Chapter 22 #2
And he was so generous. But not in the typical way, nothing showy – buying rounds for the whole room for everyone to see – rather in a way that felt completely authentic.
There were things that I discovered. Like when we moved in together, I found a letter from Oxford Brooks University.
Ronan was paying his younger brother’s tuition fees.
Jonah had been through a lot in his life, and Ronan wanted to help.
He did not weaponise his brother’s pain to make me love him, and that made me love him even more.
There was something in the way he spoke to others, too.
He was so confident and assured and charming.
His accent allowed him to say even the most mundane thing and make it sound engaging.
But it wasn’t just the Irish lilt. He was clever, but not alienating.
He was inclusive, but not grandstanding.
He spoke just enough, but let others speak too.
People clung to his every word. I admit, I do remember at times I would feel twinges of jealousy in the pit of my stomach because of the way others would just stare at him, eyes wide, laughing – always laughing – but I soon learnt that this was my own insecurity.
He had chosen me, and never done anything to make me feel scared or that he didn’t love me.
A year after our marriage, two years after Shallow Embers’ publication and not too long after the hospital, something shifted.
Or maybe it was always the same, I’m still unsure.
The writer’s block was barricading me, and so we explored other career options.
The book was still selling, but not in the way it once had.
That money had gone to the deposit on our Crouch End house.
I began my online counselling course. Ronan was very encouraging, because of my lived experience.
‘That’s what will make you so empathetic, Mal.
’ He said I lit up when I was reading the textbooks in preparation to begin.
He said I looked happy, content, the Mal he always knew.
That it was because I had purpose. Not Meek Mal, Marvellous Mal. ‘You’re back. You’re here again.’
But I wasn’t.
I couldn’t ignore a depth of emptiness that was surfacing, and looking back I still don’t know if that’s when it began, or if it had always been there.
I had an urge within me to return to how things were.
For him, and me, to return to how we were, at the Gower Peninsula.
When we would buy picnic food from the Co-op and walk along the cliff edge, talking and talking and adding and adding.
It was so beautiful there. The clouds looked as if someone had poured a pint of milk into the sky – the way their edges blended and swirled with the colours, blues and pinks and deep purples.
And the sea. The sea. It went on and on and on.
When the wind stilled, the waves would calm, and the colours would ripple across its surface, and we would dive beneath them.
That rush, that cold rush of adrenaline and clarity that came from the first dunk was how the whole relationship felt.
Free. Vibrant. Alive. And he would tell me, ‘I will always love you, Mal. There is no way that, while I exist, that will ever change. It can’t.
’ I remember it as a very specific and all-consuming warmth. As Possibility.
I just wanted it back. Because I changed.
Or we both did.
Or neither of us did.
I thought he might like the boat idea.
He didn’t.
So, as a consequence, I now hoard cash in a tampon box. Other than the gloves, I have only used it for petrol, and now for this. For lunch with Leo.
I found Leo last Monday. He was indeed living under a bridge.
He didn’t reply to my messages after the first night, so I was concerned for him.
When Ronan texted me to say he would be late back from work because of a deadline, I drove around all the bridges over Regent’s Canal – the only canal in the area.
And there Leo was, under one in Camden. It was raining and I had to hide – just a bit, and not in a creepy way – my bucket hat pulled down low.
This gratefully did not look out of place in an area like that.
I followed him. Sorry, observed him. On foot.
He went to see a man, and stopped off to buy a bag of Haribo.
A man called Mo.
It wasn’t hard for me to find out about Mo, thanks to Grindr. One thing I have come to understand over the past fortnight is how useful that app is for obtaining things, namely information.
I followed Leo that night to a flat near the bridge, and when he went inside, I opened the app.
It told me that both Leo and a man named Mo were fifty feet away.
I pinned both of their profiles. They were fifty feet away for half an hour, and then Leo left the building.
He looked a little different. Shaken. I couldn’t observe him further because I needed to get home, but I knew I would message Mo.
And I did.
I take a look at the clock on my phone again. 14:35. I catch Cuckoo Chloe half-heartedly sweeping under a table, the scrambled egg congealing in the bristles of her brush. She doesn’t care, just smearing it across the floor.
Will Leo come?