Authors: Mike Gayle
I apologise. ‘You’re absolutely right. I have no excuse and I promise it won’t happen again.’
She eyes me warily. I normally don’t give in this easily ‘And where have you been all this time?’
‘At Gershwin’s.’ Now is not the time to start oversharing with my parents about my private life. ‘I bumped into him when I was with Ginny and we all went out and didn’t get back until early this morning . . . and so we crashed at Gershwin’s.’
Mum shakes her head in bemusement. What I have just said makes no sense to her whatsoever.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ she says. ‘A man your age shouldn’t be out all hours. You’re not twenty-one any more!’
There’s a certain irony in Mum of all people reminding me of this fact but I hold up my hands in submission. ‘Absolutely right. No more late nights for me unless I call first.’ I give her a kiss on the cheek because that’s how good I’m feeling right now. ‘Consider me suitably chastised.’
Sensing there’s something wrong but not quite sure what it might be Mum reluctantly disappears into the garden. My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Ginny:
Hey you, just wanted to thank you for a lovely night and a cracking afternoon xxx G
. And I reply:
Had a great time too. Can’t wait to see you again. M x
. I think that might be it but as I’m heading upstairs my phone buzzes once more.
I know you’ve probably got a lot going on in your head right now but I want to give you written proof that I mean what I say and so here goes: THIS IS REAL. And don’t you forget it. G xxx
.
17
‘Okey-dokey,’ says our travel expert, Jean, with an overdramatic flourish, ‘that’s the last of the boring paperwork out of the way. Now all you need to do is tell me how you’ll be paying today and we’ll be done.’
I look nervously at Ginny. There are no words to describe how great this past week has been. I’ve spent pretty much every night at Ginny’s and I’m completely convinced by what we have together but even so I still can’t quite believe that I’m about to buy a ticket that will see me visiting India, Vietnam, Thailand, Bali, China, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the USA with Ginny. Doing something this reckless when I am this happy feels like I am giving my luck one shove too far.
‘Can we have a minute?’ I say to Jean as Ginny reaches in her purse for her credit card.
‘Not a problem,’ says Jean, though her face says otherwise, and as I rise from the chair positioned in front of her desk Ginny laughs and shakes her head apologetically as though I am to be pitied rather than admonished.
‘You’re freaking out again, aren’t you?’ says Ginny, joining me in a far corner of the shop next to the window showing all the best flight deals.
‘No . . . I’m not,’ I reply too quickly. ‘OK, yeah I am just a bit but you’ve got to remember this is a big deal, Gin, a really big deal. These tickets are non-refundable. Which means you’re going to have to follow through with everything we’ve planned from giving up the job you’ve done for the last twelve years to renting out your house for at least a year—’
‘And having the time of my life travelling around the world with a gorgeous but highly neurotic guy I’ve known half my life.’ Ginny laughs and kisses me. ‘I’ve thought it through, Matt, and if it was up to me we’d be going next week rather the end of next term. Since we started making these plans I’ve felt more alive, more excited, more everything and it’s all because of you! I know you think we should be sensible: take things slowly and see how they go. And before my last birthday I would’ve agreed with you . . . but not now. If I’ve learned anything since turning forty it’s that life’s too short for the sensible option. Sometimes you have to just go with your gut and see where it takes you. So what do you say?’
‘You had me at “gorgeous”, ’ I reply. Breaking out into a grin I grab her by the hand and head back to Jean’s desk.
Jean looks up from her computer screen. ‘All decided?’
‘All decided indeed.’ On cue Ginny hands over her credit card. A flurry of jabs at the card machine’s key pad and the job is done. Ginny (on my behalf as well as her own) has just committed the best part of two thousand pounds that she can ill afford to go on a trip with a man who was never even a proper boyfriend.
Jean hands Ginny the printed receipts and informs her that our tickets will be emailed two weeks before we’re due to fly. We thank her, stand up and leave. Straight away my mind starts churning over the full impact of what I’ve done and more importantly what I’ll need to do now. I’ll have to find a way of telling my parents that won’t make me sound insane, and of course I’ve got to find a way to explain to Lauren that she’ll have to sort out the whole house sale thing on her own and maybe even that I’ve found someone new. It’s all going to be pretty hard to do but as Ginny and I head back to the Bullring car park a huge grin spreads across my face. I’m happy. I’m doing this crazy, reckless, financially irresponsible thing and nothing, not divorce, unemployment or even turning forty is going to stop me seeing it through.
That evening we go to a Moroccan restaurant in Moseley and our only topic of conversation is the trip. Of all the plans I have ever made this one feels like it’s going to pay the greatest dividends, to clarify part two of the story of my life. Everything I need to know will be somewhere out there waiting for me to stumble across it. Ginny feels exactly the same. This trip is going to be the making of us.
As usual I stay over at Ginny’s that night but in the morning I go back to Mum and Dad’s because Ginny’s got to pack for a five-day field trip to Barcelona with some of her sixth-form students.
‘It’ll go faster than you think,’ she says as we stand on her doorstep, ‘and I’ve promised myself that next weekend I’m not going to do a single shred of work. It’ll just be you, me and whatever you want to do.’
‘Sounds like a great plan.’ We kiss one last time and then I leave.
I decide to try phoning Gershwin. I’d called and left a message earlier in the week and he still hasn’t got back to me and even though he’s busy at work I can’t help but think there’s something more to it. I pull out my phone and try his number but after several rings it goes through to voicemail and so I leave yet another message: ‘Mate, it’s me. Just checking in. Have news for you so ring or text soon and we’ll go for a pint.’
At home my parents are in the garden where Dad is weeding his vegetable patch and Mum is hanging out the washing. This could be the moment that I tell them my plans and as I open my mouth my dad stops digging and looks at me.
‘Were your ears burning?’
I look at Dad, confused. ‘Why should they be?’
‘Your mum and I were just commenting how nice it’s been having you home. We were thinking you might like to come to your sister’s again next weekend.’
‘I’m sorry I can’t, Dad,’ I reply, ‘I’ve got plans for next weekend but I’m definitely free the weekend after.’
Mum is clearly annoyed at my unwillingness to get into line. ‘You’re very busy for a man with no job.’
Dad rolls his eyes and nods his head towards the house. ‘I’d make your escape now son, if you know what’s good for you.’
Taking my dad’s cue I head up for a shower but as I’m rummaging in my drawers for clean underwear my phone buzzes with a message from Ginny:
Miss you already! Try not to be too miserable without me!
. I reply straight away:
Have a great time! Will try and keep it together until you get back!
and then I don’t hear from her again until Monday evening:
Arrived safely. Hostel is awful but students don’t seem to have noticed as they are too busy trying to get off with each other. Miss you, G x
. Late on Tuesday night I get another text:
Am in bar with students watching live music. Think after our world trip we should move to Barcelona and open a bed and breakfast. What do you think? Night, night G x PS Will text again in morning!
Ginny doesn’t text me the following morning or indeed that night. When her text silence continues throughout Thursday morning I begin to imagine that she’s had some kind of accident but when I ring it goes straight through to voicemail. In the end I leave three voicemails, send three texts and even leave a message at the youth hostel with my phone number in case she’s somehow lost it. But it’s only on Friday morning, having barely slept, that I get a message. The contents take me completely by surprise:
I’m so sorry, Matt, but I can’t follow through with our plans any more. Please don’t think too terribly of me. It’s been the most difficult decision of my life to make. Please promise me you’ll take the trip anyway. You deserve to be happy. Take care, Ginny x
.
As I return my phone to the bedside table I close my eyes trying to block out all of the self-directed anger I feel. I feel stupid. Stupid and embarrassed. How did I not see this coming? How did I ever think that this thing with Ginny would work? It’s not like I hadn’t anticipated a car-crash ending from the moment we first kissed or hadn’t appreciated that the odds of the crash happening sooner rather than later had doubled the moment we started making plans to go travelling. I mean, who does that? Who gets together with a ‘not quite ex’ that they haven’t seen in six years and the very next day starts making plans to spend a year travelling around the world with them? A year ago I would never have entertained this kind of recklessness and yet here I am making decisions that even a six-year-old would think twice about.
I need a drink.
I get dressed and go and find one.
‘Nice weather we’re having isn’t it?’
I glance up from my fourth pint of the afternoon at the crumpled old bloke sitting opposite and grinning inanely. He’s wearing a stained black suit jacket over a bright green zip-up cardigan. In front of him is a half-drunk pint of mild and a bedraggled newspaper that like him has seen better days. He could be me thirty years from now. Turning seventy, now’s there’s a thought.
‘Brilliant,’ I reply. It’s been chucking it down all day as we’re well aware. ‘Easily the best day of the year!’
‘Good one.’ The old bloke chuckles so hard that he hacks up something dreadful from his lungs, which he spits into a handkerchief.
The pub I’m in is the kind of cool, down-with-the-kids drinking establishment that features arty-looking second-hand chairs and posters for various drum ’n’ bass club nights, but back in the day it had held a special place in my heart for being where Ginny and I, along with the rest of our friends, had spent many hours watching long-forgotten local bands with ridiculous names in its upstairs function room. I purposely chose it as my destination because I feel like torturing myself and what better way than to select a venue where one New Year’s Eve some twenty years ago you and the woman who’s just broken your heart spent a good portion of the night groping each other near the upstairs gents’ toilets?
And as much as I’d like to blame my behaviour on my separation, or quitting my job, or even turning forty, the real problem here is all the time I have wasted. Time that I’m never going to get back. Whenever I look back on my life all I see is fragments: stints working here, relationships happening there, never a whole picture, and certainly never a picture like that of my own father. By the time Dad was forty he had three kids, a wife to whom he’d been married for ten years and a job that he’d had since turning twenty-one. What did I have to show by comparison? A half-decent career that I’d abandoned just as I was about to reap the rewards of years of hard work, a failed marriage, a big house in London that I can’t afford to live in and a long, long line of failed relationships: it isn’t exactly the stuff carved on to headstones.
‘Got a lot on your mind have ya?’
It’s the crumpled old bloke again. I raise my glass towards him and nod.
‘Woman trouble?’
‘Of a kind.’
‘They’re not worth it.’
‘Do you think?’
‘I know. Take it from me, big man. You’re better off on your own.’
For a moment I seriously considered that my unwanted companion wasn’t just some random alcoholic, but a wise old guru sent to show me the true way. Then he coughs again and pulls out his filthy handkerchief and that convinces me that he’s not. He catches me looking at him as he spits into his handkerchief again. ‘Catarrh,’ he explains.
‘You should see a doctor about that. It can turn nasty.’
‘Doctors? I’ve got all the medicine I need right here!’ He gestures to his pint.
It’s time for me to go. ‘Good to talk to you,’ I say to the crumpled old bloke and then I hand him a fiver and tell him to have a drink on me.
His face lights up. ‘You’re a good man. A good man indeed.’
‘You’re right,’ I say, as it dawns on me that I’ve drunk just about enough to think turning up at Ginny’s school is a good idea, ‘I just wish a few more people knew it.’
18
I’m sitting on a bench opposite the main entrance to Ginny’s school. There are kids dotted about playing football and chasing each other around the playground but to them I am invisible: just a bloke on a bench. I don’t have to wait too long before I spot Ginny, dressed smartly in a long black woollen coat and dark trousers and carrying a heavy leather bag. She exits the building and begins walking over to the car park. I don’t have a clue what I’m going to say to her. Her text clearly indicates that her mind’s made up and it isn’t as though I have been half expecting her to change her mind. I mean, I’ve just stopped living with my wife, Ginny’s recently come out of what seems to be a pretty intense relationship and our solution was to book ourselves round-the-world tickets and make out like we’re teenagers on a gap year? It was never going to work, yet here I am, determined to change her mind. Maybe this is why people have jobs: having too much time on your hands is a guaranteed way to get yourself into trouble.