The Reunion (28 page)

‘I’ll miss the flight,’ he said abruptly, cutting her off. He was irritated, because she knew he had to leave, and if she’d wanted to talk, if she’d really wanted to make up with him, she could have done so earlier.

‘Please,’ she said again, her voice small and tight.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with you, Jen. It seems like I’m the one putting in all the effort here. And it seems like no matter what I do, it’s wrong.’ He picked up his bag and turned to go and saw the look on her face and knew that she was going to cry and in that second decided that he wasn’t going to comfort her.

He left without kissing her goodbye.

The second he got into Cork airport, he was going to call her at work and tell her how sorry he was, that he loved her more than anything, that he always would. And he would apologise for asking her whether she still loved him, because he knew that she did, he knew it in the core of him, how could he have questioned it? It was insulting to her, it was hurtful. And though he still felt that she’d been unfair, now, in the cold clear light of day, up here at 30,000 feet with danger of death imminent, he could admit that he had perhaps taken decisions that, just maybe, he ought to have discussed with her. Like going to Cork for Christmas, for example.

And thinking about it, he knew full well why she said what she did about marriage and children, he knew that she’d overheard him talking to his mum and his aunties after Christmas lunch, when they’d been asking when there would be a wedding, and grandchildren, and all that, and he’d been saying soon, within a year or two. He knew she’d felt a bit put out about that, but he’d only been saying it to get them off his back. Only, it struck him that he’d never really explained that to her, not in so many words.

If only they’d talked through it. And there was the problem, in a nutshell, they hadn’t been talking the way they used to. That was probably his fault too, or mostly his fault, in any case. He was working all the time, he was going to Ireland a lot, plus there were those months when Dan was staying (which was another decision he’d taken without really talking it through with her), when they didn’t have much time to themselves.

As long as he could talk to her, as long as this plane didn’t pitch into the sea, he’d make it right.

SHE CALLED IN
sick, and she didn’t even feel guilty about it, because she
felt
sick. When she heard the front door close, when she realised he’d really gone, that she wouldn’t be able to see him, hold him, make it up to him for a whole week, she felt physically ill.

She pulled the duvet over her head and lay there, replaying the argument over and over. She’d been unreasonable. She’d been unkind. She’d thrown a pizza slice at his head. She’d said terrible, awful things. Bloody wife, bloody children. She kept hearing him ask her over and over again, whether she still loved him. She curled herself into a ball. If she stayed here all day, that was all she would hear, it wouldn’t stop. She had to get up, she had to do something.

She showered, dressed and went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. She rang Lilah, with whom she didn’t really want to spend the day, and was relieved when she said there was no way she could pull another sickie. She didn’t bother to call Nat or Andrew, because she knew very well that it would take Ebola fever or a severed limb to get either of them to call in sick. And in any case, she didn’t really want to spend the day with either of them.

She wanted to spend the day with Dan. She just didn’t really want to think about why she’d rather be with him than with any of her other friends. The thought unnerved her. She couldn’t remember exactly when this sense of being closer to him than all the others had started. It crept up on her, barely noticeable at first, and then there was that night out with the girls when they were teasing her about him and she got so angry, and suddenly it was all she could think about, these feelings she was having that she shouldn’t be having.

If only he hadn’t come to stay. Being around him all the time, that was what did it. Seeing him first thing in the morning, his hair sticking up and his pale skin still creased with sleep, tall and skinny with big, mournful grey eyes, eyes alive with light when he looked at her. It was his hopelessness, his general crapness, the fact that he couldn’t boil an egg, that if it weren’t for her he’d live on takeaways and Pot Noodles. It was all those long nights on the sofa talking, when he told her about how it had been for him, growing up, motherless and then fatherless, when she realised how hard he’d had it and how, compared to him, the rest of them were blessed, spoiled. He’d had to struggle so much, and yet here he was, funny and kind and when he looked at her a certain way it gave her butterflies.

She didn’t like thinking about it, didn’t like arriving home at night and looking sadly at the spot on the sofa where he always sat, one leg crossed over the other (surprisingly elegant), cigarette in hand, laughing at something on the television. She didn’t like how much she thought about him. She especially didn’t like the way in which she’d come to make comparisons between him and Conor.

She knew that it was a bad idea to call him. She dialled his number. She put the phone down. Then she dialled it again.

He was on the train within the hour and she met him at Liverpool Street at midday. They had lunch in Shoreditch, went to White Cube on Hoxton Square, wandered down Commercial Street and had a couple of drinks at the Golden Heart. They hopped on the tube and went to the Barbican where they saw an incomprehensible and highly erotic Japanese film. They went back to the flat. There were three messages on the voicemail. She didn’t listen to them. She and Dan sat, facing each other on the sofa, feet almost but not quite touching, drinking red wine.

HER TOENAILS WERE
painted dark red. Almost black. She had perfect, pale, neat little feet, the kind a fetishist might get excited about. Not that he was one. But Dan did realise that when he was with her, he focused on the small things. He thought about how she would look on camera; he looked for her best angles. He’d yet to find a bad one.

He wanted her so badly, he’d never wanted anyone like this. You could write songs about this girl, you could make a film about her face, about her laugh, and her long, elegant neck and the contour of her lips. His blood was rising, he had to stop it, he bit his lip, hard.

It wasn’t new, this thing with her, but it was getting worse, so much worse, every time he saw her, spoke to her. Kissing her hello was the most exquisite agony he had ever felt. It wasn’t new, but he’d allowed it to escalate, he indulged himself now, with thoughts of her, he thought about her in a way he hadn’t permitted himself to do for years, not since they’d first met and he’d realised, within a short space of time, that she would never look at him the way she did at Conor.

Only lately, he wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t exactly that she’d given him reason to hope. She hadn’t really encouraged him. Not until now anyway, if you considered inviting him to stay with her while her boyfriend was away as encouragement. Which it was, surely? Only he couldn’t be sure. He’d been in love with her so long he could no longer tell whether he was simply inventing motives for her, putting meaning that wasn’t there into her words and the way she looked at him.

Thinking about it led to writing about it. Not that Jen knew what it was really about. The girl in the story, the one the boy loves but can’t have, was well disguised. Dan had let Jen believe that it was based on a girl from college called Cara Nicholson who’d left him for an Old Harrovian with a trust fund and a family chalet in Chamonix. Jen wasn’t to know that he didn’t give a toss about Cara Nicholson; that there wasn’t a single one of his girlfriends or casual flings at college for whom he felt one tenth of what he felt for her.

He wanted to talk to Jen about the screenplay, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep up the pretence, whether she’d see straight through it. So when she’d asked him that afternoon, ‘How’s the writing going?’ he’d answered, ‘Oh, yeah, not so bad,’ and then changed the subject. She’d given him a bit of a funny look then (or had he imagined her giving him a funny look?) because he never passed up an opportunity to talk about his writing, but she’d let it go.

He wanted to talk to her about it because she’d become his sounding board for the screenplay. Somehow, he just couldn’t get the second part of the film (unrequited love) to gel with the first (a thinly fictionalised account of his childhood, his mother’s death from cancer when he was eight, his chaotic upbringing by a father who suffered from bipolar disorder). He was pretty sure it
could
work, only for some reason the tone of the first part jarred with the second.

But he couldn’t trust himself to talk about the fake-Cara real-Jen girl without giving himself away. The conversation had long since moved away from work in any case, it had moved on from their friends and their plans for the summer and now it drifted into even trickier territory.

She was talking to him about having problems with Conor, about the fight they’d had, and how she’d been feeling frustrated with him lately, how she felt as though everything was moving a little too quickly all of a sudden, how it scared her, how she felt as though she were losing control.

It wasn’t the first time she’d complained to him about Conor, and he wished she wouldn’t. He didn’t want to hear it, because it made him hopeful, and it also made him wretched, because he loved Conor. He was the kind of friend who would walk across hot coals for him, for any of them.

She shouldn’t be talking to him about Conor. Only, she
should
be talking to him about Conor, because he was her friend, and that’s what friends are for, isn’t it, to listen to you bitch and moan about your relationship when everything’s not going so well? She wasn’t to know how she made him feel. There was nothing between them, there never had been.

Now, toes touching, there was literally nothing between them, no space, no distance: he could reach out, if he dared, and touch her face, run his thumb along her luscious lower lip, slip his hand around the back of her beautiful, long, ivory neck, pull her face towards his, kiss her.

‘Dan? Am I boring you?’

‘What? No! Sorry, I was just thinking, you know, that…’ He couldn’t touch her, he couldn’t kiss her. ‘I was thinking that maybe you need to cut him some slack.’

She frowned at him; she had the most perfect frown. ‘I thought you’d be on my side, I know he drives you mental sometimes too.’

‘He does not!’ Dan lied with a laugh. ‘No, seriously, the thing is, you’ve got to think about how it is for him. He was the big man on campus, wasn’t he, at college? Him and Andrew, rugby team, student council, all that crap. For some people it can be a bit tricky to adjust to life after that, in the real world, when you’re nothing special any longer, not that I’m saying he’s nothing special…’

‘That’s what he keeps saying,’ Jen muttered, beautiful lower lip plumped out. ‘Adjustment year, blah blah. But that only makes me feel more anxious, as though I have just one year to adjust, and that year’s almost finished now. And I don’t feel adjusted yet! I don’t feel ready to go off travelling yet, I feel like I need to settle into normal, working life first. And as for marriage…’

‘He’s talking about marriage?’ Dan asked, and hoped that she couldn’t hear the note of despair in his voice.

‘Well, not dates or anything, but it’s… It’s what we’ve always thought, you know. It’s what we wanted.’

Dan cursed himself for being such a coward, for not having the courage to ask: ‘What you wanted, or what you
want
?’ He knew the answer anyway, he knew she would marry Conor, he’d always known. Only, now, she was sitting opposite him, resting her chin on her knees, looking up at him, just a touch of blush in her cheeks and a smile on her lips and he didn’t know any longer, he didn’t know anything.

‘What are you smiling at?’ he asked her.

‘Nothing.’ She laughed (her laugh was like music, the soundtrack to the film he’d make, about the contours of her lips).