Chapter 53
I’m distracted at work the next day. Everything reminds me of Mark.
This morning on the tube, I almost missed my stop because the woman sitting opposite me was wearing a silk scarf the same shade of pale blue as his sheets.
I get a patient’s name wrong after he tells me about the holiday he’s planning in Sicily.
At lunch, Charles mentions he’s refurbishing his flat and asks if I’ll come with him to John Lewis to help him pick a kitchen table.
‘Kitchen table?’ I’d parroted dumbly.
Does he know? How could he possibly know?
I come to my senses in time to tell him I can’t because I’ve got a manicure booked. Then I spend my lunch break trekking round salons until I find someone who can fit me in so my lie stands up to scrutiny.
When I return to the office at 2 p.m., my nails are a wanton shade of dark red. The name of the varnish: Carnal Knowledge.
Rich notices. I never painted them red when we were together. When his eyes snag on my nails, I feel like I’m wearing a sign that says: I’m having mind-blowing sex, and I don’t care who knows.
He doesn’t say anything.
It’s not until I’m home that evening that I realise I’ve completely forgotten to eat lunch. But when Mum offers me a plate of her moujendra, a lentil and onion dish I can usually consume in huge quantities, I find I’m not hungry.
A little later I drive us to the hospital to pick up Dad.
‘I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed,’ he says, as I help him put his shoes on.
His first attempt to put them on by himself was met with a stern ticking off from Mum.
It’s great to see him so well, with the colour finally back in his cheeks.
I try not to dwell on the fact that this was Mark’s workplace until a couple of days ago. And even though I know he’s in Leeds, I can’t help feeling jumpy whenever we turn a blind corner in case he’s come back for some reason and we bump into him.
‘Mark says hello,’ reports Dad from the backseat, as I drive us home.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ says Mum, next to me. ‘Tell him hello from us, too.’
‘Will do,’ says Dad, tapping on his phone.
Dad’s in a text conversation with Mark?
‘I didn’t know you were in touch,’ I say, keeping my voice even.
‘He wanted me to give him updates.’
I swallow a lump in my throat and concentrate on the road. Mark being demonstrably thoughtful with my family makes something swell inside me.
As if I didn’t have enough reasons to find his imminent departure difficult.
It’s one in the morning. I’m in bed, but I’m wide awake. I managed to get through Tuesday without any professional clangers. I even managed to go and look at kitchen tables with Charles – and was highly unimpressed by how flimsy they all felt.
I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and I can’t stop listening to boyband ballads. Today, Backstreet Boys’ ‘Incomplete’ has been on repeat.
I know what these symptoms usually mean, but it can’t be that. I won’t let it be that.
I’m not a lovelorn schoolgirl.
I went round to Vandi’s earlier and told her everything that had happened with Mark. Or mostly everything. I stuck to facts rather than feelings.
‘Way to get back on the horse after dickhead Rich,’ she’d said in a high-five voice. ‘And, talking of horses …’
‘Smooth, Vand, smooth.’
‘Well? And don’t give me that “size isn’t everything” rubbish.’
‘The answer is yes. But please don’t ask me for more details.’
‘I don’t need to. Following on from the answer to my first question, I will assume that a very good time was had by all.’
She chinked her wineglass with mine.
‘How are things with The Doll?’
‘I took your advice and we sat down and talked.’
‘Great.’
‘He’s still moving in with his girlfriend because he hasn’t told her about me, and we’ve agreed to be “buddies” until he leaves.’
‘Fuck buddies?’
‘I think me doing quotation marks implied that.’
‘When’s he leaving?’
‘A couple of weeks.’
‘And you’re okay stopping after that?’
She frowned. ‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I be? I’m not in love with him. We said we’d have a bad boy summer, and well, summer will be over soon, won’t it?’
I nodded and plastered a smile on my face because I didn’t trust myself to speak. I was sure that out of the two of us, it would be Vandi who wouldn’t be able to separate feelings from sex.
In a moment of uncomfortable clarity, I realised I didn’t know myself at all.
It’s Wednesday, and today’s song is another Backstreet Boys’ classic: ‘Show Me The Meaning of Being Lonely’.
I must be on a much more even keel because AJ’s vocals make me a bit tearful at the best of times, but so far I haven’t had a single lip-wobble.
Clive’s coming for a session by himself. The break-up with Chantelle has hit him hard, but it’s giving him a lot of insight into himself. That’s the thing about reaching rock bottom. It hurts like hell, but it gives you something solid to build on.
‘Did you have a nice break in Cyprus?’ he asks.
‘Yes, it was lovely, thank you.’
‘That’s a grand tan you’ve got there, Nella. I’m a natural redhead, which is why I keep my hair so short, and I burn if I sit near a bulb that’s too bright.’
I smile. ‘You don’t look particularly pale.’
He taps his nose. ‘Fake tan. A habit I picked up from Chantelle. It’s changed my life.’
Lots of patients arrive and dive straight into the session, which is completely normal and their right, but Clive always takes a few minutes to ask questions and connect with me.
I feel bad about the old nickname we had for him.
He’s a lovely guy with an enormous heart, even if he doesn’t always make the best decisions in his personal life. But then, who does?
‘I’m thinking of jacking it all in,’ he blurts out.
‘What do you mean?’
‘My work,’ he specifies when he sees my confused face.
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘I don’t need the money, and it hasn’t given me any pleasure in a long time.’
‘Is there something else you want to do? Maybe go travelling?’
‘I do want to travel. I want to go back to Ireland.’ He reaches for a glass of water. ‘I just have this yearning to go home, you know?’ I nod and give him the space to keep talking. ‘I miss Mary,’ he says softly. ‘I miss the girl I met when I was fourteen. I’m forty-seven now. How tragic is that?’
‘It’s not tragic. You were married – it’s not like she’s a girl you talked to for half an hour at a party once. And even if she were, if you miss her, you miss her.’
‘I thought I’d convince her to come to London when I got my first job in the city, but she didn’t want a life in a big heaving metropolis. She wanted to be near nature, have green fields on her doorstep and watch cows graze.’
His words are hitting a little close to home. ‘You wanted different things,’ I tell him softly. ‘Sometimes, there’s no way to bridge that gap.’
‘She never asked me to stay,’ he says sadly.
‘Would you not have left if she had?’
He pauses to reflect. ‘Truthfully? No, because I was a self-centred, hot-headed twenty-year-old, suddenly offered a yearly salary that was more money than my parents had earned in their lifetimes.’
‘Financial security is important to everyone. It’s not selfish to want that.’
‘When she didn’t ask me to stay, I took it as a sign she didn’t really love me. So I packed my bags, without looking back, and threw myself into my new life.’
‘You took it as a sign she didn’t love you, but might there have been another reason?’
‘She didn’t want to clip my wings. I know that now, but I also know if I’d stayed, I would have ended up resenting her. It was always a no-win situation.’
I nod, swallowing heavily.
Keep it together.
I can’t lose it in front of a patient. Clive’s situation is nothing like mine.
But hours after he’s gone, I can’t help thinking that it is.
The night before the wedding, Tig decides it’s a good idea to go for cocktails and dinner in Soho.
It’s partly my fault because after she found out that Theo was doing some bachelor-party-adjacent drinking with friends in Leeds, she felt left out that she hadn’t had a hen night with her friends.
So, I treated her and Pen to a spa day in one of the nicer West End hotels, which they both loved and now, understandably, she thinks coming back to Ealing for an early night will be an anti-climax.
Yan and I have been at work, but come to meet them for food and to keep an eye on Tig to make sure she’s home at a decent hour.
The dinner reservation is for 7 p.m., and I’m in the bar by 6.45 with a glass of chilled rosé, when Yan finds me. I haven’t seen him for almost a week because, like me, after a week away he needed to concentrate on work, and in Yan’s case, get on top of the renovations for his restaurant.
‘So, there were definite signs of heterosexual shagging in my flat when I got back on Monday night.’
I freeze. What the hell did we leave lying around? Did Mark not fix the bed?
‘I’m going to bloody kill him.’
Yan’s eyes widen. ‘That was a complete shot in the dark.’
Shit. I’ve fallen for the oldest trick in the book.
‘Sneaky bastard,’ I mutter under my breath.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
It’s a good question. I told Vandi, after all. ‘Because you were weirded out about what happened with him when I was sixteen.’
‘That was different. You were a kid then, but this connection with Mark now, it’s the real deal. I suspected he might have feelings for you, but I wasn’t sure if you did.’
‘They’ve taken me by surprise. But everything changed after Dad told me about …’
Yan frowns.
I pause. But then I fill him in, and his expression turns from confusion to wonder.
‘Shit,’ he says eventually. ‘All this stuff going on under our noses.’
‘Yeah.’
We both silently take sips of our drinks.
‘So, what’s going to happen now?’ he asks.
‘Nothing’s going to happen. He’s going to Venezuela the day after tomorrow.’
‘Hypothetically, what if he wasn’t?’
‘But he is, Yan.’
‘Plans can change.’
I shake my head. ‘It’s been exactly three weeks since I found out Rich was cheating. Three weeks, Yan. I still haven’t moved my stuff out of his flat. I’m not going to run headlong into another relationship.’
‘I don’t understand how you can be so level-headed about this. Is he rubbish in bed or something?’
I roll my eyes. ‘Yes, he’s terrible at sex. I had to close my eyes and think of Channing Tatum. For hours.’
An appreciative nod. ‘Hours? Must be all those protein shakes.’
Raised voices announce that Pen and Tig are close by.
‘We should get going,’ I say. ‘I can hear our darling sisters.’
I try to stand, but Yan stops me. ‘We’ve heard from your level head – what does your heart say?’
He deserves an honest answer. I’m just not sure how honest I can bear to be.
‘I’m going to miss him like crazy. And I could so easily fall head over heels, but I’m fragile and I need to be sensible. Besides, everything’s been such a rollercoaster with him. Who knows if this thing has legs or if it’s just based on—’
‘“Terrible sex”?’
‘Exactly.’
He seems convinced by my answer.
All I need to do now is convince myself.