Chapter 3
‘Marc didn’t take it well, then?’ Charlie said on Monday as she and Hannah swooped to claim their favourite table at Space. It was a cafe-slash-co-working location equidistant from their homes, and somewhere they frequented when each of them had desk work to do and fancied company.
With reclaimed wooden chairs and benches, overstuffed velvet-covered cushions and shelves packed with vintage books, it said ‘cosy’. However, the extensive coffee menu and available-for-hire meeting rooms indicated that its typical clientele were self-employed, caffeine-fuelled creative types.
‘Nope,’ Hannah said, popping the ‘p’ for emphasis, then sucking on the striped paper straw that stuck out of her iced latte.
She was part way through debriefing Charlie on the demise of her situationship with Marc, which she’d finished the previous afternoon.
The exchange of gossip was always a necessary precursor to hours spent answering emails, trawling through booking enquiries and poring over accounts.
Today, reporting more recent drama provided useful cover for her reluctance to continue their conversation about Jude.
Since Saturday night, she’d had a strange sense that something inside her was threatening to unravel – like there was a loose thread in a place she’d thought was sewn up tight and one swift tug could tear it wide open.
She’d been quick to rubbish Livi’s theory that Ed’s relationship with Joe was in any way problematic, but her commitment to this ruse had been tested again yesterday by a WhatsApp from her brother that blithely mentioned they were moving in together.
Ed
Forgot to tell you, I’m giving up the flat at the end of this month – just in case you feel a random need to send me anything by snail mail.
Hannah had known what this meant, but pressed for more information anyway.
Ed
Making it official with J.
No point paying rent on somewhere else when I’m at his all the time, and it’s an easier commute to work . . . NGL, the en suite wet room, balcony and city centre location are also a draw
??
Seized by the urge to ask awkward questions about whether he should sign a proper tenancy agreement, or what his rights would be if he and Joe split up, Hannah had shut her phone inside a drawer until she’d calmed down.
She didn’t want to piss on Ed’s chips or start an argument with him, and she knew that, while concern about his legal status was reasonable, this wasn’t the root cause of her unease.
Neither Ed nor Joe had a history of romantic entanglements that lasted, but even before Ed’s announcement, Hannah had begun to suspect there might be some mileage in this one.
She and her brother weren’t identical, but they’d entered the world only five minutes and thirty-two seconds apart; they were a pair, and she’d been his confidante since the moment he’d learned to speak.
Lately, she sensed he had big feelings to share, and she’d deliberately avoided giving him the chance.
Such evasiveness was entirely out of character for Hannah, and blew more holes in the ‘it’s fine that they’re together! ’ subterfuge.
‘Marc told me it was mad for us to break up, and that I needed to learn not to “run from love”,’ Hannah explained to Charlie.
The more she made of this story, the less likely it was she’d face questions on other topics – ones she definitely didn’t want to answer.
‘He also said I obviously had daddy issues, then suggested he could help me work through them.’
‘Sounds smutty,’ Charlie sniggered.
Hannah made a face. ‘I don’t think he meant it that way. It was more like he’d swallowed a self-help book. He said there was “residual trauma” from my childhood that I needed to push past.’
‘Right,’ Charlie said, grimacing slightly. ‘What did you say to that?’
‘I explained that me and my daddy issues were quite happy together for now, and we didn’t need three people in the marriage,’ Hannah said, to a gurgle of laughter from Charlie, who – in the aftermath of her split from Neil – had justified numerous shopping sprees with the argument: ‘Princess Diana had a revenge wardrobe, so why shouldn’t I? ’
Happy was probably pushing it, but Hannah had long since made an uneasy peace with her father’s uselessness.
He’d left her mother to raise four children single-handed on a nurse’s salary when Hannah and Ed were nine, Livi was two and Claire, their middle sister, was five.
After that, Mike Matthews had sailed in and out of their lives as and when it suited him, his carelessness affecting Hannah and Ed the most.
As the siblings who clearly remembered having some relationship with him, they were more wounded by missed birthdays, forgotten school plays and aborted day trips.
Hannah had cut her father off entirely when he failed to materialise at the joint twenty-first party Mum had thrown for her and Ed.
While he’d made several attempts to broker peace since, she still had very little contact with him, having finally faced the reality that – no matter what he promised her – he would always be prone to abandoning their plans in favour of a more interesting or advantageous offer.
‘That’s it, then?’ Charlie asked. ‘No chance Marc will talk you round?’
‘None,’ Hannah said. ‘Not least because he’s nowhere near as good with words as he thinks he is.
Honestly, I don’t know what possessed me to go out with him in the first place.
It was a bad decision – very much on the shitting-where-you-eat spectrum, when you think how often couples want him for weddings. ’
‘He’s fit and rich,’ Charlie said, shrugging. ‘You’re only human.’
‘I suppose,’ Hannah conceded. With his tousled dark blond hair, designer wardrobe and rakish smile, Marc was certainly attractive, and the ‘good times only’ vibe she’d initially got from him had seemed ideal.
Yes, he fancied himself as a bit of a heartbreaker – but since Hannah’s heart wasn’t on offer, this hadn’t troubled her.
‘However,’ she continued, ‘he’s also an egomaniac with very poor chat.
I won’t miss him quizzing me on which of his own records is the most significant lyrical achievement.
’ Before they began dating, Hannah had felt sure Marc’s need for adulation had been exaggerated in the snippets of edited footage she’d seen from his stint on reality TV show In the House a few years back. Now, she knew better.
‘Ha!’ Charlie giggled. ‘Surely it’s “Lara’s Lies”.’ She briefly broke into song: ‘Lara, you liar, my world is on fire, your words were the match, now my heart’s on the pyre . . .’
‘Oh god, stop!’ Hannah begged. ‘Probably shouldn’t knock it, though, it was a big hit in Malaysia. And royalties from his Southeast Asian record sales paid for his house.’
‘Proof that, throughout the world, there is no accounting for taste,’ Charlie said.
They laughed again, then both turned to their laptops.
Some useful work and another round of coffees later, Hannah saw a TikTok notification light up her phone screen. After squinting at it for a second, she opened the post, then held the phone aloft for Charlie to see – albeit with the sound turned down.
‘What am I looking at?’ Charlie said. She had a red biro tucked behind her ear and had been scribbling in her notebook for the past thirty minutes with a black, fine-tipped Sharpie.
From across the table, Hannah could see she’d been sketching ideas for new dishes.
The red leather Moleskine notebook Charlie always used for this purpose was a work of art in its own right – full of deftly drawn illustrations that only seemed lovelier when morphed into delicious 3D.
‘Marc’s latest TikTok post,’ Hannah said, her voice tight with annoyance.
‘Er. Why?’
‘You’ll understand in a second. Look at the subtitles.’
‘Oh,’ Charlie whispered, leaning in closer. A moment later, she nodded in understanding: it was an acoustic, stripped-back performance of one of Marc’s band’s biggest hits, ‘Not Giving Up On You’. ‘Yikes,’ she said, ‘bit on the nose, isn’t it?’
‘Just a tad,’ Hannah agreed. ‘The caption says: Call me an old romantic, but when you know it’s right, you don’t let go. Still so much love for her. Hashtag: not giving up on you, hashtag: still my girl, hashtag: love songs.’
‘Nooo,’ Charlie murmured, horrified.
‘Yes,’ Hannah said grimly. ‘Love, for god’s sake – we only went on a handful of dates! And there’s already a load of comments.’
She tapped her phone screen to display them, then passed the handset to Charlie so she could read them properly.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Charlie breathed after a few seconds of scrolling.
Mixed in with the inevitable ‘Awww hun, sorry 4 u’ and ‘She doesn’t deserve you babe, you’ll move on’ and ‘You’re gorge, she must be mad!
’ posts, there were darker ones. ‘Tell us who hurt you, honey’, ‘Ho needs to recognise what she had in u’ and ‘Stupid bitch needs sorting out’.
They’d made Hannah feel a bit sick, and appeared to be having the same effect on Charlie, whose mouth had dropped open in shock.
‘Marc’s replied to a couple of the nasty ones, at least,’ Hannah said stoutly. ‘Asked people to calm down and stay respectful.’
‘Big of him,’ Charlie said, scowling and handing back the phone, ‘since it’s his fault the comments even exist. What an arsehole.’
‘Two minutes ago you were describing him as fit,’ Hannah reminded her, ‘and on Saturday you were all for me going on a mystery holiday with him.’
‘Mea culpa,’ Charlie said, holding both palms up. ‘I thought he was a harmless idiot, but he’s a walking red flag.’
‘To be fair, he’s telling them to calm down,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s not like he’s egging them on.’