Naomi stands back, not moving her eyes from me as I walk to the security gate. I keep stealing glances at her, but she is motionless, arms tightly folded. I think of her getting back into her car, and back to her life, to Stevie and Ted and Alice and the big kitchen island. I get through the security, wondering if my nuclear shame will set the X-ray alarm off. I take my handbag from the tray and keep walking until she is no longer in my eyeline.
All around me, people march in great strides, excited to get to their next destination. I wait in front of the board, seeing that the London flight leaves from Gate 23. What’s going to meet me in London? I can’t bear the idea of calling Carrie or even Brigitte. Even the thoughts of seeing Johnny make me feel as though I’m being asked to ride into hell on horseback.
I pull out my phone and write an email to Violet. ‘You complete fucking bitch. What the hell did you go and do that for? Naomi is in pieces now.’
She could have really screwed things up for me back there, I hear my internal voice enunciate. I detect something in there as I keep walking through the airport, something resembling hope, and it feels counterintuitive.
Or, at the very least, I detect a lack of total resignation. My feet start to slow, and a new possibility, a thrilling one, forms in my mind. At first I try to bat it away, but tentatively, it grows.
Perhaps this can all be salvaged.
Maybe even without Naomi in the picture, I can impress Ted.Perhaps, in time, Naomi will thaw out if she sees we are a really good fit for each other and Ted is happy.
I reach the duty-free section, where I’m startled to see Alice’s face staring blankly at me from the MAC cosmetic stand. Seeing this makes something erupt in me. She just cannot have him.
I’m thrilled and sickened in equal measure as I hear myself ask a staffer for the exit. He looks at me quizzically, as though people don’t ever want to leave an airport from the way they came.
‘I left my wallet in my friend’s car. She’s pulling up in a few minutes.’ I show him the London ticket, hoping it’s enough to assure him that I’m in fact leaving.
‘You’ll have to go through security all over again, ma’am,’ he warns. ‘Do you have enough time to do that before your flight?’
‘I absolutely do,’ I assure him. He guides me through a series of corridors until I see the main arrivals concourse. It’s a very different feeling to the moment I walked through the airport with Jodie only a few months ago. Keeping an eye out for Naomi, I head straight to the taxi rank.
‘Can you take me to any mid-priced hotel that’s near the Bathurst Street area?’ I ask the driver. From the back of the car, I google ‘how to retrieve a suitcase if you don’t get on an international flight’.
27
The fizzing, apprehensive feeling from last night has cleared and has made way for something cold and grey. For the last hour I have tried to distract myself in the hotel with shitty local TV news and the minibar. I fiddle with the trouser press, for want of something to do. I put the bathrobe and slippers on and sink into the queen-sized bed, as though this is any other nice mini-break.
Ignoring those from people in my old life– Johnny, Carrie, Mum– I check my recent emails. I had messaged Jodie on Facebook after a few gins the night before, hoping that I might be able to sleep on her couch for a day or two until I find my feet. I never responded to Elliott’s original message– I’m not exactly in a position to start asking him about sofa-surfing.
‘Hey! I’m out west until the end of the month,’ Jodie replies. ‘Sorreeeee.’
‘Does anyone you know have a spare key to your place or anything? Like a neighbour maybe?’
To this, she doesn’t bother replying. I try and self-soothe by imagining Ted’s form lying next to me on the hotel’s 4,000-thread-count sheets.
‘Do you think she will ever forgive me?’ I can hear myself asking Ted, tearful and afraid at how I have taken a blowtorch to my friendship with Naomi.
‘I think she’ll come around, eventually,’ he will say. ‘Probably not for a while, though. Let’s stay out of her way for now.’
‘I know, it’s just that…’ –and Ted will pull me closer and laugh, knowing innately what I am about to say– ‘drastic times call for drastic measures.’
‘I know. I’m actually quite flattered,’ he will say. ‘No one’s ever gone to those kinds of lengths for me before.’
‘Well, it was worth it,’ I’ll tell him. ‘I’d do it all over again, a thousand times.’
I open my phone and search for Ted Levy all over the city, hoping that someone on Twitter has mentioned bumping into him. And lo, there’s a tweet from a random guy, Ray, who has bumped into Ted in Bambi’s on Dundas, an hour ago. The selfie is like a kick to the face: the lighting is all wrong and washed out, Ted looking uncomfortable as he gives the smallest amount of animation required so as not to come off as aloof. I look at Ray’s arm and how close it is to Ted’s. Jealousy pounds through me. I’m jealous of an arm. A random stranger’s arm.
Mainly because I have one outfit and am waiting on a suitcase to materialize, I decide to stay put, even though doing so makes me physically ache with longing and helplessness.
As Conan O’Brien drones on in the background, a curious thought begins to settle just over my head. I feel that I need to give myself a stern talking-to about all of this. I have already hurt Naomi, incredibly deeply. Johnny is hurting somewhere, too. I’m starting to hate the idea of wanting Ted Levy, as it’s brought me nothing but misery. The feeling of want is barely distinguishable from the feeling of sadness. And out of nowhere, I’m reminded of Lar Fucking Donovan. Of course I am.
Lar Fucking Donovan, to give him his semi-official title, lands in my life at the age of fifteen, almost a year after coming home with the Body Shop bag. Instead of taking the awfulness and chaos to the grave with him as I thought he might, my father has left behind the sort of chasm that feels like the beginning of an illness. The silence in the house is somehow booming off the walls; more so than the other stuff.
Lar stands next to me at an all-ages gig in Temple Bar, and even at sixteen his aquiline nose and amber eyes set him apart. I drink in his beauty, otherworldly in my eyes. During a pogo, he stands on my foot, belching out a quick ‘sorry’ from behind his curtain fringe.I could stand to love you for all time, I think to myself. Later, I walk out of the venue, fall on to the cobbles of Temple Bar and tell my friends that I’ve had a two-hour orgasm, unversed though I was in such things.
Someone eventually tells me that he is Lar Fucking Donovan, not heaven-sent but from Tullamore. Before long, the crush swells until Lar is an outsized presence in my life; no longer a human boy but what feels like the entire sky over my world. It feels like a colossus of a thing, as I let go of the reins and let my desire overpower me. I can already see my unborn children, with dimples and amber eyes.
