The Cupid Effect (20 page)

I'd only come in here to wee, I wasn't meant to be feeling any of this.

As it was, fate took matters out of my hands because the mystery woman suddenly burst into tears. Silent sobs, with plump tears that rained down onto the pregnancy test box, her face crumpled in pain, her whole body quivered. She held onto the basin with both hands, her blonde hair swinging back and forth as she cried and cried and cried her heart out.

Without a second thought, I went to her, put my arms around her and gently pulled her into a close hug.

‘I don't know what I'm going to do,' she sobbed.

Trudy stopped crying after a couple of minutes. Her nose still ran and she trembled in a way that meant she was just about controlling the tears. She'd managed to tell me her name as I steered her into a cubicle.

She took the wad of loo roll I offered her.

‘I'm a bit upset,' she offered in return for the loo roll. She dabbed at her wet eyes. ‘Just a bit upset.'

I was ‘just a bit upset' when an
Angel
episode finished.
This ain't ‘a bit' upset, baby
. I didn't say that, obviously. I leant back against the wall of the disabled cubicle, watched her sit hunched over on the loo.

‘Do you want to talk about it?' I said. ‘I mean, you can if you want. I'm a good listener. I've actually got an honorary degree in listening from the International University Of Auralogy.'

She said nothing.

That was meant to make her at least smile.

‘You don't have to if you don't want to, of course. We can stand and sit here in silence for as long as you want. I haven't got any more lectures today.'

Trudy ran a hand through her bobbed hair. ‘There's nothing to talk about. I'm getting what I deserve.' Then she ran her sleeve under her snotted nose, forgetting the loo roll in her hand.

‘What's that then?'

Her eyes flashed with venom at something. ‘You reap as you sow, isn't that what they teach you in school? You reap as you sow. You get what you deserve.'

I ransacked my memory but I couldn't find the exact point in time when that phrase entered my repertoire. Or when I started using it, but I doubt it came from school. ‘I went to a convent school, but I don't remember hearing that from there. I do know the phrase.'
It's entered my mind a few times with the types of things I hear.

‘Well it's what I'm living now.' Trudy paused, balled the tissue up in her fist a bit tighter. She looked me up and down as though I was wearing a nun's habit and I was about to start lecturing her on the Good Book. ‘I suppose you disapprove of me, you being a Catholic and me having this,' she raised the pregnancy kit packet, ‘but no wedding ring on show.'

‘I'm not exactly a virgin . . . um, I'm in no way a virgin and I'm not married either, so let she who is without sin and all that.'

Trudy's face turned. She suddenly became a vicious, poison-spitting demon. Her blue eyes narrowed to slits and her features became so contorted, they looked like they could actually reach out and punch me. ‘Do you sleep around? Do you sometimes wake up beside someone and not know his or her name? Do you hate yourself after every single time but can't stop yourself doing it anyway? Do you have to use one of these,' she lifted the box again, this time like a trophy, ‘and not know who the father might be?'

That would be no – to every single question. ‘Um . . .'

‘Didn't think so! So you can drop the “I'm down with your pain, sister” bit because you have no clue how I feel.'

Not exactly true. I had some clue how she felt. And I was only trying to help. I meant no harm. I was offering her an ear in a time of need. There was also, of course, that saying, something about hell and its lovely path constructed with good intentions.

‘In fact, why the fuck am I in here with you? Who the fuck are you? Just piss off, will you! PISS OFF!!'

I stood my ground. Not because I knew she didn't mean it; not because I wanted to reason with her. I was too shocked by her change in mood to do much else. Not the humour, so much as the suddenness of it; the severity. She'd gone from upset to brutal in 0.21 seconds. Naturally, I'd been told to ‘get lost' before. But never so forcefully – not by someone who didn't know me a lot better, anyway.

‘DIDN'T YOU HEAR ME?' Trudy bawled. ‘PISS OFF!'

I attempted a smile, to show her there were no hard feelings. There really were no hard feelings, on my part anyway. I was only doing what came naturally, and it wasn't me who was crying in the work loos. All right, that's not true. There were some hard feelings. Outrage pumped in my chest as I fumbled to slide back the lock and exited.

Outside, a woman with wet hands stood staring at the disabled loo. She double took as I came scurrying out, then she jumped as Trudy slammed and locked the loo door behind me.

I stood, frozen in time, immobilised by embarrassment. No one was meant to hear me being ordered to leave a cubicle. Ever. In the probability of life, the grand scheme of things, no one should hear you being ordered to leave anywhere, let alone a staff loo cubicle. The woman stared at me. I stared at the woman.

In a moment that Dali would've been proud of, I reached out, pulled a couple of blue tissues from the wall dispenser and handed them to her. Still staring me straight in the eye, she accepted the towels, said thank you and proceeded to dry her hands.

I wandered away, my work here was done.

chapter eighteen

Don't Listen

The thing with Trudy bothered me for days. No matter how hard I tried to forget it, it niggled at me. Not just in my quiet moments when I had nothing else to occupy my mind, even in my manic moments, like running for the bus; trying to find the right green olives in the supermarket; teaching. Even when I was sat in the library, reading journals, concentrating really hard, I was besieged by her.

It'd been a week, as well. A week when I should have been able to get her out of my head. And this wasn't a week to be trifled with. Seven short days in the future I had a meeting with my research supervisor. The professor who would assess how well I was doing, if my non-lecturing work was up to scratch, or if I was on a wild goose chase. And, ultimately, if I'd have to go back to London to pick up my life where I left off.

All the same, Trudy invaded my thoughts. It wasn't simply the ‘piss off' thing that replayed itself and replayed itself in my mind – that naturally smarted my pride – but, two Twix, one Crunchie and a packet of Doritos later, I was calm enough to see the funny side of it.

What kept drawing me back to Trudy, what made her a persistent ghost in my mind was the way she'd cried. How in an instant she'd fallen to pieces in the arms of a stranger. What she'd said about herself upset me too. What she did. How hard it must be for her to know what she was doing wasn't making her happy, but to keep doing it. To keep on keeping on, even when it was making her so unhappy she hated herself. She might've thrown it in my face, but I really was down with her pain. It hurt me as well. I'd experienced what she'd experienced as she wiped snot off her face with her sleeve; as she gripped the basin. I'd literally been tangled up in her aura of misery as sure as if I'd been her. Trudy was alone. And terrified. I'd felt that through her and it'd almost knocked me off my feet.

That
was nothing new.

Feeling through others, others feeling through me was nothing new. My version of that thing called empathy went beyond simple understanding. It was the actual feeling. The actual emotion. Like the time with Ed when I understood how he felt about Robyn. Like the night when I felt Mel was suicidal. Like the moment I understood how that dodgy man in the bar felt about Jess. And now this thing with Trudy. I understood how these people really felt because I felt it too. Their emotions jerked through me just as they jerked through them. Their emotions crushed or consumed or energised me as sure as they did to them. I felt others in a cloying cloud that seemed to descend then transport me to the midst of their souls, the very core of their hearts.

Before, these experiences were periodic, the occasional sensation. Like getting into a lift and suddenly being overpowered by morning sickness. Someone in there was pregnant and there was no chance whatsoever it was me. This person was keeping it a secret because she didn't know what to do yet, and how I knew it, I didn't know. I simply felt it.

Another time, I was sat on the tube, reading, when the page was splashed with a fat teardrop. I reached up, touched my cheek, I was crying. A flood of sadness followed. I hadn't been sad two seconds earlier, the book wasn't sad but I was overwhelmed by unhappiness. I wiped the tears before anyone saw, but the sadness and teariness only left me when the man next to me got up and left. Just like that, one minute my emotions were swimming in a sea of despair, the next, when the man next to me got off the tube train, I was fine.

Yet another time, I'd been stood in a bank queue and I couldn't stop myself laughing. Waves of joy kept coming and coming until I found myself covering my mouth to stop the giggles. Soon I was laughing so much I had to leave. Outside, I had no clue as to what had been so funny.

But those things only happened when I was tired. When my mind was relaxed and weary and finding it difficult to keep a grip on reality. It was like a seventh sense. Not quite being psychic. Just having a super-enhanced perception. Extra Extra Sensory Perception for feelings, I guess.

Except that was stupid, wasn't it? What I felt was probably based on understanding people. And if there was one thing I had a lot of, it was understanding. Understanding how they got themselves into certain situations and how they felt about them afterwards. How people just kept going over and over, trying to sort things out but couldn't because they couldn't get any perspective on them.

Like with Trudy. She was crying because she was scared and alone. And she had to do that test alone.

She's probably done it now
, I reasoned.
She's done it now, got the result, decided what she's going to do. And she's done it without me holding her hand or sharing her pain. Just like a few million other people around the globe manage to do every second of the day.

I sighed, sat back in the library chair, rubbed my eyes before I put on my glasses. I'd been in the library most of the day and my eyes were exhausted. The best cure: the blue-framed glasses I'd had a tantrum about being prescribed. (The woman in the opticians had stared at me in disbelief as I turned down every frame in the shop because, ‘I look like my dad in them'. I proceeded to try to talk her into finding that I didn't need them after all. You know, couldn't the diagnosis have been wrong? Anyone would've thought that I needed to have them welded to my face, not that I needed them to see things more than ten feet away. That was why we never mentioned them, not even if I was wearing them.)

I closed my eyes. Trudy. Her face, her crying face, appeared behind my eyes. That was how my mind worked. I didn't focus on her snarling, ‘Who the hell are you, PISS OFF' face, the heartbreaking one plagued me.

She bugged me, harassed me, upset me because I couldn't, with a word or deed, make it all all right for her. If anything, I'd made things worse: Trudy wouldn't have said all those things about herself if I hadn't hugged her. Now she was walking around, knowing that someone else in the world knew how she felt about herself. Usually, too, saying things out loud made it all the more real, all the more horrific. I'd prompted her to go vocal with her traumas.

A chill crawled across my skin, tingling my scalp, someone was watching me. My eyes flew open. Across the wide, light wood table on which were spread the spoils of my hours in the library, stood a lanky man. His close-cropped blond hair made his ears stick out, he wore baggy charcoal suit trousers, a white shirt with the top button open. He looked familiar. But then, most people looked familiar to me especially when there were so many faces in the college. This man, though, grinned at me as if he knew me, his green eyes excited as he yanked out a chair and deposited himself on it.

‘I've done it, Ceri,' he said.

I physically jumped out of my seat at his voice. ‘Jesus Christ, Ed! I didn't recognise you.' I
still
didn't recognise him.

‘Huh?' Ed replied.

I waved vaguely at his head, the white shirt.

‘Oh,' Ed ran a hand over his head, ‘that.' He brushed off my shock with a blasé wave.

‘That?! Ed, you're a different man. You're a man.'

‘Shhhhh,' a couple of people replied. This was a proper library, even though it was in a college. People actually came here to work and they expected silence with it. When I was a student, the library was an extension of the common room. Here, these merchants of no fun wanted to study.

I leant forwards too. ‘Done what exactly?' I whispered just as loudly.

‘I took your advice.'

My blood froze, my bowels turned to water, my hands grabbed the table for support. Ed had just uttered four words I
NEVER
wanted to hear.

I may dish out advice, I may think of myself as a cross between Oprah, a therapist, and Gynan from
Star Trek: Next Generation
but, Jeez, I never wanted anyone to
take
my advice. To listen to me, yes, but not to hear me so well they do what I say. For all the ‘faint heart', ‘life half lived', ‘life's too long' speeches I gave, I never wanted people to screw up their lives by following them. They'd only partly worked for me, and
I
believed them. I'd hashed together my theories and insights from a lifetime's tellywatching and a couple of months of self-help book reading. How could anyone do what I said from just being told about it? By me, too. Who was I in the grand scheme of things?

‘Which advice was that then?' I asked cautiously, knowing it wasn't that he start ironing his clothes inside out to stop them getting a sheen to them.