The Cupid Effect (32 page)

‘Yooouuuuu, could put it like that.'

I felt my bottom lip go again.

‘Put it like this, at least you'll never be short of a wedding invite or two.'

‘Does this mean I'm going to be disrupting lives and not getting proper love for the rest of my life?'

‘To be honest, Ceri, I don't know. I don't have all the answers. I spent a lot of time on the Internet and in books pulling together what I have told you. The original Cupid did find love, but he loved her from afar for years and then he lost her. It could be different for you. Like I said, I don't know. But it's been like this for at least ten years, I suspect it'll be like that for ages. I think, sweetheart, you've got into a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy situation, no matter how hard you try, you do it anyway.'

‘I don't mean to.'

‘I know, that's the irony. You don't mean to, but you can't help it. It's your nature. I mean, didn't people used to call you Auntie Ceri when you were in college? I seem to remember you always being surrounded by people who had problems. You could walk into any room anywhere and within five minutes you'll be talking to the person in the room with the biggest problem or biggest dilemma. You don't mean to do it, you just do it. Something in you draws out that kind of honesty. And it encourages people to, for better or worse, follow their heart. That's who you are, it's what being modern-day Cupid is all about.'

‘Yeah, yeah, I get the idea.'

‘Look, somebody's got to do it. I'm sure there's been someone like you for ages. Hey, you could be like Buffy, you know, into every generation, a Cupid is born. She will be the disruptive one.'

I glared at Jess. ‘Oh yes, ha, ha, let's all laugh at the funny Ceri who's going to be alone for the rest of her life, shall we. Ha ha. Excuse me while I hold my sides to stop them from splitting at how amusing all this is.'

She hung her head. ‘All right, what I was going to say was, somebody's got to do it, my only bit of advice is to go with it.'

‘Yeah, course you'd say “go with it”. It's all right for you, Mrs Married With Gorgeous Children, I'm the one who gets to, well, not. I'm the one looking at the next forty or fifty years of my life alone. Course you're going to sit there and suggest “going with it”.' I put down the tea on the floor by the armchair. I had to get out of there before I started laying into Jess for only telling me what I didn't want to hear. I got up, grabbed my bag and my jacket. ‘I need to go for a walk, think things through.'

‘All right, love.'

I spun around, my whole body aflame with anger. ‘Don't. Call. Me. That.'

chapter thirty-one

Cursed

So, this is it, is it?

This is my talent. My purpose in life. I am here to make other people fall in love, have sex, find their heart's desire. But not me. I don't get any of it.

I sat in Burley Park, on a bench in the middle of the park. The grey concrete path wound around me. The emerald blanket of grass rose and fell in tiny hills and odd-shaped mounds.

I was hunched over, my shoulders tense, my hands pushed deep into my suede jacket pockets. Another few minutes and the jacket would be ruined beyond repair. It wasn't raining, it was pouring. The main reason for me being hunched up. As if that was some protection from the weather. It was merely a physical reflex, though, the rest of me didn't care if I drowned in rain.

I'd sat there for about forever since I'd left Jess's house. Water drizzled down my face, down my neck and inside my clothes, while frizzing my hair.

This is my life, is it? My talent, my gift, my search for the holy grail. My huge, throbbing, pus-filled curse.

This so wasn't fair. I know I'd said this to Jess, but now it screamed in my brain: WHAT ABOUT ME?! When do I get that love and sex and settledness?

It wasn't as though my life was purely focused on finding a man. It wasn't. Part of me expected love. Not a man, but love, companionship, someone to pull around me like a person-shaped duvet at night. Someone to share and share alike with. Love in its purest sense.

It wasn't like I was asking to win a few trillion pounds on the lottery, was it? Or to walk along the Pacific Ocean floor. Or win a gold medal. I just wanted love. I'd waited patiently for years for that. What I got, what I was rewarded with was everyone else's life.

I was modern-day Cupid.

Jess was right, of course. That's what was so awful about it. As soon as she said it, the scales fell from my eyes, the barbed wire screens lifted from my brain.

The world suddenly stopped being like those old-fashioned photos I'd seen of the world – all black and white; monochrome. As all of Jess's words hit home, I stopped seeing the world as three-dimensional. Everything became colour. The world had more substance, it was multidimensional. I couldn't simply see things any more, I experienced them with all my senses. Everything had its own frequency that it reverberated on, and now I knew my
raison d'être
I was attuned to these frequencies. Every frequency. Life became more than a three-dimensional experience, it became a multidimensional experience. It was so hard to explain when the only way I had to explain it were words and they and their meanings were firmly lodged in the reality of three dimensions.

I was plugged into the world, for real. And I didn't like it. Not one bit. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Whoever coined that term wasn't wrong. Now I knew this, I couldn't unknow it. I couldn't deny it.

Right now, I was so unconfused. This was how it felt when I first put on my accursed glasses. I'd turned to the optician and said, very loudly, ‘Oh my God, I can't believe how much I couldn't see before.' And they gave me headaches for ages after I started wearing them because, I guess, my brain was seeing more than it had in a while; too much information was entering my head. I could see far too clearly. And, hey, now I could live too clearly. I had no more confusion. No more veils and fuzziness. No more drifting aimlessly wherever life was going to take me. That was why I felt others' emotions. Why I'd start crying for no reason; why I felt morning sickness when I'd never been pregnant; why I felt everyone else's confusion, hurt, hate, humiliation, joy, love, lust, ecstasy. Because I was cursed to. I was modern-day Cupid.

I'd always felt a tad different to everyone else. It wasn't the feeling that I was unique, tortured, misunderstood; not that no one understood me, it was that I understood everyone else. I knew too much about how everyone else could find what their heart was sickening for; fix their relationship; speak their mind; follow their dream; get a life, etc., etc., etc., even though I had relatively no experience of most of those things myself, I could talk and advise on them as though I'd been there, done that – several times.

I remember when all this started. The first event when I put my big mouth and need to interfere and need to help to proper use.

I'd gone on a walking holiday in the Lake District with a couple of friends. Post O-levels, pre-results, almost my birthday. I was sixteen and the three of us had our reasons for going: mine, to get away from my parents; Kathleen, to do what she wanted; Marian, to walk.

We spent most evenings and lunchtimes in the central lodge, me not drinking, just eating. I'd been dragged out walking a couple of times and it'd tripled my appetite. But, wherever we were, walking, eating, sitting, there also seemed to be this desperately unhappy couple nearby. I say desperately unhappy couple, but it was her who was miserable, under constant fire as she was from her husband. He constantly called her stupid, ugly, fat, pathetic, etc., etc. . . . in a voice that reverberated around the lodge or rang out through the hills. He never seemed to stop criticising her clothes, her walking abilities, the way she ate, the way she breathed at one point.

Everyone focused on their food when he started taking potshots at her in the central lodge. Everyone listened to his abuse; feeling embarrassed for her, feeling embarrassed for themselves but no one wanting to get involved. I wasn't embarrassed, I never felt embarrassment, all I experienced was rage. Deep rage and shame. Every word, every insult went through me as though directed at me. Meant for me. My rage, indignation and humiliation built up, day after day until day four.

By then, I'd forgotten that the rage I felt was irrational considering I'd never had a boyfriend in my life, I'd never experienced this type of constant abuse and, for all I knew, he was right. Maybe he did look at her and feel physically sick because of her body. Or her face. Or the way she breathed.

On that day, I felt how she felt. Not felt for her, felt through her. It was as if she was projecting her emotions straight into my brain and heart and I could feel her hurt, her humiliation. She also loved this man, that was apparent, she had a bond with him. All of this was being broadcast straight into me. I found it harder and harder to push food into my mouth because of what he was saying and the effect it was having on me. The pain, the anger, the resignation.

‘Look at you, how am I supposed to even want to touch you when you sit there with that look on your face and all that blubber melting onto your seat and the way you eat, the way you drink. You've got . . .' his staccato voice shot across the room, ricocheting off the embarrassed silence.

Before I knew what was happening, I was on my feet, my friends had faces of horror, Marian went to grab me but it was too late, I'd spun to face the couple. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?' I shouted at him.

The pair of them stopped, stared at me in abject shock.

‘I asked you a question,' I shouted, ‘who do you think you are to sit there talking to anyone, let alone your wife, like that?'

Like the bully he was, rather than say anything to someone who challenged him, he simply sat there and stared at me.

‘I mean, we have to sit here, night after night and listen to you abusing someone constantly, and for what? For killing someone? For mutilating someone? No, for her size. For the way she eats. For the expression on her face. How dare you. How
dare
you.

‘I mean, you can dish it out, but can you take it?'

He stared at me. No hint whatsoever of pummelling my face into silence. ‘I asked you, you can dish it out, but can you take it? Hmmm?'

Miraculously, he just shook his head at me.

‘No, thought not. Well, let me tell you, Mr Loud And Rude, you're not Mel Gibson yourself. In fact, you make David Hasselhoff look rather appealing. And, even though your looks aren't all that, you don't even have a nice personality to compensate for it. So, do the world and us a favour and SHUT UP.'

I turned to the woman. ‘And you, have you no self-respect? I mean, I can understand that you put up with this in your own home, because at least then you can ignore him, or put rat poison in his food or drop the odd cup of tea in his lap, but in public? How dare you sit there and let him abuse you in front of everybody. I know, I know, you love him, but there's one person you should love more and that's yourself and . . . and, the fact you can sit there and let him abuse you night after night means you need, you need . . . I don't know, you need to think about how much you mean to yourself.'

The silence after my storm frightened me. It was pure silence. Everyone in the room was probably holding their breath cos not even the sound of respiration could be heard.

Then the room suddenly erupted into applause. Everyone around me was clapping and congratulating me for doing what no one else would. I came down from the head rush that had pushed me into action, giddy, unsteady on my feet. And, mortified. Who did I think I was? I was worse than him, at least he knew the person he was insulting, I'd never met them before.

I turned on my heels and marched out of there, shame burning in my ears and on my face. Ironically, I went for a long walk around the lake not far from the hostel.

I was shaking for most of that walk, I still couldn't understand what I'd just done and why. I sat by the edge of the lake, staring into it.

‘Hello,' a voice said, some time later.

I turned around. It was the woman. She looked older close up, her blond hair streaked with white, her face lined and her eyes puffy and reddened, probably from crying. She stared at me, I stared at her. She sat down and we sat in silence for a while.

‘He wasn't always like that,' she said eventually. Sadness and frustration were like a shroud around her. A shroud that encompassed me.

‘Well that's all right then,' I snapped. ‘He wasn't always like that so that gives him a good excuse to behave like that now.' This really wasn't me talking.

‘It's not like that,' she said.

I gave her a hard look. Shrugged. ‘Why do you care what I think, anyway? I'm just some sixteen-year-old, what do I know about life, right?'

‘I . . .' she began. Stopped. ‘You stood up for me and I feel I owe you an explanation.'

‘I also insulted you, or have you conveniently forgotten that?' Why couldn't I shut up? I'd been known to go without speaking for days and now I had a cross between verbal diarrhoea and abusive Tourette's Syndrome.

‘Yes, but you were trying to help me.'

‘Two wrongs don't make a right. Or make it all right.'

This seemed to go over her head. ‘It was like you were reading my mind back in the lodge. Like everything I was thinking was coming out of your mouth. Even down to the David Hasselhoff thing.'

I
knew
that wasn't me speaking, I quite fancied David Hasselhoff in
Knight Rider
at that point, not that I'd
ever
tell anyone that.

‘
But, you're going to stay with him and carry on letting him treat you like that, aren't you?
'

Her face contracted in pain.

I sighed. ‘I just said that out loud, didn't I?' I said.