We Were On a Break

‘You’re very touchy this evening.’ He leaned forward over his designer denim-covered knees and fixed me with a smile. ‘Anything to do with the distinct lack of a post-Mexico engagement?’

‘Nope,’ I replied, sipping my beer with great difficulty. It really did taste like piss. ‘And I don’t want to talk about that here.’

‘She say no?’

‘Fairly certain I just said I didn’t want to talk about it.’

‘Shame that,’ Chris said with a deep, satisfied sigh. ‘Especially since Cassie was on the phone to Liv when I left. What’s all this about a break?’

When my brother started going out with Liv’s best friend, I was wary. He’d come to Long Harrington for my birthday and Liv had thrown me a party and warned Cassie and Abigail, her two best friends, not to touch him with a ten-foot pole. Abi listened, Cass did not. Chris had always been a bit of a shit with the ladies – well, a shit in general – but that had been even more of a worry than usual. I didn’t want to get in trouble with Liv when he inevitably broke her best friend’s heart. We hadn’t been going out that long and my brother had never been able to keep it in his pants for more than three months at a time and, try as I might, I could not see a scenario in which his relationship went well for me. What I couldn’t have predicted was Chris falling head over heels in love with Cass, leaving London and buying a house in the village after three months, proposing after six, then getting married and knocking out a baby less than a year later. Whatever magical spell Cassie had worked on my brother had worked and he was a new man. At least for her, anyway. Where the rest of the world was concerned he was still a total prick.

‘What did she say?’ I asked, taking another sip of my disgusting drink. Hoisted by my own lime-flavoured petard. I was happy it had worked out but it was massively annoying that he always seemed to know what was going on in my life before I did. Cassie and Liv were constantly texting each other, updating one another on every last little thing that went on. I’d tried to read their texts but since I couldn’t speak emoji I couldn’t understand most of it anyway.

‘I can’t believe you brought this piss; I don’t know if it’s cat’s, gnat’s or rat’s but I’m not drinking it.’ He took one more drink then put the half-full bottle on the fireplace. ‘She said you and Liv had some sort of barney and now you’re taking a break. What’s going on? I thought you had it all planned.’

‘I did,’ I said, fixing my eyes on a photo of the village millpond that Dad had taken when me and Chris were kids and visiting our grandparents. ‘And then I didn’t and now we’re sort of on a break.’

My brother fixed me with an unimpressed gaze.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it,’ I confirmed. ‘And I don’t want Dad to know, so don’t say anything.’

‘If I’m honest …’ Chris stood up and strode across the living room to the reusable Waitrose bag on the table. He wasn’t quite as tall as me but he was still pushing six foot. Add to that the same blond hair and blue eyes and there was no mistaking we were brothers. Unfortunately. ‘I never saw it working out with you and Liv.’

‘What?’

‘Eh …’ He pulled a six-pack of Samuel Smith ales out of the bag. ‘I’m not saying she’s not pretty but she’s not properly hot, is she? And you know you look like you could be brother and sister, don’t you? It’s all a bit too master race for my liking.’

‘Liv is hot!’ I couldn’t decide if he was trying to make me feel better about my situation or if he was just being Chris. ‘Liv’s really hot. And we do not look like brother and sister.’

‘You do a bit though,’ Chris said, pouring one of his special beers into a pint glass and returning to his chair without offering one to me. ‘I’ve seen her look all right, bare materials are there, but she doesn’t really try, does she? Always got her hair up, never got any make-up on. And I don’t think I’ve seen her out of jeans more than what, twice?’

‘I like her hair up.’ I settled on him just being himself. He’d been acting up ever since he arrived, barking about his big deal at work and talking about the baby like he was the second coming of Kanye. ‘And she looks good in jeans. You’re talking shit.’

‘And I’ve always thought it’s weird, her being a vet. Doesn’t it bother you, her stuck in a surgery all day?’

‘Where would you rather have her?’ I asked. ‘Chained to the kitchen sink, baking me a pie?’

‘Hardly,’ he said, sinking back into his seat. ‘You know I like an ambitious woman but the thought of her hand up a cow’s arse all day makes me gip.’

‘Cassie was a vet,’ I reminded him. ‘That’s how she and Liv know each other. From vet school. Where they both trained to be vets.’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, but Cass doesn’t put her hands up anything’s guts for a living. She’s a science teacher now.’

‘I think it’s brilliant Liv’s a vet,’ I replied. And it was true. I’d gone out with a fair number of girls before her and none of them had such cool careers. Dating a yoga instructor sounds like it would be fun until she’s dragging you out of bed at five a.m. for sunrise sun salutations and refusing to eat, well, anything. ‘She helps animals, she helps people, she has a stethoscope. And it’s good money.’

‘It’d have to be given she’s shacking up with a dropout,’ he replied. I wondered how upset Dad would be if I glassed him. I probably shouldn’t – we’d never get the Bud Lime smell out of the carpet. ‘Only kidding. I know you’ve got a job.’

It was the air quotes around the word ‘job’ that pushed me over the edge.

‘We can’t all be a technowiz,’ I declared, banging my bottle down hard. ‘I wish I’d thought to start an app that delivers condoms and rolling papers to students for three times the price of the corner shop.’

‘Yeah, you really do.’ There was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before. ‘That app paid for my house. Remind me how you got yours again? Oh, that’s right, it’s Granddad’s house and Mum and Dad gave it to you.’

‘They tried to give me the wrong pizza.’ Dad walked slowly back into the room, weighed down by a pile of Domino’s boxes, just as I was about to leap across the room and choke my brother with our great-grandmother’s handcrafted quilt. ‘He had to call the shop to check. I wonder how many people don’t check what they’ve been given before the driver leaves? Can you imagine ordering a pepperoni and ending up with tuna? I’d be devastated.’

‘If Liv’s so hot and so brilliant, why are you on a break instead of engaged?’ Chris asked while Dad fannied around in the kitchen with plates and the world’s biggest wad of kitchen roll. ‘You’re not making any sense, little brother. She’s had enough of you playing carpenter and packed you in for someone with a proper job, hasn’t she?’

‘It was a mutual agreement,’ I replied, swigging my pissy beer. ‘No one has packed anyone in, we’re taking a break, working out some stuff.’

I didn’t even know if that was true, but since I’d spent all afternoon literally passed out, face down in my workshop from jet lag, I hadn’t had much time to think about it.

‘Now leave it. I don’t want Mum and Dad to know until we’ve sorted it out.’

‘Getting married a big commitment,’ he said loudly, with an added cluck for emphasis. Chris Floyd, the world’s greatest authority on relationships. ‘It’s a lot to take on.’

‘What’s that?’ Dad asked, gleefully presenting us both with two slices of forbidden pizza.

‘Marriage,’ Chris said. I shot him a warning look but he went on regardless. ‘I was just telling Adam it’s not something to be entered into lightly.’

‘True enough,’ Dad agreed before taking a bite and closing his eyes, enraptured. ‘Is there something you want to tell me, son?’

‘He’s going to propose,’ Chris answered before I could. ‘Aren’t you, Ad?’ He smiled at me across the room and mouthed the word ‘what?’ before stuffing his mouth with pizza.

Dad’s eyes opened up wide and I couldn’t think of a time I’d seen him happier. Pizza, his boys, and important family gossip Mum hadn’t heard first. He was living the paternal dream.

‘That’s bloody marvellous news, that is,’ he said, setting down his plate and hurling himself across the settee to give me a hug. Dad had become quite the hugger in his old age. ‘You know your mother and I love Olivia. Do you have an idea when you’re going to ask her? Have you asked her dad for permission yet?’

‘No.’ I chewed and chewed and chewed on the same mouthful of pizza but I couldn’t seem to swallow. ‘I haven’t decided anything yet. Probably best not to say anything to Mum until I’ve, you know, worked out all the details.’

‘Surprised you didn’t do it on holiday,’ he said, dumping himself back in his chair and nibbling at his leftover crust. ‘That would have been nice.’

‘Oh yeah.’ Chris looked at Dad as though he was a genius. ‘Why didn’t you think of that, Adam? Why didn’t you propose on holiday?’

‘Anyone want any more pizza?’ I asked, getting up and loading my plate with greasy, sausage-laden Domino’s before helping myself to one of Chris’s expensive beers. ‘Beer, Dad?’

‘Oh sod it, I will have one,’ Dad said, holding out his hand for the freshly opened bottle. ‘We’ll be dry again tomorrow. Your mum poured all my booze down the drain.’

‘I’m sure she’ll let you bend the rules to toast the happy couple,’ Chris said as Dad happily glugged his beer. ‘As soon as you do it, let me know, Ad. I’ve got a bottle of vintage Bollinger from the year you were born. Cost me a grand but it’s perfect for a celebration, don’t you think, Dad?’

The senior Floyd beamed around the room at the fruit of his loins.

‘I know it’s cheesy but I am glad the two of you have stayed such good friends,’ he said. ‘It’s so sad when siblings grow apart. You’re making an old man very happy.’

‘I can’t imagine the world without him,’ I said, raising my bottle and giving my brother the filthiest look I could muster. ‘I’ve tried but I can’t.’

Chris nodded, his cheeks flushing from the booze and the pizza and the general adulation while Dad carried on putting away his pizza, gazing at his children in such a perfect state of joy I couldn’t help but think Mum had wasted her money on a two-week yoga retreat. Forcing my pizza down my throat with a mouthful of beer, I stared at the wall and waited for someone else to change the subject. Now I was really buggered. There was no way my dad could keep schtum about this and there was absolutely no way Mum would leave me alone until I fessed up about what was going on. Meaning I really should make an effort to work out what that was before she got home.

‘You all right, Adam?’ Dad asked, red sauce all round his mouth. ‘You look a bit peaky.’

‘Right as rain,’ I assured him, raising my pizza up high as Chris stifled a laugh. ‘Never been better. Never been better.’

If only Liv were as easy to placate as my dad, I thought to myself as he carried on munching until his plate was clear. I knew I should have taken her a pizza instead of flowers.

6

Thursday night drinks at the local pub had been a tradition for Abi and me well before our eighteenth birthday but in honour of my relationship implosion, we took the unorthodox move of bringing it forward to Wednesday. It was necessary. After Adam left and I finished up all my appointments, I sent David home early and spent the rest of the afternoon hysterically crying in a corner of the surgery while all the doggy in-patients howled along in sympathy. It was like a really terrible deleted scene from Lady and the Tramp. Without going into the details, I summoned my girls to the pub and steeled my liver in preparation.

‘Evening all.’ Abi shuffled into our regular corner of the Blue Bell, setting a bottle of white wine on the table. Her chin-length brown hair was half up, half down, secured by endless hair grips and her accidental cool girl glasses were so smudged it was a wonder she could even see. ‘I’ve had a shit day, let’s get smashed.’

I shuffled along the seat to make room, banging my knees on the underneath of the table as I went. Booths were the devil’s invention; it was impossible to get in or out of one without laddering a pair of tights and yet we always sat here. It was hard to break a habit after more than a decade.

‘What happened?’ I asked, pouring for everyone, my hand still shaking.

‘My lab assistant broke a very expensive piece of equipment, buggered three months’ worth of test results and I really don’t want to talk about it,’ she said as Cass picked up the bottle I had just put down and filled it up to the top. Cass and I had already talked. ‘Liv, you’re back, yay. You look nice.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I replied, my eyes dry and sore from all the horrible, horrible crying. ‘I look like shit. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since Sunday and an Alsatian had explosive diarrhoea all over the examination room when I tried to give him a rectal exam and – well, we’ll get to the rest.’

‘Good tan though,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Go on, then, what’s the big news that couldn’t possibly wait until tomorrow?’

It was only as she sank half a bottle of wine in one swallow that I realized she was expecting me to announce my engagement.

‘Nothing major,’ I said as Cass, who had already heard the story at least a dozen times since I arrived at the pub, held my hand under the table. ‘Me and Adam broke up.’

Abi picked up her glass, emptied the second half of her glass and put it back down. ‘Well, my dishwasher’s been on the blink for a week, so, you know, we’re all going through stuff right now.’

Determined not to cry in the Bell, I covered my face with my hair and snorted a half laugh, half sob as she bundled me up in a hug. Apart from a brief flirtation with Impulse Vanilla Kisses in Year Seven, Abi never wore perfume, so her hugs always smelled the same. Burying my face in her armpit was almost enough to push me over the edge.

‘He didn’t break up with you,’ Cass said, stroking my back. ‘You’re on a break, that’s not the same thing. Don’t freak out.’

‘I love how you know more about this than I do,’ I said, sniffling as I extricated myself from Abi’s hug. She stroked loose strands of my topknot back into place. ‘Feels a lot like a break-up, Cass. I mean, it’s six thirty on a Wednesday night, there are two open bottles of wine on the table and my friends are telling me not to freak out. That doesn’t paint a scene of everything being hunky-dory, does it?’

‘I didn’t tell you not to freak out,’ Abi said, refilling her glass as I leaned forward to sip from mine without taking it from the table. ‘I’d definitely be freaking out if I were you.’

‘Not helping,’ Cass said with narrowed eyes. ‘Adam told Chris it’s just a break. Chris thinks he’s got cold feet, that’s all, nothing to panic about. Everything will be back to normal by the weekend when he’s calmed down.’

‘Liv, what happened?’ Abi’s phone was flashing with a picture of a half-naked man with ridiculous muscles. She frowned and cancelled the call. ‘I thought you were coming back engaged. I’ve spent all day practising my excited face for when you ask me to be your bridesmaid.’

‘What makes you think I’d ask you to be my bridesmaid?’ I asked, sliding my glass back and forth across the table. ‘And more importantly, who was on the phone? Are you shagging Fabio?’

‘He’s no one. I was warming him up as a wedding date, but if you’re not getting married any time soon, I don’t need to answer that call.’ She tossed her phone into her bag then hid it underneath the table. ‘Seriously now, what’s going on?’

‘Technically Cass is right, we’re on a break,’ I explained, turning over my own phone to check for messages. Nothing. ‘All holiday, Adam kept going on about this amazing restaurant in town, how he’d heard it was so great but we couldn’t get a reservation until the last night, and so obviously, I’m thinking he’s going to propose then. But there we were, on our way out, and then I don’t even know what happened. One minute we’re walking down the beach on our way to a fancy night out, and the next thing I know, we’re in a taxi on our way home. No swanky restaurant, no proposal, not even any last-night-of-a-holiday shag. It was all very confusing.’

‘Chris said Adam said he wants to work out some stuff,’ Cassie said, twisting the wine bottle to check the label. I wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see: the Bell had two kinds of wine, red and white. We were drinking the white. It was not good. ‘He definitely said you hadn’t broken up.’

‘Chris said that or Adam said that?’ Abi looked distinctly unimpressed.

‘Adam said it to Chris, who then said it to me,’ she clarified, stroking the ends of her sleek, black ponytail. Everything about Cassie Huang was sleek. The word most commonly used to describe her was ‘willowy’ which I especially enjoyed hearing from my mum who had generally referred to her own teenage daughter as ‘sturdy’. And she wondered why I’d gone on the Haribo and Diet Pepsi plan in the first year of university.

‘They had an early dinner at his dad’s house. I saw Chris for, like, ten seconds before I came out.’

‘Sounds like a real keeper,’ Abi said. She’d never been one to mince her words, Abi subscribed to the philosophy of calling a spade a spade. Or a wanker if she deemed it more appropriate.

‘Chris says it’s totally normal,’ Cass declared as they continued to argue over me. It was fine, I was perfectly happy to keep quiet and drink my wine. And their wine. And everyone else on the planet’s wine. ‘Chris says all men go back and forth before they pop the question, even if you don’t know it. Steve Harvey basically says the exact same thing in Think Like a Man.’

Abi gave her a stern look. Abi didn’t care for Cass’s reliance on self-help manuals. Abi really only believed in truly relying on herself. ‘Could you tell Chris to tell Adam that when he has made his mind up do you think he could find the time to tell Liv himself rather than have her wait for it to trickle through you and his brother first?’

‘I’m only telling you what Chris told me,’ she said, her phone fluttering across the table, buzzing against the almost-empty bottle. ‘Speak of the devil, I’ll be back in a minute.’

I half-stood, half-shuffled out of the booth until she could squeeze past, smiling at Mrs Moore, the landlady, as Cass dashed for the door. She smiled back, giving me the once-over as she passed. She’d been serving me since I ordered my first Malibu and Coke at fifteen. If she didn’t like what she saw, she only had herself to blame.

‘Liv, I’m so sorry.’ Abi straightened my collar as I sat back down, her huge green eyes full of concern and just a hint of murderous rage. ‘How are you really?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, raising a hand to wave at Melanie Brookes, my mum’s neighbour, mother of two children and owner of three rabbits and a diabetic cat. There had been a dog as well at one point but he got into a cupboard and ate an Easter egg and there really wasn’t anything anyone could have done about that. ‘I feel sick when I think about it. I just really want Cass to be right, I really want this to be a wobble. Because if it’s not, I don’t know what I’ll do.’

Abigail Levinson and I had been friends ever since her dad brought her puppy into the surgery when we were both eleven. I was hanging out there, looking for animals to bother, when a little, skinny, dark-haired girl with Coke-bottle glasses and what I thought was a super cool Mickey Mouse T-shirt walked through the door. She sat down beside me as our respective fathers disappeared into the examination room, looked me in the eye and whispered, in her most serious voice, that the dog was not going to make it. I held her hand in silence until both dads reappeared with the dog who, despite my new friend’s most assured diagnosis, bounded out towards us, happy, healthy and a hundred per cent alive.

After they left, my dad explained Abi had been watching too much Blue Peter and took it upon herself to try to clean her dog’s teeth with her electric toothbrush and an entire tube of Colgate. In the interest of the dog surviving the summer, Dad took her on as his second junior intern (we were only allowed to clean out kennels and feed the cats but we felt terribly important) and we’d been joined at the hip ever since. After we graduated, she’d stayed on at uni to do her PhD and now she was such a super shit-hot veterinary research scientist. Even I didn’t really understand what she did and I was an actual vet. While I was taking pieces of Lego out of the Youngs’ Labrador’s stomach, Abi was curing cancer. Dog cancer, but still, it was impressive. She was Superwoman as far as I was concerned.

‘Sod what Adam wants.’ Abi tucked her short brown hair behind her ears and drew her eyebrows together behind her glasses, still Coke-bottle thick but considerably more stylish than they had been when we were kids. ‘What do you want?’

I looked at her blankly.

‘You, Olivia, what do you want?’ she asked. ‘You do know who I’m talking about? Short, split ends, fiddles with animals for a living?’

‘I haven’t got split ends,’ I muttered, pinching together an inch of hair and holding it up to the light. ‘I don’t want to break up. I want everything back how it was.’

‘Why?’

‘What?’

‘Why do you want things back how they were?’ she asked. ‘It should be an easy question.’

‘I don’t know,’ I confessed, busying myself by peeling the label from the wine bottle. ‘This wasn’t my idea. Leave me alone, I’m sad.’

‘Your idea or not, someone needs to set some boundaries before this gets messy,’ she said in the nicest voice she could manage. ‘And that should be you. He doesn’t get to dictate this entire situation, Liv, even if you are going to be back together tomorrow. You need to think about you a little bit. First he decided you were going to get engaged; now he’s decided he wants a break. You need to know what you want.’

‘I want to know what you want,’ I said, nudging her in the shoulder and taking a sip.

‘For you to be happy,’ she replied. ‘And for Mini Eggs to be available all year round.’

‘I don’t want to break up with him,’ I said, slowly pulling on the label, trying to move it in one piece. Life without Adam didn’t seem like an actual possible thing. ‘I can’t even process the thought of it. If he says he needs space, I should just give him space. This seems like a classic rubber band situation to me, don’t you think?’

‘You know I won’t answer that,’ Abi replied, cursing our best friend’s name as the wine bottle label ripped in two. ‘One, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is a shit present, and two, it’s full of shit advice. Cassie should be shot for giving it to you in the first place.’

‘Sorry, it was Chris.’ Cass bounced back into the booth and grabbed her glass. I shuffled around, glad of her interruption. ‘Gus was crying but he was just hungry. I’m going to head back soon, I don’t like leaving him alone for too long.’

‘Chris or the baby?’ I asked Cass.

‘Liv, don’t be mean,’ Abi admonished. ‘Surely you don’t expect Chris, a grown man, to be able to take care of his own child for more than forty-five minutes at a time?’

‘It’s not the same as asking him to record Gogglebox,’ Cass replied tartly. ‘Gus gets fussy when I’m not there at night. Sometimes he won’t settle.’

‘Chris or the baby?’ I asked Abi.

‘We should meet at mine some time,’ she said, throwing cardboard coasters in our general direction. ‘Then I won’t have to run off so early. Plus, we’ve got much better wine. You two have to come over more often, Gus barely even knows his Aunt Abi.’

‘He doesn’t know anyone, Cass, he’s five months old.’ Abi swirled her wine, coating her glass and taking a sniff. ‘And I’ve Stockholm Syndrome’d myself on this wine. Whenever I drink wine anywhere else, my brain doesn’t recognize it as the same substance.’

‘That would be because all other wine is good,’ Cass explained. ‘And this is very bad.’

‘Cass only drinks the finest wines, these day,’ I explained, ignoring the look on her face and topping off her glass. ‘Cass married up.’