Too Close For Comfort (42 page)

This couldn’t go on. The fact that the words were true – the fact that we really do never know – was why it couldn’t go on.

*

I stood there in the taxi queue, my stomach doing somersaults. Not good somersaults – not the fizzy, excitable kind that herald positive things. This was more doomed,
internal churning – ancient machinery that creaked and shook. I tried not to think about Patrick dropping me off here, kissing me goodbye as I promised it would only be a short few days. Or
the very first time – the night we first kissed, him begging me to take him seriously, to not assume he was using me for information, rain drizzling and spitting on us and neither of us
caring. Was it supreme arrogance to be doing what I was doing? My feet kept carrying me forward: I didn’t seem to have a choice.

The cab journey was interminable. Of course I had a chatty driver, the kind I’d have bonded with on a different day, but who immediately took against me after I rejected two of his cheery
opening gambits. We sat there in stony silence on the Euston Road, the traffic rock solid, the meter ticking ever upwards like a hungry gremlin. Eventually we arrived in Kennington, pulling up
outside my second police station of the day. I overthanked and overtipped, even though by now the fare was about half my month’s salary, refusing any help with the dead weight of my
suitcase.

‘You OK, love?’ he said, looking up at the building and suddenly seeing my surly behaviour in a different light.

I was about to throw out a platitude, but then I stopped myself.

‘No, not really,’ I said, smiling, grateful for the small kindness. ‘But I might be soon.’

‘Take care, OK?’

That was exactly what I hadn’t done. It was what had brought me here, to this very moment, alone on a South London street corner.

‘Thanks,’ I said, too heartfelt, then wrapped a blistered palm around the suitcase’s handle and lugged it towards the glowing mouth of the door.

*

It was a deliberate move. I knew if I texted him, or called his mobile, he’d firmly and politely tell me to respect his timeline and burrow his way back under his mountain
of papers. I told the receptionist that we had an appointment, gave her the blandest name I could come up with, then perched myself on an uncomfortable orange plastic chair and prayed that
he’d fall for it.

A few interminable minutes passed. Then he appeared, coming through the swing doors, every detail of him so familiar and so precious. I drank all of it up, greedy and proprietary, before he even
saw me. The way his crumpled shirt refused to stay confined inside the trousers of his unstylish suit. The way his red hair insisted on sticking up at unruly angles however much product he lashed
through it. The gentleness of his brown eyes, even when he wasn’t focusing on something that moved him.

Then he did see me. I do this in my room, look for the expression a client has before they’ve arranged their features into an acceptable huddle. It tells me what they’re really
feeling, rather than the press release that’s liable to come out of their mouth. The last look he’d given me – as he revved his engine and sped away from Cambridge – was one
of deep hurt, a hurt which had translated into my own body and made me ache with it. I hadn’t been able to imagine anything worse than the pain of hurting him so deeply, but this – this
look of cold disdain – turned out to be infinitely more agonising.

He stood over me, his voice a hiss. ‘I can’t do this, Mia.
You
can’t do this.’

I got to my feet, looked up at him.

‘But I just did.’

His jaw pulsed, his face white with anger. I’d misplayed it. It was too us, that teasing intimacy, and I’d lost the right to an us.

‘I’m not your chew toy, OK? I’m not here to be tossed around and thrown away depending on how you happen to be feeling.’

The receptionist was eyeing us, straining to hear. She wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t the most savoury place I’d ever been, and I didn’t relish asking any of the other
people nearby to give us some privacy.

I spoke in an undertone. ‘Patrick, can we just go outside?’

‘No!’ The word reverberated in the air. ‘No, we can’t.’ He directed a scowl towards my suitcase. ‘You can go and stay in the flat. I’ll sleep here if I
have to. Just go somewhere else tomorrow.’

‘Is that why you think I’m here? Because I’m too tight to pay for a hotel?’ Tears of frustration sprung to my eyes. ‘I love you, Patrick.’

He paused, considered me.

‘Do you, Mia, or do you just think you do?’

The question – the fact that he felt he had to ask it – made me curl up inside with shame.

‘How can you even need to ask that?’ I tipped my left hand forwards, subtly reminding him of that symbol of commitment. ‘We’re getting married, we’re trying for a
baby.’ I was clinging desperately to the present tense, losing purchase as his face remained impassive. ‘I’ve been stupid and thoughtless, but I never stopped loving
you.’

‘You’ve got some slick little therapist phrase, haven’t you? Something about love being a verb, not an adjective?’ His gaze burned into me now. ‘In fact,
you’ve got a lot of slick little phrases, Mia. They’re kind of your stock in trade.’

That almost hurt the most, the idea that I was a seller of snake oil, trading a version of myself which was nothing but a pile of empty theories.

‘Please . . .’ My eyes were brimming with tears by now. ‘Please just come outside. Five minutes.’

Patrick leant his face downwards until our noses almost bumped. For one insane, happy second I thought he was going to kiss me.

‘You don’t get to call the shots any more.’

‘Stop it!’ I said. ‘Stop talking like it’s over.’

I regretted the words as soon as I’d uttered them. A look of genuine sadness breathed across Patrick’s face.

‘I don’t know how we’d ever come back from here.’

I sat down heavily, my body suddenly leaden. The legs of the chair gave an earsplitting metallic squeal as they scraped the ground in protest. I could still hear the ringing phones and ranged
voices, but they’d receded into a kind of white noise. I saw a moment of calculation in Patrick’s eyes, the chance of escape. Then he sat down next to me, his body kept deliberately
rigid and distant.

‘I didn’t shag him. I kissed him, and there’s no excuse for that and I know I wasn’t completely honest with you – but to end things over it . . .
unless,’ the unless was almost too painful, too scorching, to express, ‘unless you’d just stopped wanting it anyway.’

A look of pure rage mangled Patrick’s face. How was it that everything I said to this man – the person I thought I knew best in the world – was so utterly misjudged? I longed
to touch him, to abandon the clumsiness of words and instead simply connect our two bodies, and yet to have reached across the thin strip of air that lay between us would have been nothing short of
an assault.

‘Don’t you dare try and turn this round on me. That is so fucking . . .’ He shook with anger. ‘Insulting.’ He paused, his dark eyes narrow and
dangerous. Patrick is essentially kind: watching him weigh up his next words – his reluctance to let them loose on me – made my skin prickle with dread. ‘When I met you, you were
all wounded from your relationship with your dad. How he’d abandoned you, abandoned your mum, never even made an honest woman of her. Made you pick the worst kind of men.
But . . .’ He cocked his head, considered me as if he barely knew me. As if he was deciding whether it was worth striking up a conversation. ‘I think now I worry that
you’re a little bit like him. You don’t seem all that bothered about getting married. You’ve been seeing that arsehole behind my back, and to be honest, I don’t really care
if you shagged him – you certainly made him feel like you’d welcome him kissing you. And nothing I do is enough for you. You still think, after all of this – after the last thing
I did was dodge about a hundred speed cameras on the M25 to surprise you after a twelve-hour work day – that it’s me who couldn’t be arsed.’

Time seemed to judder to a halt. I felt mortally wounded, like his words had sliced into the tenderest parts of my flesh. In that moment it felt like the quickest remedy was to launch my own
coruscating attack. To flush out those hidden vulnerabilities of his that he’d gradually exposed to me – those things we can choose to either love or despise another person for –
and turn them into weapons of war. I took a breath, time starting to tick forward again. I clutched a tiny corner of his jacket sleeve between my two fingers, the fabric rough and scratchy to my
touch. I looked straight at him.

‘Please, will you just come outside?’

I think he sensed that something important had shifted, that we could no longer afford to have this conversation in angry whispers, surrounded by prying eyes. He nodded solemnly, then followed
me out. I stopped underneath the sodium glow of a tall street lamp, ignoring the discarded remains of a box of chicken wings, the bits of rubbish that were casually blowing around our feet. It was
chilly, the cold in my bones adding to the sense that I’d been away for years, not weeks. Patrick looked down at me, that familiar face still so unnervingly unreadable.

‘Mia . . .’

We were standing on the outskirts of a housing estate, the windows of a nearby block lit up at random, like the open doors of an advent calendar halfway through December. What was going on in
all those homes – in all those lives – as my own life hung in the balance?

‘Let me talk now, OK?’ I took a breath – I couldn’t hide between theories, or counter arguments. All I had now was my most vulnerable self, even though part of me
didn’t want to risk bringing her here. ‘You know me well enough to know how much that would hurt me. My dad was abusive, he was cruel, and I don’t think I am those things. But he
was the way he was because he was blind, and I think I
have
been that. I haven’t noticed that I’m not making you feel like I’m excited about us getting
married. I got too caught up in what was going on in Little Copping. And I have to ask myself why.’ Patrick was watching me, his face still. I stumbled on. ‘I think I’ve been
scared. I want this so much . . . I want this so much that it scares me.’ I wanted to reach up and touch him, but his face was too immovable to risk it. ‘What if I lose
you? What if we bore each other, or our differences . . .’

It came from left field. ‘You never bore me.’

‘You never bore me!’ I looked up at him, sensing a chink. ‘Jim bores me. He’s so fucking boring. He’s exactly the same as he was twenty years ago. I just needed to
know that. That it wasn’t me . . .’

‘Wasn’t you?’

‘That I didn’t make all of it happen. That if it was my only chance to have a baby, that the fact I didn’t . . .’ I had to just let the sob come, I
couldn’t hold it in. ‘Wasn’t my fault.’ I risked looking at him properly. ‘You can have a baby till you’re a hundred.’

Patrick smiled. It was unexpected, precious. ‘I am modelling myself on Hugh Hefner, it’s true.’

‘You would look good in a jacuzzi. In your Speedos. With the Bunnies.’

It was Patrick’s turn to look vulnerable. ‘The problem is, there’s only one Bunny I want.’

‘Then . . .’

He cut across me. ‘We’d need to go slow, OK? Just build up the trust again. I don’t want to feel like I’m having to chase you. Like you’re this elusive, mysterious
creature and I’m some lumbering peasant trying to drag you down the Holloway Road to church in my wagon.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve ever made you feel like that. Sometimes I feel like I’m this ancient blue stocking, and you’re this hotshot lawyer who doesn’t ever want to
come home from work.’ I paused. ‘You do work all the time.’

‘So do you,’ he countered, but then it was his turn to pause. ‘It was all I had before you. Truth is, it’d be all I’d have without you.’

‘No, it wouldn’t. There’d be some perky blonde from Tinder . . .’

He silenced me with a wave of his hand. ‘Well done, by the way. Well done for what you did there.’

‘You knew?’

‘Snake Hips called me himself. Think he was worried the story would get told wrong if he didn’t assert his take.’

‘Of course.’

Patrick was right to warn me not to trust him.

He moved a wisp of my hair away from my face. My whole body tingled to his touch. ‘I was frustrated with you, but you were right to keep pushing.’

I risked taking his hand in mine.

‘But I learnt it from you.’ He smiled. ‘You know the things we find most annoying in other people tend to be the things we find most annoying about ourselves.’

‘Yeah, thanks, Dr Freud,’ he said, taking our intertwined hands and wrapping us up together. ‘Shall we go home?’

‘Are you sure? Do you need to get your stuff?’

‘I’ve got all my stuff with me. I knew it’d be you. No one in the world is called Jane Brown.’ He looked down at me. ‘You’re not as clever as you think you
are, just FYI.’

I felt myself begin to breathe, let him lead me towards the headlights and exhaust fumes of the main road. Behind us, a mangy fox scuttled out from the undergrowth in pursuit of the chicken
bones.

‘Trust me, I know that now.’

Three Months Later

I spotted her before she saw me. Lysette’s hair hung loose, falling in soft waves around her shoulders. She was wearing a pair of jeans, snug in the right way, with a
red-and-white Breton top slung on over them. I felt a lump in my throat and couldn’t immediately identify why it was there. Then I suddenly knew – it was that she finally looked like
herself again. She was neither a sparkly confection nor an exhausted mess: she was simply Lysette.

Then she saw me, pushing and wriggling through the crush of tables towards me as I stood up. We hugged so hard that I could hear her heartbeat.

‘Shall I go up to the counter?’ she said, casting a trepidatious look at the queue. I probably shouldn’t have picked somewhere right in the middle of Covent Garden. Backpacks
and buggies abounded. ‘I need a fix.’ She saw my face. ‘Jesus, Mia, I’m teasing you. Caffeine. I need caffeine.’

‘Let’s go together,’ I said. ‘No, we’ll lose the table. I’ll go.’