‘In an incredibly douchey way,’ Zoë pointed out, flicking the kettle on.
‘Yeah, no arguments. But he thought I knew it wasn’t a date. He thought I knew I was just there as his friend doing him a favour. It was my expectations that made it blow up into a big thing.’
‘Jesus wept, Gio.’ Zoë banged a mug down on my counter in frustration. ‘Please tell me you’re not making his crappy behaviour your fault.’
‘No.’ I chewed at my bottom lip as I tried to find the way to properly describe what I was doing. ‘I’m . . . appropriately apportioning blame.’
‘Mmm.’ She sounded unconvinced. ‘And what does that mean?’
‘It means that I think last night was the wake-up call you’ve been trying to give me for ages.’ I sat up a little straighter and tried to look brave about it. ‘I’m going to try to pull myself together and stop pining after Declan.’
She turned her large, disbelieving eyes to me. ‘And stop letting him treat you like garbage?’ she asked carefully.
‘Yep.’
‘You mean it?’
‘Absolutely.’
Zoë put aside the two mugs she’d been arranging with our chosen teas and walked calmly across to the bed before launching herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck in a fierce, if a little strangling, hug.
‘Finally!’ she said fervently, pulling herself back from her uncharacteristic display of affection and giving me a little shake. ‘So, what now?’
‘I tell him that I need some space.’ Despite my firm words, I felt my throat tighten painfully at the idea of putting distance between Dec and me after so many years spent trying to do the exact opposite. Still, I meant every word I’d said to Zoë. I truly felt I’d been unfair to Dec – although not as unfair as he’d been to me. Last resort? Really? And, the more I thought about it, the healthier I realised it was going to be for the both of us to back off from each other for a bit.
‘You’ll tell him?’ Zoë asked apprehensively.
Wise to her concern, I amended, ‘I’ll email him.’ Because, of course, we both knew if I faced Dec in person, I’d most likely crumble at the first sign of his opposition to my plan. Past behaviour was the best indicator of future behaviour, after all.
‘Better.’ And she was off and running to fetch my laptop before I had a chance to protest that I didn’t mean I was going to email him right that second.
‘I’m tired and hungover and emotionally vulnerable,’ I whined, drooping back against my pillows like a petulant child trying to avoid her chores. ‘I’ll email him later.’
‘No. Now.’
I blew one of the shorter curls that had already fallen from my ponytail out of my face and looked up at her balefully. ‘You can be a real bully, you know that?’
‘And you can be a real wet blanket,’ she retorted, opening my laptop and pulling up a fresh email for me. ‘And I say that with love,’ she added. I snorted sceptically, but obediently started typing.
Hi Dec,
I’m sorry I
But the words were deleting themselves as I wrote them and I saw that Zoë had reached over and pressed her finger firmly against the backspace key.
‘No,’ she said bluntly. ‘You’re not starting this with an apology.’
‘I was just going to say sorry for ignoring him for so long this morning,’ I protested and she looked at me witheringly.
‘No apologies.’
I huffed out a sigh. ‘Fine.’
Hi Dec,
I couldn’t talk to you properly this morning because I didn’t really have what happened last night straight in my head. I’ve been giving it some thought since then, though, and I want you to know that hearing you call me a ‘last resort’ last night really hurt my feelings and
The words were being deleted again.
‘This is my email, Zo!’ I exclaimed in frustration and she shrugged, unrepentant.
‘Yeah, so you’d think you’d be better at writing it. “Really hurt” your feelings? Christ, grow a pair.’
‘Well, “broke my heart” isn’t any better, and that’s what I really wanted to write, so–’
Zo swore under her breath and pulled one of my pillows over her head as if she couldn’t even stand to look at me anymore. Thankfully, without her supervisory input, I found I was more easily able to write what I needed to say.
Hi Dec,
I couldn’t talk to you properly this morning because I didn’t really have what happened last night straight in my head.
I’ve been giving it some thought since then, though, and I want you to know that hearing you call me a last resort made me realise that things have to change between us.
I don’t want to be anyone’s last resort, least of all yours. I know you told me years ago that we’re just friends, but I think you know that I’ve never been able to shake the hope that something more would happen between us. My thinking that is totally not your fault, but, after getting an insight into how you really see me, it’s made me realise that we need a break from each other. As my friend, I hope you understand that.
Gio.
It felt stiff and awkward to write to him like that. I couldn’t think of a time I’d ever phrased a message to him so formally; at the very least the end of any of my communications with him were peppered with x’s.
Still, stiff, formal and x-less was probably as indicative as anything I’d written of how I was feeling, so I sent the email before I could wimp out, and then slapped the laptop shut.
‘Done,’ I announced and Zoë pulled the pillow from her face and eyed me suspiciously.
‘No apologies?’ she asked.
‘No apologies.’
‘No reference to feelings or broken hearts?’
‘No said references.’
‘Any passive-aggression?’
I thought back to the last line and then held up my thumb and forefinger to indicate a small amount.
‘Excellent.’ Her tone was saturated with satisfaction, and why wouldn’t it be? This was what she’d wanted for years.
As for me, however, satisfaction was the last thing I was feeling. It’d been one thing to face Dec last night with alcohol in my veins and the Nod Next-Door at my back, or this morning with Zoë fizzing with anger by my side, but even the brief feeling of determination I’d felt when I decided to email him was fading now, leaving me empty and sad. I missed Dec already.
‘I’m going to cry now,’ I advised Zoë solemnly and she nodded back just as soberly.
‘Alone crying, or on your best friend’s shoulder crying?’ she enquired and, in answer, I leant forward and began to sob against her shirt.
*
Theo’s feet thumped against the leaf-strewn path, music blasting from his headphones, his breath puffing out in measured pants. He ran every morning, whatever the weather, had done since he was fourteen and his soccer coach had recommended it. Ostensibly the suggestion had been made to improve his stamina, although, looking back, Theo thought his coach might also have hoped it would help with his attitude. That was certainly why he ran now.
Usually he used the time to switch off, focusing on his breathing and pulse, measuring his performance against previous runs and watching that he didn’t twist his ankle on the rough route that snaked alongside the rivulet near his new flat. This morning, though, he couldn’t get his mind into the right zone. Every time he started to feel himself relax into the almost meditative state that characterised these morning sessions, he remembered another platitude O’Connor had plied his neighbour with that morning and he was jerked out of rhythm.
It wasn’t his business, he told himself, it was absolutely nothing to do with him. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Giovanna giving him that little wave as she turned to go inside her flat the previous evening. She’d looked so embarrassed and miserable, stripped of the mischievous glee that, without even realising it, he’d started to expect from her.
Had she woken up hearing the cause of her embarrassment an
d misery shamelessly begging to be let in? Would she have let him in if Theo hadn’t interfered? Had O’Connor managed to weasel his way back into her good books?
Not your business, he said firmly to himself, breaking his jog into a sprint. Nothing to do with you.
He was usually so good at keeping his nose out of other people’s affairs. He’d had more than his fair share of people adding their two cents about his life over the years and had resolved to never return the unwanted favour. But he’d felt strangely protective of Giovanna that morning, perhaps because he’d become so used to being the only one to see through O’Connor’s superficial charm.
Surely Giovanna saw through it now, too, though? And yet she’d let him into her flat, had been ready to practically drag him in just at the moment Theo’d been ready to practically drag him out.
He skidded on a patch of mud and drew up short.
No matter what people were going to say about that damn photo come Monday, the truth was that there was no reason why this morning wouldn’t be the end of it and he and Giovanna would go back to simply acknowledging each other in passing. And that was good, he had enough drama in his life.
A ‘hey, neighbour’ and a nod, that’s all they were to each other.
5
It was midnight, the witching hour.
My dad and I had come across the expression in a bedtime story he’d read to me when I was about seven, and we’d adopted it as one of our favourites. To this day, if one of us asked the other how we’d slept, the response was likely to be some variation of ‘not till long after the witching hour’, giving even the most mundane queries about time a somewhat whimsical edge.
It didn’t seem so whimsical now that I regularly got up to go to work at five in the morning, however. These days I was always asleep well before midnight, and yet here I was, staring at my phone and watching the clock click over to 00.03.
It was Dec’s fault, of course. When I’d mopped myself up after my pitiful crying jag and mustered up the courage to check my email, I’d seen that he’d responded less than ten minutes after I’d sent mine. His response had been succinct: A break from each other? What does that mean?
I let out a heavy sigh and dragged myself up against the headboard. It’d been over twelve hours since I’d seen those nine words and I still hadn’t figured out how to reply. A break had sounded good this morning. It’d sounded right – vague, but right. Now, while neatly avoiding addressing the part where I’d admitted I’d wanted more between us, Dec had demanded details and I realised both of us needed something a little bit more concrete.
But what the hell did I mean? How long did it take to rewire yourself away from ‘I’m in love with you’ to ‘I love you as a friend’?
I had no answer to that, which was why I was wide awake in the velvety darkness of the middle of the night.
Turning to my phone for help, I tried to scroll through Facebook to distract myself, but I was in a selfish mood and didn’t care that my cousin’s ex had been stuck in traffic or that a girl I hadn’t seen since primary school wanted to give a shout-out to her wonderful husband. Bully for her.
I jumped between all my other apps, but nothing could hold my attention. Everybody else’s news, opinions and senses of humour were just white noise, background to my own unhappiness. It was a disconcerting feeling when the internet failed you – the internet was supposed to have everything.
Fine, I thought, gritting my teeth as I threw my phone aside, time to go old school. I looked across at the dark shapes of the recipe books that I’d been collecting from boot sales, markets and second-hand stores since I was a kid, but I already knew there was nothing there for me; I’d pored over them so many times, I could practically quote the recipes.
I didn’t trust my clumsy hands with delicate decorative work this late at night, either. It was clear I was feeling what my mother would call ‘mentally untidy’. I wanted something new and shiny, something I couldn’t somehow contrive to link to Dec and didn’t require too much brainpower or fine motor skills. Some chocolate wouldn’t go amiss, either.
With that and the twenty-four-hour newsagency down the street in mind, I hopped out of bed. Slipping on a pair of ratty sandshoes and an ugly woollen poncho thing, a relic from my short and ill-advised foray into crocheting, I headed for the door, grabbing my combined phone holder and wallet as I went.
The lights in the corridor were bright after the gloom of my unlit studio and I paused and blinked a couple of times to adjust. It was during this hovering moment that I heard a strange noise: a low, continuous roar coming from behind my new mate, Theo’s, door.
Curious, I crossed the hall to listen more closely, flinching as I heard a rustle beneath my feet. I looked down to see that the junk-mail ninjas had struck again. I’d never seen the delivery people who dropped off the piles of shiny catalogues outside our doors, but not a day went by when the fruits of their labour didn’t appear. Not that I didn’t appreciate the pizza coupons, but I did sometimes wonder just how many trees had ended their lives abandoned on the cold tiles of 26 Veronica Way.
Putting aside my environmental guilt, I leant in until my ear was practically pressed against Theo’s door. Listening closely for a couple of seconds, I realised the weird sound I could hear was music. If you could call that yelling and banging heavy stuff music – which Theo apparently did. Weird. What was my quiet, well-mannered neighbour doing listening to heavy metal at the witching hour?
None of my business, was the answer of course and, suddenly clocking to how creepy listening in at someone’s door in the middle of the night was, I started to pull away.
I’d reckoned without the slippery catalogues at my feet, however, and as I went to step back, the pages shot out from under me, throwing me forward so fast that I had no time to reach out to save myself. The next thing I knew, my head connected against Theo’s doorframe with a bang.
And it hurt! My god, it hurt. It hurt so much that, for one panicked moment, I literally couldn’t see the faded chequerboard tiles at my feet. I clapped a hand to my forehead and muttered a constricted ‘Ow.’
As if the fact that I was truly appreciating the phrase ‘blinding pain’ for the first time wasn’t bad enough, I heard the roaring music come to a sudden halt and footsteps approach.
Oh no, no, no, no . . .
My ability to see came back just in time for me to observe the door before me opening and a pair of bare feet move into view.
Oh no, no, no, noooo . . .
‘Giovanna?’
I wanted to evaporate; in fact, my face had gone so hot it almost seemed like a viable possibility.
‘Hey, neighbour,’ I said weakly, gingerly lifting my head and then baulking as I saw, wonder of wonders, the Nod Next-Door not in a suit. He was wearing loose grey trackie dacks that still somehow managed to scream ‘expensive’, and a white T-shirt that looked like it’d come straight from a Calvin Klein shoot. In short, he looked a million bucks and I blame his sudden and appealing appearance for my opening gambit.
‘You’re not in a suit,’ I said it almost accusingly.
‘It’s past midnight.’
He made a fair point, but my forehead was throbbing too viciously to tell him so. Perhaps seeing my wince or, more likely, my hand pressed to my head as if I was trying to keep my brain in its rightful place, his brow creased.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked in tones of one who was enquiring after my mental health more than anything. ‘I’m not sure if you knocked or . . .?’
‘No, I wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . .’ I stammered awkwardly before taking a deep breath and finishing, somewhat plaintively, ‘I hit my head.’ I lifted my hand away from my forehead. From the expression on his face, the point of impact looked as bad as it felt. Great.
‘Yes, you did,’ he agreed. ‘Come in, I’ll get you some ice.’
My first impulse was to decline, but he stepped back and held his door open so expectantly that it felt churlish to refuse.
/> ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said as I obediently traipsed past him into his flat, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. I just couldn’t sleep and was going downstairs to buy a magazine when I heard a noise and I was trying to figure out what it was when I slipped on the flyers outside your door and banged my head.’ There. It didn’t sound too crazy when I explained it, did it?
Aware that it still sounded nuts, I distracted myself by glancing round Theo’s place. Like Aggie’s studio, it was an homage to the warehouse look with all the exposed beams and brickwork. It somehow looked more high-end than mine, though, and while the main room was smaller, it was obviously an actual flat rather than a studio, a door off to the right presumably leading to a separate bedroom.
We’d entered his kitchen, all stainless steel and top-of-the-line appliances, and it opened up to a sparse lounge room with a mammoth black leather couch facing a similarly epic wall-mounted TV. Covering the entire wall opposite the TV was a bookshelf neatly filled with books somewhat anally retentively arranged in height order. Against the large window at the back, a direct copy of mine, was a minimalist desk, bare except from an open and glowing laptop.
‘What was the noise?’ Theo tipped some ice out of a tray into a plain grey tea towel and sealed it in with a neat twist.
‘Oh.’ I leant against his kitchen bench and shrugged. ‘It was just your music.’
His face fell and I could sense he was framing an apology so hurried to head him off.
‘Don’t worry, I could only hear it if I was standing silently in the corridor practically listening for it. It was hardly noise pollution.’
Handing me the ice, he said, ‘Not an opinion shared by my previous neighbours.’
‘They weren’t fans of–’ I stopped abruptly as I realised there was probably a very specific term for that genre of music, but that I was nowhere near cool enough to know it.
Cake at Midnight Page 7
