The Break Page 12

  Marble Arch is my stop. I push through the rush-hour crowds, and ten minutes before my first meeting I arrive at my ‘office’. It’s actually Home House, the private members’ club. Both Alastair and I belong to it because the annual fee is a lot less than running a London office.

  The next two days will be busy and that’s probably good: downtime is no friend to me, not even the occasional second to think, because any hiatus will be like an abyss, and if I tumble in, there might be terrible difficulty in getting back out again.

  Over the next forty-eight hours I’ll be required to eat and drink a lot, and while the eating might prove a challenge, the drinking bit should be nice.

  A good PR firm keeps in with as many influential journos and TV producers as possible so that when the shit hits the fan there are friends to call on for help.

  Keeping in with the Irish media is no bother because everyone knows everyone. Then Tim, Alastair and I cover the UK as best we can: Tim goes to Edinburgh every second Thursday; I’m in London every Tuesday and Wednesday and Alastair takes over from me on Thursdays and Fridays.

  Unless a crisis blows up – and that happens a fair bit – my work (which doesn’t sound like work at all, I know) mostly involves me and my laptop taking up residence in Home House and showing media people some love. I enquire about sick kids, I remember spouses’ names and, above all else, I ply them with food and drink.

  My day tends to move from breakfast meetings to brunch to lunch to afternoon tea to dinner, and my weekly alcohol unit allowance is nearly always used up by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, thanks to Mimosa at breakfast, Prosecco at brunch, wine at lunch and Champagne at afternoon tea.

  I wish I didn’t have to drink so much but people take a dim view of me urging them on to get scuttered while restricting my own consumption to sips of fizzy water. However, right now, I’m very grateful to have a job that involves compulsory mid-morning alcohol.

  What I do is basically horse-trading – for example, if you kill the story about my client Mr X being cruel to kangaroos, I’ll give you an exclusive comeback interview with another of my clients, Ms Y, as soon as she’s out of rehab. (Honestly, for every story where a famous person does something idiotic or illegal, there are probably ten that are never published. The stuff that goes on, I tell you, you just wouldn’t believe it. And it’s usually the least powerful and most vulnerable who are publicly shamed. Anyone with any kind of heft gets the bad stories dropped.)

  As a teenager my career aspirations involved something arty – to do with clothes, maybe, or interiors. But I hadn’t done art at school – Pop wouldn’t let me, insisted it wasn’t a real subject – so when I moved to Leeds with Richie, with no qualifications at all, it was just pure chance that my lowly receptionist job happened to be at a PR firm.

  I’d known nothing about the publicity game but those people saw something in me, began involving me in campaigns, and I learnt on the job.

  So I’ve been doing this for a long time, first in Leeds, then London, then splitting my time between Dublin and London. Over the years I’ve got to know a lot of media people, and the long and the short of it is that I’m terrified of causing offence and engendering their enmity.

  Hardly comparable to being down the mines, I know, but in its own first-world way, it’s scary work. Media types have so much power. Also they’re usually mad for a bit of banter, and even though I make game efforts to join in, I’m never sure where the line is.

  Which means that as soon as the person has left, my brain starts replaying the conversation and my stomach gushes acid. Was it a mistake to laugh at the story of their burglary? Who in their right mind would laugh at a burglary story? But it had been narrated in a funny way and I’d been afraid not to laugh. On reflection, should I have found a way that acknowledged (a) the person was a comic genius who’d (b) had a traumatic experience?

  My first meeting today is with an eighties pop star who’s flirting with bankruptcy and hoping for a rebrand. I should float the EverDry ambassador’s job by her, but under the circumstances I simply don’t have the emotional energy to finesse something so thorny. All in all, our meet doesn’t go so great. And neither does the next one, just a ‘catch-up over coffee’ with a household-name columnist for the Guardian, or the one after that, brunch with a hot-right-now young TV producer.

  My head is a long way from being in the game and my lungs won’t play ball.

  But I’m functioning – saying words, standing, nodding, breathing occasionally. Frankly, I’m pretty impressed with myself. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of adulthood – you can feel as if you’ve lost everything that ever mattered and still eat an omelette and enquire after a journalist’s pet poodle.

  After lunch I have to venture into the actual world. Currently I’m in the process of rehabilitating an ex-politician (expenses scandal) and one of my stratagems is to offer her up as the figure-head for Room, a homelessness charity. It’s not a natural fit. My ex-politician, Tabitha Wilton, is posh and brisk. Her voice is a ringing, confident affair that commands instant dislike. Today she will meet with her potential ally face to face and I’m a peculiar mix of nihilistic and profoundly nervous. It’s been a battle to get any charity interested in partnering with her – even without the expenses scandal, she doesn’t rate highly on the likeability scale.

  Yet, if this works, it could do wonders for Tabitha’s image, while the charity’s profile would definitely rise – with, of course, a commensurate increase in income.

  The whole business is as grim as an arranged marriage, with Tabitha as the bride and me as – I don’t know – the matchmaker? The bride’s down-on-his-luck father? I feel hand-washy and obsequious.

  The three representatives from Room are men in suits and I’m not feeling the love.

  ‘What do you know of homelessness?’ one asks, somewhat sneerily.

  ‘Very little!’ Tabitha announces, as if she’s addressing people four counties away. ‘But willing to learn.’

  ‘How about you come on a soup run with our volunteers? This evening?’

  Tabitha wavers – and recovers. ‘Certainly!’

  I exhale, a little too audibly.

  ‘You own two homes?’

  ‘Mortgaged to the hilt! Bank talking foreclosure! Bloody terrified, if truth be told!’

  This goes down well. One of the suity-men does a small scribble on his jotter. He could be just reminding himself that he needs to buy tissues, but if he’s anything like me, he’ll want her to repeat that precise line in a press interview.

  ‘May well be calling on you myself, if something doesn’t come through for me soon!’

  In the wake of this admission, the atmosphere thaws. She’s warmer and more humble than the entitled-sounding accent would give you to believe. I like her.

  ‘You come trailing some scandal,’ a suit says. ‘The press will revisit it, should we choose to work with you. How would you address that?’

  My heart is in my mouth. I’m so anxious that I almost want to jump in and answer this myself, but all my coaching has paid off.

  ‘I was an idiot,’ Tabitha says. ‘Greedy idiot. Stealing from the tax-payer. Inexcusable. Want to make my amends to society.’

  More scribbling on a jotter. Remembering he also has to buy sausages? Or is this another good sign?

  Now the interrogation moves on to Tabitha’s availability.

  ‘Unemployed!’ she says. ‘Available twenty-four seven!’

  Talk of having lunch to meet with trustees ensues – which means that Tabitha has got through to the next round. We gather up our stuff and, with me smiling, smiling, nodding, smiling, bowing my head, twisting an imaginary cap between my hands and basically giving it the Full Unctuous, we say our goodbyes.

  As soon as we’re outside, Tabitha says, ‘Shall we go and get drunk?’

  It’s a bad idea: client-boundaries have to be observed. Plus I’m shattered, much more tired than I’d normally be. Also, I need to go somewhere private and try to
breathe.

  ‘You’re going on a soup run later,’ I say.

  ‘All the more reason to get blotto.’

  But I make my excuses.

  The tube is hot, jammers and slow, and it’s gone seven when I arrive at Druzie’s flat in Shepherds Bush.

  Druzie van Zweden has been my friend for more than twenty years. She’s originally from Zimbabwe, and our lives intersected in Leeds after Richie left me. She lived in the flat above mine and, despite us having nothing in common, we just clicked. For two years, we were up and down the stairs to each other the whole time, and when I got a much better job in London, it was a real wrench to leave her.

  But not long after, she moved to London too, and began working for a charity that oversees aid distribution in trouble hotspots. She was promoted and promoted and promoted and, these days, her job entails flitting around the globe but she has a flat in London, to which she gave me (and Alastair) a key. It saves us having to shell out on a hotel once a week, and we get to keep a toothbrush and other bits and pieces here, so it feels like home.

  Druzie’s easily one of my favourite people on the planet, but I’m guiltily grateful she isn’t here tonight: she’d take a dim view of Hugh’s shenanigans. She’s pragmatic – fascinatingly so – about relationships. In her foreign postings, she finds a boyfriend almost before she’s unpacked, and when her employers move her to another country, she leaves without a backward glance.

  She’d probably cheerily advise me to shut the door on Hugh for ever, genuinely unable to understand why I can’t.

  Druzie’s garden flat is tidy. There’s cheese, there’s peace and quiet, there’s hash in a little carved box, if you’re that way inclined. I’m not myself, but no judgement.

  But after yearning to be free from the company of others all day long, I realize there can be such a thing as too much peace and quiet. I put on Jeff Buckley – too sad. I try Solange and that’s worse. Nile Rodgers is no better.

  What next? I’m at a loss, and when my phone rings, I’m grateful. It’s Tim. ‘What’s wrong?’ He only rings when something has gone tits-up.

  ‘Nothing. Just checking you’re …’

  Well, that’s nice. ‘I’m grand, Tim. Really.’

  The sitting-room doors open on to the back garden, which catches the mellow evening light. I go out with a cup of tea and my laptop. I’ll do some work, then watch Masterchef. At times like this, I’m glad of my job: there’s always something to be done.

  It’s only when goosebumps appear on my arms that I see it’s almost ten o’clock and the garden is in chilly darkness – I’ve missed Masterchef!

  Briefly there’s relief that I’m not missing Hugh, then panic seizes me – I should be sadder. Like a cold hand around my heart, I think, We really are over.

  I can’t breathe! Fuck, I can’t breathe! Oh, my God, what if I die here, all alone in Druzie’s back garden?

  I’m on my feet, leaning on the table and, for some long seconds, I stand with my mouth open, paralysed and desperate to hook on to a breath. Finally my chest grabs one, which goes all the way down and I’m gasping and grateful.

  Christ, that was really awful. All of today was awful.

  But maybe that was the worst day and everything will get a little easier from here on in.

  But I’m waaaay too long in the tooth to know that heartbreak doesn’t begin at a high watermark of horribleness, then decrease in smooth, steady increments until you land so softly you barely notice.

  Emotions – particularly the unpleasant ones – dole themselves out in fits and starts. They play their cards close to their chests, taking pride in their unpredictability. Bad as I feel now, it’ll be lots worse when I get home tomorrow night and there’s no Hugh. The thought of the house convulsing around his absence generates another round of gasping.

  21

  Here we go. First night without Hugh. I get into bed in Druzie’s spare room, and it’s so weird not talking to him on the phone, just before I switch the light out – Wait! Someone’s FaceTiming me! For a moment of ferocious hope, I think it’s Hugh.

  ‘Hey, babes. Cape Town calling.’

  Seeing Derry’s face is surprisingly consoling. ‘Thanks for this.’ It was probably tough for her to find the time.

  Derry’s role in human resources involves big contracts sourcing the likes of five hundred nurses or three hundred engineers in one country and shifting them to another. The trips are intense – fifteen-hour days spent sifting through sometimes thousands of candidates; interviewing, grading, selecting and making judgement call after judgement call until eventually her critical faculties are eroded to nothing.

  ‘He go?’ she asks.

  ‘I suppose. I haven’t heard otherwise.’

  ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Ah, you know. Not too bad.’ Now isn’t the time. She looks tired and that’s rare. ‘When you back?’

  ‘Friday. But I’ve to go to Dubai on Saturday night,’ she says.

  ‘Christ, Der, you’ll die of exhaustion!’

  ‘I’ll be grand. Things have to calm down at some stage, right?’

  She’s paid plenty, but is any amount of money worth this?

  ‘I know you said you wanted nothing to do with any man except Hugh,’ she says, ‘but us forty-something women are packed with sexual energy, our last hurrah before the mentalpause kicks in and we shrivel up and die.’

  ‘Thank you for that happy thought, Derry. You’re a gem. Sleep tight. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too.’

  I wish people would stop urging me to go sexing because I can’t separate the physical from the emotional. Some people are brilliant at it – they fancy a person, throw out a suggestion and in the blink of an eye they’re away to the races – and good luck to them. Everyone is different, and living that way could be fun, if you were the right kind of person.

  But in my forty-four years I’ve only slept with six men and had a single one-night-stand. Just one! With a Dutch boy, Elian – I still remember his name, even though I was seventeen at the time, which makes it twenty-seven years ago. He was a medical student from Delft, our eyes had met across a crowded bar in Ibiza and next thing we were both weaving through the crowds to reach each other. He was leaving first thing the next morning and we spent the whole night talking and kissing. Together, on the beach, we watched the sun come up, then went to his apartment, where the sex happened about an hour before he had to leave.

  Over that one night, I fell in love. Well, some version of love. Our goodbye was tender and sweet – there were no promises to stay in touch, we weren’t complete saps, and within days he’d been forgotten about. For that one night, though, we’d connected: I felt I knew him and he knew me.

  I was always more about romance than irresistible sexual passion, although sometimes the two overlapped, like with Richie Aldin.

  In the post-Richie years, before I met Hugh, I had a paltry two flings. The thing was, there was no time for men: every second of every exhausting day had been earmarked for something more important, like feeding my child or doing my job.

  When Neeve was three, there was a divorced dad with a little boy in her crèche whom I bumped into at drop-offs and pick-ups. For about a year we exchanged smiles, and this evolved into a reciprocal arrangement where we’d occasionally pick up the other’s kid. Around the time I decided I really liked him, he asked me out. ‘Out-out?’ I remember asking.

  ‘Out-out,’ he confirmed.

  But it never fully ignited and didn’t last longer than a month. He was nice but a teeny bit dull, and the ending was as low-key as the entire relationship – one morning he’d smiled a little sadly and said, ‘No?’

  My strongest emotion was regret that it no longer felt appropriate to ask him to pick up Neeve if I was running late.

  My other pre-Hugh thing was entirely different. Max Nicholson was a hugely successful publicist in the big London firm I left Leeds for. Famous as he was for his work, he was more famous for his epic wom
anizing. He was textbook sexy, fun and flirty, and when he turned the force of his charisma on you, it was irresistible. He slept with whomever he chose and you could always pinpoint his current woman because she practically crackled with flashes of blue electricity. When he began to tire of her – and he always tired of her – you could see her power draining away, like a battery running out of energy.

  At least two of his discarded women left the company, to find jobs elsewhere, and another poor girl disappeared overnight because she’d had a full-on breakdown.

  Then he decided to notice me. One morning he tore by my work-station and was already several feet past when he came to a dramatically sudden halt, swivelled a graceful 180 and stared at me, stared hard. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’

  ‘Hello, gorgeous, yourself.’ I’d wanted to laugh, because he was so over-the-top.

  ‘Irish,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘English.’ I mimicked his tone and kept on looking.

  That was the start and he did it all. The flowers. The invitations on lavish dates. (‘Dinner tonight? In Lisbon?’) A pair of Manolo Blahniks in my size arriving by courier.

  Daily, Max leant over my desk and murmured, ‘You do know you’re driving me insane?’ Or ‘When are you going to sleep with me and put me out of my misery?’

  It was fun. Unlike every other poor woman who came under the dazzling spotlight of his attention, I knew exactly what I was getting into – and I. Did. Not. Care. It was like deciding to eat an entire toffee cheesecake – an exercise in self-destruction, but you’d enjoy yourself along the way.

  Not even my lack of sexual experience intimidated me, because even if I’d had an actual degree in exotic bedroom techniques, he’d still dump me in the end. It was just a question of when.

  Except I ended things with him.

  One morning, in bed he, very deliberately, traced his finger along a silvery line on my stomach. ‘Stretch mark?’