by Mike Gayle
“What for?”
“For everything. I know I’ve done everything wrong. I can’t believe I let you go. I loved you when I lived with you, and I think I still love you now. I wish I’d had the guts to tell you all this yesterday. Or even this afternoon. When the registrar said, ‘Does anyone know why these two people shouldn’t be married?’ I wanted to say what I felt.” Staring right into her eyes, he asked her a question that up until this point in my life I would never have imagined him saying. “If I had spoken up,” he said, “would you still have married him?”
She paused before answering. “We’ll never know, will we?” Then she looked away as tear after tear fell from her eyes and ran down her face. She wiped them away with her hand, smearing a dark line of mascara across the bridge of her nose in the process. “After today I never want to see you again, Dan.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why you invited me and that’s why I’m here: to say goodbye.”
Meena looked at me for the first time since her hello. I felt embarrassed to still be here; I felt embarrassed to have witnessed this most private of moments; I felt embarrassed for being me.
“Have you got a spare cigarette?” she asked. I handed her the lit one that was in my hand. She puffed on it frantically for a few seconds as if she were more in need of nicotine than oxygen, threw it on the floor and walked away without saying another word.
Dan didn’t move. He just stood and silently watched her walk off.
“C’mon, Dan, let’s just call a cab and go home, mate,” I said, checking my pockets for change for the phone. “You’ve done what you came here to do. I think it’s best that we just go. Even you must have had enough by now.”
“We can’t go yet,” said Dan, subdued.
“Why not?”
“Because Mel’s here.” He pointed across to the hotel entrance where Mel was indeed getting out of a taxi with Julie.
“I can’t believe this.” I sighed.
“What’s she doing here?” asked Dan.
“Meena invited Mel and me ages ago—just when we’d split up. I told Mel that I wasn’t going, so she obviously assumed that it was safe for her to come up here and wish Meena well.”
“Are you going to talk to her?”
That was a good question. After all that had happened today, I wasn’t in the right mood to make small talk. Julie’s presence was bound to wind me up, and the last thing on earth I needed was to start a row. Mel and I certainly needed to talk, but not here, not now, and certainly not in front of a million wedding guests. No, I decided, this is going to be the one time that I actually choose the LEAVE WELL ALONE option.
“Let’s just go,” I said quickly, “before today gets any crappier. It will, you know, I can just feel it.”
“Earlier,” said Dan, staring at me with the same searching look that he’d given to Meena, “when I asked you if you still loved Mel, you didn’t answer me.”
“I know,” I admitted reluctantly. “What about it?”
“Well, do you?”
I nodded.
“So why don’t you do anything about it?”
“Look, Dan, just let it go!” I said, losing my temper with him in a way I never had before. “I’ve told you, Vernie and Charlie—all of you a million times—the reason why. Mel thinks I only want to be with her because she’s pregnant. She doesn’t want me.”
“Calm down!” said Dan. “I’m not attacking you, Duff.”
“Look, I’m sorry, mate,” I apologized. “I know you’re only trying to help me out, but this isn’t just about me anymore. I’ve got to think about Mel and the baby too. I’ve messed her around too much in the past. There’s no way I’m going to be able to convince her. It’s just my tough luck.”
“No,” said Dan firmly. “It isn’t . . . well, at least it doesn’t have to be. Look, you’ve seen what’s happened to me today. I can’t stand by and watch the same thing happen to you. She loves you, Duff. You know that as well as I do. You two, weird as it might seem, are made for each other. You’ve got to make her see that.”
“How? I’ve tried everything. I can’t get through to her.”
“Look,” said Dan, “there was no guarantee that if I’d spoken up in the church today that Meena would’ve changed her mind. In fact I’m pretty certain that she wouldn’t have. But at least I’d have known that I tried. That’s what really galls me, Duffy—that I didn’t try. It’s just like the day that she walked out. I knew I could’ve talked her round, I knew that I could have convinced her to stay, but it was easier to let it go. If you believe in something, Duff, you can’t let it go without a fight. You just can’t.”
The Piermont Hotel welcomes you to the Halcyon Suite, for the wedding reception of Paul and Meena Amos-Midford,” read the sign outside the main banqueting hall. I opened the doors and scanned the room for Mel, but I couldn’t see her anywhere at first. Eventually I spotted her sitting at a table in the far corner of the room. It was weird, but at that exact same moment she looked up, saw me and smiled.
I was halfway across the room, less than thirty feet away from her—less than thirty feet from asking her to marry me—when the best man began tapping his dessert spoon against a wineglass to get everyone’s attention and announced that it was time for the speeches. I didn’t want to stop, but I knew if I continued walking, the whole room would be watching me, so with my heart racing, barely able to concentrate at all, I sat down in an empty seat and waited.
“Hello again, young man,” said a voice next to me. It was Orange Lady from the registry office, holding a large glass of wine. “Where’s your friend?” she whispered loudly.
“Outside,” I explained. “Doesn’t like speeches.”
“Me neither,” said Orange Lady, then added, “Do you know, this is my fourth glass of wine?” She leaned unsteadily toward me until we were almost touching noses, and whispered loud enough for everyone at the surrounding tables to hear, “Very good stuff it is too. But I do believe it’s gone straight to my head!”
The best man’s speech was loaded with jokes about the groom’s ex-girlfriends, acting skills and personal habits. Meena’s dad thought this bloke was hilarious and kept patting Paul on the back heartily. The groom’s speech was even worse: he just harped on about how wonderful his new family was. There was no love in evidence at all, only gratuitous backslapping. He finished by proposing a toast to the newest Mrs. Amos-Midford in the world, and everyone in the room raised their glasses. There was a huge round of applause, and waiters appeared, filling everyone’s glasses with champagne. The band started to play an uptempo version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Paul and Meena made their way to the center of the room for the first dance and began twirling around as if they’d been beamed straight from some 1930s cocktail party. During the whole time it took for all this to happen, Mel didn’t take her eyes off me.
Edging around the wedding photographer and a man armed with a video camera, who were recording Meena and Paul’s every move, I made my way to Mel’s table.
“Hi,” I said, smiling. She looked beautiful. More beautiful than ever. Her hairstyle had changed yet again, and now it was short and messy in the kind of sexy way Meg Ryan could only dream of.
“Hi, Duff,” she said, standing up to hug me. “How are you? How was Paris?”
“Fine,” I lied. “And you? How’s everything with you?” I’d wanted to ask about the baby too, but didn’t want to bring it up in so public an arena.
“Okay,” she replied. She could obviously still read minds when she wanted to, because she then looked down at her stomach and added, “Everything’s fine there too. No need to worry.”
“Good.”
Silence.
“Didn’t I see you here with Julie? Where is she?”
“She’s just nipped to the toilet,” said Mel hurriedly. I could tell that she was lying, because she was fiddling nervously with her hair. She always did that when she lied. I took this as a good sign, however: Julie had
obviously disappeared on purpose so that Mel and I could talk.
“Gone to look for more victims to turn into the undead, has she?”
“Don’t start, Duffy,” reprimanded Mel sternly. “Julie’s having . . . well, she’s having a tough time at the minute.”
What could possibly have fazed the mighty Julie? I wondered. Had they run out of polenta at her local Sainsbury? Had her Dyson vacuum cleaner spontaneously combusted? Or worse still, had she discovered that she and Mark would never be able to afford to live in their beloved Notting Hill Gate? I didn’t ask any of these questions of course, because it didn’t feel right baiting Julie without her being there.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “Nothing too painful I hope.”
“I can’t tell you, Duffy. At least not yet.” She paused. “I’ve got some news of my own, but you might not like it. I was going to call, but since you’re here I might as well tell you now. I told my bosses at work that I was pregnant and that I wanted to leave and they offered me a deal to make me stay.”
“That’s good,” I said. “If it’s what you want.”
She smiled. “It is . . . well, at least I think it is. The company has just taken over a group of radio stations in the north and I’ll be overseeing the restructuring of their sales divisions. It’s only a temporary project—around three months—but it’s a step up into higher management and if I do well it could mean big things in the future.”
“Sounds like you’ve come up trumps. So what’s the problem?”
“It’s away from London. I’ll have to spend Monday to Friday up there and then I’ll fly back to London at the weekends.”
“Mel,” I said nervously, “you’re being vague on purpose. Whereabouts up north is it?”
“Glasgow.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I could feel a massive pause coming, until suddenly, from an unknown source, words came to rescue me. “Don’t go,” I said so quietly that I could barely hear myself.
“What?”
“I said, don’t go. I don’t want you to go, Mel. Stay here in London and marry me. I miss you. Whatever it is that makes you different from any woman I have ever met or could ever hope to meet—the very Melness of you—I miss that more than anything. It’s just over six months since we first split up and since then a lot has happened that I need to explain to you . . .” I stumbled as I searched for the right words to express what I wanted to say.
“The reason why I didn’t want to get married when you asked me was because I lacked faith in myself. I thought the minute we got married I’d feel trapped. I just couldn’t get it into my head that marriage wasn’t a conspiracy to hijack my independence. You knew that, and that’s why you broke off the engagement, because you didn’t want to make me do anything I’d regret. Well, I regret more than anything not marrying you. I regret that I’ll never be able to have the time back that I’ve missed with you. I promise you it’s not the baby that’s changed my mind. I changed my own mind. I want to marry you because I can see now that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. No, I don’t mean that, what I mean is that . . . that . . .”
“I think what you’re trying to say is that you’re not scared anymore,” said Mel softly.
“That’s right, I’m not scared—okay, maybe I’m a little nervous, but I’ll be all right. I’m not scared about sleeping with one person for the rest of my life, in fact I’m looking forward to it. I’ll admit I still feel a bit shaky about going to Ikea, but that’s something we can work out. The big thing is that I’m no longer scared I’ll ever fall out of love with you . . . or that you’ll ever fall out of love with me. I have to commit to . . . I am committed to you because without you nothing makes sense. Without you I’m not even myself. Without you I’m nothing.”
That was it. That was my big speech. I’d given my all and now it really was up to her. I studied her face for clues to her state of mind, to see if I’d finally managed to convince her to believe. There was a look about her that I couldn’t explain, but it made me feel that I’d managed to breach the barrier that had come between us. We were now standing barely inches apart.
Without speaking she reached for my hands, held them tightly and gazed deeply into my eyes, searching for the answers to everything she wanted to know. Then she started to cry.
“I want to believe you, Duffy,” she sobbed. “I want to believe you more than anything in the world. I look at your face and I hear your beautiful words and I’m nearly there, Duff. But nearly just isn’t good enough anymore. How do I know that you really mean what you say? How can I be sure that those old feelings won’t come back again?”
“I don’t understand. You’ve always gone on about how well you know me. How you know me better than I know myself. And it’s true. I’ve never met anyone who knows me like you do. So why can’t you see that I’m telling you the truth when I say that I want to marry you? Why can’t you read my mind?”
Her tears were in full flow and we had become the main attraction in this corner of the room. I didn’t care. I couldn’t see anyone but her.
“That’s just it,” she sobbed. “I don’t trust myself anymore. I don’t trust myself to make a decision that will affect not just your life, or my life, but the life of our baby too. I can’t tell what it is you’re thinking because I don’t know what I’m thinking and it scares me. I love you, Duffy, but I’m too scared to gamble everything when I can’t be sure.”
I couldn’t believe it. This was supposed to be our happy ending, the last reel of a romantic comedy, the point where the guy gets the girl, but somehow it had turned into A Nightmare on Elm Street.
“I know I have to make a decision one way or the other for both our sakes,” she continued. “We just can’t carry on like this anymore. I know this is selfish of me, but I can’t make this decision right now, so I’m asking you for more time—time to think things through and get my head round all of this.” She leaned forward and kissed me. “My new job starts on Monday. I’ll be up in Glasgow all week but I’ll be back in London late Friday night and I promise you that by then I’ll have an answer for you.”
Bet you’re happy now
On the train back from Nottingham, frustrated at being unable to do any more than wait for Mel to make her decision, I formulated a plan. The perfect plan. A plan that would without a doubt convince her once and for all that she had nothing to be scared of, that I did love her and would always do so. The only drawback, however, was that it required the assistance of Julie. As in Mark and Julie. As in Nosferatu. As in the person who last time I checked ranked me lower on the evolutionary scale than pond scum. But that’s great plans for you—they always carry with them an element of danger. By the time Dan and I got home from the wedding it was quite late so I decided to sleep on my plan in case I was being rash. When I woke up early on Sunday morning and still thought it was the best idea I’d ever had (totally eclipsing past highlights such as baked beans on cream cracker sandwiches and taping EastEnders while I watched it in case I thought of something clever to yell at the characters after it’s over), I knew I had to do it.
Coming up the escalator at Shepherd’s Bush tube I worked out my strategy for dealing with what was bound to be an impossible situation:
1. Go round to Mark and Julie’s.
2. Beg for her mercy.
3. If needs be, cry.
I didn’t give myself the option of steps one to three not working. There was no plan B, and without Julie there’d be no plan A. Julie was essential. It was then, as I stood on her doorstep, my heart racing wildly and my index finger hovering over the doorbell, that it occurred to me that this was about karma. I was being punished for the sins of my previous life, the telling of ex-girlfriends that I was dead, the half-truths to Mel and the skeletons in my cupboards. It was as if life had decided that if I really wanted true happiness I was going to have to pay for my indiscretions.
I rang the doorbell and waited.
When Juli
e finally came to the front door she was wearing nothing but her dressing gown. “What are you doing here?” she exclaimed.
I decided in the light of what Mel had said about Julie having some sort of crisis, that a delicate touch would be required. “Hello, Julie,” I replied as chirpily as possible. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk to you yesterday at the wedding, but by the time you came back from the loo my taxi had arrived.”
Julie fixed me with a menacing stare as if I were some horrible practical joke writ large. “Duffy,” she growled, “it’s eight o’clock on Sunday morning. It’s freezing cold out here and I haven’t got the patience or indeed the inclination to humor you. So I’ll say this: I don’t care that you didn’t speak to me yesterday because I don’t like you. I don’t care if I never see you again because I don’t like you. In fact I don’t care about you full stop because I’ve never liked you. So now we’ve got that sorted, what do you want?”
“Is Mark about?” I asked innocently. I was hoping that his presence might soften Julie up a bit.
She bristled instantly. I knew that bristle. It was the bristle Mel used to use on me when I was in her bad books, just as, it would appear, Mark was in Julie’s. “He’s in Los Angeles on a shoot,” she said sharply. They’ve probably had a row about him going off around the world again, I reasoned. This is bound to be Julie’s big “crisis.” I’ll give them two simpering twenty-minute transatlantic phone calls and they’ll be back to their usual smug selves.
“He won’t be back in England for a few days,” she said, and then added, “Was it him you wanted to see?”
“No, Julie,” I said. “It’s you I came to see. I need your help.”
She was visibly shocked. All her facial expressions went into free fall. She looked very odd indeed. Then as quickly as the panic came it disappeared. “You don’t really expect me to persuade Mel to get back with you, do you?” She sighed dismissively. “Not even you can be that stupid, surely?”
