Hand On Heart: Sequel to Head Over Heels (28 page)

He'd ended their two years together only recently, by marching into the café where she was working and joining the queue to be served.  When his turn had come, as well as ordering something pretentious along the lines of a 'Caffé Mocha with a vanilla shot and an almond croissant,' in his fake-posh bankerish voice, (only she knew it was fake) he had announced to her – and anyone else who happened to be listening, which at that time of the morning amounted to quite a few – that things between them had just become 'too tricky' and he was cutting his losses and moving on.  Oh, and by the way, he had found someone else as well.  He would call round to her place that evening and collect the few possessions he kept there and return her key, he informed her.  Oh, and another by-the-way, he had never liked cats.

To start with Phoebe was flummoxed and had blushed to her roots.  But just before she died of embarrassment, rage kicked in and took its place.  To give full credit to her few acting and ad-libbing abilities, she had been able to laugh in the face of potential ridicule, throwing the whole thing back at Marcus by coming out with a perfectly timed delivery:

'Sorry, who did you say you were?  Have we met before?'  Marty would have been so proud of her, she thought.  Then she really got into the swing of things:

‘Oh, yeah, I sort of remember you now,’ she went on, pretending to contemplate Marcus’ identity, hand on hips, lips pursed and a puzzled frown creasing her brow.  She wondered where on earth this sudden strength had come from, but whatever super-power was enabling her to behave like this, it had been well and truly unleashed and she wasn’t able to stop it now. 

‘Weren’t you that guy with the really small dick and those horrible pink Y-fronts?  Yeah, I know you!  Oh God, completely USELESS in bed, you were.  Couldn’t satisfy a flea, you couldn’t.’  She guffawed loudly, slapping the counter, and noticed she had not just Marcus’ full (and horrified) attention, but that the entire queue was transfixed, waiting to see what she would say next.  ‘Call yourself a BANKER, you’re just laughable, a complete and utter WA……..’ 

Before Phoebe could finish her sentence, Marcus put up his hand to stop her.  Deep pink with embarrassment, he muttered something nonsensical, threw his money down on the counter and grabbed his breakfast, which somehow Phoebe must have prepared – on autopilot – during her tirade.  He cast Phoebe a scathing backwards glance and left the shop quickly. 

As the door closed behind him a man in the queue, a regular customer, shouted ‘Well done, Phoebe,’ which was followed by an almighty round of applause.  Phoebe took a bow. 

Phoebe had managed to hold it together and finish serving the breakfast rush before disappearing out the back and having the total breakdown she had managed to avert in public.  She gripped the work surface for support, tears coursing down her cheeks, but surprisingly, what she felt was one hundred per cent anger – there was no sadness at all, no grieving for the end of a relationship.  How dare he!  She had to admit, back home later that evening, that actually she wasn't all that bothered that Marcus was now a thing of the past.  There was a sudden realisation that it had hardly been a blissful affair, and singledom seemed quite appealing in the face of that.  The only thing that bugged her about the whole incident that morning was that, had she not reacted as quickly as she did, he could have made a total fool of her in front of all those people.  And that she would have hated.

She hadn't wanted to face Marcus when he came round to get his things, so she had boxed up the few meagre possessions that he'd deigned to leave at her place on the couple of nights a week he spent with her.  Several sets of underwear, a couple of jumpers, a novel and some artsy self-improvement manual, a fairly rank toothbrush, a CD or two – that was pretty much all there was to show for two years together.  She hardly every stayed over at his place so she knew he wouldn't have a similar box of her stuff; if he did, then she could live without it.

She left the box in front of the door to her flat and listened out when he arrived, waiting to see if he would knock or not.  She could almost hear his fist hovering in mid-air for a few seconds before he bent to pick up the box, deciding against seeing Phoebe for one last time.  There was a clink as he dropped his key through the letterbox, and she exhaled with relief as she heard his footsteps retreating down the hall. 

Phoebe hoped that box would sit in Marcus' flat for a few weeks before he bothered to unpack it.  Right at the bottom she had put in a little present from Arnie – one of his finest poops, freshly scooped from his litter tray and bagged up as a special parting gift.  She'd teach him to say he'd never liked cats.  She giggled as she imagined his reaction when he eventually found it.

Good effort, Phoebe-human.  That bloke was a tosser,
Arnie purred from his position of comfort on the sofa, reaching out a soft paw to touch her leg.

Two weeks later, Phoebe couldn't help the immense satisfaction she felt on hearing on the grapevine that Marcus had lost his job in the latest round of the bank's redundancy programme.  Apparently he'd been marched from the premises with his few pathetic possessions in a cardboard box.  Another box, another parting.  No cat poop this time, though, probably. 

Boy, what she would have given to have been there to see the look on his face. 
What goes around comes around, Marcus
, she'd thought.

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