Deranged Marriage (10 page)

‘You’re wrong.’ Great.

‘Holly, there is no point in us meeting unless you are going to tell me what you
have
to tell me. You’ll realise at some point that we are supposed to be together, I’m only trying to prevent you wasting Joe’s time,’ he paused to smile. ‘I know so much about you. When I leave you now I’ll picture you trying to work it out, and I know that you’ll have those creases in your brow and your mind will whirl. But you’ll see sense in the end. I’ll call you tomorrow. I need your decision by then.’ And, leaving me feeling totally flummoxed, he got up and walked out. I hadn’t even had a drink.

As I left the bar, I tried to make some sense of our encounter. Why he’d given me a day to make a decision when I had already given him my answer was beyond me.

It was only the second week of January, and already I felt that this year was spiralling out of control. I had called Joe and told him I was meeting George. He wanted to come and do his macho act, but I assured him I could handle it. But I didn’t because I had no idea what I was handling. I called him from the taxi and asked to come over. For some reason I felt uncontrollably tearful. I chastised myself for a bad job done, and for being such a wimp about it.

Joe found me crumpled in tears.

‘Holly, it’s not so bad. It’s almost flattering. This guy is in love with you and I totally understand that because I’m in love with you myself.’ I wasn’t comforted by his words.

‘The thing is it’s not flattering because it doesn’t feel right. He’s not in love with me. He’s not. I don’t know much about this situation but I do know that. He said that I’d got until tomorrow to think about it, and he sounded almost threatening.’ A fresh batch of tears coursed down my cheeks.

‘What can he do?’ Joe said as he took me in his arms. ‘He can’t do anything.’

Chapter Ten

How wrong Joe was. The following day George called me as promised. I told him, as calmly as I could, that I was in love with Joe and not him. I told him we had no future in
that
way. I told him there was nothing more to say. And that was when he told me, yet again, that I was wrong.

‘It’s your birthday in just over a month,’ he said.

‘Yes. So...?’

‘You’re going to be thirty.’

‘I am.’

‘And you’re not married to Joe are you?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘You’re not married to anyone, nor are you likely to be by the time you’re thirty. Do you remember our marriage pact?’

I did. The memory flooded back. ‘Yes.’

‘Well you signed an agreement saying that if you were single by the age of thirty you’d marry me. So, Holly, you have to marry me.’ As simple as that.

I put down the phone.

*

I am not sure where ‘my George’ ended and ‘stalker George’ took over. I knew it was still George, but I couldn’t equate the madman with the man who had been my most important friend. People forgive a lot in life, and I would have forgiven my friend George anything, but I didn’t know who he was any more, and there was no room to forgive a stranger.

I was squashed in the biggest conundrum, and not only could I not sort it out but I also couldn’t explain it. Joe wanted to hit George, but because the man who was harassing me wasn’t George, couldn’t be George, I wouldn’t let him. Lisa told me that it was time to call the police, but I couldn’t have George arrested. Freddie agreed with both Lisa and Joe, and he accused me of being flattered, hence my reluctance to act, but I wasn’t flattered; I was confused. I had no idea what to do, but how could I hurt him? Imogen thought that part of my friend was still there, she thought I could reason with him. But how could I reason with the unreasonable?

I was frustrated through my lack of comprehension. Feelings, emotions, they can be trapped inside you, and there isn’t always an effective method of communicating them, even to yourself.

Every time he did something to annoy me and I got angry, I recalled something from the past, a fond memory. It seemed that my mind was playing games. He would call me and demand my hand in marriage, and just as I wanted to scream, into my head would pop a vision of us when we were in our teens on holiday in France. We’d be swimming, and joking and laughing, and his wet hair would be stuck to his face. His smile would be always there and I would be trying to look cool but failing and it was just the sort of moment that only happens when you have a wonderful friendship. And we did. Or we used to have.

Joe accused me of rewriting history when I tried to tell him that this was the problem, but I wasn’t. George and I had a friendship which could have won awards. Whether my mind was playing tricks with me, or whether my subconscious was refusing to believe that the George I knew and loved would behave like this, I don’t know. I could be angry with him, but I couldn’t be too angry with him. I couldn’t do anything to stop him. All I could do was hope that he would go away and come to his senses.

I knew that the old George was still there, somewhere. He would come back and he would be sorry. He would apologise for the incident at the beginning of December when he wanted to check out his feelings and used me to do so. He would then apologise for using me as his fall-back partner when Julia turned him down. And I would accept his apology because he was my best friend.

I just wasn’t sure how far he would go before he came to his senses and I didn’t believe for one minute that he would go so far as to try to legally enforce our marriage pact.

I had a number of phone calls from George about the marriage pact. After the initial shock, I tried to tell him that he was crazy, that we’d made the pact when drunk and heartbroken and that we both knew it would never actually happen.

He disagreed. He believed that we made the pact knowing full well that we would get married. I accused him of rewriting history, he accused me of rewriting history. I knew I was right, but he believed he was right. Finally, I had taken enough and went on the offensive. It had gone too far.

‘Holly, we need to get things straight.’

‘They are straight.’

‘No, they’re not. I have a contract here, in which you put in writing that you agreed to marry me if we were both unmarried when we reached the age of thirty.’

‘We’ve been through all this. We didn’t know what we were doing.’

‘I did.’

‘Right, so when you asked Julia to marry you that was just because you forgot about the pact and you had no real intention of marrying her?’

‘No.’

‘No, George, you asked Julia to marry her because you were in love with her, you probably still are.’

‘No, asking Julia to marry me was a mistake. It’s you I love.’

‘Really? Well you’ve got a crap way of showing it. If you loved me you’d leave me alone.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Evidently. But why not?’

‘Because it wouldn’t be right. We’re right. So, will you agree to marry me and fulfil our pact.’

‘How many times do I have to say no?’

‘Final answer.’

‘Yes, Chris Tarrant, final answer.’

‘Who?’

‘Forget it George. My last word on the subject is no. I will not marry you, I will never marry you and if you’re not careful I’m going to slap a restraining order on you.’ In reality I had no idea if I could, but it sounded threatening enough.

‘Holly, I wish you’d be reasonable about this.’

‘Oh yeah? Reasonable? Like agreeing to marry you would be reasonable would it? Sorry George if I saw my wedding day as being something more than reasonable.’

‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this. I’ll write to you.’

‘You’ll what?’ Of course, he had hung up.

Why I lost control every single time I spoke to him I don’t know, but it was beginning to piss me off.

I fumed silently, all happy memories of George notably absent and all I could do was wait.

I don’t know if it was misplaced loyalty or what that meant I kept some of George’s conversations from other people. Of course, it might have been something else. Buried somewhere inside me may have been a measure of guilt. Guilt for what happened when we met at his hotel that time. Although he precipitated the incident (hereafter it is known as ‘the incident’), I complied, and even if I don’t think I complied, I didn’t stop him. Actually thinking about that night makes me feel physically sick, because that was the night I felt that our friendship died. I have pushed it so far to the back of my mind, that I can almost believe that it didn’t happen. If I had had any idea then of the consequences of my actions, then I hope I would have found the strength to stop him. What worried me most was that if I let myself dwell on it, my panic attacks would return.

I had my first panic attack when George first left London for New York. I would wake up, and the first thing I’d feel was dread, and then the palpitations would start and I’d burst into tears. It was the most fearful experience, my heart was hammering so fast, I thought it would break out of my body. I truly believed that there was something seriously wrong with me. After a week, and having drunk four bottles of Rescue Remedy (something I still have a slight addiction to), I went to the doctor, convinced I was dying. He explained I was merely having panic attacks and asked if I was under stress. He offered me antidepressants, but I decided to stick to my Rescue Remedy. When I had got used to him not being there for me, anxiety revisited only rarely.

After the phone call, I rummaged for my copy of the fateful marriage pact, and found it in a shoebox, along with other ‘George stuff’. I called Joe, told him I had a headache and was going to have an early night, and then sat in my white living room with the shoebox and a cup of coffee at my feet. I felt that I should be opening the box (a pale white box with ‘memories’ written across it in black marker) with a bottle of wine, but for some reason I didn’t want any. I was feeling irrationally tearful and I didn’t want to add to that.

It was like delving into an old love affair. A scene from a movie where the tearful heroine sits alone and laments her lost love by reading everything he ever wrote to her: looking at pictures, conjuring memories, wiping her tears. But it never was a love affair and that wasn’t what I was feeling. I felt a loss, but my feelings for Joe were so vivid that I knew that I wasn’t confusing love with friendship. I was just being nostalgic, that was all, and the George of my shoebox was the person I still missed, and the George of my everyday life was someone else altogether.

I sipped my coffee, as I opened the box. The first thing I pulled out was a photograph. It was my favourite photo of us, taken when we were about sixteen. We were sitting in the garden of my parents’ house, in sunloungers. I was wearing a pair of tatty denim cut-offs (I almost lived in those shorts the whole summer, they were so short you could almost see my bum cheeks and the treads hung down all over the place but I thought they were so cool). George was wearing some baggy Bemunda shorts and a pair of Ray-Bans, which he lived in. He hated taking them off even when he was inside. He said it was because they were prescription sunglasses but really he just liked them. We spent most of the summer that way, so the picture represented more than a moment. We’d finished our GCSEs and we thought we were so grown-up as we talked about our A levels and the future.

There were other photos, mainly of us on our travels. I was permanently in a sarong and George was always in baggy, brightly coloured trousers. We looked like wannabe hippies, which was exactly what we were at eighteen. One good thing about growing up is that one’s taste improves. I looked at the photos and more than anything saw the physical change that George had undergone. He was unrecognisable, from the slick, suited lawyer who probably only wore chino shorts in beige with creases ironed down the front. Mind you, I wouldn’t wear tie-dye sarongs either. We’d both changed. We’d both grown up.

The cards I kept weren’t all the cards he ever sent me. I kept the birthday cards from my sixteenth, eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays. I kept the joke valentines he sent me, saying that he never wanted me to be his valentine but he thought he’d be kind (he did that every year before he went to New York). And I kept the Christmas cards he sent once he was in New York. There were various other items of memorabilia to remind me of our friendship: tickets to plays, an old school badge, postcards from when we were travelling together—happy times.

As per the scene from the film where the distressed heroine sits on the floor surrounded by her memories, tears slowly began to roll down my cheeks. Then I pulled out the marriage pact (which was tucked right at the bottom of the box), and regained my composure.

It was as if someone had given me an electric shock. I realised how amazingly bizarre it was. I reread the pact and laughed at the recollection that when we’d made it we had no intention of it ever coming true. I remembered the night vividly: the drink, the fact we were both feeling so sorry for ourselves. The hangover the next day was more serious than the pact had been. I made a decision then that I would not take it seriously and I would try to persuade everyone else to do the same.

Which wasn’t easy. Lisa insisted on taking me out, or at least being with me if Joe wasn’t, and Max was also a tower of strength. They both seemed to enjoy the fact that in their minds George was a psychopath and my life was in danger. I didn’t mind too much that they were living their lives vicariously through the one they had concocted for me; at least it also kept me amused. My mother had decided that she didn’t want me to marry George, now she had seen how obsessed he was. She was there for me, but also giving me space. My father had taken action and gone to see George’s family, but as they explained, they were as baffled as he was, but there wasn’t anything they could do, George being thirty, not thirteen. My sister sent me food parcels. Bizarrely she thought that I might forget to eat. Actually it was the opposite, my appetite was voracious and I was putting on weight. Adversely I thought that maybe if I got fat, George would leave me alone, the only flaw in that plan was that Joe might do the same.