Chapter 9 #3
I left a note for my parents, hidden beneath my pillow – I knew they’d find it when I was gone, when it was too late.
That was all I offered them, all the love I had left over, so consumed was I by Jane and our dreams. I remember my last words to my brother, Callum, were that he should feck right off, because he kept playing Snake on my Nokia without asking if he could borrow it.
I wonder if I’d have regretted it, I think now – if I’d left without telling my mam and dad goodbye, without speaking to my sister Niamh, my farewell to Callum being aggressive.
What if I’d never seen them again? Yes. I’d have regretted leaving them like that – but I would not have regretted leaving.
Not with Jane, because she made up for everything I was losing.
I turned up at the station fair pipping with excitement.
We hadn’t seen each other for a few days, our parents were watching us like hawks at that stage.
She hadn’t messaged me for a while, but that was okay, she was in the same boat as me – sneaking around.
Her dad was fierce when he wanted, in that ice-cold way the English could be, and if he got a whiff of what we were planning he’d beat me to death with his golf clubs.
I’d stood there, at the side of the red-brick building, for five solid hours.
Watching people come and go. Seeing couples reunited and teens heading into town for nights out and tired-looking workers dragging their feet.
Brightening up with the arrival of every cab, listening for her voice, every single moment expecting her to walk around the corner.
I checked my phone, and found nothing. I called but there was no answer.
For five solid hours I stood, or sat on my rucksack, or walked backwards and forwards looking for her.
She never showed. As the night wore on I got more and more cold and weary.
I drank the bottle of Coke I’d brought, and ate the corned beef sandwiches I’d made for us, and minute by minute and hour by hour I started to give up hope.
She must have been caught, I decided. She must have been found out, and locked in a turret like Rapunzel. That was the only possible explanation – because I knew she loved me. I knew she wouldn’t do this to me.
I knew that right until the moment that my dad drew up in his Ford Mondeo, winding the window down and eyeing me sadly.
I was crumpled in a heap on the pavement by that point, pale and shaky and confused.
A few people had asked if they could help, and some had even offered me money – I was looking that good.
‘Get in, boyo,’ he’d said. ‘She’s not coming, son. She came round to ours a bit ago to tell us. Said she couldn’t face you herself.’
I’d just stared at him, disbelieving. I looked at my phone. Nothing. It couldn’t be true, could it? No. She wouldn’t.
I was too exhausted to argue though. Whatever had happened, the plan clearly wasn’t going ahead.
I climbed into the car, and my dad took me home.
I was silent on the way back, still trying to piece it all together, still not accepting that she wasn’t coming.
My mam took one look at me when I walked into the kitchen, and wrapped me up in her arms. I was a good foot taller than her even then, but she still had a way of seeming huge.
She’d given me a ferocious hug, then pushed me away, patting my cold cheeks.
‘She doesn’t want ye, Rory. She’s off to college in September, she says. Didn’t have the heart to break it to you, and she’d been hoping you’d get the message. Says she hadn’t been in touch for a bit, trying to let you down gently, so she was.’
I’d cried then. I’d finally started to believe it.
It was true, she hadn’t been communicating as much as usual, and we hadn’t managed to see each other properly for over a week.
That’s why I was so convinced she’d turn up – surely she felt the same as I did?
That I couldn’t live without her? That she was my moon and my stars, the very air I breathed?
‘Come on now, it’s not the end of the world,’ my mother had said, settling me at the kitchen table while she made one of her never-ending mugs of tea. ‘And we’ve got some news for you, too…’
The news was that we were moving back to Ireland.
I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was speak to Jane, but she disappeared off the face of the earth.
She was ‘on holiday’, according to my folks, but it was a holiday that lasted for weeks.
She didn’t answer her phone, never responded to messages, completely vanished from my life.
I used to go to her house and sit outside it for hours on end, in the hopes that I’d see some sign of life.
That Rapunzel would let down her hair, that my Juliet would appear on her balcony, that she would come back and make me whole again.
Eventually one of their neighbours told me they’d gone away to France, where her mum had family.
I was sorely tempted to follow her, to get a ferry to Calais and spend years wandering around that huge country in search of her.
I might have done in time, but events overtook me.
My dad’s job started, and off to Dublin we went.
Once I was there I suppose I finally started to let go, taking solace in wild nights and new girls and smoking joints.
If my parents had hoped splitting up from Jane would result in a calmer, more malleable son, they were sadly mistaken.
I was howling at an unfair and empty world.
Even now, sitting here in my comfortable living room in a place I’ve come to love, I can feel the burn of that hurt.
The sense of abandonment, the anger, the confusion.
The sheer injustice of it all. Eighteen years old and broken, already cynical and jaded, convinced that love could lead only to weakness, to pain, to loss.
It was a harsh lesson, learned early, and one that I have carried with me into my forties.
One that was taught to me by the tearful woman now sitting a few feet away.
But Jane seems genuinely distraught, genuinely confused. She seems to actually believe that I’m the one who ended things between us. Like her, I have no clue what’s happening here.
‘Jane,’ I say as gently as I can. ‘I waited for you at the station, like we planned. All night. You never showed up, because you decided it was over, that you were going to university instead. You didn’t even have the decency to tell me face to face, you snuck around behind my back and dumped me via my parents!
Then you took off, disappeared from my life.
How can you possibly see that as me ending things? ’
Her mouth falls open, and I swear to God if she wasn’t sitting down she’d have fallen. Her face goes deathly pale, and she grips the armrests of the chair as though she’s anchoring herself down.
‘No, Rory,’ she murmurs, gazing at me with those huge eyes, the ones that always undid me. I try to look away, find that I can’t – that once again, I am bewitched. ‘That’s not what happened at all…’