Chapter 40
FORTY
I almost didn’t go to the Halloween party with Luke. I stood on the landing outside Orla’s bedroom, dithering, the black dress hanging heavily from my shoulders.
Mostly, I was longing to go: to be shown off by Luke in my glamorous dress and carefully done – spooky, but not ugly – make-up, to meet his friends, to party and sparkle. But I was filled with sadness and worry about Orla and what she had just revealed to me. After what she’d told me about her grandmother, I’d had an inkling about what had happened – that she’d done something an older, conservative woman would have found it impossible to forgive. But the reality of it – to have had a baby and be forced to give her up, to have lived for over two decades with that sacrifice and only a worn photograph to show for it – broke my heart.
But Orla had told me to go. She’d lived with her loss long before I’d known about it; tonight was just one more night to add to the thousands she had spent without her daughter, not knowing where she was, whether she was safe and happy, whether she longed for Orla the way Orla longed for her.
There was also a small, selfish, craven part of me that didn’t want Luke to be alone the first time he saw his ex-girlfriend since their break-up.
His emergence from his room made up my mind for me. He was dressed as a vampire, a flowing cloak over his black jeans and jumper, a set of plastic fangs from a joke shop protruding over his lower lip. He looked utterly absurd and utterly gorgeous, and in that moment I realised I wanted to be with him more than I wanted anything else in the world.
‘Raaaar,’ he growled, embracing me, adding indistinctly, ‘time to deflower some virgins. Oh, too late.’
I burst out laughing. ‘Are you going to wear those teeth on the Tube?’
‘No.’ He spat the teeth out into his palm, wrapping them in a square of kitchen roll and putting them in his pocket. ‘Sorry. That was kind of gross. But I can’t keep them in after the big reveal – they make me lisp and drool. You’d make me drool, anyway, in that dress – you look beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’ I smiled up at him, for once secure in the knowledge that that was true. ‘Let me get my coat, and I’ll see you downstairs.’
But as soon as I was away from him, even just stepping through the door into my bedroom, my thoughts veered back to Orla. Had she known the baby would be taken away? Had she wanted that to happen? Could she have kept her? Why hadn’t she married the father? Who even was the father? If she’d known she couldn’t keep the baby, had she thought about terminating the pregnancy?
There were so many questions I couldn’t imagine the answers to, and certainly couldn’t imagine ever asking Orla, who’d always seemed so self-contained, so private in spite of her warmth and kindness to me.
Luke and I left the house and then got the Tube to a part of North London I didn’t know. On the way, to distract myself from thoughts of Orla and prepare myself for my public debut as Luke’s girlfriend, I asked him questions.
‘So who’s going to be there tonight?’
‘Rachel, obviously. Her sister Becky, most likely, and Becky’s fiancé, Rob, although they might have got married by now. Her best mate, Belinda, whose flat we’re going to. Other friends of theirs – Anna, Lauren, Helen, Gemma, their boyfriends. I dunno, maybe twenty people?’
Thinking of this room full of strangers, I felt a stab of nerves. Please don’t let them hate me. Please don’t let Luke look at Rachel and realise he still fancies her.
As we approached our destination, I felt my spirits lift. From the street, I could see the balcony of the flat that must be Belinda’s decked out in full Halloween regalia. Fake cobwebs were strung across the balustrade. Purple and orange lights framed the window, which bore cut-out silhouettes of witches on broomsticks, bats and black cats. An army of carved pumpkins peered down at us, their eyes gleaming from the candles within.
She’s obsessed with Halloween , I remembered Luke saying, and I felt a spark of fondness for her – this was the kind of girl I could be friends with, and by extension perhaps that meant I could become friends with Rachel. I imagined us going for coffee together, Luke’s ex-girlfriend and his current one – no acrimony between us, only shared affection for the same person.
Luke pressed the buzzer and, over the music that flooded down from the first floor, I heard a crackly voice answer. I followed him up the stairs and into the flat, which was noisy, hot and full of people.
A girl in a witch’s outfit, green make-up caking her face, approached us and regarded us curiously.
‘So you came,’ she said.
‘Hi, Anna,’ Luke replied. ‘This is Livvie. Belinda invited us.’
‘Hi,’ I muttered, all my misgivings returning.
‘Well, you should get a drink. There’s wine, beer, rum punch and soft stuff.’ She hesitated, her eyes narrowing under their heavy make-up. ‘Rachel is in here somewhere. She isn’t drinking.’
I was briefly puzzled by this seemingly irrelevant detail, but then Luke took my hand and led me inside. I felt grateful for his presence – plenty of guys would have abandoned me and gone off to talk to other people, but not him.
‘Wine, Liv?’ he asked. ‘Belinda’s rum punch is notorious. She makes it every year and someone always ends up spewing in the bushes.’
‘I’ll play it safe, then,’ I said.
I followed as he made his way with relaxed familiarity to the kitchen, where he poured me a paper cup of warm white wine and took a beer for himself from a washing-up bowl filled with melting ice.
‘Want to mingle a bit?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure we’ll find Rachel soon, and I’ll introduce you. Don’t worry – it’s going to be fine.’
‘I’m not worried,’ I lied, smiling.
Then I saw her, and I realised just how worried I needed to be.
She was in the living room, standing by the open balcony door. As I had expected any girlfriend of Luke’s to be, she was pretty. More than pretty – beautiful, even. Her hair was long, down to her bra strap, dark and shiny. She was petite, with the pert, clean-cut features of a china doll. She was wearing a costume that I supposed was meant to be a bride of Dracula – long, white and flowing, with dribbles of lipstick blood trickling down the smooth skin of her neck.
With a brief lurch of dread, I wondered whether Luke had planned this – him the vampire, her the former virgin. But it was impossible – Luke had told me just that morning that he had no clue what he was going to wear, and only after lunch dashed out to the market where he’d bought the plastic fangs.
Then I wondered if it was part of her costume – but the look on Luke’s face told me that wasn’t the case, either. It all made sense – why she’d been okay with him coming. She wanted this to be public, to have the support of her friends around her when Luke found out. To front it out, because she didn’t know how he would react, so that if he was angry with her, there’d be waiting arms to comfort her, and if he wasn’t, there’d be witnesses.
As for me – well, it turned out she wasn’t delighted I was there and I couldn’t blame her. But I was just collateral damage in the big reveal she’d planned.
Beneath the white dress, Rachel was clearly heavily pregnant.