For Real (Spires)

9 Laurie

Toby didn’t come back.

At first I thought he was just late, then I thought I’d confused the day, and then I realised he wasn’t coming at all. I told myself that it was entirely his right, that it was inevitable, that it was probably for the best. But I was frantic.

Was my dancing really that bad?

But he’d told me he loved me. You didn’t say that to someone, and then—Oh God. Not again. Not again.

It had only been a couple of hours, but suddenly my house was full of empty rooms, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t bear to be in it, but I didn’t dare leave in case Toby turned up. I kept half hearing the doorbell. He would tumble over the threshold and into my arms, just like always, and there’d be some story, some mistake, some misunderstanding, and we’d laugh, and I’d feel angry and foolish at the same time, but I’d forgive him. I’d forgive him because I was desperate to feel angry and foolish.

Instead of alone. And bereft.

And still foolish, for having let this happen. For having known all along that this would happen, or something like it, and made myself naked for him anyway. It wasn’t even masochism. It was a basic failure to learn.

Toby would have called it hope.

I kept thinking about last weekend, searching compulsively for the hint, the hint that surely had to be there, of what was to come. The moment it had gone wrong, and I hadn’t noticed. But I couldn’t find anything. We’d been happy. Hadn’t we? Wandering hand in hand through golden streets. If people had been inclined to look askance at us, I hadn’t been inclined to care. Perhaps Toby had?

On Sunday, I called Grace. I didn’t ask her to, but she came over anyway and kept my futile vigil with me. It helped. It meant I couldn’t cry. She wouldn’t have judged me for it, but I’d never liked doing that in front of other people. Without the excuse of sexualised suffering, anyway.

I tried to explain what had happened, but I couldn’t because I didn’t know. There was only Toby’s absence.

She could have confronted me with all the nonsense I’d told them over pancakes, but she didn’t. She just put a hand on my arm and asked if he wasn’t answering his phone and what messages I’d left him.

Which was when I had to admit I’d never asked for his number.

Grace blinked. “Okay. Well, there’s no need to panic. Toby’s a young person. He probably lives on the internet. Google him.”

“Isn’t that basically stalking?”

“Public domain, and you wouldn’t be reduced to stalking him if you’d communicated with him properly in the first place.”

The truth was, it simply hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been so resigned to the notion that something like this was going to happen anyway that I’d practically engineered it. And now it had and I was devastated and I had only myself to blame.

“Even if he is on the internet,” I said, “what am I supposed to do? Sign up for Facebook so I can Like him? Twitter at him?”

“Tweet, love. It’s tweet.” She turned on my laptop and opened up Chrome. “What’s his name again?”

Fifteen minutes of dedicated Googling later, we had comprehensively established that Toby was not on the internet except for the occasional fleeting reference connected to his mother or his school life.

“Sorry.” Grace put my computer aside and curled up on the end of the sofa. “I thought it was worth a shot.”

“I wouldn’t have known what to say, anyway.”

She shrugged. “How about, ‘Are you okay?’ Something might have happened.”

A hundred and seventy—no. No. I closed my mind to statistics. “Or he might simply have decided to stop coming. I did nothing to keep him, really, except quietly fall in love with him while telling everyone—including him—I wasn’t and wouldn’t.”

“You’re…um…you’re in love with him?”

I dropped my head into my hands. A ridiculously melodramatic gesture, but one in keeping with a ridiculously melodramatic statement. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. Maybe. Probably. I’ve forgotten what love feels like, so how would I recognise it?”

She shook her head, sympathetic and exasperated as only an old friend can be. “You think way too much.”

“I know. The world makes most sense to me when I’m working or…”

“On your knees.”

We sat in silence for a while. I knew I was being poor company, but I was selfishly glad I wasn’t alone.

“I don’t like not knowing,” I muttered, finally. “Did he just wake up on Friday morning and fall out of love with me? At least with Robert, I understood.”

“See, I never did quite figure out what went on there. I thought after what happened, you’d be the one to leave, not him.”

“My forgiveness wasn’t even in question. He just couldn’t forgive himself.”

“I live in abject terror of that, you know.” She drew in a sharp breath. “Hurting someone in the wrong way.”1

“It was a couple of fractures. They healed.” I realised I was holding my wrist protectively, my own hand a cuff. I wanted Toby’s touch. “I would have trusted him again, if he’d ever let me.”

“But he dropped you, Laurie.”

“So? His horrible aunt once called me unnatural at a family dinner party. He dropped me then, as well, when he laughed it off.”

She frowned. “It’s not the same, though.”

“Isn’t it? It’s just love and trust. Hurt and kinky sex is neither here nor there.” I took a deep breath and let the truth slip out. “God, I miss him.”

“Robert?”

“Toby. For fuck’s sake, I’ve only had two relationships. It shouldn’t be hard to keep up.”

“Sorry.” But Grace was laughing.

And then, so was I, though it hurt a bit, this helpless, sharp-edged mirth that had to cut its way through tears.

She stayed until close to midnight and then left, and I was alone again, without Robert, which didn’t matter, and without Toby, which did.

I was grateful for work the next day because it gave me focus, but it was surprisingly difficult to put Toby’s absence from my mind, and took far more energy than I would have expected. Perhaps I needed a holiday—a feeling-sorry-for-myself holiday. Pathetic. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken annual leave, and I was tired and sad and unfairly angry with Toby for doing this to me. I told myself I’d been resigned to my compromises, but he’d promised me everything, throwing love around like Smarties, and I’d believed him. Then he’d dropped me, just like Robert. And just like Robert, he’d run.

It was wrong to make comparisons, wrong to feel this hurt and empty, but I did. I did.

I kept imagining the alert, the swoosh of doors and the clatter of footsteps, and the body, the far-too-familiar body, being whisked past me to the operating theatre. It was ridiculous, of course. Nothing so dramatic had likely taken place, and even if it had, there was no guarantee it would be my hospital or my shift.

I would simply never know where Toby’s life would take him. Had already taken him.

I was so miserable, I began to worry about my performance, and that was something I couldn’t afford, so I booked two weeks off. One of my colleagues actually said, “Good for you.” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the time. Going away seemed both painful and pointless without Toby. But I had to do something.

Get through this somehow.

Surely it had been worse after Robert. But the strangest thing was I couldn’t remember that pain at all.

* * *

On Friday night—twelve days since I saw him last, not that I was counting, except that I was—I came home and found him in a black suit, sitting on my doorstep. And just like that, all the anger, all the fear, all the misery washed away, leaving me perfectly cold. Safely indifferent.

I regarded him a moment. “Hello.”

He didn’t look up. “Hey.”

“I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again.” I was actually pleased—darkly pleased—to sound so calm.

“Why? Because I didn’t show up once? Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction?”

“Well, what was I supposed to think?”

There was a long silence. It was an odd moment. He was right there, in front of my house, but he seemed far away, sullen and young, an unlikely cause of all that hurt. Perhaps I’d gone a little mad, investing so much in whatever it was I’d thought we’d had. A relationship? With a teenager?

“My granddad died,” he said.

Oh fuck. The worst of it was that my immediate reaction was a brief flare of resentment, as if he had somehow engineered the whole situation to make me react to his absence and then render my reactions—my distress, my annoyance, my sense of betrayal—invalid. It was as if he had deliberately set out to make me look foolish. Which he hadn’t, of course he hadn’t. It was simply that his pain had left no room for mine, and he hadn’t even thought to let me know.

“Funeral today,” he went on. “He missed the snowdrops. He’s supposed to come with me. That’s what we do. Every year.”

“I’m so sorry.” I tried to push everything aside except concern. “Do you want to come in?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I really wanted to see you. It’s all I’ve been thinking about all day, but now I just feel weird about it.”

“I missed you too.” It seemed a safe enough thing to say. It didn’t remotely cover the mess he’d left me in, but it wasn’t a lie either. I reached down and gave his shoulder an awkward squeeze, but he flinched away from me. “Toby?”

“I didn’t miss you. I wanted you to be there.” At last, he looked up, his eyes dark-shadowed, almost bruised. He was very pale, and his acne had flared up, blurring his jaw, his brow, the top edges of his cheeks with red and white stars. “Don’t you get it, Laurie? I wanted you to be with me, but here I am as usual, sitting on your doorstep, waiting for the corner of your life I’m allowed.”

On a rational level, I knew it was grief that made him speak like that to me, but the sheer unfairness of it struck at my good intentions like a pickaxe. “For fuck’s sake,” I snapped, “if you’d bothered to tell me or ask me, I would have been there.” Then I gasped and covered my mouth. That hadn’t been what I’d meant to say at all.

“Wow, yeah, okay.” Toby wrapped his arms round his knees, pulling himself into an impossible ball. “How the fuck was I supposed to tell you, Laurie? Get myself shot in the hope you were the one in the helicopter?”

My whole body went cold. My worst fear, flung at me by a grieving child: arriving on some scene of terrible destruction to find, not a problem to be solved, but the body of someone I loved. “Toby, don’t even joke—”

“It’s not a joke. I literally have no way to contact you. You’ve never got round to giving me any. Because it’s always on your terms. Everything is always on your terms.”

Oh God. I deserved every word. He’d been alone, and in pain, when I could have—should have—been with him, and that was my fault, not his. All this week fretting because I didn’t have his number, and I’d never even thought he didn’t have mine. “Oh God. I’m—”

“If you say you’re sorry, I’ll scream.” He looked at me, his eyes all shadow and shiny with unshed tears. “My granddad’s dead, Laurie. The person I love most in the whole world. And I spent his funeral thinking about you. How fucked is that?”

If he didn’t want my regret, could he at least accept my consolation? “It’s not fucked. Funerals are…funerals. Grief is grief. There aren’t any rules about what you should be thinking or feeling.”

“Oh, fuck you, that’s not the point.”

“I know.” I was almost glad, in a way, to bear his anger without flinching. It was something I could do for him. “The point is, I wasn’t there for you.”

His fingers knotted restlessly. “Well, at least you get it. But why’s it always me?”

“Why’s what?” It felt wrong now to be looming over him, so I hunkered down in front of him and linked my hands together.

“Why do I always have to ask for everything? Why do you never just…give…or offer?”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, but I’m not psychic. I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, but you never ask either. Do you know how fucking hard it is to be the one who’s always asking? Why do I always have to roll my heart between us like it’s a fucking marble?” His voice lifted, then broke. “How the fuck am I supposed to know?”

“Know what? That I’ll be there for you?” I tried to keep my voice gentle, but there was something unexpected and unexpectedly painful about his uncertainty. “Darling, how could you doubt it?”

Again, that cold, bright stare. “Because you’ve never given me a reason to believe it.”

His words slid into me like pieces of glass. “That’s…that’s not fair.”

“Well, neither are you.”

I had no idea how to answer. Everything he’d said was true: I hadn’t been fair. And sorry was so inadequate as to be insulting.

I didn’t know how long he’d been sitting out there, so I stood up, took off my coat, and draped it across his shoulders. He didn’t react, but at least he didn’t shake it off. Then, I sat down next to him, and we stayed like that for a while, locked in our silences. He smelled faintly of the cologne I’d bought him, a hint of spice and tears, and I ached to be back in Oxford, where it had briefly seemed possible that we could be in love. Where it had been the easiest, simplest thing in the world.

He was right, though. Asking was difficult. Incredibly difficult. But there was such a lot I should have asked and asked for, such a lot I should have given, instead of pretending and telling myself I didn’t want any of it. I hadn’t given him freedom. I hadn’t even managed my own expectations. All I’d done was place every burden of love and trust on Toby, made it impossible for him to ask for something as basic as my presence in his life, and sentenced us both to nearly a week of hell.

Perhaps it was already too late to begin building certainties. But the least I could do—at last, at long last—was try. Ask. “Toby?”

“What?”

“I know I should have done this weeks ago, but there’s something I need to ask you, and something I need to give you.”

“Too late. I don’t want your dead-granddad pity.”

“This isn’t pity.” I crushed my own impatience. I knew, like my anger and my hurt, it was just a form of emotional distraction—a way for me to feel less on edge, less vulnerable, less fucking guilty. “When I didn’t see you last week, and I had no way to contact you, I was…I was…”

“What?” He sounded so sceptical. My fault again.

“Distraught. Devastated. Heartbroken. The thing is, I’ve been telling myself for weeks that you have the right to walk away from me at any time. Well, you don’t have that right.” His head turned sharply, and I reached out without thinking and pushed his fringe out of his eyes. “I mean, you do have the right, I’m not insane. But you have to break up with me first.”

“Y’know,” he said softly, “that sounds like you want to be my boyfriend.”2

“I do. It wasn’t what I was going to ask, though.”

His lips curled into the smallest smile. “I’m still counting it.”

And I smiled back, just as tentatively. “All right.”

We were quiet again as I struggled with my incredibly banal, yet utterly necessary request. It should have been so simple, but somehow it wasn’t. I’d pleaded with him shamelessly for all manner of violations and all manner of mercies, but the sexual vulnerabilities I allowed were nothing to sitting on my doorstep with Toby, admitting everything I wanted—and needed—from him.

He nudged his shoulder gently against mine. “What did you want, Laurie?”

I took a deep breath. “Your phone number?”

“Course. And text me, so I’ve got yours.” Somehow he managed to say this as though it was perfectly normal. As though we weren’t months overdue.

I reached into my pocket, plucked out my phone, and added Toby to my address book. Texted him my contact card.

Then I pulled out my house keys and slid Robert’s old key off the ring. I’d put it on there for safekeeping when he’d finally moved out, and never got round to removing it.

Initially it had been sentimentality—it was somewhere we were still together, two keys nestled against each other on my key ring—and then just apathy. I handed it to Toby. “This is what I wanted to give you.”

His eyes widened. “Jesus, Laurie.”

“No more sitting on my doorstep, okay? Come whenever you like, whether I’m here or not.”

“Seriously?”

I nodded. “Again, it’s something I should have done weeks ago.”

He arched his hips off the step, wriggled his own set of keys out of his pocket, and added mine to the bunch, where it vanished among the other bits and pieces of Toby’s life. “So what do I get when my next family member dies?”

“I ask you to marry me.”

“That’s so not funny.” It wasn’t, but it was, the way only terrible things can be sometimes. Toby leaned in and kissed me chastely, a little sadly. “Thank you.”

“Will you come in now?”

“Yeah.”

I left him on the sofa, looking a bit like a stranger in his funeral suit, and made him tea and hot buttered toast, because it was the only thing I could think to do for him.

In grief, Toby’s living far outstripped my own, for I had never lost anyone I truly loved. My parents had not been close to their parents, so the death of grandmothers and grandfathers had always been an abstract thing to me. And though I would surely mourn the passing of my own parents, our relationship was one of form and custom, love through duty, and complete mutual incomprehension.

It was strange the way some generations felt unreachably distant and others not at all. In so many ways, I had met all their expectations, but there was still one where I hadn’t and couldn’t. They’d never reproached me for it. In some ways, it might have been easier if they had, because then it would have given me a reason to dislike them.

I suddenly remembered a birthday—twenty-first? twenty-second?—breaking beneath their silence. “Why don’t you ever ask about him?”

My mother had looked momentarily embarrassed, not because of the question, but because I had raised my voice. “I didn’t know you wanted me to,” was all she’d said. And, after that, at the end of every phone call, always and without fail: “How is Robert?” To which I could only ever answer, “Fine.”

The most ironic thing, the cruellest, was that Robert should have been perfect—attractive, well educated, well brought up, ambitious, charming—but for the fact he was a man. All the trappings of civilisation, of good living and eligibility, meant nothing. For he would not bear children. And, while we were together, he could not have married me.

What would my parents think if I ever introduced them to Toby?

And how mortifying—how loathsome and cowardly—to be thirty-seven and still afraid of their disappointment.

I sat on the floor, my head against Toby’s knee, as he nibbled the toast and sipped the tea. I didn’t know what to say to him or how to comfort him. I only knew he was in pain, and that there was nothing I could do to take it away.

The hospital, of course, was full of pain, full of loss, but there I was merely a ferryman. This was different. I had no role to hide behind. There was only the nakedness and helplessness of love.

“You know what sucks?” He put the plate down—he’d hardly eaten anything. But he kept the tea, cradling the cup too tightly, the skin of his hands blotching pink and white.

“Tell me?”

“Nobody liked my granddad except me. He was kind of a horrible person.”3

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, but perhaps it made it easier for him to dwell on bad memories instead of good. “That doesn’t seem to fit what you’ve told me.”

“No, he was nice to me. But his daughter, that’s my grandmother, hates him—I mean hated him—because he was really strict with her when she was growing up. He used to hit her and stuff. It wasn’t meant to be abusive or anything. It was just the way he’d been raised.”

“He didn’t…?” I wasn’t sure how to finish, or what I would do about the answer.

“God no. Never. Not with me.”

Relief rolled through me, and then I felt like a hypocrite. I was quick enough to react to the possibility of other people hurting Toby, noticeably less so when it was me.

He stared blankly at his tea. “My grandmother married really young just to get away from him, and she wouldn’t let him near my mum when she was born. But then when she got pregnant—my mum, I mean—and they threw her out, suddenly he was there, supporting her, taking care of me. He had one of those…baby carrier things you strap to your chest. Used to carry me everywhere like a little monkey.”

I reached up and peeled his fingers off the cup. He didn’t resist when I took it away and put it down, just held my hand instead. “People change. There’s nothing strange or wrong about it.”

“I guess. He had to have this operation, you know, in like the sixties or seventies. He was injured at Dunkirk and shrapnel got in his heart, so this doctor came all the way over from America to get it out. It took like nine hours or something, and he had this massive scar running all the way down his front and his back. Everybody thought he was going to die. My mum thinks that’s what changed him.”

“Does it matter?”

For a moment or two, he didn’t say anything. Then he shrugged. “I guess not. Not anymore, anyway.”

It was harder than I would have imagined possible to see him like this, so uncertain and so sad, but he was still my boy, my Toby, still so full of light. I could picture him in some churchyard, a small splash of dark beneath a grey sky. And I should have been there beside him. He shouldn’t have had to mourn alone. I hated myself for that. “The fact he treated other people badly doesn’t change the fact he loved you.”

“No, I know. It’s just”—he squeezed my fingers—“kind of lonely.”

I swallowed, guilt and shame, pain and love twisting together inside me like wire wool until I wasn’t sure how I could bear it or keep it all contained.

“Like normally,” he went on, “all the love and loss and all the rest of that shit is spread around, but there’s just me. He was there for me my whole life. How the fuck am I supposed to make that matter enough?”

I pressed myself against his leg, my face usefully hidden against his thigh, and tried to give him some sort of answer. “You grieve and you remember and you live.”

My voice must have betrayed me because his free hand curled into my hair and pulled a little, as if he wanted me to look at him. “Laurie, are you crying?”

Fuck. I was. Horrible, sticky tears that burned in my eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Are you really crying for me?”

Apparently so. As if it could somehow ease his pain. Another tug made me lift my head, and I glanced up at him, embarrassed and wet-eyed, helplessly hurting for him.

“God.” His thumb swept under my lashes, gathering caught moisture. “Wow.”

“I know it’s not about me,” I mumbled, “but I’m sorry I wasn’t there with you, and I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m sorry it’s been difficult for you, and I’m sorry it’s probably going to be difficult for a while. I wish I could make that better, but I know can’t.” I took a deep, ragged, teary breath. “And I’m really sorry I’m crying like an idiot, because I have no fucking idea why I’m doing that.”

“‘S’okay.” He tumbled off the sofa and into my lap, and kissed me through a mess of hopeless words and salt. “It’s…nice. It helps. Everything kind of comes and goes. Like sometimes I feel so nothingy it’s almost like I’ve forgotten he’s dead, or maybe I’m dead or something.” He curled into my arms, and I wrapped him up as tight and safe as I could. “Cry for me, okay? Since I can’t right now.”

So I did, just for a little while as I held him, and Toby told me stories of his grandfather—a man who had fought a war, made terrible mistakes, and learned so very late in life how to love.

Later, I carried him upstairs, undressed him, and took him to bed.

At first we simply lay, our bodies entwined, but then we came together more certainly, more urgently, seeking each other in kisses and touches, some scattered words and a few more tears, and Toby mastered me with nothing but himself.