by Lisa Jewell
‘I’ll call you when I’m ready’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
She’d kissed him meaningfully on the mouth as she left, and stopped once at the bedroom door to throw him a look of intense sadness.
And that was that. For the time being, at least.
Vince sighed. He always did this, he realized, left difficult situations dangling in the air, like maggots wriggling on fishing lines, hoping that if he left it dangling for long enough some nice big fish might just leap through the air and swallow it up. Awful thing to do really, as he had no intention of resuming their relationship. None whatsoever. He knew that with a shocking clarity. But he felt more comfortable in this place where he hadn’t ‘dumped’ her and he wasn’t a bastard and she wasn’t bitching about him to her friends and crying into a wine bottle and losing weight. He liked the indefiniteness of it all. And although he knew that the situation couldn’t remain like this for ever, that this trial separation was finite, he was hoping that things would sort of peter out rather than come to an abrupt end with tears and heartbreaks and the like, that things would just sort of cease to be.
He was, he fully accepted, an emotional turnip.
An emotional turnip with a stupid job.
Surely, he thought, life wasn’t supposed to be this trifling and insubstantial.
Surely he was supposed to feel more than this.
He sighed again, and turned to stare at Bethany Belle, trying and failing to find the right words to describe her dimpled cheeks.
Twelve
Cass was crouched in next-door’s front garden making kissy-kissy noises in the dark when Vince got home on Monday night.
‘Cass?’ he said, doing a double take.
‘Vince!’ She leapt to her feet. ‘Thank God. You’re home.’
‘What?’ he said. ‘what’s the matter?’
‘It’s Madeleine. She’s gone missing. She went out last night and I haven’t seen her since. Can you help me look for her?’
‘Er… yeah, sure,’ said Vince, ‘let me just, er, dump my stuff.’ He indicated his off-licence carrier and work clothes.
‘Bollocks,’ he muttered to himself as he mounted the stairs to the front door and pulled his keys from his jacket pocket. The last thing he felt like doing was creeping around Finsbury Park in the dark with Cass, looking for her blessed cat.
‘Thought you had a fucking connection’, he hissed to himself as he made his way up to the flat. ‘Can’t you send the fucking cat a telepathic fucking message or something?’
Cass was peering through the letterbox of Number 50 when Vince went back outside a few minutes later.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, coming up behind her with a torch.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing at the foot of the door. ‘Flap. She might have wandered in here by accident and got trapped.’
‘Hasn’t she got a tag?’
‘No,’ snapped Cass, ‘of course she hasn’t. It’s really dangerous to put a collar on a cat.’ ‘It is?’
‘Yes. They can get strangulated. She’s got a chip.’
‘A chip?’
‘Yeah – they’re these new things, like a little microchip, size of a grain of rice. It’s injected into her neck and all her ID’s stored on it so if she gets lost or hurt the vet can just zap her with a gun thingy and bring up all her details on a computer.’
‘Cool,’ said Vince, ‘but how will someone know who she belongs to unless they take her to the vet?’
Cass looked at him as if she were just about to tell him he was being stupid, but then changed her mind. ‘I don’t know,’ she muttered, turning back to the letterbox.
‘Has she done this before?’ Vince swung his torch back and forth across the base of the privet hedge outside Number 50.
‘No. Well, sort of. I mean she goes out and I don’t know what she gets up to, but she’ll always come back at least once during the night or day. It’s not like her to be out for so long without coming back. I’m worried she might have got lost. Lost her bearings. Maybe she was trying to find her way back to the old flat. Maybe I let her out too soon. God, I can’t bear it…’
They searched the full length of Finsbury Park Road, Wilberforce Road and even Blackstock Road that evening. By the time they got back to the flat it was nearly nine o’clock, and Vince was so cold he could no longer feel his inner thighs.
Cass eyed the kitchen table when they walked back in and clocked the four-pack of Stellas and the Blockbuster video. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘shit. I’m sorry. I’ve spoiled your night. I didn’t think.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Vince, lowering himself on to the Victorian-school-style radiator and feeling his thighs and buttocks thawing as he did.
‘No. Really. I feel terrible. You must think I’m so selfish.’
‘Well, yes, but that’s all part of your unique charm.’
She smiled wanly at him. ‘Let me make it up to you,’ she said. ‘Let me do you a reading.’
‘Oh, God…’ Cass had been yabbering on about giving him a tarot reading since the day she’d moved in.
‘Oh, come on,’ she persisted, ‘I’m worried about you. Your life’s in limbo. You’re looking thin…’
‘Thin?’
‘Yes. Drawn.’
‘That’s all those fucking chickpeas you keep feeding me. I need meat, not a tarot reading.’ As a strict vegan, Cass was stridently opposed to any form of ready-made meal and every night she commandeered the kitchen, cooking enormous pungent curries of chickpeas, lentils and strange root vegetables, which she foisted upon Vince like a Jewish mother. As a consequence Vince had been enjoying the most prolific and luxurious bowel movements of his life and had lost two pounds in weight.
‘OΚ. How about I order us a curry. With meat in it. Just for you. On me. A nice chicken tikka, maybe…’
‘Or a vindaloo.’
‘Or a vindaloo. And then let me read your cards. Please?’
‘Oh, go on, then.’
‘Cool!’ She pulled open the drawer in the kitchen table and pulled out a handful of takeaway menus.
‘So,’ she said while they waited for their delivery, ‘what’s happening with you and Magda’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Vince indignantly.
‘Why not?’ Cass looked affronted.
‘Because that’s cheating.’
‘Cheating?’
‘Yeah. Wheedling information out of me about my private life before you read my cards.’
Cass tutted and raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s not how it works. I’m not a fucking fortune-teller.’
‘So how does it work, then?’
‘The cards look at your current situation and help you deal with it. They give you guidance. And it’ll help me read the cards if you let me know how things are. So,’ she tried again, ‘how’s it going with Magda?’
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We’re talking. Just about.’
‘And this “trial separation” – how long is it going to last?’ She pulled plates out of cupboards and cutlery out of drawers as she talked.
He shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of informal. I think she wants me to do something dramatic. Tell her I love her. Propose or something.’
‘Sheesh,’ she said, tearing off two sheets of kitchen roll, ‘that girl’s got it bad.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you wouldn’t catch me hanging around waiting for some guy to make up his mind whether or not he loved me. Christ. You either do or you don’t. There’s no middle ground in my world.’
After they’d eaten, Cass passed a block of slippery cards to Vince and pulled her left knee up to her chin, ‘Now, I want you to really think about your current circumstances, your past experiences and your hopes and desires for the future while you shuffle the cards. Take your time. Really focus on what it is you want to know. Speak to the cards. Ask the cards questions.’
‘OK,’ he said, ha
ndling the cards gingerly, ‘no problem.’ Fragments of his life zipped through his thoughts like a slide show as he shuffled through the waxy cards. Bethany Belle’s tiny fingers. Magda’s silky thighs. A man he’d sat next to on the Tube that morning who smelled of raw onions. His little brother’s third birthday party that weekend. Nothing of any consequence. No big questions. Because sometimes knowing what question to ask was harder than knowing the answer.
‘OK,’ said Cass, taking the cards back from him and starting to arrange them face down in small groups on the kitchen table, ‘let’s see what’s going on in Vince Land.’
She turned cards over slowly and circumspectly, tapping her teeth with her fingernails and taking delicate puffs on a roll-up as she did. ‘Hmmmm,’ she said, drawing her other knee up towards her chin, ‘this is interesting. See this card, it suggests a kind of blockage, an obstacle. It’s like you’re stuck in the past. Like sinking mud. And this card here symbolizes regret, or unfinished business. Does that suggest anything to you?’
He shrugged, and gave it some thought. ‘Well, I guess I always kind of wished I’d done a fourth A level. I wanted to. I wanted to take History of Art, but my tutors reckoned I wouldn’t be able to deal with the workload, wanted me to concentrate on my three main choices, and I know it wouldn’t have made much difference in the long run, that extra A level, but I don’t know, I’ve always just felt that –’
‘No no no,’ snapped Cass, ‘not piddling, poncing A levels, for fuck’s sake. I’m talking about real stuff. Big shit. You know. Love. What about love? I’m getting a strong sense that this is a romantic regret. I mean, how many serious girlfriends have you had in your life?’
‘Well, there’s Magda,’ he counted her off on his thumb, ‘and then there was Helen before her for a few months…’
‘And what went wrong with Helen?’
‘Well, nothing went wrong. We just split up.’
‘Why?’
‘I dunno. It just wasn’t working out.’
‘Men.’ Cass raised her eyebrows and rubbed out her roll-up in the ashtray, angrily. ‘For God’s sake, why are you all so useless at discussing your emotions?’
‘I’m not being useless,’ he countered. ‘I just really don’t know why we split up.’ And it was true. He didn’t. He’d met her, they’d gone out, they’d gone out again, they’d carried on going out, then, five months later, for whatever reason, they’d stopped going out. Something to do with him not ‘opening up to her’ he seemed to recall. He hadn’t understood it at the time and he didn’t understand it now. To open up to someone would suggest that there was something inside you weren’t showing someone; it would suggest a tightly sealed clam or a locked box with something hidden deep inside. But that simply wasn’t the case. He was nice to her, they did nice things together, they laughed, they had nice sex, they went away for a week to Cornwall and had a very nice time in a Β & Β in Port Isaac and didn’t argue once. Everything about his five months with Helen had been perfectly nice, but it still, apparently, wasn’t enough.
‘She must have said something? Given you some kind of reason?’
‘She said she wanted me to open up to her. Fuck knows what that meant.’
‘Hmmm. Yes. I can see that. You are a bit… unforthcoming.’
‘With what?! I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘Yes, but you look like you do. You look… mysterious.’
‘Mysterious.’
‘Uh-huh. The scars, the brooding brow, the overcoat. You look like you’re full of secrets and angst.’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, you. Quite fancied you the first time I came to see the flat.’ ‘You did?’
‘Uh-huh. But then I realized you were just – ‘ She clamped her mouth shut. ‘Nothing.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Jesus, Cass. You can’t just start saying something like that, then stop. You realized I was just what?’
Cass sighed, and brought her knees back up to her chin – she was one of those bendy girls who always had to sit in strange positions, whether it was cross-legged, on counters, on the floor, in foetal scrunches. ‘Just… a bloke. You know.’
‘No, I don’t know. Just a bloke. What does that mean? Is that a bad thing?’
‘No. Not a bad thing, as such. But just – maybe a bit of a letdown when you look so… dangerous?
‘I look dangerous?’
‘Yes. But you’re not. You’re safe. And safe is nice; safe is good. Safe is really, really lovely. But I can see that some girls might feel a bit short-changed if they thought they were getting a challenge.’
Vince shook his head in disbelief. ‘Jesus. So that’s all girls want, is it? Challenges? And danger?’
‘Yeah. Well, some girls do. Not all girls. Some girls like suckers.’
‘Christ. Now you’re saying I’m a sucker?!’
‘No. Not at all. But you’re soft. And you’re reliable. You could be taken for a sucker by the wrong girl.’
‘Well, it’s not happened to me yet.’ Vince folded his arms angrily and defensively.
‘Good,’ said Cass, sounding thoroughly unconvinced. ‘I’m glad. So, back to your romantic history. Who was there before Helen?’
Vince sighed. ‘Well, there was Kelly – that was a couple of weeks – then there was Lizzie for a few months, and before that there was Jayne for a year – she went back to Australia. And that’s it really.’
‘And what about at school? Who was your first girlfriend?’
‘I didn’t have a girlfriend at school.’
‘Oh, come on. You must have!’
‘No. I was too ugly to have a girlfriend. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was nineteen,’ he boasted.
‘No way!’ Cass sat upright with undisguised delight.
‘Yeah. Well, three days before my nineteenth birthday, actually’
‘Shit – you were a slow starter. And who was that to?’
‘What?’
‘Your virginity – who did you lose it to? Was it your first love?’
‘No. It was just a girl.’
‘What girl?’
‘A girl I met on holiday’
‘What was her name?’
‘Joy. Joy Downer.’
‘So you remember her surname, then? It can’t have been that casual. No one remembers the surnames of casual shags.’
‘Well – it was kind of intense but brief, let’s put it like that.’
‘A holiday romance?’
‘Yeah. That kind of thing. We fell in love, we had sex, then she left me a Dear John letter and did a moonlight flit.’
‘Ow,’ said Cass, flinching slightly. ‘Nasty. Why did she dump you?’
Vince shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘The letter got rained on. It was all streaky.’
‘So how do you know it was a Dear John?’
‘Because the only words on it that were legible were “I feel so ashamed.” The same night we’d had sex. What else could that have meant?’
‘Have you still got it?’
‘What – the letter?’
‘Yes. The streaky old letter. Is it here?’ Cass bristled with excitement.
‘Erm – yeah, actually. I think it is.’ Vince had a pathological nostalgia for paper and was incapable of throwing away anything with handwriting on it. Consequently he had a cardboard box at the bottom of his wardrobe filled with five years’ worth of birthday cards, party invitations and letters. He even kept Post-It notes with tedious little messages on them about remembering to leave money for the milkman and apologies for eating the Singapore noodles he’d left in the fridge. So it was inevitable that Joy’s crispy little note would be somewhere in his room.
‘Ooh – find it, will you? I want to see it.’
‘What for?’
‘I’m going to read it.’
‘But I told you, it’s illegible.’
‘No, I mean read its energy’
‘Oh, God.’ He raised
his eyebrows at the ceiling.
‘Oh, come on, Vincent. Humour me. Look – your cards are telling you to look at your past for regrets and blockages, and you’re telling me that there was this girl you fell in love with who mysteriously disappeared and left you a soggy note. I think this calls for further investigation. I think you should get that note!’
Vince sighed, but slouched to his bedroom and pulled the box out of his wardrobe. He had a vague notion that the note was probably somewhere in the vicinity of his dissertation notes and finally found it buried between the pages of a notebook he’d used for his first week at college, next to a photocopied sheet of induction notes and a yellow-with-age till receipt from Safeway dated 23-09-87.
‘Wow,’ said Cass, feeling the note gently between her fingertips, ‘this letter is just loaded with energy’ She laid it gently on the tabletop and smoothed it out. ‘It’s so heavy with vibes she needn’t have bothered writing a word.’
‘Look, Cass…’ – he reached out to take the letter from her – ‘can’t we just go back to the tarot thing?’
‘Yes, but not yet.’ She clutched the letter towards her. ‘There’s sadness in this letter – tears.’
‘Cass… ‘ he reached feebly for the letter again, but she leaped from her chair and strode to the other side of the kitchen.
‘Vincent, will you just let me do this. This is important.’ She held the letter up again and closed her eyes. ‘Tears, angry, sad tears. You know something?’ She lowered the letter and faced him. ‘I don’t think this is a Dear John letter at all. I think there’s much more to it than that. What happened that night, the night she left?’
‘Oh, God,’ said Vince gloomily, ‘nothing much. We spent the day with my mum and Chris, we had a barbecue with her parents, then we went off and had sex in a field.’
‘And how was it?’
‘Cass!’
‘No, I mean, was it a positive experience?’
‘Yes, thanks for asking.’
‘And afterwards, what were her last words to you?’
‘I dunno. It’s so long ago. Just something about see you tomorrow, I suppose.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Well, did she say she’d enjoyed it?’
