Hating Valentine's Day

by Allison Rushby - Hating Valentine's Day

  ‘We have to go,’ Tony says, breaking my attention span.

  ‘But I haven’t given her her card yet…’ I look up at my mother’s retreating back as everything around me fades to black again. ‘And…’

  As the light fills in around me once more I realise we’re back in my primary school corridor. The same one as before.

  ‘Different class this time.’ Tony waves a hand and, rubbing my eyes, I follow him down to the next room.

  I look inside. ‘Ugh. Miss Hopkinson.’ There’s no forgetting a teacher like her.

  ‘Yeah. I know. I haven’t been able to help her out much. She’s a bit…’

  ‘Frigid?’ I try, the word springing into my brain from nowhere.

  ‘You could say that.’

  I did—even back then, I think. Snotty Scotty came to school with the word and had started bandying it about in the playground one morning. Apparently his father had said that was what Miss Hopkinson was after one parent-teacher meeting that hadn’t gone so well. I don’t think any of us had a clue what the term meant, but we all thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard.

  Looking inside the classroom, I’m surprised to find we’re making Valentine’s Day cards again, just like last year. I locate myself in the classroom and find that I don’t look very happy.

  ‘Remember, class,’ Miss Hopkinson calls out from the front of the room in her clipped voice, ‘we’re only making one card—for our mothers. We’re not going to spend all day cutting out red hearts, are we? We have some Social Studies to do, and heaven forbid we should actually learn something today…’ She trails off, the last sentence muttered under her breath as she turns around to the blackboard.

  I look back at my small self. She’s not gluing with much enthusiasm. And then I work it out. Miss Hopkinson. Grade Two. February.

  My mother left in early January.

  I turn away from the window and look for Tony. He’s standing in the corridor, and as I spot him the sun hits my eyes just like it did before. I squint and turn my head back to the classroom.

  Except it’s not the classroom.

  Now we’re in the living area of a flat. The tiny, miserable, one-bedroom flat I shared with Dad because our family home had sold so quickly. We rented the place while we shopped around, before we bought another house in a different suburb across town. A house and a suburb where his wife—my mother—hadn’t left any kind of presence.

  My dad, a younger version of the one I know today, is standing at the front door holding it open. ‘Hello, pumpkin,’ he says, scooping up my small self when she hurtles up the final few steps and hits the landing running.

  ‘Hi, Daddy.’

  He puts her down and peels her backpack off her back. They go into the living area and he sits down in the same easy chair Tony had been sitting in before, now squashed into this tiny room.

  ‘What have you got for me today?’ my father says, rummaging through my small self’s backpack. He takes out her lunchbox and opens it up. ‘So you don’t like peanut butter sandwiches any more?’ he says, looking at its leftover contents.

  ‘I hate them,’ she says, like he should know this.

  ‘You loved them last week. They were your favourite. As long as they were crunchy.’

  ‘I love Devon now. Louise always has Devon. And she has the kind with the smiley face on it.’

  ‘Oh, well, then. We’ll have to get some of that. If it’s got a smiley face on it, it must taste better.’ He looks at her, eye to eye now he’s sitting down.

  ‘It does.’

  ‘I might have to prise you off the ceiling when the preservatives kick in, but it’ll all be worth it for that tasty smiley face, don’t you think?’

  My small self nods, even though I’m sure she has no idea what a preservative is.

  My dad puts the lunchbox on the floor and pulls out a book. ‘Got some reading to do tonight, do we?’

  ‘Social Studies too. And we’d better do it. Miss Hopkinson screams at you if you don’t do your homework.’

  ‘And what’s this?’ He pulls out something red and scrunched from the bottom of the bag.

  She doesn’t say anything now, and my face tightens, remembering. I watch as he unscrunches the ball, knowing what’s coming.

  ‘Oh,’ he says when he reads the three large letters on the front ‘Mum’ and realises what it is. ‘Oh.’ He glances up at her.

  My small self steps forward and quickly grabs the card from his hand, ripping it in the process. ‘I hate Miss Hopkinson. I hate her and I’m never going back to that stupid school.’

  She throws the two pieces of red paper on the floor and then makes a dash for it, but in the small flat there’s nowhere to go. She runs into the bedroom, but as there’s no door comes straight back out again.

  ‘I hate this flat too. And I hate Valentine’s Day. I hate it. I’m never making one of those stupid cards again. They always make us do those stupid cards. I’m never doing one again. Ever. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.’

  I watch as her face turns red. Really red. Frighteningly red.

  My dad, standing up now, and looking far too big for the small living area, goes over and grabs her. He picks her up and hugs her as she fights away, pummelling his chest with her fists. Slowly, very slowly, as the minutes tick by, she starts to quieten down.

  And standing there in the cramped living room, watching them both, my hand held up to my cheek in shock, I close my eyes and recall just how hard my dad had held on.

  Y Y Y Y

  ‘Tony?’ I say into the blackness when I open my eyes once more. ‘Tony!’ He materialises beside me and I look down at him. ‘I want to go home.’

  He shrugs. ‘No time, babes. Things to do, people to see. And the clock’s ticking.’

  Suddenly I don’t know if I want to see anything else. I feel completely and utterly drained. Why am I seeing all this? Bringing up the past. As if seeing Mike today wasn’t enough.

  ‘Last stop,’ he says.

  After what feels like quite some time, things start to lighten up around me and I begin to recognise things. ‘Wait a second, this is Saffron.’ Saffron. Mike’s and my favourite café.

  I stop looking around me then, not wanting to go on. I close my eyes. But when I open them again I’m still in the same spot.

  ‘We have to keep going.’ Tony pulls on my pyjama pants.

  ‘I don’t think I want to.’

  ‘You have to,’ he says. But then he sees the expression on my face and hesitates. ‘Just take it slowly. Think about how things really were back then.’

  Hesitantly, my eyes scanning the garden for Mike, I turn, taking the place in, remembering.

  It’s beautiful.

  I loved Saffron. Truly loved it. It was like a home away from home. An old wooden house that had been converted into a café. Its garden outside was bliss. Simply idyllic. All English country, with poppies and herbs and bees and quiet times with iced tea. If you tried hard enough, and there were only a few people there, you could imagine it was your own garden and the other people—well, maybe they were old friends you’d invited over for the afternoon.

  After Mike and I split up I never went back there. But I’ve missed the place. A lot.

  I stand in the middle of the garden now, with the sun resting on my shoulders. It’s not hot, but nice and warm, with a gentle cool breeze. It’s early in the day. Maybe around ten.

  ‘There we are,’ Tony says, distracting me. He’s walking away across the garden. Towards the side of the house.

  I take a deep breath and follow him, spotting myself at a weathered table slightly hidden by a wooden trellis that’s practically creaking it’s so loaded down with jasmine.

  I’m with Mike. I look happy. We both look happy. And I know immediately what I’m seeing—it’s our first year together. Our first Valentine’s Day.

  Tony and I stop a metre or two away from the table. I can’t believe this. Again, it’s all so…real. Like I’m actually reliving the mo
ment in time.

  Sitting at the table, Mike and myself of three years ago are laughing at some shared joke. When they stop, he pulls something out of his pants pocket and gives it to her. To me.

  ‘What’s this?’ myself three years ago says, surprised. She looks up at him from the small package. ‘I thought we said no presents!’

  ‘I lied.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘It’s tiny. It’s nothing. Really.’

  ‘But I didn’t even get you a tiny nothing really.’

  ‘Just open it!’ Mike laughs at her.

  Hurriedly, ripping off the paper, she opens it up.

  I turn to Tony. ‘It was a lipgloss. A pinky-coloured lipgloss I’d been looking at on a cosmetic counter a few days before but had told myself I couldn’t afford that week.’

  Tony nods. ‘Good choice. Pink’s the bomb.’

  We both turn back and keep watching.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says to Mike. ‘That’s really sweet.’

  ‘There’s something else too,’ he says.

  ‘Something else?’

  He reaches down and pulls something up off the floor. A huge basket wrapped in cellophane which he passes over to her.

  ‘Mike!’ She looks at the basket incredulously.

  ‘Don’t blame me. It’s not my fault. It’s those cosmetic counter women.’

  Myself three years ago pauses, waiting for an explanation.

  ‘It’s just that when I picked out the lipgloss they ganged up on me. One of them started telling me how if I spent a little…well, no, a whole lot more, I could get all this for free.’ He gestures to the basket. ‘They worked in a pack. The first one kept showing me all the freebies, the second one started ringing their most expensive products up, and the third one did the basket and made the ribbon all curly.’

  I laugh at this now, remembering his feigned innocence.

  ‘So it’s not my fault!’ Mike says again.

  Myself three years ago opens the basket up and starts sorting through the bits and pieces, making discovering noises as she goes. Finally she gets to what the cosmetic counter women have made him buy along with the lipgloss, in order to receive the free goods.

  ‘Wrinkle defence?’ She reaches over and gives him a playful slap on the arm, then pulls herself up and kisses him. ‘Thank you. It’s very sweet—even though you think I have wrinkles, which I do not.’

  When Tony looks at me, I’m surprised to find myself smiling slightly. He jumps up on the seat beside Mike and inspects the lipgloss. ‘Doesn’t take much to make you happy. Lipgloss. Even if it is pink.’

  I look at him. ‘Don’t say that. Mike was a good present-giver. He always knew what to get me. He paid attention, noticed things I liked. Made an effort. And look how happy I am.’

  Tony shakes his head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Girlfriend, you have really got to let go.’

  ‘Let go of what?’

  Tony looks at me as if I’m a freak. ‘If you don’t know by now, I can’t tell you.’

  Oh, he means the past. Fine. Whatever. I’ve only heard that about a million times from everyone in my life over the last couple of years. But it’s an easy thing to say, isn’t it? Not such an easy thing, however, to put into practice. I shrug and glance over at myself again. My deliriously happy self. And was I ever—deliriously happy, that is.

  I can remember quite easily how happy I was back then. When Mike came along I fell fast and I fell hard. I couldn’t help myself. Maybe because Mike was my salvation in some ways—the end of a long line of bad encounters with men. Mike was such a relief. And he was what I needed. Not in the way that I was looking for a man to complete me—I’d never wanted or needed that; I still don’t. But somehow he made the whole bad journey along the pot-holed testosterone highway of dating hell seem suddenly worthwhile. Like a pilgrimage.

  I’ve never told my dad, but I used to think a lot about something he pointed out to me once concerning one of his friend’s sons. The guy—Callum, I think his name was—was about ten years older than me. He was tall and good-looking and had been engaged three times to three different women who’d all broken the engagement off. And he was a paediatrician. Dad used to shake his head with wonder every time he spoke to his friend about Callum and his adventures in coupledom. One day, after he put the phone down, I watched him as he sat there and I’d asked him what it was about Callum that he just didn’t get.

  I’ll never forget what he said.

  ‘There’s got to be something wrong with him,’ my dad had explained. ‘Something really wrong. He’s a good-looking bloke, and a paediatrician for God’s sake. They’re hot property, those paediatricians—it’s not like he’s a used car salesman or something. But he can’t hold a relationship down, can he? And it’s the girls who keep calling it off. It’s got to be him. Yep, definitely something wrong there. Jimmy can’t figure it out, though, and I have to say it’s got me stumped.’

  I’d never met Callum, so I couldn’t speculate on whether it was a ‘special’ closet of women’s underwear he kept in the spare bedroom, late nights with ‘the boys’ (all three of them in a king-sized bed), or a strange way he ran through vast quantities of gerbils from the local pet shop. Anyway, I didn’t really feel like joking about it. Couldn’t joke about it.

  Because this was the answer to why I rarely got past a first date.

  It was me. Me.

  With nothing else to go on, I’d believed it for years.

  And then Mike came along and changed everything. Or at least he did until he ended it all and left me for his wife.

  Tony raises an eyebrow at me.

  ‘What?’

  He shakes his head sadly.

  ‘What?’ I say again.

  ‘Darlin’, the guy was another one of those potholes. There were just some bits of gravel covering up the gaps that hid the fact. And I’m sorry about that. But you should know not only did he leave you for his wife, he barely gave a second thought to your feelings after he did it—he thought it was right. He didn’t sit by the phone. He didn’t remember your birthday. He didn’t think about you at Christmas. And you can bet your sweet arse he never even glanced at your horoscope in the paper.’

  My eyes start to water with this last comment. I still have to force myself to stop reading his horoscope.

  ‘You deserve better than him. And the others. Much better. I’m trying for you. I really am. But you have to try too. You have to let him go.’

  ‘That’s what everyone keeps telling me, but I can’t!’ I start to cry now. ‘I want to, but I can’t, all right! I don’t know how.’

  Tony reaches up and gives me his hand. ‘That’s what I’m here for, love. To show you how. To show you the way.’

  I bite my lip and look back over for a second at the happy pair. Myself three years ago is standing beside Mike, pulling him up. ‘Come on, wrinkle boy, I’ll buy you some breakfast. Let’s go check out the specials board.’ They walk across the garden and up the stairs into the house.

  Tony and I follow them inside.

  But when we enter the house, inside isn’t inside. Or it isn’t the inside of Saffron. It’s the inside of my old apartment, the one near the park. I’m in the kitchen. Me now and me…then. It’s morning, maybe around the same time—ten-ish.

  Mike is sitting at the kitchen table.

  I know what this is instantly. It’s the morning I’d received the phone call.

  ‘Tony!’ I yell.

  ‘What? Down here,’ he says, from where he’s leaning against the fridge behind me.

  ‘Please, no. Don’t. Not this. I want to go home.’

  ‘I can’t make you go home.’

  ‘Tony, I know what happens. I remember. I don’t need to see it again. Please…’

  ‘I can’t. It’s you. Your doing.’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head quickly. ‘No. If it was up to me I’d be back at my real apartment. The one I live in now. In bed.’

  ‘You have to see ho
w it really was. For your own good.’

  I keep my back turned on Mike and myself two years ago. ‘But I know how it was.’

  ‘Shh. Listen,’ Tony says. He comes over and puts his hands on my legs, making me turn around.

  Mike is talking. ‘It’s just that Amanda and I have discussed it over and over during the past few weeks and we really think it’s best for Toby this way. We have to try and make it work between us. For him. For his sake. I can’t be sure it’s going to work. I just know that I have to try.’

  Myself two years ago nods. ‘I know it’s for the best. For Toby,’ she says, her arms crossed, not looking at Mike but fixing her eyes on the tabletop to will back the tears.

  There’s silence as he waits for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. And from my point of view now, looking back on the past, I know that myself two years ago isn’t going to say anything else. What she’s just said is it. There’s nothing to add, considering she doesn’t believe the words that have come out of her mouth herself—that what’s about to happen is for the best.

  The truth is, in her heart she knows it isn’t going to last between Mike and Amanda. She knows that it will all come apart again, like it did last time, and that Toby will suffer for it. She feels like she should hate Amanda. Hate her for what she’s doing to her relationship with Mike. He’s been increasingly distant over the past few weeks…calling less, avoiding her…and then the phone call that morning. The morning I’m seeing played out in front of me again now.

  Yes. Myself two years ago is standing there feeling like she should hate Amanda for what she’s doing—keeping Mike and Toby at her beck and call—but the truth is she doesn’t care about Amanda at all. She just hopes that she’ll go away again soon. Leave the country like last time, when she ‘just couldn’t cope with it all’ and everything will be back to normal. Myself two years ago won’t say anything else. There’s no point in arguing about it. That would simply be futile, because Mike made his decision long before he entered the apartment this morning.

  Maybe even weeks ago.

  Mike and myself two years ago exchange a few more words before he gets up to leave. I try my best not to listen, but I can’t help but turn and watch as he rounds the corner into the living room, goes out of sight and then, a few seconds later, closes the door behind him. I jump when I hear the noise, because I know now just how final that sound is.