Dinner for Two (25 page)

All that was missing was ‘The End’. Only I could distil a saga like this into a few hastily thrown-together sentences. I look at Izzy and I can tell she wants to cry again but the reality of the situation has shocked the tears from her. I know I have to give her more details – anything that might make her understand my point of view and so, without prompting, I tell the story again, right from the beginning, and as I speak the same question keeps recurring in my mind:
Why didn’t I tell her from the very start?

Izzy listens without interrupting. Once it becomes clear that I’ve finished talking she stands up and picks up Nicola’s photo from the kitchen counter. ‘I stopped taking my pill three weeks ago,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘I stopped taking my pill three weeks ago.’

‘Are you saying you’re pregnant?’

‘I don’t know. Yet.’

‘I don’t understand. Why didn’t you talk to me? Surely you could’ve talked to me about . . .’

‘I wanted the decision taken out of my hands. It sounds stupid when I say it aloud but that’s how I felt. I just wanted to get “accidentally pregnant” again. I didn’t want us to have to try to have a baby and have it fail again.’

‘And what does all this mean after what I’ve told you?’

‘I don’t feel anything,’ she says, without looking at me. ‘I’m numb.’

‘You must know that I didn’t do this to hurt you. I acted stupidly. I acted carelessly. I acted hurtfully. But I never did any of it to hurt you.’

‘So that’s okay?’ she says sharply. ‘You didn’t mean to hurt me so the fact that you have makes it all right, does it? Whether or not you inflicted this pain on me on purpose the result is the same. After dealing with all the hurt of the miscarriage, now I have to deal with this: the fact that you have a daughter with another woman; the fact that you’ve been skulking around, telling me lies all this time. How dare you try to deny me the right to be angry with you? How can you stand there and tell me you’re sorry? It’s meaningless. And if that is meaningless what else have you said to me that’s meaningless? You promised to love and cherish me for ever – was that meaningless? You promised you’d share everything with me –
the good and the bad
. Was that meaningless too? How can you stand there and say something like that? Something that will completely and utterly destroy my peace of mind? I hadn’t thought it possible to feel so betrayed.’ She walks out of the room, grabs her coat and bag from the hallway and opens the front door.

‘Where are you going? You’ve got to stay. We’ve got to work this out.’ I catch up with her on the landing outside the flat and grab her arm. ‘Don’t go. Just don’t go, please.’

She looks at me in a way she never has before – with a mixture of hurt and hatred. ‘
Don’t touch me!
’ she spits. ‘Don’t you
dare
touch me again.’

It’s late afternoon on Monday and I’m at work. I could’ve stayed at home and moped around the flat. I could’ve spent the day in bed. But I don’t feel I have the right to fall apart. All I’ve earned is the right to go to work, keep it together and suffer in silence. So that’s what I do.

I haven’t heard a word from Izzy for two days now – the entire weekend. I’ve called her mobile but it’s switched off, I’ve called Jenny and Stella, and both deny knowledge of where she is or might be. I even called her at work this morning and her assistant told me she was working from home today.

Because I can’t talk to her in reality I talk to her in my head. I tell her I’m sorry a million times. I tell her I want everything that has happened to be in the past. And then I tell her I want us to make a new future – and what better way than with a baby? Her being pregnant seems to be the answer to everything. But I want to know that this is the right thing. I want to be sure. I want the kind of answer I give the readers of
Teen Scene
. They write to me looking for solutions to their predicaments and I oblige by giving them not just any answer but
the
answer, reducing their options from many to one so that they know exactly what they should do. I grab a handful of Love Doctor letters from my postbag, open them and begin to read.

The first was in a plain white envelope with small, neat, feminine handwriting:

I’ve been going out with my boyfriend for two months. It’s great in so many ways: he makes me laugh, he’s always attentive and buys me presents all the time. The only problem is his jealousy. He gets annoyed if any of the boys in my class even look at me let alone talk to me. This is really getting me down. What should I do
?

I pick up a second letter, a pale blue envelope with unmistakably teenage handwriting in silver ink:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
fan (16), Nottingham

I pick up a third letter, a cream-coloured envelope with a cartoon fieldmouse in the corner chewing a blade of grass. The handwriting is much the same as the previous one but this time the ink is a silvery green.

I compare the letter in my hand to the previous one. They have exactly the same handwriting. I check the postmarks on the envelopes. The first says Cambridge, even though it’s supposed to have been from Nottingham, and the second says Cambridge even though its writer apparently lives in Cornwall. The
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
fan (16) and the Janet Jackson fan (14) are both some bored teenage girl in Cambridge who likes
Teen Scene
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and Janet Jackson but doesn’t have any problems with her life and needs to make some up to feel like a valid human being. If I’d been in any other frame of mind, this would have made me laugh but now it depresses me.

I’m wasting my time doing this job and I’m wasting my talents. The readers of
Teen Scene
don’t have real problems –
I
do. I wake up my computer, which had long since gone to sleep, open my e-mail and begin a note to Jenny. I tell her that I’ll write agony-uncle columns for another two issues but after today I won’t be back in to work at
Teen Scene
. Then I write one to Fran, who, thankfully, is out of the office on a ‘make over your life’ competition shoot. I tell her thanks for everything and that I’m sure we’ll bump into each other some time in the future. I press send on both e-mails, tidy my desk, pick up my bag and walk out of the office.

I’m sitting on a bench in the gardens at the centre of Soho Square. The weather, although not warm, is okay for the time of year – pleasant enough to attract a number of people with nothing better to do than sit down and waste a few hours looking at the sky. I dig into my bag for my personal stereo. When I was younger I listened to music at every opportunity: on my way to and from work, at work, and in those spare moments at home when Izzy had gone to bed and I’d stay up until four listening to album after album on my headphones, cocooned in a world I understood. I want that feeling right away. I put on my headphones, close my eyes to the world outside and press play, but even in music there’s no escape because every song on the tape has a link to Izzy – songs she loved, songs she hated, songs she tolerated, songs that made her cry and songs that made her happy. And, for some reason, this makes me happy too. Even in music she’s there at my centre. Being lost in music means being lost in her.

The tape lasts ninety minutes.

When the tape ends I decide to go home. I head towards Oxford Street and as I walk I check my phone for messages. There are three: one from Jenny, telling me she refuses to get another agony uncle until she’s spoken to me, and two from Fran, asking my whereabouts. None from Izzy. I dial Fran’s number at work.

‘Hello,
Teen Scene
.’

‘Hi, Fran, it’s Dave.’

‘I got your e-mail. Were you really going to say goodbye like that?’

‘I didn’t want to make a big fuss.’

‘Are you sure you won’t come back to
Teen Scene
? I was talking to Jenny about it and she said she was going to try to persuade you to stay. There’s no need to go.’

‘I know. It’s just that . . . this is going to sound stupid but I got two Love Doctor letters today and they were so obviously made up by the same girl that it just . . . well, it kind of depressed me. I mean, what’s the point?’

‘The point, Dave, is that you’re mad for thinking that two letters from one girl count for anything. You help people. The girls who read the column feel better about themselves because they’ve written to you. That’s got to be a good thing, surely?’ I don’t reply. ‘I get the feeling something’s gone wrong,’ says Fran.

‘You could say that.’

‘Is it what I’m thinking?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did she find out?’

‘I told her.’

‘Oh. And she’s . . .’

I finish her sentence for her. ‘Left me? Yeah.’

‘But she’s coming back?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since Friday night.’

‘You shouldn’t be on your own,’ says Fran. ‘I’ll be finished here in a few minutes. I’ve got a couple of things to put through that Tina’s been nagging me for all week and we’ll go for a drink or something to eat. I’m not going to take no for an answer. I’ll meet you downstairs at the Phoenix on Charing Cross Road in half an hour, okay?’

‘I can’t. I’d be terrible company.’

‘I don’t mind. We can just sit, if you want to.’

‘No, really.’

‘Well, when will I see you again?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know when any of this will be sorted. And I just won’t be thinking straight until then.’

‘So why don’t you come back to
Teen Scene
until then?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not really me. I’ve been thinking I might go back to music journalism full time.’ I laughed. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for the world of relationships.’

‘So that’s it, I’m not going to see you again?’

‘Of course you will. I just don’t know when.’

‘Come for a drink,’ Fran pleads. ‘It’ll be the world’s smallest leaving party. Just you, me and too much alcohol.’

She makes me laugh so I say okay. ‘I’ll meet you from work and we’ll go for a drink,’ I tell her.

I switch off my mobile, put it back into my bag and nearly walk straight into a couple heading the other way. I’m about to apologise when I realise I know them. Only they’re not supposed to be a couple. It’s Trevor and Stella.

‘Dave,’ says Stella immediately, ‘I can explain.’ She looks at Trevor. ‘
We
can explain.’

‘I know this looks really bad,’ says Trevor. ‘We’re together, Dave,’ he explains. ‘We have been for a while. Everyone’s going to find out soon anyway.’

‘How long has this been going on?’ I ask.

‘A while,’ says Stella. ‘Before I split up with Lee if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘So, why were you so upset when you and Lee split up?’

‘Because even if I didn’t want to be with him, I did still love him.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Does anyone else know?’

‘No,’ says Stella, and then there’s a long silence.

Secrets, I think. Everybody’s got them. Even me.

‘No offence,’ I say to them both, ‘but I’d never have put you two together. I don’t know, we’ve all been friends for such a long time but it never occurred to me that something like this could be going on.’

‘It came as a surprise as much to us,’ says Stella, ‘but one day Trevor and I just clicked. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realised how great he was.’

‘I felt really guilty at first,’ says Trevor. ‘I still do, but Jenny was never right for me and I was never right for her. We were together out of habit, really. I’d have moved out a long while ago but . . . I’m not brilliant at breaking bad news. I know I have to tell her soon but now never seems to be the right time.’

‘It’s true,’ says Stella. ‘When this all comes out I know it’s going to cause a lot of hurt – especially to Jenny as she’s my friend – but we just couldn’t help ourselves.’