Chapter FOURTEEN
Lou
THEN
Christmas Eve, 21 Years Ago
Ben wasn’t coming home for Christmas, which was probably a good thing after our conversation about creating space between us the year before. It had been hard not hearing from him as much as I used to, but we’d stuck to our plans, checking in only now and then with a quick catch-up rather than knowing each other’s every move.
I missed him terribly though, and I know he missed me too. He’d tell me in the odd drunken text message, particularly on days that had meant something to us.
His staying away for Christmas meant I hadn’t planned on being involved at Ballyheaney that year, but his sister wasn’t letting me off that lightly.
‘Oh come on, please, Lou,’
Cordelia said when she turned up on my doorstep, begging me to jump on board at the last minute.
‘Uncle Eric is like misery’s mother without you. Mum’s bloody prize peacock Cleopatra was poached, so she’s going round like a zombie, and my father is having a hissy fit because the front window got smashed by an errant tennis ball. I haven’t admitted it was me and probably never will as I couldn’t bear the incessant moaning. With Ben swanning around some Christmas market in Berlin this year with some girl, please come to Ballyheaney House and help me stay sane. I need you.’
I pictured Uncle Eric, forlorn with no one to bounce ideas off, and Tilda without her precious peacock, who she’d talked to like it was human. With Ben out of the picture, maybe I could have some festive fun with a family I’d grown to love almost as much as my own?
So I got dressed, we went foraging down by the lough for some greenery and bare twigs to dress the tables with, and I immersed myself in all things Ballyheaney House, safe in the knowledge that Ben was far, far away.
He’d dropped the bombshell of his German visit at Hallowe’en in a very hurried early-evening call when he’d rung t.
‘say a quick hello’
as he waited on the Metro. He was rushing to a punk gig in the Pigalle area of Paris with some German classmates. In much less glamorous surroundings, I was dressed as Marge Simpson and was on my way to a fancy-dress party in the Students’
Union, where I would drown my sorrows with a rather convincing Captain Jack Sparrow in the form of an American student called John Taylor.
‘Tell me all about him,’
Cordelia said when we took a breather from our duties on the day of the party.
‘Is he lush? I can only hope he’s as wonderful as you are.’
So I spilled the beans to her – not all of them, but enough to give her a good idea of my latest romance, which was turning into so much more.
Quiet, unassuming, charismatic John Taylor, with his long, flowing chocolate-brown hair, dimpled smile and electrifyingly smooth guitar licks, had caught my attention long ago, but I’d been doing my best to play it all very cool. Even his lecturers were bowled over by his gift of the gab and engineering expertise, both inherited from his Tipperary-born father who had raised him and his four brothers in Yonkers, New York.
We’d fallen into each other’s company back in May at a drunken student party in the infamous Holylands area, the epitome of university life in Belfast, and when he’d kissed me against a staircase with a bottle of Buckfast tonic wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I’d got on with my life without dwelling on it.
It was nothing more than two students sharing a drunken snog at the end of a long night.
Until it happened again, and again, and again.
‘I’m thinking of spending the summer in Ireland instead of going back home,’
he told me a month later as we sat on a tartan rug in the Botanic Gardens, the sun bouncing off our skin and the smell of coconut tanning lotion mixed with the cheap beers we’d taken to share over my home-made sandwiches.
‘You’re not going home at all?’
I asked him, sensing a pledge of commitment on the horizon.
‘My landlord says he’d halve the rent cos I’d be doing him a favour,’
he explained.
‘And aside from that I can gig in the bars in Belfast to earn some money.’
‘Cool,’
I replied. He leaned across and kissed my cheek, then rested his head on my shoulder. I gulped back some fizzy wine.
‘I’d love to hang out with you more,’
he said to me.
‘We could go road-tripping? Visit my long-lost relatives down in Tipp.’
‘It’s a long way to Tipperary,’
I said, thinking I was hilarious by referencing the famous song, but also wanting to buy myself some time with his suggestion. I knew what he was hinting at. He wanted us to be more exclusive, like a proper couple, rather than a week-by-week arrangement where we’d meet for a pint over lunch, or go to the cinema to break up the monotony of the Queen’s University Library where most of us spent our evenings.
I changed the subject, my head filling with notions that if I did make plans with John, and Ben was home in summer, what would I do then? Could I make a commitment to someone else knowing that if Ben arrived back in Bellaghy, I’d find it impossible to stay away, despite our conversation the Christmas Eve before?
‘This is no way to live your life, Lou,’
said Catherine, one of my closest uni friends, when I tried to explain it to her. Catherine was a no-nonsense cello player from Newry who would often vocalise her frustrations with how I’d put everything on hold – holiday plans, seasonal adventures and now romance – in case Ben Heaney came riding into my life on his white horse, declaring his undying love and commitment to me once and for all.
‘You make the call and never mind what Ben’s doing for summer. What do you want to do?’
‘I was hoping to see Ben, but I’m happy to keep up my lease on my digs here too and get a part-time job in the city,’
I said.
‘I’m teaching music two evenings a week already.’
Catherine seemed happy with that.
‘Well, John is here in Belfast, Ben isn’t. You’ll be here in Belfast, Ben isn’t. John is up for a proper relationship, Ben isn’t,’
she told me.
‘You can’t keep putting your life on standby for someone who is calling all the shots without giving you anything in return. It’s hardly rocket science, is it?’
At nineteen years old, with my first full university year in Belfast closing in, I knew I’d a decision to make for my own sanity. But when I tried to broach the subject, Ben didn’t seem to have the same urgency to see me as I did him.
Though my questioning was far from direct.
‘Any plans yet for the rest of summer?’
I texted him as I made my way to our weekly pub quiz. John would be there with all his mates, saving a space at the table for my later-than-usual arrival.
‘I’m wondering if we’ll get to see each other.’
‘We’ll see each other, for sure,’
he messaged me straight back.
‘I’ve a job lined up in Amsterdam on a building site with some lads from Berlin. Did I tell you about that?’
I’ll never forget how my stomach lurched as the stretch of another summer so far apart loomed.
‘No, you didn’t tell me that,’
I replied with a sigh.
‘Sounds like fun.’
‘You could come visit?’
he wrote back within seconds, probably because he was on his way to class or studying in a café or library somewhere. If he’d been with his friends, I’d have been waiting until the next day for a reply.
‘Stay a while. I’d love to introduce you to the gang, Lou. Check out some flights and we can see what would work for us both.’
I sat down on a wall as I digested the ongoing casual nature of it all, watching the sun slowly glide behind tall grey buildings of Belfast city in the near distance. Something shifted within me.
Introduce me to the gang? Did that include this mysterious German girlfriend? He hadn’t told me about her, but I was reading between the lines.
It was all so vague, so Ben, so I took it as the wake-up call I badly needed, even if it cut so deeply.
I felt empty. I felt further away from him than I’d ever felt before, but it was what we’d agreed, so I just had to run with it.
I smoked a cigarette while sitting on the wall, the tears rolling down my cheeks, then I took my time before I made my way to The Botanic Inn. John’s eyes lit up as soon as he saw me, as if he’d been watching the door the whole time. He patted a seat beside him while his friends handed out pens and paper.
‘Just in time, Lou,’
John said, putting his arm around my shoulder.
‘It’s the music round first, so we’ll be off to a flying start. We’re calling our team “The Dejected”.’
I faked a smile. They couldn’t have been more accurate if they’d tried.
As the weight of Ben’s studies became heavier, and my own circle of friends in Belfast’s music scene grew wider, our phone calls became even less frequent. John and I toured Ireland in a camper van during the whole of July, playing music around campfires and busking on the streets for extra cash to fund our next pit stop. It was wild, it was carefree, it was exactly what I needed at the time.
And from what I’d heard from Ben in his sporadic messages from Amsterdam, he was having the time of his life too.
Soon, I found that when something super exciting came my way, like when I was chosen out of hundreds to perform solo at a winter recital in the prestigious Waterfront Hall on Belfast’s River Lagan, Ben wasn’t around to take my call. And if he was, it was short, sweet and to the point.
‘I’m so proud of you,’
he said when I got to tell him eventually.
‘Let’s catch up soon. I suppose a few days in Paris is out of the question?’
Of course it was out of the question. His veterinary degree was a huge commitment, but my music was equally as important and time-consuming to me, not to mention how John and I were growing closer. Days rolled into weeks, and one weekend passed after another. Soon Ben and I could go without speaking properly for longer than I could once have ever imagined.
Yet, when I played at the winter recital in front of more than two thousand people at the Waterfront, including the Lord Mayor, I looked out at the audience still wishing I could see his face in the crowd.
‘Focus on the people who are here, not on those who could be but aren’t,’
Catherine told me at the interval, so I did my best to focus on John, who was there with my mum and grandmother, clapping me on with enthusiastic pride.
‘He’s an angel!’
Mum exclaimed when we finished our evening with a delicious Chinese meal at my favourite Asian restaurant after the concert.
‘You two seem to have so much in common and I am obsessed with his accent. And his long hair! I like how he makes you laugh, Lou. That’s very important.’
Ben made me laugh more, I thought, cursing myself for allowing such thoughts to enter my mind. Ben made me cry more too, I remembered. Well, the distance and silence between us made me cry, but John was there as a constant companion, always lifting me up when I needed it most.
Soon, we were spending more time together than we were apart, and by Christmas we were well and truly official.
Very official.
We said a tearful if temporary goodbye at Dublin Airport once our studies finished in December, and I made my way home to Bellaghy, wondering if the lure of Ballyheaney House would catch me in its net again as the party season drew closer.
Though as much as I had going on with John in Belfast, nothing could have prepared me for the pain of winter nights back home without having Ben close by to comfort me.
Now that I had John, maybe it was a blessing in disguise.
Yes, here I was, telling Cordelia all about my love story with John as the snow fell down outside, while secretly thinking it had always meant to be with her brother instead.
‘I’m so happy for you, honey,’
she said, but there was a sadness behind her smile. I had no clue how much she knew about Ben and me. Cordelia and her brother were close, but I wasn’t sure how much they confided in each other when it came to matters of the heart.
Maybe that was a good thing for me. I left her to her kitchen preparations and went into the ballroom to finish setting tables, glad of the peace and quiet to gather my thoughts as ghosts of Christmas past danced around me.
I could see him in every corner. I could hear his laughter. I could feel his hand in mine as we slipped off to find a quiet space alone, year after year.
And just before I finished setting the table, I heard a commotion in the hallway.
I heard Ben’s voice.
I heard raised voices, angry voices. Not the type of sound associated with Christmas Eve at Ballyheaney House.
My heart stopped as I went towards the ballroom door for a closer look. Why the hell was Ben home after all?
And on top of that, why were they arguing so openly in the hallway?
They must have forgotten I was here.