by Olivia Ryan
‘Well, I suppose I’m glad you weren’t keeping it all entirely to yourself,’ Emily tells me. ‘I must admit I was stunned, when you told us, to think you’d never let it slip, not to me, not to your mum or anyone.’
‘Yeah. To be honest, with me and Jude sharing a room, I’d probably have blabbed to her over the weekend if I hadn’t done already.’ I sigh. ‘Come on, girls, the food’s getting cold. No point crying over split milk. At least I haven’t got to say any prayers to St Anthony, anyway.’
But just as I start to dig into my Chinese again, I realise the strange music I’ve been hearing from somewhere in the distance is my chosen ring tone on my mobile phone, calling to me from my bag out in the hallway. I run out to answer it, but it’s only my voicemail, telling me I’ve already missed four calls. What’s the matter with me? Have I gone deaf, or what? All the calls were from Matt. And when I return the call and he answers, I have to sit down on the floor to recover from the surprise.
He sounds absolutely furious. And his first words to me are:
‘Where the fucking hell are you?’
‘I’ve been sitting here waiting for you,’ he thunders across the ocean at me. Well, the Irish Sea. Matt never normally thunders.
‘Here? Where?’
‘At home, Katie, where do you think? Why didn’t you come home with the others?’
‘Because of Jude. She broke her ankle. Emily and I…’ Hang on a minute. Why am I on the defensive? ‘Why aren’t you in Prague?’
‘I came home early. I needed to talk to you.’ His voice sounds grim. I don’t recognise the tone he’s taking with me. Has he been drinking? ‘I cut short my holiday because I needed to see you. I sat up all night, waiting, wondering if your flight was delayed, and then I phoned your sister and …’
‘But didn’t she tell you? About Jude’s ankle?’ I’m so stunned by the accusation in his voice, I can only talk in short sentences. He cut short his holiday because he needed to see me? Oh, that’s rich, after all this time refusing to consider anything less than ten days!
‘Yes, yes,’ he says impatiently. ‘Lisa told me some load of crap about you and Emily driving down to Kinsale with Jude. What the hell are you playing at?’
‘Playing at?’ I’m repeating him like a parrot. ‘We’re not playing at anything, Matt! We had to help Jude. She was stuck in hospital, and her parents couldn’t come, and Fergus couldn’t help because he’s a cat. Burmese. Her neighbour’s been looking after him but she had to go and get the tatties on for her husband.’
I’ve gone from gasping in short sentences to babbling like a racing commentator coming up to the finishing line.
‘Are you drunk?’ asks Matt when I pause for breath.
‘No! I’ve given it up, as a matter of fact. On account of a fight I had with Emily…’ I stop, thinking back over the events of the last few days. ‘Which was your fault,’ I add, crossly. How dare he be annoyed with me for not being there just because he decides to come home early? And how dare he accuse me of being drunk? This is all his fault!
‘My fault?’
‘Yes! Emily told me all about her little meeting with you. About how you were feeling confused and mixed up.’
‘Yes! Look, Kate, this is exactly why I flew home early to talk to you.’
‘So you were able to talk to Emily about it, were you, even though you didn’t manage to tell me until last Saturday that you’d called off your stag party and were only going away with Sean? To talk about your confusion? I suppose you told Emily, in your cosy little chat, about all your doubts over the wedding?’ I’m suddenly, inexplicably, furious again with Emily for her secret meeting with Matt. Furious with both of them.
‘Katie, you know we both had doubts about the wedding. We admitted it. We needed to cancel it, to put it all on hold – it was your idea, if anything. You wanted to go back to how we were… and I wanted time away with Sean, to think, and decide…’
‘Sounds like you’d already decided!’ I snap. ‘Seems to me you decided when you had your little talk with Emily! Your cosy little…’
‘Will you just shut up about my talk with Emily!’ he retorts. ‘Yes, I’d decided I didn’t want to go ahead with the wedding. You’re right – OK? I’d already decided; I was just trying to find the right time to tell you.’
‘So if you’d decided, what was all the crap about the confusion?’
He sighs. I can hear it all the way across England, across Wales, across the Irish Sea, across Ireland, he’s sighing at me into my phone. It’s a sigh of irritation. Why did he have to phone, anyway, just as I was enjoying my Chinese takeaway?
‘Look, Katie, I don’t want to get into all this over the phone, OK?’ he says more quietly. ‘That’s why I came back. I wanted to talk it through with you, face to face.’
‘Talk what through? What are you going on about? We’ve already decided about the wedding. It’s off. Fine. I don’t think I’d fit into my dress now, anyway. I’m in the middle of sweet and sour prawns with…’
‘For Christ’s sake! It’s about more than a fucking wedding dress! Why are you talking to me about sweet and sour fucking prawns, when I’m going out of my mind here?’
To say I’m astonished would be an understatement. I’m sitting on the floor, holding my phone, staring at my feet and wondering if it’s possible to faint while you’re sitting down. Matt never shouts like this. I’m actually, briefly, even wondering if it’s really Matt on the phone. He sounds like he’s about to start crying. Like he’s about to have a nervous breakdown. I feel a tremor of fear.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask quietly.
‘No.’
‘Is something wrong?’
‘Yes.’
‘What? What is it? Tell me!’
‘When you come back.’
‘No! You’ve frightened me now. You’d better tell me, Matt. Please! What is it?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! All right – I’m sorry: I didn’t want to tell you like this, but… it’s over, OK? I’m finishing it, Katie. You and me – it’s no good. It’s over. Finished. All right?’
All right?
I feel trembly and light-headed, as if I’m going to be sick. I’m trying to say something but my voice comes out like a whisper, hoarse and tinny and echoing inside my own head.
‘But I was going to talk to you,’ I hear myself saying. ‘I wanted us to talk, when I come back. About a baby. Having a baby!’
There’s such a long silence, I’m wondering if he’s hung up.
‘Hello?’ I whisper, tentatively. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘A baby,’ he says, flatly, as if it’s a statement. ‘A baby!’
I wait, wondering. Will this change everything? Will he realise it’s the one thing we haven’t talked about, the one thing that could save our relationship?
‘You’re off your head,’ he says, quite calmly. ‘You know what? I think you need help.’
MATT’S STORY
I suppose I’m the villain of the story now. The pig, the nasty bastard, who dumps his girlfriend over the phone because he wants to be with another girl. I know how it sounds. Why do you think I’m going to pieces here? But I’m not that kind of a guy. Don’t look at me like that – I’m not!
I was crazy about Katie from the day I first saw her in the pub with that prat James. I could see straight away that he wasn’t any good for her. And I was. Yes, of course I nudged her elbow on purpose to make her drop the sausage. I was desperate to get her attention; who wouldn’t be? As soon as she looked up at me, laughing, sparkling like a bloody diamond in a coalmine, I fell in love with her. The next couple of weeks I was walking around in a trance, desperate to see her again. It was already over, really, between Sara and me but I finished it with almost a callous haste so that I was free to go back to the pub and lurk around waiting to see Katie again. I knew instinctively that she’d come back there, looking for me. Don’t feel sorry for Sara, by the way. She didn’t shed any tears. She told me she’d been w
ondering for a while whether she preferred her friend Becky to me, anyway.
If you’ve met Katie, you’ll understand what I’m saying. She’s got something special. She’s not beautiful in the perfect model-girl way. For a start, she has a constant struggle to stay in a size 14 – but it looks good on her. She’s quite tall, so she carries it well. She’s the most natural-looking girl I’ve ever been with. Sara used to drive me round the bend with her constant bleating about her skin, her hair, her bum, her hips, her cellulite; in the end I gave up trying to tell her to stop worrying, that she looked lovely and there was nothing wrong with her, because it didn’t seem to make any difference. Why don’t girls realise what a turn-off it is, hearing them whingeing on and on about their imperfections, their pathetic stupid worries about their looks, when half the world’s dying from terrible diseases and the other half would faint with happiness if they could afford one single jar of their silly creams and potions?
After Sara, and other girls like her, Katie was like a refreshing summer shower. She’s almost childlike in her enjoyment of life. It’s infectious. I was addicted to her, couldn’t get enough of her. What did she see in me? I don’t know; you’ll have to ask her. I think we liked the same things – walking in the woods, enjoying simple food, listening to music. We just loved being together. It was fantastic. I’d found out that I actually believed in love.
Looking back, I think it all happened too fast. We were greedy for love, grasping at it with both hands, guzzling it up, eating it alive. We didn’t give ourselves time to breathe – we didn’t want to. We moved in together, and virtually closed the door on the rest of the world. We thought we were enough for each other.
Now that I’ve had time to think about what went wrong, I blame Katie completely.
She’s got this ridiculous, immature addiction to romance. If she hadn’t been so obsessed with it, perhaps we would have settled down eventually to a sensible, ordinary relationship and we could have lived together like other normal couples, accepting the ups and downs, having rows and getting over them, maybe even having separations – having lives. Lives that didn’t necessarily have to entwine around each other every fucking minute of every fucking day. Trust me: what starts out as cosy and exclusive ends up feeling like incarceration.
To Katie, keeping the romance alive meant more than just the occasional surprise trip to the theatre or a bunch of roses on Valentine’s Day. It meant that we were still supposed to gasp with delight every time we saw each other, even after living together for a year or more. We were supposed to think about each other constantly, shiver at each other’s touch, feel hoarse with excitement when we spoke on the phone. It was absolutely fucking exhausting. I would have given anything to come home after a hard day at work, collapse on the sofa with a beer and a curry and watch football all night, without being asked if I still loved her and wouldn’t I rather have a candlelit dinner and look into each other’s eyes while listening to a CD of hideous love songs?
Eventually, of course, it became almost impossible to keep the romance alive, at least to Katie’s standards, and from my point of view, things started to become more normal and bearable. Don’t get me wrong. I still loved her like crazy. If I didn’t, for God’s sake, I would have ditched her long ago, wouldn’t I? But predictably, as our lives started to get back into gear – going out to the pub with friends like Sean and Emily, for instance, instead of spending every night cuddled up on the sofa being romantic – Katie started worrying that things weren’t right between us any more. And her solution was a romantic wedding.
I admit, if she hadn’t suggested it, I might not have thought about it for a couple more years, but I was up for it, absolutely. You love someone, you live with them, you eventually want to marry them; on the whole, I think girls still want that, and I haven’t got a problem with it. I didn’t want anyone else, just Katie, and I wanted her for life. So we were both excited about the wedding idea. We started off planning something very quiet and simple. It would have suited us both; we didn’t have much money anyway, and Katie has never been the type to insist on lots of fuss and over-indulgence. She didn’t even want a wedding dress until her sister insisted on making it for her. She wasn’t bothered about having bridesmaids but she felt guilty about her sister and Emily, and then she remembered promising Jude… and you see how these things escalate? I didn’t mind. It was mostly for her benefit, so I was happy to go along with whatever she, or perhaps what her mum, wanted. Anyway, all the plans seemed to be coming along fine to me – but as the months passed and we got nearer to the wedding, Katie just got more and more cross and irritable. I couldn’t understand what her problem was. Was it the wedding? Or was it me? I certainly seemed to be getting all the backlash, anyway, and it was beginning to seriously piss me off. Look – she was getting the full works – big white wedding, reception with caterers and disco, champagne, cake, the lot. What did she have to be arsey with me about? Emily kept saying it was just pre-wedding nerves, but all I could see was that the lovely happy girl I’d fallen in love with was vanishing in front of my eyes and being replaced by this scowling, nagging rat-bag who picked on me, accused me of being uncaring and then expected me to be romantic! It was all very well thinking things would get back to normal after the wedding. But what if they didn’t?
I don’t care what you’re thinking – I hadn’t even noticed Claire, hadn’t even given her a second look, although she worked in the same office as me. It’s a big, open-plan office with screens dividing the various sections of the company and we worked in different sections, sitting back to back with a screen between us. Occasionally I heard her laughing, or talking on the phone, but apart from that I didn’t have any contact with her. When I passed her on my way to the lifts or the water cooler or the photocopier I found myself wondering how old she was. I have this sort of a mental compulsion about trying to work out people’s ages. It’s usually easier with blokes, and it gets harder with women the older they get. Claire, with her cropped brown hair and those kind of elfin features that only look right on small-boned people, could almost have passed for twenty-five. But I knew that was nonsense because there was something much more mature about her: something about her tone of voice, the calmness of her movements – a sort of serenity that it’s hard to put a finger on, but which is very attractive and enigmatic.
I didn’t take any conscious notice of any of this, as I was saying, until the day I found her crying over the photocopier. Quite literally. She seemed to be having a fight with it – her hands were covered in black ink, with an endearing smudge of it on the tip of her nose and another splodge on her right cheek – and she was half leaning, half lying, over the open front of the machine, tugging at a piece of jammed paper and calling it a fucking bastard. And crying.
Not many women look attractive when they cry. Claire managed to look astounding. But it was the fighting and swearing at the photocopier that really made me smile. It was so completely at odds with her normal calm composure, which I suppose is what made me suddenly so aware of it.
‘I’m only crying,’ she told me, looking up and seeing me but not bothering to get up, wipe her nose or her hands or make any attempt whatsoever to be polite, ‘because I’m so fucking angry! My whole life depends on this document, and the fucking machine has mangled it up!’
I’ve never been so pleased in my life to be a comparative expert in photocopier technology. By the time I’d extracted her document, admittedly slightly mangled, and discussed various possibilities of lifesaving strategies with her – (Take the document home and iron it? Ask the client for another copy, claiming it’s been stolen during an invasion by aliens? Hack into their computer system and try to find a copy of it saved in their confidential files by guessing the password?) – while she scrubbed the ink off herself and dried her tears, we were both laughing together. I hadn’t laughed much for quite a while. It felt good. Very good.
I suppose you think you can guess the rest, but you can’t. We didn’t fall in
to bed together. We wanted to. We talked about it. We also talked about Katie, and relationships, and love (not romance), and integrity. Claire’s very big on integrity.
‘I’m not stealing another girl’s man,’ she told me with her chin held very high. ‘And I’m not being a bit on the side. Forget it.’
‘I can’t. I can’t forget it – I can’t forget you. I’m thinking about you while I’m with her.’
‘Then you have to choose,’ she said more gently. ‘But I’m not going to ask you to choose me. I couldn’t live with that responsibility.’
By the time she’d explained why she was so determined not to be the cause of any break-up, I’d also found out how old she was. She’d just turned forty – eight years older than me. She’d been married when she was much too young, had two sons while she was still in her early twenties, and soon afterwards her husband had walked out on her for one of her friends. When I tried to express my sympathy she quickly shook it off.
‘I’ve moved on. It was tough while the kids were little, but they’re nearly grown up now and I’m on the verge of freedom again. It’s a good feeling, having the world at my feet, just as some of my friends who left it all a lot later are struggling with toddlers’ tantrums or trying to balance their careers with the school run, sports days, bouts of tonsillitis and ear infections.’
‘Yuck!’ I laughed. ‘You make it sound so appealing.’
‘It is – at the time,’ she replied, seriously. ‘But in retrospect, you’re dead right. Yuck! I certainly wouldn’t want to go back.’
The fact that we laughed about this together probably tells you all you need to know about my take on having kids. You might think it very weird that Katie and I hadn’t really talked about it. I suppose it is; but the fact is that it’s never interested me much at all. Maybe in time, if Katie had started all the stuff that women do, about her body clock ticking and needing to be fulfilled, I’d have gone along with it. A bit like I did with the wedding idea – to make her happy. I’d have probably done anything to make her happy. But not yet. Not now. And when I was with Claire, listening to her vision of freedom – of waiting until her boys were finished college and then taking off to travel the world, with no responsibilities or ties and nothing to hold her back apart from the rucksack on her back – I found myself thinking: No – no kids. Not ever.
