The Story of You (2 page)

I picked up the menu and pretended to read. Eventually, when he realized he was getting nothing from me, he came round the back of my chair and wrapped his arms around my neck.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, nuzzling into me. He smelt of soap and the outside. ‘You’ve been here all this time, sitting patiently.’

‘That’s all right.’ I shrugged. ‘I always know to bring a book with me to dinner now.’

‘Or your notes, you have here I see …’ he said, indicating the work file I’d got out.

(Sarcasm is generally wasted on Andy.) ‘Why can’t everyone be as lovely as you, Robyn? Tell me. Why do I always go for the feisty ones?’

I bit my lip. Robyn wasn’t about to be lovely Robyn any more.

He sat back down again. I knew he was waiting for me to ask him about the conversation with Belinda, how unfair it all was, what a bitch she was, but I resisted.

‘So how was your day at work, beauts?’ he said, finally, after we’d ordered – me the ham-hock terrine, him the goat’s cheese and beetroot. ‘How are the certified mental as opposed to my ex-wife who’s yet to be diagnosed?’

I took some bread from the basket and tore at it. ‘Oh, you know, just a day like any other, really. Two sectioned, one attempted suicide.’

I knew that throwing a word like ‘suicide’ into the conversation this early on in the evening would be seen as provocative by Andy, but to be honest, he’d annoyed me. I felt like being provocative.

‘Oh dear. Liam again?’

‘Levi, it’s Levi.’

‘Sorry, Levi. Cry for help, I imagine?’

‘Yes, most probably,’ I said. This was Andy’s line for everything.

I wondered when I should break the news to him: now, or after the meal? In between courses? I felt like giving my own little cry for help: ‘Argh! Get me out of this!’ Maybe I wouldn’t tell him at all. Maybe I’d give him one more chance.

Andy picked up the wine menu. I could tell he wanted to get back to him and the phone call, but I was determined to carry on.

‘Anyway, I also went to Lidl with a sixty-three-year-old woman dressed in hot pants and a Stetson today,’ I said.

‘Bloody hell, is that all she was wearing?’ said Andy.

‘Pretty much …’

‘Poor woman …’ he added. He had a look on his face like I’d told her to put on the hat and hot pants as some sick and twisted joke. ‘I mean, can you imagine the humiliation, how embarrassed you’d be?’

‘Andy, she’s manic, she couldn’t give a toss,’ I said, laying my napkin on my knee. ‘She’s so disinhibited, it’s a miracle I got her to put on any clothes at all.’

‘Ah, but this is the issue, isn’t it?’ he said, leaning back into the chair and lacing his fingers. Andy likes to do this – try to have some philosophical debate, when actually, I doubt he’s genuinely that interested. I
know
he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

‘What’s the issue?’

‘That’s the job of the psychiatric nurse, isn’t it? To make sure she knows when she should be inhibited and when she shouldn’t.’

I tried really hard not to look irritated.

‘Well, I don’t think …’

‘I mean, can you imagine how awful that would be?’ he said, leaning forward, lowering his voice. ‘How demeaning, being allowed to walk into a supermarket in hot pants when you’re drawing your pension?’

I started laughing. Sometimes I think Andy thinks I am much more earnest about my job than I actually am.

‘Yeah. It’d be brilliant. Sixty-odd, waltzing around Dulwich Sainsbury’s in your hot pants, all the yummy mummies running out of there screaming, “Aaaaagghhh!”’

Andy pulled his chin into his neck.

‘Robyn, please.’

‘
Well,
honestly.’

He went back to the menu.

‘Let’s order wine, shall we?’ He smiled, determined not to make this into an argument, even though I was up for one now. An argument would make this whole thing easier, of course.

I waited. I counted.

‘Do you know what Belinda said to me?’ he said.

Eight seconds. Impressive.

‘No, what did she say to you?’

‘That I was selfish – I mean, of all the things … That she wasn’t surprised the girls didn’t want to spend much time with me because I didn’t know how to talk to them, that I didn’t understand them. She said I don’t listen to them properly when they call and …’

The starters came, and he was
still
going on about it. Then, suddenly, mouth stuffed full, he started waving his hand in front of my face.

‘Oh, my God, I completely forgot to tell you! I’ve got a surprise!’

‘A
surprise
?’ My stomach lurched. I’d psyched myself up now. Don’t start being perfect boyfriend now.

‘Yep,’ he leaned forward and put his hand on mine. ‘I haven’t got the girls next weekend – their mum’s taking them on some sort of girly shopping extravaganza; my idea of a living hell, as you know – so I thought we could go away together.’ He patted my hand and grinned at me. He did have a lovely smile, the most unusually blue eyes. ‘Well, actually, I just thought
to hell with it
and I’ve booked somewhere.’

I forced a mouthful of food down my throat. ‘Oh,’ was all I could manage.

‘Well, aren’t you pleased?’ he said, disappointed. ‘Robyn, come on, you could look a
bit
more excited.’

But I wasn’t excited, I was irritated: irritated by his having delayed our dinner by twenty minutes to have an argument with the Ex; irritated by him talking about nothing but his ex-wife; irritated and bored to tears with the whole divorce saga. No, I’d made my decision. The fact I didn’t feel even a smidgen of excitement about the prospect of a mini-break (and I’d been hankering after a mini-break for absolutely ages) cemented it.

I sighed. ‘Oh, Andy, I’m just a bit bored of it, that’s all.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of always talking about you and Belinda and the girls and the divorce.’

He looked genuinely hurt and shocked and, for a second, I felt bad.

‘But it’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me, Robyn, you know that. I can’t just switch my emotions off when I see you. Like a tap!’

‘Really?’ I tried not to say it unkindly. ‘Because I’d like you to try, Andy, just a little bit.’

He frowned, his shoulders slumping, genuinely deflated. ‘But you’re so good at listening.’ The innocence with which he said it killed me. ‘I thought you were interested.’

‘Andy, I
am
interested, to a point. All I’m saying is, just, it would be nice to be asked how
I
am, occasionally, and to be allowed to reply in more than one sentence before you start talking about you again.’

‘But you don’t like talking about yourself.’

I kind of laughed. This was true. I had said that.

‘But, I didn’t mean like never, ever, ever!’

Andy searched my face. It was at times like this that I worried he might be on the spectrum. He just really did not get it.

‘Your relationship with Belinda and the girls, it’s becoming like a chronic ailment,’ I said. ‘Like a boil on your bum, or sinusitis. It never goes away, and yet, I get a daily update, whether I like it or not. And whenever I suggest anything that might help, you’re not interested. Sometimes I feel like you just want to moan.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see. Well, can I make it up to you? Will you come away? I’ve booked a lovely hotel in Watford.’

‘
Watford?
’

‘That’s the nearest town – it’s actually on the outskirts of Watford. It has a spa, a golf course. I could play a round whilst you get pampered. Have a facial or a massage – one of those treatments all you girls like to have?’

‘Andy,’ I said, and as the words left my mouth, I did feel reassuringly sad. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea to go away together. In fact, I think we should break up. I’m really sorry, but I just think this isn’t working any more.’

Robyn,

I hate to do this on Facebook, but I haven’t got your number and the email address I tried doesn’t work any more. I’ve got some really bad news: my mum died suddenly on Tuesday. She was fine, went out for a curry with Dad, then came home and had a heart attack. I can’t believe it. I know what people mean now when they say, ‘I keep expecting her to walk through the door.’

I’ve never seen my dad like this. I know this won’t have rocked his faith in the long run, but he’s struggling. I think he realizes it’s different when it happens to you, you know?

Personally, I am enraged: I mean, fifty-nine? WTF. Thirty years of service and that’s how he repays my dad? If one more person tells me he works in mysterious ways, I’ll punch them. I remember you saying that to me once, after your mum died. I remember exactly where we were, too – down the cricket ground. I probably gave you a cuddle, then tried to slip my hand up your top …
God
, I’m sorry, Robbie. Going through all that at sixteen, with only a sixteen-year-old me to talk to. I had no idea. Now I do.

The first person I thought of calling was you, because I knew you’d understand but, like I say, I had no number, so here I am telling about the death of my mother on f**ing Facebook!

The funeral’s a week tomorrow (1 April) at 3 p.m. at St Bart’s, Kilterdale obviously. (Dad says he’s giving it, but I’ll believe that when I see it. He’s a mess.) I’d love you to be there. I know Mum would too. She was talking about you just days before she died, about that time we all went on a barge holiday to the Norfolk Broads and she had one too many Dubonnet and lemonades and fell in. Hey, she wasn’t a typical vicar’s wife, was she?

Anyway, my number’s below. Hopefully see you there.

Hope you’re well, darl X love Joe X

I smiled as the memory floodgates opened … The barge holiday and the night of Marion’s ‘Dubonnet Splash’. My God, I’d completely forgotten about all that. Joe and I had only been seeing one another a month and were still in the unhealthily obsessed stage when, against their better judgement, Marion and the Reverend Clifford Sawyer (Joe’s dad) decided to take us with them. A rev he may have been, but Cliff loved a tipple, as did Marion, and a major plus point of a barge holiday, they soon found, was the number of pub stops one could make along the way.

We’d all been in the pub this one afternoon, but Joe and I had offered to go back to the barge to make a start on the carbonara for tea. But we hadn’t made a start on tea, we’d just made out. Marion had come back tipsy and, seeing us suckered against one another (thank
God
, fully clothed), surrounded by chopped raw bacon, because that’s as far as we had got, she’d dashed off in desperation for fish and chips, falling, as she did, in between the canal bank and the boat. She’d done this
Carry On
-style dramatic scream. Oh, how we’d laughed …

‘Robyn, if you could tear yourself away from Facebook and whatever is so funny just
for a second, then perhaps you could fill us in on last night? By all accounts, it was an eventful one?’ (It was only then that I realised, I was still laughing sixteen years later.)

I’d got Joe’s Facebook message on the night shift. By now – 8 a.m. at handover – I could think of nothing else. I knew it off by heart. I’d read it so many times.

I turned away from my computer to find the whole office waiting for me to start and Jeremy – our team Manager, perched on the edge of a desk, wearing one of his ‘five for a tenner’ shirts.

‘Yes, it was eventful,’ I stuttered. ‘Really, really busy actually.’

In fact, there must have been something in the planets – something in the full moon, which hung like a mint imperial over south London – because, as well as receiving Joe’s Facebook message, the first contact I’d had from him in five years, it had been one of the busiest night shifts I’d ever done. Everyone was going mad.

John Urwin – one of Kingsbridge Mental Health Trust’s most notorious clients – had been arrested after being caught having sex in Burgess Park.

‘And all you need to know about that,’ I said, when I finally got myself together enough to join in handover ‘is that he was butt naked when arrested but
still
wearing his Dennis the Menace wig, and I think you have to love John for that.’

Kaye, Parv and Leon, also CPNs (community psychiatric nurses), had an affectionate giggle, but Jeremy was not amused. ‘If you could just stick to what actually
happened
, Robyn.’

And so I told them how John was a little ‘agitated’ when I arrived at Walworth Police Station. (This was a distinct downplay of events. I’d been able to hear him shouting as soon as I got there.)

‘WHY CAN’T A MAN HAVE SEX WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND IF HE WANTS TO? IT’S AN ABUSE OF MY HUMAN RIGHTS, DOCTOR! MY HUMAN RIGHTS!’

But Dr Manoor and I had managed to calm him down. Dr Manoor has been John’s psychiatrist for years, and thankfully knows him as well as I do.

John is perhaps one of the more extreme clients I work with (although there’s not really such a thing as ‘extreme’ in this job) and institutionalized now. I find people like him the absolute saddest. It’s as if they had their breakdown aged 18 and stayed that age – arrested development. John has been sectioned more times than most people have had hot dinners. Still, if you talked to John when he was well, he talked a lot of sense. He was a bright man – he could tell you every single species of butterfly – and he was in a relationship.

Because the night shift had been so full on, handover ran over. As well as John Urwin baring all in Burgess Park, Levi Holden was admitted with an overdose. I really don’t mean to sound glib when I say this happens quite often.

Of the thirty people on my caseload, Levi is probably my favourite: six feet of utter gorgeousness for a start. He’s also hilarious, when he’s not suicidal. And even when he is suicidal, he’s probably funnier than the average person. He has a little job washing cars in the Dulwich Sainsbury’s car park. The other day, he was making me laugh so much, slagging off all the Dulwich mums in their four-by-fours and their two-hundred-pound weekly shops.

‘
Those mo-fo dull witches wid der massive wagons and their whining dollies in the back and enough food to feed the whole of Peckham. It’s a wonder they’re not more mo-fo wide, the amount of money they spend on food!
’