Chapter 31
Josh
The first and only time I’ve hooked up with a girl since Rachel was last summer.
It wasn’t my finest hour.
You’d need a psychologist to unpick what made me do it – because I’ve not yet been able to, and I was the one making all the poor choices that night – but she was married, I knew it, and I decided not to care.
We met in a bar. She had a jet-black bob and luminous eyes, and a crowd of so many friends around her that they looked like her entourage.
I clocked her wedding ring from the off, as well as the fact she was way out of my league.
As Darren’s twelve-year-old would have said, I was definitely punching.
But for some reason she made a beeline for me, then remained at my side all night.
We went back to my flat, where I mixed up a couple of the world’s worst cocktails, because she said she didn’t like wine.
‘Do you do this often?’ she asked, once I’d handed over her drink.
I reassessed the cloudy, off-colour concoction in our glasses and shook my head. ‘Sorry. Can you tell?’
She laughed softly. ‘No, idiot. I meant, cheating on your wife.’
‘Oh.’ I swallowed, glanced down at the ring still on my finger. ‘Not exactly. You?’
‘Only when it’s worth it,’ she said with a glinting smile, then stepped forward and kissed me.
When I think back to that night, I firstly remember the relief.
I tried so hard to stay in the moment, to not compare what we were doing with what Rachel and I would have done, as we kissed and touched and eventually fucked.
And that was when the realisation finally hit: I could get turned on by someone other than my ex, which I’d been starting to worry might never be possible.
But I also remember the guilt, the next morning. Of knowing I’d had sex with someone else’s wife. I wasn’t that guy. Or was I so bitter now that I was determined to take a sledgehammer to the happiness of everyone around me?
Seven months on from the world’s most unromantic encounter, Valentine’s Day rolls around, and as usual the world is shitting hearts. Every shop I venture into seems to be propagating teddy bears and rose petals and love-themed foodstuffs, offering Valentine’s-whatever at five times the usual price.
I’m not usually this grumpy about sentimentality.
Rachel and I would always enjoy the occasion of Valentine’s, in that we appreciated an excuse to cook nice food and drink cava, and have some particularly spicy sex.
We’d exchange cards, writing each other sweet messages inside.
Rachel always drew hers for me. Sometimes they were hilariously graphic, as if they’d been ripped straight out of the Kama Sutra.
When she left, Rachel took all the cards I’d ever given her, over the years. I still have each one she wrote to me too, in a shoebox beneath my bed.
As the day has drawn closer, I have permitted myself to picture what she might be doing to mark the occasion. Candlelit dinner, new lingerie, new man? None of our friends has mentioned she’s seeing anyone. But it’s bound to happen, sooner or later.
I last saw her at Darren’s New Year’s Eve party, a couple of months ago. We bumped into each other at the drinks table. She was glowing that night, gold hair tumbling against her face, brushing the frilled sleeves of her glittered dress. It physically ached, how much I still wanted her.
For some reason, in that moment, I felt an inconvenient need to confess. I slept with someone else. I’m sorry. It was crap. It meant nothing.
But instead, I said, ‘Rach. I still have the second pill.’
She blinked at me, as if she thought she might have misheard.
It was almost reflex, I think. Because I saw her so rarely now, but had continued to rehearse these conversations by myself in bed, in the shower, at college en route to my classes.
‘What?’ she whispered.
‘I’ll keep it for you. In case you want to reconsider. I won’t do anything with it. Please, Rach. Just think about it. If taking it would mean that there isn’t this chasm between us, if it would change anything for you—’
‘Josh,’ she breathed, her brown eyes glimmering bronze with reflected party lights. ‘What are you talking about?’
There was no stopping me now, apparently. ‘I honestly think we’ve made a mistake. We belong together, you know we—’
But at this point Ingrid blustered over to whisk Rachel pointedly away, reducing me to finishing that sentence only to myself, much later that night, once I was home alone.
I couldn’t believe I’d said it, actually. I hadn’t even been drunk. I already knew she didn’t want to take the pill – she’d been clear about that from the start. So why the hell did I think that was the way back to her heart? It made no sense. No sense at all.
Anyway. Most of my friends have plans, this Valentine’s.
Even Ingrid – who is usually about as sentimental as a surgeon wielding a scalpel – has just moved in with Sean.
So I head to Wilf’s, because I’m pretty sure he won’t feel the need to start talking about Rachel, or ask if I’ve ever considered speed-dating – the answer to which is no, by the way.
But when he opens his front door he’s wearing a Periodic Table apron, looking sweaty and rattled. He’s gelled his hair – a lifetime first, as far as I’m aware – then tells me he has a date, and asks if I know how to cook lobster.
Ten minutes later, I find myself in his tiny kitchen, dismembering a crustacean so he can chuck it into linguine.
I’ve only done this once before, with Rachel, and neither of us really liked it, on account of my having clocked the lobster strolling happily around a tank before I paid good money to murder it.
‘Tell me about your date,’ I say to Wilf, partly to distract my mind from wandering too far down that particular road.
‘Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.’ Wilf leans against his worktop, cheeks rosy from the hob steam. ‘Do you fancy investing in the pill?’
I frown, silently apologising to the lobster as I snap off a claw. ‘Investing?’
‘That’s what I said. I’ve been thinking of pitching the idea to a couple of pharma companies. Maybe including mine. I’m not sure yet. I’ve registered a business, just in case.’
I know Wilf’s had conversations with a lawyer recently. He seems confident he’s in the clear as far as intellectual property and ethics and all that other stuff is concerned.
‘Thought you might want to put in some of your advance,’ he says.
Last November, I got a publishing deal for my fifth novel, a standalone thriller about an amateur detective. It made me feel, in some small way, as if the breakdown of my marriage hadn’t completely spelt the end of life as I knew it.
‘I didn’t get much,’ I say, wiping lobster flesh from my fingers.
‘Well, don’t take too long deciding. You’d need to come on board early doors.’ He turns back to the pile of herbs he’s massacring with a knife so blunt it’s almost bladeless.
‘Wilf. Do you . . . still think it was the right thing? Taking the pill.’
He chucks the herbs into a pan simmering with cream, white wine and garlic. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
Because, sometimes, I find myself wondering . . . what if I wasn’t destined to die young?
The fear of it had subsided in a way I never thought it would, almost as soon as I took that pill. But it was replaced, unexpectedly, by the kind of doubt I hadn’t foreseen.
What if all those deaths in my family were purely coincidence?
It’s slightly unnerving, stepping back from your problems and watching the light slowly shift. The transformative effects of breathing space.
‘Regret is a fallacy,’ Wilf states, as though life is simply a series of right or wrong answers, as if we’re all just living inside one long, ongoing maths equation. ‘You have no way of knowing what would have happened if you didn’t take that pill. So, actually—’
But then the doorbell sounds its town-hall chime, signalling it’s time for me to leave.
‘Do you mind going out the back?’ Wilf says. ‘I don’t want her to think . . . you know.’
Deciding not to ask what he means by this, I do as he requests, then stand out on the main road for a long time.
The thought returns to me that nobody has said Rachel is dating at the moment.
Maybe I should go round to her place. Ring the bell, just to see if she’s there.
I could apologise again for having cornered her at Darren’s party, for the ill-advised stuff I said.
Maybe – who knows? – we would even end up laughing about the fact that it’s Valentine’s and we’re both alone.
I turn in the vague direction of her flat, stick my hand out for a cab.