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Arriving home, I feel about as drained as I’ve ever felt, depleted of everything because of him. I pick up my phone and send a quick WhatsApp to Theo, who’s abroad but will get WiFi intermittently, so he said.
Why didn’t you say he thumped you? Just found out from Susan and Adam. Can’t believe him!
I wait to see if he’s online and sure enough, two blue ticks appear beside my message, letting me know he’s received it. Then I notice he’s typing… and I wait to see what he’s got to say.
Not getting involved, Lily. Good luck to you with him. Always here for you. Love you, T x
Another kick to the gut. Basically, he’s saying he doesn’t want to know me anymore so long as I’m with Paul. Great. Great. That’s marvellous. My best friend of recent times is disowning me because I’m basically trying to save someone who so far has only demonstrated he’s not really interested in turning a corner. Great, feels like I’ve brought my work home.
I enter the bedroom, ready to punch something, but instead I decide to calmly remove my make-up, pull on my pyjamas and clean my teeth in the bathroom. After all this, I doubt he’ll be home tonight. He’ll call up his brothers, go drinking, anything but face me.
So I’m surprised as hell when the front door opens and closes. I leave the bathroom with the toothbrush in my mouth and stare at him, stood there with a great big mark on his cheek, his shoulders hunched, arms heavy, face to the floor.
Then he starts crying. I have no idea what to do. Paul’s crying?
I return to the bathroom, spit immediately and towel off, rushing back towards him.
“You need to tell me everything that happened with you and Theo,” I demand, lifting his chin with my finger and seeing the sorry look in his eye, “because I don’t understand.”
He flops into the sofa and holds his head in his hands. “What’s the point? You’re gonna leave me no matter what I say.”
I’m taken aback. So, is he scared I’ll leave him? Does he actually fear not having me in his life anymore? He’s always seemed so distant, treating me almost like I’m disposable, when maybe his fear all along is that I’d leave him, because that’s what happened to him in the past.
“The only way I’ll leave you is if you don’t tell me the truth.”
He presses his palms into his eyes and shakes his head over and over. I have a feeling and leave him where he is, marching to the bedroom. Rummaging around his bag, I find a small bottle of vodka, half drunk. I wonder if he sipped some of that before we went out tonight.
I take it to the living room and drop it into his lap. “That’s not for you to drink by the way. I knew you’d had a drink before we went out.”
He throws it across the room and somehow the bottle doesn’t smash, but it’s still an act of aggression I don’t appreciate.
I’m still standing and pick up my phone, showing him I can call Theo if I want. “I’ll do it, you know I will, and I’ll get it all out of him. So we can either do it like that or you can just tell me everything, right now. Calmly and civilly, tell me why you belted him.”
Paul rubs his red eyes and catches his breath, sighing as though in defeat.
“It’s true, we bumped into one another, or at least I thought we had. I put on Facebook that I was back in town and all, seeing as though I hadn’t told anybody. You saw it… I posted a pic of myself sitting in Trinity. Anyway, he’s like there, within half an hour. He finds me in H&M and confronts me. He tells me he’s going to tell you about what I did if I don’t do it myself… and I saw red. I smacked him. He just looked so smug, like he had something over me. I couldn’t believe it. We used to be best mates.”
If I remember rightly, Paul was slowly relegated to the periphery of Adam, Theo and Tom’s friendship during and after our university days. The aforementioned trio are all culture-vulture intellectuals sharing the same sorts of lofty ideas and ambitions. Tom is the nearest thing to a savant you’ll ever meet, Theo has a masters degree in theatre studies and drama and Adam has had to turn writing projects down recently because he’s so in demand. Both Adam and Paul grew up on a council estate and have a heck of a lot of history, but aside from their football-playing days and school, I don’t know what else they have in common right now – except for maybe, me. Things have changed and people have changed.
If there’s anything Paul and I share it’s our search for a place in this world… an uncertainty about where we belong. I always thought I would become a writer or a librarian or something. Meanwhile Paul had loads of ideas about his career, including recruitment consultant, holiday rep, translator for the Foreign Office… all kinds of stuff… and he ended up doing his PGCE two years ago after all that went tits up. Who knows if he’ll survive a proper full-time job as a teacher? He’s never worked full-time before. He’s been a substitute… a part-time loafer. I’m trying to hold down a job and stick to one thing, but I don’t know if Paul will ever be able to. Meanwhile his best friends Theo, Adam and Tom always knew exactly what they were going to do with their lives.
If they were ever best friends, Theo and Paul, it was before we all left school and before the big wide world changed everything. We’ve all moved on. Just not Paul, it seems, clinging to the idea that people are going to keep covering for him because they were once ‘best friends’. Perhaps if you were once best friends, you’d always be best friends, unless the test of time shows you not to be in actual fact, friends at all.
I clear my throat and sit in the armchair, away from him, trying to calm myself down. “What is it he thinks I should know?”
His chest expands as he takes in air, psyching himself up to deliver the truth. He puffs and eventually admits, “At Susan and Adam’s wedding, I wasn’t single.”
It’s a sucker punch, straight to the gut, flooring me. That night, I was so happy. I thought I was getting my man, finally, and he broke me. And when he came back into my life recently, I thought he could heal that part of me that was broke, somehow mend me, by being with me.
Yet in this moment, it’s there, it’s always been there and will always be there. Betrayal. It hurts too damn much. It’s painful. Physically, but also emotionally, mentally.
He goes on… “She and I, that woman who hit me tonight, she and I were back together. She called during the wedding reception and said she missed me and I said why don’t we give it another go. That even though I was going abroad, she’d wait and I promised the same.”
Hot daggers assault my heart and I almost can’t believe what I’m hearing.
“Then I saw you and I was even more in love with you than ever before. You looked sad and it hurt me to see you that way because I know marriage and a family is what you want more than anything and I wanted to take your pain away. So we slept together, and the next day, me and Gina carried on as normal because it was easier for me that way than do this and risk losing you forever.”
I burst into tears and sob my heart out, holding my arm out for him to stay away because hitting him wouldn’t be enough. In fact, I don’t know what would be enough to make him feel any of the pain I’m currently feeling.
