chapter003
‘I posted a photo of us on my Instagram.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you?!’ Edie’s powers of recollection tuned in and out.
‘Yeah, you were really proud of it. You were going to put a Taylor Swift song over it, but I think by that point you lacked the motor skills … ‘Snow on the Beach’, was it? I’m not the expert on her you are. I hope it’s not about a freak event ruining a nice holiday.’
Edie wailed: ‘Why did you let me?!’
Elliot shrugged bare and gym-developed shoulders. (‘Once I’m in The Void costume, it’s only my lower jaw and upper chest left doing any acting.’)
‘Aside from the fact I’d had a skinful, too, why not? Are we hiding this?’
His nonchalance went some way to calming her. It had to be said, this was his area, not hers. If he wasn’t bothered, should she be? Like when a plane had terrible turbulence and you were convinced it was The End, then you saw the cabin crew who do the route six times a day having a laugh.
‘What if someone screen-grabbed it? I mean, they almost certainly will have for the purposes of WhatsApp chats. Then it ends up in the press.’
Elliot shrugged again. ‘They’ll write about me anyway, and last night you were very much of the attitude we should let them.’
‘Oh for fuc— Drunk me should be shot.’
Elliot smiled appraisingly. ‘Hey up. Not sure I ever spotted that drunk Edie is a chaos gremlin. Though to be fair, there have been signs.’
He lifted the duvet that was bunched at his chest half an inch and gingerly peered under, as if inspecting damage, to embarrassed scoff noises from Edie.
Elliot hesitated. ‘If you can’t remember posting that photo, can you not remember anything else after? That would be a shame.’
‘Weirdly, it’s like I have an hour or so outage around the photo, and then I can remember again. I must’ve eased up on the Co-op Merlot.’
‘Not weirdly. Some things are so incredible, even a hippocampus that’s been holed below the waterline still insists on recording them.’
‘No way to refer to me,’ Edie said, and they both stupid-laughed, before Elliot held out his arms to her.
As before, Edie had discovered that having sex with someone who was held to be a symbol of sex was, in abstract, terrifying. In practice, it was just two people in bed who wanted to be there.
‘There’s something I failed to mention yesterday as I didn’t want to spoil the vibe,’ he said, as she settled into his embrace.
‘Oh, here it comes.’
‘I have to go back to America on the twenty-ninth. New York this time.’
‘For how long?’
‘I’m not sure, probably at least a few weeks. I’ll get back as soon as I can.’
‘What time are you leaving?’
‘Er. Pick up at half five in the morning.’
‘Pfffft. Take another chance on me, we can make it work and see loads of each other! Oh, wait, actually that was a one-night stand – there’s my luxury sedan transfer to Heathrow. Toodle-oo, bitch, thanks for letting me rearrange your guts,’ Edie said, listening to the laughter vibrating in his ribs.
‘You’re gross. Four-night stand. My timings would be better if I’d planned to come round yesterday instead of having suddenly reached my absolute limit in missing you.’
Edie was glowing again. She wouldn’t have guessed it was spontaneous. Bloody actors.
‘You did pretty well to find a florist’s open on Christmas Day then?’
‘No comment. Some perks to being the sort of prick who has a personal assistant. I should go and see my family when I can get out of this bed and apologise for Brexiting their Christmas Day. Do you want to visit? I could suggest going out to dinner? There’s not tons of privacy if you stay, but no different to here.’
True that. Edie hoped what they’d imagined was stealthy quiet actually had been. Luckily, Meg slept like she’d been entombed. She’d be at work now, an early shift at the home that ended by lunchtime. Meg could be a salty customer, but she’d found her calling as a care worker, and Edie was very proud of her.
‘I promised today I’d go on a walk round Wollaton Hall with my sister and Nick and Hannah, when Meg’s shift ends. Feels a bit shabby saying oh, I’ve got a better offer.’
As was the way of life’s complex psychosocial web over thirty, the walk wasn’t simply a walk. It was keeping Nick busy on a day he couldn’t see his young son, Max. It was something Hannah’s mum could no longer do with her MS. It was brightening Meg having to work holidays.
‘Do you want to come along? Then we can go to dinner at your parents’ tomorrow night?’ Edie said.
‘Great. I’ll head back and meet you there later.’
‘Sounds good, apart from the saying goodbye at dawn in three days bit,’ Edie said.
‘The way I see it, the agony of parting was considerably worse when the idea was we’d never see each other again.’
‘I didn’t say never – I said never say never.’
For the first time since Elliot had been here, the temperature in the room fell by a few degrees.
After a moment, he said: ‘The only thing that spooks me about you is the way you were so matter-of-fact about ending it. It was, hands down, the most painful thing to ever happen to me, and I didn’t see it coming. The memory of that conversation was the number one inhibitor to me trying again. The only way I could make sense of your steely certainty was that it wasn’t as painful to you. I thought we were at least going to agonise about how to make it work. But no.’
Edie gathered that I’ve thought about nothing else but you since I last saw you didn’t mean all the thoughts were positive.
‘… I didn’t come back because I thought I had a good chance,’ Elliot said. ‘I’d decided I’d take any chance.’
After the dizziness and declarations of the previous day, she could see his point. He’d had to have enough optimism for both of them, both times.
Edie took a deep breath that gave her a sharp little pang. ‘I think you’ve confused my superficial coping mechanisms and capacity for emotional self-harm for a lack of giving a shit about a situation. Easily done. I fool myself, too.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I wasn’t blasé about ending it with you. Not at all. If it came across that way, it’s because my control was for my self-respect and your benefit. I was trying to make it less difficult. My friends were put on notice that whenever paparazzi photos of you with your new girlfriend dropped, I’d need a whole weekend of palliative care. Deliveroo McDonald’s nugs and six bottles of Whispering Angel. Ask them. It was called Operation Crankshaft.’
‘Why Crankshaft?’
‘It was the military code name for bin Laden.’
‘Wow, thanks. Am I the terrorist?’
‘The terror chieftain of my heart, and a mission I probably wouldn’t survive.’
Elliot laughed, but the mood was still clouded. Flattery about jealousy wasn’t enough.
‘My boss once said I don’t want good things to happen to me,’ Edie continued. ‘Subconsciously. He might be right.’
‘Why not?’ Elliot said.
‘I don’t think I deserve it. Or I don’t trust it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You want good things for other people you love, so why not yourself?’
‘Maybe I don’t love myself,’ Edie said, with necessary British-sarky intonation. ‘It’s … it’s that causing the bad thing to happen makes you feel in charge of what you believed was destined to happen anyway. Hope is opening yourself up to too much uncontrolled hurt. Self sabotage is control.’
‘Hmm. I suppose I don’t understand how someone so warm and generally … joyful can also be a complete catastrophist,’ Elliot said, making Edie smile.
‘It could be because the first person who was meant to love me the most left me? Only a guess.’ That was a blurt. She hadn’t expected to directly refer to her mother’s suicide in this conversation. ‘I’m not saying that for some cheap point score sympathy vote,’ she said, as much a check on herself as him.
‘If I thought you’d do that, I wouldn’t know you at all. Or deserve to.’
Elliot held her closer. Edie had forgotten his unique ability to pry things from her that she didn’t intend to share.
If she was honest, Edie didn’t always find his incisiveness, his eagerness to dissect the frog, comfortable. It spoke to a side of him that felt foreign: the L.A. world where you had expensive therapy, and a cavalier attitude to prescription medication. There was being seen, and there was being seen through.