The Importance of Being a Bachelor (18 page)

Walking along the road reading the texts Russell enjoyed exactly how good being with Angie made him feel. This thing with his mum and dad was having an effect on him yet here he was with a spring in his step and a smile on his face. And it was all down to Angie. Still grinning Russell began typing out the following reply: ‘Have left Mum’s and am walking up to High Street. Will see you soon xxx.’ He pressed send and was about to return his phone to his pocket when it rang. Assuming it was Angie, he answered the call straight away.

‘Ange!’ said Russell.

‘Have another go,’ said a gruff male voice that he immediately recognised as Adam’s.

‘All right, Ad?’ Russell wondered if this was going to be an update about their father.

‘As it happens, no,’ replied his brother. ‘My reason for being, my one motivation, the very thing that makes your brother the person he is has gone. But I’ll have to share that with you another time, kid, because that’s not why I’m calling.’

‘So why are you calling then?’

‘Because less than five minutes ago I had Mum on the phone saying that you’re moving in with your mate Angie. I told her she must have got the wrong end of the stick and that you meant you’re moving in with her in the sense that you’ll be her flatmate or housemate or whatever. I’m just checking that is the case.’

Russell groaned. Enlisting Adam as her own personal enforcer was typical Mum behaviour when she had things to say but didn’t want to be the one who actually said them. Now he would have no choice but to allow his elder brother to talk sense into him. It was the same when he had briefly toyed with the idea of getting a job instead of doing A levels, and again when he had considered dropping out of university and when he had thought about going to live in Holland. Every time he had shared these notions with his mum she had taken them to Adam who had proceeded to talk Russell out of doing whatever he’d wanted to do. Well it wasn’t going to happen. Not this time.

‘Actually it’s not the case,’ said Russell firmly. ‘So just to make it clear: yes, I am moving in with Angie in the sense that Angie and I are now together and . . . well, we’ve decided to take things to the next level.’

‘What is wrong with you?’ said Adam incredulously. ‘It’s bad enough that you’re shacking up with some bird two minutes after getting together. Don’t make matters worse by using phrases like “taking things to the next level”. You’re meant to be a Bachelor, Russ, but the way you’re talking makes me think that you should have been born a spinster!’ Russell had heard the ‘Bachelor/Spinster’ thing many times before and didn’t bother rising to the bait. Instead he held the phone away from his ear and let his brother continue. ‘Anyway,’ said Adam, whose voice Russell thought sounded a lot less annoying now that it was no longer being funnelled directly into his ear canal. ‘I thought you and Angie were just mates. I remember you giving me and Luke a huge long lecture about how much we were missing out by not having birds as friends and now look at you – copping off with your supposed best mate. Not quite the higher love that you were preaching back then, is it?’

Russell put the phone back to his ear. ‘Things change, that’s all. We didn’t mean for it to happen, it just sort of appeared from nowhere.’

‘And how long exactly has it been? Mum was a little shaky about the timing.’

Russell sighed inwardly. Adam was heading towards victory. ‘A little while,’ he acknowledged.

‘As in what exactly? Five months? Six?’

‘A couple of months.’

‘A couple of months? That’s no time at all. What’s the big rush?’

‘There is no rush. It’s just something I want to do.’

‘Look, Russ, I know you think I’m pulling rank by doing the big brother thing but I do actually give a crap about what happens to you, OK? And all I’m saying is . . . well, put it like this: there have been times in the past when I’ve done things in the hope that they’ll somehow sort out a problem I’ve been having, you know, in a “if-I-do-this-and-cross-my-fingers-it’ll-stop-me-from-doing-the-thing-that-I-don’t-want-to-do” kind of way.’

For a moment or two Russell thought Adam was talking about Cassie but he realised that the idea of his Jack-the-lad elder brother noticing anything to do with real live emotions was highly unlikely.

‘I have no idea what you are on about,’ said Russell finally. ‘But thanks for the advice all the same.’

‘Fine,’ sighed Adam. ‘Just don’t say that I didn’t warn you.’

‘We are.’

It was just after four in the afternoon and Luke (who should have been at a meeting in Exeter) was sitting on the sofa in his T-shirt and boxers thinking about his old primary-school friend, Ben Cohen. Back when they were friends Luke and Ben used to be in and out of each other’s house all the time and they got to know each other’s families really well, so it was a real shock for Luke when one morning the teacher announced that Ben wouldn’t be at school because his cab-driver father Harry had died of a heart attack. What made this even worse for Luke was that he and Ben had had a kick-around in the garden with Mr Cohen the night before. Luke felt weird that his friend didn’t have a dad any more but even weirder when his friend told him on the telephone that evening that the funeral had already happened. ‘That’s rubbish,’ he said. ‘People don’t get buried that quickly,’ but then Ben passed the phone to his older sister Rebecca, who had no reason to lie, and she confirmed it was true, adding that they were now doing something called sitting shiva.

Over the years that passed Luke thought about his friend Ben Cohen and the story of his dad’s funeral several times, usually inspired by other cases of excruciatingly embarrassing insensitivity which he had been party to, but today was the first time Luke had ever thought about that story in terms of the thing itself: the speed of the funeral. It really shocked him how one day you could be alive and kicking and less than twenty-four hours later you could be six feet under. The swiftness seemed almost indecent. How could you process what had happened in that short a space of time, let alone prepare yourself to say goodbye to a loved one? Surely these things took a week or so because that was what they needed logistically and emotionally? Surely everyone, no matter their religion or culture, was wired up with these same basic needs?

Evidently not.

Within twenty-four hours of Cassie handing back the engagement ring she had gone. Not just in the sense that she had packed more clothes and essential items for a few more days and headed back to her friend Holly’s house but in the sense that by the time Luke returned home from work the following evening everything that she owned had disappeared. Her keys to the house (the mortgage was in Luke’s name – putting her name on it was one of those things they had never actually got round to) were left on the kitchen table.

Luke hadn’t been able to believe his eyes as he looked around the house and saw all her clothes missing from the wardrobe and various pictures and photographs gone from walls and surfaces. Items to which she had equal rights, like sofas and armchairs and the dining-room table and chairs, she had left behind as though so desperate to break all ties with Luke that she was forgoing her entitlements in a bid to speed her passage away from him.

Luke knew that the swiftness of her exit had nothing to do with threats, punishment or indeed retribution for his actions and everything to do with Cassie’s own attempts at self-preservation. The longer a separation took the more drawn-out and arduous it would be for both of them in the long run. Cassie’s version of ending things was swift and to the point. Get the practical stuff out of the way while you still feel numb. Do your mourning later, in private and in your own time. If Cassie had left the timing of this separation in Luke’s hands it would have dragged on for months, featured frequent last-ditch attempts at reconciliation and ultimately ended badly enough to put them both off relationships for life. No, Cassie had done the right thing, the noble thing that in the end would be best for both of them. Even so, Luke wished that she had stayed because every second without her was empty.

Luke had called her mobile and it was all he could do not to throw the phone across the room when it went straight through to voicemail. Barely able to breathe for rising panic he dialled her office number in the hope that she might be working late and pick up without knowing that it was him but again every call was passed straight through to her anonymous electronic voicemail. Realising that he was running out of options Luke dialled her mobile number once more and plucked up the courage to leave a message: ‘Cassie, it’s me. We need to talk. I need to see you. We can’t let this happen to us. We’re better than that. I promise you we are. Please, please, call me back as soon as you get this message.’

Luke had ended the call and dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. His every fibre was primed for action but without a point on which to focus all this energy, it surged around his body pointlessly agitating his limbs as it looked for a way to escape into the world. He thought about jumping in the car and driving over to Cassie’s friend Holly’s house to see if she was there, but even in his heightened emotional state he could see the flaws in this strategy. No, the time for action had long since passed. If he had been here when she had been packing then maybe, just maybe he could have talked her round. Now all he could do was sit and wait and hope that she would call him.

He slumped down on to the sofa and switched on the TV. Determined not to be defeated by the fact that there seemed to be nothing on, he flicked up and down the channels from news programmes, to repeats of British comedy classics. Luke tried his best to concentrate on the screen, wishing desperately that he could lose himself in the excitement and the explosions, but to no avail. The huge knot in his stomach refused to stay in place, shifting from side to side before finally breaking free and moving upwards and outwards into his lungs. All at once he was sobbing like a baby and the more he tried to stop the harder and quicker it came out. He felt like something had broken inside. It seemed the pain would never stop, so he called work and told them he was taking some time off in lieu, then switched off his mobile and unplugged his phone and proceeded to cut himself off from the world.

‘There’s honestly no need for symbolic bread-based gestures.’

It was quarter to one on a cold, wet Saturday afternoon and Adam (having spent the best part of five and a half hours sitting in his car staking out his local newsagent’s like a TV detective) had just concluded that there was no option but to abandon his plan, return home and give serious consideration to his future now he had solid proof that Steph had ruined him for ever.

The reason Adam believed this was simple: his night with the gorgeous Danish/Swedish girl less than a week earlier had been an unmitigated disaster. Arriving in the early hours at the apartment she was staying in off Deansgate, he had allowed her to lead him to her room utterly convinced that this amazing girl with her fantastic looks and outstanding body would blot out everything from his doomed pursuit of the Right Kind of Women through to the problems with his parents’ marriage. But half an hour later, as the Swedish/Danish girl dozed quietly at his side, he knew two things for sure: he no longer had the will or the inclination to lead this type of life and he missed Steph more than ever.

He started to hatch a plan: on the following Saturday morning he would get up as early as humanly possible, stake out the newsagent’s where he had first met Steph and attempt to engineer an accidental meeting and then . . . he didn’t know what exactly would happen after that. But Steph made him want to be a better person and that meant more to him than anything else in the world.

He glanced into his rear-view mirror to check the traffic before pulling away and was shocked to see a lone female figure walking up the road. While not daring to believe that it might be Steph, Adam nevertheless refrained from pulling away until he could be sure. Barely breathing until the figure had come close enough for full identification Adam was relieved as first the coat, the hair and then finally the face that he had thought of kissing so many times came into sharp focus.

Waiting until she had walked past and into Sanjay’s, Adam leaped out of the car, narrowly avoiding being run over by a cyclist, crossed the road, walked straight into the newsagent’s, picked up a copy of the
Mirror
and made his way to the till at which there was a six-person-long queue. Steph was number five and a balding guy with a long grey hippy-ish ponytail was number six. Adam tried to work out what his next move should be: the most straightforward thing would be to say hello to her on the spot but that would have given the lie to the casual nature of everything he was trying to engineer. No, she would have to discover him herself . . . or even better they would discover each other at the same time . . . and everything else would follow naturally. He took a deep breath. The queue was getting shorter. Steph was second from the front. The woman in front of her paid for her shopping. Steph was next. From behind the ponytail guy Adam could just about see her handing over the money for the paper. Adam prepared his face for their encounter: a casual smile and raised eyebrows of surprise (but not too raised).

Steph turned away from the counter, her eyes fixed on the headlines of her newspaper. Adam wanted to yell: ‘Look up! Look up and see me!’ but remained in mute despair as she walked past him and out of the shop. He couldn’t believe it. All those hours spent in a cramped car and his mission was about to be thwarted by an absorbing headline! This was wrong, so wrong that it hurt. Adam looked at the headline, something to do with the number of people estimated to have died in a war on the other side of the world. He shook his head in disbelief. Why give a toss about people dying in a war halfway across the globe when none of it was affecting her? It wasn’t as if there was anything she could do about it. Why couldn’t she just be like normal people who wanted to read stuff about celebrities and only paid lip service to the idea of caring about the world? Adam watched her walk down the road. His heart could not have felt any heavier. He handed Sanjay a two-pound coin for the paper, dropped the change into the Save The Children charity tin and turned to walk away. Only he couldn’t. Steph was blocking his exit holding her newspaper and brandishing a loaf of wholemeal bread that she had clearly forgotten the first time. She glanced up and saw him. She looked both shocked and surprised.