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The Other Us: the RONA winning perfect second chance romance to curl up with
Fiona Harper
***WINNER OF THE 2018 SPECULATIVE ROMANTIC NOVEL AWARD***‘This is a pure joy’ HeatIf you could turn back time, would you choose a different life?Forty-something Maggie is facing some hard truths. Her only child has flown the nest for university and, without her daughter in the house, she’s realising that her life, and her marriage to Dan, is more than a little stale.When she spots an announcement on Facebook about a uni reunion, she can’t help wondering what happened to Jude Hanson. The same night Dan proposed, Jude asked Maggie to run away with him, and she starts to wonder how different her life might have been if she’d broken Dan’s heart and taken Jude up on his offer.Wondering turns into fantasising, and then one morning fantasising turns into reality. Maggie wakes up and discovers she’s back in 1992 and twenty-one again. Is she brave enough to choose the future she really wants, and if she is, will the grass be any greener on the other side of the fence?Two men. Two very different possible futures. But is there only once chance at happiness?Perfect for fans of One Day,The Versions of Us and Miss You


As a child, Fiona was constantly teased for two things: having her nose in a book and living in a dream world. Things haven’t changed much since then, but at least she’s found a career that puts her runaway imagination to use!
Fiona lives in London with her husband and two teenage daughters (oh, the drama in her house!), and she loves good books, good films and anything cinnamon flavoured. She also can’t help herself if a good tune comes on and she’s near a dance floor – you have been warned!
Fiona loves to hear from readers and you can contact her through her website fionaharper.com (http://fionaharper.com), her Facebook page (Fiona Harper Author) or Twitter (@FiHarper_Author).


COPYRIGHT (#ulink_057cc14b-6f2a-5930-b0d1-8affa7449bb9)


An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017
Copyright © Fiona Harper 2017
Fiona Harper asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008216931
Version: 2018-08-01
For Andy
CONTENTS
Cover (#ua640c3bd-293a-5778-8ee3-560599166852)
About the Author (#ud62b3219-0c6e-5c59-ad76-ecc25ee3845e)
Title Page (#u86b1f5cf-edd0-54e4-868d-791ebf081895)
Copyright (#ulink_03c95e72-b1cf-504b-8bc8-191397b6b601)
Dedication (#u71cb9957-c6ef-57bf-81b3-244852c99d5d)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_bb783a69-85e2-5e4f-b053-6599f92cc70f)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_9ecbaceb-cd9d-5493-97a4-843c937f18b6)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_1014bec0-84d7-5182-a806-8b4ed53f9c9d)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_77e86ae6-eb9d-50c0-9442-3a745cf8bd47)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_3de04bfd-9a96-5e7f-90f7-7103db373ad6)
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_97f1ad2f-a6ac-5c26-8997-28c7c61aa543)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_f1be896c-c4c0-5a54-946a-101417f5e019)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_7144b94e-cd67-5f2d-bf8c-8c21efb16fee)
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_464a0ce8-74d1-5140-8326-dbfc10df9455)
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_fcda61c6-b146-5026-bc22-d1a09387d373)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_ed357383-a9f2-5808-9d54-432e19b71ac8)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#ulink_2cd3612e-9881-5e10-a11c-2d489c38c4ab)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#ulink_8aa30407-2b23-565a-b71a-a5ff948196d9)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#ulink_8ff1e99a-f494-5710-9652-18f31d4bfdbc)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#ulink_639f90a1-417c-53ce-81c6-31e29df91565)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#ulink_63e2b86f-fd75-51ef-8ae1-5535ff06178b)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_e761e35e-1ab7-5488-98b5-2fd6493dc9c3)
My first thought is that I am dead.
How strange, I think, as I lie very still, desperately trying not to open my eyes. Yesterday was such an ordinary day. I wasn’t ill, as far as I was aware. I went to the supermarket, watched something really dull with Dan on the telly and then we argued and I went to bed alone.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe I popped a blood vessel in my head while I was sleeping, from all the stress. Only that doesn’t make sense. It was more of a grumpy tiff than a full-on, plate-throwing kind of row. After twenty-four years of marriage, Dan and I never do anything that involves that much energy – or passion – any more.
It vaguely occurs to me that if I’d known the previous evening was to be my last on earth that I really should have spent it doing something more interesting, something less middle-aged, like tango dancing with a brooding Latin stranger or watching the Northern Lights shimmer across the polar sky. Instead, I’d spent it in the sleepy commuter town of Swanham in Kent, watching an hour-long documentary on the life cycle of a cactus – Dan’s choice.
Slightly disgusted with myself, and feeling more than a little resentful towards my husband, I turn my thoughts back to the present.
I don’t know how I know I’m dead. It’s just that I had a sense as my conscious brain swam up from the murky depths of sleep of being somewhere entirely ‘other’.
I heave in some much-needed oxygen, pulling it in through my nostrils. Odd. I’ve always thought heaven would smell nicer than this. You know, of beautiful flowers and pure, clean air, like you get on the top of a mountain.
Without meaning to, I move. There is a rustle and I freeze. Not because someone else is here and I’m suddenly aware of their presence, malevolent or otherwise, but because it sounded – and felt – suspiciously like bed sheets. For some reason this throws me.
As I remain still, listening to my pulse thudding in my ears, I start to contemplate the idea that maybe this place isn’t as ‘other’ as I thought.
There’s the sheets for one thing. And the fact that I seem to be lying on something that feels suspiciously like a mattress. As much as I get the sense that I’m not where I should be, not in my usual spot in the universe – lying next to Dan and pretending I can’t hear his soft snores – there’s also something familiar about this place. The smell of the air teases me, rich with memories that are just out of reach.
I really don’t want to open my eyes, because that will make this real. I want this to be a dream, one of those really lucid ones. I’ll tell Dan about it over breakfast and we’ll laugh, last night’s spat forgotten. But there’s a part of me that knows this is different, that it’s too real. More real than my normal life, even. I’m scared of that feeling.
It doesn’t take long before I cave, though. It’s just all too still, all too quiet.
I blink and try to focus on my surroundings. The first thing I experience is a wave of shock as I realise I’m right: I’m not at home in my own bed, Dan snuffling beside me. Then the second wave hits, and it’s something much more scary – recognition.
I know this place!
I push the covers back and stand up, forgetting I don’t really want to interact with this new reality, to give it any more credence than necessary.
The memories that were fuzzy and out of reach now become razor-sharp, rushing towards me, stabbing at me like a thousand tiny needles. I want to sit down, but there’s nothing to catch me but a thinning and rather grubby carpet.
This is the flat I shared with Becca during my last year at university.
I stumble through the bedroom door and into the lounge. Yes. There’s the faded green velour sofa and the seventies oval coffee table, which we’d thought was disgusting at the time but nowadays would fetch a pretty price at a vintage market.
Why am I here?
How am I here?
I turn into the little galley kitchen and spot the furred-up plastic kettle that produced the caffeine that fuelled Becca and me through our late-night essay-writing sessions, a kettle I had completely forgotten about but now seems as comforting and familiar as my childhood teddy bear. It’s something to hang on to while I feel the rest of myself slipping away.
I press down the button at the base of the handle and when it actually clicks on I start to hiccup bursts of hysterical laughter. I have no idea why this is funny. To be honest, I’m starting to scare myself.
Breathe, Maggie, breathe.
I close my eyes and it helps. For a moment the room stops spinning. I try to pretend I’m not here, that I’m back at home. For a second I ache for my dull little life, then I force myself to think this through.
This can’t be heaven, can it? My student digs? I flick that idea away and replace it with another one. My eyes open again. Maybe this isn’t heaven. Maybe that’s too much for a tiny human brain to handle right off the bat.
So maybe this is something else? A waiting room of sorts. Something familiar. Something pulled from my memory banks to help me feel at home.
I frown as I look at the broken chipboard cabinets. Fabulous work, Maggie. Great choice. Of all the places you’ve been in your life, this was the one that rose to the surface? I haven’t travelled much, but what about Paris or that lovely beach in Minorca where we spent our tenth anniversary? Those had been pretty nice places. It must say something about me that I’ve subconsciously plumped for the grottiest place I’d ever lived. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I didn’t choose it. Maybe the place you go to reflects what your life was like before you came here.
I can’t decide which option is more depressing.
However, the decor might be dated, the windows so rotten they rattle in the slightest breeze, but, as I wander round, other memories start crowding in, stragglers that lope in late behind the initial onslaught.
It’s weird experiencing a memory not only in the place it occurred but at the same time it occurred. The sensation takes my breath for a second, the recollection sharper and more colourful than it would be back in my little suburban semi with more than two decades insulating me from the moment.
I don’t know how I can pinpoint it so precisely, but I know exactly where I am. When I am. It’s the morning after the May Ball. Becca is out, having finally caught the eye of the one guy she’s swooned over all through her drama course, and I’m in the flat all on my own. I remember waking up and just knowing that the world was full of possibilities and I was waiting at its threshold, one foot poised in the air, about to step into my future.
That’s when I realise I know why I’m here, in this place, in this time.
Instead of freaking out about my surroundings, I start walking around again, looking at things, greeting them like old friends. Hello, drooping yucca that looks as if someone thought of the ugliest shape they could train you into and did just that. There is no beauty in your asymmetry, but I smile at you all the same. Hello, chunky VCR and impossibly cuboid television set that we watch Dallas and Neighbours on. Hello, mirrored Indian cushion cover that I bought from Kensington Market, which got ruined during a party when someone was sick on you. I’ve kind of missed you all these years, but now I realise you are really rather hideous.
I finish taking the tour and sit down on the sofa and start to wait. This is a waiting room, after all. That’s when I notice what I’m wearing. A large, faded ‘Choose Life’ T-shirt, left over from my teenage years, which I’d kept as a nightshirt. I also notice my legs.
I start to laugh. No wonder I’ve come back here! Everything is tight and toned and less veiny than normal. I twist my legs this way and that to get a better look. I’d heard somewhere that people aren’t old in heaven, that everyone’s about thirty, but taking a good look at the bits I can see, I’d put myself closer to twenty.
I smile as I sit on the sofa, tapping my feet on the floor. But eventually the smile fades and the feet stop tapping.
OK, I think. I’m acclimatised now. Come and get me.
I wait for someone to appear, maybe my grandad or my cousin, who got taken out by breast cancer ten years ago. That’s how this works, isn’t it? But nobody comes, no one knocks on the door or floats through a wall.
I get fed up sitting on the sofa and head for the bathroom. That’s the weirdest thing about being dead. I need to wee. Didn’t think they’d bother with that in heaven. It’s a bit of a disappointment to discover otherwise.
Anyway, I go into the bathroom and do what needs to be done, and it’s only when I’m washing my hands that it occurs to me I could look in the mirror. So I do. Even though I’m half expecting to see my twenty-one-year-old self stare back at me, it’s a shock when it happens.
God, that awful full fringe. I thought it made me look like Shannon what’s-her-face from Beverly Hills 90210, but, in reality, I look more like Joan Crawford from Mommie Dearest.
I’m just drying my hands and wondering if I can find some celestial hair grips in this strange place, when I hear the front door bang.
‘Heya!’ a voice yells out. ‘Only me!’
I try to answer but discover my throat has closed up.
Becca?
Oh, no. Oh, God. Becca! She’s not dead too, is she? What a horrible, horrible coincidence! Both of us on the same day? We must have been in a car crash together. And both of us chose this as our waiting room?
That’s when everything starts to slip and slide again. I hear her moving around in the lounge, dumping her stuff down, just as she’d done that morning after the ball.
‘Mags? You there?’ she shouts, and I know she’s pulling her hair out of its usual ponytail and flopping down on the sofa. I nod, still unable to speak – still unable to move, actually – and stare back at myself in the mirror. I’m as white as a ghost, which would be funny under other circumstances.
Reality dashes over me like a bucket of ice water, and I know the next thought that enters my head to be the absolute and inalterable truth: I’m not dead at all. And this definitely isn’t heaven.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b3d1a4db-f40e-564a-849f-bde04989e43b)
One week earlier
I arrive at Bluewater, the huge triangular shopping centre sitting in the middle of a disused quarry just near the Dartford crossing. Becca and I have been meeting for a monthly shopping trip here for a couple of years now. We could take it in turns to go to each other’s houses, I suppose, but she says, as much as she loves me, the coffee here is way better. And then there’s the shopping. Becca loves shopping.
I head for our usual cafe and order a coffee. I could wait for Becca before I order, but I don’t. Ever since I’ve known her, if we’ve arranged to get together, I’m always ten minutes early and she’s always twenty minutes late. I know I should just adjust my arrival time and turn up late as well, but somehow I can’t make myself do it.
I’ve just reached the silky froth at the bottom of my cup when Becca arrives – an uncharacteristic ten minutes before her usual time – and collapses into the chair opposite me. She has a collection of shopping bags with her: things she needs to return to Coast and Karen Millen that she picked up on our last shopping outing and has decided don’t suit her. I also have something to return, but it’s a shower curtain that needs to go back to John Lewis.
‘Shall we get a table outside?’ she asks, after scanning the restaurant. ‘The weather’s glorious.’
I sigh inwardly, reach for my bags and stand up. Becca always does this. It doesn’t matter where I choose to sit, she always wants to move to a better spot. I wouldn’t mind so much but I specifically chose this table because it’s the one she wanted to move to last time.
Becca is practically glowing. I haven’t been able to take my eyes off her since she walked through the door, and since a few male heads turn as we move tables, I guess I’m not the only one.
She’s the same sort of size as me: slightly overweight, with the usual forty-something bulges and curves, but somehow she wears it better. I bought some long boots like hers in the sales last year, but every time I try them on I just end up peeling them off again. I wanted to see a stylish, mature woman staring back at me in the mirror, but all I could see was pantomime pirate. They’ve sat in their box at the back of my wardrobe since January.
‘You look nice today,’ I tell her once we’ve relocated. I usually greet people with a compliment, but today it isn’t an automatic response pulled from my mental library at random.
Becca grins back at me. ‘Thanks! I’m feeling great, too.’
I can’t help smiling with her. If happiness is a disease, it’s about time Becca caught it. For a long time I thought her lousy ex had inoculated her against it. ‘I take it things are going well with the new man?’
‘Pretty good,’ she says, and orders a coffee from a passing waiter. It’s very odd. Becca used to gush endlessly about her latest squeeze when we were younger, but she’s being a bit cagey about this one. The only thing I can think of is that it’s because this is the first proper romance since her divorce. ‘We might get away for a weekend soon. If he can work out getting time away from … I mean, getting time off.’ She looks down at the table again, but I see her secret smile.
‘It sounds as if it’s getting serious.’
Becca flushes. ‘I know. Ridiculous, really. I mean, it’s early days and we’ve only been seeing each other a couple of months and I really should be dating and having fun, but he’s just so amazing.’
I want to jump in and tell her that, while I understand how wonderful this is for her, how I’m truly pleased she’s happy again, maybe she shouldn’t leap into this relationship quite as hard and quite as fast as she has done all her others – but the words keep tumbling out of her in a breathless stream, as if, instead of filing up neatly behind one another to make sensible sentences, they’re all racing each other to see who can get out first, and I can’t get a word in edgewise.
The gushing carries on as we leave the cafe. She instinctively heads in the direction of her favourite shops and I trail along with her while my shower curtain gets heavier and heavier. I mention this after we’ve dropped off both her returns.
‘Of course,’ she responds, but then, when we’ve turned tail and are heading back towards John Lewis, we pass Hobbs. She gives me a sugary smile. ‘You don’t mind if we pop in here, do you? It’ll only take a minute, and they had this gorgeous blouse that’d be perfect for work now the weather’s finally turned warmer …’
I shake my head, but after Hobbs it’s Laura Ashley and then it’s Massimo Dutti.
I honestly don’t know if she does this on purpose, or whether her memory is really goldfish-short. There are times at the end of our shopping trips where Becca has had to dash off again and I’ve had to stay behind to do the essential errand she promised we’d get round to an hour earlier.
This makes her sound like a horrible friend, but really she isn’t. She’s had a tough time in the last couple of years. Her ex, Grant, turned out to be a manipulative, controlling creep. I always worried he hit her, but she always denied it. Even so, it took her far too long to muster up the courage to leave him, which she did eighteen months ago.
He hardly let her out his sight, our shopping trips being one of the few exceptions, and the least I could do then was to let her have some power and control over what she did for a few hours. I suppose we’ve just fallen into a pattern now, one that’s hard for me to change without bringing it up and sounding whiney.
Becca is a theatre manager now and as we shop she gives me an in-depth report on the antics of a well-known soap star who was appearing in the play that was on last week. My shoulder develops a nagging little niggle from the weight of my John Lewis carrier bag.
At first I’m nodding and smiling at her blow-by-blow account of his excessive vodka-drinking to get over his opening-night nerves but, funny as it is, after a while, I start to tune out. I mean, we’ve been talking about her stuff since we sat down for cappuccinos and it hasn’t even occurred to her to ask if anything much is going on in my life, even if I do usually just wave the question away and say, ‘Oh, just the same old same old …’
But today I do have something to say. Something big. Or at least I think I might. I really can’t work out if I’m just being silly, and I could do with a friend to help me sift through the facts and sort out the truth from the muddy paranoia.
But Becca is too full of ‘glow’ to notice the worry in my eyes. She just barrels on. It’s only after I’ve hauled my shower curtain onto the sales desk in John Lewis’s homeware department (and almost kissed the sales lady for taking it off my hands), and completed the transaction, that she finds a new topic.
‘Did you see that thing on Facebook?
I’m tucking my returns receipt back into my purse. When I finish I look at her, frowning slightly. ‘What thing?’
‘The reunion. Oaklands College. Some of the guys are planning a get-together, seeing as it’s twenty-five years since we graduated.’
Even though, logically, I know this is how long it’s been since I left university, the fact slaps me in the face, waking me up. Twenty-five years … a rapid slideshow of my life starts to play inside my head. I’m horrified to see how many slots are filled with black and white images of my routine suburban life or – even worse – empty.
‘Where is it? Who’s going?’ I ask, feeling slightly dazed.
‘On campus, I think someone said, and only a few people have responded so far. The post only went up yesterday.’
I nod. There’s not much else I’ve got to say on the subject.
Becca leads the way back out of the shop and turns in the direction of the food court. I’m pretty sure that’s where she’s heading, even though she hasn’t said anything. Shopping always makes her hungry.
As we walk she turns to look at me carefully. ‘Do you think you’ll go?’
I shrug. ‘Probably not.’
‘Really? I thought it’d be fun to see the old crowd.’
Of course you would, I say in my head. You’re happy. You look great. You’re glowing. Even if I’m curious about what everyone looks like and what they are doing now, I’m not sure I want that same inquisitiveness directed back at me.
What will they see? I haven’t become anything interesting or ‘grown into’ myself with age. If anything, I feel all that potential and passion I’d had in my twenties has been slowly diluted until I’m now a watery version of who I once was. I don’t want to turn up, have to chat to people with a plastic goblet full of warm sauvignon, and see the look of vague recognition in my university mates’ eyes before they smile nicely and move on to someone more interesting.
I shake my head. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It seems like such a lot of effort for something that was such a long time ago.’
‘You’re not even curious about Jude Hansen?’
At the mention of that name my pulse jumps. I make very sure it doesn’t show on my face. I pretend I’m too busy navigating round a young mum dawdling with a pushchair to answer.
Becca, however, doesn’t seem to want to let it go, which is odd, as she never really liked Jude. ‘Word is he’s done very well for himself.’
I straighten my spine and keep looking straight ahead. ‘I really wouldn’t know.’
There’s a part of me that wants to turn and scream at her to shut up, but there’s also another contrary part that is willing her to keep talking. It’s like a scab that’s not quite ripe for picking. I know I should leave it alone, that it’ll only sting and bleed, but part of me wants both the pain and the satisfaction of pulling it off and knowing what’s really underneath.
I deliberately haven’t thought of Jude Hansen for more than twenty-four years. I looked at myself in the mirror the morning of my wedding day and told myself that door was closed.
‘So what do you think? Shall we go?’ She nudges me as we start to peruse the chiller cabinets of the sushi place. I make a show of looking, even though I know I’m going to pick the salmon bento box. I always do.
She joins the queue, leaving me to file in behind her. ‘It’ll be a right laugh. You’ll see …’
I’m really irritated that she’s acting as if I’ve already agreed, as if my role in life is just to trail around behind her and do whatever she wants. I realise that as much as I moan about having a husband who’s so laid-back he just ‘goes with the flow’ about everything, I’ve chosen a best friend who is the complete opposite and I don’t always like this end of the spectrum much either.
‘Come on, aren’t you even curious?’ she asks once we’ve found some seats. ‘You and Jude were quite a hot item at one time, if I remember rightly …’
The penny drops then. For some reason she really wants to go to this stupid reunion and she’s using Jude as leverage because she wants me to go with her.
Maybe it’s because my shoulder is still twanging from carrying that shower curtain round for an hour longer than I’d wanted but I find I don’t want to be nice, accommodating, doormat Maggie any more. ‘Not really …’ I say, feigning indifference just as well as Becca has been doing. ‘It’s ancient history and I honestly don’t care in the slightest what Jude Hansen is doing now.’
Becca eats her chicken katsu curry sulkily after that. Normally, I’d stay silent for a couple of minutes then start to chat to her, win her round, but today I stay quiet. Let her offer the olive branch for once.
I know this spells the end of our shopping trip. When we finish we throw our rubbish away and head outside, and when we pause to say our goodbyes before heading off to our respective cars, Becca looks sheepishly at me. ‘Sorry if I was being pushy … I just got a bit excited about the idea, that’s all.’ She looks hopefully at me. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go?’
I shake my head.
‘You won’t even think about it?’
I laugh. Even when Becca is trying not to be so … Becca … she can’t help herself. ‘OK, OK, I’ll think about it.’ Usually, I employ this tactic to shut her up. I just say yes to whatever she’s pushing for to keep the peace then wriggle out of it later, but I discover as I drive home back to Swanham that I was telling the truth. I can’t think about anything else – anyone else – all afternoon.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_d8c5c253-d2a7-537f-8a40-b8ca10e6787e)
The house is quiet when I get back. Too quiet. I’ve got used to Sophie being around during the day after her A levels had finished – leaving her lunch plate on the arm of the sofa, the chart songs drifting from her bedroom upstairs, her soft laughter as she watched something on YouTube with her headphones in – but now she’s off backpacking with her friends before uni. Well, when I say backpacking, I mean in the UK. They’re somewhere near Fort William, exploring the Highlands at the moment. I said no to haring all over Europe for two months. She’s only just turned eighteen.
I feel as if I’ve got too much time on my hands now she’s not here. I find myself wandering round the house, looking at the empty spaces, wondering what I should be doing next.
Maybe I should ask for extra hours at work? I have a part-time job in a soft furnishings shop on the High Street. I gave up my career as a graphic designer when Sophie was born. Too many all-nighters to meet deadlines and things like that. It was nice to be here when she got home from school most days, even when she was old enough to take care of herself, and Dan’s money as an English teacher isn’t bad. We might not have had as many foreign holidays as some, but we’ve never gone short.
But when I think of doing full days at the shop my spirit sinks. I like my job, I do. It’s comfortable, like a pair of shoes worn in just right, but up until now I’ve been telling myself it’s just something to keep the money coming in while Sophie needed me. I don’t want it to define me.
I realise I’ve wandered through the hall, into the lounge and I’m standing in front of the mantelpiece. I’m staring at a picture of Sophie taken at her school prom. She looks elegant and happy, her warm-brown hair blown back away from her face by a playful breeze.
My eyes glaze for a second then refocus, and when I do it’s not Sophie I’m looking at in the picture, but myself. How I once was. Full of hope and ambition, optimism and bravado. A sense of loss engulfs me, but whether it’s because of my empty nest or for something deeper and long-standing, I’m not sure.
I go and get my mobile out of my handbag and dial Sophie’s number, even though I suspect she’s halfway up a mountain or in a valley with no coverage.
Much to my surprise, she picks up. ‘Hey, mum! What’s up?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ I say. ‘Just wanted to see if you’re keeping warm and eating alright.’
Just wanted to hear your voice because I’m not sure how I’m going to survive the next three years without you.
I hide the catch in my breath and realise I should have bought flowers while I was out – white lilies. Beautiful, waxy lilies that would fill the empty spaces in this house with their pure, white scent.
Sophie, however, on the other end of the line, chuckles. ‘I’m in Scotland, Mum, not the wilds of Antarctica, and it’s summer! They’ve got shops and beds and restaurants, you know. I’m absolutely fine!’
‘I know,’ I say softly. A selfish part of me wishes she’d sound a little bit less carefree. Just a little.
‘Anyway, gotta go! Love you, Mum!’
‘Love you too,’ I say back, but the line has already gone dead by the time I reach the last syllable.
I stare at the phone then decide to tuck it into my back pocket rather than putting it back in my handbag. It’ll be like I’m carrying Sophie around with me. I look at the clock. It’s only two. Another four hours until Dan gets home and I can tell him about the call. That’s our main topic of conversation these days – Sophie and what she’s up to – an oasis in the barren landscape of our communication.
I wander into the kitchen, put the kettle on, then decide I don’t actually want a cup of tea. I see my laptop sitting on the kitchen table and I sit down and turn it on. On automatic I log into Facebook. I spend a lot of time on Facebook, keeping up with what other people are doing with their lives.
I pretend to myself I’m just tinkering around for a while, reading a few updates from my cousin, liking some pictures of friends who’ve been out on the town, but eventually I cave and search for the reunion page. I find it almost instantly. There are comments from people I know. I don’t ‘like’ or ‘join’ but I do read.
One post in particular catches my attention: Hot guys: where are they now? I read down the comment thread. There are the predictable mentions of the college sporting gods and star drama students, but halfway down, snuggled in between the rest, I spot something:

Claire Rutt:
Anyone remember Jude Hansen?

Sam Broughton (was Stanley):
No? What subject did he do?

Claire Rutt:
Business Studies, I think …

Nadia Pike:
Ooh, yes! I remember him! Lovely dark hair and blue eyes. Not muscly, but definite eye candy! Wonder if he’ll turn up?

Claire Rutt:
Sigh. Probably not. Wasn’t much of a joiner, unless you had a double-barrelled name and daddy owned a yacht … I doubt he’d be interested in a poxy reunion populated with middle-class soccer mums and civil servants.

Sam Broughton (was Stanley):
Hey, watch yourself! Not only does Jack play football, but I work for the local council! Nothing poxy about me, thank you.

Claire Rutt:
:-p

Sam Broughton (was Stanley):
Anyway, pity. This Jude person was just starting to sound interesting! I’m single again, you know, and on the lookout for hubby no.3! ;-)

Claire Rutt:
Not the settling-down type, I’d say. I’d heard he’s quite the jetsetter now, though, so if you like a challenge …

I stop reading then. My stomach is swirling and I feel like I’m snooping, even though this is a public conversation on an open group. I close the browser window down and shut the lid of my laptop. After a few seconds staring at the kitchen cabinets, which I notice could really do with a good scrub, I open it up again.
I don’t go back to the reunion page; instead, I just type ‘Jude’ into the Facebook search box. A list of options turn up, none of them him. I hold my breath and add ‘Hansen’.
Nothing.
There’s Joseph Hansen, but he’s eighteen and living in Montana. And a Julian Hansen who’s a professor of philosophy, with grey hair and a kind smile, but he’s not my Hansen.
No. Jude’s not my Hansen. Never was, really.
I feel as if I’ve stepped over a line by this point, but instead of creeping back behind it I start sprinting forward. I pull up a search engine and enter those two names again, whispering them in my head as if they’re a secret.
There are no images that relate, but I do find reference to a Jude Hansen mentioned in an article about high-end estate agents, but when I search the name of the firm I discover the website is down for temporary maintenance. In full Sherlock Holmes-mode now, I go back to the article and spot the name of a photographer connected with his – something to do with either selling or finding her a house, possibly both. I search her name and ‘house’, and I get another set of results. Two pages down I see a fuzzy picture, from Twitter, I think. It’s a housewarming party and in the background there’s someone who looks very much like the Jude I used to know, but it’s difficult to tell, because it’s out of focus and the photographer’s finger is over the corner of the shot.
I sit back and stare at the screen, screwing my eyes up a little to see if that helps, but it just makes everything blurrier. I imagine it’s him anyway.
So he did do well for himself, just as Becca said. And then I mentally whisper possibly the two most dangerous words in the English language:
What if …?
I’d never told anyone this, not even Becca, but the day Dan proposed to me – after we were back in one of our regular, college drinking holes, had shared the news and everybody was buying rounds and congratulating us – Jude had found me and asked me for a quiet word in the pub garden. Even though it was July, we’d had the place to ourselves because it had been hammering down. I still remember the scent of warm soil when I think of that moment.
He’d stared at me in the glow of the security light, more serious than I’d ever seen him. ‘Don’t …’ he’d said.
I’d frowned. ‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t marry him.’
I’d stared at him then, wondering what on earth was going through his head. Didn’t he remember that he’d been the one who’d pulled back and cooled off? ‘What? And marry you instead?’
‘Yes! I mean, no …’ He’d scrubbed his hand through his floppy dark hair and looked at me with unguarded honesty, a strange look on him, because he’d always been so careful to develop an air of knowingness.
My heart had begun to pound hard, just as it had when Dan had pulled a small velvet box from his pocket down by the river earlier the same evening.
Jude had cleared his throat and started again. ‘I mean … what I’m trying to say is that I think I made a horrible mistake.’
He’d looked at me, willing me to fill in the gaps, but I’d held my ground. Not this time. If he had something to say he was going to have to be clear about it. I had to know for sure. He’d taken in my silence and nodded.
‘I think I love you,’ he’d said. ‘And I think it might destroy me if you marry him.’ He’d screwed up his face and I’d known him well enough to know he was wrestling with whether to say something else. Finally, he’d added, ‘And I think it might destroy you too.’
As fast as my pulse had been skipping, I’d raised my eyebrows, waiting for more.
He’d shaken his head. ‘You’re right. Destroy is much too dramatic. What I mean is – ’ He’d broken off to capture both my hands in his. ‘I don’t think he’s what you need, Meg.’
Meg. He was the only person who’d called me that. I pause for a moment just to run my mind over that fact, like fingers reading braille.
‘And you are?’ I’d asked him.
He’d given me that look again. ‘I’d like to try to be.’
I’d shaken my head, more in disbelief than because I was refusing him. ‘But you’re supposed to be going off to France next – ’
‘Come with me.’
I’d frozen then, brain on overload, unable to process anything more. ‘I can’t,’ I’d said, pulling my hands from his, and I’d backed away. It would be more romantic, I suppose, to say that I’d stumbled away from him, overcome by emotion, but I don’t remember it that way at all. I remember my steps being quite precise and deliberate.
That was the last time I saw Jude Hansen. I’d left him there in the rain. I’d had to.
I close my eyes and concentrate on pausing the memory, like hitting a button on a TV remote, and then I file it away carefully again behind lock and key.
Jude had always had the potential to do well, but that had only been one side of the coin. He could also be a little bit arrogant, thinking his way was the only way, and he hadn’t responded well to authority. There had been a restless energy about him. I’m glad he’s harnessed it, made it work for him.
We’d got together the first year I was at uni, in the spring. I’d known Dan, too, but back then he’d been firmly in the ‘friend zone’, as Sophie would say.
Jude and I had a wild and romantic couple of months, where we’d hardly left each other’s side, then the three-month summer break had happened. Dominic, his best mate at uni, had parents who owned a villa in the south of France but I’d come home to Swanham and spent my summer working as a barmaid. I should have known then things weren’t going to work out. While Jude’s family weren’t too different from mine – his dad was a builder too – he’d always wanted more. The rest of his college girlfriends had been leggy and gorgeous, part of the rich crowd.
I was utterly devoted to him, and time apart only cemented those feelings. When I’d spotted him across the Student’s Union the first day of autumn term, I’d had one of those moments that you see in the movies, where I’d been suddenly sure that I loved him, but it seemed the separation hadn’t had the same effect on Jude. We’d continued to see each other, but it had felt … different. More casual. I wondered if there was someone else. Or several someone elses. Dominic had a rather attractive sister … But I’d never found any evidence of infidelity, so I’d continued to follow him round like an adoring puppy.
I think he’d liked the adulation. He probably should have weaned himself off it and cut me loose long before he did, but eventually he sat me down and explained he thought we were too young to tie ourselves down.
I’d agreed. We were. It was stupid to get attached, to think I’d found the person I’d be happy with for the rest of my life. I’d told myself I’d needed to grow up, be a little bit more sophisticated.
But then six months later, I’d got together with Dan. He’d liked me since Freshers’ Week, he’d said. You’d have thought I’d be gun-shy after Jude, that I wouldn’t have wanted to throw myself into something serious so soon, but I wasn’t. Somehow I’d just known Dan was a safe bet.
Dan.
I look up at the clock on the kitchen wall. Flip! Where has the time gone? He’ll be home soon. I quickly turn my laptop off and shove it on the Welsh dresser, covering it with a cookery book and some takeaway leaflets that came through the door. I start washing up, just to keep myself occupied and I don’t even notice what I’m cleaning because I’m staring out of the window.
Dan, a safe bet?
After twenty-four years of marriage, I’m just starting to realise I might have been wrong about that.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_aa66b2da-c891-5619-a74f-1d7236d8b009)
The door slams about half an hour later, when I’m upstairs in the bathroom, and I come down to see Dan’s coat thrown in the direction of the rack and his shoes kicked off, clogging up the hallway. I’ve been nagging him about that for as long as we’ve lived together. I don’t know how many times I’ve almost broken a bone tripping over them. I pick them up and tuck them into the Ikea unit I bought specifically for them, which is populated by lots of my shoes and none of his, and then I go into the kitchen.
‘Hi,’ he says and plants a kiss on my cheek.
It’s a nice thing to do, I suppose, and for a long time I knew he did it because he was happy to see me at the end of the day; now I suspect it’s just habit.
‘You’ll never guess what?’ I say. ‘Oaklands is having a reunion. I saw it on Facebook.’ I shut my mouth quickly. I hadn’t intended to say that. I was going to tell him about Sophie.
Dan raises his eyebrows in interest as he fills the kettle, and I realise that now I’ve opened this can of worms I’m just going to have to carry on. I reel off the names of people in the Facebook group I remember. Jude’s name is on the tip of my tongue and I have to keep leapfrogging over it.
I’m usually a nice person. I try to get along with everyone, not to be bitchy or mean-spirited, but I’m aware there’s a part of me that actually wants to blurt Jude’s name out, just to see how Dan reacts. But I don’t. I keep the words inside my head.
It’s getting a bit crowded in there now with all the things I want to say but never do. I worry that one day my brain will get too full and all the things I’ve thought but don’t want Dan to know will come tumbling out.
Thinking of things I don’t want Dan to know, I feel my cheeks growing hot. I closed my laptop ages ago, but I’ve been thinking about Jude all afternoon. Not that last time we spoke, but other things: the way he used to kiss, how he could make me melt just by looking at me. I can’t quite look my husband straight in the eye now.
He gets a pair of mugs out the cupboard then turns to face me. ‘Do you want to go?’
I open my mouth and stop. I realise I have no answer. I’ve been so busy living in a slightly steamy fantasy all afternoon, I haven’t considered it. ‘Do you?’
He shrugs. ‘Not fussed. Whatever you want to do.’ And then he turns back and carries on making the tea.
I want to scream at him. I know it sounds lovely having a husband who’s accommodating about everything, but sometimes I think it’s just a ruse so all the decision-making is left to me. I’m tired, weighed down by the responsibility of a thousand tiny things: what to eat for dinner each night, which car we buy, what colour to paint the living room and which restaurant to visit on the odd occasion we eat out. Maybe that’s why I let Becca lead me round by the nose? On some level, it’s a relief.
Dan hands me a mug of tea – he always makes me one when he comes in from work – and then he heads off towards the hallway. ‘Just going to go up to the study and do some … you know … marking. On the computer. What time’s dinner?’
Now, this might sound like an ordinary domestic conversation, but it isn’t. Dan isn’t making eye contact and it all came out in a bit of a rush. I look carefully at him.
‘We’re having pasta … probably around seven.’
‘Cool.’ He turns and head upstairs with his cup of tea.
Half an hour later, I go to the box room above the hallway that we’ve always used as a study, seeing as that second baby never did come along. I don’t knock. Dan looks startled and he quickly closes down a window on the screen. Just text, no pictures. It didn’t look like a web page, I don’t think, but it was definitely something he didn’t want me to see.
‘What you up to?’ I ask breezily.
‘Oh, just some marking,’ Dan says, without looking round. ‘By the way, I thought I’d let you know I’m getting together with Sam – you remember Sam Macmillan? We went to school together? – on Thursday evening. We’re going out for a pint so I might be back a bit late.’ His tone is light but there’s a tension lying underneath it that stretches his words tight.
My insides go cold.
I know Sam Macmillan. I’m friends with his wife Geraldine on Facebook. And I know for a fact that they’re away celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary in Prague this week, because I’ve been gradually going green with envy seeing all the holiday snaps and still-so-in-love selfies.
‘OK,’ I say as I reach for his mug and retreat. I feel shivery inside as I head back down the stairs. I leave the mug on the kitchen table instead of putting it in the dishwasher and I stare out the French windows that lead to our small and slightly overgrown garden.
This is it, then.
Before now it’s just been a feeling, a sense that something isn’t right. That’s what I was going to tell Becca about today. Now I have something concrete.
I pick up my mobile and open the door to the garden, dial my best friend’s number. I know it’s usually all about Becca when we get together, but just for ten minutes I really, really need it to be about me.
‘It could be nothing,’ Becca says firmly. ‘It could be something really innocent.’
I take a moment to weigh her words. ‘Was it innocent when Grant kept turning his phone off the moment he walked through the door so he didn’t get any calls he couldn’t explain, or when you discovered he had an email account you didn’t know about?’
Becca sighs. ‘No. I wanted to believe it was, but it wasn’t.’
We’re both silent as we process the implication of what I’ve just told her – about Dan’s behaviour growing more secretive over the last couple of months. How he’s spending more and more time in the study. How he often shuts down what he’s doing if I enter. How he keeps meeting up with friends he hasn’t seen in years, but only every other Thursday night.
I close my eyes. I don’t want to go through this. I don’t want to be pulled apart at the seams, like Becca was throughout the discovery of her husband’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce. I don’t want Sophie to come from a broken home, even though she’s technically a grown-up now. She worships her father, even though she teases him about being a boring old fart. I don’t want her to have to know this.
Could I? Could I just close my eyes and pretend this isn’t happening?
‘What are you going to do?’ Becca asks, interrupting my thoughts.
My throat is suddenly swollen and I need to swallow before I can push any words out of my mouth. ‘I don’t know.’
I expect Becca to get all post-divorce militant on me, tell me to deck him one or go and take my best dressmaking scissors to his suits; but instead, she exhales loudly and says, ‘Oh, Mags …’
That’s when the tears start to fall. I wipe them away quickly with the heel of my hand. I don’t want Dan to know I’ve been crying when I go back inside. Stupid, I know. Why does this little secret even matter when there are much bigger ones eating away at the heart of our marriage?
‘You’ll get through this,’ Becca says, and her voice is both soft and full of confidence. ‘I know you will.’ We say our goodbyes, with Becca telling me to call her, day or night, if I need her.
I stand in the garden, watching the sun go down, and imagine her faith in me to be real. I let my mind play out what surely must be coming: the inevitable tears and accusations. The confession. Dan moving out. I fast-forward over it all, just alighting briefly on the main scenarios, then imagine what it’ll be like if I ever get to where Becca is now: stronger, happier, freer.
Maybe I’ll find a wonderful new man too.
My mind quickly drifts back to where it’s been going all afternoon: Jude.
Maybe we’ll meet again at the reunion. It’ll be too soon then, of course, too fresh and raw, but we’ll chat. We’ll keep in touch. He’ll text me now and again, just when I’m feeling most down. And then one day I’ll find him on my doorstep with a big bunch of flowers and I’ll just know I’m finally ready to have my own ‘glow’. Dan will be nothing but a distant memory.
I sigh, wishing it could be true, that I could jump forward to that moment in reality, not just in my mind, and that I wouldn’t have to experience all the in-between bits.
Don’t be silly, I tell myself. Things don’t happen just because you wish them, and I put my phone to sleep and walk back inside the house to cook Dan’s tea.
We sit eating our pasta. Neither of us has much to say. Dan keeps his focus on his plate most of the time, hoovering up the large portion I gave him – extra cheese on top – and while he eats, I look at him. I wonder who this is, who my husband has become.
You never really knew how to reach me, I tell him in my head. I always thought you’d figure it out some day, but now you’re not even trying. You’re probably too busy trying to ‘reach’ into some other woman’s knickers.
I chew my pasta and wish I’d cooked something that makes more of a crunch. Another thought creeps up on me, and then another and another.
What if it’s not just sex?
What if he’s falling in love with someone else?
What if he knows how to reach her, this mystery woman he must talk to on the computer?
Then I’ll rip his chest open with my bare hands and kill him.
The force of my rage stops me cold. I put down my fork.
I’m shocked. I thought my love for Dan was comfortable, like a bath you’re not quite ready to get out of, even though it’s well on its way to lukewarm. I didn’t know there was enough left to prompt such fury.
I get up and scrape my food into the composting bin, then dump my plate in the dishwasher.
‘Are you OK?’ Dan asks, pausing from his pasta-shovelling marathon.
My face feels so stiff I’m surprised I can answer. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘You didn’t finish your pasta,’ he says, his mouth still half full. I want to reach over and slap it closed. ‘It’s your favourite.’
No! I scream silently inside my head. It’s your favourite. Why can’t you ever remember that?
‘Wasn’t hungry,’ I say, then I leave the room. I want to slam the door but I don’t. I might as well have done, I suppose, because, a second later, Dan yells after me, ‘What the bloody hell have I done now?’
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_4abc2bb6-90e8-511d-9577-ab05ff1e9e0d)
What if …? becomes an itch I can’t stop scratching. As the days roll by, I find myself thinking about Jude all the time. In my mind he has mellowed with age, lost some of that youthful arrogance but is still ruggedly good-looking. He wears cashmere coats and Italian shoes, I imagine, as I kick Dan’s muddy trainers towards the shoe tidy and hang his windbreaker on a hook.
Safe bet? Hah! I put all my chips on Dan and yet he’s wasted almost a quarter of a century of my life. I think I hate him for it.
I haven’t done any more digging into his secrets, although I know I should. I won’t ask him if he’s banging one of the perky PE teachers at school and he’s not asking me if anything is wrong, even though we’ve hardly said more than a handful of words to each other in the last few days. I feel like I’m in a fog; everything is fuzzy and boring and grey. The only sharp thoughts in my mind are the ones I conjure up about Jude. Those are colourful and sweet and juicy. I want to live in that place, not even thinking about Dan. I am an ostrich and my head is firmly down the hole of my fantasies.
Becca comes into town on Dan’s ‘Thursday night with Sam Macmillan’ and we go for drinks. ‘Come on …’ she says, as we install ourselves at a table in the Three Compasses. ‘We’ve talked about it, now I think we just ought to do it!’
‘I told you,’ I say wearily. ‘I’m not following Dan. It would just be too … sad.’
I don’t want to be that desperate woman. I want to be her even less than I want to be a slowing fading, middle-aged empty nester, and that’s saying something.
‘Not Dan!’ she says, although she looks ready to be persuaded if I changed my mind. ‘I was talking about the reunion – it’s next week. Next Friday. Let’s go.’
‘On our own? What about Dan?’
Becca shrugs. ‘Someone mentioned in the Facebook group that they’d invited Jude.’
I study my large glass of Pinot Grigio. ‘Really?’ I haven’t told Becca about how he’s hijacked my every waking thought since we last talked of the reunion. It’s strange, I think. Becca tells me everything – Sophie calls her ‘the Queen of TMI’ – but there’s a lot I don’t tell Becca. I didn’t tell her about Jude asking me to run away with him, not back at the time and not even now. I also didn’t tell her I almost packed a bag and tried to track him down three days before my wedding.
‘You never liked Jude.’
She gives me a little one-sided shrug. ‘Maybe I was wrong about him. I was wrong about Grant, and we both might be wrong about Dan.’ I see her eyes glaze over and her jaw harden. She’s deep in thought. ‘Bastard …’ she mutters, shaking her head. ‘Just when I was starting to think not all men were cheating lizards, as well.’
I reach over and lay my hand on hers to comfort her, which seems topsy turvy but I get it. I haven’t been properly happy with Dan for five years. Maybe ten. But while Becca was stuck in her lousy marriage, she always held Dan up as the pinnacle of everything a good husband should be. She’s acting as if he’s let her down too. I don’t know if she’s ever going to forgive him for it.
‘Anyway, I think we ought to go.’
I take a long sip of wine to give myself time to think. ‘I really don’t know … Even if he’s there, he might just swan past me with his fabulous, ex-model wife. Or worse, he might not even remember me!’
‘You don’t know he has an ex-model for a wife,’ Becca says dryly, then her eyes twinkle with mischief. ‘You don’t even know he has a wife!’
‘You’ve lost your mind,’ I tell her. Not because she’s suggesting a bit of payback with my first love. Because she seriously thinks ‘done well for himself’ Jude would be even remotely interested in me these days.
‘Come on, Mags. This is you we’re talking about. You won’t be doing anything wrong. It’s not like you’re going to drag him out of there, get a room and have your wicked way with him, is it?’
While, technically, I know it will all be tame and above board if I bump into Jude at the reunion, I’m also aware how out of control my fantasy life has become in recent days. In my head I’ve done just what Becca said. Every time I think of it, my heart starts to race and I catch my breath. I feel like a teenager in the grip of her first boy-band crush. It doesn’t feel like ‘not doing anything wrong’. It feels as if I’ve already crossed a line I shouldn’t have done. I start to wonder if people who say that fantasises are harmless really know what they’re talking about.
A voice whispers in my head, Dan’s already crossed that line. Why not?
I don’t know that for sure, I reply.
Only because you’re too much of a coward to find out, the voice jeers.
I don’t have an answer for that, so I tune back into Becca on the other side of the table. ‘Please come with me, Mags?’ she says softly. ‘I really want to go.’ She shakes her head. ‘Stupid, really. I feel it’s something I need to do to put some of these ghosts behind me.’
I feel my resolve gently slipping. ‘Can’t New Guy go with you?’
She shakes her head, but doesn’t elaborate. ‘I really don’t want to walk into the room all by myself. It’s just … I’m not the same since Grant. He knocked my confidence.’
I know that. I’d watched, stood by helpless, as I’d seen him rob her of it bit by bit, unable to do anything but be a listening ear until she was ready to leave him and move on. I thought she’d done just that. I thought she’d bounced back.
I suck air in through my nostrils then puff it back out again. ‘OK. I’ll go.’
Becca lets out a huge sigh of relief and that’s when I realise this is what the constant badgering for me to go has been about all along. I feel awful I didn’t realise that before.
‘That’s it, then,’ she says, draining her glass. ‘It’s decided.’
When we’ve polished the rest of the bottle off, we book a cab to take me home and then drop Becca at the station and I give her an extra big hug.
‘Love you,’ she says and hugs me before I scramble out the car.
‘Love you too,’ I reply huskily, and then I close the door and watch the mini-cab drive away.
When I get back inside the hall light is still off. I dump my handbag on top of the shoe tidy and trudge upstairs, then I get into my pyjamas, slide between the cold sheets and try not to wonder why my husband isn’t home yet.
Dan and I don’t talk about it when we get up the next morning. I remember waking at 11.30pm and the bed was still empty, then again at 2am and he was there.
We waltz around each other in a practised dance as we have our breakfast – me passing him a knife from the drawer before he asks, him handing me the milk out the fridge so I can splash some in my tea. It’s odd that we know each other’s movements so well we can do this without thinking, while another part of me is wondering if I’ve ever known him at all.
We don’t talk about it in the evening either. Instead, we watch The One Show. When it’s finished Dan turns over to BBC Two. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t ask if I mind, so I have to sit in silence and try to be interested in cacti for the next hour. By the time the credits roll, I never want to see another of the spiky little suckers in the whole of my life. ‘That’s an hour I’ll never get back,’ I mutter.
Dan clicks the TV off and turns his head to look at me. ‘If you didn’t want to watch it, you could have said.’
‘You could have asked. Once upon a time, you would have. Not just assumed. Not just taken it for granted.’
He frowns. ‘Bloody hell, Maggie. I told you I would have turned over.’
I shake my head. He just doesn’t get it. ‘You never think about what makes me happy any more.’
Dan lets out an incredulous laugh. ‘How did we get from a stupid TV programme to this?’
I exhale and look away. Oh, for a man you didn’t have to explain everything to with brightly coloured flash cards! We’ve been together for close to twenty-five years. He should know me by now. Suddenly, I’m very angry that he doesn’t.
That was the unspoken promise on our wedding day, I’d thought. That we’d grow old together, mesh our souls so tightly that we’d finish each other’s sentences, share that weird kind of telepathy I’d seen between my grandparents before they’d died. But Dan has never once completed a sentence of mine, and I seem to have to explain myself to him more than ever nowadays.
You were supposed to at least try, I wail inside my head. That was the deal.
I will him to understand me, but after looking at me for a few seconds, he huffs, picks up his half-empty mug and leaves the room. I slump down on my end of the sofa and cross my arms. Part of me hasn’t got the energy to knock this into his thick skull; the other half wants to follow him and pick a fight.
I collect my mug, swill down the last of my cold decaf and head for the kitchen, where I let him know, at volume, just where he can put his effing muddy shoes.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_252f5f28-2b0f-5e19-b7ee-1a2faeea416c)
1992
I stare at my face in the bathroom mirror. The young me. The wrong me.
‘Maggie!’ Becca calls again. ‘Are you there?’
I hear her walking into the kitchen, looking for me, probably. If I remember rightly, she has some juicy gossip to deliver about her night with Stevo Watts and she won’t want to wait. I screw my face up and close my eyes. No. That’s wrong. How can this be? How can I be here, now, and still … remembering. It’s not possible.
I turn the tap on and splash the cold water on my face, hoping it’ll wake me up, but all it does is cause freezing droplets to run down my neck. I shiver.
What do I do? This can’t be real. Can it?
‘Margaret Alison Greene!’ Becca yells, doing a passable imitation of my mother when she’s in a snit. It’s not quite perfect, though, because I can hear a smile in her voice. My bedroom door squeaks as she continues her sweep of the flat. I realise I can’t stay here in the bathroom, hiding. Eventually she’s going to find me.
‘Maggie?’ she calls and this time the smile is gone. Her footsteps get faster.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. There’ll be time for answers later.
I nod at my reflection and notice that the young girl looks tense and serious, much more like the woman I’m used to seeing in the mirror, then I dry my face, take a deep breath and walk out into the hallway. I find Becca in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea.
‘There you are!’ she says, grinning at me. ‘I was starting to think you’d been abducted by aliens!’
I just nod. I can’t seem to find my voice.
It was weird enough seeing Young Me in the mirror, but seeing Young Becca is even more surreal. I’m caught in the grip of déjà vu so strong that it makes my stomach roll.
‘God, are you alright? You look like you’re about to faint. Bad night, huh?’ She puts a hand on my shoulder then gives me a cheeky look. ‘Or should I say a really good one?’
‘Something like that …’ I manage to croak.
‘Well, whatever your night of debauchery was like, I doubt it could be as bad as mine!’
Wanna bet? I think.
She turns to grab two mugs off the wooden tree near the kettle. ‘I’ll tell you all about it, but after I’ve done this. I’m gasping for a cuppa!’
I watch her in silence as she begins to make the tea. Her hair is still a mousy colour with a hint of honey that I remember, the colour it was before she discovered highlights and started covering up the premature grey. That’s not the only difference to the Becca I know in my real life. I’d thought present-day Becca glowed? Not compared to this. There’s a sense of energy and bounce to this Becca – resilience – that’s been eroded from my best friend of twenty-plus years. All the scars, all the knocks in her confidence from her crappy marriage and her horrible divorce, are gone and they’re all the more glaring for their absence.
A rush of love for her hits me, for the friend she once was and for the survivor she will become. I launch myself at her and hug her hard.
‘Hey!’ she says, as she drops the teaspoon she’s holding. It bounces on the Formica counter, but she giggles and hugs me back.
‘I’ve missed you,’ I say into her hair.
‘Daft mare,’ she mutters. ‘I was only gone for one night!’ She pulls away, shakes her head affectionately, finishes making the tea and hands me one. I keep expecting senses in this dream … this whatever it is … to be dulled, muffled, so the heat of the cheap ceramic mug against my fingers shocks me.
Becca traipses into the living room, where she collapses onto the end of the velour sofa, tucking her legs up underneath her. I follow suit, taking up my spot on the opposite end. ‘So … how was it? How was he?’ I ask, wondering if I’m a good enough actress to pull off being shocked and outraged when she tells me. I remember the details of this little escapade all too well.
Becca looks at me over the rim of her mug. ‘Disappointing.’
‘He was no good?’
‘Never got that far,’ Becca says darkly. ‘His mate Dave was throwing a party so we ended up at his flat. Ten minutes after we arrived, I went in search of a drink and when I’d got back Stevo had disappeared.’
‘No!’ I say with my best attempt at disbelief. Becca seems to buy it, but probably because she’s so wrapped up in retelling her tale she hasn’t noticed my lousy performance. ‘Where did he go?’
‘He skipped off to one of the bedrooms with Adrienne Palmer, that’s where! All those years dreaming he was the perfect guy, and thinking, if only he’d notice me my life would be sorted!’
I don’t remember much about Stevo Watts, but I do remember that as a third-year student, he’d had a reputation for prowling round the freshers. ‘Fresh meat’, I’d heard he’d called them.
I realise my best friend’s strategy with men hasn’t changed much: she finds the most good-looking, alpha jerks to swoon over, is completely bowled over if they notice her and then falls at their feet and does anything they want. That’s how she’d ended up with the horrible ex. I’ve been crossing my fingers hard that the lovely new man back in our real life is going to break that pattern.
‘You need someone who loves you for you, not just because you’re their devoted follower,’ I tell her. ‘Someone who is ready to do as much for you as you are for them.’ I have no idea if she’ll listen to me, or if she’ll even remember this next time she spies one of her ‘guys’, but at least I’ve got to try.
‘I know.’ She sighs. ‘I wish I could find someone like Dan – faithful, capable of a proper relationship. Not a total turd, in other words.’
I hold my tongue. University Dan might fit that description, but present-day Dan might be giving it a run for its money.
‘That man is gold dust, Maggie. You’re just lucky you nabbed him before anyone else did!’ she adds, laughing.
I ignore the comment and lean forward. I’ve been guilty of taking present-day Becca for granted, not looking hard enough, so now I study her counterpart. ‘Are you OK? Really?’
She sighs again. ‘Yeah. Nothing much damaged but my pride.’
‘Hey, why don’t I treat you to breakfast? To cheer you up?’
Becca grins. ‘At Al’s?’
I stand up. ‘Where else?’
How could I have forgotten Al’s Cafe? He served the best greasy fry-ups in south-west London. There’s no Starbucks, no Costa, here and now, I remind myself. No organic cafes where you can get porridge and compote or chia-seed smoothies. If you want to go out for breakfast, a full English or a bacon buttie it is.
Before I head off to my bedroom I run my fingers through my fringe. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got any spare hair grips, have you?’
‘What on earth for?’
I flatten the short hair of my fringe to the side of my head. ‘I want to pin this back.’
Becca just laughs at me as she fetches a couple of grips she’d left on the bookshelf. ‘You only had it cut like that on Saturday! Honestly, Mags, one of these days you’re going to have to make your mind up and decide what you really want – none of this flip-flopping between different options until the rest of us want to smack you senseless.’
I smile at her, but I take the grips from her open hand. ‘Thanks. I’ll be back in two secs …’
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_da0842ab-4a24-50e9-b8d0-9571d1f4cd3b)
I look down with glee at my two sausages, bacon, beans, and eggs with bursting yellow yolks. It’s been almost twenty-five years since I’ve had one of Al’s breakfasts and I can’t wait. I take a bite of the bacon, a bit with crinkly brown edges, close my eyes and let out a moan of satisfaction.
‘Steady on,’ Becca says, with a mouthful of egg, from across the table. ‘I don’t want you going all Meg Ryan on me!’
‘It’s a distinct possibility,’ I mumble as I shove another mouthful in. ‘Oh, my … It’s every bit as good as I remember.’
Becca frowns. ‘We were only in here on Wednesday!’
I shake my head. ‘I really shouldn’t eat so much junk.’
‘We’re young. What else are we going to do?’
I chuckle, because I realise she’s right – I’m young again. No more boring forty-something life! No more ties and responsibilities! I’m free. I’ve got at least another ten years before my metabolism slows and I have to start worrying about piling on the pounds.
The thought floats through my mind quite benignly, but then it slams against a brick wall and I go cold all over. What am I talking about? This isn’t real. I’m not staying. I don’t even want to start thinking like that in case I jinx it and don’t wake up.
Oh, God. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m in a coma! And this is just my subconscious having a field day while my family stand around my hospital bed and cry.
‘Dodgy sausage?’ Becca asks, seeing the look on my face.
I shake my head, but I don’t explain.
‘So what’s the plan for today?’ she asks.
I pause. Maybe I am in a coma or having a psychotic break, but I look outside the cafe window, where the sun is shining, announcing the promise of an empty, unspoilt day; I feel Al’s breakfast warming my belly, and I can’t quite bring myself to believe it. It all seems so real.
Isn’t this what I wanted? To wind back the years? I have no idea how long it’s going to last, when I might wake up with a tube down my throat or wearing a fetching white jacket with straps and buckles, so I might as well make the most of it.
‘We probably should be revising,’ I say. Finals start next week. I know that much.
Becca makes a face and I laugh. Usually, I’m the sensible one and she’s the one who’s the bad influence, but today I sense we’re going to have something of a role reversal. I’m not going to waste this glorious day stuck indoors bent over a textbook.
‘I think we ought to start with shopping,’ I say. ‘Serious shopping.’
Her eyes twinkle. ‘Kingston?’ she asks hopefully.
I shake my head. ‘Oxford Street.’
The twinkle in Becca’s eyes reaches her mouth and she grins at me.
‘And after that, whatever we want to do, whatever takes our fancy. As long as it’s fun!’
‘Good plan,’ she says, then snaps to attention and does a Benny Hill backwards salute at me. ‘Reporting for Maggie and Becca’s Day of Fun!’
I smack her hand away from her head and laugh. ‘Shut up.’
‘Oops, don’t look now.’ She nods to something outside the window. ‘Here comes lover boy … Just don’t you go changing all our perfect plans on me now he’s arrived.’
I turn and a jolt of electricity first stops then restarts my heart.
‘Dan …’ I whisper.
‘Oh, God,’ Becca mutters. ‘I think I’m gonna puke.’
I can’t take my eyes off him as he walks past the plate-glass window at the front of the cafe, grinning because he’s spotted us, and then opens the door and walks in. He leans down to kiss me softly, lingering in a way he hasn’t done in years, then sits down beside Becca so he can keep looking at me. My heart is going again, but it hasn’t yet resumed a normal rhythm.
I am honestly struck dumb in his presence, part of me shocked at how young, how good-looking, how energetic this version of Dan seems to be, and part of me wanting to reach across the table and slap him hard for making me feel this way when Future Dan is quite possibly having it away with Miss Perky Gym Teacher.
Becca finishes her breakfast as mine goes cold on the plate in front of me, then she pushes back her chair and gives the pair of us an indulgent look. ‘Right, I’m clearing off back to the flat to leave you two alone for a bit.’ She turns a sharp eye on me. ‘But I’m meeting you there after lunch to go shopping – don’t blow me out!’
Things don’t get any better when it’s just me and Dan left alone at the table. He reaches over, takes my hand in his, then turns it over and gently kisses the back of it. I stare at him.
‘What?’ he says, grinning at me. ‘Can’t a guy get a little romantic now and then? I thought you girls liked that stuff.’
I nod. Again. And then tears fill my eyes and start to spill over my lashes. Dan immediately jumps up and comes round to my side of the table to put his arm round me. He perches on the edge of the adjacent chair and takes my hands in his, his face full of concern. ‘Maggie? What is it? Tell me?’
I shake my head and swallow. I can’t tell him. But this just makes me cry all the harder.
I hate this dream. I want it to stop. I want to wake up. Now.
I squeeze my eyes shut and will it to happen, but I know it hasn’t worked, because I can still feel Dan’s fingers wrapped around mine, hear his soft breath as he waits for me to tell him what’s wrong.
But how do I tell him I’m crying because I know one day he will stop looking at me this way? That one day he will stop thinking I’m creative and wonderful and clever, and not very long after that so will I?
I haul in a breath and open my eyes. He’s looking at me as if he would gladly rip his heart out of his chest and give it to me if it would make me feel better. It almost starts me off again, but I manage to hold back.
‘I’m just being silly …’ Just for a moment I let myself forget I’m supposed to be feeling angry and wronged and heartbroken because of him. I reach out and trace my fingertips across the fine blond stubble on his cheek – he’s a bit lazy about shaving, is Dan, especially in his early twenties, when he doesn’t think the grey patches make him look old and grizzled before his time. ‘It’s just …’ My throat closes again and I have to swallow a lump down to continue. ‘It’s just that I really love you.’
The temporary dam on the tears gives up and they start to flow again as Dan takes my face in his hands and kisses me so sweetly that the heart I’ve hardened against him begins to soften. Tiny painful splits appear, like those in a dry lip that’s been stretched too far.
‘That’s nothing to cry about,’ he whispers as he pulls back and smiles at me.
I nod but the tears don’t stop, even though I’m doing everything I can to make them. It is, I whisper silently inside my head. Because right at this moment, I know I’m telling the truth.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_854ed05c-de27-52f2-9f07-63edb952ed49)
Becca and I do indeed go shopping. We wander round the giant Top Shop in Oxford Circus for at least an hour. I have no idea how much I have in my student bank account and I really don’t care. I usually hate clothes shopping in my real life, but I have ten hangers full of cool stuff in my changing cubicle and I can’t stop smiling.
‘How’s the dress?’ Becca yells from the cubicle next door.
I pull the curtain back dramatically and step outside. ‘See for yourself.’
She pokes her head out. ‘Wow! Dan is going to have a heart attack when he sees you in that!’
It occurs to me as I admire my reflection in the full-length mirror that I hadn’t even thought about how Dan might react. The dress is black, Lycra, and it hugs my bottom in an almost-indecent fashion. I would never have had the guts to wear this when I was twenty-one, believing myself fat and lumpy. Not the sort of girl who could get away with it. But compared to my forty-something self, this Maggie is svelte. Not perfect – there’s a slight curve to my belly and the top of my hips look a little boxy – but good enough. I can’t believe how great it looks on me.
‘I’m getting it,’ I tell Becca.
She makes me turn around and checks the price tag hanging down my back. ‘It’s over forty quid!’
I shrug. ‘You’re only young once, right?’
OK, maybe, in my case, twice, but I have the feeling I didn’t do it right the first go around. While this strange hallucination lasts, I’m going to make up for lost time.
I buy the dress then change into it in the toilets of a pub down Argyll Street, even though it’s more evening than daywear. When I walk out across the bar to where Becca is waiting for me, heads turn. The knowledge gives my walk a little extra swing.
We buy a cheap bottle of wine and head for St James’s Park, where we sit in deckchairs we don’t pay for. After two hours we’re very giggly, slightly sunburned and more than a little squiffy. We decide to paddle in the lake to help us cool off, taking it in turns to sip the last of the wine from the neck of the bottle as we stand there, but then a portly park warden comes along and starts shouting at us and we end up grabbing our bags and running away down the path in our bare feet, shoes hooked from our fingers, until we’ve finally outrun him, and then we collapse under a tree and laugh until we cry.
‘What next?’ I ask Becca. We’ve been taking it turns to come up with ideas and the paddling was mine.
‘I’m hungry,’ Becca moans, so after we’ve shoved our shoes back on our slightly damp feet we head in the direction of China Town. My purse is feeling considerably lighter than it was when I left Oaklands this morning and it’s the best place we can think of to stuff our faces on a budget.
We trail through Piccadilly and end up at Wong Kei’s, a student favourite because of its mountainous plates of food for low prices. We have to share a table with some American tourists who obviously have stumbled in here without knowing its reputation. Instead of understanding that the rude service is what brings people to this cult tourist attraction, they’re outraged. They don’t understand when the waiter barks instructions at them or brings them dishes he’s decided they should have instead of what they actually ordered. Becca and I just sit back, eat our chow mein full of unidentified seafood and enjoy the show.
After that we wander through Leicester Square and Covent Garden arm in arm. The wine is still having a pleasant effect (twenty-one-year-old me is such a lightweight!) and I keep telling Becca how much I love her. She’s been a true partner in crime and hasn’t blinked once at my mad suggestions, even though I know I’m acting totally out of character. Not many women have best friends like this, ones they can trust with their lives. I keep telling her that too, which only makes her tease me harder about my state of inebriation.
After scraping together our last pennies to share a pint of cider in an overpriced pub, we get talking to some guys who buy us more drinks and then we end up getting a cab with them to a club somewhere near Kings Cross that turns out to be an abandoned warehouse with huge rooms sprawling over multiple floors. I never went to anything like this when I was young the first time – the whole rave scene of the early nineties passed me by – and I launch myself onto the dance floor as if I’m planning to make up for that.
There’s one guy who’s been hanging around me ever since we got in the cab and he sidles up to me and tries to grind his hips against mine. I attempt to back away but he just keeps coming at me.
Becca leans in and shouts in my ear. ‘Ladies! Now!’
I nod, totally trusting her to be my wingman … woman … whatever. Creepy Guy tries to follow, but we slip away too fast and instead of heading for the loos, we sprint up a flight of stairs and lose ourselves in yet another room full of heaving, slick bodies. We dance most of the night away and when our feet are burning so hard we can’t stand to groove any longer, we catch a string of night buses that eventually deposit us on Putney High Street and stagger back to our flat, arm in arm and propping each other up, feet bare on the rough concrete paving stones as the sky turns from grey to pale-pink. Becca keeps starting to belt out ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ and I have to keep shushing her, so by the time we reach the front door to the house where our flat is, we’re almost giggling as loud as the singing would have been.
I fall into bed without taking my make-up off and smile at the ceiling as my eyelids drift closed. Now that is the way to do twenty-one!
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_843fc79b-ecde-54cf-b1e9-942a9405d407)
I’ve been avoiding Dan as much as possible. Mainly because I just don’t know how to deal with him. However, there’s only so much ‘pretending to be revising’ a girl can do before she can’t put her boyfriend off any longer, and I end up going to a party with him on campus the following weekend.
Derwent Hall is the old-fashioned kind of student accommodation. None of these ‘flats’ with en-suite showers and homey little kitchens you get at universities these days. Instead, it has corridor upon corridor of single bedrooms painted in a colour Becca calls ‘anti-suicide green’, a tiny shared kitchen with only a Baby Belling and a juddering fridge to its name, and a communal bathroom with shower cubicles and sinks, and one bath in its own stall that takes twenty minutes to fill.
However, Derwent’s one advantage over those smart student flats we looked over with Sophie is that it has a common room. Not huge, but large enough to fit forty or so students in if they don’t mind squishing a bit, which they don’t.
The music is already pumping when we get there, the sparse furniture pushed back against the walls or shoved outside on the grass, and people are dancing, cans of warm lager in their hands. I’m tempted to join them but Dan has hold of my hand, and when I lean in to tell him I’m off to strut my stuff, he takes the opportunity to steal a kiss.
I plan to end it quickly, but I get kind of sidetracked. I’d forgotten Dan could kiss like this. His dad is a pastor and is a little old-fashioned about things, so Dan hasn’t had a lot of experience. The upside of that is that what he does do, he does very well. By the time he’s finished with me, I’m thrumming.
Oh, why couldn’t you stay this way? I ask him silently. You’re so sweet and loyal and full of devotion. But then I remember the betrayal that is to come. I can’t let myself feel anything for him. I just can’t.
So I push away from Dan and head for the dance floor, playing memories in my head to stop me going back, pinning him against the wall and continuing that kiss: the guilty look on his face when I go into the study unannounced, the fib he told about meeting Sam Macmillan, the way he’s been lying to me about where he’s going once a fortnight for months and months. I use those mental images to keep me angry, because as long as I’m angry I’m safe.
I channel my anger-fuelled adrenalin spike by dancing to the twelve-inch version of ‘Love Shack’. Paul Ferrini comes over, Derwent’s resident stud, and joins the group of girls I’m dancing with. He offers me his bottle of vodka and I take a sip. We dance together after that. Nothing inappropriate, nothing too flirty, I reason to myself, as I feel Dan’s laser-like glare from the other side of the room, even though there’s a glint in Paul’s eyes that tells me it could be more than innocent fun if I wanted it to be. There’s a part of me that enjoys this tiny moment of payback.
When I’m finally so thirsty I can’t keep dancing any more, I return to my boyfriend. ‘Just having fun,’ I tell him as I slump against the wall and neck the paper cup of flat Lambrusco he hands me.
Dan harrumphs. He’s upset with me. But he’s not going to say anything. He’s not going to do anything about it. How very Dan of him. ‘Got a problem with that?’ I ask, unable to stand his passive-aggressive grunts a moment longer.
He fixes his stare on Paul, who is now half draped over Mandy Gomez. ‘You didn’t have to have quite so much fun!’
I’ve had enough of his hypocrisy, maybe not in this life but definitely in the other one, and the mixture of wine and spirits is spurring me on. I push myself off the wall. ‘Fine!’ I shout back at him over the music. ‘If I’m not supposed to be having any fun, then maybe I’ll leave. You’ll be happy then, because I won’t be having any fun at all!’ And then I stare straight ahead and start walking down the corridor to the exit.
‘Maggie? Mags!’ I hear him start to run after me but then the footsteps stop and he shouts something I don’t catch. The cool night air hits me as I open the door and march across the courtyard in the direction of the main gate. There’s no sound behind me but the dying breath of today’s summer breeze in the trees. I exhale with them, loud and long. I can no longer hear him loping along behind me.
Finally.
I don’t want him to follow me. I don’t want to have to deal with my real-life problems, most of which centre around him, while I’m having this weird trance or dream or whatever it is. All I want to be able to do is enjoy it while it lasts.
Oaklands College, a satellite of a larger university, has a beautiful campus. I don’t think I really appreciated it when I went there. Oaklands House, where the administration offices are, is a lovely, white Georgian mansion, surrounded by statues and tended gardens, complete with fountain. Beyond that is a large lawn, always covered in toxic-green goose poop, that leads down to a small man-made lake.
Rather than heading straight back to the flat I share with Becca, I decide to take a walk. I head down towards the black water, trying not to think about what might be sticking to the underneath of my DMs. I stand by the reeds and watch the moon, reflecting on the water, breaking apart and rejoining itself, only to be disassembled again by the ripples of the next goose that swims by on the other side of the pond.
The moment of stillness after my week of frenetic activity allows thoughts and feelings I’ve been keeping firmly at bay to come flooding back in.
I miss Sophie.
I wonder if she’s missing me, if she even knows I’m gone? Until I work out what strange trick my brain is playing on me, I don’t know if she’s quietly grieving, Dan’s solid arm around her shoulder, or whether she’s living it up in Oban or Ullapool while I sleep soundly in my bed. I know she doesn’t need me as much as she once did, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t need me at all. I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want her to have to go through that.
I close my eyes.
No.
I can’t think like that.
My stay here is just temporary. It has to be.
When I open my eyes again I’m aware of another presence on the lawn. I can hear squelching footsteps behind me, someone tracking their way from the ugly student union building towards the rose garden.
I feel very safe here, maybe because it still doesn’t feel real to me, but I suddenly remember that one year a girl was assaulted on campus when she walking between the spread-out halls of residence, and I turn.
The figure jumps and then a hand flies to his chest. I don’t think he’d seen me standing there near the reeds.
‘God Almighty, you gave me a fright!’ he says, and I instantly recognise the voice, even after all these years.
‘Jude?’ It’s just as well his name is only one syllable, because I’m not sure I can manage anything more.
The figure walks towards me, his edges becoming less blurry as he gets closer, and when he is ten feet away, I see that it is indeed Jude, the subject of all my recent fantasies, living and breathing right in front of me and smiling that smile that always turned my knees to custard.
‘Meg?’
I inhale. There’s something about hearing him say my name that way that makes me do that. ‘Hi.’
He frowns. ‘What are you doing out here?’
I shrug. I’m not about to tell him I just had a fight with Dan.
He smiles again and I almost start to feel dizzy. ‘Long time no see,’ he says in that lazy, posh-boy drawl he’s still in the process of cultivating, copied from his upmarket circle of friends.
I nod. And then, because I really need to say something else, I croak out, ‘How are you?’
The smile becomes lopsided and I know he’s quietly laughing at me, that he knows he’s got me all off kilter and he likes it. It would have made the other twenty-one-year-old me angry, because I would have thought he was mocking me, but the real me knows that he’s actually pleased to see me. The real me knows that in just under a week he’s going to ask me to run away with him, and he’s going to mean every word. That’s not disdain I see glinting in his eyes but honest-to-goodness pleasure at seeing me again.
He reaches out his hand. ‘Let me walk you home. You know Catriona Webb was attacked out here a couple of months ago?’ He points to a spot only a couple of hundred feet away past the rose garden.
I hesitate. Something inside, some strange kind of instinct, tells me he’s dangerous. Oh, I don’t think he’d ever hurt me, not physically, anyway, but it suddenly occurs to me that this meeting never happened in my old life.
What if I should have been more careful up until now? What if, by not sticking to the same script, I’ve been changing things, causing the repercussions to ripple out like the waves from the swimming goose, until the life I once knew is pulled out of shape and made into something different? While I’d love some things to change, what if I never get home back to Sophie? What if Sophie never even exists?
But even after thinking all of this, I reach out and place my hand in Jude’s. He’s right. With a sexual predator on the loose – maybe someone from outside the college who slipped past the lax security, maybe someone lurking in our midst – I really shouldn’t be wandering around in the dark on my own.
We start walking towards the front gate in silence, but after a couple of minutes he says, ‘So where’s Dave?’
‘Dan,’ I reply, even though I suspect he got the name wrong on purpose.
‘Dan, then,’ he adds, and I hear the smile in his voice.
‘Party in Derwent. I got tired.’
‘And he let you wander out here alone? That’s not very gallant.’
No, it wasn’t, I think, for a moment conveniently forgetting that I’d made it my mission to push ever-affable Dan to his limit. ‘Where were you coming from?’ I ask Jude, so I don’t have to answer his question.
‘Went to hang out with a friend, then we headed down to the bar for a drink.’
I nod. Without any more details I know this ‘friend’ was a girl. I change the subject. ‘So what are you up to after exams?’
He chuckles. ‘You know me … I haven’t got a plan. Dom and I are going to bum around the South of France for a bit and then, well … we’ll just see what crops up.’
I sigh. Seeing as I know ‘bumming around’ leads Jude into a successful career somehow along the way, I feel jealous. I worked hard, but I never amounted to anything more than ‘ordinary’.
‘What about you?’
I sigh again. The twenty-one-year-old me might not have known what the future holds, but I do. In just a few short days my life will be set on a course to suburban mediocrity and simmering discontentment. ‘I’m going to run away with the circus,’ I say wearily.
Jude laughs. Not one of his slightly cynical huffs, but a proper loud one, as if what I said tickles him. ‘Never really thought of you as the running-away type,’ he says and there’s an added edge of velvet to his tone. In an instant, the air around us changes.
I stop, turn and look at him. I know I’m being stupid. I know I could be endangering everything by just being with him, let alone feeling … this … with him, but it’s like having an itch I’ve been trying not to scratch and on a reflex I’m reaching for it, taking my satisfaction in shredding what’s left of my resolve to pieces with my fingernails.
‘Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.’
He answers me with a smile. A wicked one. ‘You’ve changed.’
I stare him straight in the eyes. ‘Yes, I have.’
He glances towards Derwent Hall and then back to me again. The sounds of the party are drifting through the open common-room windows and across the lake. The geese pay no attention. It’s nothing they haven’t heard before. ‘Then Dave’s a very lucky man.’
I hold my breath and stare back at him. I feel as if my life is teetering on a fulcrum, that if I make one false movement it’ll tip. I know this moment is crucial but I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.
All I know is that Dan is going to propose to me in four days and not even the tiniest part of me wants to say yes.
Becca finds me the next day in the canteen, while I’m buying a sad-looking tuna-and-sweetcorn baguette. I deliberately pretended to be asleep this morning, because I didn’t want to talk to her about last night. However, it appears that may not have been the best call, because my boyfriend clearly got to her first. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asks. ‘Dan told me you were a total bitch to him last night.’
I raise my eyebrows and turn to look at her. ‘He said that?’
‘Those weren’t his exact words. But I can read between the lines.’
She picks up a bottle of Appletiser and joins the queue. ’You need to apologise to him.’
Part of me wants to remind her what she said on the phone the night I told her Dan might be cheating on me, but I know that I can’t. She’ll think I’m crazy. I also know she’s right. This Dan has done nothing. If I filter out all the things he will do and will say, and look at the situation objectively, I can only come to one conclusion: I was a total bitch to him last night.
‘I know,’ I reply with a sigh.
After lunch I go in search of Dan. I find him at Al’s, nursing a cup of half-cold tea. I sit down opposite him. ‘Sorry,’ I say and he looks at me warily. ‘Put it down to hormones and the stress of looming exams.’
His jaw remains tight, but there’s a softening in his eyes. ‘We’re alright, then?’
I nod. As alright as we can be in this version of our life, I suppose.
He surprises me by half-standing, leaning across the table and planting a lingering kiss on my lips, right in front of Al and the rest of his motley customers, then he pulls away and looks at me seriously. ‘You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,’ he says. ‘I can hardly believe I’m the lucky man you picked. Always remember that. Always make me remember that.’
A lump forms in my throat and my eyes grow moist. All morning I’ve been imagining what it would be like to say yes to Jude, but now I don’t know what I want. Could I make Dan remember how he feels about me in this moment, even years from now when he really doesn’t want to? Our whole lives could be different if I could.
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_938554d2-c364-5d9d-9580-d2ed9494b9aa)
Three days. Two days. One.
My brain is counting down to the inevitable. I know it’s coming. Dan’s proposal. Even my fit of extreme bitchiness last week hasn’t seemed to have put him off. If anything, he’s trying harder than ever because of the seed of doubt I’ve planted in his mind.
When I’m with him it really is like the old days and I don’t have to fake the affection in my smile, but when we part … well, that’s when the old memories – the ‘forward’ memories – start creeping in.
What do I do?
Up until now I’ve been doing my best to just go with the flow, do what feels good. It was easy when I thought I’d wake up and realise this has all been a vivid dream, but it’s been over two weeks now. I’m also pretty sure this is no waiting room for heaven.
Which leaves only one possibility: this is real. Somehow I’ve jumped backwards in time, fully conscious of the life I’ve already lived and I’ve got to do it all over again. I’ve always thought the opportunity to go back and change the things you regret would be a blessing. Now the prospect of it frightens me.
If I’m staying here I can’t keep messing around. If I’ve really got to do it all again I’ve got to start thinking about the choices I’m making. Making the wrong one tonight could ruin everything.
I shake my head as I look in the mirror. I’m supposed to be getting ready for a meal out with Dan, but all this mental wrangling is making it a heck of a job to do my mascara. I keep poking myself in the eyeball or blinking before it’s dry and being rewarded with a row of black dots under my lashes and then having to wipe it off and start again. I take a deep breath and will my hand to stay steady.
Dan’s done a good job of being nonchalant about this date, but I know he’s booked a posh Italian restaurant in Putney and afterwards he’ll suggest a walk along the river and then he’ll take my hands, look me in the eye and my future will be sealed.
Last time I was so sure what I wanted.
They say hindsight is twenty-twenty. What they don’t tell you is that it’s crystal sharp and painful.
My heart is telling me to run, to veer off course and to do the things I’d always wished I’d done: to travel, love furiously and have wild affairs, to find a job I love and excel at it, but my head is urging caution. I wish I could dismiss those doubts, but unfortunately I keep coming up with very good points.
What about Sophie?
Could I stand a future without her in it?
Because if I don’t choose Dan, she might never exist. Or even if I do, there might not be any guarantees. What if we have sex ten minutes later that night of conception? Will I end up with a different little girl? Or was Sophie always meant to be? What if she’s more than the sum of two joined sets of chromosomes?
I put my mascara brush down and stare at myself in the mirror. There are clumps on my upper left lashes and a smudge on my right eyelid but I really can’t face another attempt. I’m too tired.
There’s a knock on the door as I’m putting my lipstick on. Red. The sort of colour I never wear any more. The sort of colour I didn’t really opt for much when I was this age the first time around.
Becca answers the door and when I walk into the living room, she and Dan are standing there, laughing at a joke I’ve not been privy to. He turns to look at me and hands me a bunch of red roses. There’s hope in his eyes, but also nervousness.
Becca makes the same sort of noise Sophie used to make when watching cute cat videos on YouTube. ‘Awww … aren’t you sweet,’ she tells Dan and then she gently prises the roses from my hand. ‘Why don’t you two get off? I’ll put these in water.’
I want to snatch them back. I want to tell Becca I’d rather do it myself, to delay the moment when I have to walk out that front door with Dan and be on my own with him, but I don’t. I don’t know how to say it without seeming rude. Or slightly insane.
Becca practically shoves us out the front door and into the hallway. ‘I won’t wait up!’ she jokes and, as the door closes behind us, I wonder if she knows, if Dan has confided in her, and two things strike me – one, that I wonder why I hadn’t twigged that he was going to propose this night the first time around, because I had a suspicion at the time he was working up to it and, two, that I’m jealous. I don’t like the fact that my husband-to-be and my best friend have shared a secret and left me out of it. Hypocritical, really, when I’m seriously considering breaking his heart this evening. Until I came back here I hadn’t realised how selfish I can be, how wrapped up in my own stuff that I don’t see what’s going on under my nose.
‘Shall we?’ Dan says, and offers me his arm. I smile at him, a smile that’s warm and bright and about as substantial as candy floss.
Dinner is a blur. I eat, I drink, I nod and laugh in the right places, but the only sensation I can really remember when it’s over is a growing sense of panic. As Dan takes my hand and heads towards the river my heart starts to pound. I can hear the echo of it rushing in my ears.
We walk past the crowded pubs with drinkers spilling out across the narrow street and onto the embankment. We keep going until their laughter and chatter is more distant, until we reach the rowing club. There’s a break in the railings and we walk down to the far edge of the shallow concrete slope the rowers use to put their boats in the river. As we stand there, staring across at the tree-lined bank on the other side, I can hear the music of the water slapping against the hulls of the little motor boats moored close by.
Dan seems paralysed. I keep shooting glances in his direction, wondering when he’s going to make his move, but he just keeps staring at the darkness in front of him. Was he like this before? I wonder. If he was, I didn’t notice it. I remember the night being balmy and warm, the lapping of the gentle river waves romantic.
Just when I think he’s chickened out, he sucks in a breath and turns to me. We’ve been still for so long it makes me jump, and that makes him smile. The serious look he’s been wearing for the last ten minutes vanishes.
He reaches for my hands and I swallow.
‘You know how I feel about you …’ he says softly.
My heart can’t help cracking a little at his words. How can you love and hate a person at the same time? I want to slap him across the face, hard enough to make my fingers sting, but I also want to kiss him.
‘… and I know that we’re young and everyone is going to say this is a bad idea, but I can’t imagine my life without you in it.’
I still don’t say anything. Partly because I have no response, but partly because I’m realising I really can imagine my life without Dan in it. It’s been something I’d been doing even before this strange experience happened to me, after all. I just hadn’t expected my wishing to make it real or, at least, the possibility of it real. Dan, however, takes my silence for agreement and he carries on.
My heart stops. Just for a beat. Because as he draws his next breath I know exactly what words are about to come out of his mouth, and I still don’t know what my answer will be.
‘Maggie,’ he says, and his voice catches on the last syllable, ‘will you marry me?’
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_a5ac862e-2ef0-5840-b44f-52c2591b5e43)
I stare back at Dan. His face is full of hope. Hope, I realise, that neither of us have left for our marriage back in our other life. A hole rips open inside me, deep and long. How can this man – the man who looks at me with such tenderness and worship – have turned into the one who’s sneaking around behind my back, who’s let slide all the promises he’s been holding so faithfully for the last twenty-four years?
I don’t have an answer for him. Not the one he wants, anyway. Not the one I gave him last time. ‘I don’t know,’ I finally stammer, and then I watch all that hope melt away and turn to confusion.
‘Don’t you love me?’
I nod. ‘Yes … no … I don’t know.’ And then I begin to cry.
He scoops me into his arms and holds me tight. I can tell he’s staring over my shoulder, asking the night sky what went wrong. I know he’s hurting and confused, that his instinct was to back off and protect himself, but the fact he’s chosen not to do that, to comfort me instead, just makes me cling on to him all the harder.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispers. ‘You haven’t been right, not for the last couple of weeks.’
I let myself mould against him, just for a moment, and then I lift my eyes and look at him. I shake my head as the tears fall. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and then I find I can’t stop. I say it over and over and over.
‘No,’ he replies and silences my litany with a kiss. ‘I got ahead of myself. It’s too soon.’
I shake my head, because I know in another version of our lives it wouldn’t be too soon. The problem is, I’m not sure I want that reality any more, even though the thought of losing him suddenly seems much bigger and more final than I ever realised.
It’ll be like him dying.
Because I won’t just grieve him the way I would if we’d split up when I was twenty-one. I’ll grieve for all the extra years we’ve had that he’ll never know about – the way he looked when Sophie was born, as if he could burst with pride and love for the both of us. How nervous he was on our wedding night. Even silly little things like that cup of tea he always brings me when he gets home from work.
That Dan won’t ever exist in this world, and I feel the loss of him like a physical pain in my chest.
He hasn’t got a hanky, so he uses the cuff of his shirt sleeve to dry my tears.
It’s not you, it’s me, I want to say, but I’m aware it sounds over-used, even in this decade, so I don’t. Or maybe it’s us. The us we will become. I’m setting us free from that, from the boredom and the simmering resentment. From the disappointment of knowing that even though we once thought we could be everything to each other, we clearly can’t.
By silent agreement we walk back towards the High Street, heading for the bus stop. When we reach my flat, I open the front door that leads into the communal hallway of our converted Victorian house, but Dan doesn’t cross the threshold with me.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’
He shakes his head.
‘This doesn’t mean I’m breaking up with you,’ I say. ‘Just that I need time to think. You’re right – we are both so young, we need to be sure this is the right thing. For both of us.’ I stop then, because I know that I’m lying, that as much as I’m pretending nothing’s changed, there’s been a seismic shift in our relationship.
He shrugs and looks at his shoes. ‘I know that. It’s just that … I need time alone. I need time to think too.’
I would have accepted that without a doubt once upon a time. After all, it’s a perfectly natural response for someone whose proposal of marriage has not been as enthusiastically received as it was delivered – especially for a man like Dan, who likes to lick his wounds in private.
‘Where are you going to go?’
Another pause. I can almost hear him thinking his response over.
‘I dunno. Just for a walk, I expect.’
Totally understandable. And I would have believed him, I really would, if when he looked at me he hadn’t worn that same expression he always used in our future life, the one that accompanies his oh-so-innocent declaration that he’s off down the pub with a long-lost mate who is actually having a second honeymoon in Prague.
CHAPTER TWELVE (#ulink_cff33459-8835-583b-b621-48447e42e35b)
The flat is empty and I sit down on the sofa in the dark. The ugly sunburst clock above the electric fire ticks.
I did it. But I don’t know whether to feel sorry or relieved.
I don’t know what to do now. This is the first time since I’ve been living this crazy … whatever it is … that I’ve veered completely off script. I was still friends with Becca, still doing my uni course, still with Dan. But now I haven’t just amended a bit of dialogue, skipped a scene or fudged a bit of stage direction; I’ve completely changed the ending.
I think about that night – the other night like this. The two realities couldn’t be more different. In that one I was laughing, happy, full of hope. In this one I’m just … numb. And wondering why my almost-fiancé is lying to me about where he’s going.
I shiver as I recall the look on Dan’s face.
I thought the fibs, the sneaking around, had been a new thing. What if it isn’t? What if he’s been doing this the whole time and it’s just taken me this long to catch on?
I screw up my face and squeeze my eyes shut, as if by doing so I can stop the spinning in my head. I can’t believe that’s true. It doesn’t fit with the steady, reliable, slightly boring Dan I know. But then I think of women who find out their husbands have had a secret family on the side for years, or whose husbands have committed rapes or awful sex offences and they truly have no idea.
Maybe I made the right call after all.
The numbness fades a little and just the tiniest smidge of peace seeps in. I breathe out. I haven’t burned my bridges yet, I suppose. I’ve just told Dan I need time, which is just as well, as I need at least a week to work out what I’m going to do.
A thought flashes through my head: Jude.
Dan’s proposal wasn’t the only surprise on this night. My heart skips into a higher gear.
I need to see him, I realise. I need to hear him say those words again. Not just because I’m keeping my options open, but I need to know I haven’t romanticised that scene after all those Facebook-prompted fantasies. If I’m really going to change my future, I need to be sure.
I stand up, grab my handbag from where I dumped it near the door and head out again. It only takes me ten minutes to make the usual fifteen minute stroll to the Queen’s Head. When I push through the heavy oak door with the etched glass panel, I stop in my tracks, confronted by two colliding realities. I look over at the corner where Dan and our friends had gathered that night, laughing and celebrating, and there seems to be an emptiness, even though all the tables are filled.
I order a lager and black, take a quick sip and then head out to the pub garden. It’s started to rain now. Hard, like it had been that night. A heavy shower after a sunny day had sent all the drinkers scurrying back inside. Not bothering to cover my head or put up the umbrella I have in my bag, I look around, and then I look again. My stomach goes cold.
He’s not here.
Of course he’s not.
He has no reason to be. I’m not thinking this through clearly.
Jude only came to the pub because he’d heard Dan and I were there. If I don’t say yes to Dan, word won’t have got round the college grapevine. The tiny flame of hope I’ve been carrying inside since I walked out my flat door falters and flickers. I sit down on the end of an empty picnic bench, deflated. It had all seemed so easy in my head.
I could look for him, I think, as rain splashes into my hair and runs down my scalp.
I could, but I go back into the pub, find a wall to prop myself against and drink my lager and black, ignoring the chattering people around me. But maybe that won’t be the same either. Jude doesn’t know he might lose me forever. Without that very specific kick up the backside, he probably won’t come looking for me at all.
I drain the last of my half pint and stand up. I have to try. I can’t just let this life drift by without fighting for it. I did that with the original one, and look how happy I was.
I plant my empty glass down firmly on the bar, then walk through the crowds and out back onto the main road. I turn and head in the direction of the college, the Student’s Union bar, to be more exact. Jude is a bit of a regular.
I shake my head as I walk, not only to clear the rain from it but to clear my mind. I was so stupid. Complacent. Letting so many chances slip by me. They say youth is wasted on the young, but not this twenty-one year old. Not this time.
I trudge out of the Student Union. I’d been in there for about an hour, nursing a warm and rather sweet white wine. Thank goodness student prices and minus-twenty-four years of inflation meant I only paid about a pound for it. I’d have been miffed otherwise. I really can’t understand how I stomached the stuff.
No Jude.
The rain has stopped, but the pavements are slick and shiny. I frown as I start to walk, not really caring which direction I go. I thought this would be easy: pick a man and that would be it. Heads or tails. Jude or Dan. I hadn’t really considered I might end up with neither.
When I look up I find myself at the edge of the lake, just short of where the reeds provide a natural barrier to prevent inebriated students from tumbling into the water. The rain has stopped now, the dark clouds pressing on towards central London, leaving the lake still and the grass sparkling clean. I spot a smear of sludgy green poop on the edge of my shoe and I start to try to use the damp lawn to wipe it off, but it’s been freshly mowed and all I succeed at doing is adding grass clippings into the mix. I’m so busy doing this I don’t notice someone walking up beside me. I’m precariously balanced on one leg, and when he speaks it surprises me so much I almost topple right into the lake.
‘Meg?’
It’s only his hand shooting out to grab my arm that stops me. As it is, my shoe – a rather old and ill-fitting suede ballet pump – flies off my foot and into the reeds. Seconds later, I hear a distinct plop. We both stare at where my shoe has just sunk below the surface of the dank water and then I turn to find Jude smiling at me.
I don’t smile back, not yet. I’m too nervous. There was me, hoping I’d dazzle him so much that he’d suggest running off to the South of France for the summer without the news of my impending marriage to spur him on, but any hopes of being poised and elegant and desirable have just disappeared into the duckweed with my shoe.
‘Hi,’ I say softly.
‘We must stop meeting like this,’ he says, the smile growing ever more mischievous.
My lips curve a little too. No, we really shouldn’t.
‘How are you?’ I ask, and I’m aware I sound a little breathless. I’m hoping he’ll think it’s because of the shoe incident.
‘Good.’ He looks me over. ‘That Dave isn’t doing a very good job of being your knight in shining armour.’
I turn to face Jude, still hanging on to him, because I’m balancing on one foot. ‘Actually,’ I say, looking him straight in the eye, ‘he’s applied for the position permanently. He asked me to marry him tonight.’
That wipes the smile off Jude’s face. He stares at me, and then it’s as if someone’s flicked a switch. I see the charm he turns on so easily for others beaming bright in my direction. ‘Well … congratulations.’ His perfect teeth are showing, but there’s no warmth in his eyes.
I take a breath. This is it. My moment. I can either let it drift past me again or I can grab it. ‘I didn’t say yes.’
Jude’s eyes widen. ‘You turned him down? Mr Perfect?’
I frown. Mr Perfect? Is that who he thinks Dan is? I almost laugh. Hasn’t Jude ever tried looking in the mirror? Or taken a really good look at Dan?
‘I told him I didn’t know, that I had to think about it.’
I’m wobbling harder now, as my leg muscles are starting to tire. Jude’s arm comes round me more firmly. ‘Come on, Cinderella,’ he mutters and, before I know it, he’s picked me up and he’s striding across the lawn towards the main house. He deposits me on a flagstone path under a portico. A dull-eyed statue of a half-naked woman eavesdrops on us.
Jude hasn’t let go of my hand, even though he could. He’s lost his don’t-care-about-anything sheen. Suddenly, he looks as if he cares very much. ‘And why would you say that to him?’
I swallow as my heart flings itself against my ribcage. It’s one thing to cheerlead yourself into ‘seizing the day’, another thing entirely to actually do it. ‘Because of you,’ I finally whisper.
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’
My heart starts to float like a helium balloon. ‘Really?’ I start to feel that giddy, heady sensation I should have felt earlier in the evening, after saying ‘yes’ to Dan.
‘I think I made a horrible mistake …’ he begins, and suddenly everything is back on track again, and he’s saying the words he said to me last time, only we’ve changed the scenery to somewhere way more romantic. He ends with, ‘I don’t think he’s what you need, Meg.’
‘And you are?’ I say, remembering my line well.
‘I’d like to try to be.’
I keep going with the script, and while I’m thrilled it’s all turned out the way it should, a little nagging feeling tells me it’s only because I engineered it, that there may be a price to pay for that. I swot that nasty little thought away. ‘But you’re supposed to be going off to France next month …’
He reaches out and grabs both my hands, and I get a sudden flashback to a couple of hours ago when I was standing with Dan by the river. The memory is so strong it almost wipes over the present moment and I have to fight to keep it in focus. ‘Come with me,’ he says.
I sway and then I stare into Jude’s eyes to anchor myself to him. Inside I feel as if something is pulling apart, like a piece of cloth being roughly torn, all jagged edges and loose threads. I feel my future unravelling.
‘OK,’ I say.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#ulink_adeedfa2-8c9f-51b1-8e52-4fe337b4002b)
I knock on the door of Dan’s shared student house and my knees are literally shaking. His mate Rick opens the door. Instead of giving me a hug, as he usually would, he just eyes me warily and leads me silently to the sitting room. I find Dan there, in just a T-shirt and boxers, staring at a This Morning segment on how to turn grunge into a wearable look for summer.
‘Hi,’ I say.
He stares at the TV for a full five seconds before turning to look at me. ‘Hi.’
‘Are you OK?’ I ask. I can detect the faint whiff of stale lager and Dan’s eyes look bleary, which is odd, because he’s not much of a drinker.
He shrugs.
‘What did you end up doing last night?’
He looks away quickly. ‘Not much.’
I see that look again, the same one he wore last night, the same one that knelled the bells of doom for our future marriage and is doing a pretty good job of messing up the possibility of this one too. Any pity I’m feeling for him evaporates.
He’s lying to me, and this just confirms it wasn’t a heat-of-the-moment, one-off incident last night because he was hurting. ‘You must have done something,’ I say, maybe a tad more shrilly than a girl about to break up with her boyfriend ought to, but his cowardice incenses me.
He talks to Judy Finnigan on the telly, not to me. ‘Rick and I had a few beers.’
Judy chatters on, not the slightest bit interested in Dan’s lacklustre social life.
I stare at him as he stares at her. This is already a habit, I realise – lying to me – and it started much, much earlier than I’d thought. I feel as if hot air is being puffed into my face as I consider how many other women there may have been, because that’s what he must be lying about. What else would he need to hide?
But then something clicks inside my head and I realise this is what I want. This makes everything so much easier, because I know I’m making … that I’ve made … the right choice.
‘I know I said we weren’t breaking up last night, but maybe we should.’
Dan’s head snaps round. That got his attention. ‘What?’ he says, although I’m pretty certain he heard every syllable.
‘I want to end it.’ Even though I’m trying to steel myself against it, I flinch inwardly as my words hit home and Dan’s face falls. All the righteous, disgruntled anger he’s been wearing as a shield melts away, leaving only confusion.
He stands up. ‘What are you saying?’
‘It’s over, Dan. You and me. It’s just not working.’
He shakes his head. ‘Last week it was working … A month before that it was working … What’s changed?’
I start to answer but the way his eyes have filled up arrests me. The backs of my eyeballs start to sting too and I will them to stop. You did this, I try to tell him silently as I look at him. Not yet, maybe. But you will. You have no one but yourself to blame.
He swallows. ‘Are you sure? Can’t we work on this?’
‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘Sorry.’
I can tell, in the midst of his confusion, Dan is finding my certainty off-putting. He scowls as he tries to compute my response, looking at the patterned carpet, complete with greasy kebab stain, for help. After maybe thirty seconds, he looks at me again, and there’s something different in his eyes. Something glittering. ‘Is there someone else?’ His tone makes goosebumps break out on my arms.
I nod. ‘Sort of.’
He lunges towards me, but stops just short of making any kind of physical contact. The look in his eyes is pure fury. ‘You’re sleeping with him?’
That’s when I take the shock and twist it into rage. Hypocrite! I want to yell at him. What you think is the moral high ground is actually stinking, boggy quicksand! And if Dan has one fault it’s that he occupies a whole mountain of moral high ground, probably learned it from his dad. When he said he wanted to wait until marriage, I thought it was sweet and old-fashioned, if a bit frustrating. I thought it signalled up what an upright and honourable guy he must be. Now I start to wonder if the premature marriage proposal has more to do with the fact he’s panting for it rather than everlasting love. His sex drive clearly overrode his morals in our future life.
I pull myself up straighter. ‘No. It’s nothing like that,’ I say, and I try not to blush when I remember the night before with Jude, when it almost had been very much like that, until I’d come to my senses and remembered I hadn’t actually broken up with Dan yet. Even the fact I’d kissed him made me feel horribly disloyal this morning.
‘Then what are you flipping well talking about?’
Even now he can’t quite bring himself to say the F-word. Even when I’m prising his heart from his chest and crushing it in my fingers. A part of me despises him for it.
‘I’m saying that I have feelings for someone else. Feelings I haven’t acted upon – ’ Dan snorts but I carry on undaunted. ‘Feelings that I shouldn’t be having if I’m ready to marry you.’
‘Jude?’ he whispers and his long frame crumples into the armchair nearby.
‘Yes,’ I say, and my voice is hoarse.
Dan shakes his head. ‘I always knew that guy was trouble …’
‘It wasn’t him. It was me … or at least it was that I found myself thinking about him all the time, even when I knew I shouldn’t.’
This is the most honest thing I’ve said to my husband in about five years. I also realise that maybe if I’d told him this in the future, maybe if he’d had the guts to tell me the same when his eye had started to wander, that we wouldn’t have ended up in the horrible situation we did, lying to each other every day by omission, pretending we were happy when really we were just coasting.
We talk then. Properly. Honestly. It’s not comfortable and I’m not sure it makes either of us feel any better, but when he walks me to the front door, I feel as if we’ve reached a shaky kind of resolution. Only time will tell if it holds or not.
And then I walk out of Dan’s house, out of his life, and into my new one, full of the hope only a future full of blank pages can bring.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#ulink_dfc81c9d-1095-5a6e-83eb-702feaf9cd08)
I spend the rest of the day with Jude. Even though he should be revising and I should be putting the finishing touches to my final art piece. We catch the Tube into central London, wander through Portobello market hand in hand and then through Kensington Gardens. It’s odd, expecting to see the Princess Diana memorial fountain there then realising it isn’t because she’s still alive somewhere, miserable in her fabulous life.
As we amble past the spot it will one day occupy, Jude stops, turns and kisses me. I have the sudden urge to write to Diana, to tell her she only has one life to live and she might as well grab happiness while she can. No one knows how many days they have left. I also consider telling her to wear a seatbelt at all times, but as quickly as the idea comes into my head, I dismiss it. Even if I sent it, the letter would be intercepted and rammed into a shredder.
‘Come back to mine …’ Jude whispers in my ear. I pull away and smile at him. I feel like a different person today, someone to whom yesterday’s rules don’t apply. For the first time in years I feel free to do what I want instead of what I should. Number one on that list is Jude. I’m tired of being the good girl.
So that’s what I do. I spent a lazy, warm summer afternoon in bed with Jude, and as the sun starts to set I kiss him at his door and leave him. I’ve promised I’ll go and see Becca’s drama performance tonight.
She’s already left the flat when I get back. I’ve forgotten exactly what time she needed to leave for the studio theatre to get ready and I must have missed her. Since we hadn’t planned to go together but meet up after the show, I potter round the flat, changing into the dress I bought in Oxford Street and grabbing a cropped denim jacket.
Becca is too busy to come out from backstage before the performance, so I find a seat with a few of her drama friends that I remember being on a nodding basis with and I watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Becca is playing Titania.
Afterwards, I go and wait outside the main entrance. The small studio theatre is used by both the drama and the dance department and doesn’t have anything as posh as a stage door. Most of the rest of the cast have appeared, been told in megaphone-loud voices how wonderful they were by their friends and have drifted off to the bar by the time Becca appears.
She marches out, looking a little strange in her stonewashed jeans and hot-pink T-shirt but with her green-and-silver-glittery stage make-up still streaked across her face. She nods at me then sets off at a blistering pace down the narrow path that leads back towards the main buildings of the campus.
‘What’s up?’ I ask, trotting after her. ‘You were amazing! Best I’ve ever seen you do it! Don’t worry about that fluffed line in your first scene.’
Becca stops, turns and looks at me. ‘You think I’m worried about missing a line?’ she asks, placing her hands on her hips. The stage make-up has the effect of making her look even more ticked off.
‘Aren’t you?’
She shakes her head.
‘Unbelievable … So wrapped up in yourself you just don’t ever see!’
‘What?’ I say and my volume increases to match my level of confusion. ‘What don’t I see?’
Becca pokes me in the hollow between the top of my right boob and my shoulder with an acid-green fingernail. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about? What planet are you on?’
I step back and rub the spot. It usually wouldn’t have been so bad, because Becca is a bit of a nail-biter, but she’s been adorned with long green plastic talons by the costume department. ‘Um … this one?’ I say tentatively. I’m getting that same reality’s-gone-screwy feeling I got when I first woke up here.
‘You broke up with Dan!’ she screams at me. ‘After he proposed, as well! What the hell’s wrong with you?’
I blink.
Oh.
I didn’t know she knew. I also didn’t know she’d take it so personally. It’s not her who’s broken up with him, after all! I stiffen and stand up straighter. ‘Nothing’s wrong with me, actually. Nothing at all.’
She throws her hands wide, shakes her head. My answer seems to have thrown her.
‘We’re not right for each other,’ I tell her, trying to keep my voice calm.
She gives me another one of those looks that tells me she thinks I’ve had an aneurysm or something. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I’ve never seen two people more right for each other.’
‘Who told you?’
She inhales deeply through her nose as she stares at me. ‘Dan. He’s a mess.’
I feel a little kick of guilt down in my stomach, but I push it away. I’m being cruel to be kind, but I’m the only one who knows that. ‘He’ll thank me in the long run.’
Becca laughs, but it’s not her usual bubbly giggle. ‘What? For breaking his heart?’
I turn and start walking. ‘You’re just being dramatic now.’
I’m halted by Becca grabbing my arm, wrenching my shoulder in my socket. ‘What’s wrong with you, Mags? You’ve been acting really weird the last couple of weeks! You’ve changed.’
I pull my arm away from her and scowl. ‘How?’
‘You’re … you’re …’ She looks desperately at me, as if she really doesn’t want to let the next couple of words out of her mouth. ‘You’ve just started being really selfish.’
I blink again. Selfish?
Well, maybe it seems that way because I’m not being my usual doormat self – I’m not going along with what everybody else wants, letting life happen to me instead of taking it by the horns. I suppose if she wants to call that selfish then maybe I should let her. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘Then explain it to me.’
For a moment, I actually consider this. Could I tell her? Could I tell her everything? But then I imagine the words coming out of my mouth and what her reaction will be. For all her wafting around like an unearthly being this evening, Becca is probably one of the most grounded people I know. She’ll just get even angrier with me, thinking I’m making fun of the situation. ‘I can’t.’
Her expression hardens again. ‘Or won’t.’
A sudden drop in my stomach alerts me to the fact that this is a crucial moment, that I have to handle it right. Dan and Becca are my anchors in this world, my only connections to the life I’ve left behind. I’ve cut one loose and I really don’t want to lose the other.
‘Remember that time we went to that gig at the Hammersmith Apollo,’ I say, ‘and we were a little bit tipsy, and we got on the bus and dozed off on each other?’
Becca looks warily at me. ‘Yes?’
‘How we woke up and realised we were going the wrong way, that we needed to get off and change buses, or we’d end up in Islington instead of Putney?’
She nods.
‘Well, that’s what I felt my life was like. The destination was fine and all that, but I had that same sudden shock in the pit of my stomach – I wasn’t going the way I was supposed to be going. I know it seems drastic and all, but I had to do something before it was too late.’
I look at her, begging her to understand. She sighs and then we fall into step beside each other, making an unspoken decision to change direction and head for the bar. I know she’s confused and angry but I also know she’ll stand by me. She’s only being like this because she’s trying to protect me, trying to steer me down the path she thinks leads to happiness for me. Somehow, I’m just going to have to convince her that path doesn’t always lead to Dan.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#ulink_df4351f4-b45f-5bd5-ad2e-5e528d1194a1)
I creep into the flat. It’s gone eleven and the lights are off in the hallway. I start to tiptoe past the living-room door when I hear a voice.
‘So who is he, then?’
I press my hand to my chest to stop my heart galloping right out of it. As I walk towards the slightly open door, I see blue light flickering on the walls. I push it open and find Becca inside, watching The Word with the sound turned right down, which, in my mind, is the only way to cope with it. I sit down beside Becca on the sofa and watch Terry Christian interview a scruffy-looking rocker whose name I can’t remember. ‘Who’s who?’
I can feel her looking at me. ‘You know who. The guy … the new guy.’
I keep my mouth closed and continue to stare at the TV. Maybe I should have sneaked around more with Jude. Maybe I should have waited a little longer after ditching Dan to dive straight into a new relationship. I can’t even use the excuse that I’m young and impulsive. On the outside, maybe, but not on the inside. It’s just that I spent a whole lifetime waiting to feel like this, a whole life of waiting, full stop. Waiting to feel important. Waiting to feel special. I can’t wait any more. I just can’t.
While most people have no idea I’m seeing anyone, I should have known it wouldn’t take Becca long. It’s been two weeks now since I split with Dan and I’m spending a lot of my free time at Jude’s. Partly because he lives with Dom, whose parents pay for his rent and it’s a heck of a lot nicer than this dump, and partly because I’ve been avoiding having exactly this conversation with Becca.
‘Maggie?’ she prompts softly when I don’t answer.
I breathe in deeply. I’m not sure if I’m ready for this. I was only just feeling we’ve been getting back to normal after I turned Dan down. She seems to have become very protective of him all of a sudden.
‘Take a wild guess,’ I mutter, keeping my eyes trained on the singer on the television, who is now yelling at the audience. He makes a few choice hand gestures and then throws his drink over the people in the front row.
Even though the TV’s turned down, the air seems to become even more still, more quiet, all of a sudden. ‘Please tell me you’re joking,’ Becca finally says.
I shake my head and risk looking her direction.
‘No,’ she says, her voice firm and low, as if she can change the truth by being determined enough about it. ‘You are not seeing Jude the Jerk again!’
‘I am,’ I reply, just as firm and determined. ‘And he’s not a jerk.’
She lets out a dry laugh. ‘That was your name for him, remember? Not mine!’
‘This time it’s different, Becs.’
She shakes her head wearily. ‘You chose him – the guy that broke your heart then used it to mop the floor – over Dan? I really don’t get it.’
‘I know,’ is all I can say back. I know she doesn’t get it. I also know if I try to tell her the truth, she’ll have me locked up in a mental asylum. Becca’s a really down-to-earth sort. She doesn’t believe in ghosts or God or even horoscopes. She won’t even watch Quantum Leap, for goodness’ sake!
‘Poor Dan,’ she says, shaking her head.
That’s another reason I’ve been avoiding the flat recently. Every time she looks at me, I get the sense I’m guilty of something. And I’m not. I realised Dan wasn’t the one for me and I broke it off. Even without the whole insane time-hopping thing, it was the right thing to do.
I know I won’t be happy with him.
Not properly. It’ll look that way for a time, but then it’ll die. Not quickly and cleanly in a nuclear bust-up but slowly, almost imperceptibly, until we’re drowning in our own stagnation and we don’t know it. ‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ I say calmly, ‘but I would like you to respect my choice.’
Becca closes her mouth and her jaw tenses. ‘He’s going to break your heart again, I hope you know that. Once a selfish womaniser, always a selfish womaniser …’
I stand up and glance at the TV screen. The scruffy rocker is gone, replaced by a group of desperate wannabes who are trying to prove they’ll do anything to be on TV by having a full body wax on camera. ‘I’m sorry if you don’t understand, Becs, but he makes me happy.’
She stares at the unfolding horror on the TV as long as she can, before wincing and then looking away. ‘It’s up to you if you decide to flush your life down the toilet, I suppose.’
‘I’m not,’ I say softly, but I know she doesn’t believe me. To be honest, I can’t blame her. If you’d talked to the real twenty-one-year-old me back then, she’d have said exactly the same as Becca.
She turns and looks at me full on. Really looks at me. I start to feel uncomfortable under her scrutiny, as if she can see past the youthful varnish to the real, older me underneath, but then she turns away. ‘Lately, I feel as if I just don’t know you any more,’ she says as I stand up and head for my bedroom.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#ulink_622152fd-fd1d-527f-99c7-0bfbbed8cf81)
The next morning, even before I open my eyes, I feel my stomach rolling slightly. It feels as if the room is moving around me. I bury my head under the pillow and try to go back to sleep.
Ugh. Hangovers.
But as I lie here I think back to the night before. Jude and I had gone out to dinner and I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, but nothing more, and I remember being fairly lucid when Becca and I had our argument about him. Surely I didn’t drink enough to –
There’s a loud noise above my head. My eyes pop open. The roof is low, only a couple of feet away, and I can hear someone walking around on it. I try and focus on the ceiling as I hear someone calling my name.
It’s Jude. Jude is calling my name.
He sounds happy, which is nice, but what’s he doing here in my flat with Becca? I’m not sure she’s ready to face him yet; her loyalty to Dan is still so strong. And how has my bed become a top bunk overnight, my face so close to the ceiling? I also don’t remember that skylight.
‘Meg?’ I hear him yell. He’s no longer above me now, but further away. I can hear a door banging, other noises I can’t identify. ‘We’ve brought breakfast!’
Breakfast. Now there’s something I can get a handle on, I think, as I stare up through the rectangular skylight with the rounded edges. The sky beyond is blue and crystal clear and I suddenly notice there’s a silver handle at the bottom. I reach for it and push it open with my fingertips.
Instantly, the smell of river water hits me, which is weird, because the Thames is at least half a mile away from the flat I share with Becca, and even so, this water smells fresh and blue, not muddy and eel-grey. Without thinking about it, I put my feet on my mattress and stand up, pushing the skylight open with my head as I do so. What I see outside causes my legs to lose all co-ordination and I crumple not only back down onto the mattress but off the bed and I end up in a tangled heap on a hard wooden floor. I seem to be jammed into a tiny triangular space I don’t recognise.
There’s the sound of footsteps rushing towards me, echoing as if we’re in a large box, and then the door opens and I see three faces peering down at me. One of them is Jude’s.
‘Are you OK?’ he says as he offers me a hand.
I latch onto his upside-down face. It’s the only thing that’s made sense since I woke up. ‘I think so,’ I mutter. ‘Don’t know what happened …’
‘You fell out of bed, you muppet,’ the girl behind Jude says. Her long, wavy, blonde hair is hanging past her face as she smiles at me, slightly bent over.
I grab Jude’s hand and he pulls me up. As I find some balance on my wobbly legs, I hear the other person – a guy – say, ‘Well, it was quite a heavy session last night …’
Jude chuckles. ‘And we now have empirical evidence Meg can’t hold her G&Ts.’
I frown at him as I pull my ‘Choose Life’ nightshirt further down my thighs with my free hand. I hate gin and tonic. And I certainly didn’t have any last night. And who are these people, anyway, grinning at me like loons, like we’re all part of some in-joke?
But then I think about what I saw outside.
Instead of chimney pots and TV aerials, low-hanging grey cloud and leafy beech trees, there is blue sky – lots of it – streaked with wispy clouds. And there are mountains. There aren’t supposed to be any mountains in Putney.
I look down at my bare thighs again and that’s when it hits me.
I’ve done it again.
Moved. Jumped. Shifted. Whatever you want to call it …
My knees get a strange crunchy feeling, like fresh cotton wool balls out the packet, and I head floorwards a second time. It’s only Jude’s grip on my arm that saves me.
‘Come on, you …’ he says and plants a kiss on top of my head before hauling me through a narrow door. I stub my toe on the raised threshold and yelp. Jude and the onlookers just laugh again. ‘We’ve got cheese and rolls and meat. And Cameron is going to make his famous espresso if we can get the galley stove to light.’
I sit on a bench with a padded cushion and all the pieces of information that have been hurtling at me since I opened my eyes suddenly snap together to form a complete picture: I’m on a boat. A sailboat. And the room I was in is the cabin at the front, hence the strange shape, and the skylight is actually a hatch. I feel myself relax a little and I breathe out.
Are we in the South of France? That’s where Jude said he was going after the end of term. I think about the mountain I saw, towering over the marina so high it seemed as if it might topple down on us at any moment. I think about the shape of the buildings on the shore, their square towers and terracotta-tiled roofs.
No, not France. Italy, maybe. Although how we ended up here is anyone’s guess.
And how long since I last remember anything? One month? Two?
I’m obviously supposed to know these other two people. From the state of the main cabin – clothes littered around the floor and beer cans and full ashtrays on any available flat surface – I get the sense we’ve been living together on this boat for more than a day or two.
‘Here.’ The girl plonks a mug of water down in front of me. ‘You look like you could do with this.’
She reminds me of Amanda de Cadanet, all swooshy blonde hair and private-school accent, and I consider for a second that I might just be having a rather intense nightmare brought on by watching the The Word while I talked with Becca last night, but then the boat lurches as the wake of a passing ferry slaps against the hull, sending my hand shooting for the table in front of me to steady myself, and I dismiss the idea.
No. This is real. At least, as real as the last ‘jump’ was, anyway.
I sip the water and it seems to help. ‘Thanks …’ I croak, trailing off because I realise I don’t know the girl’s name.
Jude offers me a round, crusty roll and I tear it open with my hands and stuff a healthy helping of ham and slices of pale-yellow cheese inside. The biting, the chewing, the swallowing that follows helps anchor me to this day, this time, more firmly. By the time I finish breakfast I almost feel normal again.
‘So what’s the plan for today?’ I ask and look round, hopefully. Maybe I can play detective and piece the rest of what I want to know together if I’m clever about it.
They all look at me, then look at each other, then burst out laughing again. I feel my hackles rise.
‘It was your idea!’ the nameless guy says. ‘Wow. Those G&Ts really did their job, didn’t they?’
‘Humour me,’ I say, not sounding very humorous at all.
‘We were going to sail down to the island. You know, the one with the palazzo? See if we can moor off one of the beaches.’
I nod as if I know what he’s talking about. ‘Of course we were,’ I say, as if everything is completely normal. ‘When are we setting sail?’
‘Soon as we’re all ready,’ he replies.
I nod again and stand up. ‘Better get dressed then.’ I’ve decided that short sentences and concrete facts are my best friends right now.
As I throw on a stripy T-shirt and some shorts, find some blue-and-white plimsolls I don’t recognise but assume are mine, because my socks, which I do recognise, are stuffed into them, I let the questions come.
Why? I think to myself. Why did it happen again? Was it something I did, something I said? Something I wished really hard in my heart? Part of me hoped it was, because then at least there’d be some rhyme or reason to this … whatever it is. At least I’d have some control, even if I have to work out what the trigger is. The thought it might just all be random doesn’t sit well with me.
And I’ve missed so much! Saying goodbye to all my uni friends – for the second time, anyway, but I’d been looking forward to that bit – the summer ball, graduation … Those were some of my best memories of my time at Oaklands, yet I’ve skipped straight over them.
I peer at myself in the little mirror attached to the inside of the cupboard door. The awful fringe is longer, but not quite long enough to tuck behind my ears, which leaves me looking like an old English sheepdog. I think about the blonde’s effortless honey waves and wonder I can learn enough Italian to get myself a haircut.
We cast off less than half an hour later. By perusing some navigational maps left on a tiny desk to the side of the stairs that lead up to the cockpit, I manage to work out we’re on Lake Garda. I have a vague idea of this being somewhere in the north of Italy, but I’m not exactly sure where. When I get up into the cockpit and sit down on the moulded bench next to Jude, who is confidently manning the tiller, I check out the position of the sun and decide we’re heading south. I refer to the mental snapshot I made of the map and decide we must have been moored somewhere near either Riva or Torbole and are now heading down to where the lake broadens and the mountains become less rugged.
It takes longer than I expect to travel the distance. Hours. But then the only experience I have of boats is the kind with pedals that you can rent by the half hour on a pond in the middle of a park. The sun is right overhead by the time we spot the tiny island Cameron was talking about.
Cameron Lombard, that’s right. I’ve worked out who he is now, and this is indeed his boat. Well, his dad’s boat, to be more precise. Cam is the son of a sporting-goods tycoon and, from what I gather, he’s enjoying an extended gap year after finishing uni two summers ago and has spent most of it bumming round Europe. If I have to admit it, I’m slightly intimidated by Cameron. He’s got that kind of confidence that makes him seem invincible, makes every decision seem like the best plan ever rather than a whim of the moment.
Thankfully, his girlfriend, Isabelle, or Issie – I’m not sure of her surname yet – is much less terrifying, if no less confident. She’s laid back and friendly and talks to me as if we’ve known each other for years.
From the conversation that ensues between barking sailing instructions and having to run around the boat pulling ropes and tying things to kleats (in which I am, yet again, the butt of the communal joke: ‘Watch the boom, Meg! After your dunking last week, I’d have thought you’d learned that lesson!’), I glean that Jude and I bumped into the other couple in Cannes about three weeks earlier, and after a week full of lounging around on pine-fringed beaches and bar crawling, we – well, let’s face it, it was probably ‘they’ – decided it would be a jolly good jape to nip over the alps into Italy and pick up Cam’s daddy’s boat, Vita Perfetta, from Malcesine.
They seem a nice enough couple, I suppose, but I find it awkward trying to relate to them as if I know them, as if we’ve shared close quarters for more than a fortnight now. So, as we sail the last part of our journey, I sit in the cockpit with them, cradling an open bottle of beer, but not actually drinking it, and I let the conversation flow around me like I’m a rock in a stream. I am in the middle of it but I am not part of it.
I try to dip my toe in when the facts are safe and neutral, to capture any bits of relevant information, but when they all start talking about the street entertainer in Riva’s town square the night before, or the amazing moules they had in that little cafe near San Malo, I have to shut up and the river of words rushes around me again, making me feel separate. Apart.
To be honest, it’s not just the missing chunk of time that’s the problem. It’s them. The life they lead. I should count Jude in with me, because we come from very similar backgrounds, but somehow he seems more like Cam and Issie. He talks like them, knows what to wear and what to say to seem effortlessly sophisticated. He fits right in. That, and the fact that I can’t remember the last six weeks of my life, means I can’t help feeling as if I’m an alien that’s been teleported in.
As we near the island, Cam and Jude drop the sails and tie them up – the big one at the back against the big swingy thing, which I now know is the boom, and the front one onto the railings and posts at the front of the boat. The motor putt-putts away as we drift across water that’s the colour of a cloudy emerald. I stand on the deck, one arm wrapped around the mast for stability, and shield my eyes from the sun with my hand. As we get closer to the long strip of rock in the middle of the lake, I let out only one word: ‘Wow!’
Jude comes to stand beside me. He doesn’t need to hold on to anything, just relies on his natural grace and balance. ‘It’s pretty amazing, huh? I can see why you wanted to get a closer look.’
The boat moves past the rounded tip of the island where the palazzo stands. It takes my breath away. It’s all pink and white, like one of the fondant fancies my nan used to serve up when we went round for tea, but there is nothing frou-frou about its architecture. There are bold arches that remind me of Venetian palaces on the Grand Canal, and the house stands majestically amongst the manicured gardens that cover the small lump of rock, proudly facing the lake to catch the rays of the midday sun.
None of us say anything as we motor past a small private dock, to where another boat has dropped anchor off a gently curving beach no more than a few metres wide. ‘Bloody great idea, Meg,’ Issie says from the cockpit. ‘Well done, you.’
For the first time since I jumped into this time, this place, I feel as if I have managed to get something right. Even if it was the ‘other’ me that did it.

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