The Last Time I Saw You (17 page)
“Shall we wrap this up?” he says, casting me a black look, like it’s all my fault.
I look at the raddled version of the script I’m holding, covered in endless adjustments and counter-adjustments and wonder how I’ll ever make sense of it. I should have just admitted defeat three hours ago, listened to the tune he was humming and sung along—that’s what Charlotte would have done. I can see Mary in my mind’s eye, almost feel the
froideur
that will ooze from her when news reaches her of my latest idiocy.
“Yes, sure. Just give me your last few notes.”
I take them down as diligently as I can, even though the kind of sickly, maudlin lines he’s come up with are nothing
like the message of empowerment that I wanted to get across. And then, finally, it’s over.
“Thanks very much for taking the time to do this,” I say. “I know how fierce your schedule is.” I look at the script again, the prospect of imminent freedom giving me a surge of hope. Perhaps it can still mean something, achieve something out there in the big bad world. Flynn’s eyes are narrow and frosty as he looks at me.
“It’s my project, Olivia, there’s no ‘taking the time.’ I should be thanking you.”
Finally I’m back at the car, shaking my limbs out to get rid of the sticky energy of the last few hours. Mary’s texted me:
Did you wow him?
she’s put, with a gratifying string of kisses at the end. You can always tell you’ve committed some unmentionable sin when she damns you with a single
x
, left hovering, lonely and friendless, at the end of a message. Something tells me I’ll be back in that particular wilderness pretty soon.
I think it went OK
I write, then let loose with a string of x’s of my own. I look at it for a minute, blindsided by one of those rushes of fearfulness—that sense of the world as a place that’s perilous and fragile—that have dogged me ever since I first heard that Sally had been killed.
I couldn’t name exactly what it is that makes me decide that now is the time to contact William again—it feels like a force that exists outside myself. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that he must feel it too, that our kiss might have heightened the nightmarish, surreal quality that the world has taken on. I want to at least make that tiny piece of it all right again. I don’t want to send some stupid, abbreviated semblance of a message; instead I call him.
“Olivia,” he says, his voice shot through with embarrassment. “Thank you for calling.”
“Thanks for picking up.”
“I’ve wanted to call, to apologize properly for my atrocious behavior.”
“Please don’t. Apologize I mean,” I add hurriedly. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”
“That’s very generous of you, but of course I have.” Is it more than the inappropriateness of it—is the very idea of kissing me truly horrific, something that could only happen
in extremis
? Holding me for those brief seconds must have made him blindingly conscious of what it is that he’s lost forever. Maybe I shouldn’t have called, should have let that stupid, stolen kiss be the stop sign. “But please, let’s stop talking about me for a minute or two. How have you been?”
There’s something in his voice, something that catches me before I make my excuses and run for the hills. Instead I let the stress of the last few hours come tumbling out, relieved to have a tiny window of normal, rather than the relentless narrative of life and death.
“She’s a tricky customer, this Mary lady,” he says, once I’ve vented my frustration.
“She’s brilliant though,” I say, hotly. “And she was right. I can’t believe I’ve screwed it up all over again.”
“There is no right, Livvy,” he says, his tone softer. I think it’s the first time he’s called me that. “And you tried to do what
you
thought was right. I’m worried about that text though.”
And something unfurls in me against my will, like a cat stretching out as its tummy’s tickled. It moves me that he cares about something so small in the midst of everything.
“Hang on, I’ve not actually sent it. I . . . I wanted to call you,” I say, hoping he doesn’t hear something in my voice that shouldn’t be there. I fiddle with my phone, find it saved to drafts, then let him help me come up with something that’s not exactly a lie but won’t send Mary apoplectic.
“Thank you,” I say, once it’s done. “And . . . William, I can forget what happened, I’m a brilliant amnesiac. I don’t want you to never call me again.”
“You’ve been a very good friend these last couple of months,” he says, his voice infused with that softness. “I can see why Sally . . .”
He doesn’t finish the thought. Instead it hangs there, until I feel I have to fill the silence.
“Maybe we could take Madeline on another outing. The Saturday after next?”
“I can’t,” he says, his tone suddenly cold. Oh God, I’ve totally misjudged this. He was going for a gentle landing, an easy exit, and instead I’ve taken him at his word.
“Okay. Look just call me when you can—”
“No, I mean I
can’t
,” he says, emphatic, somehow detecting the hurt in my voice. “I truly can’t, not that I don’t want to.”
And then he tells me why. The personal effects from his New York apartment are being shipped back to the family home in Dorset, and he must spend the weekend sorting through them. His parents are abroad, and I picture him alone in some gloomy country estate, subsumed by the pieces of a life that’s lost, holding each one up to the light and trying to decide if it means enough to make the cut. It’s too awful to contemplate.
“I should have done it all when I was there, but . . .” He trails off again.
“It must have been so horrible being in that apartment.”
“We tried, but it was too much. We turned tail and went and stayed with Richie and Mara, they oversaw packing it all up. They’ve been incredible.”
I feel instantly guilty at the way I bristled when I met Mara, competing for Sally’s affections even in death. She said she’d be there for them and she’s been true to her word.
“William, please tell me to piss off if you want to, but . . . I could help you.” The words are out of my mouth before I can think too much about what they mean. I pause, tense, wondering if I’ve overstepped the mark again. He doesn’t speak, but then there’s a clicking sound. “Are you smoking?”
“Possibly,” he says, taking a drag. “That’s a very kind offer but it’s not your responsibility.”
“I know that.”
He can take it or leave it.
I could feel the blood draining from my face and I reached a hand toward the bar to steady myself. He was sporting a hat, a navy trilby, pulled to a bit of an angle, which he somehow managed to pull off, and a jacket far trendier than anything I remembered him wearing.
“Gimme a hug,” he said, “I’ve traveled halfway across the British Isles to be here.”
He was staring at me, waiting for me to bridge the gap, his look of appraisal impossible for me to miss. I knew him too well, knew that while he wasn’t sleazy, he couldn’t help but weigh up every situation that presented itself—too young, handsome, and horny to lose out on a round of what he saw as a numbers game. He wasn’t a bastard, he was an opportunist, and it was only now, from the vantage point I was squarely standing in, that I could admit to myself that I’d never previously elicited much of a charge. I could see in his
eyes what I already knew—that the Livvy that had packed up her Greenpeace-badged backpack five months before had ceased to exist. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled myself toward him, my whole body sparkling and rippling at the feel of him. One thing certainly hadn’t changed. I pulled away as fast as I could bear to, immediately guilty.
“I can’t believe you came!” I said. “This is Matt, my boyfriend”—I turned toward him and he gave an awkward half-grin, still not stepping forward—“and this is Sally.”
Sally was beside herself at the sight of her plan coming together.
“Feels like we’ve already met,” she laughed, leaning in and kissing him on both cheeks, branding him with her plum-colored mouth. He looked at her a little too long for my liking, though I couldn’t entirely blame him. She was skinny again, dressed in a floor-length green sheath with a halter neck, her hair expertly tonged into an up-do: combined with the thick black flicky eyeliner she had a kind of retro glamour that felt almost unnaturally sophisticated, her ability to transform herself into more than the sum of her parts more pronounced than ever. In fact, if you entered the room cold, you’d doubtless put money on her being the birthday girl.
“How did you do it!?” I asked, throwing my arms around her. My heart should have returned to a normal rate by now, but it didn’t seem to want to play ball.
“Called your mom,” she said. “Happy birthday!”
I squashed down the voice in my head that urged me to subject her motives to some forensic analysis. She obviously took on board how much James meant to me, and thought I’d love him to be here. She was right too. I smiled at him. “You need a drink,” I said, exactly in unison with Sally. The three of us looked at each other, and cracked up laughing.
It’s hard to enjoy your own party, especially when the love of your life and the love of the moment are within ten feet of one another. It was utterly different from any birthday I’d ever had before—I loved the way people bought me drinks and made me feel special—but I felt bad that I couldn’t pull Matt into the center of it all, his tortoise-like demeanor totally at odds with this kind of forced sociability. It wasn’t like we didn’t have lovely times when we were alone—we could talk endlessly about the books that had defined our adolescence, and he would remember every small detail about my life, quietly protective of me—but somehow it didn’t translate. We stood at the bar, awkward, our conversation as stilted as a couple of foreign exchange students thrown together with only a phrase book to get them through. James was having an animated conversation with Sally, her fingers lightly dusting his arm for emphasis.
“Let me properly introduce you to James,” I said, embarrassed by the way my eyes kept straying toward them.
“You haven’t mentioned him before,” said Matt carefully.
“Haven’t I?”
“Nope.”
“Really? We went to high school together.”
Matt didn’t respond, but he was no fool and I felt sinful, even though my sins were shadowy and nebulous. James must have noticed we were talking about him, as he chose that moment to come over.
“Hi, mate,” he said, pumping Matt’s hand. “How you surviving?”
“Surviving?”
“Life with this one,” he said, a smile playing around his lips, an intimacy about the way he said it.
“I wouldn’t call it survival,” said Matt, trying to defend me, even though he didn’t need to. In principle I loved him for
it. We stood there for what felt like an age, three statues, before Sally crashed into the circle. She grabbed both my hands, seemingly oblivious to the two boys, even though I knew with Sally that oblivion was only ever a pose.
“We need proper dancing,” she cried. “I brought some CDs.”
James cleared his throat theatrically.
“Ladies,” he said, “stand aside and await musical greatness.”
James loved his music; one of the first things that had triggered my romantic delusions was him making me a mix tape, although I soon found out it was no more than an excuse to show off his precociously eclectic record collection. I remember what he put on first—“Modern Love” by David Bowie—and we threw ourselves around, screaming the chorus, before Depeche Mode came on. I’d never known Sally to like anything remotely indie or retro, she was very much a chart girl, but she seemed to be loving it, and so was everyone else. Soon the whole party was jumping around, with me getting drunker and drunker, reveling in the frenzy of it all. Matt danced too, but we didn’t dance together, even though we were close by—we’d lost our phrase book again. When it got to midnight, he pulled me aside.
“Would you hate me if I made a move? You can come back to mine later, I just can’t miss training tomorrow.”
“Course, I understand,” I said, a little too quickly. Perhaps my eyes even flicked back to the dance floor. “I mean, I wish you’d stay, but if you have to go . . .” I smiled at him, trying to smooth the hurt from his face, but it was as if the wind had changed and it would stay that way forever.
“Goodbye, Livvy.”
“Don’t say it like that!” I said, hoping that if I played dumb, I could row the boat back to the shore.
“It’s not right,” he said simply.
I gripped hold of his hand, not remotely prepared, even though I should have been. It was all I deserved. “I don’t not love you,” I said.
Who could blame him for walking away from that tangled clump of words?
“Goodnight, birthday girl,” he said, making a speedy exit, too kind to give me a rundown of my multiple sins right in the middle of my own party. If I could find that version of Livvy again, part of me would urge her to run after him, win a couple of years of being safely held, and avert the trauma that was hurtling down the track, but perhaps neither he nor I deserved something so vanilla. Instead I stood there, staring after him, unable to work out if the pain in my chest was hurt pride or a wrecking ball of loss.
Sally came and found me, giving me a massive hug when I told her what had happened, filling my nose with the familiar combination of Marlboro Lights and Chanel No. 19—for years my head would whip round on the tube when that cocktail of smells seeped from a nearby body. “Twat,” she kept saying, “how could he do that to you on your birthday?” At first I stood up for the truth, protesting that it was more complicated than that, but gradually I sank into the warm bath of her unconditional support, wiping my eyes and bravely reentering the fray on the dance floor like the wounded heroine she’d painted me as. Sally wasted no time telling James what had happened, and he too puffed up with outrage, until we were like the Three Musketeers, a trio who had existed forever, bonded by blood.
Sally started flirting with a guy from the ex-poly, Shaun, who’d sneaked in from the main bar, and James and I found ourselves dancing together more and more. It wasn’t that we were slow-dancing—it’s hard to do when the song’s “Come
on Eileen”—but it was more than dancing separately in close proximity. I felt high on it, the shock of Matt’s abandonment somehow fueling the intensity of the moment —his fingers would brush me more than necessary, his smiles slow, languid invitations, and soon I was physically yearning for him to kiss me. I shudder now thinking about it: I hope it was youth that made me so callous, that there isn’t some switch buried deep within me that could still be flicked to off.
Eventually the lights went up, and we struggled to adjust, mole-like and disoriented. “Sally said I could crash at your house,” said James, his eyes fixed on me, and I felt my old anxieties flooding back, a painful reminder that they were more than just a coat I could shrug off at will. I tried to ignore them, tried to force the inside to tally with the polished shininess of my outside, impulsively reaching for James’s hand. He squeezed it back, flung an easy arm around my shoulder, and we went to look for Sally, me trying my best not to betray how much my body shook. She was out the back with Shaun, sharing a cigarette, and soon the four of us were piling into a cab back to our halls, waving a cheery goodbye to Lola, left stranded on the pavement with Justin. I remember Shaun was relegated to the front seat, forced to make conversation with the driver, while the three of us continued our love-in—now I’d got over the shock, it felt amazing to be bumping around between the two of them, the two hemispheres that made up my world.
When we got back I showed James my tiny little room and left him making a pretense of unrolling his sleeping bag while I went to the bathroom. I locked the door, looked at my face, makeup smeared by tears and sweaty dancing. I didn’t take it off, I adjusted it; I would never have had the courage to face James without its protection. It made me miss Matt
suddenly, who was never happier than when we were hiking around the moors, my cheeks colored only by the biting wind. The booze was starting to wear off, an early onset hangover kicking in, along with that tinge of melancholia that it often brings. It brought me up short, made me question what I was walking back into, but I didn’t have the strength to turn away: I’d longed for this, and it felt like if I didn’t seize this chance, I’d lose him to all those other girls who were the real deal rather than the imposter that I was. Courage, I thought, giving myself a wide, artificial smile in the mirror. Was I homesick for the Livvy that had gone absent without leave?
I slipped into bed, and James propped himself up on one elbow.
“I know it’s cold, but are you really going to bed in your party dress?”
I felt utterly silly. He smiled at me, sensing it, perhaps relieved I was still my same old awkward self when I was put under pressure.
“Do you want a cuddle?” he said. “You know I’m an excellent cuddler.”
I nodded mutely, holding the duvet up to give him room to slip into my bed, part of me hoping he meant it literally. I wish I’d the courage to speak, to tell him that for all my bravado, it was much too soon for us to jump into the grave of my relationship with Matt. I wish even more I could have told him how much more intimidating the reality felt in comparison to my love-soaked, sepia-tinged daydreaming, in which I always maintained directorial control. The feel of him in my arms, flesh and bone, was almost too much to bear.
As he kissed me I felt myself floating above us, critiquing my performance. He peeled off my dress, revealing Sally’s present. “Wow,” he muttered, kissing my neck and shoulders
around the straps, and I felt that yawning gap between inside and outside, my sexy underwear signing me up to a contract I was terrified to deliver on. I kissed him back, stroked that body I’d longed for, but I couldn’t abandon myself to it. Now I wonder why that felt so wrong—why shouldn’t we have needed to travel the runway before we took off, to have got to a place where it was born out of a relationship rather than a collision of circumstances—but then it felt like abject failure. We were naked by now, but he must have sensed my body stiffening to his touch. I wanted to coil myself around him like a sinuous serpent, but instead I felt like a plasticky curl of garden hose. He drew back, stopped kissing me, his hands withdrawing.
“We don’t have to do this.”
“Perhaps if we just slow down a bit,” I replied, kissing his face like an overeager puppy, full of apology.
He kissed me once more, little more than a brushing together of our lips, and then we lay there, neither one of us asleep, neither of us venturing back over the line. Did he know that it was because I wanted him so much, rather than because I didn’t? Even now I still don’t have the courage to ask.
He looked like he was asleep when I woke up, and I crept out of the room, wrapping my nakedness under all the clothing I could grab. As I left I saw him surreptitiously open one eye, then shut it again. Shaun and Sally were in the kitchen, sipping coffee from her cafetière, giggling away as if they’d known each other for years. “Hang on,” said Sally, racing after me to the bathroom and shutting us in.
“So?” she said, searching my face. I tried to bat her away, wishing I’d been able to close the door quicker.
“It’s not like that with us,” I said, trying my hardest to sound breezy. “I should’ve known that. We’re meant to be mates.”
“Well at least you know
now
,” she said, her voice comforting. “It’s better, isn’t it? To know?”
How quick she was to agree, even though my protestations wouldn’t have convinced a four-year-old. I don’t believe for a second that they convinced her.
