The Pieces of You and Me

by Rachel Burton

  We were born twelve hours apart – you at 6 p.m. and me the following morning – in the same hospital, our mothers recovering in beds next to each other, an odd but lifelong friendship developing from that initial bond. You were early and I was late, which was the pattern that continued for the rest of our lives. You were always waiting for me to catch up with you.

  Our parents’ houses stood back to back and our mothers’ friendship transferred to us. We grew up together, in one another’s pockets. We made a hole in the back fence so we could cut through into each other’s gardens instead of walking around the block to the front door. We wandered in and out of each other’s houses as though we owned the whole street. We did everything together from the moment we were born.

  Our first day of school seemed less daunting because we had each other. We were always in trouble for talking, or for reading some book or other that we weren’t meant to be reading, both of us so ahead of the rest of the class even then. Sometimes, when they made us work in pairs, the teachers would separate us, make us work with other people. But you were always looking over your shoulder, making sure I was OK.

  When you were six you punched the boy who used to bully me. You got in a lot of trouble for that. Afterwards you told me you were going to marry me one day, and always look after me. You were the only six-year-old I’ve ever known who tried to stick to that promise.

  The autumn after my grandmother died we were sent off to separate schools, hothousing us in single-sex environments, prepping us for the ‘great things’ our parents had planned for our futures. I missed you desperately. I was so used to you then that I missed the testosterone in my every day, even if I wasn’t really aware that’s what it was that I was missing. Every evening when we got home we ripped off our expensive school uniforms and pulled on the dirty, scruffy clothes we preferred wearing to sit in my mother’s apple orchard, catching up on our days, daydreaming.

  And then, when we were eleven, the unthinkable happened.

  They took you away from me …

  5

  JESS

  ‘Don’t be mad at me,’ Gemma said in the voice of someone who had done something that would make me mad.

  The two of us were lying on our backs listening to soothing music as two beauty therapists performed a procedure known as Billion Dollar Brows on us.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What have you done other than make me undergo this torture?’ I wasn’t sure I was a Billion Dollar Brow sort of person. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set foot in a beauty salon. It must have been over six years ago and I was sure eyebrows had been much less complicated back then.

  ‘You’ll thank me for it,’ Gemma said.

  ‘For what? The eyebrows or whatever else it is you’ve done?’

  ‘You’ll thank me for both in the end,’ she said.

  ‘Gemma, what have you done?’

  ‘I invited Rupert to my wedding and he’s RSVP’d yes,’ she replied very quickly, the words tumbling out of her mouth.

  ‘You’ve what?’ I felt my stomach lurch at the thought of it. After spending the last few nights going through my old diaries, reading through my memories of Rupert as a child, a teenager, our first kiss and everything that happened afterwards, I had been trying not to think about him at all. I had been failing spectacularly but seeing him at Gemma’s wedding wasn’t going to help. I’d worked so hard at moving on that this felt like a setback.

  Except the part that felt like a second chance.

  ‘He’s coming to the wedding,’ Gemma said. ‘And he’ll dance with you and realise what a terrible mistake he made and …’

  ‘Gemma, stop,’ I said. ‘Stop getting carried away. If you’ve invited him because he’s an old friend and you’d like him to be there then that’s fine.’ I was being much more reasonable than I felt, mostly due to the presence of the two eyebrow technicians. ‘But if you think there’s going to be some great reunion, you’re mistaken.’

  ‘I just want us all to be together again,’ she said. ‘Well, except Camilla of course.’

  ‘And Dan,’ I replied, wondering what he was doing these days. Gemma didn’t say anything.

  ‘When did you invite Rupert?’ I asked, changing the subject.

  ‘I sent an invitation to his department at the university. He replied with his address and telephone number, if you’d like them.’

  I was tempted. More than tempted. I wanted her to put the number into my phone so I could call him the minute I got out of the beauty salon. But I ignored that feeling, took a deep breath and tried not to think about the fact that in just over a week I’d be seeing him again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gemma said when I didn’t respond. ‘I wanted to do something nice for you. You were always meant to get married first – you know that.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that because it was true. It should have been me first. It should have been me ten years ago. Rupert and I should be celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary instead of being forced into some awkward situation at Gemma’s wedding. We could have had a house together; we could have had a family. I could have avoided Dan and never got ill. I could have been happy for the last decade instead of wasting my time thinking about what might have been.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said.

  ‘So you don’t mind?’

  I sighed. Gemma and Rupert had always got along well. They had the same sense of humour, even though Rupert’s was far more restrained. They spent years as teenagers ribbing each other and I knew that she had missed him when he left. He was one of the few people who stuck by her, who didn’t try and encourage her to go to university when she hadn’t wanted to.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘But don’t try and matchmake. Just leave it OK?’

  ‘I told you he was single, didn’t I?’ she carried on regardless. ‘And his first question was whether you were seeing anyone.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked, despite myself.

  ‘Yes, he seemed quite keen to know that.’

  My heart skipped at the thought of that, although I tried to put it out of my mind.

  ‘Look, Gemma,’ I said. ‘It’ll be lovely to see Rupert again at the wedding, but it doesn’t mean we’re getting back together. It was a long time ago and we’re different people now.’

  ‘I’ll sit him next to your mum,’ Gemma said, ignoring me. ‘She can write a poem about it all.’

  ‘What do you think?’ the eyebrow technician asked suddenly, holding a mirror above my face. It took me a moment to recognise myself. I looked ghastly and had to bite my lip to stop myself saying so. I could hear Gemma gushing about her amazing new eyebrows in the background, so I forced a smile and told the therapist that they were perfect. I actually wanted to cry. I was still so pale and thin, and the sudden encroachment of dark oppressive brows just didn’t look right. Brows like this suited women like Gemma, with her tanned skin and good bone structure. On me it looked like a five-year-old had got into her mother’s make-up bag.

  I managed to keep quiet as we paid and left the salon. I didn’t want Gemma to realise how upset I was but she knew me too well.

  ‘Shall we go for a coffee?’ she asked.

  I made a non-committal noise. All I wanted to do was go home and scrub my forehead for the rest of the evening until I looked less ridiculous.

  ‘Jess, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied in an attempt to sound breezy.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Jess. What’s wrong?’

  I sighed. ‘I look like Noel bloody Gallagher,’ I said. It was ridiculous to be this upset about eyebrows, but honestly, they looked dreadful.

  Gemma started laughing to herself and headed off down the street. I followed her, brushing my fringe down in an attempt to hide my brows.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know it was meant to be a treat but I hate them. They don’t suit me like they suit you.’

  Gemma looked at me then, still smiling. ‘They’re fine,’ she said. ‘They always
look a bit alarming when you first have them done, but they’ll fade and you’ll thank me when you see the wedding photos.’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘Eyebrows are the windows to the soul,’ she said.

  ‘I thought that was eyes?’

  ‘Window frames then.’ She laughed, linking her arm through mine. I’ve always wondered what it must be like to feel as carelessly happy as Gemma.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and get that coffee.’

  … The day you left for boarding school I didn’t want to let you go. We stood outside your house, your father’s car packed up with your things, my arms wrapped around your waist, your chin on the top of my head. Even at eleven you were head and shoulders taller than me.

  ‘Come along, Rupert, please,’ your father said. I could hear the irritation in his voice. He was always impatient when I was around. Maybe he was impatient when I wasn’t around too, but I did feel that his impatience was reserved especially for me.

  You pulled away, pushing your glasses up your nose and looking at me. I remember your eyes seemed bluer than ever that afternoon.

  ‘I’m still here, Jessie,’ you said. ‘Whenever you need me.’ But I knew I wouldn’t see you until the Christmas holidays and when you’re eleven the distance between September and Christmas seems enormous, insurmountable, impassable.

  You got into the back of the car and your father pulled away, off to your expensive new school in London. It felt like you were going forever. It felt as though it was the end. You looked out of the rear window as the car turned out of the bottom of the road and you waved briefly. I felt as though I’d never see you again.

  But life carried on much as it always had, even though you weren’t there. I moved up into the Senior Building of my all-girls school and I made friends who helped me keep my mind off you, who helped to fill the gaping hole you’d left behind.

  Caitlin and Gemma were the only girls like me at school – my grandmother had high ideas about my education, but I don’t think she’d thought through how hard it would be for me to fit in. Caitlin and Gemma and I were ordinary – we didn’t have trust funds or long limbs and blonde hair and our fathers weren’t ‘something in the City’.

  But they always saw me for who I was rather than as ‘Rupert Tremayne’s friend’ …

  6

  RUPERT

  Even though in the end she hadn’t believed him, it had always been Jess. From the day he asked her to marry him in the school playground he knew. Admittedly, he didn’t really know what it was that he knew when he was six, but it was a feeling; a sense of the way things were meant to be. Even years later, after he’d left her standing at the departure gate at Heathrow airport, he had still known. None of the women he’d tried to lose himself in at Harvard could compare, not even Camilla – especially not Camilla. He’d always wanted them to be Jess and they never could be. He’d stopped dating completely in the end.

  He could clearly remember the day he first realised his feelings for Jess had slipped from best friends to something more, something much more. It was the Christmas holidays before their GCSEs. Something about Jess had changed that winter; it felt as though she was sliding away from him. She was starting to have a life that he wasn’t a part of and she talked about the parties she had been to and the boys Gemma and Caitlin had giggled over, the boys they had kissed.

  ‘Did you kiss anyone?’ he’d asked, unable to hide the jealousy from his voice.

  She’d shaken her head. ‘Not this time,’ she’d said with a grin.

  He had wanted to kiss her then, but he hadn’t had the courage to do anything except think about what that would be like and it had taken him until the following summer to admit what was happening – that they couldn’t just be friends anymore.

  He’d always thought he’d asked her too soon, that she hadn’t been ready for a relationship when she was sixteen. But she had known as well as he had that they had both reached the point of no turning back.

  Over the last week, since seeing Jess again, Rupert had had to stop himself from tracking her down. He knew Gemma worked at Kew. It would be easy enough to call her, to find out where Jess was, what her phone number was. Gemma had seemed quite keen to push the two of them back together, had even told him Jess was single. What harm could there be in asking Jess if she wanted to meet for a coffee next time he was in London?

  But he had pushed her before, when they were sixteen, and again, when they were twenty-one, when they were both lost in the grief of losing Jess’s father. He didn’t want to be that person again and Jess had made no move to get in touch with him. He tried to remind himself that walking away from her outside her hotel had been the right thing to do.

  When the thick gold-embossed envelope appeared in his pigeonhole at work it had felt like a lifeline. Gemma had invited him to her wedding after all. He had thought she’d been joking when she mentioned it in the pub. He hadn’t needed to call her in the end because Gemma had given him a second chance. He knew this would be the last chance he would get. It was now or never.

  JULY 2017

  7

  JESS

  I woke up on the morning of Gemma’s wedding feeling as though I’d been hit by a truck. Not today, I thought. Please not today.

  Five years previously I had come down with glandular fever. I’d known other people who had had it, I knew that it could take weeks, even months, to recover, but for me something had gone wrong. The virus had triggered something else in my body, something worse, and had left me sick and weak for years. Up until a year or so ago I would wake up most mornings feeling like this – every bone in my body aching, my glands swollen, my head pounding. I knew when I stood up I would be dizzy and that everything I did, from cleaning my teeth to brushing my hair, would be exhausting; that every movement would feel as though I was walking through jam.

  Over the years, the bad days became less frequent and I was able to live a more normal life – if going to bed at 9 p.m. and barely drinking or socialising could be considered a normal life for a woman my age. My thirtieth birthday party ended at 6 p.m. and the strongest substance imbibed by me was Earl Grey tea.

  These days I still got tired easily and, towards the end of the day, the bone-aching weariness would return. But as long as I took my painkillers and my other medication I could usually manage most situations.

  I lay in bed racking my brains, trying to work out what I’d done to trigger a flare-up like this. I knew the run-up to Gemma’s wedding – the endless hair and beauty trials, the rehearsal dinner, the dress fittings and the stress of the last-minute arrangements – would be exhausting, but I’d tried to get early nights, tried not to drink and tried to do the things that I knew helped me. Yet, despite my efforts the wheels had fallen off on the one day I needed them more than ever.

  The only thing I could think of was that London was enjoying a brief heatwave and, although I loved the summer time, the heat could be a trigger for my symptoms – especially in an old hotel without air conditioning, when I hadn’t slept well.

  I wasn’t going to admit, even to myself, that I hadn’t been sleeping well recently because I’d been up late night after night reading my old journals, poring over the box of photos, lost in memories of the past. And I wasn’t going to admit that my insomnia had increased along with my anxiety at seeing Rupert again today. My stomach churned with a mix of dread and excitement at the thought.

  I took some deep breaths and tried to remember the times I’d had to battle flare-ups like this before – like when the deadline for my second novel was looming, or Gemma’s engagement party. I’d got up, taken my meds and got on with the day. As I sat up in bed, swinging my legs over the side and reaching for my medication bag, I tried not to remember the consequences of those times I’d battled through, tried not to remember how they had left me depleted for weeks.

  By the time Caitlin knocked on my hotel room door to collect me, I was showered and dressed and ready to go and get my hair and m
ake-up done.

  I watched Caitlin’s face fall as I opened the door.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  I forced a smile. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Honestly, it’s just been a long time since you saw me without make-up on!’

  She looked at me for a minute, scrutinising me.

  ‘If you need anything today just ask me, won’t you?’ she said.

  I opened my mouth to tell her again that I was fine, but I knew I couldn’t lie to her. Caitlin knew me too well.

  ‘Just ask,’ she repeated, and I nodded. ‘Now come on,’ she went on. ‘We can’t leave the bride-to-be waiting any longer. She’s phoned me three times this morning already. Has she phoned you?’

  ‘I switched my phone off.’ I grinned.

  ‘Sensible girl,’ she said, taking my arm and leading me off to the bridal suite.

  *

  An hour and a half later we sat in Gemma’s room surrounded by the detritus left behind when three women get ready for a wedding. The hair and make-up people had left and the photographer, who had been taking photographs of us getting ready, had gone off to take some photos of Mike and his best man.

  I’d scrubbed up well considering how bad I felt – the make-up artist had her work cut out with me, but she’d worked magic. Even I couldn’t tell how bad I looked underneath when I saw my reflection and the dark blue of the bridesmaid’s dress brought out the green in my eyes. I almost looked healthy, and my ridiculous Billion Dollar Brows had calmed down just as Gemma had promised they would.

  Gemma sighed audibly.

  ‘Cold feet, Gem?’ Caitlin joked.

  ‘Dad,’ Gemma said quietly. ‘James walking me down the aisle just won’t be the same. I wish he could be here.’