Bitter Sweet

by Robert Young

I'm willing to accept at this juncture that I came over there as a little bit insensitive. Don't get me wrong, it isn't like I didn't actually care about her feelings or as if I didn't have any myself. I did. It cut me up to go through that, to see the pain and the hurt and desperation in her eyes.

  It’s just that there are things you don't know. Things that happened, or didn't happen, things that we said, or didn't say. And you don't know Mel to be absolutely fair, you don't really know what she's like. Or what she can be like, to be more precise.

  Or the thing. There's the thing too but I've already said that I'm over that and I'd hate for you to think that I might not be.

  Anyway, you're here to find out about Sally aren't you? That's what you're after really. You don't want to hear about Mel and what she was like. Or the thing

  Alright then, fuck it, let's just get it out of the way and then we can move on.

  We met a little over a two years ago at a party. It was all a bit random really because it wasn't as if we'd been invited. Not originally at least. I mean if they'd drawn up a guest list, I can confidently say that we wouldn't have been on it. Mel was on it of course, it was her party. When I say we, I mean me and Luke.

  Luke had insisted that we spend a quiet evening down our local, having a couple of pints, talking nonsense and eating crisps and as plans went, it was a pretty good one. Around ten that night, the door opens and seven or eight people troop in and it’s quickly apparent that they're drunk. They're louder and gigglier than anyone else in the pub and they head straight for the bar and stay there, rather than find a quiet table to take their drinks to. They order shots and two of the three guys each put a straw into a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, bend the straw right over the top of the bottle and flatten it against the neck and then shoot the whole thing down their throats in a matter of seconds. The others cheer and the one who necks his fractionally faster than the other claims bragging rights for the next few minutes until he baits his opponent into demanding a re-match which he duly accepts and then wins again.

  Pint glasses looking a bit empty in front of me it is my round so I give Luke the 'Same again?' nod and head over to the bar.

  Inside five minutes, Luke has joined me and we're chatting away to the whole group who, it turns out, have just made a mass escape from a party which was getting boring. The two Smirnoff Ice drinkers then insist that Luke and I do a 'Strawpedo' and since the girls they are with are all very pretty, backing down from this challenge is clearly counter-productive so we accept the challenge, lose the race gallantly to the other two (I mean we could have won of course but it felt like they were our guests and we didn't want to be ungracious hosts) and get a cheer from the group and pats on the back and it’s like we have passed an initiation and all of a sudden we're a part of the group now and then its tequila's all round and the course of our evening has very definitely turned a corner.

  Hour later we rather sheepishly follow the group into the flat of a total stranger. The party is subdued and there are several reproachful looks at the escapees for being so rude as to disappear to the pub and then to have brought back two random strangers. To their credit they vigorously defend our characters, claim to be good solid friends of us both and if I'm honest, over-sell us a little bit. Still, I don't suppose it hurts to be introduced to new people as a 'fucking great bloke, a legend' despite having known your introducer for only the briefest of periods.

  An hour after that, the bottle of tequila that we've taken back has been demolished and the party is beginning to liven up a bit and it is with a chunk of pride, dipped lightly in jealousy, that I notice Luke is snogging one of the pretty girls from the pub in the corner of the room. That's my boy! Jammy bastard.

  I, meanwhile, have found myself chatting to the host of the party who has yet to thaw out completely and appears to hold me partly responsible for half her guests pissing off to the pub for an hour. Guilty by association, there is no reasoning with the slightly-drunk and emotional, so I don't bother and opt instead to make polite conversation and pepper it with compliments, first about her home, then about the food that she's prepared and left out for people and then, as a final push in my little charm offensive, about her.

  At this point in the evening I am however, just a tiny bit whammed, and am all too happy to tread in areas that good sense and decency might otherwise prohibit.

  Saying 'I really like your top, it’s very stylish,' whilst pointing at said top with my hand (holding a can at the same time I might add, so it’s more a gesture than a point) and also with my eyes may have been intended to come across like I'm not one of your stiff, repressed types who's going to be too embarrassed to pay a girl a compliment about her top in case it might be construed as being a remark about her tits but in fact, I think it just came across as a remark about her tits. What with me staring at her tits. And pointing at them. Still though, nice tits.

  Anyway, blah, blah, blah. I won't bore you with the conversation that followed but she must have been charmed by my boldness and confidence, my lack of pretension. She cannot fail to have been won over by the manner in which I was able to convey how very blue her eyes were, that they were in fact really blue and not in a way that the word blue is merely a label intended to insinuate into your mind the concept of blueness, but that they themselves were perhaps the very essence of blueness, that they transcended simply being blue because they were so blue. I articulated the profoundness of this concept by repeating the word blue several times. But I think we connected somehow then; she could see that I understood something about her on a fundamental, perhaps even spiritual level, and wasn't just some bloke drinking her beer and looking at her tits telling her she had very, very blue eyes.

  (There will be other points before we're done that you will probably think of me as shallow, superficial and immature. Mostly I’m playing that up, as a sort of defence-mechanism, but I'll grant you I don't necessarily come off as the noble hero for the most part. But if you're expecting a chauvinist-learns-error-of-his-ways type of a payoff, you're in the wrong place. That's not what's happening here).

  Mel would have you believe - she tried to foist this nonsense on me but I'm nothing if not searingly perceptive and saw instantly through it - that she already thought that I was fit, made her laugh and that she was pissed anyway. I think we can read between the lines there right? Right.

  'Anyway,' she said some weeks later when we were talking about the night we met, 'I knew you fancied me.'

  'Oh really?' I said with a hint of incredulity. How could she have possibly known that?

  'You kept staring at my tits.'

  Damned women's intuition! Actually, her point was a flimsy one since staring at a woman's chest in no way indicates that you might fancy her. Fancy her chest? Yes, probably. Fancy her? Not necessarily. I have in my time, fallen for many a cleavage. Women? A handful. In referring to myself there, I am referring to men of course, all of us pretty much.

  Anyway, back to that fateful night. Wisely deciding not to outstay our welcome, Luke and I stumbled out the door after I'd plundered a kiss and a phone number and a sneaky grab of her arse just so she knew that I wasn't just classy but a little bit mischievous too and we headed into the night, happy with our lot, and delighted once again that the best nights are always the ones you don't plan. The ones where you just pop out for a pint and end up coming home the next morning looking slightly shell-shocked are always the memorable ones, the ones where you have stories to tell.

  Seven months later, as Mel's birthday approached, you will not believe the trouble I had convincing her of the wisdom of this theory in the face of her insistence that I should organise a proper birthday celebration for her.

  So anyway, we did the three months of being giddy and nauseatingly inseparable and we shed our inhibitions for public displays of affection in ways which chill me to my very marrow. We giggled. We petted. We gazed.

  We alienated many of our single friends, snogged in the cinema and shifted our chairs close
r in restaurants. I must hasten to append this before you jump to the wrong conclusion and point out that at no stage did we create ridiculous nicknames for each other or more importantly, for each other's bodily parts. Nor did we feel compelled to leave the bathroom door open whilst using the toilet or get those awful tattoos in Sanskrit or Chinese or some such random foreign language with the other's person's name.

  The point is, we were just like most couples who have just got together but not as bad as some and whilst I do have some fond memories of her and of us, I shall not cast a rueful glance back over my shoulder in years to come and wonder if she might have been the great lost love of my life. Alright? She's just an ex.

  The disintegration started slowly when it came. The initial excitement began to ebb away as it always does once that first rush of endorphins - or whatever it is that causes the wild chemical imbalance in you - has begun to subside. A more sustained release than that would surely upset one's equilibrium for good and make you into a proper mentalist. The brain can't handle it for too long.

  So then once a little perspective returned I noticed things that I didn't much like and undoubtedly she did the same with me. It started with her reluctance for me to meet up with my neglected mates like Luke for a boys night out which then extended to subtle manipulation and the clever use of the power of suggestion to stop me from doing this very often. The suggestion with the most power was that involving the withdrawal of sexual favours of course; thus has it always been since the dinosaurs, such primitive creatures are the male of the species.

  I noticed the snoring a bit more too. Cos that wasn't an 'endearing' trait as I'd been fervently trying to convince myself for so long. It kept me awake. It woke me up in the first place. It drove me freaking insane and then when I employed an irritable poke in the back to make her stop, just to claim a tiny respite for myself, I'd get a talking to for being nasty.

  She did all the usual stuff too like use my razor on her legs, or I'd follow her out of the bathroom and into the kitchen of a Saturday morning to discover she'd finished the milk on her cornflakes so there wasn't even enough for my coffee. And then, I swear she'd do this on purpose; she'd end up with the cornflakes just swimming in milk, like a dozen corn rafts set adrift upon a dairy white ocean. She'd munch and slurp her way noisily through it whilst I sat there, enduring the sound like fingernails on a blackboard, until she was ready to get dressed and come to the shop with me so we could go to the shop together and get milk and bread and the papers. Any suggestion from me that it would only take me five minutes and she could stay there in her pyjamas whilst I went alone was swatted away. No, we had to go together.

  It was the time I just turned and went on my own anyway that was when I saw the cracks were appearing. Time was, a walk in the sunshine down the road in the morning, the world full of promise and the day simply pregnant with opportunity for us, to pick up four pints of semi skimmed and the Saturday papers, was a joyous pleasure in itself. By the time I just span and walked out with a quick word over my shoulder that I'd be back in a bit, strolling down there alone in the rain was actually becoming preferable.

  I resented that she wanted to change me, but bless her; much of it was merely to make me a better person. I did eat too much crap and booze too much even though I did less of that since getting together with her. I didn't read enough, didn't exercise enough, wasted money on things I didn't need, didn't really apply myself at work. She was right about all of those.

  But not tucking my shirt in properly even though I was wearing jeans and a sweater over the top wasn't such an issue in my mind, and I happen to like my hair like that. I'll wash up later.

  I'm stopping the narrative here for a second because I was going to try to redress the slightly negative image I'd created for you earlier but I'm afraid the bitterness and resentment are still a little close to the surface. So before it gets out of hand, here's what I liked about her:

  Pretty. She really was lovely. A natural blonde she had hair a little past her shoulders and she knew how to completely change the way she looked just by putting it in a ponytail, or piling it all on top of her head in a way that was supposed to look hurried but had obviously taken ages to do, or using the straightening tongs I bought her to look all sleek and slinky. She really did have gorgeous blue eyes too; a rich, dark blue but with flecks and shards of lighter blues and a little sliver of brown here and there if you looked hard enough that actually appeared red against that blue. Soft skin that tanned easily and went a delightful pink in the cheek when she blushed or came.

  She had a positively yummy bum and as I may have mentioned, she was possessed of an ample and shapely bosom. Sorry if that sounds a little pretentious, but I wanted to avoid saying tits again.

  She was always well turned out, stylishly dressed in ways that were never less than flattering. When she laughed, she wasn't self-conscious about it. Didn't try to hide her joy behind her hand, wasn't apologetic or embarrassed about just letting the laugh go. If her younger brother rang up with some wildly overblown drama involving the latest girlfriend or what their Mum had just said to him, Mel never dismissed or patronised but had a way of making her brother sound like his point was valid, but perhaps when viewed this way, wasn't that bad after all.

  If there were call to praise someone for something, she would not be short of a compliment and the time I passed some exam for work which I wasn't even that bothered about, she bought me a card and a bottle of champagne.

  The phone rang often for her and she had long giggly chats with friends who came to her with their problems and with their idle gossip. Lots of them sought her advice and her approval. People loved her.

  I did.

  But Mel liked things just so, and she was too used to being listened to and doling out advice to people. She liked me because I was a handful, a bit naughty and to be tamed and because I wasn't like her last boyfriend who had been a bit wet and a bit of a pushover and a doormat.

  But then she tried to dampen my spirit and push me over and walk on me. She wanted to change the person she fell for in the first place. What she failed to realise is that I'm deceptively un-malleable. I'm like one of those stress balls and you can squeeze me and push me and shape me into what you think you want me to be like, and I'll go along and let you do it, but I'll just spring back into my original form again pretty soon.

  And it wasn't like I wanted to change her either, not in the same way. I liked her the way she was and I tried to accept those things about her I wasn't so keen on but I think what really happened was that I just mis-read some things about her. That in fact after the excitement faded there wasn't so much that I liked about her after all.

  But what I should have done was accept the realisation when it hit, and walk away before the sourness curdled everything.

  Naturally enough, I didn't do that. At first it was just because I still loved her and I didn't want to deal with the fact that it wasn't going to work out. But the more that I saw the weak points, the more I saw faults too and the worse it got.

  I started to find other things to do, other people to see and she'd be driven to nagging me about not spending enough time with her. Then she'd try other tactics like dropping in the name of some guy she knew, things he'd done that she was clearly impressed by, something he'd said the other day that was so funny, or a friendly drink after work with him. Just stabbing furiously at my jealous-button. And I'm still far too into her to be able to ignore it and rise above it all at this point so there are arguments and counter-accusations that I'm not seeing Luke at all but someone else perhaps.

  The final few months we just drifted further and further apart, silently letting the distance creep back in, me hoping that she'll see where it's headed and let it go there without too much obstruction. Her probably thinking in fact that if she gives me some space then I'll get over my obvious reluctance to grow up and commit and then just, well, grow up and commit.

  By the time I did finally pull the rip cord and b
ail out that day, I'd hardly really spoken to her in almost two weeks. She was right to have had a go at me that morning to be fair to her but for God's sake woman, take a freaking hint!

  It wasn't the two week near-silence that should have spelled it out for her either, not on its own. By then I'd seen the road ahead and I'd executed a text-book mirror, signal, manoeuvre but she had missed it, through myopia either forced or genuine. I'd stopped staying over and when I did stay, I'd take more stuff with me when I left than I turned up with the night before. My own stuff I should add, I wasn't just pinching things from her flat.

  I'd only stay one night at a time, not the four or five days in a row where I was washing shirts and underwear in the sink then wearing them again because I had only brought two days clothes with me. I even began bringing her things back over from my place too. Shampoo would reappear in her bathroom, earrings she could swear she left at mine would be right there on the dresser.

  Cynical yes, but I'm trying to spare us both some future awkwardness and pain. Don't blame me for being the only one with eyes to see. I'm only thinking ahead really. You may yet come to see how astonishingly rare that is for me, so a little credit here please.

  But I've ducked it long enough now and you must be growing impatient. The thing.

  We're three weeks in and we've been on several dates, had nights out and nights in and we're moving from being merely a bit smitten with each other, to full on connected at the hip. A flash of guilt behind the eyes, a quiver of the bottom lip and she confesses.

  A week after we had gone out, had kissed properly and had spent a night together but had not actually done it yet, she had met up with her ex for a drink. Just friends of course, just to catch up. But she'd ended up back at his and he'd tried to kiss her and she'd let him and she'd been very confused at the time and we'd not really been a proper item at that stage and she wanted to be honest with me. And she was very sorry indeed.

  If I'm ever in a nasty accident and I break or gash something horribly I will not prod or poke at the wound or examine it too closely because that will only make it hurt more, amplify my anguish.

  But I poke and I prod at this one and as much as the pain shoots through me each time as a warning not to touch it, I keep probing. In hindsight, my questions are designed to give her a get out clause. I ask leading questions, almost giving her the answer that I want to hear and mostly she does as she is bid. But it's the momentary pauses and hesitations, the way she drops her lashes to her cheek at a vital moment that embed themselves in my memory like splinters.

  She explains that she wasn't really sure how she felt about me, she'd had a glass of wine and she still, back then (like it was in the distant past rather than a fortnight or so since it happened) had some feelings toward her ex. It had gone no further than a kiss and she'd left pretty much straight after and gone home and really regretted doing it and maybe that was what made her realise how she really felt about me...

  I believed her. Because you need trust right? And it was only a few weeks into things and we'd not even slept together by then. And it was just a kiss and she'd not initiated it and she'd stopped it and left. So it's not such a big deal really. Not really.

  She slept with him didn't she? And not just that time, but more times afterward up until she realised she liked me more than him and had to make a choice and that deceiving us both was getting too much for her.

  I don't want to think that is the reality of the situation because I want to think more of her than that and I want to think more of our relationship than that. But the pauses she left before saying 'No, nothing happened,' and 'that was the only time' have burrowed into my brain and take their sweet time surfacing, and the way she broke eye contact at the moments that she should have held it come back to me and its all that I can think. I don't want to think it, but I do, more and more, just in small patches here and there, but gradually in large ugly blooms, like mould on bread.

  Truth is, all I have is paranoia and suspicion. She might have been totally honest with me about it. Why even tell me anything at all? She didn't really need to. If she'd carried on seeing him and then eventually taken her pick, I'd have been none the wiser. So telling me that must have been difficult and brave and important for her to get it in the open, so we can deal with it and move on and not have some dark secret lurking behind us. But then, maybe she started to come clean and then only went half way. Couldn't bring herself to tell me everything so just left it at a kiss and just once and she's sorry, sorry, sorry.

  I don't know. The point is, whether it happened or not, the trust is damaged now. Cracked just a bit, but the cracks spread and widen the closer I inspect them. And the more she tries to reassure me, the more she tries to cover and repair those cracks, part of me refuses to accept it and interprets it as further evidence of her guilt. Doth the lady protest too much? A part of me thinks so.

  You can only repress that for so long. You can rationalise things and reason them out and decide that you do trust her and if she says nothing happened then that is precisely what happened but the mind doesn't work that way. The mind makes its own mind up, reaches its own conclusions entirely divorced from the ones you want to reach, forms opinions other than the ones you want to form. And sometimes it decides that your girlfriend cheated on you, is a fucking nag and a drama queen and a liar and then dumps her for you.

  Chapter 5