The Way It Never Was (24 page)

‘The TV auditions went really well darling,’ she said, sounding her usual self once more. ‘They said that it might not be immediately, but they plan to create the right part for me.’ For a brief second, I actually wondered if they were not just trying to let her down gently as that doesn’t half sound like the perfect non-committal answer but even if that was the case, Anna had enough bravado to put a positive spin on it. She then asked me whether I had seen Stan, as apparently she was still upset about ending it with him, for fear he would be truly heartbroken. I wasn’t entirely sure as to what Anna’s motivation for asking after him was. Perhaps it was a hangover from her days as a possessive girlfriend who used binoculars on a regular basis but I wasn’t going to indulge her.

‘He seems okay actually,’ I said cheerfully as it was the truth. From my perspective, my friend was behaving like he hadn’t got a care in the world – he certainly wasn’t reaching for Michael Bublé.

‘Oh,’ she said, barely able to disguise her surprise. ‘Well, keep a close eye on him. It could be delayed grief.’

It took every ounce of civility not to say something rude in response but I behaved impeccably.
Liv
would
have
been
devastated
.

Back to the present, Stan and I are now sat with coffee in hand, while he tells me he’s thinking of throwing in the towel at his job and taking some time off. He is?
Why
did
I
not
know
?

‘I trust you’re not going to bugger off travelling and become the old bloke that no-one wants to sit next to on the bus,’ I grin, inwardly panicking that he might leave these shores and do just that. He pulls a face.

‘As if! No plans to start staying in smelly hostels I assure you. Got too many Hilton Hotel points to use up,’ he smiles, before looking serious again. ‘No, I just meant doing something new.’

Listening to him of all people question it all, gets me thinking that perhaps every person at any stage can have a ‘Is this it?’ moment, but maybe what it should be – a moment. Unfortunately, in my case, my ‘Is this it?’ moment became a way of life.

‘So what’s happening with you?’ Stan asks, so I tell him about being offered full-time work at the Globe.

‘No surprise there,’ he says. ‘This is so you Kate. Not sure how you got into secretarial anyhow, you are a born saleswoman. No offence, but I was never able to picture you doing mail merges. Attention to detail has never been your strongest point.’

I could tell him that I now realise that much of my time in the administration wilderness was to do with dealing with the emotional fall out after Joe, but to be honest, the last thing I want to do is bring the conversation round to him with Stan of all people. Ugh. In a short space of time, whatever we had has gone from being poignant to seemingly inconsequential. It now feels so foreign to me that I chose to undermine my own life plan for a man – and one with a ponytail at that.

‘I know working in a café doesn’t come under the category of ‘high flying’ ’, I say, doing finger quotations. ‘It’s certainly not what I thought I would end up doing, but I tell you what? It feels right to be working here.’

It’s true, the time I’ve spent in here, the hours, the graft, the banter with the staff, even the clearing up – I’ve loved it. I even tell Stan that at Paolo’s request, I washed three years’ worth of urine off the walls with sugar soap to paint the toilet a shade of lime green.

‘Perhaps Paolo was testing you with painting the toilets, like that scene in
Karate
Kid
when Mr Miyagi gets Daniel to wax polish his car,’ Stan offers by way of an explanation and I giggle. ‘Wax on, wax off.’

‘What I like about this kind of work is that you sort of know where you’re at all the time,’ I continue, pausing as I try to articulate exactly what I mean. ‘People tell you if they’re not happy or they thank you if they are. It’s very instant. It’s very honest. It’s impossible to over-read into things like I did in all those work places, you know, having to manage politics on a daily basis. Here, there’s no time to do any of that overanalysing before the next customer comes in.’ I say, not really meaning the last bit as I think I’ll spend the rest of my days reading into everything.
Just
look
at
Stan
and
I
.

‘Well, it sounds like it’s a no brainer,’ says Stan, reaching over the counter and holding my hand. ‘It’s been ages since I’ve seen you happy like this.’ He’s right. The last two years I have been scared about just accepting who I was and what made me content. I now realise that not making any changes is simply copping out on having to do any decision-making.

‘I think I was under the impression that as I went to university, I was supposed to do something that had a fancy job title.’ I say. ‘ “I work in a café” just doesn’t have the same ring to it does it?’

Stan then interrupts. ‘Well, I remember in California…’
Do
not
mention
California
, I inwardly plead. ‘You said you just wanted to work for a small independent business. Who cares what constitutes sexy?’ he says and then smiles.

I look at him, wondering how come it took me so long to get this complete clarity when friends like him have had it all along.

‘I think I thought I liked cafés as I like to sit on my arse without having to fully participate in life. But good news! It turns out I love cafés as I like working in them,’ I say grinning, giving him a thumbs up. ‘Anyhow, I feel like I’m talking shop a bit too much, pardon the pun.’ I say as we drain our coffees and get ready to go.

‘So…are you going to get back out there on the dating front?’ I ask, trying to sound chipper but for the first time thinking that perhaps I’m bored of having this conversation with Stan. It’s always the same, him having a love life and me watching from the sidelines. I’m tired of it.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he shakes his head in that non-committal way of his. ‘I think I’ll have some time on my own. But yes, at some point probably.’ He then puts the cups in the dishwasher and winks at me. ‘You know me, nothing I like better than being in back-to-back relationships.’

As we are on the subject, I then decide to say what I feel, in as light-hearted a way as I can muster. ‘Well, while you’re single, let’s make a pact – let’s not choose to date each other’s friends.’ I really do mean this now as we’ve learnt the hard way. And just like that, Stan once more goes from Anna’s significant other to the old friend that knows me too well. It gets me thinking as to whether I’ll ever be able to file him away under a category, or whether our story will just run and run, until one of us settles down that is.

Suddenly Stan starts tapping the spoon on the table, making me jump. ‘So about the Westerner 4,’ he blurts out, continuing to make the irritating noise with the cutlery. ‘Before you have time to change the subject I just want to say, I’m just sorry that I was such an arse.’

My heart in my mouth, I can feel myself go a shade of crimson, with a rash developing on my neck. ‘I’ve never had the chance to say it properly to you as I got a bit distracted by Anna that night,’ says Stan. ‘She said that you’d told her I should take her out, which made me think that you had given up on me. So I went out with her.’

As I try to take in the full force of what he’s saying, I reach over and halt the tapping of the spoon again – the man is driving me bonkers. He then grabs my hand and I desperately try to fill the silence with something, with anything that won’t trip me up, leave me vulnerable again.

‘That’s not strictly true actually,’ I correct him. ‘If you really want to know, I actually told Anna to stay away from you.’ Stan just sits there processing all the information. ‘You know,’ I continue, not really knowing how I’m going to say it without sounding cheesy. ‘I just didn’t want to her to take you away from me if that makes sense. You sort of fill the gap.’ He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t let go of my hand either. We just sit there until eventually I move my hand away to shut the coffee machine down. ‘Here’s to moving forward as friends!’ I make a toast with a random empty cup, aware I’m sounding like an enthusiastic head teacher.
If
I
say
it
enough
times
,
I
might
actually
mean
it
.

CHAPTER 32 -
‘THAT HOLIDAY’

Not long after I moved out of his house and into my flat, Stan and I went on holiday. I might have been on the property ladder, but given that I was spending fourteen-hour days up in London working as a secretarial temp, I had the same itchy feet that made me want to forget all ‘grown up’ obligations and leave the country again. I was also overwhelmed with something I can only interpret as a real need for romance, or at least some sort of sign that I had it in me to be able to move on from Joe, who was now back to occupying my thoughts. I knew it wasn’t going to happen meeting someone at the pub or a half-hearted attempt at online dating – it hadn’t happened so far. No, I had to introduce some excitement so I might meet someone in an extraordinary way, just as I had with Joe – something that would propel my life back onto the right course. I came to the conclusion that a holiday by myself would solve everything. If it happened abroad once, it would happen again right? I asked for three weeks holiday, which was refused by HR who pointed out, quite rightly so, that I hadn’t actually accrued so much as four days. So I promptly quit, in no doubt that another administration job would be waiting for me on my return.

Now a seasoned expert in his field, Dan was a tour guide on the ‘Westerner 4’, described in the brochure as a ‘three week journey of a lifetime from LA to Seattle’.
Journey
of
a
lifetime
hey
! I had high hopes. Travelling 3,000 miles covering four states, I would get to experience adventure with a load of ‘like-minded individuals’. Better still, Dan had told me it would be free as he was allowed to bring an ‘other half’ for one of his tours, thereby making up for the fact I was now out of work. He also promised me I’d meet lots of eligible men. Well, it was a done deal – I started to mentally prepare for the likelihood of a holiday romance and had it all planned out. On our return, my boyfriend (as he would become after day one as he wouldn’t have any qualms about commitment) would then end up working in London too, where I could stay with him at the weekends instead of having to commute up on a Monday morning. After a month or two, he’d say that it was ridiculous us not being together all the time and perhaps he should try out life by the sea. He’d then start working for a consultancy that only required him to spend two days in the office where he’d stay at his bachelor pad, before coming down for a long weekend to mine, where he’d join a local rugby club and make lots of improvements to my flat, ticking off that snagging list that I never got round to finishing. Yes, I was all about creative visualisation.

The week before I was due to fly out to LA, I went out for a drink with Stan. Since I moved out, I’d been a little unavailable on purpose. I missed the effortless, unspoken compatibility between us, so I decided to just avoid him while I was making the transition to living on my own. Having seamlessly fitted into each other’s lives and knowing each other’s moods with just a glance, it took moving out to realise that despite my feelings for him, I’d never had that connection with Joe, whose self-centred nature never so much as noticed my changing moods and towards the end, started to dictate them.

Halfway through the first beer of the night, Stan said that he liked the sound of coming on my holiday and what did I think? To be honest, I didn’t know how I felt as I was supposed to be doing this on my own and there was this imaginary boyfriend waiting for me, so I didn’t sound overly keen. As it turns out he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

‘Come on Kate, we’ve lived together, we’ve shared a couch,’ he pleaded. ‘We’ve done food shopping. How hard can it be to share a tent?’ As he was saying it, I was getting a flashback at the memory of him coming out of his steamy bathroom, dripping with water, looking buff, with only a small towel. Oh yeah, I’d seen Stan in all lights.

After an hour of proper persuasion, Stan wore me down. Okay he could come. Confessing that I was just a little concerned that people would see us as a couple, which would ruin my quest for a holiday romance to end all holiday romances, he promised me that he would not cramp my style.

He then gave me this really strange look I’d not seen before. ‘I’m not paying all this money to go on the pull Kate! I can do plenty of that at home. I’m going on holiday with my friend.’
Speak
for
yourself
! I thought.

At Los Angeles airport, I saw my brother at the arrivals hall, standing there in all his laidback glory, sporting backward sunglasses on his head on top of a baseball cap that was also on backwards, a t-shirt with a rude hand gesture on it and combat shorts that displayed legs that looked like brown chicken drumsticks.

He hugged me then took me aside. ‘I am so sorry Kate. You’re going to kill me.’ I was busy wondering what he meant until the following morning when the guest list was revealed. It turned out that all the attractive single men my age were on every other tour bus but ours. He had every reason to be worried at my reaction, as I was now facing the prospect of spending the next twenty one days with three couples in their thirties and some serious female totty for Stan in the form of three Danish girls with flat stomachs and long legs. Swell.

Despite this initial setback and the subsequent discovery I was still the world’s worst backpacker, I still had the best holiday of my entire life. It was better than that year in Australia, better than all the girlie trips to Majorca – better than all the teenage summer camps combined. It wasn’t just any one thing in particular; it was more that all the right elements came together in no particular order. There was the majestic scenery of the national parks, the re-discovery of my love for flip-flops, the cool music in the van, the fact that Dan was an entertaining tour guide. It was overcoming the challenge of putting up a tent and getting over the initial pining for an en-suite bathroom. It was being daring and outwitting the others to bag us the best vistas to camp out under the stars. It was Stan and I on cooking duty, attempting to cobble together some sort of meal out of three canned ingredients. It was also the wonderful discovery that the Danish girls found the snug swimming trunks worn by the husbands of the Smug-Marrieds as funny as I did. And it was that everyday that the sun shone and my hair lightened and my skin tanned, my quest for romance dissipated but my confidence grew. Finally, I was coming out of my shell again and all thoughts of Joe faded into the background. This was once again my story.

By the time we reached the Big Sur coastline, we were a seasoned group of travellers – or sheep, depending on how you look at it. Now in our final week, we knew when to get off that bus, when to go for a toilet break, how to ensure your CD got played and when Dan was blatantly plugging some activity to make his commission. Yes, we were the consummate organised tour professionals. The evening before we flew home, the group had been dropped off at Pfeiffer Beach for a compulsory sunset watch and we all took a walk by the ocean to wait it out.

‘Strange the way things have worked out. You coming out here with me,’ I said to Stan, burping slightly, having just eaten a gargantuan muffin from the Big Sur Bakery.

As I patted my bloated tummy, I remember him looking at me oddly, so I gently nudged him for a response, only to find he wasn’t going to give me one. Instead, he bent down and picked up a pebble and started tossing it back and forth between his hands, looking thoughtful.

‘I don’t question it really,’ he said after a while. ‘You know me, not a great one for thinking too much about stuff. We have what we have.’

His response was vague enough that I turned to look at him with my back to the sinking sun, feeling the waves lapping around my feet.

‘And what do we have Stanley?’ I squeezed his arm grinning.

‘Chemistry, Katharine, loads of it actually,’ he replied with a solemn expression on his face. I just looked at the pebble in his hand going from left to right like a cat watching the tennis, thinking that it had never really occurred to me that this is what it was that held us together. Loyalty – sure. Same sense of humour – most definitely. But chemistry?

‘Okay, I don’t want to point out the obvious,’ I said a little sarcastically. ‘But if that is really the case then how come we have never got together?’

Tossing the pebble out into the surf, he shrugged. ‘We wouldn’t have stayed friends would we? I never wanted to ruin it.’ Was this what I thought it was? Was this a declaration of something?

I started to wade into the ocean a little deeper. Honest to God, up until that point, I’d always thought Stan was very attractive but in that almost untouchable ‘Rob Lowe’ way, a little like owning a rather lovely painting in a museum that has a rope barrier the whole way round it. There and then on Pfeiffer Beach, I took a good look at that side profile of his – his slightly wonky Italian nose, the dark hair that needed to be cut regularly for fear of looking like ‘The Hoff’, the olive skin, the lanky height and his chest that was just hairy enough – and from somewhere deep inside I actually felt a spark of something real. He
was
right. We did have chemistry. Buckets of it actually! In abundance! Okay, the old saying about love looking not with the eyes but with the mind was true, but Stan wasn’t just attractive personality wise, he was very easy on the eye! Even when I was at the height of my infatuation with Joe, I wasn’t so blinded by desire that I didn’t recognise that his eyes were a little too close together and that he had a ponytail that he cared for like a pet. I had never felt that way about Stan. He was absolutely gorgeous, end of.

One of the couples then came running past me in the surf, laughing like they were in some bad life insurance advert. All thoughts of what to say by way of response then well and truly left my brain. Looking over at Stan who had now waded over to stand by me, I wondered whether he too was relieved that a conversation that was erring into deep and meaningful territory had been interrupted by me walking off. What with the smug selfies being taken and the splashing and crashing of the waves, I could barely make out what he was saying.

‘Kate. It’s just never been complicated being friends with you,’ he shouted as I covered my hands to protect my contact lenses that were threatening to fall out. ‘But I think it has got a bit awkward though,’ he shouted above the din as I focused in on the darkness. He didn’t need to say anything else as I knew what he meant, that this understanding we had was now taking something of a battering now we’d reached our twenties where big questions loomed large over us, questions like:
Why
was
it
so
good
living
together
and
if
so
why
aren’t
we
together
?

Standing there, he then put his arm around me and I visibly relaxed into him. ‘Promise me,’ I said, staring forward at the sun that had almost disappeared on the horizon. ‘When we get home, you will back off a little, you know, don’t ring me so much.’ I then turned to face him. ‘We need to move on from this. You know –
this
.’ I pointed my finger at him and then at me. ‘You know, so we can meet other people,’ I then added, to which Stan just looked a bit taken aback.

‘What are you talking about?’ The way he said it, he made me feel like he was having a conversation on another level.

Just as I was about to elaborate, he pulled me towards him and properly kissed me, right on the mouth. Just a firm, sublime kiss, you know, like they do in the black and white movies. Seconds turned into minutes and my head went into freefall. The odd thing is that all I could think about was that in sharp contrast to Joe, he actually kissed properly, no training needed. It was so damn lovely that quite honestly, I didn’t want it to end.

‘Kate, can I tell you something?’ he said when he eventually broke away. ‘When you came back from Sydney, all upset over that bloke – and this sounds so stupid – I was actually properly jealous.’

God, I had unknowingly played hard to get had I? I just stared at him in disbelief as I remember having interpreted his reaction at the time as just being protective as a friend would be. ‘You’re kidding me right?’

Stan then took both of my hands in his and looked straight at me, making me visibly feel weak at the knees. ‘Kate, I’ve always liked you, for as long as I can remember.’ Not knowing quite what to say in response that would articulate how much I realised I felt the same, I leant in and kissed him again. I ignored the shouts of surprise around us, I ignored the silence that followed and then as it turned out, I ignored the cry of ‘Watch Out!’ as something rather solid hit me square on the back, pushing me under the water. My head was spinning from the full force of Stan’s confession – and now, it would appear the rather large matter of a heavy surfboard over me. After what seemed like minutes of being trapped underwater, I finally came up for air. I spluttered, then stood up waist deep looking around me, only for another wave to crash down on me, pushing me back under. When I finally came up for air, my contact lenses were now glued onto my eyeballs. As the vision cleared, I clapped eyes on the surfer who had hit me now chatting to Stan animatedly like they were old friends.

What I remember most about that day on Pfeiffer Beach – well, apart from being hit by an enormous surfboard – was Stan and I just grinning inanely at each other, my head pounding from the emotion of the moment, my thigh killing me from my little collision – and most of all, him quietly telling me how he felt.