Getting Over It (31 page)

Chapter 40

I
WAS RAISED TO BELIEVE
that good vanquishes evil. Cinderella’s ugly sisters, Cruella De Vil, the sneering shop assistants in
Pretty Woman
—they all got their comeuppance for no better reason than because they deserved it. So when I hear about Adrian’s latest atrocity, I expect justice. I want a storybook hero to sweep to the rescue and save the goodie and punish the baddie. Yet, when I beg Tina to let me call the police, she hesitates, then says, “No.” She says real life doesn’t work like that, that I don’t know what Adrian is like, he’s smarter than the law. When she says this, I feel helpless and weak and sick to the stomach. I am robbed of speech and two decades of complacency.

I don’t sleep well on Thursday night and wake up on Friday morning feeling groggy. I drag myself to work and try to wake up. But I can’t. I drink two double espressos which make my body jangle but have no effect whatsoever on my dopiness. I see Tina slink into the office, head bowed. My heart lurches, and I decide she doesn’t need to avoid eye contact because today I am going to ignore her. I know it’s childish of me, but I’m so angry and frustrated that if I spoke to her, I’d find it hard not to shake her. Listen to me—I’m as bad as Adrian. I force a smile as Lizzy bounds up and tinkles, “Are you looking forward to tonight? What are you going to wear?”

My smile dissipates and I say, “Er, this.”

Lizzy looks at my baggy faded gray top and frowns. “You can’t wear that for my birthday! It’s my birthday!”

Grow up,
I want to say, but don’t. “Well, I haven’t got anything else,” I growl.

Lizzy peers under my desk. “Oi!” I squeak.

“I wanted to see what shoes you were wearing,” she explains, “and I have to say, those stack-heeled boots aren’t my favorite.” To be frank, my stack-heeled boots aren’t anyone’s favorite.

A while back, when Tina was still herself, she took one glance and said they looked like calipers. But I like them. “I know!” sings Lizzy. “I’ll ask Tina to lend you something fabulous from the fashion cupboard. I’m sure she will when she—I’m sure she will.” Lizzy tootles off, consults with Tina, and four minutes later, reappears at my desk brandishing a pair of strappy black stiletto sandals and a yellow wraparound top with mauve lace edging.

“Ay carumba,” I say crossly.

“Don’t be silly!” snaps Lizzy. “These will look gorgeous with your black trousers.”

I reply, “Yes, but what about with me in them?”

Lizzy ignores my grumblings and forces me to try everything on. I stare dourly at my reflection in the Ladies mirror while Lizzy skips around me like a demented pixie, pulling and tugging and brushing at the top. Then she says, “Helen, you look divine! Wait there!”

She slips out of the door, and two seconds later is back with Tina. “What do you think?” she crows, flinging her arms wide like a cabaret singer.

“Great,” says Tina, smiling wanly and addressing the words to my left ear.

“Good!” says Lizzy. “That’s that, then.” She allows me to put on my gray top for the remainder of the day, but confiscates my boots “because I don’t trust you.” She dances out of the door, leaving Tina and me alone.

I feel as awkward as when Michelle’s grandmother set me up on a blind date with her dog walker—who was Russian (“from Rrrrussia weez love!” he threatened on the phone) and had a mullet.

“Hello,” I say.

Tina nibbles at a fingernail and blurts, “Helen, please don’t be off with me or Adrian tonight, he’ll get suspicious and, and—” Instantly I feel cruel and ashamed, so I touch her upper arm, trace my finger down it gently, and squeeze her hand. Her eyes fill with tears and she turns and walks out.

As I don’t wish to disappoint Lizzy—and because when she leaves the office, I search frenziedly around her desk for my calipers but can’t find them—I walk into the restaurant bang on 7:30 wearing my black trousers, carnival top, and strappy sandals. And the first person I see is Tom. He is standing in the far corner of the room, in conversation with Brian, who is wearing stonewashed dungarees. I’m so astonished (not at the stonewashed dungarees, they complement the green Day-glo t-shirt perfectly), I double-take and nearly drop Lizzy’s present on the floor. The birthday girl skips over. “Surprise!” she squeaks in my ear.

My face feels hot and red. “Oh my god, you maniac! Keep it down!” I mutter, trying to keep the inane grin on my face under control. Lizzy clamps a hand over her mouth to muffle a loud giggle. Luke appears at my side, digs an elbow into my ribs, and winks. “That was subtle,” I say.

“Tom came with Luke, so don’t blame me!” exclaims Lizzy happily.

Luke adds, “We went to loads of trouble, so don’t bugger it up this time.”

I stare at my strappy sandals and murmur delightedly, “You meddling kids!”

Luke takes this as a sign of approval and cries, “I’ll go and get him, shall I?”

He is only prevented from doing so when I grab his shirt, drag him backward by the scruff, and hiss “No!”

But then Tom walks across the room, gazes at me for a second, and says boldly, “Hello, you.” And I know he’s being bold because when he says it, he turns pink and his voice trembles slightly. I open my mouth and realize it’s as dry as stale toast, so my “Hello, Tom” emerges as a faint croak.

Tom blushes again—not least because Luke and Lizzy are staring at us like Muppets—and starts to say “I, uh, you look ni—” when he is interrupted. Luke nudges him in the back and exclaims, “Aren’t you gonna kiss her, then!”

I freeze as the godawful words boi-oi-oing around our ears like a boomerang at a funeral. Lizzy—who I conclude didn’t quite understand what she was dealing with when she went into cahoots with Luke—looks aghast. Tom’s horrified expression cracks and he roars, “Arrrrrgh!” and pretends to throttle Luke.

“Come away now!” orders Lizzy sharply, like a nanny who is watching the rhinos with a five-year-old when they start rutting.

Tom and I are left to face each other. My hands dangle awkwardly by my sides and I don’t know what to do with them. The rabbit foot is thumping away crazily in my chest, and I look at his face and all I can think of to say is, “How’ve you been?”

Tom tilts his head and nods and mutters, “Okay, thanks, and you?”

I nod too, and say, “Fine, thanks. Just fine.”
Just fine!
Who do I think I am? Dolly Parton? I bite my lip and wince and because I am starting to panic, blurt, “Luke says funny things, doesn’t he?”

Tom nods miserably and says, “Yeah.” Suddenly he looks as if he might cry and my insides squeeze and I take a deep breath and I say, “But sometimes he says things I think but don’t dare say.”

I say this, can’t believe I’ve said it, stare at the floor and screw up my face, thinking,
Fool, fool! Arse! Fool!
When I dare to look at Tom again, he’s looking at me like he’s starving and I’m a large kabob, and we step forward at the same moment and he gently holds my face to his and we kiss. We kiss as soft and warm as velvet on velvet, and I close my eyes and feel choked with joy, and when I open them for a quick peek, his eyes are shut, so I glance around the room to see if anyone has seen us—twenty people are ogling—so I close them again and sink deeper into the kiss.

“Everyone’s looking,” I mumble.

“So what,” whispers Tom and holds me tighter, and I hug him back hard, and I gaze into his blue eyes and feel a headrush and it seems madness that we’ve been apart—mad, stupid—and I think,
This must not happen again,
and the warmth hits me like sunshine after rain.
I love you.

It’s not like anything else, ever. Everything that has gone before Tom is all very nice and fine but nothing. Tom is it. I look at him and I think of that old-fashioned phrase, “I love you with all my heart”—if I recall it’s what the handsome prince says to the flaxen-haired princess—and that is what I feel. He kisses my face, my hair, and says into it, “Sorry for being a jerk.”

I rear back so fast I nearly knock out his teeth on my skull. “You’re sorry!” I squeak. “Don’t be! You were right! Everything you said. I’m sorry.”

Tom shakes his head. Then he smiles. “When you fell into the pub that time with Lizzy, even though, what you said”—at this point I nod hastily to encourage him to gloss over it—“I wanted to run after you and kiss you to death.”

I glow and say, “Did you!”

He nods and kicks at the floor, like a small child, and says gruffly, “It was shit without you. I hated it.”

I can barely believe it’s Tom saying these things—not some balding smelly-breathed goon, the sort that usually trap me in bars—but Tom. Tom whom I lust after. Tom who tells it like it is. Tom who fancies me, Helen, even if I do have flat hair and drive a Toyota. Oh god, please let it be real.

Dare I say it, I think Tom is thinking along similar lines, because we sit next to each other during dinner and he keeps beaming at me, and kissing me, and squeezing my hand, and he barely eats a thing. And, in an unprecedented scene, neither do I. We just talk.

Tom wants to know everything, like what I did for Christmas, and did I think of him at all, and how my job is, how Fatboy is doing and Nana and my mother, and how are things with me and her—although I don’t have to tell him—and how I found my flat and how I did it up and did I miss him, and he keeps gazing at me as if I’m some unimaginable beauty, and I want to know everything about what he’s been doing, if Celine is still working at Megavet (no, she was sacked for gross incompetence after dropping a hamster then treading on it), if his sister is okay, if he’s still doing his boxing, how his family is, and if he’s got over his fear of painting (nice of me to remember), and if he’s had sex with anyone since me (the cheek, and can he ask me the same question?), and can we go to the Heath Extension again in the Honda and eat bagels?

When I ask him about the heath extension, he stares at me and says, “I’d do anything for you, Helen. I mean it.”

And I don’t bleat, “Ah, but you didn’t let me stay in your flat” because now I understand. I gulp and whisper, “And me for you.” (I am not so liberated as Tom, because the full sentence “And I’d do anything for you, too” sticks, and although I want to say the words, they feel more comfortable in my head. Anyway, he seems content with the abbreviation .)

I keep gazing at him and grinning and thinking he likes me, and what the hell was I doing rejecting his advances like a cat refusing cream. We smile at each other until our mouths ache. And until I catch Luke’s eye across the table and he immediately opens his mouth wide (without bothering to swallow the chewed up burger inside it) and sticks a finger into the gunk to communicate his repulsion at the fact his closest female friend and one of the lads have mutated from normal decent people into a nauseating pair of twittering lovebirds.

Tom sees Luke and tauntingly feeds me a chip, mouth to mouth. Luke puts his head in his hands as if in great sorrow. Tom sighs and says, “You know he’s going to blackmail me forever?” and I nod and say, “So, can we have sex later?” and he grins. I promptly stand up, scraping my chair. Tom looks at me, raises an eyebrow, and jumps to his feet—and a waiter brings in a huge pink birthday cake and we all have to sing “Happy Birthday, dear Lizzy.” Tom and I squawk it with gusto. We are exchanging sneaky “Shall we, now?” looks when I glance across the table to see if anyone has noticed and catch sight of Tina.

And the happiness drains away. She looks terrified. Cringing, servile, like a starving dog. She is sipping water and her hand is shaking. She won’t look up. The person to her left has given up trying to engage her in conversation and is talking to the person on his left. The person to her right is to blame. Adrian is dapper in a pale green shirt and a beautifully cut dark gray suit, and his teeth are whiter than white and his blonde hair is styled just so. He is in animated chat with the woman next to him. He touches her hand, lightly, to emphasize a point, and she throws back her head and laughs prettily. I want to stab her.

“What’s wrong?” says Tom, following my line of vision.

“Oh, er, nothing,” I say. “I think Lizzy’s on to us. We’d better, ah, save it for later.”

Tom glances at me and says, “Something’s wrong.”

I shake my head and say, “I’m just going to talk to Liz for a sec, you’ll be all right, won’t you?” At this point, Luke appears behind Tom and tries to poke a bean in his ear, and Tom shouts with laughter, grabs his wrist, and twists it so that Luke is forced to his knees.

I grab my chance and hurry over to Tina. I say “Hi” and she looks horrified. She says feebly, “I see you and Tom got it together.”

I smile and say “Yeah!” and “Why don’t you come over and have a chat?” Tina glares at me as Adrian swivels round, an ingratiating smile tacked to his face, and croons, “Helen! How excellent to see you! You look terrific. And I love your top, it’s so you.” Much as I’d like to spit in his eye, I can see Tina quaking, so I force the corners of my mouth upward and say, “Yes, it’s a nice top.”

I pause and add, “Don’t let me interrupt you—I was just about to drag Tina over my side of the table for a sec to see Tom and Luke.” Adrian’s smile remains fixed as he replies, “We’d love to, but”—show glance at the Tag Heuer—“my lady’s been nagging on all night about being exhausted, so I’m sweeping her home to beddie-byes, right now. Rouse yourself, darling, the cab’s waiting outside!”

Tina stands up like a robot and says in a strained voice, “Goodnight, Helen.”

They kiss and hug Lizzy, then leave. I can’t relax. Lizzy skips over and says that she and Brian and some others are going on to a club and would I like to come, too. She adds quickly that she won’t be offended if I wouldn’t. I start to apologize, but she squeezes my shoulder, nods toward Tom, and whispers, “Be happy.”

Tom sees that people are dispersing and he turns to me and says bashfully, “Would you like to share a cab?”

I reply, “Of course.”

Luke sticks his head between us and exclaims, “Great! I’ll cadge a lift!”

Tom and I glare at him and Luke smiles and says, “What?” then, “Don’t worry, you can drop me off first!”