How Not to Fall in Love, Actually

by Catherine Bennetto

  ‘Joe’s been better since living here. Thanks for looking after our mate. You’re a stand-up girl,’ Tim said with sincerity.

  ‘Joe’s great to have around, actually. I enjoy his company.’

  ‘He’s literally the best guy.’ Tim leant forward, his expression suddenly severe. ‘He doesn’t deserve this shit. I never liked Katy. I mean, she was the hot bird at school and we all wanted to shag her but she was out for herself, you know? Devon wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted Shoreditch. She wanted cocktails, she wanted to get black cabs everywhere and one of those Chantel handbags.’ He shook his head. ‘Not marriage material.’ He fell back in his armchair. ‘But mates gotta keep that shit to themselves sometimes.’ He shrugged and looked burdened. ‘He stayed with us for a couple of nights after the whole cheating thing but I think seeing the family unit was a bit too much, you know? Joe’s a really sensitive guy. He hides it well but those are the ones you gotta keep your eyes on. For depression and stuff.’

  ‘You’ve got kids?’

  ‘Yeah, a daughter,’ Tim’s face split in a wide smile. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. ‘Little Annie Lou.’ He showed me a photo of a pink-faced baby in a pink Babygro lying on a pink sheet surrounded by pink soft toys. The pinkness was cloying.

  ‘She’s adorable.’

  ‘She’ll be three months next week. We’re throwing her a little party. Stupid, I know, but you gotta celebrate the small things in life, right? Or the shit can cloud your view.’

  I nodded. Hardly poetic, but I agreed with the sentiment.

  Dan and Joe arrived back inside debating the marriage of mint and pork.

  ‘Come on, get dressed and we’ll head off.’ Dan clapped his palm on Joe’s shoulder.

  ‘I am dressed,’ Joe said, looking down. He’d gone for tucked in in the end.

  ‘But your shirt’s got nothing written on it . . .?’ Dan said with a brief frown. ‘You have to have something written on your shirt as a conversation starter.’ He unbuttoned his checked shirt and held it open, displaying a snug white t-shirt with ‘I can meat your needs’ written across his chest. ‘We wear these at the shop,’ he said, beaming. ‘The ladies really react to it.’

  ‘Well?’ I said sceptically.

  Dan’s smile dropped. ‘Not really.’ Then his grin was back. ‘But it weeds out the losers. You can’t handle this?’ he ran his hand across the letters. ‘Then you can’t handle this.’ He indicated himself with camp flair then commenced hammed-up flexing.

  Joe laughed. ‘Put it away!’ He grabbed his wallet and phone then gave me a hug. ‘Don’t wait up.’

  I got more kisses, hugs, invites to three-month-old birthday parties, invites to watch them play football on Sundays, offers to be put in touch with Tim’s wife to ask any baby questions and then the noisy boys were stomping down the hall checking whose Uber account to use, what pub to start off at and bickering about who had first round. I was warmed by their obvious affection for Joe.

  ‘Got your goo balloons?’ Tim asked as the front door opened.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ Joe said, and Dan cracked up.

  The door slammed behind them and it took me a further two seconds to work out what a ‘goo balloon’ was.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The next morning I opened my bedroom door, bladder full to bursting, and was greeted by Joe in his boxers, hair all a-squiff, kissing another long-limbed slutty-pants a day or two out of high school.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ I said in a prissy voice as I pushed past Joe’s naked back. He still had his socks on, the stud muffin.

  Joe de-suctioned his face. ‘Emma! I was just . . . this is—’

  I made a shut-your-trap hand gesture and took minuscule steps to the bathroom. Any sudden movement would have the bladder gates opening and I couldn’t have that happening in my hall at eight fifteen in the morning in full view of the people on the common, Joe and his teenage plaything in a body-con dress from Reiss I’d seen on the internet and lusted over, but realised I could never have because I was the size of a Peugeot 106. When I exited the bathroom Joe was still at the front door whispering to the giggling girl who really should’ve been at home watching Saturday-morning cartoons. I stomped down the hall to the kitchen constructing a suitable reprimand. Eventually Joe sloped into the room, eased himself onto the sofa and put his head in his hands.

  ‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ he groaned.

  ‘And why’s that?’ I said, firmly astride my high horse. ‘Because you’re hung over or because you’ve just realised you’re a borderline paedophile?’

  Joe lifted his head from his hands. His face crumpled and he looked like a 4-year-old tr ying not to cry. His chin pitted with the effort. The lecture I’d been formulating dissolved.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not this person.’ He shook his head, then winced at the action. With stilted movements he rested his head in his hands again. ‘I woke up this morning and she was down the end of the bed giving—’

  ‘Ah!’ I said sharply. ‘Don’t need to hear.’

  ‘Sorry. Anyway, she was, you know, and I realised I didn’t even remember her name. What kind of guy takes a girl home and doesn’t even know her name?’

  ‘Lots of guys, I’m afraid,’ I said, squeezing my tea bag out and dropping it in the sink. ‘You’re clearly no different.’

  Joe sighed; his broad back rose and fell with his breath. It was a hurtful thing to say. I immediately regretted it. We’d all done stupid things with the opposite sex while drunk. Hell, I’d only recently been free-boobed in the forest with a married man, and I’d been completely sober. And completely pregnant. I did an all-over body tremble to purge the image. I grabbed my mug of tea and crossed the room.

  ‘I’m feeling a little “Groundhog Day” about this whole situation.’ I placed the tea in front of him.

  ‘I know,’ he said without lifting his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I sat next to him and rested my arm across his shoulders. I felt his body lean imperceptibly into mine. It gave me comfort to know that I myself was a comfort.

  ‘I liked her dress, though.’

  Over bacon and eggs with sautéed potatoes, Joe regaled me with his evening.

  ‘I think it was the shots,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘That’ll do it.’

  ‘I’d told the guys I wasn’t that interested in women at the moment and suddenly it was all they could focus on. Like I’d laid down this great challenge.’

  ‘Men,’ I said with my mouth full.

  ‘Tim called me a faggot and ordered a rainbow.’

  ‘Rainbow?’

  ‘Shots lined up on the bar in the colours of the rainbow,’ he said. ‘It’s a gay pride thing.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, feeling out of touch with my generation.

  ‘He said it was in honour of my faggoty behaviour.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘I did the shots so Tim would get off my back, but then . . . I can’t remember much.’ He put his cutlery together, knife facing the correct way, and pushed his plate away. ‘I remember being outside a club in Piccadilly. I remember Dan telling some girls I was in the market for a new girlfriend. I remember kissing someone on a light-up dance floor.’ He shook his head. ‘And then I woke up with her—’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Sorry.’ He picked at the edge of the table.

  ‘You going to eat that?’ I pointed to his potatoes.

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Joe pushed his plate across the table. ‘Before last night, and the night with Yuliana, I’d . . .’ He looked self-conscious. ‘I’d only . . .’

  I nodded, encouraging him.

  ‘I’d only ever been with . . .’ He fidgeted with the syrup bottle.

  ‘Spit it out!’ I snatched the syrup from his hands. ‘Only ever been with?’

  ‘One woman.’ Joe reddened.

  ‘Yeah, I know, Tim told me.’ I grinned.

  Joe shook his head with fond exa
speration.

  ‘So how did that happen?’ I said.

  He fiddled with a napkin ring I had no recollection of buying. ‘I met Katy when I was at high school. We dated on and off, and I was so smitten that whenever we were in one of our . . .’ he dropped the napkin ring and made quotation marks in the air ‘. . . “time for ourselves” periods I just waited around hoping we’d get back together. I couldn’t even look at other girls. I loved her from the moment I saw her. None of that cheesy movie stuff. I really did.’

  I didn’t know what to say to him. I’d never felt that way. I couldn’t relate. I ignored Joe’s distress and contemplated my own. Was I ever going to have that feeling of all-consuming love for someone? Did I want it? It sounded terribly overshadowing. Where would I find the time for craft? Or jetboating? Joe waited for me to say something, and when it became apparent I had nothing to add he went back to the damned napkin ring. It was bloody ugly with its orange lacquered patterns round its plastic side. I frowned at it like it would be able to take my reproach on board. Why was it here on my table, shiny and dreadful?

  ‘How about I make that cannelloni you like tonight?’ I said in a buoyant voice.

  Joe shrugged.

  ‘Extra-cheesy?’ I roused.

  Joe gave a weak ‘Sounds great.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  I got up, snatched the vile napkin ring out of his hands and marched it directly to the bin.

  ‘Who bought you? How did you get in here?’

  Later that afternoon I returned home, supermarket bags overflowing. I kicked the front door shut and waddled down the hall.

  ‘I’m making those brownies you like for dessert.’ I dumped the bags on the kitchen table.

  ‘Great,’ Joe said in an unusually unresponsive manner, not moving from his position on the sofa. He held his phone, his face solemn.

  ‘What’s up?’ I began unloading papaya, olives, custard, manchego cheese and all manner of other things that had taken my fancy while I was waddling, hungry, up and down the aisles. ‘Joe? You OK?’

  It took him a moment to look up. His face was unreadable, like he’d brought down the shutters to his soul.

  ‘Katy phoned,’ he said, his voice void of emotion. ‘She wants to meet after work.’

  ‘What for?’ I said with a pang of annoyance. We were going to watch Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile. Classics!

  He glanced up but seemed to look right through me. ‘I don’t know what she wants.’

  Around five o’clock, Joe came down the stairs, freshly shaved and smartly dressed, with an occupied air about him. He left saying he’d be home in time for dinner. By seven thirty I’d eaten two of the five cannelloni tubes. By 8.10 p.m. I’d eaten the rest and was watching the final scenes of Romancing the Stone. When the movie finished I contemplated tidying up the kitchen and going to bed but instead decided to go upstairs and, like any rational, mature young lady, look through Joe’s stuff.

  Joe’s bed was made but strewn with clothes. It was a small comfort to know women were not alone in the dilemma of ‘what to wear to meet the ex’. I tiptoed unnecessarily across the room, scanning for . . . evidence? I wanted juicy stuff. Torn photos of Katy with a pin poked through her eyes; a diary with details of their sex life and how her genital warts had really got in the way of their relationship. Immature? Yes. Did you expect anything less? I’d built a picture of Katy in my head of an impossibly beautiful raven-haired witch with blood-red lipstick and a fondness for seamed stockings. I opened the bedside drawers. Nothing. And nothing under the bed. A couple of suits hung in the wardrobe. I tried to imagine him in them as I’d only seen him in jeans, faded band t-shirts and big woolly jumpers. I shut the wardrobe and spied his computer on the dressing table. I clicked a button and the screen came alive, asking for a password. Being the open person he was I knew Joe’s password within the first week of meeting him. I typed ‘nah-needs-garlic’, his favourite line from a movie, and it opened immediately. The desktop image was Joe grinning at the camera, sunglasses on, shirt off, his toned arm flung over the shoulder of a striking blond woman in a turquoise bikini, trendy aviators and with a straight-toothed smile. A sandy beach and an aqua ocean stretched out behind them. It could be his sister, I thought, rather unconvincingly. Made even more unconvincing by the fact that Joe only had brothers. I was not ready to release my image of dark-haired Katy as a cold-hearted seductress looking for gentle souls to shred. In his files I found more images of the same woman and there was only one person she could be. Katy didn’t seem to wear unapproachable blood-red lipstick and her hair wasn’t raven but a rather lovely I-have-Swedish-heritage-so-my-hair-is-naturally-the-colour-of-organic-wheat-on-a-summer’s-day-in-a-Van-Gogh-painting kind of shade. I carried the laptop across the room and made myself comfortable on Joe’s bed. Scrolling through the pictures, I got a peek into his earlier life. The life before I met him. There were pictures of Joe and Katy on the tops of mountains in puffa jackets and shiny goggles. Ones at long tables with large groups of people drinking from oversized pewter mugs. Ones at temples, at the tops of iconic buildings and on boats in diving gear. I scrolled down to the most recently added pictures and stopped at a selfie-style one. Joe standing in the living room of a loft-style apartment, all exposed brick and industrial lighting, holding a ‘sold’ sign. Katy was at the edge of the frame, kissing his cheek. Joe grinned like the cat that got the organic Cornish cream straight off the top of the milking pail. I realised he’d been doing remarkably well for a man who’d had his life thrown upside down. Yet after receiving the call from Katy he’d let his congenial facade drop. I flicked back to some pictures of Joe and Katy at a party, dressed in togas with laurels round their heads and big glasses of red wine and zoomed into Joe’s grinning face. A small part of me hoped they might try and get back together. They seemed to have had a perfect life. It would be a shame to throw it all away because of one indiscretion. But another part of me hoped Joe would tell her to go fuck herself and find himself a girl who would never hurt him in such a way, ever. I felt a huge surge of motherly protection towards him.

  Around midnight I heard the gate click shut and Joe’s footsteps crunch up the path. I’d been in bed for an hour but unable to sleep. I tried to deduce from his footsteps how it had gone with Swedish Wheat-Haired Witch, but his footsteps sounded like a man walking up a path at midnight trying not to wake his neighbours. He let himself in, walked upstairs and in no time at all I heard him snoring.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The next morning, walking round the sunny common, I was impatient to find out what had happened.

  ‘Was it weird, seeing her? I mean, did you want to, you know, stab her in the face or something?’

  ‘No,’ Joe said, bemused. ‘I didn’t want to stab her in the face.’

  ‘Chest?’

  He let out an amused pfft but kept his gaze on his feet. ‘No.’

  ‘Chop off a toe? Rip out an earring?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘I had no violent urges or homicidal compulsions.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I was most disappointed.

  We continued our meander across the common, Brutus at Joe’s heels and me clutching a plastic bag full of scones Harriet insisted we feed to the ducks. She’d buttered and marmaladed them. Joe had woken up quiet and distant after his evening with Katy. I wasn’t used to seeing him so preoccupied. It unsettled me. Even Brutus seemed to sense Joe’s distraction and chose to trot behind rather than tussle with the stick Joe carried. A few quiet minutes later we reached the edge of the pond where Brutus commenced his usual routine, pacing six yards round the water, barking with his teeth clenched to avoid a scolding, and Joe and I tore off bits of leaden scone and tossed them to disinterested ducks.

  ‘So what happened?’ I said when we reached the end of our baked goods.

  Joe appeared not to have heard. My back ached, so, in the absence of any reply, I wandered to a nearby bench seat. Joe gave a plaintive look at the scone pieces bobbin
g on the pond then, clicking his tongue for Brutus to heel, drifted over and sat next to me.

  After a period of quiet, he spoke. ‘She wants to get back together.’

  ‘What?’ I blurted. ‘Is she fucking nuts?!’

  The look on Joe’s face made me realise the current topic required more thoughtfully edited responses.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered.

  Another silent minute passed.

  ‘So what did you say?’

  Joe looked down and seemed to notice the stick in his hands for the first time. He threw it and Brutus, who had been sitting, statesmanlike, at Joe’s feet, streaked across the dry grass. I wasn’t the most patient person at the best of times, and this late in my pregnancy even less so, so the staccato nature of our conversation was driving me crazy.

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What did you say when she said she wanted to get back together?’

  ‘Oh.’

  Brutus arrived and dropped the now gummy stick at Joe’s feet.

  ‘I said I’d have to think about it.’

  For the sake of my sad friend I said the ‘c’ word in my head.

  ‘Well, if you don’t mind me saying,’ I said.

  Joe gave me a look.

  ‘And even if you do . . . what’s there to think about? She cheated on you.’

  Further darkness crossed his face. ‘I know.’

  ‘And you weren’t even married yet.’

  Joe threw the stick again and nodded. I watched him follow Brutus’s enthusiastic stick retrieval with dark-ringed eyes, heartache etched in newly carved lines on his face.

  ‘OK, I’m going to try to be tactful here,’ I said.

  Joe gave a doubtful look that was completely deserved.