The Story of You

KATY REGAN

The Story of You

Dedication

In loving memory of Nanna R and Grandad F

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Epilogue

Reading Group Guide

A Q&A With Katy Regan

Keep Reading: The Story of You

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Katy Regan

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

Mid-May 2013

The first time it happens, I’m on the Tube; coming back from a Depression Alliance coffee morning with Levi, which would be about as much fun as it sounds if Levi wasn’t one of my favourite patients (I know you’re not supposed to have favourites in this job, but sometimes you can’t help it).

It’s Friday, rush hour, in the middle of a May heat wave, so you can imagine the fun and games. I’m sardined in at all sides, about halfway down the aisle, right hand gripping the bar above, really wishing I’d shaved my armpits.

‘Everyone move down the aisle,’ the driver shouts through the Tannoy. ‘This train’s not moving until everyone moves down.’

Most people just tut and stand there. It annoys me when people do that. There’s a time for rebellion, I think, and rush hour on a Friday is not it. I want to get back, jump in the shower, then pop into the Turkish bakery for some of those pastries my sister Leah likes, and get to her house before 7.30 p.m. to catch the kids before we talk. If you get to my sister’s house at 7.33 p.m., forget it. Toys packed away, entire house wiped down. It’s like she never had kids.

I nudge the person next to me to get her to budge up. She staggers slightly and I murmur an apology. She’s trying to eat a prawn-cocktail salad standing up and I think: that’s dedication, that is. That’s hungry.

Eventually, the doors close and we jolt into action; soon I’m hurtling through the dark.

I crane my neck to look at the Tube map above: fifteen stops to Archway, which is home, but only four till Leicester Square, when all the tourists will pile out. It’s not so bad when you break it down like that. A poster grabs my attention: something about match.com and ‘making love happen’ and, just below it, a woman wearing a badge in the design of a Tube stop that says BABY ON BOARD. My eyes drift automatically to her midriff: there’s no sign of a bump yet beneath her white, broderie-anglaise blouse. Probably in those first vulnerable months, I think. Maybe just found out, giddy with excitement. I watch her, imagining her life. I like this game – it comes with the territory of the job, I suppose. I think, here’s a woman who knows how to do pregnancy; this is no martyr, soldiering on. I imagine she will get home tonight to her Victorian conversion, where husband (Steve, thirty-four, civil servant) will be waiting with a vast shepherd’s pie and give her strict instructions not to lift a finger.

There will be a pile of pristine baby-grows already in the drawer; a basket filling daily with talcs and wipes and cotton-wool buds. I was obsessed with the baby basket when Mum was pregnant with Niamh. I would pull it from under her bed and pore over the baby-scented goods; count what new items she’d got that week, grilling her about names: Niamh or Sadie if it’s a girl, Richie if it’s a boy. (Richie King! What a name! He’d have got the ladies, if he’d ever made it into the world.)

I imagine this woman will call her baby Ben; Ben or Holly – something safe that will never go out of fashion. The train stops at Embankment and many get off, but the hordes get on. A woman listening to Daft Punk next to me disappears and is replaced by a man wearing white, stained overalls. He’s sweating and smells as if he’s had a few after work – as well as of something else, something heady, which hits you immediately between the eyes. Turps. Takes me a while to put a name to it. Must be a decorator, I think.

The train hisses on to Charing Cross. It’s becoming like a furnace in here now; I can feel the hand that’s gripping the bar above is clammy with sweat, and the straps of my rucksack are rubbing on my shoulders. The carriage sways and shudders along, the man who smells of turps accidentally puts his hand over mine and we exchange a shy smile. I can see the pearls of perspiration form on his shiny head, and then, before he can stop them with the handkerchief he is struggling to take from his pocket, run down to his ears and onto his eyebrows. I feel sorry for him; I think, I bet he can’t wait to get out of here.

Woman with the prawn-cocktail salad is hanging on with one arm in front of us now, wilting with the heat. She suddenly yawns, a huge, wide, doggy yawn, revealing bits of iceberg lettuce. When she eventually clamps her mouth shut, a gust of fishy breath envelops us. Man who smells of turps and I exchange an eyebrow raise. What a relief, someone else who has surpassed me in the bad-Tube-etiquette stakes. I love the nonverbal communication that goes on in the Tube, the humanness of it all, the fact we’re so often thinking the same.

It comes as I catch my reflection in the window: dark hair pulled back and badly in need of a wash; eyes always more smiley (and crinkled at the sides) than I expect. It starts, deep and penetrating, a heart-burn in my chest, then, travelling at speed, spreads down my limbs, up my neck, my face, into the palms of my hands, until I feel something has to happen to release me from this heat, or else I will combust, surely? I will pass out.

I cough, then swallow, or try to, but it feels like a bunch of dried leaves has been shoved in my mouth. God, I’m going to be sick, I think; I’m actually going to puke. And I panic – I think, I don’t have a bag. But then, as suddenly as the heat struck, an icy wave descends – the chills – and I gag, but nothing comes out. I am sweating buckets now. If I raise my shaking hand to my forehead, an actual droplet comes off on my finger. My heart pounds hard and fast, like a spray of bullets. I can’t get my breath and I think, my God, I am having a heart attack.

I blink back the sweat and open my eyes, but the Tube map in front of me is swerving so much that I have to close my eyes again in case I pass out. We stop at two, maybe three more stops and I tighten my fingers around the bar above me; reach out to a vertical pole in front of me, but my palms are so wet that it slides right off and I stumble, accidently standing on the man-who-smells-of-turps’s foot. I shake my head by way of apology, but I don’t look at him, although I am aware of him looking at me. It feels like a bag of wet sand is sitting on my ribs. No matter how much I try to expand my chest, I can’t get enough air, and I am consumed – overwhelmed – with a wave of terror that this is it: I am dying. But I’ve been lied to, cheated. Everyone said Mum died peacefully, that death is peaceful; but it isn’t, it’s horror.

The last thing I am aware of, someone is touching my arm. I say, ‘I think I am having a heart attack,’ and then there’s a screeching sound, the wail of an alarm. Then I am sitting on a bench on the Tube platform; the man in the white overalls who smells of turps is holding my hand. Another man in green overalls is asking, ‘Are you a diabetic?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not diabetic. But I’ve just found out I’m pregnant.’

Chapter One

Three months earlier

February 2013

Dear Lily

I’m going to end it with Andy. I’ve decided.

I’m sitting here, alone at a restaurant table for the second time this week, whilst he’s outside arguing with the Ex, and I’ve decided enough is enough. There’s only so much sitting alone in restaurants picking at olives a girl can take. I don’t even like olives!!

Andy’s a nice man and it’s been great to have the company, but I’ve realized that’s it: it’s just company, someone to watch telly with and go out for dinner with and cook with (though even that’s started to grate: How many hours has that man spent with a pestle and mortar? What’s wrong with a shop-bought curry sauce now and again?). I’ve started to wonder, what’s in it for me, you know? How did I ever think I could have a successful relationship with a man going through a messy divorce? He needs too much himself. He’s broken. And, as you and I know, I spend enough time with broken people in the day job. I can’t be the therapist outside of it too.

Oh, Lily, but I’ve started to wonder if I’m the broken one, if I’m the one who needs therapy. Am I to keep doing this? Is this to be the pattern my relationships take? Long periods of celibacy followed by unsuitable, emotionally unavailable men? It’s like I pick them out or something.

I worry that what happened all those years ago has scarred me forever, that I’m too scared to fall in love with anyone – because look what happened when I fell in love with Joe, look at the fallout then! Maybe going out with people like Andy, who I’m never going to fall in love with, let’s face it, is my way of dipping my toe in relationships, playing at having a boyfriend but never actually diving in with both feet. And that’s a bit tragic, isn’t it? That I might never fall in love again? That at thirty-two that’s it, game over?

I sneaked my notepad underneath some work notes and pretended to read them whilst really watching Andy arguing on the phone to his Ex, outside yet another Modern European brasserie in central London. It was something I’d grown very accustomed to during the past year.

From a purely psychological point of view, it made fascinating viewing. Andy was a confident man, very male in his behaviour and attitude, and yet he looked so weak when he was on the phone to Belinda (or Belinda Ballbreaker as I call her, since she means WAR in this divorce. She means war in life, generally, as far as I can tell …)

He had his back to me and was flexing alternate bum cheeks, running a hand, anxiously, through his salt-and-pepper curls. Andy was a very handsome man, yet it struck me at that moment that his hair was not dissimilar to Russell Grant’s. Maybe this was the self-protection kicking in, the physical attraction waning to make The End more bearable.

‘Sorry, sorry, so sorry, honey.’

Eventually, Andy came back inside the restaurant, red faced and apologizing profusely. I looked studiously at my notes, as if I’d been doing this all the time. ‘She hung up on me,’ he said, palms in the air, as if this had never happened before. ‘She actually put the phone down.’

I made a sympathetic face but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to know what would happen if I didn’t offer advice or thoughts like I usually did; if I didn’t allow him to offload on me.

Andy stood there for a few seconds, as if needing to physically recover from the latest bashing from his Ex. It was no good – he really was good-looking, with his piercing blue eyes and his dusky skin tones. No matter if his hair had a touch of the ‘Russell Grant’ about it … He looked like an architect, I thought, and I’d always fancied dating an architect: that mix of practical and creative.

I picked up the menu and pretended to read. Eventually, when he realized he was getting nothing from me, he came round the back of my chair and wrapped his arms around my neck.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, nuzzling into me. He smelt of soap and the outside. ‘You’ve been here all this time, sitting patiently.’

‘That’s all right.’ I shrugged. ‘I always know to bring a book with me to dinner now.’

‘Or your notes, you have here I see …’ he said, indicating the work file I’d got out.

(Sarcasm is generally wasted on Andy.) ‘Why can’t everyone be as lovely as you, Robyn? Tell me. Why do I always go for the feisty ones?’

I bit my lip. Robyn wasn’t about to be lovely Robyn any more.

He sat back down again. I knew he was waiting for me to ask him about the conversation with Belinda, how unfair it all was, what a bitch she was, but I resisted.

‘So how was your day at work, beauts?’ he said, finally, after we’d ordered – me the ham-hock terrine, him the goat’s cheese and beetroot. ‘How are the certified mental as opposed to my ex-wife who’s yet to be diagnosed?’

I took some bread from the basket and tore at it. ‘Oh, you know, just a day like any other, really. Two sectioned, one attempted suicide.’

I knew that throwing a word like ‘suicide’ into the conversation this early on in the evening would be seen as provocative by Andy, but to be honest, he’d annoyed me. I felt like being provocative.

‘Oh dear. Liam again?’

‘Levi, it’s Levi.’

‘Sorry, Levi. Cry for help, I imagine?’

‘Yes, most probably,’ I said. This was Andy’s line for everything.

I wondered when I should break the news to him: now, or after the meal? In between courses? I felt like giving my own little cry for help: ‘Argh! Get me out of this!’ Maybe I wouldn’t tell him at all. Maybe I’d give him one more chance.

Andy picked up the wine menu. I could tell he wanted to get back to him and the phone call, but I was determined to carry on.

‘Anyway, I also went to Lidl with a sixty-three-year-old woman dressed in hot pants and a Stetson today,’ I said.

‘Bloody hell, is that all she was wearing?’ said Andy.

‘Pretty much …’

‘Poor woman …’ he added. He had a look on his face like I’d told her to put on the hat and hot pants as some sick and twisted joke. ‘I mean, can you imagine the humiliation, how embarrassed you’d be?’

‘Andy, she’s manic, she couldn’t give a toss,’ I said, laying my napkin on my knee. ‘She’s so disinhibited, it’s a miracle I got her to put on any clothes at all.’

‘Ah, but this is the issue, isn’t it?’ he said, leaning back into the chair and lacing his fingers. Andy likes to do this – try to have some philosophical debate, when actually, I doubt he’s genuinely that interested. I know he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

‘What’s the issue?’

‘That’s the job of the psychiatric nurse, isn’t it? To make sure she knows when she should be inhibited and when she shouldn’t.’

I tried really hard not to look irritated.

‘Well, I don’t think …’

‘I mean, can you imagine how awful that would be?’ he said, leaning forward, lowering his voice. ‘How demeaning, being allowed to walk into a supermarket in hot pants when you’re drawing your pension?’

I started laughing. Sometimes I think Andy thinks I am much more earnest about my job than I actually am.

‘Yeah. It’d be brilliant. Sixty-odd, waltzing around Dulwich Sainsbury’s in your hot pants, all the yummy mummies running out of there screaming, “Aaaaagghhh!”’

Andy pulled his chin into his neck.

‘Robyn, please.’

‘Well, honestly.’

He went back to the menu.

‘Let’s order wine, shall we?’ He smiled, determined not to make this into an argument, even though I was up for one now. An argument would make this whole thing easier, of course.

I waited. I counted.

‘Do you know what Belinda said to me?’ he said.

Eight seconds. Impressive.

‘No, what did she say to you?’

‘That I was selfish – I mean, of all the things … That she wasn’t surprised the girls didn’t want to spend much time with me because I didn’t know how to talk to them, that I didn’t understand them. She said I don’t listen to them properly when they call and …’

The starters came, and he was still going on about it. Then, suddenly, mouth stuffed full, he started waving his hand in front of my face.

‘Oh, my God, I completely forgot to tell you! I’ve got a surprise!’

‘A surprise?’ My stomach lurched. I’d psyched myself up now. Don’t start being perfect boyfriend now.

‘Yep,’ he leaned forward and put his hand on mine. ‘I haven’t got the girls next weekend – their mum’s taking them on some sort of girly shopping extravaganza; my idea of a living hell, as you know – so I thought we could go away together.’ He patted my hand and grinned at me. He did have a lovely smile, the most unusually blue eyes. ‘Well, actually, I just thought to hell with it and I’ve booked somewhere.’

I forced a mouthful of food down my throat. ‘Oh,’ was all I could manage.

‘Well, aren’t you pleased?’ he said, disappointed. ‘Robyn, come on, you could look a bit more excited.’

But I wasn’t excited, I was irritated: irritated by his having delayed our dinner by twenty minutes to have an argument with the Ex; irritated by him talking about nothing but his ex-wife; irritated and bored to tears with the whole divorce saga. No, I’d made my decision. The fact I didn’t feel even a smidgen of excitement about the prospect of a mini-break (and I’d been hankering after a mini-break for absolutely ages) cemented it.

I sighed. ‘Oh, Andy, I’m just a bit bored of it, that’s all.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of always talking about you and Belinda and the girls and the divorce.’

He looked genuinely hurt and shocked and, for a second, I felt bad.

‘But it’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me, Robyn, you know that. I can’t just switch my emotions off when I see you. Like a tap!’

‘Really?’ I tried not to say it unkindly. ‘Because I’d like you to try, Andy, just a little bit.’

He frowned, his shoulders slumping, genuinely deflated. ‘But you’re so good at listening.’ The innocence with which he said it killed me. ‘I thought you were interested.’

‘Andy, I am interested, to a point. All I’m saying is, just, it would be nice to be asked how I am, occasionally, and to be allowed to reply in more than one sentence before you start talking about you again.’

‘But you don’t like talking about yourself.’

I kind of laughed. This was true. I had said that.

‘But, I didn’t mean like never, ever, ever!’

Andy searched my face. It was at times like this that I worried he might be on the spectrum. He just really did not get it.

‘Your relationship with Belinda and the girls, it’s becoming like a chronic ailment,’ I said. ‘Like a boil on your bum, or sinusitis. It never goes away, and yet, I get a daily update, whether I like it or not. And whenever I suggest anything that might help, you’re not interested. Sometimes I feel like you just want to moan.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see. Well, can I make it up to you? Will you come away? I’ve booked a lovely hotel in Watford.’

‘Watford?’

‘That’s the nearest town – it’s actually on the outskirts of Watford. It has a spa, a golf course. I could play a round whilst you get pampered. Have a facial or a massage – one of those treatments all you girls like to have?’

‘Andy,’ I said, and as the words left my mouth, I did feel reassuringly sad. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea to go away together. In fact, I think we should break up. I’m really sorry, but I just think this isn’t working any more.’

Chapter Two

March

Robyn,

I hate to do this on Facebook, but I haven’t got your number and the email address I tried doesn’t work any more. I’ve got some really bad news: my mum died suddenly on Tuesday. She was fine, went out for a curry with Dad, then came home and had a heart attack. I can’t believe it. I know what people mean now when they say, ‘I keep expecting her to walk through the door.’

I’ve never seen my dad like this. I know this won’t have rocked his faith in the long run, but he’s struggling. I think he realizes it’s different when it happens to you, you know?

Personally, I am enraged: I mean, fifty-nine? WTF. Thirty years of service and that’s how he repays my dad? If one more person tells me he works in mysterious ways, I’ll punch them. I remember you saying that to me once, after your mum died. I remember exactly where we were, too – down the cricket ground. I probably gave you a cuddle, then tried to slip my hand up your top … God, I’m sorry, Robbie. Going through all that at sixteen, with only a sixteen-year-old me to talk to. I had no idea. Now I do.

The first person I thought of calling was you, because I knew you’d understand but, like I say, I had no number, so here I am telling about the death of my mother on f**ing Facebook!

The funeral’s a week tomorrow (1 April) at 3 p.m. at St Bart’s, Kilterdale obviously. (Dad says he’s giving it, but I’ll believe that when I see it. He’s a mess.) I’d love you to be there. I know Mum would too. She was talking about you just days before she died, about that time we all went on a barge holiday to the Norfolk Broads and she had one too many Dubonnet and lemonades and fell in. Hey, she wasn’t a typical vicar’s wife, was she?

Anyway, my number’s below. Hopefully see you there.

Hope you’re well, darl X love Joe X

I smiled as the memory floodgates opened … The barge holiday and the night of Marion’s ‘Dubonnet Splash’. My God, I’d completely forgotten about all that. Joe and I had only been seeing one another a month and were still in the unhealthily obsessed stage when, against their better judgement, Marion and the Reverend Clifford Sawyer (Joe’s dad) decided to take us with them. A rev he may have been, but Cliff loved a tipple, as did Marion, and a major plus point of a barge holiday, they soon found, was the number of pub stops one could make along the way.

We’d all been in the pub this one afternoon, but Joe and I had offered to go back to the barge to make a start on the carbonara for tea. But we hadn’t made a start on tea, we’d just made out. Marion had come back tipsy and, seeing us suckered against one another (thank God, fully clothed), surrounded by chopped raw bacon, because that’s as far as we had got, she’d dashed off in desperation for fish and chips, falling, as she did, in between the canal bank and the boat. She’d done this Carry On-style dramatic scream. Oh, how we’d laughed …

‘Robyn, if you could tear yourself away from Facebook and whatever is so funny just for a second, then perhaps you could fill us in on last night? By all accounts, it was an eventful one?’ (It was only then that I realised, I was still laughing sixteen years later.)