After You

‘Why does it have to be anything? We have fun together. Why can’t we just let it run and, I don’t know, see what happens?’

‘Because I’m human. Okay? And it’s hard enough to be around someone who is still in love with a ghost, without them also acting like they’re just using you for sex.’ He raised his hand, covering his eyes. ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I just said that out loud.’

My voice, when it emerged, cracked a little. ‘I’m not in love with a ghost.’

This time he didn’t look at me. He pushed himself to a seated position and rubbed at his face. ‘Then let him go, Lou.’

He climbed heavily to his feet and walked off to the railway carriage, leaving me staring behind him.

Lily arrived back the following evening, slightly sunburned. She let herself into the flat and walked past the kitchenette, where I was unloading the washing-machine, wondering for the fifteenth time whether to call Sam, and flopped onto the sofa. As I stood at the counter and watched, she put her feet on the coffee-table, picked up the remote control and flicked on the television.

‘So how was it?’ I said, after a moment had passed.

‘Okay.’

I waited for something more, braced for the remote control to be hurled down, for her to stalk off muttering, That family is impossible. But she simply changed channels.

‘What did you do?’

‘Not much. Talked a bit. Actually, we gardened.’ She turned round, resting her chin on her hands on the back of the sofa. ‘Hey, Lou. Have we got any of that cereal with the nuts left? I’m starving.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Are we talking?

Sure. What do you want to say?

Sometimes I look at the lives of the people around me and I wonder if we aren’t all destined to leave a trail of damage. It’s not just your mum and dad who fuck you up, Mr Larkin. I gazed around me, like someone suddenly handed clear glasses, and saw that pretty much everyone bore the brutal imprint of love, whether lost, whipped away from them or simply vanished into a grave.

Will had done it to all of us, I saw now. He hadn’t meant to, but even in simply refusing to live, he had.

I loved a man who had opened up a world to me but hadn’t loved me enough to stay in it. And now I was too afraid to love a man who might love me in case … In case what? I turned it over in my head in the silent hours after Lily had retreated to the glowing digital distractions of her room.

Sam didn’t call. I couldn’t blame him. What would I have said, anyway? The truth was that I didn’t want to talk about what we were because I didn’t know.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love being with him. I suspected I became slightly ridiculous around him – my laugh goofy, my jokes silly and puerile, my passion fierce and surprising even to myself. I felt better when he was there, more the person I wanted to be. More of everything. And yet.

And yet.

To commit to Sam was to commit to the likelihood of more loss. Statistically most relationships ended badly and, given my mental state over the past two years, my chances of beating the odds were pretty low. We could talk around it, we could lose ourselves in brief moments, but love ultimately meant more pain. More damage – to me or, worse, to him.

Who was strong enough for that?

I wasn’t sleeping properly again. So I slept through my alarm and, despite tearing my way up the motorway, arrived late for Granddad’s birthday. In celebration of his eighty years, Dad had brought out the foldaway gazebo we had used for Thomas’s christening, which flapped, mossy and listless, at the end of the garden where, through the open door that led to the back alley, a succession of neighbours popped in and out, bringing cake or good wishes. Granddad sat in the middle of it all on a plastic garden chair, nodding at people he no longer recognized, only occasionally gazing longingly towards his folded copy of the Racing Post.

‘So this promotion,’ Treena was on tea-duty, pouring from an oversized pot and handing out cups, ‘what exactly does it mean?’

‘Well, I get a title. I balance the till at the end of every shift and I get to hold a set of keys.’ This is a serious responsibility, Louisa, Richard Percival had said, bestowing them with as much gravitas and pomposity as if he were handing me the Holy Grail. Use them wisely. He actually said those words. Use them wisely. I wanted to say, What else am I going to do with a set of bar keys? Plough a field?

‘Money?’ She handed me a cup and I sipped at it.

‘A pound an hour extra.’

‘Mm.’ She was unimpressed.

‘And I don’t have to wear the uniform any more.’

She scrutinized the Charlie’s Angels jumpsuit I had put on that morning in honour of the occasion. ‘Well, I guess that’s something.’ She pointed Mrs Laslow towards the sandwiches.

What else could I say? It was a job. Progress of sorts. I didn’t tell her about the days when it felt like a peculiar form of torture to work somewhere where I was forced to watch each plane taxi on the runway, gather its energy like a great bird, then launch itself into the sky. I didn’t tell her how putting on that green polo shirt each day made me feel somehow as if I had lost something.

‘Mum says you’ve got a boyfriend.’

‘He’s not really my boyfriend.’

‘She said that as well. What is it, then? You just bump uglies once in a while?’

‘No. We’re good friends –’

‘So he’s a pig.’

‘He’s not a pig. He’s gorgeous.’

‘But crap in the sack.’

‘He’s wonderful. Not that it’s any of your business. And smart, before you –’

‘Then he’s married.’

‘He is not married. Jesus, Treen. Will you just let me explain? I like him, but I’m not sure I want to get involved just yet.’

‘Because of the long queue of other handsome, employed single sexy men waiting to snap you up?’

I glared at her.

‘I’m just saying. Gift horses and all that.’

‘When do you get your exam results?’

‘Don’t change the subject.’ She sighed and opened a new carton of milk. ‘Couple of weeks.’

‘What’s wrong? You’re going to get top marks. You know you will.’

‘But what’s the difference? I’m stuck.’