listened to me like she does. Funny – quirky, you might say – but both times when the other woman, the one in uniform, has accompanied me to the loo, when I’ve come back Blue Eyes has reapplied her lipstick. That tickles me, that she would bother. It’s a strong red-wine colour against her alabaster complexion. Harsh, almost, but it works. A face that hints that the smile, when it comes, will be worth the wait. She’s tall and striking in the way a Greek statue is striking: soft curves chiselled from hard marble. Grace and power combined. She makes me think she can tell me it’s going to be all right – that she has the authority to say this and make it so. And that makes me want to tell her everything, even though all is lost.
So I do. Because when you’ve held it all in for so long, once you start letting it out, you can’t stop. And maybe that’s what I’ve been afraid of all along. And maybe it’s only now, talking to Amanda, that I realise that when there’s too much inside, it creates this big pressure. The pressure comes from the very act of holding it all in. It’s no wonder the walls of me were cracking.
I didn’t see Lisa after that. Well, I saw her but she didn’t see me and now I’m in here.
Even saying that feels surreal. That I wouldn’t see Lisa every week would have been unthinkable once. But she went off to Majorca with some of the girls we used to meet up with – she invited me but I said no, obviously. Our lives had forked, I suppose. She was a single woman now and I was still married, to all intents and purposes, and that had changed things. When Patrick left her, he’d also left our little gang of four: me and Mark, Lisa and Pat, two couples happy as anyone doing happy things together. His scandalous dumping of her for a younger model had left us all reeling at the time, and that was before I had bigger things to worry about.
Meanwhile, somewhere in all of this, Katie went to Ibiza with her friend Thea and to Portugal with the boyf’s family, who are quite wealthy and had rented a villa with a pool. They say you lose your sons but keep your daughters, but I could see she was drifting away from me. She’d made no moves to apply for uni and I couldn’t broach the subject without her getting cross. She barely seemed to have time to chat or to want to spend time with me anymore, but that was understandable, I suppose.
I didn’t want to spend time with me either.
Mark and I didn’t go away. We hadn’t booked anything and we didn’t say it out loud but neither of us, I knew, saw the point. Instead, we drifted like shadows in the walls of our house. He went to the pub, or wherever he went, came back stinking of fags and beer; I went on my walkabouts. We ate our tea watching television: together but not together, looking anywhere but at each other.
I walked. I printed off the news. I went to work. I walked. I printed off the news. I went to work. Repeat to fade.
Dave continued to be a pain in the neck. Phil opened up a bit more, told me he’d got divorced the year before, which went some way to explaining the deterioration in his appearance.
‘I lost everything,’ he said, sitting on his regular stool after one of his gambling losses, ironically, though that’s not what he meant. ‘House, furniture, you name it.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘She used to shout at me, call me names.’
‘Oh, Phil, I am sorry.’
He shrugged, gave a bitter half laugh. ‘She cheated on me. I knew she was doing it. Used to leave little clues, and then when I asked her about them, she’d say I was controlling. Said she was innocent but everyone knew. Everyone. I thought I was losing my mind.’
‘Oh dear. That’s a bad do.’ Poor chap. It was no wonder he sought comfort in the betting shop – and here.
‘She made me feel about that big,’ He made an inch with his thumb and forefinger. I knew without him telling me that he’d repeated a pattern learned during his childhood, but he told me anyway. ‘My mum was what they used to call a scold.’