verity
Now
This is the first proper day without him.
I’ve been trying to distract myself all day, and I’ve stayed extra, extra late at work, trying not to think about going back to the flat and him not being there. About the end. I let myself in and feel for a moment, just the briefest of moments, relief. He isn’t there. He isn’t cleaning and he isn’t waiting to tell me something that I’ve done wrong.
That relief, that momentary sense of freedom from what being with Logan is sometimes like, is quashed by the other feeling: the counterpart to the relief side of the coin – horror at the thought of having to be without him. The slam of the door makes me jump when I shut it behind me.
I stand in the corridor for a moment, not sure what to do. Should I text him? Should I leave it? I’ve lived here perfectly happily on my own for years, why am I now fretting about someone who moved in without being asked to not being here?
My mobile is in my hand anyway so I check the screen. Check the text messages. Check the messaging apps. All silent, all empty of new contact, all a reminder that it has ended.
Yes, we talked a good game: we were just giving each other space, we were going to talk about what next, but those are just the pauses you make on the way to the end. No one does ‘space’ and then gets back together.
What you doing?
It’s one text. It won’t. Of course it won’t hurt.
The reply is almost instant:
I was out with my sister, now I’m waiting for you.
I reply:
????
Suddenly he’s in the corridor. I can tell from here he’s been drinking and I can tell he hasn’t accepted that the end has come for us. We don’t speak. We don’t need to, not really. I drop my computer bag, which I’m still holding, I let go of my bag and I shed my jacket. In that time he comes to me, and I reach out my hands to place them on each side of his face as he bends his head and kisses me.
May, 2019
It cost us nearly ten thousand pounds to get everything – opening remarks to judge’s closing comments.
When I’d originally told Logan Carlisle how much it was going to cost to get everything, I had expected him to go off on one – for him to accuse me of stalling and trying to delay things. But he didn’t. He said he’d find the money somewhere and hung up without another word. Rude, I’d thought as I put down the phone. Rude and deluded. Where was he going to get that much money from? He must have got it from somewhere, though, since the documents were emailed to us three weeks later. Without being asked to, I spent a few days printing them out so it would be easier for us to process and then we arranged a time to meet.
‘Come in,’ I said to him on the day.
I’d told him to come over to my flat because it would mean we could work on the stuff a bit later into the night and, more importantly, there was less chance of us being seen together.
The last thing we needed – I needed – was anyone seeing me and him sitting in a café together and mentioning it to Mum and Dad. And that would totally happen. Someone would randomly bust us without realising that was what they were doing. Dad used to get Mum to buy him his ‘treats’ from the supermarket because he knew if he did it, he’d most likely run into someone who he’d been extolling the virtues of healthy eating to hours earlier. Brighton was a city, but not like London – there were lots of people living here, and they were dispersed, their lives seeming to barely touch, but at the same time, everything seemed interconnected, overlapping and smothering. You met people all the time who were linked to you or would become linked to you in a way you didn’t even realise was possible.
I was already technically lying to my parents by not telling them I had waylaid this man on his trip to confront my mother, I didn’t want to have to outright lie about it, too.
Logan Carlisle hesitated for a moment on my doorstep, and for the first time since I’d met him, he seemed unsure of himself, uncertain about what he was about to do. Gathering up his courage, he stepped into my blue-carpeted hallway and stood there making the place look untidy and small. I suppose Dad and Con, both taller than Logan Carlisle, never really lingered in the corridor when they came over so they didn’t have this shrinking effect on the place. Or maybe it was seeing the place through his eyes for the first time. I couldn’t imagine anyone who could rustle up ten thousand pounds at the drop of a hat would live in place like mine – a one-bedroom conversion just down from The Level in Brighton.
‘Shoes off?’ he asked, looking at my feet in their monster slippers.
‘Yes, please,’ I replied.
He kicked off his pristine trainers revealing odd socks – one was a green-and-black paisley pattern, the other was a green-and-purple stripe arrangement. The socks made me feel a lot less silly about my big monster slippers – especially when, noticing my look, he explained, ‘I can’t wear matching socks.’
‘You can’t wear them? What, you’re allergic or you’ll get in trouble?’
‘Both. I don’t feel completely dressed if my socks match. I think it’s something that started when I was little. My parents were so controlling after . . . you know, with Poppy, so things like wearing odd socks to school were my only rebellion. Kind of stuck. Years later I still do it.’
‘OK.’
‘I had a girlfriend once who tried to cure me of it by buying me only black socks. Do you know how I got around that one?’
I dread to think, I thought as I shook my head.
‘I coloured in the brand name on the soles of the socks different colours so they didn’t match any more.
‘Oh. OK. That seems very . . . committed of you.’
Logan Carlisle, for the first time, laughed. Loud and long, he laughed. That one action, that simple act of raising his lips and crinkling up his eyes erased years from him, dissolved for the briefest of moments the burden on his shoulders, and freed him from the cage he carried with him. ‘That’s a very diplomatic way of putting it.’
If he laughed more, scowled less, Logan Carlisle could be a very attractive man. If you liked his sort of looks.
‘Don’t worry, that’s my only quirk – apart from the sixty million other things, I suppose.’
In the living room, I’d arranged the papers I’d printed off into piles on the floor. I had put each day’s court proceedings in order in a line in front of the sofa. From the sofa I’d placed my two largest, squishiest cushions on the floor for us to sit on. I had highlighters, sticky notes and paper clips; Blu-Tack, felt-tips and erasable biros. Everything we should need to get through the papers.
‘Welcome to the archive,’ I said. ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea before we start or would you like to get straight to it?’
He shed his brown leather blazer as though he meant business and tossed it onto the back of the sofa. ‘Let’s get to it. Tea can always come later. I’m hoping you’ve got lapsang souchong. Organic no less.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I’ve got. Only I’ve got a special one that tastes like ordinary tea. It’s a special organic flavour they’re trialling.’
He did it again: laughed. Creased up his face and allowed mirth to escape his lips, to dance on his features. It was almost embarrassing how much that suited him compared to how he normally was.