Elena rolled her eyes. She should have called her mama from Venice but just hadn’t had the chance.
‘I worry about you girls, you know,’ her mama continued. If she carried on much longer, there wouldn’t be any tape left for message three. ‘I want you to promise me you’ll keep in touch from now on and let me know what you’re doing? Okay?’
‘Okay!’ Elena yelled back.
‘Good!’ her mama said, as if she’d really heard her daughter.
Elena sighed in relief as her mama finally hung up. There was one more message.
‘Elena? Are you there?’
It was Mark’s voice, and it sounded so sad that Elena immediately wanted to burst into tears.
‘I wanted you to know that I’ve handed my notice in at the college so there won’t be any awkwardness next term.’
Elena’s eyes pricked with tears as she heard Mark sigh.
‘It was the only thing to do, really,’ he said, his voice quiet and subdued. ‘But I wish you well. Bye.’
Elena quickly pressed the rewind button and listened to his message again in case she’d been mistaken.
‘But I wish you well. Bye.’
That was all: the sum product of their time together had resulted in nothing more than a cold and colourless farewell. Elena wanted to cry out loud and stamp her feet in tantrum but, instead, she grabbed her handbag from where she’d dumped it only seconds before and left her flat, hailing the first taxi she saw. Normally, Elena wouldn’t pay taxi fares - not on her college salary - but this was no time to be hanging around in the vain hope of a tube or a bus turning up. She had to speak to Mark - subito - as the Italians would say.
Mark’s flat was three miles away and the taxi driver assured her that he was taking the fastest route there.
‘It’s left here!’
‘I know!’ the taxi driver said.
‘Then first-’
‘Right - yes! That’s the way I’m going.’
Elena bit her lip, worrying in case Mark had left his flat as well as his job. But he wouldn’t do that, would he? He wouldn’t cut off all communication between them.
‘It’s this house at the end of the street.’
The driver just nodded this time and pulled over. Elena threw some money at him and jumped out of the car, dashing across the pavement and pressing the flat’s buzzer.
She waited. There was no answer. She pressed it again. Still, there was no answer. She tried the communal door but it was locked so she pressed the buzzer for Mark’s neighbour.
‘Yes?’ an elderly lady’s voice enquired.
‘Mrs Chambers? It’s Elena - Mark’s fiancé. Could you let me in? I’ve left my keys at home.’ The truth was, Elena didn’t have any keys to Mark’s flat. It wasn’t that Mark hadn’t tried to give her a set: he had! It’s just that she hardly ever visited him and didn’t see the need.
‘I’ll give you a call before I come round,’ she’d told him.
‘But don’t you want to surprise me occasionally? Come round on the spur of the moment?’
Elena had been puzzled by that. With three fiancés, the idea of anything being spur of the moment could be disastrous. No, she had to live by a strict timetable and that meant being independent and only having her own set of keys to worry about.
Mrs Chambers pressed the magic button which released the door and Elena bounded up the stairs, two at a time, and knocked on Mark’s door.
‘Mark? Are you there?’
There was no reply.
‘It’s Elena. I need to talk to you.’
‘I don’t think he’s in, dear,’ Mrs Chambers said, her head popping out from behind her door.
‘Do you know where he is?’ Elena asked, hoping that she was a nosy neighbour and might be of some help.
‘I’ve not seen him for ages,’ she said. ‘I thought I heard him late last night but he was in and out before I could ask him to fix my TV. It’s on the blink again.’
‘So you don’t know where he’s gone?’
The old lady shook her head.
Where could he be? Elena wracked her brains. She had no idea where he could be and she felt appalled because it showed how little she knew him. She’d taken no time to get to know his hobbies or interests, or even whom his friends were.
No, that wasn’t strictly true - there was one friend she’d heard him mention. He had a strange name - quirky-sounding - the sort of name you’d give to a pet dog. Benjie or Bonzo or something.
‘Barney!’ she suddenly shouted.
Mrs Chambers, who was still watching Elena from behind her door, flinched.
‘Barney Malone! I bet he’s at Barney’s! He lives in the next street, doesn’t he?’
‘Does he?’
Elena nodded, a big smile crossing her face for the first time since she’d left Venice.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, tripping back down the stairs. Her taxi had long gone but Elena thought she could remember the way to Barney’s. How had Mark described the flat? It was uglier than a 1970s public convenience and smelt far worse.
‘That’s the one!’ Elena said to herself a few minutes later as she looked up at the grim exterior. It really was unyielding in its ugliness. There wasn’t a single redeeming feature except a yellow plastic pot somebody had filled with purple primulas which stood on the doorstep.
Elena walked up to the door and looked around for the intercom. It soon became obvious that there wasn’t one. Of course! She remembered Mark telling him about how he’d have to stand in the middle of the pavement and yell up at the top flat until he was heard. Was she capable of that?
‘Barney!’ she yelled, startling a couple of pigeons on a fence. ‘Barneeeeee!’
It was ridiculous. She wasn’t even sure which window was his.
‘BarNEEEEEE!’
Nothing: no response at all. She’d only succeeded in making herself hoarse.
Then, just as she’d turned to go home, a window was opened and a tousled head popped out.
‘Who is it?’
Elena spun round. ‘Barney - it’s Elena. I have to speak to Mark. Is he there?’
Barney squinted down at her but he didn’t say anything.
‘Please, Barney - let me up.’ They stared at each other - their eyes waging a battle of wills.
At last, Barney nodded and Elena rushed to the door to be let in, legging it up the stairs to the top floor where a door stood ajar.
‘Barney?’ she called.
‘In here,’ a gruff voice said which gave Elena the distinct impression that she wasn’t welcome.
‘Can I come in?’ she asked, already half way down the hall which opened into a small sitting room.
‘Hello,’ a voice said.
‘Hello,’ Elena replied, seeing a very pregnant woman sprawling on a sofa. Balancing precariously beside her was a large bowl filled with bright jelly babies which her fingers dipped into with acute regularity.
‘Would you like one?’ she asked Elena who must have been staring.
Elena shook her head. ‘No, thank you,’ she said. There was something most disconcerting about watching a pregnant woman biting the heads of jelly babies.
‘Is Mark here?’
The woman didn’t reply.
‘Please! I need to know.’
‘BARNEY!’ the woman shouted, making Elena leap out of her skin. ‘Get your bony ass in here. It’s rude to leave guests.’
Elena heard the unmistakable shuffle of Barney and he reappeared in the doorway of the kitchen which joined the living room, his off-white housecoat saggily exposing a pale chest and skinny legs.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘This girl walks all the way up your stinking stairs and you then ignore her!’ the jelly-bean woman said.
‘I didn’t invite her here,’ Barney said sulkily.
‘Oh! You didn’t invite her!’ the woman echoed sarcastically. ‘Sheesh!’
‘Well, what do you want me to do, Linda?’ he asked, flinging
his hands in the air in a manner that was very Italian.
‘Come and sit here,’ Linda said, beckoning to Elena. ‘Now! What’s a lovely lady like you doing in a horrible place like this?’
Elena gave a tiny smile. ‘I’m trying to find Mark.’
‘She’s trying to find Mark!’ she repeated, flinging the sentence across the room at Barney.
‘Well, how am I meant to know where he is?’ Barney responded.
Linda seemed to swell up with indignation at this question which, in the circumstances, Elena didn’t think was a good idea. ‘Because you’re bloody joined at the hip, you two! You’re thick as thieves. Two peas in a pod! You’re inseparable. You live in each others’ pockets!’ she yelled. ‘Need any more clichés?’
Barney sighed, his shoulders drooping with the weight of being under Linda’s thumb. ‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘Pardon?’ Linda said, leaning forward until Elena felt sure that she would topple off the sofa.
Elena saw the look of intense annoyance in Linda’s face. ‘He’s here, isn’t he?’ Elena said, turning to face Barney. ‘Barney?’
‘Barney!’ Linda said, her warning voice quite scary. ‘Barney, please!’ she added, a little softness now colouring her voice. ‘Take pity on a girl in love!’ She got up from the sofa with a great effort, her profile looking like the back of a whale.
‘Blimey!’ Elena exclaimed. ‘When are you due?’
‘Not for another month. Worrying, isn’t it!’
‘Linda, I’d be happier if you sat down and didn’t get so worked up about things.’
‘It’s you who’s getting me worked up about things! Now tell this poor girl where Mark is!’
There were a few moments in which Elena looked from Barney to Linda and back again, not quite sure who was going to win and feeling very sure that she was never actually going to find out where Mark was.
‘He’s-’ Linda started.
‘- in the bedroom,’ Barney finished.
‘You can go through if you like - have some privacy,’ Linda said.
Elena gulped. She was right: Mark had been there all along. Had he been listening to them? Had he told Barney to tell her that he wasn’t there?
‘It’s through there on the left. Don’t trip over anything. It’s Barney’s land-of-the-lost-guitars room.’
Elena walked out of the room, hearing Linda yelling at Barney and making no attempt not to be heard by Elena. She really did have a voice, that woman, Elena thought, and now she came to think about it, she remembered Mark telling her that she sang in Barney’s band.
Barney’s music hideout was at the back of the flat and, as Elena approached, she could hear strumming from behind the closed door. She felt herself smiling. She’d never heard Mark play a guitar. He was really quite good. She stood outside the door for a moment, acutely aware that he was so close and that it was just a matter of her opening the door. But what a huge task that was Their relationship was in tatters: she’d ruined it! Single-handedly, she’d wrecked what they’d built so carefully together.
She closed her eyes. Where had all her strength gone? In the taxi from her flat, she’d felt so confident and strong but, somewhere, all her strength had ebbed away. She wasn’t even sure if she could reach out and open the door into the room where Mark was.
Then why did you come all this way? a voice asked her. She couldn’t tell if it was Rosanna chiding her, Stefano remonstrating with her, or her own conscience. Whoever or whatever it was, it worked because her hand closed on the handle of the door and she was in the room before anything else could change her mind.
‘Hey, Barney! These strings are a bit knackered, aren’t they?’ Mark said without looking around.
‘It’s not Barney, Mark,’ she said.
Mark’s fingers stopped strumming and he turned from his position on an old chair by the window but he didn’t smile. Had she been expecting him to smile? She wasn’t sure. But the absence of such a greeting made Elena feel like turning and running away again.
‘What are you doing here, Elena?’
‘I’ve come to see you.’ It was a silly thing to say but his question was a profoundly silly one too. What did he expect her to say? That she’d come to audition for Barney’s band?
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.
‘I’ve already heard all you have to say to me,’ Mark said and, to Elena’s horror, his fingers began strumming once more.
‘You haven’t,’ she interrupted, trying not to be deterred by his indifference. ‘You haven’t heard everything I have to say because I’ve been lying to you.’
To her great satisfaction, he stopped strumming and looked up. ‘I know. I met him, remember?’
‘I’m not talking about Reuben.’
‘No? Don’t tell me, you’ve had another fiancé hidden away somewhere?’
Elena winced at his accuracy but didn’t rise to his bait. ‘Sarcasm really doesn’t become you, Mark.’
‘Oh, really?’ he said in a tone which could have eaten sarcasm for breakfast. He began strumming again.
Elena swallowed. Her throat felt horribly dry - like her first day of teaching. She didn’t know what to do. There was no training for this; no manual to tell her how to handle this sort of situation.
‘MARK!’ she suddenly shouted. ‘Will you please put that bloody guitar down?’
He did. He then turned dark and angry eyes on Elena. ‘What is it you want, Elena? I’ve already given everything up for you: my time, my sanity, even my job.’
‘I never asked you to do that.’
‘But it’s done all the same.’
‘Then undo it.’
‘What?’
‘Tell Tomi you want your job back. You know he’s desperate. He’ll give it back to you sooner than spending on advertising for somebody else.’
‘Thanks. That makes me feel so much better.’
Elena sighed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. You know you’ll be missed. The students will miss you. Even Tomi will.’
There was a pause when both of them knew exactly what should be said.
‘And I’ll miss you,’ she said at last, filling the silence with exactly the right words.
‘You don’t even know I’m around half the time,’ Mark said. ‘I’ve been your shadow for months now but you only notice now that the sun has gone in.’
For a moment, Elena wanted to make a joke of his poetic turn of phrase but she felt too sad to say anything at all.
‘You have every right to say that,’ Elena said. ‘If I was you, I’d be saying exactly the same things right now. But I think you should listen to what I have to say.’
Mark made a noise that was mid-way between a sigh and a groan. ‘What?’
‘Can I sit down?’ she asked, looking around the shabby room. There was one other chair opposite the one Mark was occupying but it was covered with newspapers and sheets of music. Elena crossed the room and swept the mess up in one armful, placing it on the floor in a small mountain.
‘I was hoping you’d be waiting for me at the hotel when I got back to Venice,’ she told him. He didn’t say anything. ‘No, that’s a lie.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’
‘I was hoping you’d follow me and stop me after I broke up with you - tell me to stop being stupid.’ She shrugged. ‘But you didn’t. And you were right not to because you’ve been doing that all along, haven’t you? You followed me out to Venice and tried to tell me, so many times, that I was being a fool and that I couldn’t be happy with anyone other than you. But I didn’t want to hear you.’
She paused. He was watching her with an intensity that made her feel nervous. She felt like she was auditioning for her life.
‘I guess I didn’t want anyone getting as close as you were. It scared me. Do you want to know why? Do you want to know what this is all about?’
Mark frowned. ‘Rosanna said there was something I should-’
‘I’ve never told anyo
ne before. I’ve locked it away. But I’ve leant that no matter where you run, no matter how you cocoon yourself in your new life and your new self, you can never truly escape your past. It’s only ever a blink away. No matter how brash and bold I am, no matter which mask I choose to wear, I’m still the sixteen year-old girl standing in the bend of the road, looking down the cliff face at a billowing cloud of dust.’
Tears swam in her eyes as the words left her mouth.
‘Lucio and I had spent the whole summer together. We’d just left school and were celebrating - doing all the crazy stuff you do when you’re sixteen. I’d never met anyone like him before but I guess every sixteen year old girl feels like that when she falls in love, and I really believed I was in love. I thought I was going to spend my whole life with Lucio. We didn’t talk about that, of course; we were too busy messing about to be serious but I could see my whole future clear ahead - as bright as the summer sunshine. We spent hours doing absolutely nothing but our favourite thing - messing about on his moped. He loved that moped. It was like an extension of him, really, and he insisted on it being an extension of me too! We did some really stupid things - every day - but none as stupid as the day I’ve tried so hard to forget.’
Elena stopped for a moment but she didn’t look at Mark. She was miles away - somewhere in the Italian countryside - somewhere in her past.
‘We’d taken the coast road and had stopped for a picnic that I’d made up that morning. And then …’ she paused. ‘It was all so unreal. Lucio got on his bike and was fooling around. One moment, we were laughing, and making fun of each other, and then there was the roar of his bike as he took up my dare. He was always a bit of a show-off and I loved him for it.
‘I hadn’t really believed it had happened because it had seemed more like a scene from a film than anything else. I kept expecting him to appear again - with a huge smile on his face as he laughed at having tricked me. But he never did appear.’
‘What happened?’
‘His bike had skidded, right on the edge of a cliff. He didn’t have time to stop. I couldn’t even see him - the land just disappeared into air and then sea. There was nothing there.’
Irresistible You Page 27
