Chapter 26
SAMMIE
The flight home is exactly as comfortable as you would expect a flight home from such a mess of a holiday to be, business class or not.
I mean, physically, it’s great. The seats are reasonably comfortable, the cabin crew are polite; we even got a glass of fizz before take-off.
Mentally, though, I’m screaming.
Mum is sitting beside me by the window, looking out at the ever-darkening sky.
The flight took off twenty minutes ago. We have probably exchanged less than ten words since boarding, six of which were a matter of logistics and two were little more than grunts of acknowledgement.
I notice her check the little laminated safety card in the seat pocket again.
This is what we do instead of talking. These little mundane activities. Anything to pass the time really.
I should say something. I know I should.
I can feel the words sitting somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach, waiting to pour out of me.
The thing is, I don’t know where to start.
With the lying? The scheming? Do we talk about Hank or Nico first?
The romantic ambush Mum and Hank came up with?
I think pretty much everything from the singles night to me firing the flare gun needs discussing sooner rather than later – and where better than up in the air, where neither of us can escape?
She turns to look out of the window again. I look over and see her reflection in the dark window. She looks tired – the kind of emotional hangover that comes after something dramatic happens, and I feel terrible for my part in it.
Maybe I could stay angry with her if she didn’t look so sad, if she had her warpaint on, if she was in defensive mother-hen mode… but not like that.
I puff air from my cheeks.
‘Shall we get this over with?’ I suggest.
‘Okay,’ she says softly. She turns to me, looks me in the eye and gets the ball rolling. ‘I’m sorry.’
And there it is, just like that, the only words I really need to hear to know that we’ll be okay.
‘I’m sorry too,’ I tell her. ‘So, so sorry.’
‘I should have been honest with you,’ she insists.
‘And I should have known that I could talk to you,’ I reply. ‘I just… I thought you were happy, and I wasn’t, and I didn’t want to drag you down with me.’
‘You did what you thought was right,’ she reasons. ‘And so did I, but I definitely shouldn’t have gone along with Hank’s surprise yacht holiday idea.’
‘There are very few statements in life where “surprise yacht holiday” is a bad thing, but I think we’ve found one,’ I joke.
She laughs, but there’s still so much sadness in her eyes.
‘I told myself it was for your own good,’ she says. ‘And that sounds awful now.’
‘It sounded awful at the time too, to be fair.’
She nods.
‘Why did you actually do it?’ I ask her.
She leans back in her seat.
‘Because I was worried about you.’
‘Mum…’
‘I know, I know, you didn’t need my help, but I’ve been taking up all your time, getting in the way – whether you’re too polite to tell me or not – and I wanted to give you something that was just for you.
But, if I’m being honest with you, I did rather like Hank.
Before he made out like he was rich, before the yacht nonsense.
I saw a man with a son who he cared about, like I care for you, and we wanted the same things. I thought he was a good man.’
‘I think he is a good man,’ I admit. ‘I think he only wanted to impress you.’
‘The yacht was nice, sure, but it wasn’t what I was looking for,’ she replies. ‘I was looking for excitement, but stability too. And real love, if that’s not too much to ask for.’
‘Do you think you could have that with Hank?’ I ask.
‘I doubt that now,’ she replies with a sigh. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think, if you like him, you can see past all of that,’ I tell her. ‘I think you can figure anything out, make anything work, with the right plan of action.’
‘It felt real to me, even if we were pretending at first,’ she says. ‘But the lies are a different issue. When I found out about the yacht, about him not owning it, I felt so foolish. Not because of the money. I don’t care about the money.’
‘I know,’ I reassure her.
‘It made me wonder what else wasn’t real,’ she says. ‘But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the mixed messages in that respect.’
Something in my chest tightens. I don’t really want to talk about this part now. Mum and I are good; that’s all I really care about. Better to get it out of the way, right? Leave my excess baggage here on the plane, go back to my real life much lighter.
A week ago, I would have said that if something starts fake, it stays fake. But I’m not sure that’s true now – I’m not sure if we were pretending at all, to be honest.
I can still feel his hand on the back of my neck. I can see flashbacks of the two of us in the club toilets; I can literally still smell his aftershave on my hair. It’s hard to move on, when he’s still on me.
‘Sammie…’ she prompts me.
‘It’s more complicated with Nico and me,’ I insist.
She waits. Her patience has always been her most effective weapon against me. When I was a teenager, it made me confess things I hadn’t even done yet.
‘Yeah, okay, I did really like him,’ I admit. ‘But that doesn’t mean he was right for me.’
‘The only part I care about is that you really liked him,’ she says. ‘But… is it really past tense?’
I sigh.
‘I don’t know what tense it is.’
But the feelings are present enough to hurt.
‘He’s not my type, so it doesn’t matter.’
Mum raises an eyebrow.
‘Isn’t he?’
I shake my head.
‘Handsome, funny, clever, clearly besotted with you…’
‘Mum…’
‘Sorry, darling, but it’s true,’ she says.
‘That’s everyone’s type,’ I point out. ‘But I want someone stable, someone serious, someone I can settle with.’
‘Nico seemed stable.’
‘He was like a big kid,’ I remind her. ‘Hank made it sound like he needed looking after. Like he wasn’t the settling-down type. Like he needed a woman to sort him out – I didn’t want to be his mum, and that’s what it sounded like he needed. I have enough projects at work, thanks.’
‘Darling, Nico isn’t a project, and he very much has his life together,’ she corrects me.
‘Is that why he still lives with his dad?’ I reply.
‘Nico doesn’t live with Hank,’ she says. ‘Hank lives with Nico.’
‘What?’
‘Hank moved in with Nico when things were difficult for him,’ she explains. ‘He didn’t get into the details but he said it was a real lifeline when he needed one.’
Amazing how tweaking a few words in a statement gives it a whole new meaning.
‘Okay, but… work-wise… he’s not exactly climbing the ladder, is he?’ I say, showing her that the house thing doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
‘Well, no, because he’s already at the top,’ she says.
‘Wait, what?!’
I stare at her.
‘Sammie…’
‘His dad said he sells video games,’ I say. ‘And I’ve seen him playing them, he talks about them. That’s his job, right?’
‘I suppose, yes, that’s right,’ she replies. ‘But he does own the company.’
‘What?!’ I practically screech, bagging myself a few dirty looks from our fellow passengers. ‘What company?’
‘I don’t know the name exactly. Something to do with zombies,’ she explains.
‘War Zombies?’ I reply in disbelief.
Oh my gosh, I wore his War Zombies T-shirt, the arse used me as a walking billboard.
‘That’s it. Hank said it like I should know what it was.’
‘Everyone knows what War Zombies is.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes, Mum. It’s huge,’ I inform her.
I don’t even play it and I know War Zombies. Everyone knows War Zombies. Some of the guys at work book annual leave when a new one drops. Tom once spent an entire lunch break explaining its multiplayer maps to me using pens. It’s a huge franchise – and all of that is Nico?!
‘And the yacht,’ Mum adds carefully.
I raise my eyes, waiting for her to finish.
‘It’s his.’
Oh, of course it fucking is. So that explains where Hank’s money came from. It was never his; it was Nico’s.
I lean back against the headrest and look straight ahead.
‘I had him all wrong,’ I confess. ‘But… he let me think that way, right?’
‘Hank says he’s embarrassed about it,’ she tells me. ‘And I suppose he wants to make sure people like him for him, not his money, and you did like him before you knew all of this…’
I have spent days mentally filing Nico under good-looking but unserious man-child with possible dependency issues, when it turns out he is a successful business owner who lets his widowed father live with him and use his yacht whenever he wants.
‘I thought he wanted rescuing from his dad,’ I blurt.
‘Maybe he did,’ Mum says softly. ‘Just not in the way you thought.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter now, because I’ve blown it,’ I tell her.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I do. Think about it. I left him,’ I reply. ‘What would it look like if I went crawling back now, now that I know he’s rich? He’s not going to think it’s genuine.’
‘But it is,’ she stresses.
‘But I can’t prove that,’ I reply. ‘And I told him, very plainly, that the two of us were a mistake.’
‘I think, if the two of you talk…’
‘Nah, I’m not doing that, I’m too embarrassed,’ I tell her.
‘You’d let a little embarrassment stop you from finding love, hmm?’
I think back to what Nico said, about letting yourself be embarrassed in front of people, owning it, but this is so, so much worse than falling through a kids’ climbing frame.
For a while, we just sit – another of Mum’s tactics, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I’m not going to come around to her way of thinking, not on this one.
I suppose I understand why he didn’t tell me about his business. It must be hard, but he didn’t give me much credit, did he? He treated me like someone who might only like him for what he had from the off, and he could have told me at any time, but he kept it a secret.
I don’t know what’s stronger, my embarrassment or my anger, but I have enough of both to know that I don’t want to talk to him.
Mum squeezes my hand again.
There’s nothing I could do right now, not even if I wanted to, which is probably for the best.
Thinking about it, I’m not sure I did care all that much about Nico seemingly having no direction in life.
I think the thing that scared me the most was how much I felt for him, that we might end up moving too fast, him moving in with me – and then what?
Maybe things would go well or maybe they wouldn’t.
Would he stay with me because he had nowhere to go?
I know now that never would have been the case, but it scared me.
I liked him enough that my first thought was: how do I make sure I don’t get hurt?
Me and my bloody risk assessments. I never stop to think that maybe I’m the liability to myself, do I?
This time it was all me, and there’s no escaping that, is there?