For five solid hours I stood, or sat on my rucksack, or walked backwards and forwards looking for her. She never showed. As the night wore on I got more and more cold and weary. I drank the bottle of Coke I’d brought, and ate the corned beef sandwiches I’d made for us, and minute by minute and hour by hour I started to give up hope.
She must have been caught, I decided. She must have been found out, and locked in a turret like Rapunzel. That was the only possible explanation – because I knew she loved me. I knew she wouldn’t do this to me.
I knew that right until the moment that my dad drew up in his Ford Mondeo, winding the window down and eyeing me sadly. I was crumpled in a heap on the pavement by that point, pale and shaky and confused. A few people had asked if they could help, and some had even offered me money – I was looking that good.
‘Get in, boyo,’ he’d said. ‘She’s not coming, son. She came round to ours a bit ago to tell us. Said she couldn’t face you herself.’
I’d just stared at him, disbelieving. I looked at my phone. Nothing. It couldn’t be true, could it?No.She wouldn’t.
I was too exhausted to argue though. Whatever had happened, the plan clearly wasn’t going ahead. I climbed into the car, and my dad took me home. I was silent on the way back, still trying to piece it all together, still not accepting that she wasn’t coming. My mam took one look at me when I walked into the kitchen, and wrapped me up in her arms. I was a good foot taller than her even then, but she still had a way of seeming huge. She’d given me a ferocious hug, then pushed me away, patting my cold cheeks.
‘She doesn’t want ye, Rory. She’s off to college in September, she says. Didn’t have the heart to break it to you, and she’d beenhoping you’d get the message. Says she hadn’t been in touch for a bit, trying to let you down gently, so she was.’
I’d cried then. I’d finally started to believe it. It was true, she hadn’t been communicating as much as usual, and we hadn’t managed to see each other properly for over a week. That’s why I was so convinced she’d turn up – surely she felt the same as I did? That I couldn’t live without her? That she was my moon and my stars, the very air I breathed?
‘Come on now, it’s not the end of the world,’ my mother had said, settling me at the kitchen table while she made one of her never-ending mugs of tea. ‘And we’ve got some news for you, too…’
The news was that we were moving back to Ireland. I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was speak to Jane, but she disappeared off the face of the earth. She was ‘on holiday’, according to my folks, but it was a holiday that lasted for weeks. She didn’t answer her phone, never responded to messages, completely vanished from my life. I used to go to her house and sit outside it for hours on end, in the hopes that I’d see some sign of life. That Rapunzel would let down her hair, that my Juliet would appear on her balcony, that she would come back and make me whole again.
Eventually one of their neighbours told me they’d gone away to France, where her mum had family. I was sorely tempted to follow her, to get a ferry to Calais and spend years wandering around that huge country in search of her. I might have done in time, but events overtook me. My dad’s job started, and off to Dublin we went. Once I was there I suppose I finally started to let go, taking solace in wild nights and new girls and smoking joints. If my parents had hoped splitting up from Jane would result in a calmer, more malleable son, they were sadly mistaken. I was howling at an unfair and empty world.
Even now, sitting here in my comfortable living room in a place I’ve come to love, I can feel the burn of that hurt. The sense of abandonment, the anger, the confusion. The sheer injustice of it all. Eighteen years old and broken, already cynical and jaded, convinced that love could lead only to weakness, to pain, to loss. It was a harsh lesson, learned early, and one that I have carried with me into my forties. One that was taught to me by the tearful woman now sitting a few feet away.
But Jane seems genuinely distraught, genuinely confused. She seems to actually believe that I’m the one who ended things between us. Like her, I have no clue what’s happening here.
‘Jane,’ I say as gently as I can. ‘I waited for you at the station, like we planned. All night. You never showed up, because you decided it was over, that you were going to university instead. You didn’t even have the decency to tell me face to face, you snuck around behind my back and dumped me via my parents! Then you took off, disappeared from my life. How can you possibly see that as me ending things?’
Her mouth falls open, and I swear to God if she wasn’t sitting down she’d have fallen. Her face goes deathly pale, and she grips the armrests of the chair as though she’s anchoring herself down.
‘No, Rory,’ she murmurs, gazing at me with those huge eyes, the ones that always undid me. I try to look away, find that I can’t – that once again, I am bewitched. ‘That’s not what happened at all…’
TEN
JANE
This whole night has been a complete head fuck. I don’t usually swear, even in my own mind, but there really is no other phrase for it.
First seeing Rory, and being whisked away to his lair. The outright shock and trauma of being confronted with him again, and the borderline fear I’d felt when we were first alone on the landing. Rory was always a gentle soul, but right then, as he blocked me from going into my room, I saw a different side to him. Green eyes blazing, nostrils flaring, a quiet and grim determination in his voice.
By the time I pulled myself together and came downstairs, creeping past Beth’s room and taking heart from her laughter, there was no sight of him. I’d wandered around, and seen that picture – the one of him and Angus on the deck of theJuliet.
That threw me for six, and by the time we started talking I felt like my heart was going to explode. I sat there, sinking into that chair, drinking that perfect tea. How did he even know how I took it? Still, though, I felt sick as I drank. As I listened to his words, feeling the sting of his implied insults, the stark difference between us. He could be a pin-up on a Hot ArtistCalendar, his body all lean muscle from his work, his eyes alive with the forest, his wide lips full of promise.
Me? Well, as he’d pointed out, I was ‘just’ – just me. Just plain old Jane, project manager to a boring business, mother to an irritable teen, commander of nothing but her Deliveroo account. It’s like Maximus’s speech inGladiatorfilled in with the mundane.
And then, it all got even worse. Even stranger. I had no clue why he was so annoyed with me, no clue why he was fizzing with barely controlled anger. He seemed so self-righteous, so convinced that he deserved something from me. In my mind, all he deserved from me was a slap across the face – so why was he so upset? It was like we’d switched roles somehow. Was he mad because I’ve turned up on his territory and somehow soured things for him?
Nothing is clear, including my brain. My skull is stuffed with cotton wool and scorpions. As he explains, as he tells me that he waited for me, that I dumped him ‘via his parents’, I am completely struck dumb. Has he rewritten history over the intervening years? Is this the story he’s told himself, the legend he has created to ease his guilt? Or am I going crazy? That is definitely a possibility, I think, grabbing hold of the arms of the chair and digging my nails into the padded upholstery. I need something real to ground me, because none of this makes sense. None of this has any substance. If I don’t hold on I might float away, and appear in Beth’s bedroom like Banquo’s ghost.
‘What do you mean, that’s not what happened?’ he snaps, voice low but somehow still a yell. ‘I was there, Jane. I was there outside the station, all night long. You’d been round to mine, and told my mum and dad that you were ending things. That you wanted to go to uni instead. And then you went to France, and I never heard from you again.’
I stare at him, trying to process what he’s saying. The individual words make sense, but their meaning does not – none of it is true. Except France. I did go to France, but I had zero choice in the matter – my parents insisted, and I had no energy to fight them by then. No will left to try and defy their wishes, not without Rory. There didn’t seem much point, to that or to anything at all.
I take a few deep breaths, and drink some more tea. It’s now lukewarm and disgusting, but I think I probably need the sugar. I look up at Rory, and rally my thoughts. He is as upset as I am.
‘Okay. If you say you were there, I believe you – but I still don’t understand, Rory. You messaged me and said you’d changed your mind. You sent me a big long text saying you couldn’t go through with it – that you loved me, but it would be a huge mistake. You told me… you told me you didn’t want to see me any more. That it would be best for both of us if we broke up.’
‘No. No I didn’t. I would never. Shit. I’m getting the whisky…’
