style="font-size:15px;"> She hoped not. She really, really hoped not.
Phil Flanagan signed the change order on his desk. He’d barely read it; he was a project manager on a residential housing development, but given how he was feeling it was a struggle to muster up the enthusiasm to care about his job. It was a struggle to muster up the enthusiasm to care about anything.
Not with Kate gone. It was bad enough that she’d broken up with him, but now she was on holiday, living it up in the sun. Surrounded by men who would be ogling her by day and pawing her in the pubs and clubs by night. God, he couldn’t stand the thought of it. Couldn’t bear to picture it.
But he couldn’t stop himself. All day long images of her in bed with a faceless man, their naked, suntanned limbs passionately entwined, tortured him. Which was the reason he was barely paying lip service to his job.
He stared at his signature on the paper. He hated his name, hated the alliteration of Phil and Flanagan. He’d always had the idea that he was going to change it someday; originally he’d planned for that day to be the day he got married, when, in a grand romantic gesture that would both impress her and get rid of his horrible name, he would take her name. But that plan was out of the window now that she’d dumped him because she needed some fucking space, needed to see what life was like without him. Well, he could tell her what it was like, it was rubbish, totally fucking rubbish, just a series of minutes and hours and days all merging into one big morass of him missing her and wondering where she was and if she was in bed with some greasy fucking foreigner on holiday. And at the back of it all, the question: why, why had she done it?
And what was he supposed to do now? His whole life had been planned around her: get married in the next year or so, then kids, then grandkids, then retirement, then their last few years eating soup together in a home somewhere, before dying, her first, then him a few days later of a broken heart.
It wouldn’t say broken heart on the death certificate, but that was what it would be, and all the people in the nursing home would agree about it. They’d smile at each other and say how lovely it was – sad, but lovely – that he couldn’t live without his wife of seventy years.
Well, that wouldn’t happen now, and the loss of it stung.
He’d known there was something wrong a few weeks back, when he’d suggested that they get started on planning their wedding. They weren’t engaged, not yet. Not officially, at any rate. Not in the announced-to-the-world sense. That would come in due course, but he saw no reason not to start at least discussing the main points of their wedding-to-be – possible locations, numbers, all that stuff – because they were going to get married, of course they were. Everyone knew that. Everyone had known it for years.
Sure, she said. We should start thinking about it.
We should check out some venues. I was thinking Lowstone Hall, or maybe the Brunswick Hotel, if we wanted something more modern.
Yeah, maybe, she said. Let’s think about it.
So should I contact them? Do you like those places?
Er – let me think about it. I’m not sure.
Not sure? Phil said. We talked about both those places a while back. What changed?
She wouldn’t look him in the eye. Nothing. I just – let me think about it, OK?
He’d thought it was odd, that there was something different in her manner. But he had not been expecting what came a week after that.
Phil, she said. We need to talk about something.
And then she told him. Told him that they’d been together since they were teenagers and she wasn’t sure he was the right person for her any more. She wanted a break. Wanted some time apart so she could live her life, make sure she knew who she was, that she was not sleepwalking into a bad decision.
So it’s a break? He said. For how long?
Maybe a break, she said. Maybe not.
But if it is, how long for?
I don’t know, Phil. I can’t say.
He felt his world slipping through his fingertips. You don’t have to be exact, Kate. But what order of magnitude are we talking? A week? A month?
More, probably. Six months? I don’t know. She looked at him, tears in her eyes. I think it’ll be easier if we say it’s for good. That’ll stop you wondering.
No, he said. That’s not easier. Not at all. It’s a lot worse.
And that was how they’d left it. Him: broken, devastated, unsure of what to do from minute to minute, staying in his friend Andy’s scruffy flat. Her: on holiday in Turkey, living it up with her friends.
On his desk his phone began to vibrate. It was Michelle, a girl he’d met the weekend before. He’d called Kate from her house – from the bathroom – drunk as all get out, expecting her to be sad when she saw how easily he had moved on, to understand what she had lost and to say, Come over, Phil, leave her and come back to me.
It hadn’t quite ended like that.
To make matters worse, in the morning he’d sat there drinking tea on Michelle’s couch and all he could think was Shit, she looks like Kate, like a pale imitation of Kate. He hadn’t noticed it the night before. He hadn’t noticed much of anything with about six beers and a bunch of whisky and Coke swilling around in his belly.
And now she was calling him. He was going to tell her he couldn’t see her. He liked her – she was nice enough – but he knew that there was no future with her. It was rebound sex, a way to take his mind off what had happened, and, even if he’d wanted to do it again, he knew it wasn’t fair to use her like that. He picked up his phone.
‘Michelle,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘Good!’ She was, he remembered, from Blackpool, and the false brightness in her voice matched the false confidence of the fading seaside resort. ‘You?’
‘Fine, yeah.’
‘What are you doing tonight? Want to meet up?’ There was a nervous quiver in her voice.
He was about to say No, I can’t, and I’m not sure we should meet up again, it’s not you, it’s me, I recently came out of a difficult relationship … But then the image of an evening in Andy’s empty flat – Andy was away with work – drinking alone to quiet his thoughts, came to him, and he thought Why not? It’s only a drink. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sounds great. Where do you want to meet?’
‘The Mulberry Tree?’ she said. ‘Seven?’
Just after seven he walked into the Mulberry Tree. It was a popular
