Come Together Read online

  ‘What?’

  He lets go of my wrist. He still doesn’t look at me. ‘It’s late. We’d better get going.’

  I sit behind Jack on the bike, barely daring to hold on.

  I just don’t get it.

  Why? That’s what I want to know.

  What’s so wrong with me?

  I thought everything was great. We get on brilliantly, we make each other laugh, we have great sex, but still it’s not enough for him to be able to tell me that he cares.

  Perhaps I pushed him too far. Perhaps the thought of us being together frightens him. Perhaps he’s not ready. Or perhaps he doesn’t think I’m the one for him. Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong. Perhaps he wants more. But how can I be more? I’ve given him as much of me as I can. There isn’t any more to give.

  So what do I do? Dump him? Shrug it off and carry on our relationship on a non-serious basis? Try to change?

  I can’t work out how we’ve reached this crisis point. How can everything be perfect one minute, and ruined the next? I don’t understand. What have I done?

  There’s such a barrage of questions in my head that I don’t notice that Jack has been steadily speeding up.

  ‘Slow down!’ I yell, gripping him tightly as he takes the last corner before the descent to the town. We swerve out into the road, but the angle of the curve is too tight. I can feel Jack tense as he squeezes the brakes.

  ‘Watch out!’ I gasp, but it’s too late.

  The next thing I know, I’m lying on the ground, my arms stretched out in front of me. It feels sandy. My elbows hurt. Everything is very quiet and dark.

  ‘Amy?’ I can hear Jack’s choked scream, but I feel very disorientated. ‘Amy? Are you all right?’

  I can’t speak. Jack is crouching down next to me. He looks terrified. ‘Put your arms around my neck,’ he whispers, lifting my arms and putting them around him. He lifts me until I’m standing. It’s then that I notice that he’s crying, and that I’m supporting him.

  ‘Jack?’ I croak. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I thought I’d killed you,’ he sobs. ‘I thought I’d killed you.’

  ‘Shh,’ I say, holding his shoulders, so that he can see me. ‘See, I’m fine.’ He’s shaking his head madly and it starts to frighten me. ‘Jack, calm down. Everything is all right. We’ve fallen off, but it’s okay. I’m fine.’

  Jack’s gasping for breath. He puts his hands up to his head and grabs clumps of his hair. ‘You don’t understand. There’s something I’ve got to tell you. It’s been eating me up. Ever since you asked me what I felt … Whether it was right … And I wanted to tell you … I wanted to tell you … but I couldn’t …’

  I reach out to him, as relief floods through me. It’s going to be fine after all. He does love me. I knew it. It might have taken a bike crash to knock some sense into him, but he’s realised after all.

  He breaks away from me, shaking his head.

  ‘Tell me,’ I urge.

  He’s racked with sobs and I can feel myself welling up in sympathy. I’ve never seen anyone this upset.

  ‘I’ve fucked up. I’ve fucked everything up.’

  ‘No you haven’t,’ I soothe. ‘It’s all right. You mustn’t be afraid of saying it.’ Jack’s breathless like a child. ‘Calm down,’ I urge.

  He shakes his head. ‘McCullen. Sally McCullen,’ he chokes. ‘The girl in the painting … the girl from Chloe’s party…’

  He pauses, gasping for breath. He looks at me, tears coursing down his face. He looks as if he’s cracking up, but it’s amazing how instinct can kick in. I back away from him.

  ‘What about her?’ I ask. He hasn’t said it, but already I know it all.

  Jack sniffs loudly. ‘Something happened. Last Friday. I thought you were with Nathan and I called and called you. But you weren’t there. I was drunk.’ He gulps heavily. ‘And she came over. I’m sorry … I’m so fucking sorry.’

  I don’t hear any more. Everything slots into place: him turning up late at the airport; his odd behaviour when we arrived; his not making love; the mark on his stomach …

  The love bite on his stomach.

  I feel Jack lurching towards me. ‘It wasn’t my fault. I was going to tell you.’

  I now understand the expression ‘to see red’. I can’t hear what Jack says next because my knuckles are firmly embedded in his face.

  He yelps with pain and staggers backwards, but I’m running. Running as fast as I can. I find the bike on its side further down the road. The engine is still turning over. It takes all my strength to pull it upright. I sit on it, just as Jack reaches me.

  ‘Amy!’ he implores, reaching out to grab me.

  ‘Fuck off!’ I yell, kicking my foot into his groin, as hard as I can, before driving away.

  Self-preservation is an amazing thing. Despite the fact that I feel as if my whole world has been blitzed, I still make it back to Villa Stephano in one piece. I calmly park the bike outside. Vasos, the bar owner, is compèring the karaoke and everyone looks in a jolly mood. Darren’s mother is giving an abysmal rendition of ‘Karma Chameleon’ whilst performing a pissed can-can with one of her mates. No one notices me as I walk through the bar to the stairs. Why should they? I’m showing no outward signs of my very dodgy mental health.

  Once I get to the room, however, I lose it. At first I just cry, but then I really go for it. I hurl Jack’s clothes out of the window, shouting obscenities, until I’ve exhausted myself.

  It was obvious something wasn’t right when we met at the airport. I should have known.

  But how could he?

  How could he do this to me?

  I slump on to the bed and put my hands on my chest. It feels painful. Perhaps my heart is literally breaking.

  After a while, my sobs subside to a whimper and I can hear the karaoke downstairs. But all I can think about is:

  How?

  What?

  Where?

  Why?

  When?

  I don’t know how long I sit in the dark, staring at the wall, as I invent answers to each of these questions, but eventually I’m conscious of a knocking sound.

  ‘Amy?’ It’s Jack at the door. ‘Let me in.’

  I squeeze my eyes closed.

  ‘I’m not going away. You’ll have to let me in,’ he says, knocking harder.

  I cover my ears.

  ‘Come on.’ Louder this time. ‘We’ve got to talk. I know you’re in there.’

  ‘Go away,’ I sob. I want to die. I curl up in a ball on the bed. I don’t want him to see me.

  ‘Amy. Please,’ begs Jack. He’s banging harder now.

  I ignore it, wishing I was home. Wishing I was in my bed. Wishing I was safe. Wishing I’d never been stupid enough to get involved with Jack in the first place. Wishing that I’d had the sense not to trust him. Wishing that I hadn’t made myself vulnerable. Wishing that I was someone else, somewhere else, in another place, in another time.

  Later – I don’t know how long – I realise that the banging has stopped.

  I know Jack hasn’t gone away. I know he’s there, as if I can see him. And that’s the problem. I can see him.

  I can see him in my head.

  I can see him kissing me on our beach. I can see him looking at me in the moonlight. I can see him laughing with the wind in his hair.

  I can see all these things.

  But I still can’t see him with Sally.

  I yank open the door. Jack is slumped on the stairs, his head is in his hands. When he looks up at me, his face is badly bruised, his eyes bloodshot.

  ‘What do you mean something happened?’

  He looks at me blankly.

  ‘Tell me now. What happened?’

  Jack doesn’t move. ‘I didn’t fuck her,’ he whispers.

  I’m shaking. ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. It was her. It was all her.’

  ‘TELL ME!’

  Jack buries his head in his hands again.
‘I was asleep. I woke up and she was giving me a blow job. I swear, that’s all that happened.’

  ‘Oh! She only gave you a blow job!’ I shout. ‘Poor you.’

  Jack stands up. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘So tell me? What was it like? Just how precisely did she land up with her mouth wrapped around your dick?’

  He can’t say anything. I look at him with the kind of disgust I’d reserve for an overflowing sewer.

  Because now I can see it. I can see his face contorted with pleasure. From someone else.

  ‘I never want to see you again,’ I gasp.

  I slam the door and throw myself on to the bed. I cover my head with the pillow as Jack pounds on the door. He’s shouting my name so loudly that he must have interrupted the FunSun disco. I can hear a row outside as he’s told to shut up.

  Then everything goes quiet. I don’t know if Jack has been taken away, or whether he’s still outside. I don’t care.

  I take the Walkman off the table and put the headphones in my ears. I press play, cranking up the volume to drown out the sound of my own tears. It’s the Beatles song, ‘Come Together’.

  Fucking typical.

  9

  Jack

  Chucked

  ‘SHE DID WHAT?’ Matt asks incredulously, staring at my bruised face.

  ‘Chucked me,’ I repeat, and then, just in case this expression isn’t one with which he’s familiar, I add, ‘binned me; trashed me; dropped me; dumped me.’ At this point, it occurs to me that each and every one of these terms could equally be applied to rubbish. This is no coincidence. For rubbish is what I am. Rubbish is how I feel. Were a cockroach to walk into Matt’s living room right now, I have little doubt that it would make a beeline for yours truly, and upon arrival, declare itself at home.

  Matt, however, is having a hard time taking this information in. He slumps down on the sofa next to me. ‘But that’s impossible.’

  His statement, combined with his look of consternation, momentarily reminds me of Spock being confronted with some scientific aberration aboard the Starship Enterprise. And I can understand this reaction. What’s happened is indeed illogical and contrary to life as I know it.

  Of course, I’d like to go with Matt on this one. Really, I would. I’d love to sit here and assure him that, under the known laws of the universe, it is impossible that a nice girl like Amy could have chosen to trash a nice guy like me. I’d like to tell him that since this is so blatantly impossible, I must be undergoing a delusional episode from which I will soon awake and discover that everything is well in my world. But I’ve never been big on denial, so instead I tell him, ‘Shit happens.’

  Because it does.

  I know.

  It’s just happened to me.

  ‘But it was all going so well,’ Matt complains. ‘You two were really into each other.’

  ‘It was and we were.’

  He stares at me for a few seconds, before asking, ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Well, who did the dirty on who?’

  ‘What—’

  ‘One of you must have,’ he points out. ‘That’s why people break up. Most times, anyway.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I protest. ‘People break up for millions of different reasons.’ He waits for me to elucidate, so I do. ‘One of them might snore and the other one can’t stand it. They might support different football teams. I don’t know … anything. They might just run out of things to say.’

  ‘So it was you, then,’ he concludes

  There’s no point in shitting him on this point; he knows me too well. Besides, I need a sounding board. I need someone to tell me that I don’t have to nail the lid down on my life just yet. ‘Yeah.’

  He nods. ‘Thought so. You want to tell me about it?’

  And I do. I take him through it step by step. I start with Amy and me swapping our baggage outside Zack’s and how good it felt not to be carrying that stuff around any more. I take him through Max’s party and my fit of jealousy, and my ultimatum and Amy’s stand. I describe Black Friday and Amy’s date and my continuing paranoia. I detail McCullen’s arrival later that night, along with my rude awakening the following morning. I tell him about showing McCullen the door and telling her I never wanted to see her again. And, finally, I tell him about the holiday, about the bike crash, and about what I told Amy and what she told me.

  After I conclude my tale of woe, the first thing Matt says is, ‘That Nathan guy sounds like a real prick.’

  I appreciate that Matt’s trying to cheer me up, but it’s not working. Still, more out of habit than any continuing sense of loathing, I nod my head and remind myself to add people who eat their bogeys to the More Pleasant Than Nathan list.

  The second thing Matt says, in view of my lack of response to the first, is, ‘Why the hell did you tell Amy about S&M?’

  This question comes as no surprise. It’s the same question that first occurred to me after the bike crash, in the brief yet startlingly unpleasant interlude between Amy punching me in the face and kicking me in the nuts. And it’s the same question I’ve been asking myself ever since.

  After all, there was no need to tell her. Sure, there’d always have been the worry of her finding out through some other means. Maybe I’d talk in my sleep. Maybe McCullen would start mouthing off. Or maybe I’d join some extreme religious cult where I’d have to confess to everybody I’d ever lied to in my entire life. But, quite frankly, each of these scenarios, then, as now, seemed pretty unlikely. The plain fact of the matter remains that, if I’d just kept my big mouth shut, I would have got away with it.

  Same as I’ve been doing all my life.

  The consequences of this would have been obvious and uniformly beneficial. There’d have been no bike crash, for example. Neither, of course, would there have been any miserable journey home on the plane with her refusing to speak to me. Instead, there would have been the two of us standing there on that cliff top, arm in arm, gazing down at the moonlit beach. And not just any beach, either. Our beach – as in the place where we made love. As in her, me and the sea. As in poetry, for Christ’s sake.

  But – oh, no – not Jack Rossiter. Jack Rossiter had other plans. Like ignoring her on the cliff top when she asked him if he felt it, too. Even though he did. For the first time in years. Even though, for the first time in years, he found himself in a situation with someone that felt like a wish come true. The problem was, it felt too good to be true. And that’s because it was too good to be true.

  ‘Honesty,’ I suggest to Matt. ‘I wanted to be honest with her.’

  ‘Honesty?’ Matt queries. He looks at me like I’ve just farted.

  ‘Yeah, honesty. As in telling the truth.’

  ‘I know what the word means, Jack.’

  ‘So, what’s your problem?’

  ‘My problem is, I fail to see what it has to do with relationships.’

  ‘It’s got everything to do with relationships,’ I say, exasperated.

  He stares at me blankly. ‘Not with mine, it doesn’t. And not with most people’s.’ His look turns to one of suspicion. ‘You haven’t been reading my copy of Ten Steps to Lasting Love, have you?’

  ‘Your what?’

  Matt gets up and walks to the window. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I didn’t want to bullshit her,’ I continue. ‘It didn’t feel right. She trusted me and I lied to her and the longer I left off telling her the truth, the worse it was making me feel.’

  Matt turns round and faces me with narrowed eyes. ‘What, like a conscience thing?’ he queries. ‘Like, whenever you laid eyes upon her, you felt an unrelenting sense of betrayal coursing like poison through your veins? And each time you kissed her or made love to her, you felt like you were betraying her afresh? Almost as if each new intimacy you shared no longer meant anything, because it rested upon foundations of deceit?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, realising that Matt’s put his finger on it, ‘that’s exactly how
it was.’ A wave of relief washes over me. Someone, it seems, understands.

  But that someone, it turns out, isn’t Matt. ‘In other words, you did it to make yourself feel better. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to cope with your guilt on your own and learn your lesson never to do it again?’ he asks, returning to the sofa and sitting back down.

  It takes me a few seconds to recover from my disappointment that Matt and I are not about to undergo a seminal male bonding moment. But I cope with it OK. To begin with, tree – hugging’s never really been my idea of fun – too much mildew and squirrel shit, for a start. And as for hunter-gathering – well, I got kicked out of the cub scouts for smoking when I was nine and never looked back, so I’d better steer clear of that, too. Mainly, though, I cope with it, because I’m not pissed off with Matt. More me.

  I mean, it’s not like his reaction to my behaviour is abnormal. Quite the reverse. Were I, for example, to carry out a quick vox pop in the street outside Matt’s house and ask the following questions of members of the public in steady relationships

  a) If you got drunk and got laid by a stranger who you’d never see again, would you tell your partner?

  b) If you started an affair with someone, only to realise that you were actually in love with your present partner, would you tell them about the affair?

  c) If you could shag someone and get away with it (and yeah, yeah, Hollywood stars are included), would you turn them down?

  I have little doubt that the answers would be a uniform ‘no’. I mean, infidelities aren’t something people own up to these days, are they? Sure, you tell your friends, but not your lover. What would be the point? There isn’t one. Not unless you wanted to break up.

  Or, at least, that’s how I used to think. Even with Zoe. Even though I never was unfaithful to her, I reckon that if I had been, I would have kept schtum about it. Too much grief, otherwise. When I tried it on with Amy, though, it just didn’t work. Hence my starring role in the classic of Greek cinematography, Confessions of a Moped Driver. Honesty, it seems, got the better of me. Like Matt, however, I’m not buying into the honesty angle on its own. It’s too simple. Too easy. Sure, honesty’s important, but it’s only important in that it’s a symptom of something else. Honesty’s just the fall guy. He must have been working for someone else. And not just anybody, I now realise, but Mr Big himself. And when it comes to emotions, there‘s only one Mr Big. It just amazes me it’s taken me this long to recognise him.