“I’ve got some amazing news,” he said. “How would you”—he paused for dramatic effect—“like to spend the next … Oh, you’re on the phone. Sorry.”
“Tell him I’m crying—that I’ve just had a row with Luc,” Vic instructed.
“Vic’s had a row with Luc,” I said.
Tom pulled a face. “You want a cup of tea?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t be too long, OK? I want to finish what I was telling you before Paolo gets back.”
“He’s gone,” I said once he was out of earshot.
“Right,” she said. “Tell me again what happened.”
Ten minutes later, well into a heated debate, Vic was absolutely adamant that it was all going to end in tears.
“So you had a perfect kiss. Keep it that way—hold on to the memory but walk away! I’m telling you, from everything you’ve said he sounds gorgeous, perfect and lovely, so there’s bound to be something really wrong with him.”
“There isn’t. He’s amazing,” I insisted. “What happened to your ‘you deserve to be happy, even if that isn’t with Tom’ stuff?”
“You barely know this bloke!”
“You barely knew Luc,” I shot back. “And three months later you moved to another country for him.”
There was a pause.
“But he’s Gretchen’s brother!” she said, changing tack. “What’ll happen if you and Mr. Perfect eventually split up? Gretchen’ll be caught in the middle and you’ll be wanting to ask her what he’s up to, who he’s shagging and she won’t want to tell you because she’ll feel loyal to him … Or he’ll turn out to be some dick that you have to see every time she has a birthday or party. It’ll properly bugger your friendship up. Not that I give a tiny rat’s arse about that.”
“I know you don’t like Gretchen,” I sighed.
“I don’t know her,” Vic said quickly.
“Yeah, well, there’s some stuff going on there too.” Then I repeated what Bailey had told me about Gretchen.
“Oh God, Alice,” Vic said.
My bedroom door gently pushed open again. “Are you nearly done?” Tom asked. “I really want to talk to you.” Then we both heard the doorbell ring. “What the—? I’ll get it.” He rolled his eyes and slipped back out noiselessly.
“Please don’t start anything with this girl’s brother,” Vic implored. “Please.”
“I already have, so I have to tell Tom, don’t I? It’s the only honorable thing to do. I’m not a cheat and I don’t want to treat him this way.”
“It was a kiss, Alice—it’s not like a rampant shag back at your place or his, and it’s certainly not worth ending a relationship over. You’re not kids, and Tom’s one of your—our—best friends!”
“But I promised Bailey I’d see him again!” I stared at the ceiling. It looked all nice and simple up there. “And I know I want to. That’s the real problem; it wasn’t just what the kiss meant then. It’s what it’s going to lead to and I can’t do that to Tom. You know him … you know that would kill him.” I paused. “Actions have consequences and I just have to deal with that. I’m sitting here like I’ve got a decision to make and I haven’t. I made it the second I kissed someone else.”
“Fine. Finish it then, but do not tell him there’s another man. What the hell will that achieve, apart from making him feel like shit—you’ll just lose him as a friend too. You’re going to have to lie, tell him there’s no one else and then not date Bailey openly for at least another couple of months.”
“That’s just taking the easy way out!” I said, chewing on a nail. “Isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s not, you dick! You only want to tell him you kissed someone else to make yourself feel better—that’s not fair to him. You’ve got to just live with what you did and make it as OK for him as possible. That’s what you do if you care about someone. But you know what, Al? You should never end a relationship with someone to be with someone else. End it because it’s not working and you’re not happy, but not just because you want to swap new for old. It never works. You know what color grass is on the other side of the fence? It’s just green. That’s all. Does Gretchen even know about all this?” Vic asked suddenly.
“No idea. All Bailey said in his message was she’s back. He did say that he was going to try and get her to go into a psychiatric hospital for a bit when I saw him. I assume she’s there, I haven’t spoken to her yet.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” I said immediately. “I shouldn’t even have told you, really.” I took a deep breath. “Right. I won’t say anything to Tom about the kiss. I’ll just do the decent thing and end it.”
“I can’t believe you’re actually even talking like this—like two years with him mean nothing. How can you walk away just like that and …”
I’d asked myself the same questions for two days and I was still nowhere closer to an answer, except for the simple truth. “I kissed someone else,” I said with my eyes closed. “If I were really happy, I’d never have done that. Not in a million years.”
“But he kissed you! And people slip up all the time! They get drunk, they—”
“I was completely sober, Vic. Just wish me luck.”
“Luck,” she said sadly and hung up.
I got to my feet, straightened my skirt and walked out into the sitting room. Was I actually going to do this?
“Tom,” I began—but the words died on my lips as I saw, to my utter astonishment, Gretchen perched on the edge of the sofa and Tom standing frozen in the middle of the room, his mouth slightly open, holding, bizarrely, a fish slice in one hand and a tea towel in the other. He was just staring at me, like he was seeing me for the first time.
“Hi, Al!” Gretchen said merrily, as if she’d seen me only the day before and hadn’t, in fact, done a mysterious vanishing act in the meantime. Hadn’t Bailey said she’d need to be hospitalized when she turned up? She looked totally normal, but then I wasn’t sure how someone with a mental illness was supposed to look. “I was just saying to Tom how he and I shouldn’t mind that you and my brother are going out with each other now. We’ll all have to be terribly grown-up about it, won’t we?”
I felt my stomach lurch, knot and then fall away from me. Horrified, I swayed slightly on the spot and for a minute thought I was going to faint. Tom hadn’t moved a muscle.
Gretchen looked at me, then at Tom. “What?” she said innocently.
I don’t remember who told her to go. I think he did.
After the sound of her feet running down the stairs and the bang of the front door, when it was just us standing at opposite ends of the room, facing each other, Tom finally said, “Whatever happens next, don’t lie to me, Alice.”
I heard a low whimper and realized it had come from me.
“What the hell is going on? What’s she talking about, you and her brother going out?”
I shook my head desperately. “I don’t know! I met him for coffee, that’s all! What did she say to you?”
“You met him for coffee?” With all the precision of a business hotshot in training, he leaped on that. “When?”
“Two days ago.”
“You didn’t tell me!”
“I’ve hardly seen you!” I said truthfully. “I was going to tell you tonight, but Vic rang—you and I have barely had a chance to say hello!”
I saw him look at me hesitantly, worried and wanting to believe me. Suddenly understanding Vic’s “little white lie” theory and thinking I saw a chance to claw the situation back, I said, “I promise, Tom, whatever she told you, she’s got the wrong end of the stick. I told her brother I’d see him to discuss Gretchen. She’s not well, I’ve just found out she’s—”
But he ignored me. “So it was just an innocent coffee?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a wisp of smoke drift through the top of the oven. Whatever Tom was cooking was starting to burn.
“The oven, Tom.”
“It’s only a pizza, leave it.” He looked at me steadily. “It was just an innocent coffee?”
My eyes started to swim with tears. He was asking me out-right. “Yes,” I said. Which was true—that had certainly been my intention.
“Absolutely nothing happened?”
I just stood there, like a rabbit frozen in the headlights. I didn’t know whether to dash toward a lie and protect both of us or face the truth and take the hit. I hesitated just a fraction too long.
He looked at me in disbelief. “Something did happen, didn’t it?”
I nodded slowly, whispered “Yes,” and the tea towel slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor.
I saw his chest rising and falling as he stood there, looking at me. “Tell me.”
“I kissed him.”
He flinched like I had physically struck him, and a look of surprised pain flashed across his face. Walking over to the small rickety table his mum and dad gave us when they got their new one, he leaned on it for support, not looking at me. “I was going to tell you I’d met up with him, Tom!” I burst, “I promise—ask Vic!”
The minute the words were out of my mouth I knew I’d made a huge mistake. His head snapped up. “You’ve discussed this with other people?”
“Only Vic,” I said pleadingly as he put his head in his hands.
Smoke was more determinedly escaping from the oven. “Tom, the pizza—” I said timidly.
“FUCK the pizza!” he shouted suddenly, making me jump.
“You know what happened to me today?” he exploded. “I finally got offered a six-month placement in New York. They first hinted I might be in with a chance before Christmas and I was so excited because you’d just come back from America and loved it—I thought it would be really great for us: you can work from anywhere; we’d have six months in another country, a subsidized apartment tax free, where we could save loads to buy our own place when we got back! I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but I’ve been working my arse off to prove to them that I’m New York office material and today, today, I found out they’ve OK’d it—they want me to start in May. I said I’d have to check with my girlfriend first, but I thought you’d be over the moon. I pretty much said we’d go, as long as you agreed. Jesus!”
“Oh Tom …” I said. So that was why he’d not said anything more about getting a mortgage or registering for property details; all the time he’d been waiting and working to surprise me. I reached my hand out and moved toward him. “But sweetheart, that’s in, what, two weeks? I couldn’t just drop everything and go,” I said truthfully, trying to make things better. “I’ve got clients booked. I’ve worked so hard to—”
He stepped back quickly. “Don’t touch me,” he said brokenly. Then, to my horror, I saw tears well up in his eyes. “I was doing all that while you were busy kissing Gretchen’s brother and then talking to Vic about it?” he whispered incredulously. A tear angrily spilled over and ran down his cheek.
Pushing past me, he strode out of the kitchen and into our room. I followed him and watched as he grabbed a bag from the bottom of the wardrobe and began to shove random things in it, including one trainer, the other of which he left under the bed. He didn’t notice and I didn’t point it out.
“What are you doing? You’re not going? Just stay and talk to me. Tom, it was the first and only time it’s happened. It was just a kiss! I promise you!”
He ignored me, marching out of the room, grabbing his keys and wallet from the side in the kitchen, pausing only to glance at the oven before switching it off.
“Open a window in a minute or the fire alarm will go off,” he said.
Then, picking up his bag, he walked straight past me.
“Tom! Please don’t go,” I begged. He wasn’t actually leaving? “Tom, please, wait!” I heard his feet on the stairs and seconds later the front door slammed. He had gone.
In the silent and slightly smoky flat I stood there stunned, jumping only as the fire alarm shrilly sprang into life with an ear-piercing shriek.
T
he high-pitched mechanical bleep bounces off the hospital walls, my eyes are wide with fear as the alarm relentlessly sounds and I’m starting to shake. Not again—oh God, not again. Tom’s face is ashen as he looks first at the nurse fiddling with the tubes above Gretchen’s head and then at Gretchen herself, the only person untroubled by the noise.
Bailey looks absolutely petrified, he’s not even been in the room long enough to sit down yet and now this. “Don’t panic!” the nurse says loudly, moving smartly around to the other side of the room and pushing a button. The noise dies immediately. “It’s not her heart. A tube needed reconnecting,” she explains. “The alarm has to go off so we know about it, that’s all.”
Seconds later, as we are recovering ourselves, a doctor arrives to give Bailey a rundown of what has happened and an update on Gretchen’s current condition, so Tom and I are again removed to the relatives’ room. Tom is now extremely agitated. He isn’t the only one.
“He won’t remember everything they’re telling him, this is ludicrous!” He paces the room. “He’s just arrived, you don’t have to be Brain of Britain to see he’s not going to take it all in. One of us should be with him—if not me, you,” he says, which must cost him.
“Be patient, Tom, he’ll be back in a minute.”
“Patient?” He looks at me incredulously. “If that were your …” But he bites his lip and manages not to finish the end of his sentence.
The nurse pops her head around the door. “Tom? Would you like to go back through now?”
Without waiting for me, Tom practically shoves her aside so he can get past her through the door. I stand up to follow as the nurse comes all the way in and says casually, but with an assured, no-nonsense tone to her voice, “Let’s just give them a minute.”
I sit back down, but instinctively know something is up.
The nurse sits down too. “So, how long have you and Gretchen been friends?” she asks chattily, absently twisting her wedding ring.
I look at her, frightened and wary. “Over a year now. Why?”
“Not long really then.” She puts her head on one side, clean light hair gleaming, and waits.
“We’re very close though,” I say to plug the gap. “You know how you just click with some people?”
She smiles. “Absolutely, kindred spirits and all that. I’ve known my best friend since school. Love her to pieces but she drives me crazy sometimes. I expect Gretchen does you, too?”
I don’t say anything. I just glance out of the window. “Sometimes, yes, she does,” I say eventually. “She can be very difficult … but then she’s a manic-depressive.” I look back at the nurse. “Although I’m sure you already know that. So she can’t help some of the things she does.”