Chapter 13
Dinner had been a lot. Odd and uncomfortable until a glass of wine each greased the wheels of conversation – at which point Jude had felt like Dorothy, opening the door of a monochrome Kansas cottage to discover Oz in full colour.
Hannah had been willing to set aside the obvious awkwardness she felt in favour of celebrating with the happy couple.
Perhaps because she’d ticked off the unenviable task of finding a last-minute wedding venue, she was happier and more relaxed than he’d seen her since he left four years ago.
Her smile was easy – sincere – and she allowed herself to be pulled into the conversation without resistance.
At points, she and Jude even tag-teamed, telling stories Ed and Joe had missed out on the first time around, or contradicting them when they selectively edited or misremembered details.
As they tucked into stone-fired pizzas in the garden of a pub not far from Renfrew, Jude couldn’t help feeling this whole scene was a bizarre confrontation with the road not taken.
If things had gone another way – if he or Hannah had made different decisions – perhaps they’d have been there looking forward to their own upcoming wedding.
On the night, he ignored the perverse urge to examine how he felt about that; refused to remember how badly he’d wanted it, once. In the five days since, he’d repeatedly slapped down the question, but don’t you still want it? before he could ask it of himself.
When he tried to stop thinking about the drive home, however, his brain wouldn’t co-operate.
The experience played over and over, on a loop in his mind.
If he didn’t concentrate on looking away from it, he found himself back inside the warm, dark interior of Hannah’s van, his eyes trained on the eerie splash of its headlights on the road so they didn’t stray to her face too often.
A heavy, loaded silence had fallen between them the moment they were alone, and they’d both been studiously polite, refusing to express clear preferences on how to fill it.
They’d settled for listening to Six Music in the end.
It was what the stereo had given them when Hannah turned on the van’s ignition, and it seemed easiest just to let it play.
The thickness of the air between them said they were both thinking about other times when they’d been in cars together; days when they’d been sure enough of where they stood to argue vociferously about playlists and radio stations.
Sometimes, the bickering had become flirting, and he’d wondered what it meant – whether she felt it, too.
In the early days after Hannah passed her driving test, they’d had countless play-fights over sockets and iPhone connector cables.
He’d silently thrilled at the touch of her hand as they pushed and shoved each other’s grasping fingers away from the volume control in her second-hand Ford Ka.
He sat with his hands in his lap as she drove, trying not to listen to the achingly romantic lyrics of a Richard Hawley song.
He felt sure that he and Hannah were standing on the same precipice – refusing to look down in case they tumbled into a sea of memories that swallowed them whole.
He could smell her perfume again, mingled with the soft, clean scent of her shampoo.
The first time she ever kissed him had been in a car, and the image of it was seared onto Jude’s brain – burned into his bones and written in his blood.
He’d been learning to drive during the summer before he finished his PhD, and he was terrible at it.
For the first time in his whole life, he faced the prospect of taking a test he might actually fail.
Hannah, who’d already had her licence for four years by then, was helping him practise parallel parking after work one night.
When he finally performed the manoeuvre successfully, she’d thrown her arms around him, thoughtlessly brushing her lips against his before scrambling out of the vehicle, yelling a harried goodbye and running back up the hill to her mum’s house.
They’d not mentioned it the next day. A few weeks later, he’d passed his test and gone back to Sheffield.
Jude had bawled Joe out for the lift debacle the morning after it happened, his ire fuelled by a blend of righteous indignation and frustrated desire.
It was getting harder to deny the effect Hannah still had on him; the ease with which he could slip back into unqualified adoration of her, if he didn’t watch his step.
She dumped you in an airport, he reminded himself, and you pleaded with her not to leave you in front of the lady on the check-in desk .
. . Not to mention a slew of fellow travellers, many of whom spent the next day and a half staring pityingly at you.
The check-in assistant had eyed him in horrified fascination after Hannah walked away, her expression somewhere between sympathy and certainty that he must have done something to deserve this.
‘Hi, I’m Marcia!’ had been written on her nametag, and she’d drawn a smiley face above the ‘i’ in place of a dot.
It was strange what you remembered, Jude thought; odd that his brain had taken a snapshot of that particular detail while his heart was exploding in his chest.
He had the nagging sense that his brother was deliberately shuffling him and Hannah closer together – positioning them like dolls which, at any moment, he might decide should kiss.
Joe had hotly disputed this when Jude implied he was playing games, and argued that any kissing that occurred would not be on his account.
However, he’d said this with a measure of smug satisfaction, as if it were enough for him to know his machinations had been noted; to hear they were having some impact, even if just on his brother’s state of mind.
Jude would rather die than admit it, but their primary effect was the disruption of his sleep.
Too many nights this week he’d been disturbed by salacious dreams of milky skin and strawberry-blonde hair; night-time imaginings that saw him wake up flushed, aching and in need of a cold shower.
It was Friday morning, and he was sitting at the table in his mother’s kitchen, nursing a large glass of water after a long, punishing hike that had done nothing to quell his nascent sexual frustration.
He feared his problems would only get worse the more time he spent with Hannah; the more versions of her he encountered.
The red dress she’d worn at the engagement party still haunted him, but – in a moment that now seemed little short of sadistic – Joe had shown him sketches of the outfit their tailor had designed for her to wear at the wedding.
It consisted of a cropped jacket and a close-fitting dress with a deep, wide neckline; long, but slit to the thigh so she could walk in it.
Tight enough that it would cling to every curve . . .
The sudden, shrill ring of his phone shook all thought of thighs and curves away.
Larry, said his home screen, and Jude eyed it with a sigh. The man wouldn’t leave him alone, and it was rapidly becoming wearing.
Jude’s boss had been incredulous at his decision not to head back to Sydney within days of the Sheffield conference, but several weeks on, his surprise had hardened into indignation.
‘After all I’ve done for you, I can’t believe you’d leave me high and dry like this,’ he ranted, by way of saying hello.
The tone of Larry’s voice, the raucous background noise and the fact that it was now 9 p.m., New South Wales time, alerted Jude to the possibility this call was being placed from a bar.
The LogicLabs founder and CEO was partial to ‘a few jars’ at the end of each working week, and it seemed several had already been sunk.
Larry got lairier than ever when he drank, and Jude was suddenly grateful to be on the other side of the world.
‘It wasn’t my intention to stay here this long,’ he said patiently, ‘but, as previously discussed, I’m not willing to miss my brother’s wedding.
And it makes no sense to come back between now and then. ’
‘Your mother’s certainly not worried about missing it,’ Larry shot back, in his bizarre hybrid of an accent. It was inconsistent, sitting somewhere between Sydney and Guildford, but – however his vowels came out – he always managed to sound belligerent.
Jude still felt Lillian’s refusal to accept Joe and Ed’s invitation was a powerplay rather than a final decision – but he couldn’t help wondering how Larry knew about it.
It seemed doubtful there was anything resembling friendship, let alone romance between them; both were so cold-blooded they were practically reptilian.
It was more likely they were trading information, like a pair of Cold War spies.
Jude felt a little ill at the thought that they’d been talking about him.
‘Regardless, I will be there,’ he said. He realised that his resolve to remain part of the wedding party strengthened every time someone suggested he should step away.
Lillian had tried again last week, and he’d been so firm with her that he’d surprised himself.
Simply refusing to give her objections airtime had felt oddly radical, despite the fact he’d been living independently since the age of eighteen and wasn’t far off thirty.
But there’d been a strange mix of terror and elation inside him when he said, ‘We’re not going to talk about this, Mum.
My mind’s made up, and you’re not going to change it.
If you keep trying to come between Joe and I like this, I’ll have to consider whether I can keep staying here. ’
She’d given him a fairly wide berth since this incident, and had retreated to the garden first thing this morning. He could see her through the French doors, carefully deadheading her favourite rose bushes.