‘Who are you texting?’ Matty said.
‘Rosie,’ I said, putting my phone down and snuggling up to him. ‘She’s complaining she hasn’t seen me since my birthday.’
He put his arm round me, pulled me close, kissed the top of my head. ‘You do know she doesn’t like me all that much, don’t you?’
I sat up a little. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I dunno, she’s just always been a bit cool with me. Just not sure she gets me.’
As far as I knew, nothing could have been further from the truth – all those Marriage Material and He’s a Keeper jokes. If anything, I had been getting a little fed up of all the wedding-bell cracks.
‘No, really, I really don’t think so, you know. She thinks you’re great.’
On the television, two police officers, a man and a woman both in full black body armour, burst out of the back of a van waving giant guns and shouting, ‘Armed police!’
‘I am great.’ Matty took a swig from the beer bottle in his other hand. ‘She still doesn’t like me.’
There was an explosion of gunfire from the television – he had the sound on rather loud and I had to raise my voice over it. ‘No, honestly, I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick there. She’s never said anything.’
He looked down at me where I rested against him. ‘Put it this way. How often did you see her before I came on the scene?’
‘Once a week, at least,’ I replied.
‘Right, and how often do you see her now?’
‘Yeah, okay, fair point. Maybe I should make more effort.’
He rose from the sofa swiftly, so swiftly I almost fell forward. ‘This is crap,’ he said brusquely, and walked towards the kitchen. On the television, the woman officer was holding her gun up high and pointing it at someone out of sight. There was a close-up of her face on the screen, her mouth open and eyes wide, the sound of her breathing harsh and fast.
*
Rosaria had said a drink, but I suggested we made it a coffee, in Nero on Long Causeway. This was a compromise on my part. Matty didn’t like me going out drinking without him – he worried about me getting home safely. What if I had a seizure when I was in a pub or a bar and people just thought I was drunk? And Thursday was my turn to cook. Matty had said it wasn’t fair him doing so much of the cooking and we had to have a rota, even though, he had joked, with my culinary skills he would make sure he got a hearty lunch at the hospital.
We arranged to meet as soon as she could get there after work, 6 p.m. – Nero closed at 7 p.m., which would give me an excuse to go home. She was already there when I arrived, in a big bright red jumper, cowl-neck, her black curly hair piled onto her head. Oh Rosie, I thought, as I saw her. Funny how I hadn’t been missing her the last few weeks, but as soon as I saw her, I really did.
She stood up to greet me and her smile seemed a little fixed, I thought – but it was the end of the working day, we were both tired, and hungry, probably. I thought, I could murder a chicken and pesto panini but I’ll be eating with Matty later.
‘What do you want?’ she said. She already had a large latte in front of her.
‘No, no, I’ll go,’ I said. ‘I’ll just leave my coat here, okay?’
What an odd thing to say, I thought as I waited in the queue. As if she’d mind if I left my coat with her. Was it me, or were we both a little nervous? At the back of the coffee shop, there was a man sitting on his own muttering to himself. ‘You don’t know, do yer?’ he kept saying, over and over again. ‘You don’t know? How do you know? You don’t know anything.’ There were two young women sitting at the table nearest to the counter and they kept glancing over at him, then talking to each other in low voices in an Eastern European language I couldn’t identify.
When I sat down again, Rosaria and I talked for a while about my birthday, and about another party that was coming up, then she left a long pause.
‘I feel I’ve hardly seen you recently …’ she said.
‘Yeah, I know, it’s been really busy …’ I said, lifting my coffee cup carefully. It was still perilously full.
There was a pause while we both drank from our cups. Then she added, ‘You hardly text me either. Even when we’re busy, we’ve always texted.’
Right, so it was coming out now. It was true, I had neglected her recently. And it wasn’t just work or winter, I couldn’t use either of those as the whole excuse. Matty and I had fallen into such a domestic routine. He loved me being home when he got back from work, he said; coming home to me meant the end of the working day. He hated coming home to an empty flat and he didn’t like eating alone. I knew all the rules about not dropping your women friends when a man came into your life but really, Matty and I had only been living together a few months – wasn’t there bound to be a period of adjustment? And it wasn’t all plain sailing, I had discovered. Living with someone – the state that looks so enviable from the outside. I felt as though I was only just beginning to realise how difficult it could be, how many allowances you had to make. I’d even been prepared to ask him to leave not that long ago, but for the last couple of weeks, he’d been a real sweetheart. We were both learning, after all, and it took time and effort – and that was hard to explain to a friend.
In the pause in our conversation, I took my phone out of my pocket and checked for texts, more as a delaying tactic while I thought of what to say next as much as anything else. I no longer knew how to confide in Rosie – once upon a time, I would have told her everything.
‘Am I keeping you?’ she said.
Did I detect a certain dryness in her tone? ‘No, of course not,’ I said brightly.
Another pause.
‘Lis’,’ she said. ‘Is everything okay, at home I mean, you and Matty?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know, it’s just, you seem a bit jumpy, you know? You used to be really relaxed with me and now you just seem a bit twitchy and on edge all the time.’
‘Not at all …’ I said, smiling. ‘No, it’s just work is really hectic and Matty’s job is really hectic too. He’s working all hours, works through his lunch break most days, then still has patients to see long after the clinic should have closed and he can’t turn someone away when they’ve been waiting all afternoon for their appointment, you know how it is.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ she said, and her voice still sounded a little on the dry side. ‘Jasmine says. She says Matthew’s an amazing doctor, everyone at the hospital adores him. He’ll be a consultant really soon.’
I wanted to say, why are you bringing Jasmine’s name into the conversation? Why don’t you just say what you have to say?
‘In fact,’ she continued, looking down at her half-drunk latte, ‘Jasmine is really quite awestruck, as you would be, I suppose, you know, when it’s someone senior to you, few years older. It’s quite, you know, status-driven, isn’t it, in that place? Not that different from a teacher–pupil relationship, in some ways. I mean …’ She drew breath. ‘It’s not illegal or anything, I’m not saying that, but …’
I looked at her.
‘But?’ I said, coolly.
‘But,’ Rosie said, taking a deep breath but returning my look. ‘It wouldn’t really be on for someone to take advantage of that, would it?’
I rose to my feet. I loved Rosaria, we had been friends for years. I needed to leave immediately. I needed to leave before I said, how fucking dare you? Your little sister fancies my boyfriend and he needs warning off? I saw the way she looked at him at my birthday, all that hair-tossing, and what, she throws herself at him and when he behaves in precisely the way he’s been invited to behave it’s all his fault?
I did not want to say these things so I said lightly, ‘Yes, well, I hear Jasmine texts him quite a lot, asking him career advice and all that, all the time apparently. Needy and immature is how he describes her. Did she tell you she rang him on a Saturday night when he was out having dinner with me, or did she not ment
ion that bit?’
Rosie bristled at the imputation that it might be her little sister behaving inappropriately. ‘I think you might find it’s the other way around.’
There was a moment of stalemate. She was still seated, in one of the low easy chairs, and I was standing. It was either up to me to sit down again or her to stand. Sitting back down seemed like too much of a concession.
‘Look, I’d better go …’ I said, picking up my coat. ‘I’ll call you, okay?’
She gave me a sad, careful look. ‘Okay.’
*
Back home, I slammed the door behind me, took my coat and shoes off and washed my hands, began cooking with alacrity. Matty came home around half past seven and made no comment on the fact that I was already back. We ate together, making small talk about his day. He cleared the table and I stayed seated while he loaded our tiny, narrow dishwasher and began to wash up. After a while, he said, over his shoulder, ‘How was Rosaria, then?’
I sighed, a deep sigh. There was no point in going round the houses.
‘Well, a bit weird, to be honest. We had a bit of an argument, sort of, not really.’ I took a breath, kept my voice casual. ‘She says you text Jasmine a lot.’
He was standing with his back to me. He paused for a moment, then continued washing a saucepan. ‘And do you believe her?’ His voice was very reasonable.
‘Do you, text her a lot I mean?’ I said. I could not bear another row. Why had he asked about Rosaria? He must have known there was a reason I wasn’t telling him about our coffee together. Why couldn’t he just let it go?
‘So you do believe her,’ he said plainly and simply.
‘She says Jasmine is very taken with you.’
‘Well, yes, I wasn’t going to say anything but she clearly has some kind of crush on me. It got a bit out of hand and I’ve cooled off on her. She was getting the wrong idea.’
‘You said she was just interested in talking about medicine, her career …’ I said. At least this wasn’t an argument – not yet. He seemed surprisingly calm.
He still had his back to me, his hands in the sink. ‘Well, it became obvious to me she had a bit of a crush and it was getting inappropriate so I backed off. Sorry to say this but it does happen quite a lot with the nurses, you know. A lot of them are from quite working-class backgrounds. Doctors, you know, for them it’s a way of trading up, it’s a well-known phenomenon. She’s not the first nurse to make it pretty clear it was there on a plate if I wanted it.’
His tone was still relaxed. He lifted a saucepan out of the water and rinsed it before putting it upside down on the draining board. I had always found it incredibly endearing to see him in washing-up gloves. He turned to me. ‘I knew something like that had happened, as soon as I walked in the door. I can read you like a book. And it was Rosaria, after all; you can’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘I didn’t want to talk about it.’
He smiled at me. ‘I knew the minute I walked in the door! You can talk to me about anything, you know.’ He turned back to the sink. ‘You know, you might want to think about whether maybe Rosaria has an ulterior motive here. After all, if she succeeds in breaking you and me up, she gets her best friend back, doesn’t she?’
‘I don’t think she’s trying to break us up, really, Matthew. She’s not malicious like that, she’s always looked out for me.’
‘And you’ve always looked out for her and maybe she finds it hard you’ve got other priorities now, and she’s the one left on the shelf? I mean, women your age, you know, the biological clock and all that. When was the last time she had a proper boyfriend?’
‘I dunno,’ I said, thinking about it. ‘Couple of years ago, she’s had a few casual things.’
‘Well, there you go.’
There was a long silence while I thought all this through. Rosaria had never come across that way to me but perhaps he had a point. Maybe all that female bravado she and I had indulged in – the gossiping about men, the loyalty to each other – was masking a kind of panic, a kind of need? But she and I were always so comfortable together in conversation – we’d had various minor tiffs over the years but she was the one person I felt I could always tell anything.
‘I …’ I said, hesitantly, ‘I’m not sure, you know, I’m not sure you’ve ever liked her all that much.’
He still had his back to me. ‘That’s not it …’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t have a problem with Rosaria. She’s clearly a bit of a gossip, though, and maybe you want to think about that. If she gossips about other people to you then maybe she gossips about you to them.’ There was another pause, then he said, ‘Maybe it’s time for you to have a think about what she’s really like … if she’s lying to you about me texting Jasmine, then what else is she lying about?’
‘She could be mistaken, you know, genuinely mistaken, or Jasmine hasn’t been straight with her. You think she’s lying …?’
‘Well, it’s quite simple, either she’s lying or I am, and I’m not. So it’s her. She’s a liar.’
The tone of his voice had altered ever so slightly, just one notch – he was speaking just that little bit more slowly. I paused, trying to work out if I was right in detecting that, or being over-cautious. Perhaps it was okay. We were just conversing, after all. There was no sign of any anger growing in him. I thought of my resolution to ask him to move out a couple of weeks ago, and how he had been lovely to be with in the last fortnight, but it didn’t change the things that had already happened, things that needed tackling sooner or later. Maybe now was a good moment to raise those things, while we were being calm and open with each other.
‘I don’t think she’s a liar …’ I said. Such a small, soft word to pronounce, a word you could whisper, a silk scarf, and yet such a sharp, hard word in its effect – a knitting needle of a word. We all exaggerate, especially during arguments, we all say things for effect – you could say we all lie, from time to time. Saying someone had exaggerated or spoken out of turn or even told a lie, even that wasn’t so big an accusation, given context. Calling someone a liar, though: that was an accusation of a whole different magnitude.
‘Well,’ he said casually, ‘the definition of a liar is one who tells lies, no? And I think we’ve agreed she’s lying.’
I paused for a moment, then, in the same way I might have paused before stepping out onto a rickety rope bridge over a very deep canyon.
‘Sometimes …’ I said, then dried to a halt.
He heard something in my voice – a minute change in register. He stopped what he was doing, became motionless, but didn’t turn around.
‘Go on …’ He was quite still, his voice low.
I looked at the table in front of me while I spoke. ‘I don’t know, sometimes, you scare me a bit.’
He turned then, and the look on his face was one of horror. ‘What? How the hell did we get from your best friend being a liar to this?’
Immediately I rowed back. ‘I just mean, sometimes you seem …’
‘What? I seem what? Lisa, for God’s sake, I am the least scary person on the planet.’ He lifted both hands out of the washing-up bowl, holding them high. ‘How can you say that?’ He pulled off the washing-up gloves and dropped them onto the counter top.
It was going badly wrong, but I had to try. ‘Sometimes, I just feel …’
‘Give me an example, go on.’
‘Well, you know, sometimes, when you pinch me, in the street or …’ He would pinch me sometimes, from behind, when I was standing at the cashpoint and he was waiting for me, or squeeze my thigh really hard when we were in a pub together, until I said ouch out loud and people glanced at us. Once, he had dropped behind while we were walking and kicked at the back of my heels, making me trip. He always made me feel stupid for objecting to any of this and the funny thing was, it wasn’t until that moment, when I was trying to articulate why I felt so uneasy, that I had realised those things were part of it. It was a standing joke between us, my physical incompetence, my
clumsiness – but he made it worse. He enjoyed making it worse.
He actually laughed, then, throwing his head back, teeth glistening, a hard bark of a laugh. ‘Oh my God, my girlfriend doesn’t like me pinching her bum! Okay okay, well, we’ll drop that measure of appreciation then, ha, my God! Sorry, I happen to think you have an incredibly sexy bum, and it’s a bit of an ironic joke, I’m not that much of a dinosaur, but sorry, okay!’ He raised both hands palms upwards again.
‘I told you I didn’t like it …’
‘Yeah, well, I didn’t realise you were serious. Jeez, you really are a bit of a sensitive flower, aren’t you? Why is this one coming up now, for God’s sake? I thought we were talking about your unreliable gossipy best friend. Where the hell has all this come from?’
‘And then when …’ I hesitated at this point, because I knew it was going to take the conversation to the brink. I had just about got away with it up until now. He was laughing, but I knew that if I took this to the next stage, it would be a different sort of discussion.
There was a moment, then, when the evening was in the balance, when I could have said something like, ‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t like it much!’ Or pinched him, or made some sort of joke, and we would have slid away from what was about to happen. I saw it all very clearly. But I also saw an opening, and one that I had to take advantage of. The tipping point: perhaps I knew that if I didn’t do it then, I would only have to do it in the future. My unease had been building up for too long.
‘… that time, you know, when you grabbed my face.’
He crinkled his nose, contorted his upper lip and gave his head a tiny shake. ‘When?’ He picked up the gloves from the counter top and shook them free of water, then pulled the plug out of the sink, laying the gloves on the edge, turning back to me, leaning against the counter, crossing his arms.
‘You know, that Sunday, after Sunday lunch with my parents.’
‘Which Sunday lunch? We haven’t been to Sunday lunch with your parents for ages.’
‘No, before Christmas I mean. I went alone, you know the one, you were working and I came back in a really bad mood and you grabbed my face.’
Platform Seven Page 22
