put my phone down and sat back and thought of everything that had happened over the last few years. After Ben. My life was divided that way; before Ben and after Ben. The actual ‘with Ben’ stage didn’t even seem to matter so much anymore. It had been a lie anyway.
Was this, this new era at Scott’s, a new beginning? I didn’t know. I wanted a new beginning. A new start. Friends. A lover maybe. A life.
All the things I had fought in vain for over the last few years. The years that had followed that most public fall from grace. I had been broken. In pieces. Pieces that no matter how patiently, how delicately, I tried to fit them back together, could never be the same as they were before they were broken in the first place.
Sharp edges jutted out. Others, dulled by thick globs of glue – ugly, deformed, misshapen. All the pieces were still there. But they weren’t the same. I was not the same. How could I have been? The whole had become both more and less than the sum of all its parts.
Maybe what I had been trying to do these last few years was to break myself again in a stupid attempt to make this break cleaner, hoping the fix would be neater this time. But it just made it worse. The gaps started to widen. So I stuffed the gaps with whatever I could find. First drink, then pills. They made the broken edges softer. They made it more bearable.
Except they also made it worse. They facilitated me making poor decisions. Voicing my hurt to him. To show Ben my anger, and not realise that the truth can often be distorted. He told his side of the story – his lies – to anyone who would listen and they believed him because they saw the drunk I was quickly becoming. Believed I was unstable.
I started to spend each and every minute of darkness in a ball of anxiety, sure that it would never get light again. You can’t take these things for granted. When you get complacent things go wrong.
I had thought about suicide. Especially at night when the very act of existing hurt. When even banging my head against the wall didn’t silence them. When I missed him so badly that all I could think of was how little effort it would take to make it all stop.
To break myself so badly that no one – not even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – could put me back together again.
I even planned it. It was the awful winter of 2010. The snow didn’t seem to stop. The headlines were filled with record low temperatures. The River Foyle froze, Europe’s fastest-flowing river, now creaking, slow, thick with the effort of trying to break through the ice.
I planned to go the beach. I would wash down some pills with vodka, walk down to the shore front, sit crossed-legged on the sand, and wait for the cold to feel too warm. Wait for the vodka and the pills to lull me to sleep, or to a place where I didn’t hurt so much.
Maud thinks I mustn’t have really wanted to do it. She thinks it was all a cry for help. Why else would I have sent Ben an email telling him that it was my turn to leave him? That I couldn’t live without him.
Maud needed to think it was just a cry for help, if you ask me. Because it was too hard to think it was anything but. And my parents? I don’t think they have ever forgiven me. I let them down. How could I have done that to them? As if I had done it just to spite them. Our relationship has never recovered. I have never recovered.
2007
Rose
Rose Maguire: is in a relationship with Cian Grahame
There’s a freckle about two inches under my left breast that Cian loves. I’m not sure I even paid attention to it before he told me how cute he thought it was. Before he circled his finger around it as we lay in bed together before leaning across to kiss it, so tenderly that I could only hold my breath.
‘Even your imperfections make you more perfect,’ he had whispered, and my heart had soared. I was falling in love with him. Properly in love. Not just lust, or desire or those feelings that aren’t real that just rush in at the start of something to make people obsessed with each other. This was something more. Love that I’d read about, where you feel invincible; as if you have met the other half of yourself that you didn’t quite know was missing.
I knew that I ached when we weren’t together – although he sent me flowers to work, called me at lunchtime, sent romantic text messages telling me he couldn’t wait to be with me again. When I went home he would come and make me dinner – and he finally let me start reading what he had been working on.
It was so different to what I normally read – but it was good. He was good. He had talent to burn. I wanted to tell everyone about him – about his writing – but God, he was so shy about it. So secretive. It had to be just right he said. I felt so privileged that he let me read it.
But more than that, Cian wanted me to keep him company while he wrote round the clock. I was his muse, he said. Imagine that. Me? A muse! It made me feel unique and special, even if sometimes it seemed that a muse’s role was not to talk much but supply cups of coffee and Custard Creams when needed.
Of course I got to be there when the doubt started to creep in too – doubt, it seems, having a habit of creeping in with writers quite frequently at 3am when I was trying to sleep. But I loved him enough not to mind waking to soothe him, to calm him with a kiss. To tell him how good he was. It made me feel special, and he would hold me tighter and tell me he didn’t know how he ever wrote without me, how he felt as if he was on the cusp of his life finally coming together, both personally and professionally. He was getting all he ever wanted – and taking me with him.
There was a hotshot agent interested in representing Cian and this book so the stakes were high on him getting this just right. It was incredible pressure to work under. Not like my job where I went in, sorted out people’s teeth, and went home again. I didn’t have to think about my job morning, noon and night. Cian said the book was always with him. Always. I’d laughed, asked him if it was with him even when we were, you know …
He looked at me very intently and I felt that familiar curl in the pit of the stomach – the one that made me want to forget the run of myself and have noisy, messy sex with him right there and then.
‘It’s always with me,’ he had said and then he’d kissed me so passionately, with such an intensity it almost took my breath away.
If he became a little distracted from time to time I reminded myself it was, as he called it, just part of the creative process. I remembered how it came and went – how when things were going well for him he became almost euphoric with the joy from it and I encouraged those good times and was suitably sympathetic when he had a bad day.
And I revelled in the highs – in the way he kissed that freckle just under my left breast and told me that my imperfections made me more perfect.
Perhaps it was the same with him? And God, I was falling so in love with the perfect and the imperfect parts of him that I don’t think anything could have stopped me.
Emily
A man was arrested in relation to Rose Grahame’s death two weeks after
