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‘Aye. It is lovely, all right,’ her dad said contentedly.
That night, when Liv lay in her bed, she knew she wasn’t going to fall asleep easily. In the room next door, Maya slept contentedly, her head probably filled with land deeds and tort law and maybe, if she was lucky, a prosecution for something a little more dangerous to look forward to; perhaps defending a client in a big case in the New Year.
Liv snuggled down, expecting to dream of nothing more than snow falling on her face as she walked back to the farmhouse earlier, the taste of disappointment on her lips and a hollowed-out, disillusioned feeling in her stomach. So she pulled the quilt up tight around her, pretended that everything had turned out just as it was meant to and felt herself drifting off into a deep and dream-filled sleep before the clock struck the hour in the hall at the bottom of the stairs. She was woken just on the cusp of sleep by her phone vibrating next to her. She reached out to her night stand and pressed the on button to check her notifications. She hadn’t really looked at it all day. She had a missed call from Pete. Damn, some friend she was after all her giving out to Eddie earlier. She’d ring Pete first thing in the morning, see what was up; probably, it was nothing more than he fancied going for lunch in the next town over.
Liv drifted easily back to sleep, thinking of Pete, and somehow a smile crept across her lips and she was contented, far more content than she had a right to be.
*
In the city, Liv got up the following morning, ragged. The snow on the empty streets outside brightened everything in a sterile light. It made her shiver, quite aside from the fact that the temperatures had dropped further. It seemed, within the space of a couple of written sentences, her whole life had been capsized. In a bolt from the blue it had emptied her out as easily as if she’d been tipped over and spilled across a precipice that she’d never imagined could lie so close to life as she knew it. She hadn’t slept all night and if she did manage to close her eyes for even a moment, they shot wide open again with the certainty that there was no ignoring what she’d read in that note last night. At this point, she knew the words off by heart. She’d read it a thousand times over, sat at the kitchen table, unable to move any further. Shock. That was what it was, complete and utter shock.
Can’t see you this week, Pete is asking questions. Too much to lose.
Don’t contact me for a while,
x
Liv had known immediately what it was. Anya and Pete had been over a few weeks earlier. They’d had dinner, takeaway, because Liv had ended up working late and there just hadn’t been time to cook. They’d drunk wine, probably too much, and sat talking into the early hours. Just before they left, Anya mentioned that she knew a girl who might be interested in getting some jewellery made. She’d made a big show of writing down the girl’s details and handing them to Eddie. Eddie had stuffed the envelope into his pocket and, truly, Liv had forgotten about it after that.
Until now.
Now, she was sure this was the same note. But it wasn’t a name and address or a phone number or an email contact for some potential customer who would keep Eddie busy for the New Year. It was something else entirely. A cruel game they were playing behind Liv’s back and behind Pete’s back. Pete had somehow seen through Anya, but of course, Liv had been completely blind to it all.
What had Pete said? It wasn’t serious; Anya had only been fooling around. Pete had suspected it was with a married man – married? Hah! That was a joke.
True, Liv knew, she was the queen of burying her head in the sand when it came to Eddie. At about three o’clock in the morning, it dawned on her that she’d been doing just that for their whole relationship. Relationship? Had there ever even been a proper relationship there beyond what was convenient for Eddie? She had to think about that long and hard. The way they’d gotten together, the way they lived their lives – they were just flatmates, not even good friends. They were flatmates with benefits, and if Liv was being completely honest with herself, and why not at this point? The benefits weren’t even all that spectacular. Sex with Eddie was just about going through the motions. Had it ever been any more than that? No.
She had worked hard, over the years, to convince herself that they were content and happy together. But honestly, now, with the stark reality of that note in her hand she had to face it. Their ‘connection’ had been little more than convenient for Eddie and maybe, God – and this made her feel really pathetic – but it had been fostered by her own desperation. Yes, she knew it: she was so desperate to have this ideal life she’d pinned her hopes on when she hardly knew anything about life at all, that she’d traded years of her time for something that hadn’t been really worth a second glance at all. She’d always known, deep down, that this thing between them was second best. Now, she was certain that it wasn’t even second best. This morning, as she sat looking across at that note on the table opposite her, she had a feeling that it might have freed her from the most toxic relationship she had ever forged and she wasn’t just thinking about Eddie, she was thinking about his mother just as much.
Maya had seen it from the start. She’d tried to tell Liv so many times, but in the end, she knew that even she couldn’t convince her sister that this thing was not right. But it had gone on so long. How on earth had she let it continue for almost six years? And then, she got really cross with herself, why on earth had she sold herself so short? For so long.
And she’d have married him. She’d have slipped that ring on her finger, with the deluded notion that because it looked like something that meant something to her, it would all be well and she and Eddie Quirke – and his awful mother – would live happily ever after.
She was so mad!
She was angry with herself, with Eddie Quirke, with Anya and even with Maya for not making her see sense sooner, which she knew was completely unreasonable. She had two hours before she was due back at the hospital. She had just two hours to scour this flat from any trace of Eddie Quirke. She started with refuse bags, everything from their bedroom that was his, which basically meant his shoes and clothes, because he’d never gone out and bought so much as a dish cloth since he’d moved in.
She cried and wailed while she was stuffing in socks, jumpers, jeans and underwear, then she moved towards the bathroom and continued to drop things in, aftershave, body spray, hair gel – so many products. She looked at the towels on the rail. They would all have to go. She’d buy all new towels and sheets in the January sales. That thought made her cry even louder, so by the time she made her way into the living room, she was almost spent, just that racking, uncontrollable breathing that she’d perfected as a child and then stopped somewhere around the teenage years; she had forgotten that she could cry so much, but then, these were tears filled with rage as much for her own stupidity as they were for the loss of Eddie Quirke.
Finding little tell-tale signs, like Anya’s eye pencil buried between the cushions on the couch and a pink cigarette lighter tucked out of sight beneath the mattress on her bed, made her want to throw up. But it confirmed that Eddie had brought Anya here, probably on the nights when Liv had been working, and that hurt her even more. The idea that they would be here, together in her lovely flat; how on earth had she been so blind?
She would ring Maya on her first break. She’d rather wait, for another day or two, but Liv knew there was a good chance her mother would try to recreate Christmas Day when she got home at the end of the week and the last thing she wanted was the Quirkes looming like spectres on the other side of their family table.
She managed to make it to the hospital with seconds to spare. She’d left the flat with a line of black refuse bags taking up the tiny utility room. Later, tonight, she would take them to Eddie’s workshop and leave them there. Where he lived, or indeed how he lived, was no longer her concern. That thought gave her a huge pang of loneliness and yes, she hated herself all the more for it.
The truth was that after six years together, their lives had woven into each other; and then she shook herself out – because whose fault was that? It certainly was not Eddie Quirke’s. He may have lived in her flat for free, eaten the food she’d put in the fridge and allowed her to let him take her for a complete fool, but to be fair, he’d never made any promises. There had never been a declaration of any sort – love, lust or even enduring partnership of any kind.
But, he had taken everything she’d so willingly given and he must have known that in her mind things between them were very, very different to what they’d put into words.
*
‘And you haven’t told him yet?’ Maya had said after she’d called her. Liv knew she was choosing her words carefully.
‘No. I know I should have, but I needed to get my head around things first. I needed to get everything sorted.’ The last thing she wanted was Eddie Quirke arriving back in Dublin to convince her that it was all some misunderstanding when she knew in her gut that throwing him out of the flat was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. ‘I’ll ring him when I’m good and ready. Let’s face it, I don’t owe him any favours at this stage.’
‘Of course,’ Maya said. ‘I know you won’t want to hear this, Liv, but I really think you should be absolutely rejoicing. You’ve had the luckiest escape from him – he’s only ever been a leech. He’d have made you completely miserable in the long run.’
‘Or I’d have made myself miserable more like.’ Liv knew that it took some sort of action for another person to have any effect either way on you. And the fact was that Eddie didn’t care enough to make her feel bad, unless it was by deflection of following his own interests. The more she thought about it, she realised, all she’d ever been was a wave to his tidal direction.
