AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Different? Is that how I look now?’ she asked, moving closer to him, not taking her eyes off him. He seemed smaller, almost inconsequential, this little man who had been such a huge part of her life for so long. It turned out, he was nothing to her and she was even less than that to him. ‘Funny, but there are so many better words to cover how I might be looking today,’ she said smiling at him, but the expression held no joy, apart from the momentary satisfaction of having caught him on the back foot. ‘How does betrayed sound? Or maybe foolish? Two-timed, perhaps? Or is that just a term for when you’re a kid – surely at this stage in our lives, what you’ve been doing with Anya Hegarty is having an affair, so what does that make me, Eddie? Apart from stupid?’
‘I… what, no, no, you have it all wrong, Liv. It’s not what you think it is. I wouldn’t…’
‘Oh, Eddie, but you would and you did. I saw you both, with my own eyes and everybody knows about it, the whole village, but you already know that probably.’
‘But we’re… living together, the flat and… everything.’ He didn’t even try to deny it. If she’d hoped he’d beg for another chance, it had not come. Silence filled the air between them. At her back, Liv heard Barbara linger almost soundlessly beyond the flimsy partition wall.
‘No, Eddie, we’re not living together anymore. You came to stay in my flat for a night or two and I should have thrown you out ages ago,’ she said with far greater confidence than she felt.
‘Come on, Liv, we can be grown-up about this, surely. You and I… we never actually… I mean, there were no promises, no real rules about what we were…’ He was scrambling, stopping because maybe, for once, he was faced with exactly what she thought they were.
‘That’s funny, because I thought, you know, when you lived together, when you shared everything you had with another person, it meant more than just – nothing?’ She turned away from him, determined not to cry. She would not give him or Anya the satisfaction of going over this later and laughing at her. She took a deep breath. ‘You know what? Maybe you’re right,’ she said, fixing her stare at a poster of some obscure heavy metal band that she assumed had been pinned to Eddie’s wall twenty years earlier and had, like herself, become part of his life that he didn’t notice anymore. ‘Maybe we can be grown-up about this.’ The hardness in her voice sounded alien to her and she felt as much as heard Eddie catch his breath behind her back. ‘I want you out of my flat by the end of the week. I want my keys back and as far as I’m concerned, we’ll leave it at that.’
She knew Maya would have wanted her to press him for an astronomical amount of rent back-paid, just to put the wind up him, but Liv’s anger didn’t stretch far enough beyond devastation to play that sort of game.
‘You’re angry; you have things all confused. I’m not… It didn’t mean anything; it was just a fling. Surely we can…’ And then he stopped, catching something of her determination on the air, the truth of his situation finally hitting him. ‘You can’t just ask me to leave.’
‘I’m not asking you to leave, Eddie, I’m telling you; find somewhere else because you’re not living in my flat anymore.’
‘Now, listen here, Liv Latimer’ – Barbara was behind her, her expression livid, her voice finally revealing the dislike that Liv had always pretended not to recognise – ‘you can’t just swan in here and tell my son he’s homeless. He has rights, as a tenant, as a… common law husband.’ Eddie for his part had shrunk further down beneath his quilt at the mention of the wordhusband, common law or otherwise.
‘Actually, Barbara, I can, because it’s my flat and he’s been seeing Anya Hegarty for weeks, probably months behind my back, and so his place is with Anya, not sleeping each night in my bed.’
‘But Anya has nowhere to live either and…’ Eddie sounded pathetic now.
‘That’s right, Eddie, because ye’re as bad as each other, and you thought you’d just move her into my flat, so you could have the best of both worlds. God, you really are hilarious. What do you think I am, a complete doormat? Anya’s not welcome in my flat and I very much doubt that Pete will want to see either of you within a ten-mile radius of his place either. It’s time to grow up, Eddie. You and Anya are more than welcome to each other.’ She turned on her heels, pushing past the open-mouthed Barbara, and made her way down the stairs and out the front door, banging it loudly behind her.
She was shaking by the time she got into the jeep again.
‘Okay?’ Maya said, although they both knew, she was nowhere near okay.
‘Fantastic.’ Liv tried to smile through her tears. It was a wobbly, noisy attempt, but it felt better than disintegrating into a wretched mess.
‘Well, did he deny it?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know, sort of, but not really.’ She was glad to be sitting in the car next to Maya speeding away from the narrow street. ‘I think he was in shock that I turned up at the foot of his bed at this hour, more than anything else.’
‘So, you just had it out with him?’
Maya flicked on her indicator. Soon they’d be driving past the pier and on the road out to open fields and the soothing countryside. Liv craved the sight of fields, stone walls and endless blue-grey sky.
‘Not really. I just told him he wasn’t living at the flat anymore.’ She looked out the window at the sea opposite. ‘Oh God, can I do that, after he’s been living there for so long?’
‘Squatter’s rights?’ Maya laughed. ‘No, don’t worry, that would have taken him a little longer to establish. You’ve managed to get him out, just in time.’ They both started to laugh at that, even if it wasn’t funny, and Liv wasn’t sure what she felt at this stage – she knew it wasn’t happy, but at least it felt good to be here with Maya.
*
Liv’s phone rang just as she sat on the bus for work. She was doing split shifts all over the place, and there was no point hanging about the hospital, but still, she’d only had four hours away from the place and she was returning for another four; today it felt as if they were desperately trying to plug holes in theTitanic. She was just lucky not to be redeployed to a different ward.
She pulled the phone out of her bag and answered it. She didn’t recognise the number, but presumed it was probably the hospital. The switchboard there often came up as a private number depending on which extension was calling.
‘Liv, hi, it’s me, glad I caught you.’ Eddie’s voice sounded really far away and for a moment, Liv almost forgot that things had changed so completely between them.
‘Eddie, what can I do for you this evening?’
‘Oh, nothing really, I just fancied a chat, you know,’ he wheedled and she held the phone from her ear for a minute and then took a deep breath. She wanted to say, Well then why don’t you go and ring up Anya? but she knew that Eddie never called without some purpose, not really.
‘Oh, right well, fire ahead so.’ She pursed her lips. Let him make a stab at having a conversation with someone who had no intention of making an effort; God knows, she’d done it often enough over the years.
