The guilt.
The feeling of despair, of being trapped. Claustrophobia.
The longing for what I never knew existed until recently. The uncertainty was something I couldn’t bear, but had to endure.
One of the other dentists arrived and made me a cup of tea. He took the newly damaged BMW away to his mate’s garage and brought it back at lunch without a scratch on it, all for one hundred and fifty pounds.
If only the rest of my life could be sorted out so easily.
That night, I parked up at Southampton seafront overlooking the harbour and described my eventful encounter to John. I fully blamed him for my accident.
I’d become one of those ditzy lust-struck women with no rationale.
Once he ascertained I wasn’t hurt, he howled with convulsive snorting laughter. How I’d actually tried to go, not once, but twice. As an afterthought, he added seriously, ‘Remind me not to let you drive my car any time soon.’
Chapter Nine
SATURDAY 21ST JULY 2012
I hardly slept between excitement and fear of the alarm not going off. I stayed at Clara’s as it was easier to go from there than from my house. She made salmon and salad for dinner and we washed it down with a couple of glasses of white wine.
It was better than any therapy. She continuously asked me if I was sure of what I was doing. I wasn’t.
If I had to hear about the seven year itch one more time, I would crack up. If it was an itch, there was only one person who could scratch it, and no prizes for guessing who that would be.
In some ways though, it was comparable to an itch; I couldn’t escape it, and there was absolutely no relief from it.
There was no need for the alarm, I was up long before the crack of dawn. I dressed in dark blue jeans, a white vest and a navy blazer.
As I passed through airport security, a flicker of madness threatened to overwhelm me.
What if all of this was in my head?
What if I’d built him up to be something he wasn’t?
What if he was an axe murderer?
No. I was acting purely on gut instinct, and my gut urged me to go with this.
I boarded the Flybe propeller plane and put my headphones in, unable to face anyone talking to me. The butterflies in my tummy were very real. In an hour I would see John.
I closed my eyes, concentrated on regulating my breathing and tried to relax.
Things had been awful at home the past couple of weeks, all my own doing of course. Instead of ignoring the big wedge between myself and Rob, I’d since welcomed it, encouraged it even. Instead of trying to coax conversation out of him, I avoided him.
I felt cruel. It wasn’t in my nature; I didn’t want to be that person. He must have noticed the subtle changes, and I hated doing it, but I thought if I increased the already vast distance between us, when I did leave, he wouldn’t feel it as a loss as such. I wasn’t sure if that even made sense, but it was the only thing I could do that wasn’t drastic.
As soon as the wedding was over, I vowed to talk to him properly. But I didn’t want to spoil my brother's big day with any awkwardness. The wedding felt like a lifetime away, I just wanted to get it over with rather than spend every day dreading it, knowing how awkward and awful it would be.
I’d tried to rehearse in my head what I’d say to Rob, but I just couldn’t think of any way of putting it that would make it easier. The fact of the matter was that I wanted a divorce. And the sooner the better. In my mind we were already separated.
A part of me wondered whether he might secretly want a divorce too, now he had his passport, hence the complete and utter lack of effort for the last few years.
Or maybe this was what a normal relationship was to him. I honestly didn’t know.
The plane descended to a bumpy halt in Dublin, right on schedule. The sun shone hazily through the clouds; the temperature distinctly lower than it had been in Southampton.I ran my fingers through my long dark hair and sent up a silent thanks to whoever was up there looking down on us that it wasn’t raining.
We disembarked the plane and I merged into the swarm of passengers exiting through passport control. Hard to believe I was actually in Ireland. Last time I’d been here with the girls, we’d taken in the usual tourist sites; Stephens Green, The Guinness Factory and The Open-Top Bus Tour.
