Don't You Forget About Me (Page 27)

‘Leave it with us.’

He folds his arms. Conciliatory but not quite friendly.

There’s a pause and I say: ‘Thor is a Norse God. Felt entitled to any wench he chose. Should’ve known, really.’

Lucas smiles and shakes his head, in appreciation I’m making light of it but also implying I shouldn’t, and says: ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there earlier.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘I’ll call your taxi, I can imagine you want to go home.’

I open my mouth to say something more, something to lever this moment open between us, and don’t quite have the nerve. But if I finish this Rémy Martin, as a chaser to so much adrenaline that I could have lifted a lorry, perhaps I will.

As I’m walking out to my cab, Lucas is mopping blood from the floor.

‘Lucas,’ I say, the sound of the car’s engine ticking over outside, knowing this is wildly reckless. It feels like a moment out of the ordinary, when both our defences are down, and if I don’t do it now, I possibly never will. It’ll only get harder to ask as time goes on. And I have to know.

‘I’ve been thinking. Didn’t we go to school together? Or sixth form?’

I hold my breath and swallow hard. Lucas stares at me for a moment. He half-heartedly plunges the mop in the mop bucket water, while he thinks.

‘… Oh, God. Yes, I think so? I thought I knew you from somewhere and didn’t want to say in case I got it wrong.’

I squirm. I immediately wish I hadn’t raised this. Every word out of his mouth for the next thirty seconds will crucify me. I’ve devoted years of my life to second-guessing what they might be, yet he will toss them away, carelessly.

‘Did we …? Were we …?’ Lucas hesitates. He clears his throat: ‘I’m not sure how to phrase this in an, er, gentlemanly way. My memories from eighteen through to twenty-two or twenty-three are very hazy at best.’

He’s asking me if we did it? I can feel my heart plummeting through my gut, through the floor, into the sewers beneath the city. Surely, surely not. He can’t even remember if we did it? That’s some score card. That’s some lack of meaning I had. Rav says I’m modest? So I’ve a lot to be modest about.

I say nothing at first. I can’t even force my facial muscles to mime polite reciprocation. I’m wearing the misery like a mask.

‘We hardly spoke, I think,’ I say eventually, thickly.

‘Ah!’ Lucas says, with an evident ‘phew’, his shoulders dropping half an inch. ‘I wasn’t sure … Youth, eh? Hah.’

Lucas looks at me in awkward hopefulness. I turn away.

‘Night.’

On the journey to Crookes, silent tears that I’m not even able to staunch until I’m home flood down my cheeks.

No doubt Fay would say it’s positive I can cry. Fay didn’t find out the love of her life forgot her.

‘You don’t know he’s the love of your life,’ she’d said, with a benevolent smile. ‘You’re how old? Lots of time.’

‘Cathy and Heathcliff knew in Wuthering Heights, and they were kids. I mean, I know that’s slightly dodgy.’

‘And look how that ended,’ Fay said. ‘With them dead.’

‘That’s the outcome in general,’ I said, and Fay noticed our hour was up.

19

Anyway, at least now I know the answer for sure.

I hug my bare knees in a hot bath, a washing line of Karen’s stout underwear strung above me like bunting, melancholy coating me like tar. It’s the morning after and I still feel like I’ve been turned inside out.

Not to be crude, but someone who doesn’t even remember whether he ever fitted a key part of his anatomy into a vital part of my anatomy in the act of physical intimacy – which by the way, would’ve been my first time, Lucas McCarthy – very clearly isn’t the love of my life.

Unless he’s feigning forgetfulness of course, and he does know who I am. Which is barely an improvement – so The One is supposed to be someone who shudders at the thought of discussing the fact we were once close? That guy’s no Rudolph Valentino either.

I don’t know why I find this so difficult to accept. I’ve had twelve years to get used to the idea that I’m unimportant to Lucas McCarthy.

No, that’s not true, I do know why. It’s because he’s never been inside my body, but he’s been inside my head.

And this pain is not because he’s now so obviously wantable. I’m not that shallow. It’s not due to the way, when his face breaks into a smile, it can apparently still crack my heart open. No. I fell for him when he was a skinny nerd in a Cure t-shirt, overlooked, wan and shy. I liked his early work.

I’m finding my irrelevance hard to accept because there’s nothing I’ve ever trusted more in my life than that first flush of how I felt about him. It was pure heady instinct, I never had to question it for a second.

But if Lucas didn’t feel it too, if I could be so utterly wrong about his reciprocation, I can never trust my judgement again. If that wasn’t two people falling in love, then what the hell is?

I lie back and stare at my red-varnished toenails, protruding in the foam.

This is the final contributing factor to my existential bleakness that is my turning thirty. In my twenties, I used to think I was a caterpillar, and I was going to pupate into a butterfly. The girl in the pink coat with the melted make-up, the roots that needed doing, holding a bag of chips and batter bits on the night bus after a brutalising shift, being asked if her boobs were fake in Rogues – she was not who I was going to be. She was an amazing origins story.

Sooner or later, superhero Georgina Horspool was going to burst forth, fulfilling all her glorious potential.

But now I am slowly letting go of that hope. Like that baleful line in obituaries at the start of the paragraph outlining where it all went wrong. ‘Sadly, it was not to be …’

Lucas’s reappearance makes that brutally clear. He is something else. I am still right here.

I point my toes, hold my leg out of the water and drag a razor up my calves, turning them this way and that to check I haven’t left a raccoon-stripe of hair.

As a serial monogamist whose relationships have generally puttered out rather than exploded, I’ve only ever taken a detached interest in Clem’s dating advice. Now, heaving myself out of the water, I remember her inspirational protocol after a blow to the feelings.

‘Liking yourself is a radical act,’ Clem had instructed Jo and myself. ‘Never more so than when you’ve had a crap time from a man.’

So when you get turned down for a second date, when you find out you were one of seven options, when your texts have the Read receipt, when the WhatsApp shows two blue ticks and your Facebook messages say SEEN – Clem says do the opposite of wallowing.

She prescribes: spend an entire day treating yourself as you’d wish to be treated. Take yourself for margaritas, see a film you fancy, have a long walk. Buy something frivolous which brings you joy, order a takeaway. Get sheets with high thread count and lie like a starfish on them, naked.

‘It’s like aggressive hygge. Celebrate how great you are and what a nice time you have by yourself. Refuse to partake in the self-loathing we’re virtually commanded to, in this sick society.’

I don’t have tons of funds, but I can put my dumb blonde hair in the big rollers, do a face mask, get a gel manicure at the salon two roads over, walk into town and purchase myself a Magnum Salted Caramel and a beautiful Penguin Classic edition of Wuthering Heights, which I’m going to re-read. See if it lands differently, now.

So I do.

I get Jammy some yellow bell pepper that he’s mad for, and go for a hot chocolate, sitting in a window so I can see the smoky-darkness of a winter evening fall, the street lamps switch on.

And, I decide, while spooning up the last of the foam, I’m going to revisit Fay. I need to tell her about seeing Lucas again. I want her to tell me that despite the fact it feels like my chest is being crushed in a vice, it is some sort of catharsis. You want to talk to her because you won’t tell anyone else. And why is that, exactly?

I wonder how counsellors feel when former clients reappear with their lives in as much a mess as ever. Is it like cutting someone’s unflattering ’do for years, getting them to grow out layers and stop harsh treatments, and then seeing them strutting round town with a backcombed, white straw pompadour, like a French Regency wig? Dispiriting?

I’ll have to ask Rav.

‘Can I speak to Fay Wycherley?’ I say, mobile to ear in the quiet kitchen when I get in, having ascertained Karen’s definitely out. Studying my glossy nails, the colour of blood. Aggressive hygge. Glamorous defiance.

‘I’m sorry, she doesn’t work here anymore.’

‘Oh … Do you know where she went?’

‘She went on to a practice in Hull, I think.’

‘Oh. Right. Thank you. Do you have the name? I’ll try her there.’

I won’t, because I can’t see myself travelling to Hull, but it seems a courteous farewell.

‘Hang on, do you mind waiting for a moment?’

The receptionist puts me on hold to Flautist Moods: Vol 7. Then there’s the noise of a phone being crashed back out of its cradle.