Authors: Mike Gayle
I call out her name and she looks over at me.
‘How long have you been waiting?’
‘Not long.’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘Not excessively.’
Ginny shakes her head. My presence here is making her sad. ‘I wish you hadn’t come.’
‘I haven’t come to shout. I just want to talk.’
‘There’s nothing to say, Matt.’
‘Ten minutes,’ I say, ‘that’s all I ask.’
She briefly glances over at her car as though imagining herself escaping and then sets her bag on the ground and sits down on the bench. It’s only as I sit down too that I realise this is the same bench on which we first kissed all those years ago.
I wonder if Ginny’s even aware of this bench’s place in our joint history.
‘How was your day?’
‘Long,’ she says. ‘We only got back from the trip just after lunch but since then I’ve witnessed a student teacher being reduced to tears by a fellow member of staff, two fights in the playground and a couple of policemen escorting three year-eleven boys off the premises. It’d be quieter in Beirut.’
‘So you wouldn’t recommend teaching?’
‘Who to? You?’
I nod even though the thought has only just occurred to me. ‘I need to find myself a new career and they’re always saying how fulfilling teaching is.’
‘Who are “they”?’ She sighs and rubs her eyes. ‘Don’t do it. The hours are too long, the job satisfaction virtually nil and the remuneration pitiful. Take it from me, you’d hate it. I know I do.’
We watch a couple of pupils walk by kicking a football between them. With different haircuts, fatter ties and yet still carrying the same Gola sports bags (do those things never go out of fashion?) they could’ve been Gershwin and me back in our school days.
I decide to get to the point. ‘So are we going to talk about this or what?’
‘What is there to say? I feel awful about it, Matt. You must know that I didn’t make this decision lightly.’
‘But I don’t understand why you reached it at all. What’s happened to change your mind?’
‘It doesn’t matter what happened. My mind’s made up and it’s not going to change.’
‘But was it me? Something I said or did? I just need to know.’
Ginny places her hand on my arm and I sense that her steely resolve is finally melting. ‘It wasn’t you. These past few days have been some of the best I’ve ever had.’
‘Well that’s how I feel too,’ I say, ‘so what’s changed your mind? I know I don’t have the best track record. I know I’ve let you down in the past but this . . . this would’ve been different.’
Ginny stands up. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘So that’s it?’ I stand up too. ‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’
‘Yes.’
‘And nothing I can say will make a difference?’ I’d promise her the world and everything in it even though it isn’t mine to give. ‘Look, Ginny, please, I’m begging you, let’s just try and work it out.’
Ginny picks up her bags and starts walking towards the car park.
I’m rooted to the spot, my head spinning, then a thought occurs to my addled brain and suddenly it all makes sense.
‘You’ve gone back to your ex, haven’t you?’
Ginny stops dead in her tracks and before she’s even opened her mouth I know it’s true. I can see it in her eyes, in her face, in her body language. She begins to cry. ‘He’s changed his mind, promised you whatever it was that you wanted and now you’ve gone back to him.’
‘I never meant to hurt you like this.’
‘This was our bench,’ I say.
Ginny looks confused. ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ I reply, and then I stand up and walk away.
There are none of the usual signs of life when I reach home and I find out why from a note for me in my mum’s handwriting on the kitchen counter:
Have gone to Yvonne’s. Shouldn’t be back too late. Help yourself to whatever you want from the fridge. Love, Mum.
It feels odd being in the house on my own. I never liked it when I was kid and I’m still not that keen now. I always remember this house being full of life. With just me, it feels cold and empty and I find myself wishing that my parents had already returned so that I could hear something other than my own thoughts.
I should have known that ex of hers was going to pop up out of nowhere and wreck everything because that’s what exes do best. They give the impression they’re out of the picture just long enough for you to think you’re safe and then in a puff of smoke, they reappear claiming a change of damascene proportions.
It had even happened to me a couple of times in Oz. Jenna, a colleague from work who I’d started seeing a few months after I moved to Sydney, got back with her ex-boyfriend six weeks into our relationship because he was allegedly ‘filled with regret’ over their break-up which he’d institigated and then a year later my fledgling relationship with Thalia, a single mum who I met at a party in Melbourne, was scuppered by the return of an ex-husband determined to ‘clean up his act’.
And this, I suppose, is one of the intrinsic problems of dating when you’re my age: too many people over thirty-five have baggage, and the fact that they choose to carry it rather than, say, putting it in a locker and forgetting about it should tell you everything you need to know. They carry the baggage because the baggage still has value. It was true of Jenna, it was true of Thalia and it’s true for Ginny and her ex too. My guess is that the ‘something’ that happened to her in Barcelona was a call from her ex-fiancé that convinced her he had changed. Faced with the choice of the couple of shabby carrier bags she had with me or the embossed leather storage trunk she had with the guy she’d planned to marry and who would give her the family she longed for, I hadn’t stood a chance.
As I go upstairs for a shower I pass my room and spot the papers Lauren sent me to sign lying on the bedside table. She’d already texted me three times but I just couldn’t bring myself to look at them. Reaching for a pen I sign the papers one after the other, tuck them inside the stamped addressed envelope that she’d enclosed and seal it up. It feels good to have ticked this one thing off. Almost the beginning of a new era: one where I no longer hang on desperately to the past. This nice idea is proved wrong in a matter of minutes when my phone vibrates and I practically leap on it, hoping that it might be a message from Ginny. But it isn’t. It’s just another text from Lauren asking about the papers. I tell her they’re in the post and then switch off my phone.
For the next few days I pretty much go to seed. I don’t go out, I field a number of texts from Jason Cleveland asking me when I’m free for a drink, I barely leave my room and I don’t speak to anyone other than my parents. Just as I’m beginning to wonder if what remains of my thirties is going to seep away down the plughole of my existence I get a text from an old workmate telling me that he’s going to be up in Birmingham for the weekend and did I fancy joining him and some friends for a night out. Unlike Jason Cleveland’s proposed night out (which I know will be as horrible as it is beery) this is exactly what I need right now, something fun and out of the ordinary to look forward to, so I text back straight away and get the details.
As the date gets closer, I’m feeling more optimistic. I emerge from my room, even take myself out for a run and on the day he’s coming up I resolve that this night out will mark the end of me thinking about Ginny. This will be the weekend when I rid her from my head and heart for good. I’ll go out with my old mate, maybe meet someone new and that will be it. I will have officially moved on from my past.
In preparation I take myself up to the high street for a haircut (same as always: short all over) and to Superdrug to replenish my toiletries. I narrowly manage to avoid an encounter in WHSmith with Alice O’Conner (then, the girl most likely to get her elder brother Gary to punch your lights out for no good reason; now, harassed mother of three).
Feeling that the high street is no longer a safe place for me I head home past Peacocks and am stopped in my tracks by a group of three glamorous teenage girls – all lipstick and shopping bags – coming out of the shop. One of them is Gershwin’s daughter, Charlotte.
I’ve known Charlotte since she was a baby so it’s hard to think of her as anything else but seeing her, oblivious of the leers of a passing group of teenage boys, it’s clear that she is anything but. She doesn’t look older than her biological age or anything – she looks and dresses like a fourteen-year-old girl – no, the shocking thing is that she looks like the kind of fourteen-year-old girl for whom any teenage boy would willingly lay down his life if she asked him. It isn’t just her curls of dark brown hair, her flawless skin, or her cooler-than-thou sense of style. It’s the fact that it is all contained in one perfectly formed single entity. On Gershwin’s behalf I want to protect this beautiful girl with her whole life in front of her by locating a sufficiently hefty stick with which to fend off the youths who would inevitably swarm around her if left unattended.
‘You do know that I’m going to have to have a word with your dad about locking you up, don’t you?’ I joke as I throw menacing glances in the boys’ direction. ‘Either that, or lock up every single boy between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.’
‘You’re so embarrassing,’ she says, throwing her arms round me. ‘When did you get back from London?’
‘I’ve actually been here a while but I’ve been a bit busy.’ I look down at the vast array of shopping bags clutched in her hands. ‘You’re flush, aren’t you? What’s the occasion? I haven’t missed another one of your birthdays, have I?’
She laughs and shakes her head. ‘No, not this time. Dad gave me some money and told me to spend it how I wanted.’
That didn’t sound like the Gershwin I knew. ‘Your dad gave you money just like that? I bet you nagged him to death for it.’
‘Didn’t have to this time. He’s so happy that I reckon he would’ve given me a Chanel handbag if I’d asked for one.’
‘Really? Last time I saw your dad he was a right misery.’
‘That was because he’d fallen out with his girlfriend,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘Thankfully they’re back together now so everything’s sorted.’
This didn’t make any sense. ‘Since when did your dad have a girlfriend?’
‘He’s had one for ages. Before the split they were even living together.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I am!’
‘This is weird. I saw your dad only a little while ago and he never said a word about any girlfriend.’
Charlotte shrugs. ‘Maybe he was too down to talk about it. You know what Dad’s like – it’s impossible to get anything out of him when he’s in a mood.’
‘So who is she, this woman? Is she nice?’
‘Maybe this is something you need to talk to Dad about,’ says Charlotte. ‘I don’t want to cause any trouble.’
‘Of course you don’t. And I can’t imagine any reason there would be.’
‘It’s Ginny,’ she says. ‘I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew.’
19
‘I can’t believe he didn’t tell you,’ says Zoe. She pushes the tin of biscuits on the table in my direction. ‘You wait till I see him, I’ll give him a right earful . . . treating you like that and dropping Charlotte in it too! What was he thinking?’
Having accepted Charlotte’s offer to ‘come back to mine and talk to Mum’ I’m now sitting at Gershwin’s ex-wife’s kitchen table having just had confirmation of everything that my goddaughter had told me. Ginny’s mysterious ex, the one she told me she missed ‘every single day’, is none other than my best friend.
‘I mean . . . how did it even happen?’ I refuse Zoe’s offer of biscuits and concentrate on the mug of tea in my hands. I’d never have put Ginny and Gershwin together in a million years. ‘Did they always fancy each other?’
Zoe pulls her chair up closer to the table. ‘The first I heard of it was about a year ago when Charlotte told me that he and Ginny took her to the theatre to see a play that one of Ginny’s friends was in. Charlotte said that the whole time they were there her dad kept acting really odd and making comments about how he and Ginny were just good friends. The first thing that Charlotte said the minute she walked through the front door was: ‘I think Dad’s seeing Ginny.’
‘So when did he tell you what was going on?’
‘It must have been a week or two later. He dropped off Charlotte after a weekend at his and just came out with it. I’d long since stopped caring what he got up to but as it happened I’d always really liked Ginny – she’s a lovely girl – and so I was pleased that at least Charlotte would be able to get on with her. But I told him at the time: “Look, I’m glad you’re moving on and everything but have you spoken to Matt about it?” because, you know, I knew you and Ginny had history.’
‘And what did he say to that?’
Zoe shrugs and rolls her eyes. ‘You know what he’s like. He was all, yeah, yeah, yeah . . . Matt’s married, he’s fine about it so I just assumed that he’d get round to telling you in his own time.’
‘And this was when exactly?’
‘About ten months ago although I’m guessing they’d been together a while if he was bothering to tell me.’
‘And they lived together?’