She doesn’t deserve to be treated like this. She deserves the very best of me and I can’t give her that. I certainly can’t give her any more than thatnow. What the hell have I been doing, playing with her emotions like this?
‘There you are!’ says a nurse, who was with us earlier. I look up at her. ‘Ah, it’s been a really big day for you, Daddy-to-be! Your wife is ready now. She’s asking for you.’
I jump up.
‘She’s not my wife. We’re not married,’ I tell the lady, who looks at me as if I’m a prize moron for feeling the need to correct her. ‘Sorry. Sorry, yes, it’s been an emotional day for sure. I’ll go and see Lesley now.’
MAY 2009
12.
KATE
‘Why are you not at work?’
I wake up to see Sinead at the bottom of my bed, two cups of coffee in her hand and what looks like a flapjack wrapped in plastic between her teeth. She sets the coffee down on my bedside locker, opens the flapjack and offers me half but I shake my head. The very notion of food right now is enough to me make me nauseous, plus I’ve barely woken up yet after a disastrous sleep full of dreams where I was lost and couldn’t find what I was looking for.
‘I’d booked the day off in advance to be here with you, lady,’ Sinead tells me. ‘There’s no way I was letting you stew here on your own today, crying into your pillow. Come on. Get up and we’ll do something nice. It’s a gorgeous day outside. Shit, you probably don’t really care if it is, do you? In fact, the sun shining probably makes it even more unfair.’
It’s David and Lesley’s wedding day – a day that I’ve been dreading for so long – and even though David and Ideliberately haven’t been talking as much as we used to over the past couple of weeks, the countdown to the big day has slowly chipped away at me as I come to terms with the fact that I was much more dependent on his calls and his friendship than I ever should have been.
‘Thank you. You’re a sweetheart,’ I tell Sinead, as I try and peel myself off the bed. ‘In hindsight I really should have made sure I was on the rota today for work instead, but I’d booked it off ages ago on the slim chance that I might have been invited to the wedding. How naive can I possibly be?’
Sinead shoots me a look with a raised eyebrow.
‘And you’re telling me you’d have gone if they’d invited you?’ she asks, munching a mouthful of her convenience breakfast. ‘You mean you could have actually stomached watching him kiss her and say, “I do”? Sorry, I didn’t mean to put that image in your head, but you know what I mean.’
My stomach churns at the thought.
‘No,’ I tell her simply, ‘There’s no way I would have gone, but a few months ago I seemed to think I could have.’
No matter how much I try to erase it from my head, the image of David in his sharp navy suit today, watching his bride walk up the aisle towards him, has kept me up most of the night, and to be honest it’s making me really nauseous.
‘We need to let go,’ I told him on a recent phone call. The wedding was approaching faster and faster once Easter had passed and May came around. With the baby comingalong now, everything had changed, and I needed to give us both some space. ‘You’re having a baby with your future wife. I can’t pretend to just fit in around all that.’
He protested and insisted we could keep our friendship going, just like I expected him to, but deep down I think he knew that we were growing way too close for comfort. My sister Mo was right. I was setting myself up for an almighty crash by growing so intensely close to someone who was never going to be mine in the way I’d secretly wished for.
He was like my crutch and I was his, so it was no wonder that when Lesley had a miscarriage just ten days ago, he called me during the night sobbing his heart out, and I coached him through it until I couldn’t take any more.
‘We can’t keep talking like this, David. It’s unfair on us both and it’s unfair on Lesley. You need to focus on your future with her. She needs you now more than ever.’
And so slowly over the past few weeks, apart from the night of the miscarriage when I couldn’t turn him away, I gradually learned that – no matter how much it pained me – it was for the best to deliberately ‘miss’ David’s calls. It was best to leave long gaps between his texts, to stagger the times I’d email him something I’d found online that I thought he’d find funny or of interest and, in an attempt to shield myself from the inevitable crash, I very, very slowly tried to wean myself off him, if only on the surface, as this dreaded day came around.
‘I don’t think that you and David Campbell will ever be able to stop orbiting each other,’ Sinead tells me as I nibble on a piece of toast downstairs when I finally do get up. We both sit in our cosy pyjamas, the sound of a lawnmower outside making it sound like a normal Saturday morning in May, even though it’s anything but normal to me as my heart is being torn to pieces inside. ‘You have a deep, unbreakable bond that no one else can touch, but if being in his life is going to cause you both this heartache, I think you’re right to step away totally, Kate.’
‘I know,’ I say, putting the toast down, its blandness doing nothing for me. The wedding is this afternoon, it’s just past nine in the morning and I’ve tried my best to message him good luck but I can’t just yet. ‘I’m trying to totally step away, I really am. I wish we could just be friends without it feeling so intense and so across the line. I wish I could just be happy for him getting married without it being a threat to our friendship, but I can’t.’
‘Are you in love with him, Kate?’ Sinead asks me, staring at me now so there’s no escape and no way to avoid her very direct question. ‘You can tell me the truth. There’s no need to deny it either to your own self or to me.’
I shrug and stare at the mantelpiece.
‘I … I know that I can talk to him more than I could any other man I’ve ever met.’
‘OK.’
‘He makes me feel like no one else has ever done, andI know we have some sort of magic between us,’ I say, unable to hide a smile as I recall some of our tender conversations. ‘We have a bond from ten years ago, yes, but it’s more than that, Sinead. The last time we met in person, we had the most wonderful time together. He tried to kiss me before he left and I really wanted him to but we stopped before we took it too far.’
‘OK,’ says Sinead again, her eyes wide like saucers.
