by Dani Atkins
‘Changed my mind,’ he said succinctly.
There was a chorus of noisy cheers, and a bit of back-slapping, but I was quieter, meeting David’s eyes with a warm smile. He smiled back.
It was a good night. Term was over and everyone was in the mood to celebrate.
‘I think it actually looks even better than last year, don’t you?’ Pete asked artlessly, as we took our places at the circular snowy-linen-covered table. I intercepted a warning glance from Andrew, and realised they must have agreed between them not to refer to the previous year’s ball. It was quite sweet in a way, their clumsy efforts at trying to shield David from his own memories. But I could have told them they were wasting their time.
I’d seen the way he had scanned the marquee as soon as we entered it, looking for a tall dark-haired brunette who was – almost certainly – a couple of hundred miles away from here. I also saw the way he carefully ensured he chose a seat with a direct view of the stage, and heard his casual enquiry to one of the organisers about when Moonlighters would be playing.
‘She’s not going to be here, mate. You know that. She doesn’t even play with that band anyway,’ Andrew told David unnecessarily. ‘She was just stepping in last year.’
‘Depping,’ said David quietly. ‘They call it depping.’
I’d like to think that alcohol wasn’t entirely responsible for what happened that night, although it would be stupid to deny it played its part. We seemed to empty the six bottles of wine on our table just a little bit faster than those around us. We ordered more, then moved on to champagne. I think some of it was pre-Christmas exuberance, and some was an understandable reaction to the undeniably fraught events of the last three weeks. My attack, and the fall-out from it had affected us all, and I don’t think we could be blamed for wanting to kick back and enjoy the night. But there were, undoubtedly, other things for which we couldn’t claim to be blameless.
I was aware of Mike’s eyes on me as I pulled my chair a little closer to David’s, to hear what he was saying above the noise of the music. Or that was what I told myself, anyway. David was showing no visible signs of intoxication, which is more than I could claim. When Pete picked up the half-full bottle of champagne to refill our glasses, I placed my hand firmly over the top of the flute.
‘No more for me,’ I said.
‘Tipsy Person,’ teased Andrew, laughing uproariously at his own humour in a way that only the inebriated can do. Everyone laughed. Everyone except David. Something about Andrew’s words had speared him like a tiny dart. I saw it in the twist of his mouth and the cloud that covered his eyes. He got quickly to his feet, as though to outrun whatever emotion had just tried to snag him.
‘Fancy checking out the silent disco?’ he asked, holding his hand out to me.
We wove our way across the floor, well, I wove more than David did, if I’m being perfectly honest. I kept hold of his hand, partly because it helped me to navigate in a straight line, and partly because . . . just because.
‘Maybe we should go outside for some air,’ David suggested gently, watching my concentrated efforts to perform something I thought I’d mastered a good twenty-one years earlier – walking.
‘I’m sure it’s these heels,’ I said, blaming my four-inch stilettos, which I’d always been able to walk in perfectly well before. David laughed softly, and was still doing so when a dinner-suited first year staggered back from the chocolate fountain, his mouth dripping melted confectionery like a vampire at a slaying. The guy swayed for a moment, much to the amusement of his companions, and then cannoned straight into me.
‘Hey, watch where you’re going,’ David warned, glaring angrily at the younger man, as I tumbled into his side. I let out a small yelp of pain as my ankle twisted sharply and I felt it buckle beneath me. I would have fallen to the floor in a glittering inelegant heap of sequins had it not been for David’s strong arm, which shot out at lightning speed, catching me around the waist.
‘Idiot,’ muttered David, staring at the student who had already launched himself back towards the fountain. ‘Are you alright?’ His head was bent low towards mine, and he was still holding me cinched tightly against him.
I tentatively put some weight on my foot and winced. ‘Shit. Bugger it. Ouch.’
‘I take it that’s a no,’ said David, his eyes betraying a concern that belied his light-hearted comment.
‘It’s my ankle,’ I said, throwing a death-ray stare at the group of students rough-housing around the chocolate fountain. ‘The one I broke skiing. It’s always been a bit iffy since then. It’s my weak spot.’
‘And there I was thinking there was nothing weak about you,’ David teased. ‘Only now we’ve found your Achilles ankle.’ He might have gone on like that for a little longer, but he sobered when he saw me flinch as I gingerly took a step forward.
‘That looks really painful,’ he said, and even above the noise of the ball, I could hear the worried note to his voice. His eye scanned the marquee. ‘I think there was a St John’s Ambulance tent outside. Why don’t we let them check you out?’
‘I don’t think it’s that bad,’ I said, anxious not to let the evening end with a trip to A&E. ‘I just need to rest it for a bit.’
David looked far from happy with my refusal, but tightened his grip on my waist and guided us through the crowd towards the silent disco, which was considerably closer than our table. I hobbled beside him, until we came to a halt at the darkened annexe packed with students vigorously gyrating to soundless music. There was nowhere to sit; nowhere I wouldn’t be barged into by the posse of rhythmically challenged dancers, so I gestured towards a small recess I had spotted near the exit.
‘We could stand over there for a minute,’ I suggested.
The ground beneath the canvas flooring was uneven underfoot, and even with David’s support my walk was an ungainly lollop.
‘Someone should take a look at this,’ David said, dropping to his knee, his hand carefully encircling my ankle, which was throbbing painfully and already beginning to swell. His fingers were like flames on my skin, scorching and branding, blazing a fire trail of memories back to our first meeting.
A group of girls walking past clutched at each other’s arms and stopped, openly staring at us. The penny dropped with an almost deafening clang.
‘Get up, you idiot,’ I hissed, wrenching my foot free and ignoring the lance of pain that travelled all the way up my leg. ‘They think you’re about to propose.’
He laughed, turned to the girls and shook his head regretfully and they walked off, clearly disappointed. I clutched on to him, shaking with laughter and wobbling on one leg, until his arms fastened around me in support once more. I should have told him to release me, that I was in no danger of falling. But the truth was I wanted no release from him, neither physical nor emotional. And as for falling . . . well, wasn’t that already far too late?
From within the disco, the circling spotlight that appeared to be searching for escaped prisoners among the dancers, panned through the darkness towards us, and settled on an area above our heads. We both looked up. Suddenly I knew what this tiny alcove had been intended for, because suspended from the ceiling on a length of red silken ribbon, was a large sprig of mistletoe.
I laughed nervously.
‘Oh,’ said David. ‘I see.’
I tried to think of something light or amusing to say, something to take away the tentative question in his eyes as he looked at me. It was a bad time to have temporarily lost the faculty of speech.
‘Do you think we should?’ David asked, inclining his head upwards to the provocative piece of foliage dangling above us.
‘Probably not,’ I managed to say, in a voice that didn’t even sound like mine. I thought there might have been a tiny glimmer of disappointment in his eyes, which disappeared when I added, ‘Unless it’s bad luck not to . . .’
I felt his arms tighten a little around me, no longer holding me up just because of my injury. We were going to d
o this. We really were, and there was a very real danger I would pass out before his mouth touched mine, because it was suddenly getting really hard to breathe.
David’s head lowered as though in slow motion, and my lips were already parted, waiting. His kiss was a kaleidoscope, twisting the present and merging it with the past in a prism of glittering lights that took me back to the side of a snowy mountain and our first kiss. Retracing the path they had taken five years earlier, my hands left his shoulders and my fingers threaded into his hair, trying to anchor me to something that wasn’t mine and that would slip away from me in moments.
And that’s exactly what happened. But not in the way I had expected. David’s mouth, so gentle and tender on mine, suddenly froze. They call it being petrified when you are turned to stone. I think that’s what we both were, in every meaning of the word, when we looked up and saw Ally watching us from the shadows.
I’d lost David long before his arms fell away from me and he turned to face her. Ally looked beautiful, I remember thinking, beautiful and tragic, like a heroine in a book. So what did that make me – the nasty villain determined to ruin the happy ending? Ally was trembling, I could see that even from this distance, from shock or rage, I didn’t know. Either way I could feel the guilt crashing down on my head, like a ton weight in a cartoon. She was hurling out insults, like tiny balls of barbed wire, and most of them were hitting their target. I knew this argument. I’d heard it so many times before, on the lips of my parents. That’s what made it so much worse. I knew better than this; I was better than this.
‘Ally,’ David cried, reaching out to her.
I don’t know what I thought I would achieve, but I only knew I had to try, so I too took a step towards her, forgetting my injured ankle. I stumbled and grabbed hold of David’s arm to keep myself from falling. In hindsight, it would have been far less painful to have crashed to the floor.
I could see what was about to happen. I could see it, I just couldn’t believe it. It was as shocking as witnessing an angel wielding a machine gun. I saw Ally’s hand flying through the air, a tiny flat-palmed Exocet missile that was securely locked on target. I was too stunned to swerve, duck or even block her, so she landed a pretty impressive slap across my blood-drained cheek.
Everything speeded up the second her hand connected, and the blood that had been absent flooded back to my flesh with a vengeance. I cradled my cheek. She’d slapped me. She had actually slapped me. I thought that would be the biggest shock of the night. But there was an even greater one: David’s reaction.
He was incensed, suffused with a fury I had never seen in him before. He moved between us, positioning me safely behind him, creating a human shield with his body. He turned and asked me something; perhaps he was checking if I was alright. I have absolutely no idea if I answered him.
Their fight was short, and ugly. I’d heard them argue many times before, but never like that. I wanted to be a thousand miles from there, and yet a horrible compulsion rooted me to the spot, ensuring I didn’t miss a single word as the man I loved tore into the woman he loved, and she cut out his heart right in front of me. And I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop her.
Chapter 9
Charlotte
‘He mourned you, you know. Like you’d died.’ I gave a bitter laugh as I bit down more firmly on the cyanide capsule I’d avoided for years. ‘I think he’d have gotten over you more easily if you actually had.’
Ally’s face turned chalky white. I knew why. It felt wrong and dangerous to talk of death in these corridors. It was close enough already, we didn’t need to invite it to pull up a chair and join us.
‘David grieved. It wasn’t just a break-up – at least not for him. It was genuine grief, we could all see it.’ I paused, wondering if I had the strength to carry on. Apparently I did. ‘Sometimes I think he’s still grieving in a way. Even now.’
‘I . . . I . . .’ Ally looked from David’s closed door, back up the corridor to the room where her own sick husband lay, before finally turning back to me. ‘Why are you telling me this? Why now? Tonight? It all happened so long ago. We’ve all moved on.’
‘Have we? Sometimes I’m not so sure. Maybe the slates haven’t been wiped as clean as you think. Maybe there are still secrets hiding in dark corners. Perhaps it’s time they came out.’
Ally shook her head fiercely and looked again towards her husband’s room, as though she could draw strength from him, even from this distance. There was a vulnerability to her, like a deer who knows the hunter’s cross hairs are positioned right over its heart.
‘He looked for you everywhere, you know.’
Ally swivelled back to face me. Her eyes were bright with tears and there was a brittleness in her voice as though each word had been snapped off. ‘Well, he didn’t look very far, did he? I hadn’t left the country, I was home with my parents. I wasn’t hard to find.’
‘I think it was easier for him to look for you in the places he knew he wouldn’t find you,’ I said, acknowledging something I had believed for a long time. I was suddenly tired, bone-achingly tired, and I didn’t want to be doing this, I didn’t want to be opening this door, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself.
‘It was worse on campus. It was like he had an inner radar. He’d be talking and laughing, yet you’d see his eyes follow any girl with long dark hair.’ My laugh sounded hollow as though the humour within me had withered and died. ‘He also attended a lot of concerts in those final months, for someone who wasn’t that interested in music.’
‘Graduation day was the worst, though. But then I think we all thought you’d be back for that.’
I closed my eyes, and was suddenly back in the darkened auditorium. It was a sweltering hot day, and we were all melting beneath the heavy weight of our graduation robes. Each faculty had an allocated seating area, and from where he sat David couldn’t see the Music students. I was two rows behind him. Close enough to see him pick up the programme and run his finger under her name of graduating students. When they started calling up Ally’s classmates, I saw him stiffen, his eyes fixed on the short flight of stairs leading to the stage where they were filing up, waiting for three years of hard work to be exchanged for a red-ribboned scroll. But they’d gone straight from the Ms to the Os. Although written in the programme, no microphoned voice called Alexandra Nelson to the stage.
‘I graduated in absentia,’ Ally said quietly.
I nodded. ‘I didn’t see David for almost a year after graduation.’ I saw genuine surprise on Ally’s face. ‘We were never together at university. Not even after you left.’ I could have stopped there. There was no need to bare my entire soul to her. But I wanted no more secrets here. ‘But that was his decision, not mine.’
Ally’s green eyes held mine for a long moment, before she nodded. And I could tell I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. Her suspicions had never been entirely groundless.
We both jumped at the sound of the door opening behind us.
‘Mrs Williams?’ I leapt to my feet as though on springs. ‘Just five minutes, now,’ the doctor warned.
I was at the door, ready to duck beneath his white-coated arm, or barrel him out of my way if he didn’t clear a path and let me through. Ally’s voice was so quiet, that I’m surprised I even heard it. My name on her lips still sounded alien to me. ‘Charlotte, I’m . . . I’m glad you told me this. Even after all these years, it couldn’t have been easy.’
I didn’t need to tell her that it hadn’t been. The truth was written all over my face. I turned to go, but she wasn’t quite done yet. ‘Charlotte,’ Ally reddened slightly, and she raised her hand to her face. ‘I’m sorry for . . .’ her voice faltered; she lost the words to complete her apology and instead ran her fingers across the smooth plane of her skin, from cheekbone down to jaw line.
I never thought I would hear her say that. Even more astounding, I never thought I’d hear myself say, ‘Forget it.’
And yet I did.
Ally
Joe’s room was a haven of quiet after the frenetic activity in David’s. The nurse attending to him turned and smiled as I entered. She was yet another new face.
‘Come for a wee visit, have you?’ she asked, in a soft Scottish burr, as though wandering the hospital like a refugee in the middle of the night was quite normal. I suppose to her it was.
‘Has there been any change? Any sign of him coming round?’ I asked, taking my place beside Joe’s bed.
The nurse shook her head regretfully, and then busied herself in the furthest corner of the room, to give us as much privacy as the glass-walled cubicle allowed.
‘I’m back,’ I whispered, bending to kiss Joe’s cold, still cheek. The ends of my hair dangled across his face. It should have tickled or irritated him, but he didn’t so much as twitch. I reached for his hand, threading my fingers between his. ‘Max is on his way,’ I said conversationally, as though we were chatting over dinner and it was our farmhouse kitchen table between us, instead of a rock-hard hospital mattress. ‘Jake will be so excited to see him again. And so will I. It’ll be good to see an old face.’ I didn’t add that I’d already had my fill of spectres from my past for one night. There would be plenty of time to tell Joe all about that when he woke up.
I glanced over at the nurse, who was doing her very best to look as though she wasn’t listening to our conversation. But I couldn’t shake the horrible feeling that she was the only one listening. I searched for some sign that my words were reaching Joe, but there was nothing. I laid my head down on the woven blanket beside his hand, inhaling that indefinable ‘hospital smell’ on the fabric. It took me back to another night, in another hospital. Except that time I had been the one in the bed, and Joe was the one beside me. I smiled into the waffle thread of the blanket. It was the only time I had ever seen my strong and capable husband afraid of anything.
