pictured myself sharing the news with Charlie, putting a brave face on it. Texting him from the hotel bar or the train tomorrow. ‘Back on the horse, mate. You’ve got your wingman back. Beers Friday?’ I couldn’t discern whether what I felt was elation or despair. I took out the box, hurled it into the river and it made a plink.

‘What was that?’ you enquired indifferently.

‘History, that’s what it was – which is what you’re going to be soon.’

‘Very profound,’ you said and maybe if you hadn’t laughed
I wouldn’t have done what I did next, but right then – hair in your face, the half-smoked gone-out cigarette by your feet – you were the one person I hated more than myself. I had to break it – had to break us – so completely we couldn’t hurt either of us any more. ‘That girl in Prague, she was gorgeous,’ I said and recalled with a bright clarity how I’d been before you: on my own, nothing to lose, no one to care about, no one to let down, no one to be let down by. ‘The sex was dynamite. I might as well be dead as in bed with you. You might as well be dead as in bed with me.’

‘Funny you should say that.’

You sucked futilely at the empty can. I reached out and there was a rip. Saw your black frilly bra, the one I’d bought you for Valentine’s Day. Needed to pull you so close it would drown it all out, or push you so far away I’d never see you again. Yes, that was it, no one to hurt, no one to hurt me. I could live like that. I could survive. I had to live like that to survive – shepherding girls I’d met on Saturday nights to the front door on Sunday mornings, kissing them on the cheek and saying, ‘I will,’ when they enquired casually if I was going to call, then texting Charlie, Mr Single, saying, ‘Mate, I pulled an uber-hot chick last night!’ Only had the confidence to talk to you the night we met because I had nothing to lose and I’d been so glad I’d left all that shit, that me, behind, but now I’d go back to it and I’d cope and it couldn’t be any worse than this, but I needed you gone first, erased. Right then I loathed you, Al, for making me think there was an alternative. I saw the bridge with its trusses and cantilevers, and recalled I’d once set my heart on being an architect. Another abandoned dream. ‘Come back with me, please,’ I said. One final pathetic effort.