It’s because he’s not unsettled at all.
He’s barely even paying attention. He simply glides me around the party like some new toy he just bought, showing me off to this person and introducing me to that. No secretive looks, like the ones he offered before. No admiring eyes aimed in my direction.
He doesn’t need to aim them now.
I’m the finished product. There are no dents to be pondered, no flaws to fascinate him. Now he can just be as he always is – the way I imagined he was when I saw that view. He simply glides across the surface of his life, unseeing, and seems so content to do so it’s almost excruciating. I watch him have conversations with people without registering a single word, and smile in a manner that they seem to like.
But I don’t think I could – ever. His real smile – the one he tries to hide, and fights whenever it steals across his face: that’s the one I love. I love it when he does things against his will and says things he doesn’t mean to, all of it splurging out from some secret core of him that only I know.
But if he doesn’t prefer the real me, than what hope do I have of ever being with the real him? He’s turned me into this person now, and she is not the type to ask for proper smiles. She doesn’t question why he’s smooching with these insincere people, or wonder if he secretly hates it all.
And even if she does wonder, she never tells him. What could she possibly say?
What can I possibly say?
If this is the life he wants to lead, there’s nothing I can do about it. I either go along with it, or end it forever – and I can’t end it forever, I can’t, I just can’t. I’m not ready to go; I don’t know if I ever could be. He still smells the same and looks the same and most of all:
He still feels the same, when he suddenly swings me into his arms for a dance.
How often have I wished to dance with someone? Oh, too often to count. I’ve had dreams of moments like this, where the handsome hero sweeps me up and spins me around, in a room made of mirrors. It’s every woman’s fantasy, I’m sure – or at least it’s the fantasy of every woman who’s ever seen the movie Labyrinth.
All I need to do now is eat the poisoned peach, and I can pretend that everything is perfect for ever. He’s smooth and charming and still attentive. He even asks me after a moment:
‘Are you having a nice time?’
And the truth is, I don’t want to say no. I lean back a little so I can look into his eyes, searching for whatever was there before and must be still there now. He didn’t just change into a different person, any more than I have. All I have to do is shake him back to himself.
‘Does it seem like I am?’ I ask, because he always knows. If he’s the same as he was, he’ll know. He’ll see it in my eyes or feel it in my body language, and that will be the moment when he whisks me away.
But the moment never comes.
‘It does,’ he says.
And that’s the end of that.
* * *
I know it’s a foolish and rather melodramatic thing to do. But the truth is … I don’t even really mean to do it. I just tell him that I’m going to the ladies’ room, fully intending that to be the case. I’m in desperate need of the bathroom, if only to unstrap myself from the iron maiden that is my underwear. I need some relief, I think.
Only, once I’m out of the ballroom, I turn left instead of right.
And then I just sort of … keep going. The hallway is too narrow and plush, to the point where it’s almost stifling. I simply want to get past it, and out into a room that has more air. But once I’m in the entranceway there doesn’t seem to be any more oxygen than there was in the place I’ve just come from – most likely because of the concierge, who seems to be sucking the life out of everything with his disdainful glare.
It’s really no wonder I end up outside.
But it’s more of a wonder when I find myself hailing a cab. I have to walk five blocks to do it, and my shoes are starting to feel like fire. Everything is starting to feel like fire, and yet somehow I’m doing this. I’m getting into the back of a taxi, and when he turns to me and asks where I want to go, I don’t even hesitate.
So I guess I do know what I’m doing, after all.
I’m fleeing the scene of the crime, and that seems to fit. This certainly feels criminal, though I’m not entirely sure why. Because I didn’t tell him where I was really going? If he truly is the person I saw back there, he probably won’t even care. He’ll just get himself a new doll to dress up, and cart her around instead.
While I do my best not to cry in the back of a cab.
For the record: I don’t succeed. The radio is playing Adele, so I don’t even stand a chance. She just starts singing about wishing the best for someone, and suddenly I’m pressing my lips together too tightly. I’m clenching my fists and gritting my teeth, as though all of these things could turn me to stone.
I wish they could turn me to stone.
I wish my face wasn’t wet. I don’t know why it is, to be honest, because nothing really happened. He didn’t dump me in some spectacular fashion, complete with parting shots about my ass in this dress or the hair that doesn’t quite suit me. And I didn’t dump him for a terrible thing he didn’t actually do.
It’s just better this way, I think. He needs a woman who really is all of those things – not one who could probably force herself to pretend on weekends. And I need a man whom I can do all of those ordinary things with, like cuddling on the couch in front of programmes he probably doesn’t watch, and walking through the park on Sundays and … and …
Oh, God, why am I torturing myself with these thoughts? I see that perfect picture of a happy relationship, and suddenly that ache behind my eyes is a sharp sting. There isn’t a trickle that I’m just about restraining. There’s a torrent that I can’t hold back. I have to pass money to the driver with my mascara running down my face.
And of course he makes it worse.
‘You all right, love?’ he asks, but I don’t answer. I can’t answer. The floodgates are open, and it’s all I can do to stumble out of the car. As it is I almost miss the kerb and fall flat on my face, and getting to the door is hellish. Getting upstairs is hellish. I keep missing steps and tripping over things that aren’t there, and once I’m finally inside it’s not any better.
I have to look at myself in the mirror in order to get this awful make-up off. I know I do, but I don’t want to. I’m well aware of what I look like, and it’s not a pleasing prospect – how could it possibly be? I feel like the biggest drama queen in the world, and I’m sure that will be reflected on my pathetic face.
I bet I have mascara tracks a mile long, and lipstick smeared halfway around my face. My perfect hair is probably coming undone, and I’m sure I no longer smell like a gossamer haze of perfectly pitched perfume.
But at least it will be me.
That’s one good thing amongst all of this – I am myself again. Battered and bruised and halfway indecent, but the skin fits again. And it fits comfortably, too, once I’ve removed every trace of this ill-advised makeover. I groan with delight once my feet are free of these stiletto shackles, and peel off the dress like I’m removing a suit of armour. I just did ten rounds on the charity ball battlefield, and now need to tend my wounds.
As silly as my wounds may be.
Because they are, and I know it. I understand it, before Janos even calls to tell me so. By the time I’m out of the shower he’s left three messages on the machine, and all of them are a variation on that one theme: why did you leave?
Of course the first is sympathetic … even conciliatory. He asks me where I am and if I’m OK, in so soothing a tone that I get a little pang. I picture him in that opulent entranceway, with a deeply troubled look on his usually so trouble-free face. There are suddenly lines where there weren’t before, and he’s picking at a thousand things that don’t exist.
It’s an unsettling image, and it almost makes me pick up the phone. I could just say I didn’t fee
l well, I think, as my hand hovers over the receiver.
But then the second message comes.
‘Are you running away?’ he asks, in a manner that forces me to remember why I did. Or at least it pushes me into a mental argument with him, in my head. ‘I had reasons,’ I tell him, and try to ignore the part where my reasons seem flimsy.
They’re only flimsy to him.
And even if they’re not, he’ll make them seem so. He’ll handle me until I suddenly find myself being a completely different person at a million balls and banquets, in clothes that aren’t me and hair that isn’t mine. Or maybe I won’t find myself at all. Maybe I won’t even notice the change. It’ll be so gradual, each alteration so small and seemingly insignificant, that by the time the transformation is complete I won’t see it. This glamorous girl will be the person I’ve always been, and this hollow life of parties and pretentious people will seem like reality.
Instead of some nightmare I once had, about being trapped in a velvet-lined coffin made mostly of solid gold.
And I know – I do know – that this is probably an overreaction. I’m aware that everything could turn out fine. It’s just that his messages don’t make me feel like it is fine. They build the pressure until I get to the last one, and then they explode all over me. ‘We need to talk,’ he says, like some awful hammer coming down.
That phrase never means something good. It means what I thought –that I’m about to be handled – and even if it doesn’t there are plenty of other horrible connotations. Most typically people say it when they want to end things, and somehow that’s just as bad as my first interpretation.
I don’t think I could stand here and listen to him dismissing me, like an employee. I’m not even sure if I could stand him doing it the other way, either. Heartfelt apologies are just as bad – in fact, everything is bad about this. I can’t stop pacing and staring wildly at the phone, as though it’s a bomb that’s about to go off.
And when it doesn’t I slowly turn my attention to the door. How long before he comes here? How long before he realises that I’m not going to answer his calls, and that maybe he should go for something face to face?
I can’t have that. I’m already spiralling relentlessly out of control, and all I’ve had to endure so far are some phone messages. I’ll crumble if I see him again and he looks at me with those warm, dark eyes. I’ll give in without so much as a fight, and the thought is making me itch in my own skin. It’s making me want to fly away.
And that’s when I see it:
Lucy’s postcard on my computer desk, propped up against the screen. It’s an image of some distant ocean, sapphire-blue and oh, so calm-looking – a slice of heaven in the middle of the Mediterranean.
‘Come and see me anytime’, she’d written on the bottom, in that casual way of hers.
But now it doesn’t seem so casual. It seems like a get-out clause, or an escape route. I don’t have to sit here and wait for a conversation I don’t want to have. I can leave and never return, just like she did. Someone will find my message stuck on the fridge. They’ll rummage through my stuff in a frantic bid to figure me out.
But, by the time they do, I’ll be long gone.
Chapter Seventeen
I’m not sure what I expected when I got on the plane. Some party island where everyone is naked all the time and constantly living it large? I guess that’s partly the image I have of Lucy, but then again it’s been so long since I last saw her that she’s starting to fade. In my mind her face is blurry.
And this place brings her right back into focus. I remember how much she loved to lie in a hammock at the bottom of her mother’s garden on lazy summer days. She liked peace and quiet as much as she liked parties, and her favourite thing in the world was the ocean.
So of course she’s come here, to this quiet island. Of course she has. This is who she really is – secretive, like the town where they’ve piled one building atop another, full of hidden spaces and dark shadows, only blazing bright on the outside. And so beautiful, oh, she’s just as beautiful as she ever was.
More beautiful, in fact. She looks so relaxed in her own skin I’m almost envious, and that’s before I get to the caramel hue of her newly toasted skin, and the tangle of her red hair, and her pretty little bare feet.
‘Lissa!’ she says, like it’s me who’s the best person in the whole world.
Even though it’s her. I’m the person who shut down our friendship just because she needed a long vacation. She’s the person who welcomed me with open arms, the moment I bothered to pick up the phone. And she’s also the person who did this – who went away to find herself – without any help at all.
She didn’t need me to tell her to go.
But I needed her to ask me to come.
And I need her hugs even more. She embraces me warmly, smelling of coconut and sunshine and so many good things. Too many good things, in truth. I rest my head on her shoulder and breathe her in, and that’s pretty much all it takes to upset me. My jaw clenches and I shut my eyes, trying to hold it back.
But that doesn’t work on her. It never worked on her. She always knew when I was crying, even if I pretended not to. I’ve tried to fake her out, before today, with claims of sinus problems and head colds, but she’s never so easily fooled.
And she isn’t fooled now. She doesn’t even mistake it for happy tears, or a little emotion over our reunion. She pulls away and I barely have enough time to glance at something else before she asks the dreaded question.
It’s the one I’d hoped to avoid, somehow – as though we could just party-hearty-marty and forget everything. Hell, maybe that’s why I convinced myself she was that person, instead of this person.
The one who asks:
‘What happened?’
* * *
I don’t think I’m having a nervous breakdown or anything. But she does all the things I imagine people do when their friends are having a nervous breakdown. She makes me tea, even though I don’t drink tea, and runs me a bath, even though I don’t take baths. And when I insist that I don’t want to talk about it yet, she persuades me to have a rest until I feel ready.
I don’t think I’m into that, either, but it turns out I’m wrong. I am into that. I’m so into it I pass out the moment I climb onto her shawl-covered bed, despite my refusal to lie down. I just prop myself up against the pillows while she gets my tea, and the next thing I know it’s almost morning.
I’m still in my clothes, and everything is completely silent and dark – apart from the hush-shush of the ocean, somewhere off in the distance, and the first fingers of dawn creeping in under the makeshift curtains she’s put up.
It’s just a multi-coloured blanket, really. A shawl, like the ones she’s using on her bed and over the back of her couch. They’re everywhere, these rough little squares of material, and they give the place a wonderful feel. They turn the light from the window into a kaleidoscope of colour – but it’s more than that.
It’s more than the prettiness and the earthiness of her place. It’s how lived in it seems. She’s been here for a thousand years. She grew up from the ground and claimed it for her own, and I love it for that reason.
I love it for many reasons. There’s something intoxicating about walking out into the living room to find the balcony doors open – no hermetically sealed wall of glass here. I step out into the dawn light and the ocean is right there, separated from me by nothing more than scrubland and a doable jump down. Its smell, its taste … I don’t have to imagine it.
And no one could ignore it. The whole thing has my attention so firmly I don’t even notice Lucy sitting there, until she speaks.
‘Had enough not resting?’ she asks, and I jerk and turn too violently. I’m on edge, I think – to the point where she’s suddenly the villain waiting for the heroine in a place she doesn’t expect. I’m actually imagining her stroking an evil cat.
But I don’t know why.
Because I don’t want her to a
sk?
Maybe, maybe.
Because I don’t want to say?
Almost definitely. Saying is sticky and difficult, and there’s that feeling creeping through my body again – the one that says I was a fool to let such a little thing bother me. The moment I explain she’ll laugh, and tell me to knock it off, and I’ll have to face the fact that I’ve blown the best thing that ever happened to me because of a little concern about my sense of self.
‘Earth to Alissa.’
‘Oh … yeah. Yeah, I feel much better now, thanks.’
‘You sure, babe?’
‘Definitely.’
‘So you just travelled hundreds of miles, with holiday time I know you don’t have, because you fancied getting a tan.’
‘I had holiday time,’ I say, and am actually quite proud of myself for taking the conversation in another direction. Now she’s busy asking me about that, instead of anything dangerous. ‘You did?’ she says, and then I tell her yes and she’s all ‘Well, I guess Henderson must have softened.’
At which point I realise I haven’t deflected her at all.
I’ve just brought her around to something even worse.
‘Come on. What really happened?’ she asks, followed quickly by the something even worse. She slaps the arm of her recliner and jerks towards me as she delivers this little doozy: ‘If you tell me you’re having an affair with him I will kill you, I will just kill you. He scratches his balls and then sniffs his fingers, Lissa.’
‘He … what? Wait … what?’
‘Are you sleeping with him?’ she asks again, only this time she speaks each word in this robotic tone so as to be extra, extra clear.
Not that I need her extra clearness in regard to this particular concept. No, I’m all set on that. I’m not as set on this, however:
‘I was hoping you’d explain the ball-sniffing, more than anything.’
She waves a hand in response. As though ball-sniffing is so commonplace it barely needs commenting on. Apparently I’m surrounded by men who are secretly doing this gross thing, and she’s just let me go on in ignorance. Oh, the amount of times I’ve shaken his hand! And that guy at the charity thing with no chin – I shook his hand too. He almost definitely scratches his balls and sniffs his fingers, if not something way worse. Maybe he really rummages around down there, underneath the underwear.
Run To You Page 20
