by Laura Tait
‘I’ve booked Gauchos for seven p.m.,’ I share. ‘Thought we could have a drink first.’
‘I can’t eat in Gauchos,’ Avril barks at Tom, as if the rest of us aren’t there. ‘Vegetarians don’t eat at steak restaurants.’
‘There will be something on the menu for vegetarians,’ I say with a confidence I don’t feel. I’m already having to bite my tongue. If this were the other way around and a guy was controlling a girlfriend like this, everyone would go spare. How come it’s acceptable the other way round?
Ben squeezes my hand, and I feel grateful how well matched we are. We might be different, but he still understands me. He’s been great since I told him about my mum, seeming to sense that it’s not something I want to talk about.
I attempt another change of topic. ‘How’s your love life, Russ?’
He answers with a pfft, then says: ‘I’ve got a theory. I think the longer you’re single, the longer you’re likely to stay single. You become more desperate – and girls can smell it a mile off.’ He laughs to himself. ‘I fucking reek.’
Ben laughs. ‘Like those forty-year-old cruise ship singers who audition on X Factor – you can see the desperation in their eyes.’
‘And then there’s all the bad habits you get stuck in. The only difference is their bad habits are singing out of their noses and waving their fists when they sing, mine are eating my dinner bang on six o’clock and taking a couple of comics with me to the bog.’
‘Both would put me off,’ says Ben.
‘I fully understand, buddy,’ he says. ‘Rebecca, do you have any fit single mates that would go for me?’
‘I don’t know, Russ, I’ll ask them. Danielle, would you go for Russ?’
Danielle laughs and looks ready to reply, but none of us will ever know what she was about to say. Because at that moment, Avril turns her lips to Tom’s ear and says: ‘If she does, you’ll be the only one in your little trio she hasn’t fucked.’
I don’t get her joke, and look to the others, expecting them to share my confusion. But the others don’t look confused. They look horror-stricken. I laugh into the silence, nervous for some reason, but no one joins me. And it dawns on me: it wasn’t a joke.
Your little trio. That’s how she refers to Russ, Tom and Ben.
The only one she hasn’t fucked. What about Ben?
‘What about Ben?’ I say.
Tom chews his bottom lip, while the others stare at Avril in disbelief.
‘What?’ she says with a shrug. ‘I didn’t think anyone else could hear me.’
The pain is physical. My stomach clenches and my head spins. I feel dizzy, like I might throw up. Is this what Ben felt like when he was standing on the cliff edge at Beachy Head? I’m aware there’s an argument unfolding but I’m still trying to process what I’ve just found out.
‘You really have a way with words,’ Danielle spits at one point. ‘Tell me – has any of your poetry ever been fucking published?’
‘Do you have a problem with me being a poet, Danielle?’
‘No, I have a problem with you being a cunt, Avril.’
In my dumbfounded state, I almost laugh. Everyone’s still talking over each other but I can’t take any of it in. I’m vaguely aware of Ben and Danielle taking turns to repeat my name again and again, each time more urgent than the last, but I feel disconnected, like it’s a TV in another room.
With my head pressed against the glass I watch the sun drop lower and lower, until the horizon burns bright orange. If I wasn’t frozen to the spot, I’d take a picture – my camera is in my bag. Ben and I haven’t got many pictures of just the two of us, we realized while rearranging the flat the day he moved in. I’ve bought him a frame for his birthday.
Ben slept with Danielle. That happened. Avril said so, and no one has denied it. That actually fucking happened.
I don’t. That’s what Ben said the night I met him when I implied everyone fancies Danielle.
I need to get out – why are we moving so slowly? I drop my face into my hands, as if by doing so no one can see me any more. I feel a hand on my back but I shrug it off violently. Finally I feel a jolt, and we’re no longer moving.
‘When?’ I croak, and even though it was barely audible, everyone shuts up.
Please say never. Tell me I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
Ben takes a deep breath. ‘Ages ago. You and I weren’t—’
I get up and leap towards the exit.
‘Rebecca!’ Ben says, as the glass door slides open. But I’m already halfway out.
Chapter Seven
BEN
I step off the cabin straight after Rebecca but already she is away, down the steps and through the barriers.
I check my pockets, panicking as Rebecca becomes smaller and smaller to my eyes. Where the fuck is my Oyster? I pat down my pockets one last time but there is nothing else for it.
Planting my arms on each side of the barrier, I vault it, clipping my left foot as I arch over but just managing to keep my balance.
A man shouts behind me as I accelerate into a jog. I glance back and see a ticket officer gesticulating at Danielle. The others watch me with concerned expressions, except for Avril, who is through the barriers herself and casually cupping her mouth to light a cigarette.
What the fuck was she thinking?
I notice heads turn as I break into a sprint. No one used to bat an eyelid when Jamie and I ran home from school. Is that how you know you’re getting old? When you can’t run without people staring? Why am I thinking about this now? I think it’s because this whole situation seems surreal.
Let them stare. Rebecca is the only person that matters right now. I need to reach her, to explain.
I see that she’s heading not towards the O2 but to North Greenwich station, so I zigzag round a parked car and twist left.
When I reach the station I stop momentarily to get my bearings. She’ll be heading back to the flat or to Arch 13, which means she’ll get the bus.
I start to run again, but there’s no sign of her as I follow the line of bus stops that arcs around the station. At the final stop I turn, desperate and exhausted, and at last I see her, sitting on a bench in the shadow of a vending machine. I bathe in the relief for a second before stepping towards her.
She is pretending she never saw me sprint past, even though she must have. Her hands are tucked under her armpits, and her eyes are screwed up like she’s concentrating hard on something. The frustration, and the fear of not knowing what she is thinking, is like a hand squeezing my heart.
I approach her gently, like a rare bird that has landed in the garden. She uses both hands to smooth her hair away from her face but still does not look at me.
When I sit on the other end of the bench she twists her position so I can no longer see her face, but within seconds she realizes the gesture is insufficient and stands.
‘You’re overreacting,’ I tell her.
Silence.
This is what she’s like in arguments: she locks the door and pulls down her shutters. That’s why I never told her about sleeping with Danielle.
OK, that’s not why I didn’t tell her about sleeping with Danielle. I didn’t tell her because what was the point? I would have been shooting myself in the foot. Soldiers actually did that during the First World War to get out of service. But I didn’t want to get out of anything. I knew within a couple of dates that I was falling in love with Rebecca and I’ve never had a single doubt. What does it matter what happened before we started seeing each other?
‘Can’t we talk about it?’ I say.
Rebecca bridles. ‘Oh, suddenly you want to talk about it?’ Her words are screams pretending to be whispers and doing a bad job. ‘You’re a year too late, Ben.’
The sun has disappeared, leaving smears of purples and dirty yellows like a bruised eye.
‘It was before we . . .’
I see Rebecca glance self-consciously at a man who has approached the vending m
achine. He is reviewing the contents as though reading a book, left to right, top to bottom. Finally he puts in some coins.
‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Becs. It’s you I fell in love with.’
Vending machine man starts to bang his palm against the side of the machine, which obviously hasn’t upheld its part of the contract. A few metres away a huddle is forming at the nearest bus stop.
‘Tell me what I can do to make things right?’ I try, but Rebecca’s attention is elsewhere now, to a bus that is pulling in.
The man bangs harder, his fist clenched now, but nothing comes out.
‘Don’t come back to the flat tonight,’ Rebecca says.
I go to say something but my brain is a fog. She stands up and moves away from me.
‘Rebecca!’
‘Don’t follow me.’
The bus is one of the new ones that allows you to board at the front, middle or back, and I’m about to tell her that I’m going to need some stuff, but she has jumped the crowds and boarded at the back. I watch her disappear up the stairs.
I step forward to go after her but something holds me back. I know Rebecca, and if I cause a scene on the bus it will make things worse. Right now she just needs some space.
Vending machine man follows her on to the bus having given up on whatever he wanted. A few seconds later the bus is on its way, and I’m left alone on the concourse wishing that another flock of starlings would come along and turn back time.
I stand there, stunned, only vaguely conscious of a can clattering to the bottom of the vending machine.
If someone had told me when I woke up this is how my twenty-eighth birthday would end, I’d have laughed, but although it’s fucked up, I know I should be grateful for one thing: that Rebecca doesn’t know everything.
I just need to keep it that way.
Chapter Eight
REBECCA
Monday, 3 November
I can’t believe it was just a month ago I sat there banging on to Danielle about how you know you’ve found The One when they find your faults endearing. What the hell did I know?
I pause at the door to review the living room before leaving for work. Two crusty cereal bowls decorate the coffee table; cushions hang off the sofa; the blanket I spent the whole of yesterday wrapped in is on the floor – partially covering the open pizza box and its one remaining slice of ham and mushroom; six half-drunk mugs of coffee sit on four different surfaces. Six? Christ, he’s only been gone two days.
And then it hits me: there’s no one here to find this endearing.
My phone vibrates once in my hand and I know without looking that it’s a text from Ben. I unlock my keypad and let my thumb hover for a second. Any affectionate thoughts I feel for him and his ninja-like ability to clear up after me are short lived. The image of him and Danielle in bed together seeps back into my consciousness, followed by the image of his face as I boarded the bus and pulled out of North Greenwich station, and I feel wretched again.
This is what it’s been like all weekend. I’d miss him and my phone would ring, and it would occur to me that all I would need to do to put an end to feeling like this was to answer it. But then the visions would come. Images so vivid I felt like I was there, watching Danielle kneeling on the bed dressed only in matchy-matchy underwear (I wish I didn’t know that she religiously coordinates her knickers and bra), and undoing the buttons on Ben’s shirt. Then running her hand down the dark cluster of hair on his abdomen and reaching for his belt.
At one point I had to run to the loo and throw up the pizza, my mobile ringing away in the background.
Still standing at the door, I ignore his text and punch the word cleaner into my phone, then email it to myself before shoving the door closed behind me.
My bike is leaning against Ben’s in the downstairs hall, nestled under its handlebar, as though his bike has its arm around mine.
‘For fuck’s sake, Ben!’ I complain as I try to wrestle it free. I mean, strictly speaking this isn’t Ben’s fault but blaming him for everything helps. I need to stay angry because feeling angry doesn’t feel as bad as feeling betrayed and hurt and stupid.
‘Everything OK?’ the heavily pregnant woman from the flat downstairs asks passive-aggressively as she opens her door. What did Ben say her name was again?
‘Fine,’ I mumble as the bikes separate. ‘Thanks.’
The ride does its job of clearing my head, and as I chain up my bike I feel relieved to be at work. I considered pulling a sickie for the first time ever this morning. I barely slept all weekend so when the alarm went off at six o’clock, I defiantly pulled the quilt over my head and thought, Bugger that for a game of soldiers. But after a few minutes I lost my resolve and dragged myself out of bed, determined not to let this throw me off course, and I’m glad I did. There’s something comforting about being at work. From the imposing framed prints of buildings hanging in reception to the distinctive smell of freshly vacuumed carpets. It’s just any old normal Monday, I tell myself.
Having to shower in the crappy cubicle is the only drawback of cycling to work, but I’m in and out in minutes. Then, after shaking my hair out of the shower cap, putting on a little make-up and slipping into a smart black shift dress, I’m back in reception.
‘How did you do that?’ Jemma asks, handing me a tea. ‘It was like watching a contestant in Stars in Their Eyes walk through that screen and come out transformed. Except as a sexy architect instead of an eighties pop star.’
I blush and thank her for the tea, planning to sneak out to Pret for a coffee in an hour or so.
‘Think I might divert my phone to reception,’ I say before I head up. ‘If I get any calls just tell them I’m busy.’
At my desk, I chuck my mobile back in my bag so I won’t clock whether Ben and Danielle add to the barrage of texts they sent yesterday. I do feel bad for not answering Jamie’s calls and messages, but right now I’m too scared to find out whether he knew about this all along. That would make him more Ben’s friend than my friend and I’ve never wanted to think of him that way.
Opening Outlook with trepidation, I find emails from Ben and Danielle. I leave them all unread.
I reply to my cleaner email with, Tidy up after yourself, you lazy cow.
Then, focusing on the task at hand, I dig out the ground-floor plans I made last week and head into Jake’s office for our catch-up.
I know where I am with my work. The lines aren’t blurry on floor plans – they’re solid and clean. Either they are there or they aren’t, and whether or not anyone has crossed them isn’t debatable. Why couldn’t it have been the same with my relationship? Am I just crap at that side of things? I keep thinking back, looking for clues that it wasn’t as perfect as I thought it was, but I can’t find anything, which makes me feel like even more of an idiot.
My boss taps his sticky-outy bottom lip as he examines the pages, then looks me in the eye. He’s about to ask something serious – I can tell.
‘You’ll be honest with me, won’t you?’
I nod, wide-eyed. ‘Course.’
‘Do you think I should shave my head?’
I glance at my designs, then back at Jake.
‘Sorry?’
‘My hair is getting thinner and thinner. It’s making me look old. But will I look even older if I’m bald?’
I’d never seen this anxious, vulnerable side to Jake until his wife left him last year, a week before he turned fifty, and he developed an obsession with his appearance. The first thing he did was put himself on a no-carb, high-protein diet that made him look puffy and aged – his face looked like an over-baked potato with two raisins stuck in it.
‘Um, no.’ I shake my head. ‘Bald is good.’ But not wanting to add to his paranoia, I quickly add: ‘Your hair doesn’t look thin, though.’
He smiles. ‘Beautiful.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your designs,’ he says, tapping the page. ‘You’re thinking like a senior architec
t.’ I breathe a sigh of relief that we’re back to talking about work.
The subtext is clear. Senior architect is the next step on the ladder for me. If I can stay on top of the cinema project, that’s what Jake could promote me to.
I thank him, then manage to go the rest of the day without having a proper conversation with anyone. This is deliberate – I’m scared conversing will lead to me having to admit what happened at the weekend, and then inevitably whoever I’m talking to will want to offer me words of advice, and I just don’t want it. No one here even knows Ben. There’s nothing anyone has to say that can help me. And I don’t want everyone knowing my private life.
At five o’clock my phone rings, making me jump. I wonder why it’s not gone through to Jemma, then I realize it is Jemma.
‘Hello?’
‘Only me,’ she says. ‘I’ve got your boyfriend on the line. Says he cannae get through on your mobile so I thought you might want to take this one.’
‘No, just take a message, please.’
I try to make my voice sound normal.
‘It sounds like it might be urgent.’
‘It’s probably not.’
‘But what if there’s been an accident or something, and—’
‘Look, there’s not been an accident,’ I snap. ‘I don’t want to take the call. He’s not my boyfriend any more.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Righteo.’
I feel bad when I hang up; I hope I didn’t offend her.
But then she turns up at my desk five minutes later carrying two cups of tea in one hand and a packet of chocolate digestives in the other, and I sort of wish I had offended her because then this wouldn’t be happening.
‘So what happened?’ she asks, wheeling over a chair to join me at my desk.
I pretend to be concentrating on something on my screen. I can’t talk about this here.
She dips a biscuit in her mug. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yep, I’m fine.’ My throat feels dry so I sip my tea.
