The Reunion (22 page)

Zac shrugged. ‘Maybe. My brothers used to kick the shit out of me when I was little.’ Dan struggled to believe there was ever a time that Zac was little. ‘But we get on all right now. Lisa – that’s my sister – she’s a little sweetie.’

‘It must be nice.’

‘You? No siblings?’

‘No siblings and no parents. Not any more.’

‘Shit. Sorry. That’s harsh.’

‘Yes, it is harsh, isn’t it? I miss having a family. Not my real family of course, because that was never really a proper family. Long story. But us,’ he gestured around him. ‘These guys, they were my family once. Closest thing I ever had, in any case.’ He took a long swig of his beer. ‘It’s why it hurt so much, when everything fell apart. They don’t think I lost anything, you know. In fact, they think I
gained
. That bloody film. I never meant to hurt them.’ He looked up at Zac. ‘Tell her, tell Lilah. It was never my intention. Tell her I mean that. I hate the fact I hurt her feelings so badly.’ He shook his head. ‘It was my fault, you know. She didn’t over-react. I was stupid, I was a fucking idiot – I used stuff that she’d done and said, I took things and twisted them, I created this character… it
was
fiction. It
wasn’t
her. It wasn’t how I saw her, but there were too many similarities, it was too close to the bone. Christ, even the actress they chose –
they
chose, it had nothing to do with me – she looked like Lilah. And it was the last thing she needed, poor girl.’ Dan spread his hands out, imploring. ‘I tried to contact her, you know. Many times. She wouldn’t have it.’

Zac smiled. ‘If grudge-holding were an Olympic sport…’

‘Lilah for gold, Natalie for silver?’ They both laughed. ‘I wish there were something I could do to make it up to her.’ Zac leaned back in his seat, studying Dan’s face, his expression inscrutable. ‘What?’ Dan asked him. ‘Is there something?’

Zac shook his head. ‘Not for me to say,’ he said quietly. He finished off his beer and got up to place the bottle with the rest of the empties on the kitchen counter.

‘No, go on,’ Dan said. ‘Tell me. I won’t say anything to her. What is it? She doesn’t want to try acting again, does she? Because we tried that at college and it didn’t work out. She’s got the looks and the sense of drama all right, but the woman can’t take direction.’

Zac grinned. ‘It’s not that.’

‘What then?’ Even in the half-light, Dan could see from the way Zac shrugged, lowered his lids, that he was embarrassed. ‘Money? She needs money?’

Zac puffed out his cheeks, spreading his arms wide. ‘I can take care of her. I will. She’s broke. She has been for a long time, she ran up a lot of debts. I don’t exactly earn a lot, but we get by. Only… well. You know Lilah. Getting by isn’t really her style.’

Dan was only half listening. He was rather pleased that she wanted to ask him for money. That was familial, wasn’t it? When you were hard up, got yourself into debt, you turned to family, didn’t you? That’s what people did, wasn’t it?

‘She has this whole thing,’ Zac was saying, ‘about how you owe her.’ He held his hands up in supplication. ‘I don’t think that. I think she’s taken resentment over that film too far. But she seems to think that she deserves something from you. Reparations, she calls it.’

Dan’s heart sank then. She wasn’t turning to him because she thought of him as family, she saw it as repayment of a debt – worse, punitive damages for what he’d done to her.

‘Don’t say anything to her, Dan, I shouldn’t have mentioned this.’

‘No, no,’ he said distracted. ‘Of course not.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket again, ran his fingers over the touchpad to bring it to life. He brought up Claudia’s message and tapped ‘reply’.

There was a noise from the hall and Jen appeared in the doorway. She was leaning against the arch, her hair falling forward a little into her face. She looked exhausted.

‘I’m off to bed,’ she said. ‘Will you two be OK?’

‘Course we will,’ Zac said. ‘I think I’m ready to crash out myself.’

‘Dan?’

‘Yeah, fine. You go on.’

‘OK,’ she said. She walked over to him, leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. She smelled of vanilla, and a touch of something citrusy. The scent sparked something, a memory travelled through him like electricity. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly, brushing her thumb over his cheekbone, ‘that things got so fraught today. I’m so glad you came.’

His breathing was shallow. He brought his hand up to take hers. The room seemed oddly still – the fire no longer crackled, the wind no longer howled, Zac may as well have disappeared into thin air. ‘I’m glad, too.’

She let go of his hand and turned away.

He sat in the darkness for a long while afterwards, staring at his phone, looking over at the staircase, listening to the creaking of the house, people moving around upstairs, Zac’s heavy footfall, Jen so much softer. When she kissed him, spoke to him in that low voice, when he could smell her and touch her, he was transported. It was a revelation. He had a chance. He couldn’t let it pass. He replied to Claudia’s message:
Don’t tell him yet. We need to talk. Call me.

September 1999

Email exchange between Dan and Lilah

Dan to Lilah

Lilah,

I called three times yesterday, I assume you’re ignoring me. I’m sorry you took offence at some of the stuff in the film. You have to know that while there were aspects of you in the Zara character, it wasn’t supposed to
be
you. Let me take you out for champagne as an apology? Please, I don’t want us to fall out over this.

Dan

Lilah to Dan

You’re sorry I took offence? Are you kidding me? I didn’t take offence, Dan, what you did was offensive. And I don’t care about the fact that the character might have had aspects of me or not, you used things I’d told you in confidence, you used my words, my actual words. You used things I told you when I was desperate, broken-bloody-hearted. Tell me, were you making notes when we were having all those chats when I stayed with you? Maybe you were recording me? Did you bug my room?

You’re an arsehole and no quantity of champagne will make up for this.

Dan to Lilah

Of course I wasn’t bloody taking notes. I’m a writer, Lilah. We use things from life, all artists do. Once again, I’m sorry if I offended you (is that a better sentence construction?). It wasn’t my intention, and I have to say that I’m pretty upset that all you saw in the film was a slight against you. There was a bit more to it than that, I hoped.

Lilah to Dan

Sod off you pretentious wanker.

ANDREW HAD FORGOTTEN
how loudly Lilah snored. It was extraordinary how such a delicate creature, so fine-featured and small-boned, could produce quite so much noise, quite so much grunting and snorting, in her sleep. He remembered now that the reason for his lack of sleep between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three was not solely Lilah’s voracious sexual appetite but her terrible sinus issues.

He slipped out of bed and walked to the window. The snow had almost stopped. It lay thick on the road, almost perfect, untouched save for a sole trail of tiny prints, weaving this way and that – a drunken fox, perhaps? The branches of the trees opposite sank almost to the ground under the weight of snow and, just outside the window, icicles, some three or four feet long, hung from the eaves, gleaming silver in reflected moonlight. He thought he might take some pictures to show the girls. Quietly, he crept over to the bed and retrieved his phone from the bedside table.

He’d turned it off to save battery and on turning it back on he discovered, with a start, that the signal had returned. The phone beeped at him, angrily and repeatedly, alerting him to missed calls and text messages. He tried to muffle its sound under the blanket he had wrapped around his body, although it didn’t actually matter: Lilah wouldn’t have been woken by a bomb going off. She could sleep through anything.

There were twenty-four missed calls, mostly from Jen’s landline, and a number of text messages, mostly from Natalie. As he flicked through them, he noticed a clear trajectory in tone, from frightened (
r u ok, call me
) to panicky (
Where r u? V worried pls call asap
), before a sudden hairpin bend towards jealous rage, and finally, a long slow drift into incomprehensibility (
u aasvard dont cmmd cabk
).

There were also three messages from his daughters, one from Grace telling him she’d had an ‘epic’ time at Longleat Safari Park (still so easily entertained, Grace; she hadn’t quite tipped over into teenager-hood yet) and one from Charlotte asking if he could persuade Natalie to let them go to Sonja’s party on New Year’s Eve. Charlotte most definitely was a teenager, and had already developed the technique of waging extended divide-and-rule campaigns in order to get whatever it was she wanted. Andrew was seen as the weaker of the parents so he was always the first point of attack. The third text, also from Charlotte, was a picture of the two of them, grinning happily in the front room of their grandparents’ house, with a ‘
love you Dad xxxxx
’ message attached. This sent a few minutes before the New Year’s Eve party request, to soften him up. Nobody’s fool, that girl, just like her mother.

He took some pictures of the snowy scene outside, his heart swollen: beauty and love, what more could you wish for? His friends (even Natalie, it now seemed), looked at his life and felt sorry for him, but the thing no one seemed to realise about him was that, of all of them, he counted himself the luckiest. He got what he wanted, he got the woman he loved, and two beautiful daughters into the bargain. He longed to see them now, his arms ached for them.

He shivered. He felt a nameless fear, dread, rising up in him. He could tell himself a thousand times that it would be OK, because although Natalie would be angry with him tomorrow (today), and the day after that and possibly a few days more, they would be OK, once the anger burned out. Once his own anger burned out. Things would go back to normal once the guilt was crushed down, shrugged off, ignored. They would be OK. Wouldn’t they? After all they had been through together, they could get through this. And yet, he felt afraid. He typed a message to Nat.
Hope this doesn’t wake you up, just wanted to tell you how much I love you. Always, A.

He turned back from the window, smiling despite himself at the girl in the bed, arms and legs everywhere, a beautiful broken doll. He crawled back into bed, trying his best not to disturb her, trying to find some corner of the bed where he could curl up without touching her. He needed, now, to put as much space as he could between his body and Lilah’s. He closed his eyes and dreamed of Nat lying next to him: he dreamed of putting his hands on her, feeling her shiver.

16 January 1997

Email, from Andrew to Nat

Dear Nat,

I got your email yesterday, I called last night but your mum said you were really tired and had turned in early. Perhaps that’s true, but if it isn’t, I can think of at least two possible reasons why.

Either way, I understand.

Let me explain though, about Lilah. She came to pick me up at Basingstoke, and I realised that I couldn’t lie to her, I couldn’t just sit there and lie, I couldn’t pretend what happened between you and me didn’t happen, I couldn’t go home with her, go to bed with her, carry on with her. I couldn’t. I could have made excuses, told her I was tired, that I wasn’t feeling well… You say I know you. Well, you know me. You know I couldn’t do that, I’m not built that way. So I just told her. I told her that I’d fallen in love with you.

The damage is done. By the time I got back last night she was gone, she’d taken some of her stuff and smashed a fair bit of mine. Dan left me a message in the early hours to say she’d turned up at his place – he said she’s going to stay there for a while. Did she call you? Whatever she said, you know that she won’t have meant it. She loves you, she will forgive you.

If you can’t be with me, I understand that. But I won’t accept it. I won’t go away. I’m not saying I’m going to hassle you, or stalk you, or call you every night, but I’m not going away. I won’t live without you, Nat. I refuse to, not after everything you and I have been through. Perhaps, in the light of everything, I don’t deserve to be happy. But you do, and I believe, I know, more certainly than I’ve ever known anything, that I can make you happy if you let me.

There is nothing on this earth that will stop me loving you. Sorry if I sound like a lovesick teenager, but that’s how I feel.