Chapter 27
27
By the time Sam gets home, early in the evening, I’m all cried out; I just feel empty and desperately sad. Even Samson has been no comfort as, having initially taken my sobbing as an opportunity to get attention, he evidently decided after a while that I was becoming altogether too needy for him and went out instead.
‘So. How was it?’ Sam asks enthusiastically. ‘Are you hooked on shooting now or was it Dullsville, Arizona?’
‘The shooting was good,’ I tell her, trying to summon some of the happiness I felt earlier today. ‘I hit quite a few, actually.’
‘Really?’ She looks sceptical. ‘I didn’t have you down as the field sports type. This isn’t the top of a slippery slope, is it? If you start foxhunting, I’ll take a dim view.’
‘Foxhunting is illegal, and it’s not the top of a slippery slope. In fact, there is no slope at all.’ My mask crumples and the tears start to fall again.
‘What on earth happened?’ Sam is on the sofa next to me in an instant, wrapping me in a hug.
‘Nothing,’ I murmur into her shoulder.
‘Nonsense. Something happened, otherwise you wouldn’t be so upset. Come on, spill the beans.’
I pull away from her and look her in the eye. ‘You’ll think I’m stupid.’
She grins lopsidedly. ‘I’m sure we’ve both thought each other stupid many times over the years. That doesn’t mean we have to hide stuff from each other. Come on, Ruby. Tell me what happened. Maybe I can help you with it.’
‘You can’t help.’
‘It won’t stop me trying. Even if I can’t help, it will make you feel better. A problem shared and all that.’
In spite of myself, I laugh through my tears. ‘You know that isn’t true, don’t you? Sharing a problem doesn’t halve it at all. All you’ve done is bring someone else down, and you’re no further forward than you were when you shared it.’
‘I know I’ve said this before, but you, my lovely, are such a cynic. I’m sure you never used to be like this when I first met you.’
‘Yeah, well, I have a lot to be cynical about.’
‘Are you going to tell me what happened to make you so upset, or are you just going to retreat inside your shell and refuse to come out?’
‘Not going to lie. The shell sounds pretty attractive at the moment.’
‘You’re being ridiculous now. This is me you’re talking to. If you can’t talk to me, who can you talk to?’
I sigh. ‘You’ve got a point there. I did try talking to Samson, but it turns out he’s not cut out to be a therapist.’
‘Samson has many qualities, but empathy isn’t among them,’ she agrees.
‘He’s still the handsomest cat in Margate.’
‘And you’re trying to change the subject.’
I sigh. ‘Fine. Cameron told me he likes me.’
For a moment, her face is a mask of incomprehension before the penny obviously drops. ‘You mean, as in like like?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him that I couldn’t give him what he wanted, and then I dashed in here and hid until he drove away.’
She thinks for a while, evidently digesting the bombshell. ‘And you’re sure you didn’t get the wrong end of the stick? He wasn’t, for instance, just saying how much he’d enjoyed spending time with you and you maybe read more into it than there was?’
‘I didn’t get the wrong end of the stick, Sam. He told me he’d fallen for me. In fact, he said he’d fallen hard. I think that’s pretty bloody clear, don’t you?’
She thinks a little more before her face hardens. ‘Here’s what I don’t get,’ she says suddenly. ‘I’ve always accepted your no dating rule as just a part of your adult personality. You’re happy with your life as it is, etcetera etcetera. But if that’s all it is, you would have just told him that you were sorry, that’s not your vibe but you were happy to be friends, and moved on. There’s more to this than you’ve told me.’
Shit. I should have known she’d see through me. I can practically hear her brain whirring.
‘Now I come to think about it,’ she continues after a while, ‘you’ve also said you didn’t intend to be single forever. So, if that’s the case, and Cameron is falling at your feet, why turn him down? I mean, we know you like him, and we definitely know you fancy him. He’s a decent guy and you seem to have a lot of fun together. What am I missing?’
It’s like she’s found a loose end on a knitted jumper and is pulling on it. The more she tugs, the more the carefully crafted self-defence I’ve hidden behind for so many years starts to unravel. I’m just not sure I’m ready to bring the truth back out into the open, let alone share it with her. Apart from the people involved at the time, I’ve never told a soul what happened; I can feel myself filling with shame and embarrassment just thinking about it. The problem is that, having suppressed my feelings for so many years, it feels a bit like I’m shaking a mental Coke bottle full of memories. Any moment now the cap is going to burst off and they’ll all come flooding out, making a hell of a mess in the process.
‘Something happened,’ Sam continues thoughtfully. ‘You were never short of boyfriends at school. Then you went away to uni, went out with Olly, and nothing since then. You dumped Olly, broke his heart, but you’ve never dated anyone since. Oh, shit!’
She turns to me with her eyes wide. ‘He didn’t, you know, lose his shit and harm himself or something, did he? I mean, I know you broke his heart and everything, but was it worse than that? Is this a guilt trip thing?’
The Coke bottle in my mind explodes, and I suddenly need to be alone. I dash into the bathroom, plonking myself on the loo and resting my head in my hands as I let my mind transport me back. Now that they’re free, the memories are running amok and it feels like it all happened yesterday.
‘Ruby.’ Sam’s voice comes from the other side of the door. Her tone is gentle and full of concern. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ I call. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’
What the hell am I going to tell her? With the benefit of hindsight, my reaction to the events back then seems totally disproportionate, but it didn’t feel disproportionate at the time. Do I really want to rake over the implosion of Olly’s and my relationship again? Do I actually have a choice? Maybe it’s time to come clean, with Sam at least. The prospect both drains and terrifies me, but I’m not sure I have the energy to keep up the lie any more. Time to face the music.
‘Blimey, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Sam observes when I eventually rejoin her in the living room. ‘Do you want a glass of water?’
‘Please,’ I whisper. If nothing else, it will get rid of her for a few more moments so I can carry on trying to put my whirling thoughts in order. While she’s gone, I perch on the sofa with my legs curled up underneath me and my arms wrapped round my chest. As my therapist would have observed, my body language is full-on self-protection.
‘Here you are,’ Sam says, setting a glass on the table next to me.
‘Thanks,’ I reply, taking a sip. The water is cold and very welcome, and it’s all I can do not to swallow down the whole glass in one go.
‘So…?’ she prompts after I’ve had a few sips.
I sigh. ‘You’re partly right,’ I tell her. ‘It does stem from my break-up with Olly. But the story I’ve always told you isn’t quite true. I didn’t break his heart. He broke mine. In fact, he didn’t just break it. He smashed it into smithereens and stamped on the broken shards.’
She looks confused. ‘So why didn’t you say that all along?’
‘I, umm, didn’t take it very well.’ That’s the understatement of the year. The memories are fully formed now. ‘The truth is, I had a bit of a breakdown.’
‘You? But you’re the most together person I’ve ever met.’
‘I am now, thanks to shit tons of therapy.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was just before our finals; I was already under a lot of pressure, but I was handling it well, or so I thought. Olly and I were planning our future after university, and the idea of that kept me going. And then…’ I dry up.
‘And then?’ she prompts again.
‘And then he called me one afternoon and asked if he could pop by to see me. He sounded totally normal, so I didn’t suspect anything. I thought maybe he was bored revising, like I was, and needed a bit of distraction. Ha. I couldn’t have got that more wrong. As soon as I opened the door to him, I could tell something was up. He had this look on his face that I’d never seen before, and he actually dodged when I tried to kiss him. I asked him what was wrong, and it all came tumbling out. He was seeing someone else; he didn’t want a future with me after all. He called me clinging and needy, said having sex with me had become a chore. He told me I was draining him, holding him back. He said he hadn’t realised, and I quote, how “utterly fucking miserable” I made him until he’d started seeing this other girl.’
‘Bastard!’ Sam exclaims. ‘And you didn’t have a clue this was coming?’
‘Nope. I was completely blindsided. And you know what the worst part was? He actually seemed to be enjoying trashing me. Here was this boy that I loved with all my heart, that I thought I was going to build a life with, maybe even marry, being so cruel and looking like he was getting pleasure from it. I don’t know how long he spent sitting there telling me all the ways in which I wasn’t good enough for him, but it felt like I was standing in a boxing ring while he punched me in the face over and over again. And then, when he was done, he simply got up and walked out. I felt like my world had been torn apart, but that was just the beginning.’ Now that I’ve started to tell the story, the words are pouring out of me like a torrent. I couldn’t stop them if I tried.
‘When the initial shock started to wear off, I tried to call him, to reason with him, but he’d blocked my number already, so I went round to his house.’
‘Uh-oh,’ Sam murmurs. ‘I have a suspicion I know where this is going. She answered the door, right?’
‘Close. He answered, but she was right behind him. It looked like I’d disturbed them in the middle of sex. So not only had he seemingly taken pleasure in ruining my life, he’d hotfooted it straight back home for a celebratory fuck with my replacement.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I completely lost it. I screamed, I called him every name under the sun, I think I called her a few choice things too. None of it made any difference, of course. They just stood there while I ranted and, when I paused to draw breath, Olly smiled – the bastard actually smiled – and said, “You’re making a fool of yourself, Ruby. Go home,” and closed the door. I realised I’d played right into his hands. Bastard probably got a power kick out of it. If he wasn’t fucking new girl before I arrived, I’d lay money that he fucked her after I left. I was totally humiliated.’
‘Where is he now?’ Sam asks. ‘I’m going to find him and kill him.’
‘I don’t know. My therapist and I agreed it would be best if I didn’t look for him. Anyway, you’d think that would have been the end of it, wouldn’t you. I go away, lick my wounds and eventually move on. But Olly wasn’t having that. He was enjoying my humiliation far too much. He knew my regular haunts, my routines, and he made sure he and his new girlfriend were in my face wherever I went. It was like he was taunting me. In the end, I stopped going out unless I absolutely had to. I got paranoid about seeing them, convinced they’d be round every corner. I was on a downward spiral. I even contemplated suicide at one point. I stockpiled paracetamol and bought a big bottle of vodka, but thankfully that was as far as I went.’
Sam’s reaction is instant. She pulls me into her as the tears start to fall once more. ‘You poor, poor baby,’ she soothes, stroking my hair. I really want to stop telling the story now, but I’m not done. Now I’ve started, it all has to come out. I gently pull away from her and take another sip of my water.
‘It was Helen, one of my housemates, who decided to intervene. Without telling me, she rang my mum and said she was worried about me. Mum arrived the next day, took one look at me, and that was that. By that stage, I wasn’t even washing, just hanging around in my pyjamas when I wasn’t lying in bed feeling sorry for myself. Apparently, and I only found this out a long time later, I absolutely stank. Mum sent me straight upstairs to shower and wash my hair, laid out clean clothes for me and then took me out and made me eat a proper meal. She obviously found the vodka and the pills because I noticed they were gone when I came down from the shower, but she never mentioned it. She was brilliant. She dropped everything and stayed with me while I sat my finals. As soon as the last exam was done, she took me home and enrolled me with a therapist.’
‘Thank God for Helen and your mum,’ Sam says. ‘Why didn’t I notice any of this?’
‘You went off travelling immediately after you finished uni,’ I remind her. ‘I deliberately hid it from you because I knew you wouldn’t have gone if you were worried about me.’
‘Of course I wouldn’t have gone!’
‘Which is why I didn’t tell you. And then it just became easier not to tell you, so I changed the story and told it for so long I actually started to believe it myself. Anyway,’ I say, suddenly exhausted by letting this all out, ‘the therapist helped me to regain my perspective before eventually signing me off. I started to move on, but not before I’d made a solemn promise to myself.’
‘No more men,’ Sam murmurs.
‘No more men,’ I agree. ‘And it was working just fine until Cameron fucked it all up this afternoon.’