You Had Me At Hello

‘No.’

‘That’s funny, I was sure you would have, for some reason,’ Ben says, unguardedly. ‘A little girl with her mother’s attitude problems, and the same stupid mittens.’

He gives me a small smile and looks into his cup again. The warmth of this – the reference to something obscure that only we’d understand, the fact it reveals he’s thought about me – prompts me to emit a small, strangled noise that approximates a giggle. Then, in a moment, it drenches me with sadness. Like my chest cavity is full of rainwater.

We avoid each other’s eyes and move on. Ben tells me about the law firm he’s joined, how his wife’s also a solicitor. She got transferred from her London practice to their Manchester office so she could be up here with him. They met at a Law Society dinner. The crowded room, black tie. The scene plays in my head like a trailer for a Richard Curtis film I most definitely don’t want to see.

He concludes, jokily: ‘If I’m a solicitor and you’re a court reporter, perhaps we shouldn’t be speaking?’

‘Depends. What department are you in?’

‘Family.’

‘Divorce settlements, that kind of thing?’

‘Yeah, access arrangements. Sometimes grim. Other times, if you can get the right outcome, grim satisfaction.’

I understand why he’d want to work in that area, and he knows I know, so I nod. ‘I think there’d be more of a conflict in talking to a reporter if you were in criminal.’

‘Couldn’t take the hours. The friend who got me the job up here is in criminal. He’s on call all the time, it’s punishing. Actually, he was saying he wants to talk to the press about a case. Shall I give him your name?’

‘Of course,’ I say, eager to please and forge a connection.

We get to the end of one coffee and, despite my offer to buy the second, Ben checks his watch and says he’d love to but he probably ought to be going.

‘Yeah, me too, now you mention it,’ I lie, twisting my watch round and glancing at it without looking at the time.

Ben waits solicitously as I pull my coat on. I hope he’s not noticing the stone I’ve gained since university. (‘Stone,’ Rhys used to snort. ‘A stone weighing thirty pounds? Did I miss the latest barmy Brussels directive?’)

We walk outside together.

‘It’s great to see you, Rachel. I can’t believe it’s been ten years, it’s incredible.’

‘Yeah, unbelievable,’ I agree.

‘We should keep in touch. Me and Liv don’t know many people up here. You can tell us where’s good to go out in Manchester these days.’

‘I’d love to!’ Like I know. ‘I’ll get Caroline, Mindy and Ivor out, too.’

‘Wow, you still see them?’

‘Yeah. I see them all the time.’

‘That’s really nice,’ Ben nods, yet I feel it’s another example of my decade-long stasis, as if I sit around in a moth-eaten Miss Havisham graduation ballgown, listening to a crackly recording of Pulp’s “Disco 2000”. ‘I’ll let you know about that story, too. What’s your number?’

Ben keys it in while I try to remember the numbers in the right sequence, awash with adrenaline.

He checks his watch again: ‘Crap, I’m late. What about you? Need walking to your stop?’

‘It’s only round the corner, I’ll be fine, go.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘See you soon, Rachel. I’ll call you.’

He ducks down and pecks me on the cheek. I hold my breath in the shock of the contact and the brush and warmth of his skin against mine. Then there’s a horrifically awkward moment when he unexpectedly goes for the other cheek too in that media London/sophisticated European way. I don’t expect it and we nearly bump faces, so I have to put my hand on his shoulder to steady myself and then panic it looks too forward, over-correcting by leaping backwards.

‘See you!’ I say, though what I really want to do is re-run the action without me being such a gauche fool, in the manner of a bossy child directing a play in their front room. ‘Right, you stand there, I am here again … Go!’

I walk to my stop in a semi-trance-like state, cartoon stars circling round my head, the two recently kissed places on my face burning. There’s the illicit rush at seeing him – and he asked to see me again! – combined with the spirit-flattening confirmation that his life’s shiny and joyful and functional and mine isn’t.

An hour after I get home, when the fixed grin has faded and I’m watching the old telly in the spare room, I let tears fall. Once the dam has cracked, there’s a deluge. Married. Happily. Olivia. What’s even in a posh shepherd’s pie?

I feel as if I’ve woken up after a coma, been jolted back to life by a favourite song. I’m not sure I like the view from my bed. The experience of meeting Ben again is the very definition of the word bittersweet.

Then two very clear questions form in the tears, snot and inner maelstrom: how am I going to feel if he doesn’t call? And what good’s going to come of it if he does?

11

I don’t ask Rhys to borrow the car so I can move my things because I know he’ll want to use the car to be nowhere near the house on the day I leave.

The evening before last, I was coming out of the shower with a towel wrapped around my body and another around my head. I was moving quickly because any extra amount of skin on show feels inappropriate, post-separation. Rhys charged up the stairs. I thought he was going to dodge past, or argue about the cavalier use of the hot water, but he stopped in front of me, looked me in the eye. His eyes were unexpectedly moist.

‘Stay,’ he said, thickly.

I thought I’d misheard. It sunk in.

‘I can’t,’ I blurt.

He nodded, not even angry, or resentful. He galloped back down the stairs and left me standing on the landing, shivering. Turns out the consequences of a huge decision don’t all tumble down at once like opening an over-full cupboard; they keep hitting you in waves.

When I tell Caroline I’m going to hire a removal van, she asks what I’m taking with me and decides it can be done in a few runs in her car. She turns up early on a Saturday to find me, lightly sweaty, standing in a hallway crammed with everything I own that’s portable. It feels strangely like leaving for university, only with bleak despair where all the bright hope used to be.

Rhys went for Mindy’s plan about the furniture. I saw the thought scroll across his face – ‘Screw making life easier for her’ – then imagining those flat-bed-truck-style trolleys in IKEA, and he grunted his agreement. So it’s clothes, books, DVDs, a surprisingly huge haul of bathroom toiletries, and then ‘odds and sods’, a category which sounds like it should be the smallest but turns out to be the largest. Photo albums, plants, accessories, pictures … I’ve been scrupulously fair whenever encountering something the house only has one of – hot water bottle, mop bucket, cafetiere, engagement ring – and left it for Rhys.

Caroline casts an appraising eye over the junk and decides it’s two journeys, three at a pinch. We start heaping it into the back of her Audi saloon and, with the back seats folded down and some determined pushing, we make decent in-roads.

‘Definitely two journeys,’ Caroline concludes, as I lock the front door, saying what I’m thinking, minus the part about how much I’m dreading coming back for the next and last time.

We set off, me blithely chattering about the flat to distract from the inner turmoil, Caroline casting worried glances at me whenever she can take her line of sight off the road.

‘We don’t have to go, you know. If you’ve changed your mind …’ she starts, and I bite my lip hard and furiously shake my head to indicate please, not now.

Caroline pats my knee and asks about the route. When we arrive at the flat, I’m grateful for all the tasks – paying the car-parking meter, unlocking the flat, running relays with armfuls of clutter – to occupy me. Eventually it’s all piled up and time to collect the rest. I deep breathe and blow the air out as if I’m an athlete limbering up for a feat of exertion.

Back at my house, or what used to be my house, the rest of the packing is completed in minutes.