Chapter 29
29
WITH A TRUMP, TRUMP, TRUMP
The bathroom door is locked and I can hear Laura sobbing inside.
‘Laura,’ I say while knocking gently on the door. ‘Will you come out so we can talk?’
‘In… a… minute…’ she stutters between gasping sobs.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But just so you know, I’m not going anywhere. And I wasn’t trying to upset you. I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad.’ I hope she knows that there is no way, no matter what has happened between us, that I would be so cruel as to use her grief to make her feel guilty for not being there for me when my father died. I’m not that callous or cruel.
‘I… know…’ she says, her voice just a little calmer now. ‘I know.’
I hear the loo flush followed by the sound of running water and then Laura opens the door, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed, her cheeks blotchy. She is twisting her hands together in the way she always did when she was nervous.
‘We should talk about what happened,’ she says. ‘Shouldn’t we?’
I nod, because as much as I don’t really want to dig into that particular chapter of our lives we can’t keep on with it hanging over our heads. I realise that Laura has been scared of that particular axe falling all this week, and on top of her raw grief, it must’ve felt like an unbearable burden. Maybe it was wrong of me to tell her we didn’t need to talk about it when we first spoke. I’d thought it was the right thing to do to tell her it could wait. Looking at her now, however, I see it has been eating at her and it would be better if we pulled that old and horrible sticking plaster off once and for all.
‘Let’s sit down,’ she says, leading the way into her old bedroom – which looks almost the same as I remember it. Of course, the posters are gone from the walls and the dressing table is no longer cluttered with Body Shop smells or stained with Heather Shimmer lipstick and the remnants of whatever dye Laura had put in her hair.
As I sit beside her on the bed, I wonder what it would be like if walls could talk. The things that this room saw and heard during those formative years would probably make us both cringe to the soles of our feet, but for the most part the hours we spent here were happy ones. They were of a time when we thought nothing would ever break our bond of friendship. We were so sure we’d be in each other’s lives forever. Even more so when Laura’s then boyfriend, Aidan, introduced me to his best friend Simon Cooke. The delirium we’d felt at being able to double date was next level. We had dreams and plans of holidaying together with our eventual families and growing up and growing old as besties.
And for the longest time, we stayed on that path.
‘First of all,’ she says, eyes cast downward, ‘I need to tell you that I went to your dad’s funeral. I’m sorry I didn’t have the balls to come to the house for the wake, or to come up and give you a hug at the church. I was scared of making a scene or making the whole thing harder for you than it needed to be.’
My breath catches in my throat, the familiar pull of grief winding its way around my heart. ‘You came?’ I ask, my turn now to sound croaky and emotional. I’d be lying if I said I never wondered if Laura would show up at the funeral. It wasn’t at the forefront of my mind, but it was there and I remember wishing she would. Even though it had been eight years since we’d last spoken. Even though I had Niamh to support me, and my boys to take care of. Even though my focus was on my own pain and on my mother’s pain – I felt as if the final part of the puzzle was missing. I knew that with both Laura and Niamh by my side, it would be marginally more bearable.
‘I couldn’t not,’ she says, blinking full tears, which fall freely down her cheeks. ‘He was a great man,’ she says. I nod in response because I don’t trust myself to try and speak. I know if I do, I will merely disintegrate into a sobbing mess and the purpose of this visit is to help Laura with her grief, not come at my own full force. ‘He was like a father figure to me, when I didn’t have one of my own. You know that – how he watched out for us when we were teenagers and eejits without an ounce of sense in our heads. It was your daddy who would pick us up from town, or wait outside while we went to a disco or a concert or whatever we were at. I couldn’t not go to pay my respects. But I sat at the back of the church and even though every part of me ached to run over to you and give you a hug when I saw you walking in behind his coffin, it wasn’t about me. It would have drawn attention away from your daddy, and God knows he deserved all the attention and more.’
I’m drowning under the weight of conflicting feelings. I’m so touched, but there’s also an old familiar feeling pushing its way into the light. It’s the wee demon on my shoulder who has held on to all the hurt and pain that I’m supposed to have let go of in a bid to move on and who wants to scream that life can be brutally unfair.
So yes, Laura came to my dad’s funeral but she didn’t hug me. She didn’t let me know. She wasn’t there to support me. She was there to assuage her own guilt. She was putting her own comfort first. Just like she did when Simon started playing away from home. She should’ve had my back. I trusted her to have my back. I needed her.
I can see Laura is crying, of course I can. And I know she is waiting for me to say something. She’s probably waiting for me to do a ‘Becca’ and say it’s all in the past and it doesn’t matter. All that matters now is how we move on.
That’s what I want to say. That’s what I want to feel . But in this moment, I don’t feel it. The person I feel sorry for in this moment is that teenage me who would sit with her best friends in this very room listening to music, experimenting with make-up and being utterly convinced that these girls were the best friends that anyone could ever wish for.
That girl who ended up, at the age of thirty-six, alone with two semi-feral nine-year-old boys trying to help them understand why their daddy had walked out. Trying to understand, herself, why he had. No, it hadn’t been perfect. But it hadn’t been awful either. At least I didn’t think so. We were just busy parents raising demanding boys and working hard jobs.
Of course we didn’t have the same time for each other that we once had. Of course we didn’t get to go on romantic holidays, just the two of us, any more. Of course our weekends were spent running from swimming lessons, to football practice, to playdates instead of lounging in the house together reading the papers and drinking wine. Life wasn’t as enjoyable as I thought it would be, but I didn’t give up. Simon did.
And when he did, that woman who was once a hopeful teenage girl, and who is now the very cynical woman I’ve become, lost her best friend.
She had stood with Simon. ‘He’s Aidan’s best friend,’ she’d said, when she’d allowed Simon to move into their spare room. ‘What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to fuck up my own marriage by kicking him out,’ she’d said, as she made a bed for him, cooked for him, drank wine with him in the evenings and washed his dirty socks and pants. ‘I know he’s hurt you. I know he’s been a bastard but he has nowhere to go and Aidan wants to help his friend,’ she’d say and I’d wanted to ask her why she didn’t want to help her best friend with the same vigour.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ she’d asked time and time again, even though I’d told her that what she should do is pick me. Don’t have the man who left me high and dry sleeping under her roof.
She never heard me. She just kept asking.
Until the day I’d told her exactly what she was ‘supposed to do’ and it involved going and fucking herself.
It had been the only, huge, stand-up row we’d ever had. There had been lots of little rows, of course, over the course of our friendship. Petty little fallings out over things that didn’t matter. Like when she’d lost my favourite Mariah Carey tape. Or when we had battled over which of us would get to be which Spice Girl at Halloween. But there had never been a full-on, door-slamming, cursing fight. Not until that day.
We had been well into pretending we were coping with our new reality when Laura had invited me over for coffee. The men were at work. Robyn was at school. It was just going to be a coffee and chat, like we used to do. Niamh had urged caution when she’d messaged me from the staffroom. She’d told me to maybe wait until the weekend and she could come with me, but I’d been stubbornly determined to go anyway.
In the end it was something so small that proved to be the final straw. As I sat in her kitchen and we drank our coffees, she unloaded her dryer and started folding the clothes. I knew those clothes. Those were Simon’s clothes and I don’t know why but the sight of her balling his socks put me over the edge. How had he betrayed me and managed to end up having my best friend wash and dry, and roll into balls, his socks?
I remember staring at them and that shoulder demon was there whispering poison in my ear. ‘If you were important to her, she’d let him roll his own damn socks,’ it said. ‘If you mattered, she’d take a pair of scissors and cut the big toe out of each one of them, followed by cutting the crotch out of all his boxers.’
Needless to say, I didn’t drink the rest of my coffee. I’d asked her why she was looking after Simon and she had blinked back at me for a moment before replying, ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Becca. I’m only taking his laundry out of the dryer.’
I’d proceeded to tell her she wasn’t ‘only fucking taking his fucking socks out of the fucking dryer’.
‘You’re shitting on thirty years of friendship,’ I’d told her. ‘You’re choosing him. You’re prioritising his needs and Aidan’s needs and who the fuck is worrying about mine? Not you, anyway! You clearly couldn’t give a flying fuck!’
My voice had been shrill and angry and I’d felt red hot rage bubbling up inside me because why was no one looking out for me? Simon had let me down when I needed him and now Laura was.
‘That’s not fair,’ she snapped back. ‘I get that you’re hurt but all I’m doing is supporting my husband’s best friend because it’s important to him. It’s not always about you. And balling his socks doesn’t mean I’m okay with what he did. You know that. You’re not stupid, Becks. There’s no need to be so oversensitive about everything.’
She might as well have uttered the most unforgiveable words that can ever be said to a woman in pain – ‘calm down’. ‘There’s no need to be so oversensitive’ was so painfully close to crossing that line. Needless to say, I did think there was a need to be what she described as ‘oversensitive’.
So that was when I told her to go fuck herself. That was when I’d walked out.
And now, here we were, ten years later and that pain was resurfacing again because nobody had put me first. And my daddy had been added to the list of people who had left my life when I needed him most.
So here in Laura’s bedroom, just over a week after she buried her own mother and while I am supposed to be helping her start to sort through the remains of a life now gone, I force my pain to stay silent. I want to tell her how hurt I was, but I know she is vulnerable and I don’t actually want to hurt her. I just want her to know what it did to me. I want her to acknowledge it. I want her to see me. I’m so tired of being invisible. Becki never wanted to be invisible.
The anger that was building inside me suddenly, and maybe because it knows ultimately it has nowhere to go, transforms into the largest Unexpected Wave of Sadness to date.
‘I love you,’ I choke out, and I mean it. I love Laura. I wish it didn’t still hurt to see her and relive what we went through but it does. ‘And I don’t want to hurt you.’ I can hardly breathe while I force these words out of my mouth. ‘But I don’t think I should’ve come here today. I don’t think it’s the right time… for either of us. I thought I could put it behind me or work through these feelings but I can’t. It hurts too much. It’s too hard.’
‘It’s too hard?’ she replies, her voice a mixture of grief and anger. ‘ You find it too hard? My mother has just died but I’m supposed to feel sorry for you ? Or invent a time machine and go back ten years and make different choices? Just so the perfect Miss Becca Burnside doesn’t feel sad?’
Her words are slap in the face. ‘I didn’t say that,’ I stutter.
‘No, you didn’t. But it’s always about how you feel, isn’t it? It was then, and it is now. It’s always about how difficult your life is, as if the rest of us just sail along without a care in the world. I made mistakes, Becca. I’m big and ugly enough to admit that. But I can’t keep beating myself with the same stick over and over again. And I absolutely don’t have the strength to do it now.’ Her voice is cracking as it stumbles over the words and I hear the demon on my shoulder screaming at me that it was just stupid to think we could ever, ever go back. There was no act of fate, or time capsule or letters from our younger selves that could fix this.
Tears blinding me, and my head buzzing with a million jumbled thoughts, I feel my way down the stairs and back to the kitchen where Conal looks at me, his face full of concern. He makes to speak but I raise my hand to stop him. I just can’t.
As I pull my coat back on and clip Daniel’s lead to his collar, I mutter a stuttering apology and then I leave. I’m sure I feel Laura walking down the stairs as I walk up the hall. I don’t need to look up to know she is there. I can feel the weight of our collective sadness as I walk back out their front door and head for my car.
I drive away as soon as I can get my keys in the ignition, only to pull over at the side of the road as soon as I’m out of sight of the O’Hagan house. Daniel is whining, straining at his harness in the back seat, probably desperate to get back to his new BFF, Lazlo, as I cry like an absolute sad case, not caring if anyone walking by sees me.
So much for embracing life and finding my friends again. So much for moving on and being happy. Here I am, just a week later, and one of my best friends is MIA, and I’ve left the other hurt and angry in her dead mother’s house. I feel as if my heart has been ripped out as the pain of both my divorce and losing my dad hit me afresh. One of my sons seems to be set on a path of self-annihilation and even the flutter of something remotely akin to attraction to a man has just been rendered futile after I’ve left his sister devastated.
And to top it all off, everyone in Asda in Strabane knows that I am now the proud owner of size-eighteen full briefs.
Fudge my actual life.