Chapter 28
28
‘Well?’ Sarah asks as I let myself into the flat late that afternoon. ‘Did it work? Did you seal the deal?’ She and Mike are sitting nonchalantly enough on the sofa, with the Sunday newspaper spread out between them, but something tells me they’ve been waiting to ambush me.
‘I’m not sure,’ I tell her honestly.
‘What? How can you not be sure? Either you did or you didn’t.’
If only it was that simple. Although Will and I held each other for ages, which was very nice, we didn’t kiss and neither of us seemed to be able to find the words to move things on either. In the end, we’d gently released each other and headed back to the house where Jonathan had wisely decided to make himself scarce. Our conversation had stuck to safe topics while Will made us a cup of tea and we drank it and then, after another admittedly lovely hug, I’d left and driven home. Although I was elated to begin with because I thought we had made a genuine breakthrough, I then spent most of the journey back second-guessing everything and now I’m completely confused.
‘It’s complicated—’ I begin.
‘It so isn’t,’ Mike interrupts. ‘If it is, it’s purely because yet another only child is showing their inability to communicate properly.’
To my surprise, Sarah is on him before I even get a chance to spring to Will’s defence.
‘Mike,’ she says sternly. ‘I love you to bits, you know I do, but this has to stop.’
‘What?’
‘This only child stuff. Someone has to be honest and tell you that it’s total bullshit, and it looks like it’s going to be me.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ he retorts indignantly. ‘I’ve spent years gathering evidence. When I publish my findings?—’
‘You’re not going to publish anything, and nobody’s going to give you the Nobel Prize either. Well, not for that, anyway. If they introduce a category for kicking vulnerable old ladies out of hospitals on to the street in the middle off the night, you might be in with a chance of that one.’
‘Unfair!’
‘OK, but you’ve got to let the only child obsession go. It’s a dead end.’
‘She’s got a point,’ I add. ‘Look at Luke. He was like a checklist of all the narcissistic traits you say only children suffer from, but he had a brother.’
‘The exception that proves the rule,’ Mike mutters mutinously.
‘Nuh-uh,’ Sarah counters. ‘Sorry, honey, but you don’t get off that lightly. Let me ask you this. Your mum falls down the stairs and breaks her leg. Who looks after her?’
‘Dad.’
‘Yeah, he would normally, except he’s in a wheelchair following a freak accident involving a wheelie bin. Now who helps?’
‘What happened with the wheelie bin?’
‘Never mind that. Who rushes to help?’
‘Louise, my oldest sister. She lives closest.’
‘So, even though both your parents are incapacitated, you don’t have to lift a finger.’
Mike does have the grace to look a little uncomfortable. ‘It’s not quite like that. I mean?—’
‘It’s exactly like that, Mike.’ Sarah is evidently not going to let him get away with anything this afternoon. ‘You might ring up, make a few sympathetic noises, but your life is basically unaffected.’
‘They live over a hundred miles away though, and Louise is just down the road.’
‘Yes, but now imagine you’re an only child.’
‘Like Will,’ I add. ‘He’s had to give up his life to look after his dad because he doesn’t have a handy sister just down the road.’
‘You’re ganging up on me now.’
‘You say ganging up,’ Sarah counters. ‘I say that Tilly and I are working together to help you see this from a better perspective. We’re helping you to grow as a person.’
‘It feels like ganging up.’
‘No pain, no gain. Anyway, the point is that only children aren’t any more selfish than anyone else. They just have a different, and arguably more challenging, set of circumstances to deal with. Who’s going to sort everything out when your parents pass away?’
Mike is looking increasingly uneasy. ‘Louise and my brother David are the executors of the will. That’s not my fault though. It makes sense that the two eldest children would do it.’
‘Yes, but there’s much more to it than that, isn’t there? Who’s going to clear out the house, organise the funerals, all that stuff?’
‘We’ll do it between us. This is a bit morbid, Sarah.’
‘I’m just making a point. Will will be all on his own doing that as well, when the time comes. That’s a big burden.’
‘Yeah, but he’ll walk off with a fat inheritance. Tilly, didn’t you say Jonathan’s house was huge? I’ll only get a small proportion of Mum and Dad’s estate.’
‘My heart breaks for you,’ Sarah says while miming playing a tiny violin. ‘The point is that you’ll never have to carry the kind of burden that someone like Will does because you’ll always have your siblings to share it. Being an only child is a tough gig, Mike. You could do with cutting them some slack instead of censoring them all the time and trying to make them out to be socially inept.’
Mike looks unconvinced. ‘But Caroline?—’
‘Was horrible to you,’ I agree. ‘But was that because she was an only child or because she just wasn’t a very nice person?’
‘Who’s Caroline?’ Sarah asks.
‘One of Mike’s exes,’ I explain. ‘She broke the golden rule by dumping him. He’s never forgiven her.’
Sarah looks like a light bulb has switched on in her head. ‘That explains everything!’
‘Uh-oh.’ Mike looks at her apprehensively.
‘I was never able to reconcile the Mike that I thought I knew with the person everyone warned me off when we first started seeing each other. But, if we factor revenge shagging into the mix, it all starts to make sense.’
‘Revenge shagging?’
‘Yes. Punishing this Caroline by treating other women with the casual disdain she showed to you. The only question is why did you stop when you met me?’
‘I think you’re overanalysing this, Dr Freud,’ Mike tells her, but his facial expression is unconvincing. ‘Anyway, aren’t we supposed to be talking about Tilly and Will?’
‘We’ll come to them,’ Sarah almost purrs. ‘I think I might be on the brink of unlocking the great mystery of Mike, and the opportunity is too good to miss. Tell me about Caroline.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s not the done thing to talk about your exes with your current girlfriend.’
‘I agree it would be weird if you brought her up all the time, but you’ve never mentioned her. It’s like you’ve gone to the other extreme, which is also troubling, because you only excise someone that fully when they’ve done you a lot of damage. So spill. Besides dumping you, what did she do to you?’
Mike sighs. ‘You’ll say I’m overreacting.’
‘I promise I won’t.’
‘Fine. She called me shallow.’
‘Sorry?’
‘When she broke up with me, she said it was because I was shallow and she needed a man with more emotional substance to him. She accused me of skating across the surface of life without ever engaging with the deeper issues.’
‘What on earth did she mean by that?’
‘She basically felt I’d never struggled. I had a happy childhood, did well at school, got my degree and landed a decent job straight out of uni. Life was handed to me on a plate, in her view.’
‘The same could be said of lots of people. What struggles did she have, then?’
‘None that I could see, but she always made this big deal about how hard she found it to make friends at school because she hadn’t grown up around other children and how I couldn’t possibly understand how difficult it was. It pissed me off because it felt like I should feel guilty for growing up in a large, generally loving family, but I couldn’t say anything because it would just make her worse.’
‘And then she dumped you.’
Mike nods.
‘I never liked her,’ I offer. ‘She was always criticising you. I mean, you can be a consummate arse sometimes, but you didn’t deserve to be treated like that.’
‘Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence.’ Mike laughs bitterly. ‘Anyway, it’s water under the bridge.’
‘It isn’t,’ Sarah says to him, her tone suddenly gentle. ‘Because under all that bluster is a wounded little boy who still doesn’t understand what he did to make her behave as she did. I need that little boy to hear that he didn’t do anything. It’s not his fault. She sounds like a deeply damaged person who needs everyone around her to be just as damaged as she is. You’re just fine as you are. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ She leans across and plants a kiss on his lips. ‘Right. Now we’ve sorted that out, we can move on to Tilly and Will.’ She waves to the spare sofa. ‘Why don’t you step into my treatment room, Tilly. The doctor will see you now.’
* * *
‘Sarah thinks I need to be more assertive and take the lead,’ I say to Tash a few days later as we’re grabbing a quick lunch together in the hospital canteen. ‘She thinks Will is just a bit shy and will come out of himself if given the right impetus.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I think there’s a real risk of spooking him. I mean, he is shy and he does lack confidence, but I’m not sure leaping on him is going to help.’
‘But you can’t stay in limbo forever either.’
I sigh. ‘No, I know.’
She smiles. ‘I’ve never seen you like this before. You really like this one, don’t you? I mean, you’re right to. He’s definitely a catch, as I’ve said already.’
‘I do.’
‘I’ve got it!’ she suddenly exclaims, slapping her forehead and causing a few other people to turn and look at us. ‘You need Isaac.’
‘Umm. How?’
‘Well, you had a lovely day out with him, didn’t you? He hasn’t stopped asking when he’s going to see Will again.’
‘I’m sorry, and I love Isaac, but I think he’d have precisely the opposite effect to the one I want.’
‘Nonsense. I mean, you’re not going to be smooching in front of him, I hope, but he’s the excuse you need to spend more time together and maybe, after you’ve dropped him home…’
‘The only thing we’d be up to after dropping him home is crawling into bed.’
‘Exactly!’
‘Separate beds. To sleep. Sorry, Tash, but you can’t reconcile free babysitting with sorting out my love life, no matter how hard you try.’
‘Take him anyway? Please? I won’t get any rest until you do.’
I smile. ‘I’ll talk to Will.’
‘I’m serious though,’ she continues after a mouthful of her sandwich. ‘Maybe the key to this is just spending more time together. The more he gets used to you, the more confident he’ll start to feel around you, and then, who knows?’
‘You might be right. His dad needs to back off too. Will was so embarrassed when Jonathan openly tried to push us together. I think he actually did more harm than good.’
She grins. ‘All the more reason to spend time with Will away from his dad’s house. Parks, soft-play centres, all those sorts of places.’
‘Definitely not the soft-play centre. I don’t think we can show our faces in there again after last time.’
‘I don’t know. It sounds like you might have been good for them.’
I know she’s just after another day of free childcare, but I am considering Tash’s idea as I make my way back down to A&E. Maybe she’s right and all Will needs is time. If that’s the case, Isaac does give us the perfect opportunity to spend another whole day in each other’s company. And, as she pointed out, we’ll be away from Jonathan’s ham-fisted attempts to matchmake us. It’ll also be an easy thing to sell to Will, I reckon. There will be absolutely zero opportunity for romance, but maybe this is all about carefully laying foundations rather than rushing to the next level before Will is ready. This might be a longer game than I’m used to, but the one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that he is worth the wait.