Chapter 30
30
I love being back in London. I love the familiarity of the streets where I live; the fact that I don’t need to type everything into Google Maps every time I want to leave the house. I love the hustle and bustle of Crouch End Broadway, the peace and tranquillity and green space of Alexandra Park, the constant hum of background noise even when it’s quiet; I love the variety of faces and people, the fact that anything you want to do is right on your doorstep – I even love the ridiculous amount of traffic and the impatient drivers that used to drive me mad. Because all of it is home.
Over Christmas, after helping me move back into my house, Kirstie, Sophie and I go to our usual haunts, the pubs and bars that we’ve been going to for most of our adult lives, the places that have seen us through early motherhood, the teen years (the kids’, not ours), through heartbreak and illness and divorces, through falling in love, holiday planning and anything else life has thrown at us over the twenty-five-plus years of our friendship.
I love the bones of these women, these people who know me better than anyone else in the world, including my children and my ex-husband. Being with them makes my heart sing, and slowly the heartache and difficulties of the last few months begin to fade into the background.
Their kids come back for Christmas – mine are stuck out in Australia and New Zealand for a few more months – and we spend days on end sitting around laughing and eating and drinking, just like old times. It feels like a little bubble of happiness. Like life has never changed. Like Newcastle, and Matt and Gladys, Jay and Alan, never happened (except for the occasional text from Jay asking if I’d consider going back, telling me he was falling in love with me, and generally making me feel terrible).
As Christmas turns to the drudgery of January, and life settles back into an old familiar routine – albeit one without a permanent job and therefore even less money than before thanks to the unpredictability of supply teaching – a sort of malaise begins to set in.
At first I just put it down to the January blues. But as the weeks pass and the weather stays grey, my mood still doesn’t brighten. The texts Jay keeps sending me aren’t helping either – messages begging me to go back, to let him explain, to tell me that he misses me. All they do is make me feel worse.
Because they’re from the wrong man.
In the first week of February, the girls finally stage an intervention – at least that’s what Kirstie calls it as they bundle into my hallway, removing their coats and boots and scarves and dumping dripping umbrellas in the cloakroom sink. The air steams with damp clothing as they march me through to the kitchen and order me to sit at the table. I do as I’m told, then they sit opposite me, like some sort of inquisition.
‘What’s going on?’ I say, puzzled.
Kirstie lays her hands flat on the table and says, ‘We’re sending you to Canada.’
I stare at her, then look at Sophie’s face, and back to Kirstie, waiting to see who laughs first. But neither of them crack so I smile instead, and roll my eyes.
‘You two are hilarious.’ I fold my arms and sit back in my chair. ‘What are you really doing here?’
‘Sorry, M. But that really is what we’re doing here.’ Sophie’s voice is quiet, and I look at her for a hint that she’s having me on. But there’s only worry in her pretty face, and my stomach drops.
‘What…’ I stop, swallow, lean forward. My leg is jumping up and down furiously beneath the table. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘We’re sick of seeing you mooning around feeling miserable?—’
‘—that’s not quite how I’d put it?—’
‘—so Soph and I have taken matters into our own hands.’ Kirstie rubs her hands together like a Bond villain.
I feel as though my blood has turned to ice and my heart is thumping erratically against my ribcage. ‘You… you’ve done what?’ My throat is dry and the words come out crackly.
‘Listen, I know you said you weren’t going to chase around the world like the star of a Richard Curtis film – your words, I believe,’ Kirstie continues. ‘And Soph and I have been so thrilled to have you back here with us that we’ve ignored the fact you’re pining for too long. But look at you.’
‘What about me? I’m fine.’ I tuck my hands under my thighs to stop them shaking. ‘Just tell me exactly what it is you’ve done.’ My pulse beats in my temple.
Sophie flicks Kirstie a glance, then blurts it out in one go. ‘We got in touch with Matt and he’s agreed to meet you to talk and you’re flying out to see him in two days’ time.’
I stare at them both, trying to fathom what the bloody hell is going on here. They’ve contacted Matt? He wants to meet me? What the hell?
‘What the hell?’ I say out loud, standing suddenly. The chair behind me screeches across the floor and my legs shake.
They both stand too, and we stare at each other across the dining table. This is usually a place where we sit, drink and laugh and put the world to rights, but right now it feels like a battleground, with me on one side, and my betrayers, my best friends, on the other. They’d better start explaining themselves, and fast.
Sophie looks like she’d rather be anywhere else but here having this conversation, but Kirstie looks perfectly at ease, and now she leans her hands on the table and tells me exactly what they’ve been up to.
‘Neither of us wanted to see you so sad any more,’ she says, her voice gentle. ‘So I stole your phone and took Matt’s number and I rang him.’
‘You rang him.’ I stare at her, dumbly.
She shrugs. ‘You still had his number in there, so I figured if you really didn’t want to speak to him ever again you’d have deleted it.’
I don’t say anything.
‘Luckily he hadn’t dumped his UK phone, so I told him that you’d left Jay, that you were back in London, and that you wanted to see him, to sort things out.’
‘I told her we should have spoken to you about it first,’ Sophie says, but Kirstie interrupts her.
‘And we all know you’d have said no, and then continued to moon around feeling sad.’ She folds her arms defensively. ‘So I took it upon myself to do it anyway.’
‘You had no right,’ I say, my voice a whisper. I clear my throat. ‘What made you think that was okay?’
A flicker of doubt crosses Kirstie’s face, but quickly clears again. ‘Because we love you, Miranda. Simple as that.’
I stare at the faces of my best friends, the two women I love more than anyone else in the whole world apart from my children, and right now I want to punch them both. I’m mortified, and angry, and confused and… oh God , what must Matt think of me?
I sit, my legs suddenly weak. Kirstie and Sophie sit down too, Sophie with a look of relief on her face as though this must mean I’m okay with it.
The truth is, I don’t know how I feel about what they’ve done. They’ve betrayed me, but somewhere – buried very deep down for now – I know it would have been for the right reasons. They just want me to be happy and yes, Kirstie is right that stubbornness would never have allowed me to agree to them ringing Matt.
It’s done now, so rather than worry about it, I need to decide how I feel about it. About the fact that Matt has said he would like to see me. That he’s agreed to talk to me.
‘I can’t—’ I start, then let out a puff of air and run my hands through my hair. ‘Jesus, you two,’ I say, and laugh. ‘You’ve done some mad things over the years but I think this might be the most outrageous thing you’ve ever done by a country mile.’
‘Buuuuut…?’ Kirstie says. ‘Is it a good thing?’
I don’t answer for a moment, unsure how to respond.
‘Tell me more, then I’ll decide.’
Kirstie looks at Sophie with a triumphant, told-you-so grin. ‘So, he was pretty surprised to hear from me,’ she says. ‘I explained everything – that you were single and back in London, and he knows you regret not staying in touch.’
‘But I?—’
Kirstie doesn’t let me speak. ‘And before you say anything, I had to tell him that, because he had to think this was at least partly coming from you.’ She shakes her head. ‘Honestly, you people and your stubbornness are going to be the death of me.’
Sophie takes over, cutting Kirstie off before she can continue.
‘Matt, understandably, thought we were completely insane, but by the end of the conversation Kirstie had convinced him you were totally up for flying over and meeting him in a coffee shop on neutral ground.’
‘You thought I was mad travelling three hundred miles to Newcastle to look for Jay – now you expect me to fly ten times that to meet someone for a coffee? ’
‘It’s not just someone though, is it? It’s The One.’
Is it? Is Kirstie right? I mean, I definitely have feelings for Matt that I hadn’t wanted to admit to, but The One?
As if she can read my mind, she elaborates. ‘I saw the way you looked at each other and I saw the way you looked when you spoke about him. And I’ve never once seen you look like that at anyone else, definitely not Jay.’
Poor Jay.
‘But if Matt is The One, why was I dreaming about the man I almost ran over, and someone called Jay? What does that mean? And what about the skydiving, and the fact he was in London that day, and the pink tie? None of that fits Matt, but a lot of it fits Jay.’
‘Maybe it’s all just a coincidence,’ Sophie says gently.
‘But you believed it too!’ I say.
‘I did. But maybe I was wrong.’
‘So you think Matt is The One too, do you?’
Sophie nods. ‘I think he probably is, yes.’
I sigh. ‘So what happened? What did he say?’ I just need to get this over and done with, like ripping off a plaster.
‘Well, he seemed pretty pleased, and when I said you’d left Jay because you hadn’t got over him?—’
‘You said what ?’
Kirstie has the grace to look sheepish. ‘Sorry. I know it wasn’t subtle, but I needed him to understand.’ She shrugs. ‘Anyway, it was all fine because he said he’d love to see you and was happy for you to go and see him.’
‘But…’ There are so many things wrong with this situation I’m not sure where to start. ‘But he’s more than three thousand miles away! I mean, how long even is the flight?’
‘Oh, only about eight hours. I mean, it took you more than six to drive to Newcastle right, so it’s not much different.’ Kirstie waves her hand in the air.
‘Not much different?’ I repeat, like a well-trained parrot.
Sophie reaches over the table and takes my hands. I let her. ‘Listen, M. I know this is a lot to take in, but I promise you, Matt sounded pleased to hear from us, and he’s excited about you coming to see him. You always say you only live once, that life is for living, right?’
‘Do I?’
‘Well, you have done. In the past. But anyway, you’re right. It is. And I know I was the one who persuaded you to go chasing after Jay in the first place, and I would say I was sorry about that, only… well, it’s worked out okay in the end, hasn’t it? Because you might not have fallen in love with the man from your dream, but you did meet Matt and…’ She smiles. ‘He seems to be pretty much the man of your dreams anyway.’
I let those words settle for a moment and see how they feel. Is Matt really the man of my dreams – if not quite the man from my dreams? I’m not quite sure what my friends have seen that makes them so convinced that he’s the one for me, but they’ve clearly seen something. And the truth is, when I think about Matt – which I try not to do too often because it hurts – I feel a flutter of excitement in my belly. A stab of regret. A longing to see his face again.
To kiss his lips.
‘Fuck it.’
Both of them open their eyes wide, look at each other then back at me again.
‘Does this mean you’ll go?’ Kirstie says.
‘You’ve paid for my flight, right?’
She nods.
‘Then it would be a shame to waste it, wouldn’t it?’
They both leap up and run round the table and smother me in hugs until I have to push them off me.
‘But don’t think for one minute I’ve forgiven you for interfering in my love life.’
‘No, course not,’ Kirstie says, serious.
‘And if this turns out to be a huge disaster, you need to be prepared for the fact that I’ll never speak to either of you ever again.’
‘Message received loud and clear.’ Sophie’s grinning at me and finally I crack and laugh.
‘Good God, what would my life be like without you two interfering in it?’
‘Boring, that’s what. And lonely. And utterly, utterly miserable.’
‘It was a theoretical question, but yes. All of those things. Plus quiet. Blissfully, blissfully, quiet.’