Don't You Forget About Me (Page 43)

‘I was talking to a friend of mine in Dublin … A former friend of mine. Owen. He was having an affair with Niamh right before she died.’

I open my mouth and close it again, and gulp. ‘Oh.’

I’d made the rules: Niamh was tragic, and devoted. Not unfaithful. Oh.

‘I found out a few weeks before Niamh got her diagnosis, but it had been going on months before that. She was having loads of nights out with girlfriends and I got suspicious and turned up at the bar she was out at, and caught her with her face locked onto Owen.’

‘Oh, God.’

He leans back.

‘We were in trouble anyway. We got married too young, for the wrong reasons – her family wouldn’t have us living in sin. It was never right. There wasn’t a friendship there, which is what it always has to be underneath, right?’

I clear my throat and nod.

‘… I could say more, but don’t speak ill and all that. The point is, I knew we were over, before Owen. It was confirmation. Could’ve done without knowing the other man quite so well, but there we go.’

I nod as if I understand, except I don’t really understand. I feel glad of the heat and tingle of alcohol in my stomach.

‘And then she found out she was ill?’

‘Yeah. We’d agreed she was moving out. Then she went for a routine check-up after having these headaches and was told there was no hope. It was an aggressive cancer, and it was inoperable.’

Lucas’s voice has grown thick and I merely take in this information, knowing I will lie awake for an hour when I go to bed tonight, trying to figure out how it must’ve felt. She left you and now she’s leaving you.

‘They gave her six weeks. She made eight. I told her, just go and be with Owen and we’ll work out the rest.’

‘That’s incredibly heroic,’ I say to Lucas, then in case he thinks I’m being flip: ‘I mean that. Incredible of you.’

‘It sounds like that, doesn’t it?’ Lucas says. ‘Funnily enough, it wasn’t heroic of me, at all. When she told me she was terminal, she said it didn’t change anything between us and I was relieved, because it didn’t. I was devastated for her but it’s not as if a tumour could make us love each other again, or undo the hurt. I would’ve been in a far bigger mess if she’d said: sorry we’re estranged and I was shagging one of your best mates but can we be husband and wife again for as long as I’ve got? I wouldn’t have known how to do that.’

I nod, as if I understand.

‘But, she also wanted it kept secret. She knew a lot of family and friends would judge her for the affair with Owen. We had to go through it all presenting a united front.’

‘Literally no one knew you’d separated?’

‘No one. I told Devlin after the funeral. He and Mo had already announced they were calling their daughter after Niamh and he was committed. And you know,’ Lucas rubs his eyes and smiles. ‘It’s still a nice name, and they liked her.’

He sounds more Irish than he usually does, in tiredness.

‘As to why I’m having frank exchanges of opinion. Niamh took Keith to Owen’s when she was sick. I could hardly say no. When Niamh died, Owen refused to give him back. Said it had been her dying wish that Owen keep him and I said, well, he wasn’t hers to gift. You can imagine Owen’s in a lot of pain and not seeing things straight, at the moment.’

‘Oh? Wow that’s … but Keith’s yours?’

‘Oh yeah. He was never Niamh’s dog, I got him as a puppy. So. Here’s where it turns into a Shane Meadows film plot. Devlin and I had to jail break Keith from Owen’s, and kidnap him. Dev tricked some guy we knew who was doing work on his flat to give us a spare key, and we staked it out, and burst in when he’d gone out, took Keith.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. Not long after, I’ve come to do this work in Sheffield so Keith and I are safely at a distance from Owen’s wrath. And he’s … vociferous, I think is the word.’

‘Doesn’t he feel any shame for having slept with your wife and borrowed your dog and tried to keep him?’

Lucas takes a large slug of whisky. ‘Quite the opposite. He has decided he at last freed Niamh from a tormented marriage, only to lose her, and he’s the victim in this. And I know where he’s coming from because he did love her so he must be hurting too. But he said …’

Lucas pauses. I can see him bracing himself: ‘He said that maybe our fighting gave her stress that caused the cancer. I don’t believe for a single moment that Niamh and I screaming the odds, killed her. But what a thing to hear. I bullied her into an early grave.’

‘Lucas, that is …’ I swallow. I’ve gone from wanting to hard swerve all this, to wanting very much to be the friend he needs: ‘Unhappy couples fight, and say things they might regret later all the time. You no more knew what was round the corner than Niamh or Owen did. The lack of compassion in saying that … what a bastard.’

‘Thank you.’ He finishes the whisky. ‘Mind if I have more? Another for you?’

I nod and hand my glass up. There’s only the sound of Keith’s light snoring until he returns.

‘Waaaait. That’s why you didn’t want me walking Keith?’ I say.

‘Oh? Yeah. I think Owen’s an unpredictable mess and I don’t let Keith out of my sight in case he decides to repatriate him to Ireland. I thought I was subtle in turning you down?’

‘You weren’t subtle,’ I laugh and Lucas says: ‘Sorry.’

A brief silence.

‘I don’t know how to grieve Niamh. There’s not many handbooks out there for how to be sad at the death of someone who, at the time, you wanted to kill.’

‘Try a counsellor. They honestly help.’

‘Really?’

‘I went to one too,’ I say. ‘When the relationship with the person who’s gone is complicated, my counsellor used the analogy of a clean wound versus a dirty wound. The clean one is still a wound, but the healing is more straightforward. When it’s like an explosion of shrapnel, there’s infections, there’s secondary cuts. That takes longer to heal, and it heals differently. You have to accept the damage is different.’

I didn’t, for a moment, ever forecast I’d one day be sitting with Lucas McCarthy, repeating this. Fay and I were talking about two men I knew, and one of them is in front of me.

Lucas sits forward. ‘Do you mind me asking who you lost?’

‘My dad.’

‘And you went to see a counsellor about it?’

Somehow, although I could tell the edited version of this history, I already know Lucas is going to be the first and only person other than Fay to hear the full.

The emotion is blunted by Lagavulin and yet I still have to pace myself.

‘I was very close to my dad …’ I’ll have to deliver a sentence at a time and sort myself out in the pauses.

‘You don’t have to talk about this, you know,’ Lucas says.

‘No, no. I want to. I visited from university after a month. You know, huge bag of washing, you feel like a character who’s been on some epic journey, forever changed by their travels.’

Lucas laughs, softly.

‘Ah yes. You think you’re Frodo. Or is it Bilbo.’

‘I told my mum I was coming home that weekend, and my dad hadn’t been informed. My mum and my dad not communicating was kind of a hallmark of their relationship. If my dad had known, he’d have been fired up to see me, chippy tea, he’d have bought a bottle of wine. Instead I get home, travel weary from the far-off land of Newcastle and expecting this fanfare and no one’s home. But that’s OK. I threw all my washing in the machine, made myself a five-slices-of-bread-tall sandwich, head upstairs to scarf it.’

Lucas smiles and I think I see genuine affection towards me.

‘Then, thanks to being an underslept fresher, I fall asleep. When I woke up, I could hear my dad’s voice. I sneak downstairs quietly, all ready to shout “SURPRISE, it’s me!” and I twig that he’s not talking to someone in the house, he’s on the landline in the hallway.’

Time hasn’t dulled this impact. Even now, twelve years later, I feel almost as shocked as I did when it happened. I also feel like I’m betraying Dad by recounting it. I’d never known until now that’s why I’ve kept it to myself. To protect him.

‘And … he’s saying things, obviously to a woman. Not things you ever, ever want to hear your dad say. Things he’s going to do to her. Things he’d like her to do to him. Oh God, Lucas, porny stuff. I’ve actually managed to block a lot of it out. The C word featured.’

‘Ah, no,’ Lucas puts a hand to his forehead. ‘That’s … that’s so rough.’

‘Yeah. So I’m halfway down the stairs, I can’t move without him hearing or seeing me and I’m coming to terms with the fact I now know he’s having an affair.’

I catch my breath. ‘He hangs up. He sees me. He absolutely loses his shit about me earwigging on him, as a way of dealing with what he knows I heard. I’m scared, I lose my shit at him. I say how awful it is to Mum, to me, to my sister. What a terrible dad and husband he is.’