by Jennifer Cox
Robert worked at the head office of a national courier company and the party was like going to the wedding of someone you’ve never met (including, in my case, your Date): a room full of people talking animatedly about things you didn’t understand and couldn’t contribute to.
It was a long night, made longer by the sit-down meal where I accidentally bonded with the loud, drunk wife who then tried to give me a head massage during the awards ceremony. There was also a Brotherhood of Man tribute band (though, who knows, maybe it was the real thing). Robert led me onto the dance floor and proceeded to throw some moves reminiscent of the scene in Diamonds Are Forever where the man has a scorpion dropped down the back of his shirt. Not that I did much better. Accepting that resistance was useless, I gave it some Travolta. Assuming the position, hand on one hip, I energetically flung the other hand out, rapping the old man dancing next to me very hard on the back of the head with my knuckles.
My final sight of Robert, as I mouthed I was going to the loo and fled the building, was him doing the funky chicken with the loud, drunk wife. I vowed no matter how much the Numbers God needed appeasing in the future, I was never doing a mercy date ever again.
And then Garry rang to say he’d booked his flight to London.
I had a million emotions, all of them good. In the time I’d been back, I’d realized how much I loved London. I wanted Garry to see the city, but also to see me in my hometown. He was the reason I felt good about being here—when you’re happy and in love, London is a wonderful place. In fact my newfound All-Purpose Flirty wasn’t just for the people I beamed at walking down the street; I was flirting with the city too. And from the red of the double-decker buses, the white of the Brick Lane bagels, and the boys in blue on the beat, the city was flirting right back. Eros had shot his arrow from Piccadilly Circus; the London Eye was giving me a big, cheeky wink.
God, I needed to stop being so cheerful: Any minute now I was going to break into song and the entire street would join in, dancing like a scene out of Mary Poppins, singing: “It’s a jolly holiday with Garry.”
And it would be good to have a break from having a long-distance relationship: emailing, Instant Messaging, and chatting on the phone were an important part of both of our days, but this was also frustrating at times. Not just that we weren’t face to face, but because of the logistics of being an ocean apart. The time difference meant there was always one of us sitting up until 2 a.m. or getting up at 6 a.m.
I loved our marathon conversation today. I feel bad, though, that it is on the wrong side of the clock for you. Next marathon, we can do it on the wrong side of the clock for me. (gotta keep things fair!)
We rarely talked for less than two hours (after the terrible shock of the first phone bill, we’d renegotiated phone plans to get the cheapest international rates), so we were both constantly exhausted from broken sleep patterns and harassed that we were always late for work or meeting friends in the evening.
One good thing, though: The stress and excitement of the situation meant that the weight was finally falling off me. I might have become clinically insane by the time Garry got here, but at least I’d look good in a pair of shorts.
Eleven p.m. at Heathrow airport and I was sitting in a grim, smoky café waiting to meet Garry.
Not that I was particularly aware of my surroundings: I had so much adrenaline racing around my body, I was concerned I might actually start astral-planing. I was drinking herbal tea to try to calm my nerves, but that and the nerves were making me want to pee constantly. Every time I popped into the loo, I’d worry I was going to miss him arriving, and then I’d catch sight of myself in the mirror, see how anxious I looked, and get nervous all over again.
But the moment he walked through the gate, all nerves vanished instantaneously. I suddenly didn’t feel awkward or nervous about seeing him at all, just really, really glad he was here.
Looking amazing (he’d had a long flight and looked great; I’d had a short drive and looked like crap—where was the justice in that?), he cut through the barrier, finding the shortest possible route to my side. Walking up with a huge smile on his face, he said, “Hey, baby,” dumped his bags on the ground, reached out, and pulled me into a close embrace.
I buried my face in his neck and silently hugged him right back. I was just so happy to see him, I couldn’t say a word, I couldn’t even kiss him. I just stood wrapped in his embrace, pulling my fingers through his hair, trying to absorb the fact that after the last few weeks of emailing and phoning and waiting, he was actually here in London.
We must have looked like the poster for Lovers Reunited at the Airport, but I didn’t care. I felt only relief. Like arriving back from a school trip late at night and sleepily spotting your parents waiting to collect you, a sense of all is right in the world washed over me.
It was now my turn to play tour guide, and I really enjoyed it. We explored the huge Buddhist temple by Wimbledon common; watched the herds of deer roaming wild in Richmond Park; wandered wide-eyed around the cornucopia of Harrods’ food hall; and annoyed everyone as we sang “I don’t want to go to Chelsea,” jumping on and off buses in Chelsea and along the King’s Road.
I explained the mysteries of roundabouts, Marmite, Teletext, the Telegraph crossword, clotted cream, and night buses. Unable to find a pub serving food after 2 p.m., I tried (and failed) to make a case for English licensing laws. I also tried to explain why Garry couldn’t find anywhere serving decent cocktails. That British people drink beer to be sociable, wine to be sophisticated, and cocktails to be insensible. Cocktail names did seem to indicate the drinker’s intent: Americans were moderate, elegant drinkers, and they had the Manhattan and the Cosmopolitan. As night follows day, so the Brits had the Slippery Nipple and Sex on the Beach.
Garry loved my flat and by being there made me realize how much I’d missed living with someone, cooking together and listening to music in the kitchen or content to do our own thing in separate rooms.
There was an ongoing fuss about coffee. Garry had brought his favorite coffee, Peet’s, with him but my coffeemaker broke on the second day. As Garry tinkered with it, I confessed that I’d bought it at a garage sale thirteen years ago for fifty pence.
“There was a reason it was being sold cheap,” he said dismissively.
“Oh, you mean there was a chance it would stop working a decade later?” I replied smugly.
In the spirit of Access All Areas, Garry was meeting my parents. I was nervous because I knew Garry would be nervous; I thought maybe my parents would be a little nervous too. As the pregnant woman eats for two, the woman introducing her boyfriend to her parents eats anxiously for four. I bought my body-weight in ciabatta from the Italian bakery round the corner, and we set off.
But, as invariably happens in these situations, from the moment my parents opened the front door and slightly awkward introductions were made, everyone immediately hit it off. Garry was charming and funny, and my parents clearly liked him straight away. My dad had spent quite a bit of time working in the States, and since my mother has long followed international politics, they were both full of questions about Garry’s life, American domestic policy, the NBA, and “Do you know that bar in Vegas…?”
Relieved of the role of community liaison officer, I was free to advance steadily up Mount Ciabatta, washing it down with cup after cup of strong, black coffee. After half an hour, bloated with excess wheat but caffeinated to the hilt, I could barely sit still. I bounced up and down, contributing nothing but constantly interrupting the conversation: “Does anyone want more coffee…that’s in today’s paper, isn’t it, let me see if I can find it…was that someone at the door…did you see that bird in the tree…oh, that’s in my bag, Garry, I’ll get it…”
In the end I went upstairs to my old room and lay on the bed reading my old childhood comic books until I was calm enough to return to the group and enjoy the rest of the morning.
Hugging and kissing my parents good-bye, we drove on to Camb
ridge. It was a perfect autumn afternoon; both of us were impressed and slightly awed as the city unveiled itself from the shroud of chilled mist that swathed the buildings and streets.
We peeped into the beautiful fifteenth-century inner courts of Trinity College and Queens’ College. We walked hand in hand along the paths of damp autumn leaves that lined the banks of the River Cam, watching the boaters elegantly punt their way along the chill, still water.
We drove home via my sister Toz’s and spent a boisterous evening with her and the kids. Zack, Tabs, and Michael were adorable as ever and raced around showing off their toys, clambering over Garry trying to tickle him. We set off for home at 10 p.m., leaving poor Toz to put three overexcited children to bed.
Collapsing on the sofa with a glass of wine at the end of our long day, Garry looked very thoughtful. “You know, it meant a lot, seeing you with your family today,” he told me seriously.
“Why’s that?” I quipped. “Are you starting to realize anything involving parents turns me into a nervous wreck?”
He laughed. “No,” he said gently. “It’s that seeing you with your family makes me realize how much they love you.”
I smiled shyly. “Yeah, they think I’m okay,” I said, trying to make light of it.
But Garry refused to be distracted. “It’s made me realize,” he continued, “when you come and stay with me in America, how important it is that I make you feel just as loved and special.” He put down his glass and sat close so he could kiss me. “I really love you, Jen.”
When I come to stay with him in America…? I looked at the china cats next to the chimney as if checking to see if they’d heard it too. If they had, they didn’t let on, just stared back sphinxlike, keeping a dignified silence, their feelings firmly under control.
You can learn a lot from cats. I wasn’t going to cry this time; I could easily have done so but I’d decided it was time to find a better way of showing my happiness. So I kissed him back instead and we went to bed.
Apart from the time passing too quickly, Garry’s visit was completely perfect. Things took a bit of a downturn, though, the day before he left.
I had to chair a one-day conference in the city. It wasn’t how either of us wanted to spend our last full day together, but there was no way around it. So we’d agreed: Garry was going to wander around sightseeing, then he’d come and join me and the speakers for drinks at the end of the day. Paula, Posh PR Emma, and Jo would be there too and were all very excited about meeting him.
It was a miserably cold, wet day, but the conference was well attended, and after the wonderful but busy and intense week together it felt almost relaxing now to have a straightforward day of work.
Midmorning, I was up onstage going over some points for the delegates before the coffee break, when someone walked in at the back of the hall.
It was Kelly.
It was nearly a year since we’d seen each other, and that had only been brief, me dropping off some of the things he’d left at my flat at his office. The shock of seeing him now felt just that, like a harsh jolt of electricity slamming into my body. He looked over in my direction, but was too far away for me to know if he could see me staring incredulously back. He took off his jacket and leaned against the wall.
I’d forgotten what a presence he had; I hate to use the word smoldering, but unfortunately I have no choice.
All credit to me, I have to say, I kept talking as if the man who’d broken my heart hadn’t just walked into the room. Instead, I reminded the delegates that the coffee break lasted only fifteen minutes and please remember that phones had to be switched off as soon as they came back into the auditorium.
Experts at precisely how many calls they could make and how many chocolate cookies they could get through in the fifteen minutes allotted to them, three hundred people looked at their watches, then stampeded out of the hall in unison. Only two remained.
I stepped down from the stage and walked over to the end of the aisle from where Kelly was now casually watching me.
“Hi,” he said in a friendly, relaxed way as I walked up. “Seminar going okay?”
“It was until you turned up,” I felt like retorting, but I didn’t. I just nodded and said: “Hello, Kelly, how are you?”
He was fine, apparently. Work was going well; he’d just got back from a job in Algeria and was off to China at the end of the month. I watched him as he talked. I watched the way his mouth moved, the way he tugged at his dark curls to process a thought, the way his head tilted slightly as he listened. It was all very familiar. And that it was so familiar triggered an almost forgotten sensation inside me. Over our five years together, we’d gradually grown into a certain shape. I could feel my part of our shape forming now: the girlfriend shape. But even as it developed, and even as we talked, and even as I looked at the handsome face and strong body of the man I had loved so much, a far more powerful feeling grew alongside it: one of impatience. Growing together and learning each other’s ways and worlds had been for nothing—Kelly had never wanted a serious girlfriend. And I had never wanted to seriously admit that.
I now knew that to be the truth. I recognized the role I’d played in my own deception. But I’d known that for a while; I’d done the work and was a long way past that insight. I wasn’t angry anymore, I just wasn’t interested.
Another bond between us flexed, stretched, then shattered into a million pieces.
I stood up. “So, it’s lovely to see you again, Kelly,” I said, really meaning it. “I’d better get on with all this, but thanks for dropping by. I’ll see you around.”
In my head, I stood in the center of the Coliseum, Kelly’s broken body crumpled on the ground before me. My bloodied arms held aloft, I acknowledged the cheers of the crowds and saluted as they threw flowers and bags of Kettle Chips at my feet in exaltation. My female friends poured into the arena, stamping their feet and clapping their hands, chanting: “Jen-ny, Jen-ny…”
But the body got back up.
“I’ll see you tonight,” Kelly said. “Jo’s asked me to the drinks.”
Crowds stopped cheering and an eerie silence filled the arena. Bags of Kettle Chips rolled like tumbleweeds across the dusty ground.
“Ummm, Kelly, well, that’s nice,” I replied weakly, my thoughts freefalling in shock. “…But you don’t have to come to the drinks….”
“I know I don’t.” He shrugged. “But I’ll be in town anyway, so why not?”
This was very, very, very awkward. “Kelly…” I said tentatively, groping for the right way to phrase this. “You know I’m seeing someone?”
He nodded and shrugged again, as if to say what of it?
“Well, he’s over from America at the moment and is coming along to the drinks tonight.”
“Yeah, I heard something about that,” Kelly replied nonchalantly. “Well,” he said, picking up his jacket and fixing me with a lazy grin, “I don’t mind if he doesn’t.” And, kissing my cheek and gently squeezing my shoulder, Kelly turned and walked out the hall.
I watched him go in amazement. If he doesn’t mind…What about if I sodding mind? Had Kelly done this on purpose? Did he know Garry was in town and was checking him out? Was this some kind of macho guy thing? And how would Garry feel about meeting a load of my friends and Kelly?
All around me, delegates were flooding back into the hall, chancing one last hurried phone call through a mouthful of cookie crumbs. They took one look at my expression and turned off their phones guiltily, mouthing their apologies.
Was this going to be okay? Was Garry going to be okay? Was I going to be okay? One thing I was sure about, Jo was not going to be okay. In my head, I was back in the Coliseum, Jo peering anxiously out from behind the rump of a nervous-looking lion. The crowd held their breath as I grimly crunched over flowers and Kettle Chips toward her, hands on hips.
The rest of the day passed quickly. And juggling a busy seminar packed with high-maintenance speakers, I actually managed to forget abou
t pretty much everything but the task in hand. For once I didn’t mind work monopolizing my attention.
After the final speaker had delivered her presentation, I gave a summary of, then conclusion about, the day’s key points, thanked everyone for coming, and with that we were finished. As I stood in front of the stage with the organizer, fielding individual questions from the delegates, I saw Garry walk in at the back of the hall. Although I was happy to see him, I also felt quite anxious: I really had no idea how he was going to react to the news that Kelly was here. Garry came down to join us—windswept but very upbeat after a day spent exploring—and I introduced him to some of the speakers. Twenty minutes later we all managed to escape to the pub.
The whole time we were walking through the driving rain to the bar, I tried to get Garry on his own so I could tell him about Kelly. Whatever his reaction was going to be, for both our sakes I wanted to give him the chance to have it now, rather than in a room with my friends, colleagues, and ex. But it was impossible for us to break away from the group, and as we walked into the smoky bar I could see Kelly over on the far side of the room talking to Posh PR Emma.
Paula (who had set up the date with Seattle Jason) was right by the door, and as soon as she saw me she broke off from her conversation to come over and give me a big hug. She hadn’t met Garry yet and on being introduced to him gave him a warm hug, too. She clearly wanted to make him feel welcome, but the whole time she was hugging Garry she was also looking at me and frantically wiggling her eyebrows and gesturing with her head in the direction of Kelly.
“I know, I know,” I mouthed helplessly. “Bloody Jo invited him.”
Paula rolled her eyes and we both looked over at the bar where Jo was standing, rifling through her handbag for her purse while shouting exasperatedly into her cell: “…but Ryan, you promised you’d be here…”
