He's Got to Go

by Sheila O'Flanagan

  “Understandable, I guess,” said Cate.

  “I thought you might ring me the next day. I’d have said something to you then, to let you know that I knew something was up. But you didn’t. And I thought that you were clearly having too good a time to ring me.”

  “I wish,” muttered Cate.

  “So I got really furious then. And I decided that I’d throw you out.”

  “Thanks,” she said crookedly.

  “Then when you came home and told me…” His voice trailed off and he looked at a spot in the ceiling. “I couldn’t believe it. And after all the time I’d been thinking that you were having an affair with someone I suppose I believed that the baby couldn’t possibly be mine. Every time I thought that it might be, I was consumed with rage that you hadn’t told me. And that you were going to get rid of it without telling me. I couldn’t believe that you’d do a thing like that without telling me, Cate, I just couldn’t.”

  She stared into her glass of water, watching the bubbles rise to the surface and break around the thin slice of lemon.

  “You told me you didn’t want children,” she said finally, not looking up at him. “I was going to tell you one night when we were having a takeaway only you started talking about not going down the suburban route and having kids and so I just couldn’t. Especially whenever I thought of what it would be like with you and the TV show and the radio shows and everything. You’d be so busy and I’d be the one who’d have to do all the nappy changing and getting up in the middle of the night and everything. You were moving onto a different level of success, Finn. I didn’t want to destroy that by dumping the whole notion of a baby on you.”

  “But you didn’t have the abortion after all.”

  “No,” she whispered. “In the end I couldn’t.” She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears. “I didn’t want the baby, Finn. Not really. But it was there, it was part of me, and I couldn’t just…”

  He watched the tears slide down her cheeks. He’d never seen her cry before. He reached out and put his arm around her shoulder. “Cate—”

  “I’m sorry.” She sniffed. “I think the crying is a hormonal thing. I kept doing it earlier on in the pregnancy but I’ve more or less gotten over it now.”

  “Cate, I’m really, really sorry.”

  “For what?” She took a tissue out of her bag. “You were right to be mad at me. For all the reasons you gave. If you’d lied to me I would’ve been mad at you too.”

  “I didn’t give you a chance to explain,” said Finn.

  “I told you what happened,” she said. “You only half believed me. Fair enough. You wanted me to leave. I understood.”

  “Cate stop being so bloody understanding,” said Finn.

  “I said I understood,” Cate told him. “It doesn’t mean I liked it very much!”

  “I was ashamed of myself,” said Finn. “Even if the baby wasn’t mine, presenting you with a packed suitcase wasn’t exactly a nice thing to do.”

  She sniffed and said nothing.

  “I thought about ringing you almost straightaway but I couldn’t. I was hurt and annoyed and embarrassed and all sorts of things.”

  “And busy,” said Cate.

  “That too,” admitted Finn. “But not so busy that I couldn’t phone. Only I didn’t know what to say.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Cate. “It was a difficult time.”

  “I do so absolutely hate it when you’re being rational,” Finn told her. “It makes it very difficult for me to appear hard done by.”

  She gave him a watery smile. “Why should I help you feel hard done by?” she asked.

  “No reason,” he said. “But at least that way I don’t see myself as an utter bastard.”

  “You’re not,” she said.

  “I tried to be,” said Finn.

  “Look, I’m not going to keep pandering to you,” she told him. “You were a bastard but I wasn’t exactly great either so we’re quits.”

  He grinned at her. “Oh, Cate, I love you the most when you’re bossy and commanding.”

  She looked at him. “Oh?”

  “And when you do your icy, always right kind of thing.”

  “I don’t feel very icy or even halfway right,” said Cate.

  “How do you feel?” asked Finn.

  She looked at him and bit her lip. “Different,” she said eventually. “The last couple of months have been so different for me. I found out that there were other things in life besides sports shoes and sales graphs. I found out that I couldn’t exist on just a lettuce leaf and cup of herbal tea. I found out that my two sisters have become good friends as well as family.”

  “And I found out that I love you more than ever,” said Finn. “And that I was a complete fool to tell you to go.”

  Cate said nothing.

  “I know that I made a fool of myself tonight too,” he said. “And that dragging our lives into the public gaze wasn’t the cleverest thing I’ve ever done. I know that I was difficult to be with because I was so caught up in my own life. I know that I made the TV show into the biggest, most important event in my life. I know that I sometimes treated you and your job as secondary to my own so-called brilliant career. But, Cate, it’d be different if you came back. I promise you. If you want me to give up the TV thing I will because it means nothing without you. If you want me to get a job as a—”

  “Stop,” she said.

  “Stop?”

  “You talk too much,” she told him. “You get carried away trying to make each sentence more meaningful than the last. It’s probably your chat-show persona.”

  “It’s how I feel.”

  “Oh, Finn.” Tears spilled down her face again but she didn’t bother to wipe them away. “I sometimes thought that you were only with me because I looked nice and because I had my own career.”

  “Don’t be so bloody stupid,” he said. “I was always with you because I loved you.”

  She smiled through her tears. “Actually, that sentence was probably the most meaningful yet.”

  “So you’ll come back?” He looked at her hopefully.

  “Of course I’ll come back.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “I never ever wanted to be away.”

  It was a couple of minutes later before she raised her head again. Then she stood up.

  “Where are you going?” asked Finn.

  She walked into the bedroom, turned on the light and opened the window. He followed her, surprised at her actions.

  She leaned out of the window and waved. Below them, in the car park, he saw the door of Nessa’s Alfa open slowly. Bree, Nessa and Jill got out.

  “Everything all right?” called Bree.

  “Couldn’t be better!” cried Cate.

  “You don’t need any moral support?” Nessa asked.

  “I think I’ve worked it all out.”

  “Sure?” Bree and Nessa spoke at the same time.

  “Absolutely certain,” said Cate.

  “Are you still in love?” asked Jill.

  She turned to Finn who moved into the space beside her.

  “I hope she is,” he told Jill. “Because I’m sure as hell in love with her.”

  Bree and Nessa looked at each other and grinned.

  “Are you?” called Nessa.

  “Actually, I am!” Cate smiled down at them.

  “But I’m going to be really nice to her now and make her a cup of hot chocolate before she goes to bed,” said Finn. “She’s had a hard day.”

  “Treat her right,” warned Nessa. “You’ll have us to answer to if you don’t.”

  “Oh, I will,” Finn promised. “I will.”

  He closed the window. Cate waved at them again and then moved inside the apartment with him.

  “That was fun,” said Jill as she climbed into the backseat of the car and then yawned widely. “And I’m out really, really late.”

  “I’m glad they’ve sorted it out,” said Nessa. “I’m glad you have too, Bree.”<
br />
  “Oh, I haven’t sorted it out,” Bree said. “But I’m ready to give it a whirl. What about you?”

  Nessa smiled. “My horoscope for tomorrow said that I should look out for advantages in new situations. But to take things as they come. It’s probably the best advice I’ve ever seen in one.”

  “You’re back reading them, then?”

  “Only when they say something sensible.” Nessa got into the car and started the engine.

  “They never say anything sensible.” Bree slid into the passenger seat beside her.

  “Oh, I know that,” said Nessa. “I always knew that really.”

  And she smiled as she put the car into gear and headed home.

  Up Close and Personal

  with the Author

  Are Your Books Autobiographical?

  I think every author is asked that at some point and no matter how hard I try to explain that I make it all up, people always believe that it’s based on fact. I very rarely put actual events that have happened to me or people close to me in books, though I made an exception for the car-getting-stuck-in-the-mud scene in He’s Got to Go which is based on a real event that happened to me and a couple of close friends while we were in Spain. It was a total nightmare and I felt I couldn’t waste the experience! Everything else is complete fiction.

  However, I know that there must be something of my life in the characters of my books because our personal experiences color how we feel about everything and my novels deal with feelings and relationships. So although the plots are totally invented I suppose I have experienced the emotions that the characters go through, although in a completely different context. I’ve lain in bed and wondered if the man I loved was cheating on me—but in a very different way and very different circumstances, for example, to Nessa. I’ve also experienced the feelings of pressure that Cate does in her job as a sales executive, although in my bond trading job. And I think there’s a bit of Bree in me too. I like fixing things.

  Writing is a little bit like acting, without being on stage, because you do get under the skin of all of your characters and there are times, when I’m deep in the novel, that I start behaving like them too which can be a bit disconcerting for people around me. Actually, although I don’t have children myself, when I wrote about a pregnancy in one of my previous novels (Dreaming of a Stranger) I used to feel bloated and uncomfortable whenever my character Jane felt that way. And I had sympathetic back-ache too—though that might have been because I wasn’t using a very good chair at the time!

  The other great thing about writing is that you can be the kind of person you aren’t in real life. I quite liked the idea of having my own motorbike but when I dated a guy who had one I was utterly hopeless. It was so heavy I could hardly hold it upright let alone ride it. I’m fairly short (5′ 1″) so I get a kick out of making my heroines taller. I’m not the world’s greatest cook either and it was fun to write about a chef in a previous novel (My Favourite Goodbye). The thing is, when you’re writing, you have to be every character and believe in every character—even the less pleasant ones. Generally I like to think of my characters as close family or friends and I believe in them totally. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t want to write about them. Besides, they’re with me for a long time when I’m writing about them, a lot more than my actual family.

  Do You Have Sisters of Your Own?

  Well, yes, two of them—which is why many people assume that He’s Got to Go is about us and why I specifically mention them in the acknowledgments to say that it’s not. But I am fascinated by the dynamic that goes on between family members and how, at different times, each one can be up or down or be the strong one or the dependent one. At the same time you never lose the tag you had as a child—I was always the academic one because I had my nose stuck in a book all the time!

  You Were a Bond Trader? How Come You’ve

  Ended up Writing Books?

  I got into finance by mistake. Honestly. My mother accepted a job for me while I was on holidays because I’d already turned down a couple and I think she was afraid I’d spend my life loafing around. And then I discovered that I was quite good at managing other people’s money (much better than at managing my own). Also, I like to do whatever I’m doing to the best of my ability so I kind of threw myself into the whole dealing thing. But it certainly wasn’t what I expected to do with my life and career.

  Did You Always Want to Give up Trading and

  Write Books?

  It was certainly always my ambition to write books because I was a big reader myself as a kid. Whenever I had any money I’d buy myself a book and I used to walk a couple of miles to our local library once a week too. Reading is still very important to me and I suppose I’ve always wanted to bring that same enjoyment to the people who read my books now. But I enjoyed working in finance too and I guess it’s given me an understanding of the business side of writing; like when the publisher is screaming for you to meet a deadline it’s not because they want to make your life a total misery, it’s because there’s a whole team of people—editorial, production, marketing, booksellers—waiting to get your book on the shelves. Knowing that people are depending on you helps the motivation!

  So What Motivated You to Write He’s Got to Go?

  I wanted to write about sisters but also about women whose lives aren’t going exactly as they planned because, let’s face it, nobody’s life goes exactly how you planned it. The thing is, though, a lot of people look at what goes on in the part of your life that they see and think that everything’s fine, whereas things might not be so fine at all. And that’s the case with the three sisters in He’s Got to Go. They each envy each other for specific parts of their lives but they don’t initially see the unhappier sides to them. It’s probably a case of the grass always being greener as far as they’re concerned. But at the same time, their feelings are colored by their experiences as children together—so that both Nessa and Cate still see Bree as a flighty baby, for example. I enjoyed writing the parts when two sisters call each other to complain about or discuss the third but I hope the reader can see that even though they’re being bitchy sometimes they’re also deeply concerned for each other. Both Bree and Cate are worried about Nessa’s fairy-tale marriage falling apart, even though they’ve mocked her about it in the past. Cate and Nessa are concerned about Bree’s lack of boyfriends (and then the man she chooses) while Nessa and Bree are anxious about Cate’s high-pressure life.

  What’s the Astrological Stuff at the Beginning

  of the Chapters All About?

  Whenever I read a magazine I always look at my horoscope. I forget it almost straightaway but I can’t help myself. I know there are people who believe that their horoscopes can help them in their lives and Nessa is one of those so I thought it would be nice to give an astrological heading to each chapter. Of course in her case when things go wrong her stars don’t really prepare her for it. Interestingly, though, I do think the main characteristics of star-signs are uncannily accurate. I didn’t allocate the sisters signs at the start but as I wrote about them I knew when their birthdays would be.

  Do you Believe that a Man Who Betrays you has

  Got to Go or should He be Given a Second

  Chance?

  That’s a million-dollar question. I think when trust has gone it’s very, very difficult to repair a relationship no matter how hard you try. At the same time people are a lot less willing to work at relationships these days and perhaps that’s a bad thing. Whether you stay together or split up depends on a whole range of issues but you’ve really got to think hard about what you want and what’s good for you. Sometimes we make decisions and then try to justify them afterwards. It’s worth trying to think things through before you make that final choice. But it’s much easier to make the hard choices for someone else, for yourself it’s not at all clear-cut.

  Are You in a Relationship of Your Own?

  Yes. I live with my partner and we’ve been together for double-
digit number of years! It scares me when I think about it sometimes because the time has passed so quickly. And we’ve had both good times and bad times together. So far we’ve always managed to work through the bad times but maybe that’s because we try not to take each other for granted and because we both make compromises! (I reckon I compromise more than him. I think all women do!)