Chapter 5
FIVE
LAUREL
When I was six, I stole my brother’s bike. I didn’t think of it as stealing at the time – I wasn’t that shitty a kid. I thought I was borrowing it.
The thing was, I didn’t have a bike and Justin did. He was due to get a brand-new one, and his current one would be passed down to me.
But Justin’s birthday was still two months away. It was a Saturday afternoon in July and all my friends were out riding around the cul-de-sac. Mum was having a nap. Justin and Dad were out at the football.
I opened the garage door, wheeled out the bike, closed the door and set off to join my friends. It was Saturday, the sun was out, we were having fun. Someone’s mum or big sister was probably supervising us, but only half-heartedly.
It was half an hour or so before the sky went suddenly dark, and the heavens opened. Within seconds, my T-shirt was wet through and my hair was dripping. Justin’s bike slid alarmingly on the tarmac where a parked car had leaked oil on the road when I braked.
‘Girls!’ My friend Stacey’s mum appeared in the doorway of their house. ‘Look at the state of you! Come indoors right now.’
So we went upstairs to Stacey’s room and played with her Barbies while we waited for the rain to stop.
When I went to retrieve the bike, it wasn’t there. Stacey’s lay alone on the wet grass verge, bright pink instead of silver, one bike instead of two. Full of remorse and fear now, I walked home. By the time I reached the kitchen, I was crying.
Somehow, I must have managed to stammer out the whole story. Mum didn’t punish me, though she did give me one hell of a telling-off. And the main thing she said, over and over, was, ‘You must never take other people’s things without asking, Laurel. That’s theft and it’s wrong.’
For thirty-four years, I didn’t. I never so much as shoplifted a mascara from Boots or returned a library book late.
I reached the age of forty without having ever had a speeding fine or taken illegal drugs.
I tried my hardest to do the right thing, the decent thing, in whatever situation I found myself in.
Then I met Gray, a man who was unquestionably someone else’s, and there was no way of asking if I could borrow him for a while.
I never meant to have an affair with a married man. I knew full well that it was against all the laws of the sisterhood. But by the time I realised what was happening, just the same as with my brother’s bike, it was too late, and the damage was done.
It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been at the lowest of low ebbs at the time.
Simon and I had been together for ten years, throughout my thirties, while all my contemporaries were getting married and starting families, and I believed – or wouldn’t allow myself not to believe – that we’d be next.
But as it turned out, Simon didn’t believe the same, although it took an ultimatum from me for him to admit it.
He wasn’t ready; he didn’t know if he ever would be ready; he knew it wasn’t fair; it wasn’t me, it was him.
So I left and moved into my friend Mel’s spare room, and a couple of months later I heard through the grapevine that Simon had met someone else and that she was pregnant.
A couple of weeks after that, I turned forty. A week after that, I met Gray.
I was emotionally in tatters, more fragile and bruised than I could recall ever being before; not to mention literally bruised after taking a tumble from – ironically enough – my bike, right outside Gray’s house.
At least, I thought I was only bruised. It was Gray who insisted I should go along to the minor injuries unit at the local hospital to get checked out, then insisted on coming with me because I was all shook-up and trying not to cry.
He was right, as it turned out, and I – a healthcare professional who should have known better – was wrong: I had a distal radius fracture and had to wear a splint for six weeks.
Gray waited at the hospital while the orthopaedics team patched me up, even though I told him I’d be fine and there was no need for that.
Afterwards, he took me to a nearby pub and bought me a Bacardi and Coke.
Then he asked for my number so he could text and check I was okay.
‘You’ll need to call me anyway,’ he said, ‘when you’re ready to pick up your bike.’
I looked at the wedding ring on his left hand and wished he wasn’t so attractive. All the decent ones are taken, I’d complained to Mel just the previous night, after a first date with a guy whose Tinder profile said he was forty-two but who would clearly never see fifty again.
Gray was decent. He was handsome, he was kind, he lived in a beautiful house so must have a good job. On the surface, he was everything I’d been looking for.
Except, obviously, he was taken.
Which meant that nothing would come of this.
I’d finish my drink and go home and figure out how to make scrambled eggs on toast with one hand, then in a couple of weeks I’d drop him a message and collect my bike and apologise to his wife for the inconvenience of leaving it at their house – maybe even give her some flowers – and that would be that.
I’d never see him again, because I wasn’t desperate or a home-wrecker, and my mum had taught me right from wrong.
I shouldn’t have let things go any further than the exchange of numbers and the return of my bike.
But I found I couldn’t stop thinking about him, dwelling on his kindness, the way his hand had felt in mine when he helped me to my feet, the way he’d taken control of the situation and looked after me when I was so used to being the one doing the looking after.
I know I shouldn’t have. But I did.
‘You’re setting yourself up for massive heartbreak, Laurel,’ Mel told me, when the relationship had progressed to the point where I could no longer not tell her about it.
‘He won’t leave his wife for you. They never do – and if he did, he’d only find someone else to cheat on you with.
He’s not a good man. You’re wasting your time like you were with Simon. ’
But I didn’t want to hear what she had to say about Gray – and I couldn’t bring myself to end it.