The Break

by Marian Keyes

  ‘I meant, big shock for you.’

  ‘No, no, no –’

  ‘I’m good,’ she says. ‘I understand that Dad needs to do this. It’s you I’m worried for.’

  ‘Kiara …’ Sometimes Kiara seems more mature than all of us but a lot of that is probably just surface and it would be a mistake to start relying on it.

  ‘Mum, I’m fine. But you’re going to need a strategy for the next six months. You should take up rock-climbing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Okay, maybe not rock-climbing. I’m just throwing suggestions out there. But there must be tons of things you wish you’d done with your life and now’s your chance!’

  God. All I want to do is go to bed for six months and subsist on Sugar Puffs eaten straight from the box. Instead I’m going to have to make new memories, be my best self, do one thing that scares me every day and all that other proactive stuff that pervades Kiara’s thinking.

  ‘Like, if you died tomorrow,’ she prompts, ‘what would you regret not having done?’

  This is bullshit. I’m the adult here, she’s the child: I’m the one who should be providing comfort and solutions.

  ‘There must be something, Mum.’

  Maybe it’s the stress but I can think of only one thing. Since I’ve given up the cigarettes, I’ve put on a couple of pounds. And when you’re as short as me, every ounce shows. I haven’t adjusted to my new weight and I don’t want to – this isn’t the real me.

  ‘I’d regret not getting thin again,’ I say. ‘I’d hate to die being the wrong size. I feel that I wouldn’t be able to properly enjoy the afterlife – it’d be a bit like going on a hike with a gritty little stone trapped in one of my boots.’

  Kiara’s smile wobbles. This clearly isn’t worthy. Then she recovers. ‘Boom,’ she says. ‘There you go. Eat clean, right?’

  ‘Sweet-potato toast,’ I say. ‘Unless sweet-potato toast is over already?’

  ‘It’s still a thing.’

  I wasn’t sure it was, but Kiara was kind.

  ‘Maybe you could talk to Urzula,’ she suggests.

  ‘Maybe,’ I muttered.

  ‘Aaaaand maybe not.’

  Sofie’s mum Urzula is a self-made diet guru, who pops up with increasing regularity on TV, both here in Ireland and in the UK. She has no qualifications, but her icy Baltic thinness and her cruel Latvian-accented judgements are garnering a growing following of people who celebrate her tough-love, sock-it-to-the-fatsos bluntness. She’s obsessed with fighting lard. In my opinion, she’s simply managed to convert her eating disorder into a career.

  ‘Urzula has ice in her soul,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ Kiara says. ‘Urzula has a level teaspoon of millet porridge in her soul.’

  We share a laugh and Kiara goes off.

  Now that the girls have been told and it’s all official, I do what I should have done days ago and ring Derry. ‘I’ve something weird to tell you.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Hugh is sort of leaving me. For six months,’ I add quickly. ‘Then he’s coming back. But while he’s gone, it’ll be like he’s single.’

  For a moment she’s silent. Then, ‘Where are you? At home? I’ll be round in ten.’

  It’s probably less than eight minutes later that her car hares into our estate, and comes to a sudden halt just outside the gate. In she sweeps, half of her hair in a bouncy New York blow-dry and the other half still wet.

  ‘Aw, Derry, for the love of God, you didn’t have to leave mid-blow-dry.’

  ‘I’m tight on time. Tell me.’

  Haltingly, I outline the facts.

  ‘And this happened when?’

  ‘Last Sunday night.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell me because … it was too weird? You were too humiliated? You were hoping he’d change his mind?’

  ‘All of the above.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Amy, you poor little baba.’ She looks at me with heartfelt sincerity. ‘You have shitey luck with husbands.’

  ‘But he swears he’s coming back.’

  Her expression says it all: even if Hugh comes back, everything will be different. No way can he simply slot back in and take up where he left off.

  ‘Amy, you’re a survivor.’ She’s firm on this and, yes, I appear to be – I survived Richie leaving, I survived all the tricks he played on Neeve, I survived the Exorcist-level bile of Neeve’s teens, I survived two catastrophic redundancies, one long ago in London, another more recently in Dublin.

  But being a survivor is hard bloody work, harder than it looks, and I think I might be running low on survivor juice. Given the choice, I’d far rather a pampered life of indulgence where nothing bad ever happens.

  ‘How can I help?’ She’s always proactive.

  ‘By letting me vent. And please don’t make me go on dates. I want nothing to do with men, not now, not ever.’

  ‘But what about that –’

  ‘Derry, please! That was a moment of lunacy.’

  ‘But you could finish what you st–’

  ‘I’m begging you, Derry, never, ever mention that, like ever. Please.’ There’s a danger I might cry. ‘I just want to bunker down for the six months, keep a low profile and see what things are like when Hugh comes back.’

  ‘When’s he going?’

  ‘Soon. In the next week, that sort of soon.’

  She’s biting her bottom lip. ‘Lookit,’ she says, ‘I’m meant to be flying to Cape Town today.’ Derry works in human resources; it involves a lot of travel. ‘But I could try and cancel if –’

  ‘Derry, don’t be mad. Anyway, he’ll be gone for six fecking months. You can’t cancel all of your trips.’

  ‘But who’s going to mind you if he goes this week? Maura will make it all about her. Jesus, though, she’ll go baloobas when she hears …’ She notices my expression. ‘Wait, what, she knows?’

  ‘Sorry, Der. She guessed something was up. She came into work yesterday and leant on me till I confessed.’

  ‘The Waterboarder strikes again.’

  ‘To be fair, she wasn’t unsympathetic.’

  ‘But, still, she’ll be fuck all use if thing go nuclear. What about Steevie? Is she still AMAB?’

  I nod. AMAB stands for ‘All Men Are Bastards’.

  ‘Could that be a good thing? The pair of you can make little wax men and get out the needles … no?’

  ‘No. It sounds mad but Hugh can’t help this.’

  Derry is incredulous. ‘Hugh is a total dick. I love him, you know I do, but he’s being a total dick.’ She looks confused. ‘Why don’t you hate him?’

  ‘I do hate him. Sometimes. Well, all the time …’ Then I explode, ‘Why couldn’t he have stuck to the promise he made when we got married? Why does he have to be so weak?’ Before she can reply, I go on, ‘Or am I the weak one, letting him go off like this? Would another woman have insisted on the full terms of our marriage contract? “For better, for worse”?’

  ‘Yeah, your words, asshat!’

  ‘But making him stay wouldn’t work, Derry. He’s been miserable and emotionally unavailable.’

  ‘He’s a dick.’

  ‘But, Derry, I still love him. And I feel sorry for him. It’s a mess.’

  ‘Oh-kay.’ It takes a moment. ‘I think I get it.’ So that wouldn’t be her response but she’s working hard to align her opinions with mine. ‘Holding two opposite and opposing thoughts at once. No one ever said this life business would be easy. So who else can help? What about that half-wit Jana Shanahan?’

  I snort with unexpected laughter. Derry can’t abide Jana: where I see sweetness, she sees profound silliness. She once said about Jana, ‘The wheel’s still spinning but the hamster’s looong goooone.’

  ‘Would she be any good in a crisis?’ There’s huge doubt in Derry’s voice. ‘I think she’s as useful as Pinterest but you’re fond of her.’

  ‘She’s friends with Genevieve Payne.’

  ‘And you don’t want Genevieve finding out until Hugh’s
out of her reach? But what about when he’s gone?’

  ‘I still don’t want her finding out.’

  ‘But she will. Someone will tell her. Fuck it, everyone will tell her. Sorry, babes, you’re going to be trending, like, for ever.’

  ‘Not if I tell no one. Except you, obviously. And Maura. And the girls. And Jackson will have to know because he’s in the house so often. But apart from them, I’m telling no one else.’

  Derry’s face is a mix of alarm and compassion. ‘Amy, honey, you can’t – Look, there’s no way you can keep this a secret for six months. And you shouldn’t have to – you’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘But it’s so humiliating,’ I whisper.

  ‘It is humiliating. But it’s going to be really, really tough and you need people who’ll be there for you.’

  I say nothing. I’m kind of over depending on people. Some of my siblings, grand: our messy childhood united us. But the rest of the world, not for me, not right now.

  ‘It will leak out.’ She’s pulling no punches. ‘You’re better off controlling it. Treat it like a work press release.’

  What – like that fanciful one I wrote in my head? Not a hope.

  ‘I’ve to go,’ she says. ‘I’ve a flight. I’ll FaceTime you. But tell people, Amy, manage it.’

  ‘Okay.’ I won’t.

  She leaves, and I’m sorting the laundry basket when my phone rings. It’s Mum. I’m instantly on high alert: what disaster is after happening? ‘Is everything okay?’ I ask.

  ‘The girls are with me – Neeve and Sofie. They tell me that Hugh is going away?’

  ‘They told you?’ You don’t tell Mum bad news! We’d learnt at an early age to ring-fence her banjaxed immune system. What were Neeve and Sofie thinking of? I’ll have to have a stern word with them, Kiara also …

  But it would be utter madness to make them keep Hugh’s absence a secret – they’re too young, it would be too much responsibility. Wild with sudden rage, I realize that Derry is right and there’s no way this can be contained.

  ‘I’d say you’re upset,’ Mum says.

  ‘Ah, you know …’ She really isn’t that kind of mum.

  ‘Would you like to hang out with me?’

  ‘Er …’ Hang out?

  ‘We can paint our nails – Neeve gives me lots of polishes.’

  Lucky you. I get nothing except anti-dandruff shampoo.

  ‘If you like we can drink wine. It’s a great pick-me-up. I wish I’d discovered it years ago.’

  She needs to get off the phone because I have an idea. ‘Thanks for the offer, Mum.’

  We say our goodbyes. Then, in a blind fury, I yell, ‘Hugh! HUGH!’

  He starts hurrying up the stairs, so I grab my phone and meet him halfway. ‘Get that fucking towel!’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The fucking towel that dries in five minutes!’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Just. Fucking. Get it.’

  He disappears out the back to the shed – clearly his Departure HQ – and reappears with the small blue bundle. ‘What’s going on?’ he asks.

  ‘Unroll it and hold it. Smile.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just fucking do it.’

  I take several photos of Hugh holding the towel, a glassy-eyed grimace stapled to his face. ‘Fuck’s sake, Hugh, SMILE! Lucky you, heading off for a six-month sex holiday!’

  I upload the least-miserable-looking photo to Facebook. ‘Check this out!’ I write. ‘Hugh’s travel towel. Dries in twenty minutes! Happy travels to him as he heads off for six months. Bring us back some sunshine!’ Speedily I bang out about a hundred emojis of planes, suns, ice creams, cocktails and bikinis, and post it to my 1,439 friends.

  ‘Amy, what did you just do?’

  I whip the towel from him, scrunch it up into a ball, then fling it hard at his chest. Disappointingly, it’s too light to have much impact.

  ‘What did you do?’ He grabs my phone and I grab it back.

  The story is out in the world now and I’m owning it. I’ll probably break the internet, but from here on in the narrative is being controlled by me.

  10

  Eighteen years ago

  One clean bright April morning in London, in the late nineties, I was hurrying through Soho, dressed in a pair of dark blue clam-diggers, pointy pink stilettos and a button-through, candy-striped blouse. There were lots of young hip types about, bearing coffee cups or retro briefcases, looking like they were en route to work in advertising or something similarly cool – and I was one of them.

  It was one of those rare days that had probably happened four or five times in my life when I felt like a round peg slotted with dazzling snugness into a round hole.

  My destination was a sound studio, where I’d be working on a marketing campaign, and my head was already trying to manage any potential pitfalls.

  ‘Hi.’ Hugh from the studio had appeared in front of me – and I found I was absolutely delighted to see him.

  ‘Hi!’

  We worked together fairly regularly and everyone loved Hugh. He was big and good-looking and quiet and confident. People went on about his ‘Irish’ eyes – I think they meant they were smiley. If you asked me, they weren’t that smiley – I’d sensed a slight withholding about him.

  People assumed that my affection for Hugh was because we were both Irish, but that was neither here nor there. It was because he was really good at what he did – my life was so riddled with stress that anything that made my job easier was appreciated. Most mornings, facing into my day felt like going to war: I had to get Neeve up, dress her, feed her, drop her to school, get the tube to work, have meetings, manage clients … but when I was due to work at Hugh’s studio, my spirits always lifted.

  When Hugh was manning the decks, things started on time. If a script didn’t fit into the thirty-second slot, he’d suggest intelligent edits, even though that wasn’t part of his remit. Or when my client started muttering that the actor’s delivery didn’t embody the brand’s core message, Hugh would intercede and tactfully coax more gravitas, or less chirpiness, or whatever was required.

  ‘Good timing,’ Hugh said, that sunny morning in Dean Street. ‘I was just out getting the coffees.’

  ‘The hardest-working man in ad-making.’

  We walked the few steps to the scruffy Soho terraced house where the studio lived.

  ‘Hey, you look amazing this morning,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Good amazing or ridiculous amazing?’

  ‘Good amazing.’

  I smiled fondly at him. ‘Over at Rocket Sounds they call me Timewarp Girl,’ I said. ‘Or Rockabilly Amy. I much prefer the treatment I get at Hugh’s Studio.’

  ‘It’s a definite look you’ve got going.’

  By now, we were in the house and climbing the narrow, slopey stairs to the top floor, where the studio was.

  ‘That’s because all my clothes are second-hand due to skintness. Jesus, these stairs.’ I paused on a landing and looked out of a narrow window. ‘Look at that – the backs of other houses.’ I laughed. ‘You do know I’m only pretending to admire the view so I can catch my breath. You wouldn’t think of getting a lift in here?’

  ‘Listed building,’ he said. ‘Yeah, you’d never know to look at it.’ Then he added, ‘But if I could do it for anyone, I’d do it for you.’

  The sudden sincerity in his voice made me look at him in surprise, made me look hard, and I don’t know exactly what happened but the light on him seemed to alter. In an instant he went from being Hugh my fondly regarded colleague to a very different Hugh.

  Out of nowhere a powerful attraction had bloomed into life, like one of those super-speedy desert flowers and, with no warning whatsoever, I wanted him. I was stunned. What the hell had just happened?

  Hoping for enlightenment, I looked up at him. He was a big man, not all of it muscle but, still, yeah, you would … He looked as shocked as I felt. I swallowed hard, continued up the stairs and didn
’t speak again until we were with the others.

  After that day on the stairs, things had changed. Over the next three or four months I was giddy and buzzy when we were working together – and quite devastated the time he was on holiday and a freelancer was covering.

  Physically, I was hyperaware of him. If he walked near me, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and if he left the room, I was irritable and anxious, impatient for his return. Even though our connection was unspoken, when my team needed Hugh to open early, they said, ‘Get Amy to ask. He’ll do it for her.’

  Soho back then was Hook-up Central. Everyone seemed to sleep with everyone else, like they were collecting footballer cards: the Spanish Girl; Maria’s boyfriend; the Swedish coke dealer; the kitchen porter at Pollo with the enormous schlong; the bar-girl at the Coach and Horses; the male model from Dundee; the Japanese boy with the Afro. Maybe Hugh was part of that scene and I was just another person to be ticked off a list. ‘Rockabilly Amy, with the mad clothes. Yeah, I did her.’

  I wouldn’t have been the first woman to sleep with a man she thought was wild about her and be ghosted the moment he rolled off her. But my colleague Phoebe offered the intel that Hugh was single and he wasn’t a slut, and for a short time relief made me euphoric.

  Then a fresh bout of soul-searching engulfed me. Richie’s cheating had changed me: the thought of trusting a man scared me witless.

  Paradoxically, my life – which had been functioning efficiently – suddenly seemed threadbare and sad. I was only twenty-seven: I should have been sharing a flat with two other girls, drinking our heads off and having one-night stands. My life was empty of fun, spontaneity and connection. Once again, I was the odd-bod.

  It was impossible to consider a sex-drenched fling with Hugh. It wasn’t just because of Neeve, it was because of me – even before Richie had done what he’d done, casual sex had never held any appeal. If things were to become more serious, Hugh would need to hear my sorry story. But what if I offered myself on a plate, saying, ‘These are my wounds,’ and he legged it? How was that even survivable?