You Had Me At Hello Part 9

14.

I awake to an odd noise, like a bee trapped in a tin can and something scuttling over a hard surface. I sit bolt upright in the twilight and think, Mindy better not have neglected to mention some kind of vermin infestation of B-movie proportions. As I shake off the sleep I see that the noise is coming from my vibrating mobile as it pushes itself around the nightstand. I pick it up as it's about to clatter to the floorboards and see it's Caroline.

'Did you nick my towels after all?' I mumble, sleepily.

'Are you drunk?'

'No! Been asleep.' I rub an eye with the heel of my hand. 'Although that sounds an interesting idea.'

'I wanted to see how my policy of leaving you in splendid isolation was going. I've started to feel guilty, which is downright inconvenient.'

'What do you mean?'

'I laid down the law that we should give you tonight on your own.'

'Cheers!' I splutter, incandescently annoyed for a quarter of a second.

'If we came round tonight and got drunk, you'd have hungover Sunday night blues on your first night alone in the flat. This way, it gets it out of the way.'

'Or it'd bundle all the bad things together,' I grumble.

'Is that how you feel? I can come round now if so.'

I look around at the strange and new surroundings. Rupa's got some sort of fairylight addiction: strings of red roses, the stamens replaced by pinp.r.i.c.k bulbs, those snakes of clear tubing with a disco pulse throbbing along them. Even through the grey filter of my misery, I concede it looks rather beautiful. And, as ever, Caroline's tough love is a good thing.

'Ah, I'll cope.'

'Go and get yourself a bottle of wine, order a takeaway, and I'll come round tomorrow.'

After I hang up, I discover I'm not hungry, but I do recall spying a bottle of Bombay Sapphire on Rupa's shelf. I swipe it and tell myself I'll replace it twice over before I leave. I don't have any tonic so it has to make a rapper's delight of gin and juice with a carton of Tropicana. As I switch the television on and let a medical drama wash over me, another worry surfaces. One I hadn't wanted to admit to having. It's just, Ben hasn't called. And I've started to think he's not going to.

I shouldn't be thinking about it. It's positively distasteful, he's a married man, not a potential date. Only: if he never calls, it's going to say such an awful lot. It would be an extremely eloquent silence.

Half an hour of you was enough. In fact, it was too much, but I grinned and bore it. The past is the past and you're the only one living in it. See you again, on the tenth anniversary of never. And by the way, that haircut makes you look like Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code.

In my heart of hearts, I know that's my guilty paranoia talking, not Ben. Ben is the person who irrationally apologised for so much as mentioning his wedding when I told him about my ex-engaged status. So why is it, when I examine every exchange between us so many times, perspective collapses? I can't help but think about the killer detail he took my number, but he never volunteered his, did he?

He was the one saying it'd be great to go out, rea.s.sures the angel on my shoulder.

That's the kind of thing you say to be nice during the social disentanglement process and don't necessarily make good on, counters the devil.

Oh G.o.d, he's never going to call and I'm going to see Ben and his Olivia of Troy examining high thread count linen in John Lewis and fall backwards over someone in a wheelchair in my haste to escape.

As the patient on TV goes into something called 'VF' and the crash team swing into action, I settle on a theory that suits both my fatalism and my knowledge of Ben's character. He did mean everything he said about it being nice to get together. He asked for my number in good faith, he probably believed he'd use it. Then he thought it through, debated how to describe me to his wife. That consideration alone could make him rea.s.sess whether it was a good idea. I can imagine a few memories that might've helped him come to a conclusion. And at that moment, he scrolled down to my name in his phone, felt a pang of regret. Then found his resolve, hit delete, and continued with his charmed, Rachel-less life.

Half an hour later, my phone starts flas.h.i.+ng with a call. Mum, I think. I prepare myself to be falsely positive for five minutes. I check the caller display: unrecognised number.

'Hi, Rachel?'

I recognise the warm male voice instantly. I go from someone half asleep at six in the evening to the most awake person in the whole of Manchester. He called! He doesn't hate me! He didn't lie! Adrenaline shot with endorphin chaser.

'Hi!'

'Are you OK?'

'I'm fine!'

'It's Ben.'

'h.e.l.lo, Ben!' I say this in a voice that people usually reserve for 'h.e.l.lo, Cleveland!'

'Are you sure you're OK? You sound a bit odd.'

'I am, I was I was ...' Christ, I don't want to admit I've been asleep this afternoon, like an eighty-two year old '... having a lie down.'

'Ah. Right. I see.' Ben sounds embarra.s.sed and I sense he thinks I mean some sort of afternoon singleton lie down, with company. 'I'll call back.'

'No!' I virtually shout. 'Honestly. I'm fine. How are you? It's weird you called now, I was just thinking about you.'

Mouth, open. Foot: placed inside.

'All good things I hope,' Ben says, awkwardly.

'Of course!' I squeal, with the ongoing note of hysteria.

'Uhm, I wanted to see if you wanted to meet my colleague after work one night next week to discuss this story?'

'Yes, that'd be great.'

'Thursday? I'll come along, if that's OK?'

'Totally fine.' Totally, amazingly, wonderfully fine.

'He's all right, Simon, but he's a bit full of himself. Don't let him take any liberties if he starts up about the evils of the press.'

'I'm sure I can give as good as I get.'

'So am I,' Ben laughs. 'Right, I'll email a time and a place at the start of the week.'

'Great.'

'Have a nice weekend. I'll let you get back to your lie down.'

'I'm standing up now, think I'll stay that way.'

'Whatever works best.'

We say a stilted goodbye and ring off, with me on a strange, pain-free, woozy high. Onscreen, the patient's heartbeat has returned.

15.

I should be listening to the details of when, on or about the 26th of August last year, Michael Tallack of Verne Drive, Levenshulme, obtained monies by deception by strapping on his brother's leg iron and claiming spurious disability benefits.

Instead, mentally, I'm far, far away and long, long ago: part of a group watching a fireworks display at Platt Fields Park in the autumn of my first year of university. I 'oohed' and 'aahed' as each explosion bloomed and faded into spiders of glittering dust. I turned to Ben to say something and saw he was watching me instead of the night sky. It was an intent look and gave me a sensation similar to when you think a fairground ride has come to a stop and it hasn't, quite.

'Uh ...' I stumbled over the words that were previously on the tip of my tongue, 'I'm cold.'

'In those?' Ben asked, sceptically, pointing at my gloves. They were Fair Isle, multi-coloured. Admittedly, the size of hot water bottle covers.

'They're nice!'

'If you're seven.'

'Aren't you cold?' I asked him.

'Not really,' Ben said. 'Hadn't noticed.'

His eyes sparkled. In the freezing atmosphere, I felt heat rise to the surface of my skin. I breathed deeply and clapped my mittens together.

A girl joined us, winding her arm through Ben's in familiarity. I angled my body away from them and when I turned back to say something, they'd slipped away. I found myself craning my neck to try to spot them in the crowd. I felt ever so slightly abandoned. Which was ridiculous, and clearly a sign of how much I was missing Rhys.

'All rise,' barks the court clerk, snapping me back to the here and now.

I wait politely for everyone to file out ahead of me, instead of overtaking to slice the fastest path to the door, in my usual tetchy work mode. My mind's very much on my after-work appointment with Ben. Equal parts terror, antic.i.p.ation, excitement, guilt, confusion ...

I get a cow-s.h.i.+t coffee and go to the press room to drink it in peace. I see Zoe has got there before me. Despite her doubts, she's taken to court reporting brilliantly. The ability to spot a story is one you can't really teach, and she clearly has it. She's also had the confidence to leave a courtroom where nothing much is happening and seek something better. It took me ages to find the guts to do that. I'd be pinioned to the bench listening to a ten-a-penny aggravated twokking, doing side-to-side slotting eye movements, like a portrait in a haunted house when backs turn.

'Sodding Gretton,' she says, by way of greeting, over her takeaway spud, spearing discs of cuc.u.mber with a white plastic fork and placing them in the opened lid.

I sip my coffee. 'Is he stalking you now? I thought I'd seen less of him.'

'Yeah. I got this nice story about a have-a-go hero pensioner chasing toerags off his allotments, think I've got it all to myself, and then I turn round and he's breathing down my neck.'

'Uh oh, there wasn't a joke about hoes, was there?'

'The deadly or dangerous weapon was a rake, thankfully.'

'Take it as a compliment. He wouldn't bother if he didn't think you knew what you were doing.'

'I suppose.'

I reflect that this is truer than I'd like. It's an uncomfortable discovery that Gretton's instantly switched to targeting Zoe. Am I that dispensable? I haven't had anything great lately. This must be how fading movie stars feel when they lose a stalker to a younger rival. Even rodents like him are fleeing sinking HMS Woodford. Admittedly, Zoe looks like she's going to go far. I think people once said that about me. This bothers me more than it would have done, now that I've broken off my engagement. Funny how, when one part of your life falls away, the other bits that are left start looking rather feeble. I've always thought I had a good job. Now I'm thinking I've never exactly chased promotion, and here's Zoe, probably going to overtake me in a few weeks flat and then be on to the next thing.

'I'm getting off on time today. If news desk ask, I was here until the bitter end,' I say. 'I don't need to file anything until tomorrow and the progress in Court 2 is on the stately side.'

Zoe makes a salute. 'Understood. Anything fun?'

'What, in Court 2?'

'What you're off to.'

That's a good question. 'A drink with an old friend.'

'Ooh. A friend friend or a friend?'

For some reason the question irritates me. 'Friend, female,' I snap, then realise my guilty conscience is making me antsy.

Zoe nods, spearing a slice of woolly tomato and then plunging through potato flesh the way gardeners work over soil.

16.

The Tallack trial continues, and my afternoon pa.s.ses in a similar reverie. This time I'm back in my study period before first year exams. Ben left me a cryptic note in my pigeonhole in the university's arts block with the venue, time and 'come alone', as if we were secret agents.

I'd never been up to Central Library in St Peter's Square, content to make do with the university library, John Rylands. In acknowledgement of this, and to take the mickey, Ben drew me a map with the whole route described, eventually arriving at what resembled a blue-biro-inked cake, the Tuscan colonnade standing in for candles. He drew a goonish face, captioned 'Ben', and an arrow to indicate he was inside.

On arrival, as I admired the architecture, I saw Ben waving at me from a desk.

'Hi. Why are we here?' I hissed, sliding into a chair next to him.

'I didn't want anyone overhearing us in the uni library,' Ben whispered. 'And it's an outing. Look at these.'

He pushed a stack of exam papers towards me.

'Past papers?' I asked.

'Yep. Going through them, there's a totally obvious pattern. There's only a question about Beowulf every other year.'

'Riiight ...' I said. 'So ...?'