day, involving seven pans and three types of eggs. The day I met his family, when I was virtually levitating with nerves, and Rhys saying on the doorstep: ‘They’ll love you. Not because I do. Because everyone with eyes and ears does.’ The weekend in Brighton with the world’s worst car journey down, the dubious Nazi-run B&B that was nowhere near the seafront and the bistro with the horrible waiters. It could’ve been awful but instead I remember laughing like a pair of school kids for two days solid. The day we moved into our house and drank champagne out of mugs, sitting on the stairs, in a furniture-free desert of sandy carpet, arguing about whether his frightening Iggy Pop photo had too many pubes on show to be fit for the ‘reception rooms’. The scores of in-jokes and shared history and special knowledge I couldn’t imagine having with anyone ever again, not without a Tardis to whisk me back to being twenty.
What was I doing, throwing all this away? Did it all add up to say I should stay with Rhys? Was I making the biggest mistake of my life? Probably not, purely on the basis that award has already been handed out.
I tell myself, this day is as bad as it’s going to be. This is a day you have to get through. It occurs to me that it’d be easier to get through unconscious. I crawl to the huge bed, cover my face with my arms and weep myself to sleep.
As I drift off, I imagine the supermodelly Indian girl animating in her portrait, looking down, saying: ‘Well, that’s not what this flat is for.’
14
I awake to an odd noise, like a bee trapped in a tin can and something scuttling over a hard surface. I sit bolt upright in the twilight and think, Mindy better not have neglected to mention some kind of vermin infestation of B-movie proportions. As I shake off the sleep I see that the noise is coming from my vibrating mobile as it pushes itself around the nightstand. I pick it up as it’s about to clatter to the floorboards and see it’s Caroline.
‘Did you nick my towels after all?’ I mumble, sleepily.
‘Are you drunk?’
‘No! Been asleep.’ I rub an eye with the heel of my hand. ‘Although that sounds an interesting idea.’
‘I wanted to see how my policy of leaving you in splendid isolation was going. I’ve started to feel guilty, which is downright inconvenient.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I laid down the law that we should give you tonight on your own.’
‘Cheers!’ I splutter, incandescently annoyed for a quarter of a second.
‘If we came round tonight and got drunk, you’d have hungover Sunday night blues on your first night alone in the flat. This way, it gets it out of the way.’
‘Or it’d bundle all the bad things together,’ I grumble.
‘Is that how you feel? I can come round now if so.’
I look around at the strange and new surroundings. Rupa’s got some sort of fairylight addiction: strings of red roses, the stamens replaced by pinprick bulbs, those snakes of clear tubing with a disco pulse throbbing along them. Even through the grey filter of my misery, I concede it looks rather beautiful. And, as ever, Caroline’s tough love is a good thing.
‘Ah, I’ll cope.’
‘Go and get yourself a bottle of wine, order a takeaway, and I’ll come round tomorrow.’
After I hang up, I discover I’m not hungry, but I do recall spying a bottle of Bombay Sapphire on Rupa’s shelf. I swipe it and tell myself I’ll replace it twice over before I leave. I don’t have any tonic so it has to make a rapper’s delight of gin and juice with a carton of Tropicana. As I switch the television on and let a medical drama wash over me, another worry surfaces. One I hadn’t wanted to admit to having. It’s just, Ben hasn’t called. And I’ve started to think he’s not going to.
I shouldn’t be thinking about it. It’s positively distasteful, he’s a married man, not a potential date. Only: if he never calls, it’s going to say such an awful lot. It would be an extremely eloquent silence.
Half an hour of you was enough. In fact, it was too much, but I grinned and bore it. The past is the past and you’re the only one living in it. See you again, on the tenth anniversary of never. And by the way, that haircut makes you look like Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code.
In my heart of hearts, I know that’s my guilty paranoia talking, not Ben. Ben is the person who irrationally apologised for so much as mentioning his wedding when I told him about my ex-engaged status. So why is it, when I examine every exchange between us so many times, perspective collapses? I can’t help but think about the killer detail – he took my number, but he never volunteered his, did he?
He was the one saying it’d be great to go out, reassures the angel on my shoulder.
That’s the kind of thing you say to be nice during the social disentanglement process and don’t necessarily make good on, counters the devil.
Oh God, he’s never going to call and I’m going to see Ben and his Olivia of Troy examining high thread count linen in John Lewis and fall backwards over someone in a wheelchair in my haste to escape.
As the patient on TV goes into something called ‘VF’ and the crash team swing into action, I settle on a theory that suits both my fatalism and my knowledge of Ben’s character. He did mean everything he said about it being nice to get together. He asked for my number in good faith, he probably believed he’d use it. Then he thought it through, debated how to describe me to his wife. That consideration alone could make him reassess whether it was a good idea. I can imagine a few memories that might’ve helped him come to a conclusion. And at that moment, he scrolled down to my name in his phone, felt a pang of regret. Then found his resolve, hit delete, and continued with his charmed, Rachel-less life.
Half an hour later, my phone starts flashing with a call. Mum, I think. I prepare myself to be falsely positive for five minutes. I check the caller display: unrecognised number.
‘Hi, Rachel?’
I recognise the warm male voice instantly. I go from someone half asleep at six in the evening to the most awake person in the whole of Manchester. He called! He doesn’t hate me! He didn’t lie! Adrenaline shot with endorphin chaser.
‘Hi!’
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine!’
‘It’s Ben.’
‘Hello, Ben!’ I say this in a voice that people usually reserve for ‘Hello, Cleveland!’
‘Are you sure you’re OK? You sound a bit odd.’
‘I am, I was – I was …’ Christ, I don’t want to admit I’ve been asleep this afternoon, like an eighty-two year old ‘… having a lie down.’
‘Ah. Right. I see.’ Ben sounds embarrassed and I sense he thinks I mean some sort of afternoon singleton lie down, with company. ‘I’ll call back.’
‘No!’
