Messy, Wonderful Us Read online

I still recall the intensity in his eyes on the day he told me about Julia. The way he spoke about her, the mystery of her, was almost poetic. It was as if, by stepping into his life she had shone a bright and beautiful light upon him. He was captivated, incredulous at his luck.

  ‘I’m convinced that the problem is not with his marriage, but with himself,’ she continues, forcing herself to take on a practical tone. ‘I truly believe he simply needs to learn to love himself again. To not take on the burden of so much work. But I don’t know how he’s going to do that. Not when he’s moved into Jeremy’s flat.’

  I feel my lips part. ‘He’s moved in with Jeremy?’

  ‘I got home from work tonight and he told me he needed space to think. He packed his bags and he’s there now.’

  ‘Now I really don’t believe it.’

  I notice for the first time that her hands are trembling. ‘Do you think I’ve lost him, Allie?’ she asks.

  The truth is, I don’t know what to think. I don’t understand any of it. ‘You can’t have, Julia. Look, I don’t know what’s going on with Ed at the moment, but I do know he loves you.’

  ‘I feel as though he wanted this perfect woman. Then he quickly realised that I’m not perfect and I never could be. Now he feels robbed.’

  In the ensuing moments of silence, I notice a shift, not just in her position, but her entire demeanour. She leans forward on the sofa, as if everything she’s told me has been building up to one question.

  ‘Will you talk to him for me, Allie?’

  My ribs tense. ‘Me?’

  She nods, her eyes fixed on me. ‘Please. Nobody is closer to him than you. I truly think you’re the only person capable of getting through to him.’

  Chapter 13

  It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when I met Ed because I knew of him long before we actually came into contact. His family swept into school one golden September, arriving with the crunch of leaves and the glare of chilly sunshine. Ed was eight and one of four; his brother Mike was in the year above us and they had two little sisters, Michelle and Kim, aged four and two.

  Until then, juniors had felt small and uneventful, with little to disturb the ebb and flow of harvest festivals, spelling tests and British Bulldog. We didn’t see much of his dad at first, but his mum, an Avon lady, added a rare touch of glamour to the school gates, where she’d wait with her beauty queen hair and frosted lipstick, radiating Skin So Soft.

  Despite being in the same year, Ed and I were not drawn to one another in any way. I was conscientious and hardworking. Ed was not. He didn’t need to be. He was a child with an unequalled memory and hunger for information that appeared unsated by the national curriculum. The books in the school library, aimed at our age group, failed to hold his attention and he was bored by the work taught in maths and English classes. He was often in trouble, out of bounds or bending the rules, which unsettled me, long before I entered secondary school and I felt that way about virtually everything.

  I started my first year at Cherryfield Community Comprehensive having lost all my friends. I’d been separated from the small group of girls with whom I’d learnt to jump rope and play rounders, after they won places at a highly regarded, oversubscribed Church school. This hadn’t been an option for me: after Mum died, Dad quietly became an atheist, so there was no way we’d have fulfilled the school criteria – having a parent with five years of church attendance behind them.

  So I ended up at Cherryfield, a sprawling and undistinguished institution that had received a boost in spending in a bid to improve student attainment and reduce expulsions. Five years later, it had some impressive facilities and had produced two trampolining contenders at the Commonwealth Games, but no great rise in exam results. All in all, it felt like a strange and dangerous city, in which I was entirely lost.

  Puberty didn’t help. I was surrounded by girls experiencing the more glamorous elements of adolescence – sprouting breasts, starting periods – whereas I just developed a chin pebble-dashed with acne. I didn’t want to discuss these changes, current or pending, with either Dad or Grandma Peggy, despite their excruciating efforts. There are some things you just don’t want to talk about, and the fact that everyone around me was changing at a rate I couldn’t keep up with was one of them.

  Still, I eventually made a friend. Gail was an aspiring beautician with an electrifying home perm and who carried an inhaler, not for medical reasons, but because she said it made her ‘get high’. I was so relieved to finally have someone to hang round with that I became a willing subject for the fake-tanning experimentations she inflicted on me at every sleepover.

  We weren’t what you’d call kindred spirits though. One afternoon I caught her looking at the bookshelf in my bedroom, her eyes narrow and wary. I had a large collection of novels, some gifts, some from the charity shop, the odd one – such as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase – that had been on loan from the library forever.

  ‘All these books clutter the place up,’ Gail told me, a curl appearing on her top lip. ‘You want to get rid of them and go for a minimalist look. That’s what my salon’s going to be – minimalist. White walls. White chairs. White . . . bog paper.’

  I noticed, to my alarm, that she’d taken A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engel from the shelf. She flicked it open with a crunch of its delicate spine, and the pages splayed open like a rolodex.

  ‘You wouldn’t be interested in that,’ I said, prising it from her, before folding my hands tightly around it and clutching it to my chest.

  The book had belonged to my mother. Grandma Peggy told me that she used to read it under the necklace of apple trees at the bottom of their garden. I’d read it so many times I could’ve recited it from cover to cover. The knowledge that my mother’s fingers had turned the same pages as mine, her eyes had fallen on the same words, used to leave me with the most wondrous feeling, like I was swimming in a pool of warm, silky water.

  This was more than sentimentality. It was a genuinely brilliant book, with a main character, Meg, who I’d idolised. When I was really young I’d liked to imagine that, had my mum still been around, our family would’ve been just like hers – with a beautiful scientist mother with whom I’d go on adventures through time and space in search of the Tesseract or similar threats to humanity.

  It’s little wonder really that it took me a while to find my feet at school. And at Cherryfield, if you were clever, the last thing you wanted to do was shout about it. This left me in the tricky position of desperately wanting to achieve, but having to do so as inconspicuously as possible. I’d deliberately keep my hand down in class even when I knew the answers. I’d hide my exercise books, glowing with secret pleasure when I opened them and found an A plus inside. But everything changed when I was moved up to the top set in science, and found myself seated next to Ed.

  He smelled of boy, though not in the same way the others did, that rot of ripening boxer shorts. His boy smell wasn’t unpleasant, but dry and warm, almost like biscuits when he hadn’t overdone the Lynx. Paradoxically, the fact that he smelled nice was one of many reasons I was more comfortable around Gail, even when she was cackling an anecdote about her mum’s friend’s breast implants exploding on a flight to Bulgaria. I also hadn’t forgotten the trouble he’d got in at primary school. That put me on edge. Because, for all that I was desperate to fit in with the other kids – I was a natural-born conformist who rarely challenged authority – my overriding desire was to work hard and do well academically.

  We barely spoke for the first few lessons – simply sat side by side, tolerating each other’s presence. So when I took my place behind the desk in preparation for biology one afternoon, I was surprised when he said: ‘Is this the lesson when we have to dissect a frog?’

  I registered a sheen of perspiration on his skin and how his complexion looked white and waxy.

  ‘I think so,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Well . . . I . . . ugh.’

  I turned my head to the front of the class a
nd pretended not to have heard him. But I became aware that he was swaying.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ I whispered.

  ‘I just . . . might have a problem with this.’ He grasped the edge of the table to steady himself and his knuckles whitened.

  ‘Not as much of a problem as the frog.’ I grinned hopefully, but my wit fell on deaf ears. ‘Seriously, are you okay?’

  He nodded tightly.

  ‘If you don’t feel up to it I’m sure they’ll let you off,’ I suggested.

  But he turned to look at me in a way that made one thing absolutely clear. He was not the kind of kid to just give up. ‘I’m fine.’

  He wasn’t fine. But he did go through with the exercise. It was only when the teacher instructed the class to open the stomach to see what the frog last ate that it all became too much. He began swaying again and a rivulet of sweat made its way down his temple. I could hear my own heart racing through my ears and I glanced up, realising that Mr Kegg’s back was turned.

  Ed puffed out his cheeks, closed his eyes and the scalpel fell out of his hands onto the table.

  I checked Mr Kegg again, picked up the scalpel and made the incision.

  I nudged Ed and he opened his eyes. Then I placed the scalpel back in his hands as he looked at me in silent disbelief, as Mr Kegg appeared and said: ‘Well done, Edward.’

  Chapter 14

  I discover from the address Julia gave me that Jeremy’s flat is in an exclusive development in the city centre, a giant, mirrored totem pole of superpads that rises up into the sky. When they first went on sale, the local press made much of their eye-watering price tags, the roof terraces and walk-in wardrobes, providing a glut of publicity that the developers must have loved. The seductive message was clear: this is not just an apartment for sale, it’s a statement. But statements don’t always have the desired effect and I’ve never been able to walk past them without thinking of a balding man in a lipstick-red Ferrari.

  The thought that Ed has fled to Jeremy in his moment of crisis, as opposed to me, his oldest friend, sits like a blister on my pride as I drive through torrential rain and try to work out where to park my car. I could’ve understood if it had been his friends Aaryan or Charlie, both of whom are married with kids and therefore at least qualified to discuss what’s wrong. Ed seems to like Jeremy, but I can’t look at him without recalling his excruciating attempts to chat up a waitress at his wedding, when it was patently clear that all she wanted to give him was a teriyaki beef skewer. If he’s a better confidante than me, I really must be bad.

  It takes me twenty minutes to find a parking space, followed by a short walk through plastering rain and hardy party-goers refusing to let the biblical weather ruin a Saturday night. I announce myself to the twenty-four-hour concierge, who invites me to stand in a gleaming lift, where I drip on the floor until I reach the penthouse with a small lake under my feet.

  Ed opens the door and I step in, shaking myself off as I remove my coat. ‘Hello there,’ I say tentatively, hanging it on the rack.

  ‘Hi,’ he replies.

  The apartment is large and unforgivingly masculine, a showroom of polished surfaces and contemporary everything. I follow Ed to the sofa and sit opposite him on a marmalade orange chair, an angular construction that looks as though it’s designed to be installed in The Tate rather than actually sat on. As I silently scrutinise him, my first instinct is that he seems fine. But there is something behind his eyes that makes me question the integrity of that word. When does fine ever really mean fine?

  ‘Do you want to talk?’

  The sentence does not come easily to me. It never has. Yet I’ve never been more acutely aware of my failing than tonight. He leans back on the sofa, pressing his neck against the cushion.

  ‘Julia told me that you’re thinking of leaving her,’ I continue. ‘She wanted me to come and speak to you. If I’d known any of this was going on, I would have . . .’ But the truth is I don’t know what I would’ve done.

  He doesn’t respond.

  ‘Clearly, it’s up you whether you want me to push off and mind my own business.’ I glance at the window, the rain snaking down the glass. ‘Although it’d be good if you didn’t throw me out in this.’ The sentence begins as a laugh but barely gets started.

  A clock chimes somewhere. A flash of lightning illuminates the sky. I hear voices in the corridor outside, that quickly fall silent.

  ‘Should I go? I should, I think. Yes, I’ll go,’ I decide. I stand up and walk over to collect my soggy coat, slowly in case he changes his mind. I pick it up and drape it over my arm, turning around. ‘I hope you’re all right, Ed.’

  I have my back to him again and my hand on the door latch when he speaks.

  ‘Don’t go, Allie.’ I swallow and return my coat to the rack, before making my way back to the orange chair. He raises his eyes to me. ‘Sorry.’ His voice sounds dry and raw.

  ‘No worries.’ I smile, hopeful that it’s somehow catching. ‘You can talk to me, though.’

  He nods. ‘Thanks. But I’m fine, honestly.’

  ‘I know I’m not usually . . . good at this sort of stuff. But I want you to know that I’m here for you, Ed. Whenever you want. I’m off on my trip to Italy in the morning, but you can phone me at any time of the day and night while I’m there. Well, after ten would be ideal obviously . . .’ The joke does not raise a smile.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I cross my legs and try to settle my hands on my lap, but no position feels comfortable. ‘It might help you to try and talk now. How do you feel?’

  He shifts forward, elbows on his knees. ‘Like shit.’

  That, it appears, is that.

  ‘Listen, Ed,’ I continue gently. ‘Julia told me you’re under pressure at work. It happens to the best of us. Even you.’

  ‘It’s not about work. It’s about me and Julia. Things aren’t . . . like they were at the beginning.’

  ‘But what made you think they would be?’

  He shrugs. ‘Perhaps I didn’t mean that. Things just aren’t working between us right now.’

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘I don’t fully know the answer to that, Allie. And I don’t know how to make it right. That’s why I’m here.’

  I glance around the place, at the geometric wallpaper and glossy black kitchen units. ‘Do you really think Jeremy might be able to offer you clarity on this?’

  ‘He’s in Chicago. He’s letting me stay while he’s away.’

  This is at least a small relief. I try to think of something wise and useful to say. ‘Ed, relationships change. It’s surely normal that feelings in the first flush of love aren’t as intense after a few years. But you’ve got other exciting things on the horizon. Kids, for one thing. It won’t be long for the two of you, I’m sure.’

  Ed has always seen himself as a family man. Even in the days when he had an inexhaustible supply of girlfriends, he’d liked to think that wasn’t the most authentic version of himself. What he really wants is to live in a house full of kids and dogs and books and, above all, love. Something he had in spades as he grew up. Yet here he is, about to throw it all away because ‘things aren’t like they were in the beginning’. It seems so illogical.

  ‘Even the strongest relationships have patches of trouble,’ I argue. ‘Especially when you’re under stress. But, Ed, you don’t just bail at the first sign that things aren’t perfect.’

  ‘I know, Allie. That’s why I’m not sure what to do.’

  ‘You still love her, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

  My heart clenches, followed by a wave of desperation to say and do the right thing. ‘If you love her, Ed, you need to keep hold of her. Fight for her. You’ve probably given the poor woman the shock of her life by saying you are leaving.’

  ‘I said I needed some time to think, that’s all. And I do.’

  My mind turns to Jeremy returning from Chicago. I have a hideous thought that his strategy t
o ‘help’ Ed will probably involve taking him out on the pull. ‘When’s Casanova back?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Then you definitely need to go home.’ I smile, but I mean it. ‘What are you going to do otherwise? Where are you going to go?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know yet.’

  ‘You could always stay at my place while I’m away. That’d be better than checking yourself into a hotel. We don’t want you turning into Alan Partridge.’ I realise from his reaction, or lack of, that my attempts to cheer him up by joking are not working, but I still can’t stop myself. ‘Well, the only other option is that I put you in my suitcase and take you to Italy with me, but frankly I had to sit on it to get the zip up as it is.’

  He looks up and blinks, his blue eyes settling on me. ‘I could always get a flight though.’

  I feel my chest brace. ‘I was only joking, Ed.’

  ‘I know. I could though.’

  I shake my head. ‘No. Absolutely not. You couldn’t do that.’

  ‘But why?’ He is now more certain, more animated than I’ve seen him since I got here. ‘I speak Italian. You’d have someone with you to support you on your search for this Stefano guy. That’s not something you should be doing on your own anyway. Besides, who the hell wants to go on holiday alone?’

  ‘It’s not a holiday.’

  ‘Whatever, Allie. I should come. I definitely should come.’

  ‘You definitely shouldn’t. What would Julia think? It looks terrible.’ Whatever is going on between him and Julia, I know he wouldn’t want to humiliate her. He contemplates this for a second, long enough for me to assume I’ve persuaded him of the madness of his idea.

  ‘How about this then,’ he says finally. ‘I’ll speak to Julia and explain why I need to get away and have a little time to think. I’ll promise her that when I return she’ll have a straight answer about our future. One I haven’t been able to give her so far.’

  ‘What if she says she wants you to stay and make that decision here?’

  ‘I don’t know, Allie. Under the circumstances I think, or at least hope, that she’ll understand where I’m coming from.’