The Reunion (34 page)

When they set off Dan found himself gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white.

He relaxed a little as the journey went on. He and Conor talked about their plans for the summer. ‘Sorry you’re not going to make it to France,’ Conor said.

‘Yeah, I know. It’s a bugger, but it’s a good job, the internship. Plus I’m flat broke, I can’t afford to go away.’

‘You could come for a while, couldn’t you? Get away for a week or two?’

‘Well…’

‘Don’t bug him, Con,’ Jen said flatly. It was the first thing she’d said for the entire journey. ‘If he has to work, he has to work.’ She was pleased that he wasn’t coming. She was happy that she wouldn’t have to see him, to deal with him.

‘Shall we put some music on?’ Dan suggested to Conor. He didn’t want to talk any more. He didn’t want to hear her voice.

He hadn’t felt like this before. For the past few months, all he’d felt for her was love, longing, then sadness. But now he was bloody furious. This was her fault. She made him feel like this. She made him want her. She came to him that night, she kissed him, she led him into that room and put her hands on him. And now she was just cutting him off. She took what she wanted, a little holiday from Conor, a little glimpse over the fence to see if the grass really was greener, and then she went back to her man, discarded him as though he were nothing. Conor put a CD on,
The Holy Bible
by the Manic Street Preachers. Dan turned it up to ten.

HE’D BEEN LOOKING
forward to this weekend. Four whole days off work, nothing to do but drink beer and go swimming and hang out with his best friends. And now here they were and everything just felt weird. Jen seemed withdrawn and a little sad, and Conor couldn’t fathom why. He just never knew any longer when she was going to be her old self, laughing at everything, laid back, relaxed, and when she was going to be tense and anxious. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. Only today, of all days, seemed to be a tense and anxious day.

And what, Conor wondered, was up with Dan? He was so touchy. That thing about driving the car, so obviously a joke, and he’d bitten Conor’s head off. And now he clearly didn’t want to talk. They hadn’t seen each other in weeks and yet the moment they were on the road he’d turned the music up so loud they could barely hear themselves think, let alone have a conversation.

The whole thing was making him uneasy. The aggressive way that Dan was driving, slamming the car into gear, accelerating until he was a foot away from the car in front, Conor was almost tempted to ask him to slow down, but he didn’t want to seem like a wuss. It was, after all, a new car. Dan had the right to show off a little bit. He just needed to relax and enjoy it. He leaned back in his seat. Enjoy the ride, he thought to himself.

It was a beautiful day, clear skies and warm sunshine, the weather forecast predicting one of the hottest weekends of the year. He could picture them all, messing around in the pool, music on, cold tins in hand, sausages on the barbecue, the girls in their bikinis… He thought for a moment about Jen in her bikini, wondering whether she’d brought the black one or that deep red one she bought last summer and just thinking about it brought a smile to his face. He turned to look at her and as he did he noticed that Dan was looking in his rear-view mirror, and he didn’t seem to be looking at the traffic. He was looking at Jen, and just for a fraction of a second, before she turned her head, Conor could have sworn that she was looking right back at Dan. Then her eyes moved to Conor’s face and she smiled at him, her face flushed.

Conor turned the music down a little. Dan glanced at him for a second but didn’t say anything. He wasn’t imagining things. Something was up. What, for example, was going on just before they got into the car? He couldn’t be absolutely sure, because he was busy checking out the car itself, but he could have sworn that as he looked up at them, Jen was pulling away from Dan. Jen was angry with him. They must have had a row. That had to be it: that’s why Dan put the music up so loud, why Jen was so quiet, why they were eyeing each other angrily in the rear-view mirror.

It was probably something about the screenplay that Dan was writing. Jen had been his official reader since last summer; apparently she was his most perspicacious critic. Presumably she’d said something he didn’t agree with. Jen wasn’t a great puller of punches when it came to things she liked and didn’t like. Conor immediately felt better having figured this out. A falling-out over artistic differences? It would blow over by this evening.

Conor leaned his head against the window and watched the scrubby embankments and service stations of the M3 whizz by until they became a blur. His head drooped, his chin nodding towards his chest. His mind, though, kept ticking over.

It was a little odd, though, that Jen hadn’t mentioned falling out with Dan. It was the sort of thing she would usually have told him about. Whenever she had a row with Lilah or got pissed off with Andrew about something, Conor got the blow-by-blow account. More detail than he needed, to be honest. So why hadn’t she mentioned this?

When he thought about it carefully, he wasn’t entirely sure it could be something about the film script. Or at the very least, not something trivial, because, now he considered the matter, things hadn’t been right with Dan and Jen for a while. When Dan was staying with them, those two were thick as thieves, and then when Dan left it seemed like every time Conor got home from work late, Jen was sitting on the sofa, legs tucked up beneath her, nattering away to him on the phone. But he hadn’t come home to that in a long while.

He sat up straighter in his seat, opened the window a crack to get some air. Outside, the motorway roared. How could he not have noticed this before? Something had happened between Dan and Jen, and not recently either. Something Jen had never told him about. That sense of unease he had earlier grew, started to morph into something else, something which felt like dread.

Conor shifted a little in his seat, sliding over to his left so that he was up against the passenger door. From that position he could just about see Jen’s face in the side mirror. She was looking out of the window, her expression blank, but her hand was clasped around the base of her throat. She was feeling nervous, vulnerable. He
knew
her.

He shut out the music, trying to remember the last time he talked to Jen about Dan, the last time he could remember her even mentioning Dan’s name. It wouldn’t come to him. He couldn’t believe that he’d been so caught up in himself that he hadn’t noticed a change like this. Conor’s mouth felt dry, his lower back damp with sweat. He rolled the window down a little further, took a deep gulp of hot, dirty air. Pure carbon monoxide.

It wasn’t true, was it, that he hadn’t noticed a change? He
had
noticed a change in Jen, he just hadn’t connected it to Dan. Earlier he’d thought about how Jen’s moods, her slide from happiness to sadness, had no rhyme or reason. Maybe he was wrong about that. Maybe the rhyme and reason was sitting right next to him in the driver’s seat.

He looked across at Dan, who glanced back at him, cocking his head a little, quizzically. He smiled, but the smile died right there on his lips.

‘You OK?’ Dan asked, and when Conor didn’t reply, Dan looked back at the road, but Conor could still see the expression spreading across his face. Defensiveness? Guilt? What did Dan have to feel guilty about? Conor kept staring at him, saw Dan swallow hard, looking as though he’d been caught doing something wrong, as though he’d been caught red-handed. He’d seen that look on Dan’s face before, not all that long ago. The barbecue, when he caught Dan coming out of the room, just after Conor had asked him to leave Jen to rest; the expression on his face was exactly like the one he wore now. And when Conor went in to see Jen he could tell that she’d been crying.

Something was not right.

It seemed to Conor that, where before he’d only been able to see puzzle pieces, now he was beginning to see a picture. Jen had lied to him. They had had a row, and the next day, when he was gone, she went to the cinema, and she lied to him about going alone. She went to the Barbican, she saw a Japanese film. Dan was the only person he knew who really enjoyed Japanese cinema, who could talk for hours (pretentious wanker) about Kurosawa. And since then, Conor couldn’t remember Dan and Jen saying two words to each other.

Conor felt hot and cold at the same time, as though someone had poured petrol over him. He felt sick, breathless, his head swimming, he wanted to get out of the car. The sun was beating down outside and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that a storm was coming, he could sense it, dark clouds gathering somewhere just out of sight. He needed to talk to Jen, to look her in the eye, to ask her what happened, to ask her why she lied. He wanted to put his hand around Dan’s throat and squeeze.

‘Are you feeling all right, Conor?’ Dan was looking at him, a little frown on his face. ‘You feeling sick? You want to stop?’

Conor looked at Dan’s face, at the genuine concern in his eyes, and he couldn’t believe the thought that had just run through his head. Dan was his friend. Jen loved him. And Conor trusted her, he trusted them both. This was ridiculous. He was wrong, he had to be. Dan would
never
do that. Jen would
never
do that. She would rather die than hurt him like that. He let go of the door handle and slipped his hand back between the door and his seat, he reached back for Jen and she took his hand and squeezed it, and he felt breath come back to his lungs.

THEY COULDN’T GET
there too soon. Jen wanted to tell Dan to drive faster, faster, faster. She couldn’t wait to get out of the car, to get out of this ridiculously cramped, uncomfortable back seat, to stretch her legs and put some physical space between her and Dan, because she couldn’t bear this proximity.

She couldn’t stop looking at him. She tried, she focused on the service stations and the scrubby embankment, the stitching coming undone on the back of Conor’s seat, the dark red varnish peeling from her fingernails, but no matter how she tried her eyes were drawn back to him, to the muscles in his tanned arms, flexing as he changed gear, to that little scar, a tiny crooked white mark on the nape of his neck just below his hairline. A knife fight, he told her the first time she asked him how he got it. Attacked by a vicious dog. An unfortunate forklift incident. He had a different story every time, they got more and more ridiculous. In the rear-view mirror she caught his eye and she realised she was smiling.

Her face felt hot. Everything felt hot. God, she wanted to get out of this car. Conor opened his window a little and there was a moment of relief as the air rushed in. She breathed deeply: exhaust fumes and the faint tang of petrol.

She wanted to get out of the car and yet she was afraid, because once they were out of the car she would have to face them both, and she wouldn’t know how to behave, she’d forgotten how she used to be with the two of them, back when things were normal. She couldn’t remember how she used to look at Dan, but she was sure that when she looked at him now, she did so differently, and Conor would know. He would see something in her face, in the way she couldn’t quite hold Dan’s gaze, and he would know.

Just then, with perfect timing, Conor reached back and took her hand, and the guilt came over her in waves. She felt as though she were drowning. She bit down hard on her lip, she squeezed his hand tightly, she felt Dan’s gaze, still on her, watching her face, and she closed her eyes.

They stopped in Weyhill for lunch, where they had arranged to meet up with the others. Jen clambered out of the back seat as quickly as she could, almost falling over in the car park.

‘Steady,’ Conor said to her, catching her arm and pulling her closer. ‘You all right?’

‘That car’s a bloody nightmare,’ she muttered, pushing her hair out of her face.

‘Hey!’ Dan protested. ‘She can hear you,’ he said, patting the bonnet.

‘Yeah, well, it’s not built for three, is it?’ As she said it she wished she hadn’t, she felt as though she were pointing out the awkwardness, the
wrongness
of the three of them.