by Chris Binchy
I could see now that she’d been out. She didn’t seem drunk, but she was flushed and buzzy and the air around her seemed to crackle.
“That’s fair enough. I’ll deal with that when I have to. How did you get on?”
“It’s just not going to work, is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Well, this is the way he does things, right? You said that. You’ve seen this before.”
“What happened?”
“So after I left you, I found him and asked about where he’d been and he said he’d been out with friends and that he was sorry for not having got in touch. So I told him what you’d said and asked him who the girl was and he said she was nobody. I asked again, and he said that she’s a friend but that he likes her, and somewhere around there it just blew up. He was saying he’s got too much going on and feels like he’s under a lot of pressure and that maybe a relationship isn’t the thing for him right now, and I told him to fuck himself basically, that if he wants to do other things and do other people then he should have the balls to just say so, not stop answering his phone or responding to messages or talk about commitments and pressure. I’m not going to chase a boyfriend around or wait for him to call or try and coax him into seeing me. I don’t need to do that. I’m not going to be the pathetic girl at home who doesn’t know what’s going on while he’s out meeting girls who are friends that he likes. So I told him to say whether he wanted to try and keep this going or not, and he said he didn’t know. So I think that’s probably it.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. Seriously. I went out and met Fiona, and actually I feel all right. I was on my way home but then I thought I’d see if you were up so I could tell you what the story was. And I wanted to thank you. I didn’t really say that to you earlier, but I know that it’s a big thing for you to look out for me when he’s been your friend for so long.”
“I just didn’t like it.”
“You’re a good friend,” she said and held my hand, then rested her head on my shoulder. We sat in silence. She wasn’t crying, but she was very still, and I thought at any stage she might start. There was nobody else around, and the house was quiet. I could have sat there all night but then she spoke.
“I have to leave,” she said.
“Are you sure? You can stay if you want.” I said it casually, and she didn’t seem to notice.
“No, I better go,” she said.
We stood and walked to the door.
“Thanks a lot,” she said, and she looked up at me. I could see that she was exhausted.
“It’ll get better,” I said as if I knew.
“Thanks.”
I kissed her cheek and held her. Then I kissed her again, quick and then slower. I knew the next time it was going to be something else, and as soon as I realized that, I hesitated.
“No,” she said. “I have to go.” She took a step back and I let her go, but she didn’t go any farther. We stood looking at each other, waiting for the next thing to happen.
“Just stay,” I said and leaned forward and kissed her deep on the mouth and then she kissed me back and I became aware that she was with me now and we were walking together toward my bedroom. There were things I could have been thinking, calculations I might have made or anxieties about why it was happening. Maybe she was drunker than I’d thought.
But in a moment like that, how much space do you allow the voices that tell you to stop? You don’t want to know. We stood at the edge of the bed, holding hands, face to face, saying nothing, and we surely both knew what was going to happen next. Every idea that I tried to hold on to slipped away as soon as it was thought. Then we were on the bed and she was lying back. I lay across her and we were kissing again and the world outside with its shadows and light, with its people everywhere doing things, drifted away. They were all getting it wrong and this was where I was and all I needed to know was here. What about him? I thought. Can I do this? I stopped and pushed myself back off for a second. I saw her looking up at me for the first time. Her eyes were sleepy, but she was all right.
“What about Alex? What’s he going to say?”
“What can he say?” she said, and that was it. That was all I thought about him, because we were in my bedroom, and when she began to pull at my clothes I knew that it wasn’t going to stop. As I unbuttoned and unzipped her clothes, she shifted and turned and I felt her skin now. Under the covers of my bed. Breathing and warmth. Closeness. You get closer and closer, and what does that do to you? This new place that you come to, it seems like nothing, commonplace and easy when you are there, but everything tells you that it can’t be as simple as this. That there must be consequences, that something has to happen next. But why? Why does it have to be anything more than what it is? It was Camille, and I knew her. She wasn’t going to turn into a stranger overnight. I could see her now and feel her beneath me, smell her skin and lose a sense of what was her and what was me.
It was a dream. The strangeness of a situation that you feel you’ve been in before but can’t quite remember, everything moving to a place that you know but can’t imagine. I had thought about it before. Of course I had. Every night the shape that came to me was her. Every time I saw her I held on to as much as I could. But now with her in front of me, lying beside me, moving, I tried to catch the rhythm that she was in.
“Is this okay?” I said, checking again to be sure, because I couldn’t believe that this was where we were.
“Yes,” she said, quickly. “It’s fine.”
“It’s all I ever wanted,” I said into her neck at a time when I had never been closer to her.
In the morning I was aware of everything before I was fully awake. When I moved, I could tell that she was still there. I turned over and looked at the back of her head, the darkness of her hair against the pillow. The skin of her neck that I already knew, her shoulders, the top of her back. The inward curve of her body that the bedclothes followed in and then out again.
My head was thick with tiredness. I would have to talk to her and find out what was going to happen next, but I could allow myself this moment of pleasure. There was an empty space where guilt should have been. Alex had tried with her. The two of them had struggled to make it work together, and it was clear that he had already started moving on, too early, before she knew what was happening. So why should I feel guilt? Who knew where he had ended up the night before, out in the thick of it on a Friday, where everybody in a thousand places in town set out to get what they wanted, not thinking of the people at home. The others, left behind. He could keep it all. It was an ending. That was what it was. A marker made by me and her to signal the end of one stage, the beginning of another. Why should I be thoughtful, delicate, measured? I had loved her from when I met her first, and when I’d got to know her, that just intensified. Surely I was allowed in this moment, waking with everything new about her still fresh in my memory, to be unqualified in my happiness.
She was here and we were together and it felt like I should know her even better now, and yet I was too uncertain to touch her. As she began to move, I felt the questions start to rise in me. What if it was a mistake for her? A drunken impulse that would have to be faced in the next thirty seconds? Circumstances had somehow cast a spell that now would be broken by her waking. I didn’t deserve her, and I knew it. Alex had been right all along. This was a fantasy for me. It was a dream. But then she woke, and she rolled over. When she saw me, I watched her in a second process the memory of where she was. In that instant of analysis I thought my heart was going to stop, but then she sort of smiled.
“Hi,” I said. “You’re still here.”
“I was asleep,” she said. She sat up. “What time is it?”
“Nearly eight.”
“Okay.” She thought for a second, putting s
hape on her day. “I’ve got to go,” she said then. “My parents are coming over later, and I need to be there.”
She got up, found her clothes on the floor beside the bed, and left the room without looking back. I got dressed and was sitting on the bed when she came back in. She sat beside me and put a hand on the back of my neck.
“You understand this, don’t you?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll maybe ring you later on,” she said.
“Sure. No problem.”
She kissed me on the side of the face, and I turned. She kissed me again on the lips, but so quickly that it didn’t seem to mean anything.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “This wasn’t some horrible mistake, was it?”
“Listen. David,” she said. When I heard my name I breathed in and held, but it didn’t come. “You know the whole story with Alex. You know it’s all a mess and I know we’ll have to talk about it sometime but can we not do it now, just leave it for tonight? I’m not ready for it yet. Is that okay?”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“You’re a friend, you know,” she was saying. “A good friend. But I don’t know what I’m going to do now. And I think it’d be better if we just don’t talk to each other for a while.”
“Who? Me and you?”
“Just until I sort out what’s going on in my head. Would that be all right?” I didn’t say anything. Just looked at her. Her hand was still on mine. She pulsed it, a little flex, smiled crooked at me. “Nothing to say?”
“It’s not what I wanted to hear,” I said.
“You understand, though. Don’t you? I’m not going to do something now and then in a week or two discover it was the wrong thing to have done. Hurt us both more. And you. You can see that I have to wait until I know what I want to happen.”
“I do,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t have any of your doubts. I’ve known since I met you. Since then.”
“Really?”
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go.” We looked at each other. There was nothing in her expression that told me anything. She just looked at me, blankly, as if she hadn’t understood what I’d said to her.
“You could have said something,” she said then.
“Not really. The right moment never arrived.” I smiled at her. “Is this bad timing?”
“I’m all over the place,” she said. “I need to get my head together. That’s all. I’ll call you in a week.”
“A week?”
“No longer than that. Is that okay?”
“Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”
“You look pretty desolate.” She was almost smiling at me.
“I love you,” I said out of nowhere.
“I’ll ring you,” she said and kissed me, too quick and light, then went to go. She stopped after a second. “Thanks again,” she said as she went.
I understood what she had said to me. I could see her point about needing to let things settle before making a decision about what she wanted to do and all that. I could do a good job of appearing reasonable, but I hated it, and even before she was out of the building I knew that the whole week would be taken up with me blaming myself for not having done it differently.
Because in that time anything could happen. Whatever good there might have been in it could be turned inside out as she thought it through. Maybe it had been the right thing to do—declaring my love like a panicking informer ratting out of habit. Maybe it would make her see me differently. But already I was realizing that there were situations that were just beyond my capabilities and that I was out of my depth. I thought I could read people, that years of standing back and watching gave me some special insight, but it gave me nothing. Seeing what people do tells you nothing about why they’re doing it. It tells you nothing about what they’ll do next. Even with Alex and Camille, people that I knew so well, I couldn’t say what would happen.
I would be assessed. But when I tried to look at it from her perspective, I saw that there never had been three people involved, it was just the two of them. When in the end a third person came along, destabilizing the situation, it wasn’t me—it was that Rebecca girl. For Camille, I was a friend giving comfort when she was down. That was all.
It made sense, the two of us together. We knew each other. We knew we liked each other. The strangeness of sleeping with her was only that it hadn’t happened before. She needed me, and I was there. I made no pretense to myself that day that I would do anything else. I just sat in front of the TV with the phone beside me, waiting to hear from someone. I drank black coffee because the milk had gone off, clumping down the sink. In the afternoon I watched horses racing, a biblical epic, a dance competition. It would make you want to give up. I ordered a pizza, and then when the doorbell rang, I let myself hope that it might be her. I slept on the couch and in the morning moved into the bedroom. Was this what I was going to do for the week? Just sit back and wait until something happened? A week could even be a loose term. How specific did I expect her to be? When was it all right for me to ring her? And how would I start that conversation? Just wondering what you’d decided . . . Any news? Yes or no? Me or him?
I wouldn’t be capable of that, and so I would have to wait. Because no matter what way I looked at it, I knew that if she had something to tell me, she would, but every hour that passed, the outcome seemed more and more inevitable. I went to work on the Monday morning, underslept, with a gloom that O’Toole bollocked out of me in five minutes. He was all fired up and enthusiastic, and I saw that the freshness of it was a space to live in. The nervy drudgery of starting something new would hold me. We were setting it up as an office, carrying things in from vans, moving furniture around, and making calls to suppliers. I got home late every evening and just ate and went to bed. I could stop myself from thinking about her. There was enough going on. I shut it down when the questions came to me and thought of something else. Targets. Deadlines. Drinks at the weekend. Happy little exchanges with people at work. Phone conversations. Saying hello and thank you to people in shops. That was where I was. I could compartmentalize. There was a part of my mind that would stay shut down, while I contemplated the possibilities of work. But by Thursday I was numb, trying to ignore it.
Chapter Eighteen
Alex called on the Friday after work and said that he wanted to meet. I asked him when, and he said as soon as possible and named a place. There was no chat, not a word beyond what was necessary. He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I ordered a drink and sat at a table near the door, away from the work people standing at the bar in a shouting, staggering group. He nodded when he saw me, walked over, and sat down. He didn’t get a drink.
“How are you?” I asked. He said nothing in response. Just sat looking at me with no particular expression on his face. “Are you all right? What’s going on?”
“Do you have anything to tell me?” he said.
“I don’t think so. I assume you know everything.”
“No, I don’t.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had known at all stages that this conversation was coming, but still I wasn’t ready.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“I don’t know how you could do the things you’ve done. I don’t understand why you would be such a fucking disloyal bastard, why you would want to hurt me like this. I have never in my life said a bad word about you. Not once. We’ve been friends for twenty years. What happened to you? Why did you suddenly turn against me?”
“I didn’t. I’m not against you.”
“Telling her lies about me. What did you think you saw in that nightclub? You met me talking to a girl, and you immediately assumed I was cheating on Camille, based on nothing.”
“No, that wasn’t it at all.”
“Well, what was it? Because after I talked to you, all drunk and full of irrational outrage spoiling for a fight, the next day Camille comes over and practically kicks my door in, telling me that she knows I’m having an affair. Where did this come from, I wondered to myself, never even considering the prospect that you’d have been so nasty as to tell outright lies about me. But then she tells me that you saw me with someone and that you thought it looked as if I was sleeping with this girl. Which is a bit of a fucking stretch considering that, first, I hadn’t done anything to make you think that, and secondly, I told you I wasn’t. You asked me what was going on, and I told you—nothing. Because nothing was. So why did you tell Camille that you had your doubts or suspicions or whatever it was? Why was that, David?”
“Because I did. You said that girl was a friend or whatever, and I just didn’t believe you. That’s all.”
“Why would I lie? Am I not honest with you? Have I not told you the truth since I’ve known you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Then why wouldn’t you believe me?”
“Because I just don’t trust you anymore.” I didn’t even know what I was saying. The words were coming out of me somehow, and all I could do was listen to them. They sounded forthright, certain, defiant.
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The whole Camille thing.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said. “You told me that was resolved.”
“I thought it was. But obviously it’s not.”
“There’s nothing I can do about that now. It makes no difference anyway. You don’t have the right to lie about me, to freak Camille out for no good reason, to try and fuck things up for me out of some sense of entitlement or revenge or whatever it was.”
“I know what I saw,” I said.
“What? What did you see?”
“You out with some young one at three in the morning, while your girlfriend’s ringing your phone and leaving messages with no idea where you are. I saw how that girl kissed you and how turned on you were by the fact that you had to pretend it was nothing because I was there. I saw you back in your element with one girl desperate and heartbroken trying to keep up with you, and another throwing herself at you, all easy and fun but off the record for the moment. None of this is new. You do the same thing every time, use the same words, the same serious facial expression and tone of voice.”
