I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - Milly Johnson Page 0,52
thought it might help you. But you said, “Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait, Mary.” ’
‘Did I? Did I say it like that?’
‘Exactly like that.’
‘Why would I do that?’
His lack of self-awareness made Mary prickle with an annoyance that fuelled her next words.
‘Because I’m just Mary who files your correspondence and makes your coffees. Not someone to take any serious notice of.’
There, she’d let it out; it had been sitting inside her for years.
The words seemed to hang in the air for a moment, with long tails of echoes. Jack had never blushed in his life, but he felt heat rise in his cheeks and when he spoke next, his voice was drained of volume.
‘I’m really sorry if I did that, Mary. I can’t remember it, but if I did, then please accept my belated apology.’
‘Don’t worry about it, it’s fine.’ Mary acknowledged the admission, dried her hands while thinking that she wouldn’t have dared say all that to Jack had she been scared of getting on the wrong side of him. It was the first step in letting him go. The realisation triggered a wave of both relief and sadness at the same time.
Chapter 17
‘Well this is very pleasant isn’t it?’ said Luke to Bridge as they sat opposite each other at the table constructing a paper chain. ‘And the most polite we’ve been to each other in years.’
‘Don’t forget we need to sign and swap those documents before we get out of here,’ said Bridge. ‘That would be too ironic, being holed up together for days and then forgetting to do that.’
‘I promise I won’t if you won’t,’ said Luke and licked a strip of paper. ‘Ugh, that awful gluey-glue taste.’
Bridge made a grumbling noise of agreement, tried not to think again about the last time she had made a paper chain with Luke. But the taste of the glue had jogged his memory too.
‘Ooh, déjà vu,’ he said. ‘I had a sudden flash of doing this before with you, making a chain. We can’t have though. We were never the making-paper-chains sort of people, were we?’
‘No, it’s déjà vu,’ she said. He’d forgotten then. Forgotten that day when the chain they’d spent putting together all afternoon ended up as a flattened, unusable, broken pile of scrap paper. So why hadn’t she? Why was the memory half-fluorescent, half-neon lights? She looked forward to some modern technology where you could go to a clinic and have selected memories zapped out of your brain with lasers.
‘Can you remember, that first Christmas we had in the flat?’
‘Not really,’ she said, lip curled like a disgruntled toddler.
Luke grinned.
‘Yes you do. There’s nothing wrong in having memories. We were married, we can’t airbrush ourselves out of each other’s history.’
‘Sadly.’
‘Even if you did once say I was the reason why God gave you a middle finger.’
She couldn’t help but laugh at that.
‘There’s been enough bad blood between us, we can walk away from each other with civility,’ said Luke.
‘You are not now and never will be on my Christmas card list,’ said Bridge. She’d been at loggerheads with Luke for so long, she couldn’t think of a sure path out of it. Like Hansel and Gretel, they had strayed deeper into a dark wood of mutual enmity one footstep at a time, getting lost in it, questioning how they could have wandered so far into such a hostile place and carried on fighting long past the point of remembering what they were fighting about.
‘We were young, daft and very much in love once,’ Luke said, softly.
‘Daft being the operative word.’
‘I’ve never met anyone like you, Bridge. Still haven’t,’ said Luke.
Bridge stopped sticking. ‘Go on, say it: “Thank God.” ’
‘I wasn’t going to say that at all. You are an incredible woman. I’ve seen how far your star has risen and I’ve been really glad for you. Okay, I admit that on occasion I was happy it had because I intended to take half your business, and before you open your mouth I bet you were secretly glad Plant Boy was doing well for exactly the same reason.’
Say something nice in return, Bridge, prompted a voice inside her.
‘…I’m glad you’ve done okay too. I was wrong to scoff at the only good idea you had in all the time I knew you.’
He laughed at her barbed compliment.
‘I’m not sure I would have had half the success without the name. Do you remember the day you came up with it?’