‘I’ve probably got the Covid now, thanks to you. You can come and visit me in hospital on my deathbed.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right. But you feel OK, don’t you?’ Cheryl looked pale and shiny and my immediate instinct was to flee.
She shrugged.
‘OK,’ I said, reaching for her free hand – a hand she pulled away. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Is it over?’ she asked, speaking in smoke. ‘Because if it is then I’d rather just know.’
‘It?’ I asked, obtusely. ‘Is what over?’ I don’t know why I asked her that – I knew perfectly well what she was referring to.
‘Us,’ she said waving her cigarette around. ‘You and me. Is it over?’
‘Why d’you ask that?’ I said, buying time and maybe hoping just a bit that she was about to express her own desire to move on.
‘I haven’t seen you for months, we didn’t shag when I did see you, and you made me take the bloody train,’ she said. ‘And that’s just for starters.’
‘I told you, I had to bring a colleague with me,’ I said, which had been convenient but also true. We’d listened to Steve’s eighties pop all the way up the motorway and I’d thought about how much longer the journey would have been had the soundtrack been Adele or, heaven forbid, rap.
‘So nothing’s wrong?’ Cheryl said. ‘It’snotover?’ She neither looked nor sounded convinced.
Despite myself, I shrugged. It was an automatic reaction that came from my body rather than my brain and, as such, was maybe not entirely my fault.
‘Christ!’ Cheryl said. ‘Youtosser!’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, my words catching up with my body. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘Christ,’ Cheryl said again, her eyes wide and shiny – her tone suddenly sharp. ‘I thought you was just going to say “No, Ches, everything’s fine.” I really did. But no… You fucking fucker, you. Fuck!’
A lump formed in my throat. I admitted to myself that I didn’t want to be with her at that particular moment, and yet neither did I want to make her sad. I thought I could probably make her stay or make her leave depending on what I chose to say next, and I was damned if I knew which was best. The whole thing felt impossibly complicated.
I shrugged again. It was the gesture that had upset her so much first time round, and, ouch! without thinking I’d done it again. So in a way a decision had been made. A lazy, selfish, badly expressed decision, but a decision all the same.
Cheryl understood everything. She crushed her cigarette on the marble tabletop and stood up. ‘At least—’ she said, but then stopped and with a shake of her head she left the balcony.
I followed her into the bedroom, where she was pulling her still-packed suitcase from the closet.
‘Cheryl!’ I said. ‘Don’t just leave. Surely we need to talk, don’t we?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we do.’
‘At least what?’
‘What?’
‘You said, “at least” something,’ I reminded her.
‘At least I’m not fucking pregnant,’ she said. ‘Thank Christ at least for that.’
‘Please, just come back in and sit down and talk,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t do that. I’ve never done that.’
‘Done what?’ I asked. ‘Talk?’
She pulled on her coat before she replied. ‘I’ve never sat around waiting to be dumped,’ she said, looking not at me but at the window. ‘… not my thing. I’d rather quit while I’m ahead.’ And then she spun on one heel and left.
‘Cheryl!’ I said, as she vanished from view. But I could hear the weakness in my voice and I noted – as no doubt Cheryl did – that I hadn’t followed her into the hallway.
