If I Were You

Chapter 55 Flynn

The night porter barely blinks as I stalk past him through the doors, hit by a wave of warm air smelling strongly of chlorine. I want distance from our room and Amy and everything about this whole hideous situation. She’s clearly made up her mind about me and I’m shocked by how much that hurts, how quickly she has lost faith in me.

The room soars above me, the space echoing as I move around the edge of the pool, the steam and sauna in darkness, the water in the enormous round jacuzzi still. I walk down the side of the pool, past cushioned loungers, towels rolled in preparation for a new day, and slip off the heels that make my feet ache.

Staring across the turquoise water, I want to plunge from the edge and submerge myself, shut off all the thoughts in my head. I make out my reflection, or rather Amy’s, in the water, her small frame, her hair loose. Sighing, I sit on the edge of the pool and lower my feet into the water, sending out ripples that grow bigger as they move away, making her disappear.

Staring dolefully into the bright blue, Amy’s painted toenails wiggle back at me.

Seeing Tanya has been hard, and thinking about Charlie makes me feel like someone is squeezing my chest tighter and tighter, making it impossible to breathe. My anger that Amy hasn’t stopped to question things is mixed up with anger about everything that has happened. Normally kept under wraps, I feel closer to exploding with it all than ever.

I’d not expected the bombshell that Tanya was pregnant but quickly tried to be supportive. She’d been distant at times, struggling with the pregnancy, anxious, googling all sorts of medical things, nervous about the impending birth.

I was out of my depth in so many ways, but I tried to think of things I could do to help, always pushing the problems in our relationship to the back of my mind. The baby was bigger than anything else.

I was finally going to be part of a family. My lonely years as a child, the pain I carried with me like a constant stone in my chest, started to splinter and break up. My mother’s eyes drifting over me, never resting despite my efforts to please, to joke, to be happy, a good boy. People’s well-meaning comments, that I looked so like my father, made her flinch.

Had I? Was that why she was so quick to agree to send me away?

She removed all the photos, never spoke of him, and Patrick swept in and obliterated the last traces he’d existed. In my mind Dad was a blur, a collection of memories that soon jumbled into photos I’d seen, and blanks so big I started to confuse them with real things. Now there is simply a blurred nothing where his face once was and all the memories I tell people are fabricated. They distract people and mean no one probes. Until Amy, Amy asking for more details, Amy who has known loss and wants to share. How can I tell her I’ve made up a collection of memories? It will only confirm in her mind that I’m a liar.

As I lean over the pool, the tears drip from my nose, splashing into the water beneath me. Grief for that time, for that tiny baby, for the person I had been, making me finally succumb. Is it being in Amy’s body that means the tears are closer to the surface? Amy who weeps over an X Factor back story, a charity advert, a slow song. Or is it that I am finally giving myself permission to feel these things?

I’m drained and exhausted, unsure how much time has passed as I drag myself across to a lounger, pulling one of the immaculate, fluffy towels over me and shutting my eyes, spent from thinking about a past I’d been determined not to return to. I never meant to lie to Amy; I just have no idea where to begin to unpick the truth. I’m not sure who I really am beneath the fabricated past and the faux-cheery present. I think of her upstairs somewhere, sad and angry, and know something is broken between us that might never be repaired.