We Were On a Break

‘Has she had a good time?’ I asked, also remembering I had told Liv I wanted to take a break at three o’clock in the morning and I put the Weetabix back, swallowing down the dark feeling in the pit of my stomach. ‘It was a yoga retreat, wasn’t it?’

‘Yoga retreat and a sugar detox,’ he corrected, turning a corner and staring wistfully at a packet of chocolate Hobnobs. ‘And something to do with mindfulness.’

‘Intense.’ I raised my eyebrows at my dad in his freshly pressed shirt and trousers with a crease so sharp they could have sliced bread. Not that he was allowed to eat bread. Mum’s middle-aged interest in all things healthy had completely passed him by, but Coco Pop bans aside, they both seemed to be adjusting to her new path with relative ease. Probably because Mum didn’t know he was sneaking down the café for a bacon sandwich every other morning when he went out to get the paper. That was the thing about villages: too small for secrets. I’d seen him, hiding in the back behind his Telegraph, brown sauce all over his mush.

‘That’s the one,’ he nodded. ‘Are you sure you can’t do tonight? I mean, Chris has got his own business and a new baby but he said he could find half an hour or so. Early doors? Four-ish?’

Sighing, I picked up the Hobnobs and put them in the trolley next to the Coco Pops.

‘If Chris can make it, I suppose I can.’

‘He’s a good lad,’ Dad said with a nod. ‘He’s got a pitch, you know.’

‘I do know,’ I replied, folding the sleeves of my jumper over my knuckles. ‘He mentioned it. Twice.’

‘He’s doing so well.’ He smiled brightly at a furious-looking woman in a tabard and kept talking. ‘And little Gus, what a pumpkin. Healthy as an ox, he is.’

‘Total pumpkin,’ I agreed, unsure as to whether or not that was a good thing but Dad had been a doctor before he retired so I assumed positive things.

‘You should get some babysitting in,’ Dad advised. ‘Before it’s your turn.’

‘Yeah,’ I replied, focusing on the nutritional table on the back of a jar of Horlicks.

Ever since that fateful night Friday night at Sadie Jenkins’ house party in Year Twelve, me and my mates had spent almost every waking second trying to work out how to have sex as often as possible without knocking anyone up. Sex good, babies bad. Now they were popping up all over the place and I never knew how I was supposed to react. When Cassie first got pregnant, Chris was a wreck, hiding in the back of his garage and singing Oasis songs to himself while he played with his original, mint condition 1992 Game Boy. Now he was posting topless black-and-white pictures of himself on Facebook, holding the baby in the air like he was the FA Cup. As Liv pointed out, it was all very Athena poster and not in a good way. Chris was not a man who should be appearing shirtless in the world.

‘All right, out with it,’ Dad demanded as we headed for the toilet paper aisle. ‘You haven’t said a word about your holiday and quite frankly, Adam, I can’t remember a time you’ve had less to say for yourself since you went through puberty. Is something the matter?’

I shook my head and grabbed a twelve-pack of Andrex.

‘Nope.’

‘Your mum doesn’t like those ones.’ He fished them back out of the trolley and put them straight back on the shelf. ‘Ever since they put the dogs on the paper. She says it makes her uncomfortable.’

‘Fair.’ I swapped for an overpriced, unbleached organic, recycled brand and waited for Dad’s approval, which was given in a slow nod. ‘I’m just tired, we got in late.’

‘But you had a nice time?’ he asked. ‘And Liv’s well?’

‘We had a brilliant time the whole two weeks,’ I said. Not technically a lie, it didn’t really go to shit until the last night. ‘Liv’s fine.’

‘And she won’t mind me borrowing you tonight?’ He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, smiling brightly. ‘Pizza, Coco Pops and a bit of Newsnight?’

‘How could any woman begrudge any man pizza, Coco Pops and Kirsty Wark?’ I replied. ‘Other than Mum, obviously.’

‘Sugar is more addictive than cocaine,’ he said wisely. ‘And meat is murder. And I’m sure there’s something about pizza but I can’t think of it right now and, to be frank, I don’t care to. I’ve earned the right to a slice of pizza once in a while.’

Couldn’t argue with the man.

‘When do you think she’ll pack this all in?’

‘I’m not sure she will.’ He tapped his fingers on the top of his walking stick while contemplating the different types of wet wipes. ‘She’s stuck to this a lot longer than she did the ballroom dancing or the pottery.’

‘Any joy on selling the kiln?’

‘Not a lot of demand for a second-hand kiln round here,’ Dad replied. ‘And you never know, she might take an interest again.’

‘You’re a saint,’ I said, thinking of all the oddly shaped bowls and redundant ashtrays filling up my kitchen cupboards. Mum’s hobbies must have cost them a small fortune. Almost as much as a half-completed law degree, suggested the little voice in my head that sounded an awful lot like my brother. ‘I don’t know how you cope sometimes.’

‘I knew what I was getting into when I married your mother,’ he said with a little shrug. ‘The only thing she’s ever stuck to for more than six months is me, so I can’t really complain. I know it’s different nowadays but I won’t say I wasn’t glad when Chris tied the knot. It changes things. You’ll understand when you get married.’

‘Yeah,’ I shivered involuntarily, not sure if I was more afraid of going over to apologize or the thought that she might not want to see me in the first place. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

There was, after all, a first time for everything.

I’ve never been a smoker but there were times when the idea of popping out for a cigarette sounded so great. Hiding at the back of the surgery and checking Instagram was not relaxing. All those photos of other people’s holidays, overdrawn-lip selfies and artfully shot pasta might have been easier to stomach with a lungful of nicotine. Every time I scrolled through, I thought of an old framed photo of my granddad hanging in my parents’ living room. He was standing in the surgery in his operating gown, enjoying a pipe with his colleagues immediately after performing his first successful spinal surgery on an Alsatian. I’m not saying it was the healthiest thing for my granddad or the dog, but everyone in the picture looked incredibly relaxed and every single one of them was puffing away. Here I was, squinting at a smudged phone screen, looking at what one-quarter of Little Mix had for breakfast and my anxiety levels were off the charts.

For sixteen minutes I’d been pretending I was about to call Adam and in those sixteen minutes, I’d done a full lap of my social media channels and checked three different websites to make sure it wasn’t Mercury retrograde. I wasn’t usually someone who was lost for words but it was one thing knowing how to say ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stevens, your hamster didn’t make it’ without hesitating but quite another to call your boyfriend when all you had to work with was ‘So, I was just wondering, did you by any chance dump me at three o’clock this morning?’

‘Liv?’

I looked up to see Adam right there in front of me, same red hooded sweatshirt as the night before, a different, more sheepish expression on his face.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Well, at least he’d saved me a phone call.

‘You look knackered.’ There was a sad-looking bunch of pink roses in his right hand and he was hanging onto them for dear life. ‘Busy morning?’

‘Very,’ I replied. ‘And, you know, I didn’t get a lot of sleep.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he looked down at the flowers in his hand and blew out a big, heavy breath. ‘These are for you.’

He stretched as far as his long arms would reach, only taking two extra steps towards me when he was absolutely certain they were necessary.

‘Thanks,’ I said, trying not to notice the remains of the price sticker he hadn’t quite managed to remove. There were a bunch of Sainsbury’s bags in the back of his car and my stomach rumbled loudly. Would it be impolite to trade the flowers for a loaf of bread? ‘They’re pretty.’

They weren’t.

‘Least I could do,’ Adam’s words were stilted and uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry about last night, I don’t know what was going on in my head, I must have gone mental from the flight.’

‘You mean about the break thing?’ I asked, concentrating on the bouquet of flowers. Even though he was here to apologize and take it back, having David’s theory proven right hurt. Really hurt. Hurt like I’d been kicked in the stomach by a donkey. That really had happened once and donkeys do not mess about.

‘Um, yes?’ He dug his hands in his pockets, looked at his feet for a moment then peeped back up to see whether or not he was forgiven. ‘Sorry.’

He was not.

‘You’re sorry?’ I asked. He had dumped me. There had been a dumping and I didn’t even know. Standing there, in the car park, phone in one hand, crappy supermarket flowers in the other, I was so close to meltdown. Anything I said or did would be wrong. If I cried I would feel foolish, if I shouted, he would shout back, and if I punched him in the throat, well, in theory I could go to prison but really shouldn’t I get some kind of prize? I didn’t know which was worse, to be angry, crazy or heartbroken, because, in that moment, I was all of the above.

‘Yeah, I’m sorry.’ He gave me a small, handsome smile and lifted his head a little bit more. ‘Uh, so, I know we were supposed to go round to Chris and Cassie’s tonight but Mum’s away and Dad asked if me and Chris would go round there, so I think we’re going to do that instead. Me and Chris, I mean.’

My grip tightened around the stems of the roses and I thanked the supermarket overlords for removing the thorns.

‘What?’

For some bizarre reason, I couldn’t quite seem to get over the part where my boyfriend had dumped me and then magically changed his mind overnight. Turned out it was incredibly hard to forgive something in the past when you had only just found out it happened in the first place. I wasn’t a saint, I wasn’t Beyoncé, more’s the bloody pity.

‘Me and Chris are going to my dad’s for tea,’ he repeated, a smile fully realized on his face, his body easy and relaxed all while a tiny version of me ran around circles in circles inside my brain, screaming at the top of her lungs and drowning out my thought process. ‘So dinner at their house is off. Didn’t Cassie call you?’

That was all he had to say? Sorry I broke up with you, I’m going to my dad’s for tea, here are some shit supermarket flowers now let’s pretend it never happened, cool, OK, bye?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, resting the flowers on the wall and rubbing my shiny, sunburned face with both hands. ‘I think I’ve missed something. What exactly happened last night? What exactly happened in Mexico?’

A wave of tension swept over my boyfriend and he rocked backwards on his heels, tugging on the strings of his hoodie and pushing out his bottom lip.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, kicking the gravel with the toe of his Converse and squeezing his shoulders up around his ears. He did the same thing when I found out he’d eaten all my Jaffa Cakes so at least I was certain he knew how serious this was. ‘It was stupid, I wasn’t thinking. I was just tired, Liv.’

‘Well, it came from somewhere,’ I pointed out, still processing. ‘You must have meant it at the time.’

I could feel my face getting hot, not just hurt, not just angry but consumed by feelings I’d paid no mind to in years. Adam had never made me feel anything other than safe, loved and, very occasionally, mildly irritated but that was only when he shoved Penguin wrappers down the side of the settee. All I wanted to do was go back to bed, pull the covers over my head and pretend this wasn’t happening. Instead I had to resolve it like a grown-up then explain to a sixty-two-year-old man that his cat’s neon pink furballs and the fact he kept forcing it to wear neon pink hand-knitted jumpers were related.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Even though he didn’t look nearly as shit as I did, I could tell by the bags under his eyes he hadn’t got a lot of sleep. As was right and proper. ‘I was pissed off. All that shit on the plane and then you wouldn’t stop talking and I needed some space to calm down.’

All that shit on the plane? Like that was my fault?

‘I was only upset because you were being weird all Monday night,’ I reminded him, sending the heat in my face to fuel the fire in my belly. Rage was better than tears: angry, I could work with. Tired and emotional, I could not. ‘And I’m not the one who caused a scene on the plane.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said stiffly. ‘What else do you want me to say?’

‘And now you don’t need space?’ I asked, still processing as I spoke. It wasn’t fair, he’d had a whole morning to think about this and I had been blindsided. If anyone needed space, it was me.

‘Oi, Liv, Mr Harries is here—’ David stuck his head out of the door, took one look at Adam, one look at me and slammed it shut again. ‘Never mind,’ he shouted through the letterbox, ‘I’ll sort it.’

‘Look, I said I’m sorry,’ Adam said, ignoring David’s interruption. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so pissed off.’

‘I’m so pissed off because at three o’clock this morning you apparently broke up with me,’ I explained, beating the flowers in the palm of my hand until there was a carpet of baby pink petals under my feet. ‘And now you want me to pretend it never happened. It was only nine hours ago, Adam. What is going on? You’ve changed your mind now? Nine hours was a long enough break, was it? I. Just. Don’t. Understand.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t long enough.’ I could tell he was annoyed now. Clearly he thought his five-quid apology flowers were going to be enough. ‘If you’re going to be like this, maybe I could use a bit more time.’

‘Fine!’ I shouted.

‘Fine!’ he shouted back.

For a moment, we stood in silence in the car park, neither one of us moving or speaking and I was unsure whether to carry on arguing or run and hide. Adam clenched and unclenched his hands and I could see the same options spinning around in his eyes, like a human fruit machine.

I would not speak first, I would not speak first, I would not speak first …

‘So what?’ he said eventually. ‘What do you want?’

Less than three days ago my answer would have been ‘to get engaged’; now I didn’t have a clue what to tell him.

‘You’re the one who wanted something,’ I reminded him, bitterly pleased he had been the one to break the awkward silence. At some point, our conversation had turned into a competition I was desperate to win, even though I didn’t really know what that meant. ‘You can’t say you want to break up one minute and pretend everything is all right the next without some sort of explanation.’

He straightened himself up to his full height, towering over me as he nodded, either because he agreed or he was trying to convince himself that he did, I wasn’t sure.

‘Fine,’ he said again. ‘I mean, yes. A bit of space might be a good idea, you’re right.’

It was such an Adam thing to do, turn the situation around to make it seem like it was my idea in the first place. But there was no point making this worse than it already was by pointing that out. I rolled my eyes, turning back towards the surgery so that he wouldn’t see. David’s head was just visible through the frosted-glass pane in the door, and I realized he was listening to everything through the letterbox.

‘I’ve got to get back to work,’ I said, pointing behind me with my battered bouquet. ‘I really can’t get into this now.’

Or possibly ever.

‘Fine,’ he replied. So help me god, if he said ‘fine’ one more time … ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

‘When?’ I asked. ‘Specifically?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. For the first time since he’d shown up, he actually looked like he was in pain. Without warning, all my fire and brimstone burned away, leaving nothing but a stick figure, holding onto a bunch of broken flowers with a lump in my throat. ‘But I will call you.’

‘OK.’

My gaze settled on his shoes and I couldn’t even look at him. I didn’t think I’d ever felt so unsure around him and that included the time I got so drunk, the second time I stayed over at his house that I puked into his pillowcase.

He automatically stepped towards me for a kiss but stopped just before he reached me. My shoulders seized as he pressed his lips against my cheek instead.

‘See you later, Liv.’

I watched as he climbed into the car and drove away, shopping bags bouncing around in the back seat.

‘You all right?’ David asked behind me, opening the door slowly. ‘Want me to tell Mr Harries to stop being such a daft twat and send him home?’

‘No.’ I turned on my heel, handing him my flowers, taking a deep breath. Not yet, not yet, not yet. ‘I think doing that myself might actually make me feel a bit better. There’s only an hour of surgery left, I’ll be OK.’

‘Sainsbury’s?’ he turned the bouquet over in his hands and gave it a disapproving sniff. ‘Even I know better than that. Shall I put them in water?’

‘Water or the bin, I don’t really care as long as I don’t have to look at them.’

‘Excellent choice.’ David closed the door behind us as I strode back into the surgery. ‘Glad to see you’re OK. I heard some of it. What a tosspot.’

‘Not now,’ I said, taking out my topknot, winding it up and wrapping the elastic band around my hair so securely, I looked like one of the Real Housewives. All of the Real Housewives. ‘Give me a minute and then send in Mr Harries, please?’

I swallowed hard and the edges of my vision began to blur. Not yet, I told myself, not until I was alone.

‘Whatever you say, doc,’ he said, unconvinced. ‘I might pop upstairs and put a bottle of wine in the fridge as well. Just in case we fancy an after work bevvy.’

‘Make it two,’ I called after him. ‘Dinner and dessert.’

‘That’s why you’re the boss,’ he said, shooting me the double guns. ‘You’re so wise.’

I watched as he sauntered off down the hallway, holding my flowers to his chest like Miss World. Despite being considerably younger than me, and one hundred per cent more male, he was usually right about most things, but in this instance I wasn’t so sure. I certainly didn’t feel very wise. I closed the back door to the examination room and made sure the other door that opened into the waiting room was securely latched. Safely locked away, I lay back on the steel examination table and popped my stethoscope around my neck, bouncing the weight of the drum in the palm of my hand until I calmed down. I loved my stethoscope so much, sometimes I put it on with my pyjamas while I was watching telly but today it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t sure if anything was.

‘What is happening?’ I whispered, staring up at the flickering fluorescent tube above me.

Two fat tears slid out the corners of my eyes, ran over my temples and into my hair. Had I spent so much time fretting over when he was going to propose, I’d missed the signs of an impending break-up? This wasn’t my first rodeo; I’d been the dumper and the dumped in my thirty years on this planet but I hadn’t seen this coming. Adam and me weren’t supposed to break up, ever. He was mine and I was his, why would I have looked for signs?

Was this why he was so anxious on Monday night? Not because he was going to propose but because he knew he was going to break up with me when we got home. Another warm tear plopped out of my left eye and made a beeline for my inner ear, making me shiver. But then he’d changed his mind. Probably got home to an empty bed and realized it was easier to keep me around than to find someone new. Probably couldn’t be bothered to work out which DVDs were mine and return them.

I laid the drum of my stethoscope on top of my chest and listened for my heartbeat. It was still going which was something of an achievement in itself.

‘Hello?’

The handle of the waiting-room door turned and the door knocked against the latch. Sitting up, I wobbled for a moment, almost falling off the table before catching myself, wiping my face and giving a loud, satisfying sniff.

‘Just a moment,’ I called through the door as I splashed my face with cold water. ‘I’m almost ready, Mr Harries.’

Just three more appointments, just one more hour to get through.

With a deep breath that stuck in my throat, I pushed myself out of my mind and opened the door. A sandy-haired older gentleman carrying a long-haired black cat in a shopping bag held up his hand politely as he walked in. The cat was wearing a hand-knitted jumper with a picture of what I took to be Olaf from Frozen emblazoned on the back.

‘Mr Harries, I thought we’d talked about getting rid of Jeremy’s woolly jumpers?’ I said as gently as possible, turning away to dab my runny nose with my sleeve. ‘They’re what’s causing all the hairballs.’

‘But he loves them,’ Mr Harries protested. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, sharing a despairing glance with poor Jeremy. ‘I really don’t know.’

5

‘And that’s how I blew up the microwave,’ Dad finished his story with pride. ‘It was only a small fire and I put it right out, no problems. Scorched the curtain a bit but you can’t tell unless you look.’

‘It was time we replaced that microwave anyway,’ Chris said, waving his hand as he laid down his decree. ‘I’ll get you a new one, a better one. Mine’s brilliant, does everything except wipe your arse. Amazing.’

‘You could get a gold-plated microwave that shits unicorn droppings, it’ll still blow up if you put metal in it,’ I pointed out.

‘I still can’t understand why you were trying to heat up a yoghurt.’

’I wanted to know what would happen,’ Dad replied. ‘Now I do.’

‘You should sue them,’ Chris went on. ‘It should say on it that you’re not supposed to microwave yoghurt pots.’

‘You can’t sue the manufacturers for human error,’ I said. ‘I think you just need to be more careful, Dad.’

‘And I think you shouldn’t take legal advice from a law school dropout.’ Chris twisted around in Mum’s favourite armchair to give me the full benefit of his smug, older-brother expression. ‘I’ll get a new microwave sent over before Mum gets back. She’ll never know.’

‘She doesn’t use it any more anyway.’ Dad merrily ignored the pair of us, having done a wonderful job of developing selective hearing over the years. ‘I’ll tell her I got rid of it because of the radiation. She’ll be made up.’

‘I’ll get you a good one,’ Chris said, already looking at microwaves on his phone. ‘Can’t have you and Mum getting into accidents. We probably ought to replace the whole kitchen.’

‘We’re not senile quite yet,’ Dad said, pushing himself up to his feet as the doorbell rang. ‘You don’t need to put a catch on the toilet to stop me falling in.’

‘He was dicking about with a microwave, not trying to burn the house down,’ I whispered after he left the room. ‘Stop patronizing him, they don’t want a new kitchen.’

‘Calm down, Ad.’ Chris popped the top on a bottle of beer, wrinkling his nose at my provided beverages. He only drank craft ales so I’d brought Bud Light with Lime. It was the little things that got you through the difficult days. ‘You shouldn’t feel inferior because I’m in a position to help them out.’

‘If they wanted a new kitchen, they’d buy a new kitchen,’ I replied, turning my phone over to check the time. Between the night on the settee, the Mexican jet lag and whatever the hell had happened with Liv, I was dying on my arse.

‘And if I want to help my parents out, I will,’ he replied with serial killer calm. ‘Maybe if they hadn’t spent half their savings on paying for the barrister’s qualification you jacked in a year before you finished, they might have bought themselves a new kitchen before now. Or at least had a lawyer son who could afford to buy one for them.’

‘Oh, fuck off.’ I burrowed backwards, praying for the settee to swallow me whole ‘They don’t want a new kitchen, Chris.’