Apricot Press

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?

Over after-work wines, Cass had caved to her primal self, that hair-pulling surrender—a rocky softness she’d thrown herself onto, challenging to break more and take more—a shiftless slavery to stolen weekends, rattling exotic headboards.

And then, suddenly, something else. It wasn’t just the hours in between. It was Rob and Cass, themselves for themselves. Co-conspirators sneaking around on meres and mountains, traversing duckboards and holing up in wonky shepherd’s huts, and pubs with wood burners and strangers’ dalmatians at their mud-caked boots. Waking on craggy beaches, the fine rain shushing their canvas ceiling, her boiling loneliness brought to a simmer. The flat stones tipped free from her skimmed soles.

‘Come on, Cass. The worst thing. What is it?’

There was no fiction between them. He wore the gold band that branded him as Lesley’s, and Lesley was his story. The organiser of barbecues. Consoler of potential mothers. Knitter of rainbow bobble hats for other’s little ones. Adorable.

Cass wasn’t connected. She wasn’t involved.

‘You feeling rueful, pet?’ she sneered at him from the cooling hotel pillow as he buttoned his shirt, the bitterness of dammed tears stinging her sinuses as they did whenever their time was up.

‘About what? I’ll leave her, babe. Just say the word.’

‘Nah. No way. That’s on you, Rob!’

‘It is on me ‘cause I have no option. I’m in love with someone else. But you need to say so.’

‘Why?!’

‘Because I’ll have nothing afterwards. I need you to say it.’

‘Never.’

*

‘You must have been, ha’way,’ Rob chiseled away with his sledgehammer grin. ‘It’s carved in the bloody cliff! You can’t miss it!’

‘I told you, I never went anywhere, not without you,’ she bristled. ‘You’ve got decades on me, pet. And you’re a shite listener!’

‘Okay. I’ll take you. There and everywhere.’

In the car park, he blinkered her eyes with childish glee. ‘You haven’t earned it yet,’ he cajoled her along the snaking woodland path for the circular route, blocking glimpses of the ghostly blot on the hillside with a star jump or a headlock.

They skipped and hopped to the top, hand in hand in their favourite coats, their thighs burning, their mouths aching from the stretched, giddy greed of each other’s company again. Solely them. Hopelessly them.

At the peak, they picked over the spoils of Sutton Bank—The Finest View in England— where parcelled green blankets enveloped lushly for miles across the Vale of York to the Pennines. Zipping gliders from a flying school, launching from the lip of the world like fledgling birds, promised to decapitate them if they strayed from the overgrown path, lined with drooping catkins—the dainty harbingers of long-promised Spring.

Above the clouds, the condensation settled on their hairlines like dew on a spiderweb. Rob took her in his big arms, wiping the moisture tenderly away with the heel of his palm and smoothing her flushed cheeks with the gentle pride of a potter. The contrast in him, the contentment in her, once defective clay tossed from wheel to wheel, squeezed The Words from her lungs, only to catch in the unvarnished grooves of her throat.

She wanted to say them.

She felt sure she would.

They crested, triumphantly astride the man-made white stallion cut crudely into the side of the sheer slope, the topsoil replaced with scattered chalk. From their vantage point, the white blight could have been anything—a blob of acceptable graffiti lovers scrawled over with their own contributions of teddys and wreaths—anything to be seen and remembered and wondered on, briefly.

Rob wrinkled. ‘I know. It looks crap from up here. Come on, let’s have a look from down there.’

‘We could have done that in the first place!’ Cass beamed, shoving his immovable chest.

‘Aye, but the fun is in the anticipation. What you can’t have just yet.’

They scuffled along the cliff top and down the log ladder staircase, prancing towards the car park, his puffa jacket rustling against her ear as he pulled her in to him.

A pair of red spaniels bounded towards them. Like worn Velcro, they came undone.

She grabbed his wantaway hand instinctively.

‘Oh!’ a woman in a rainbow bobble hat exalted, locked to the spot on the thin seam of dirt trail beneath them.

Rob’s wrist twisted. Cass gripped tighter. He pressed her shoulder, yanking loose, stuffing his pockets and shambling wide, a great gulf opening between them.

‘Uncle Rob! Mummy, it’s Uncle Rob.’

Two trussed-up tots in shiny puddle suits pulled at the gawping woman, pointing and waving.

Rob greeted them with a pursed cordiality, flipping his sunglasses on, striding past them like strangers—his nephews whose nappies he’d gleefully changed. Who he’d thrown in the air and taught how to swear.

‘Hi, kids. Being good? Good, good.’

He shot an ill-advised, battering row of teeth to his sister-in-law. A harder don’t-you-dare nod to the weedy, beta dad lugging behind with a picnic basket.

Cass eyed the mother, who sucked her burning cheeks, a slack smile wriggling through. She shook her head minutely, coolly eviscerating this other woman—a stain on all women.

The gallows bride hurried to match the steadfast stride of her condemned man.

At the car, raised voices ebbed and pierced—the husband pleading to his shrieking wife as she flapped and slapped his peaceful protestations away.

‘Who’s your friend, Rob? What’s the big rush? Introduce us!’

‘Get in,’ Rob jabbed at the yawning door, taking the daggers to his back, the pale horse unseen and all else beheld.

*

The day the divorce came through, Rob was down on one knee.

Him being him, he needed an audience, but it was no one they knew—a wantaway waiter, an elderly couple with crinkle-cut smiles, a bemused table of Iraqi businessmen.

They scoped and rushed the registry office like old-hand bandits. Rob’s blessed mother, their only witness, told Cass how pretty she was in that charity shop crushed velvet dress, but couldn’t quite meet her eye.

Back at her flat, Cass sent him out for Chinese, the good one that didn’t deliver, promising him something spicier if he didn’t forget her prawn toast again.

As she contemplated shaving her legs, the ornamental landline rang.

‘Hello?’

Silence. She listened for the click of a telemarketer—the cacophony of some open-plan cubicle in Mumbai.

‘Hello?’

The silence persisted. Her presence burnt. Cass took a punt. ‘Lesley?’

A sigh punctured through.

‘I’m sorry, Lesley,’ Cass sighed back like semaphore between shrouded ships.

‘There’s no need. Congratulations, Cass.’

‘Thanks. He’s not here.’

‘Good. It was you I wanted to speak to. Just quickly.’

‘Alright.’

‘You’re not the first.’

Cass waited in vain for the scarlet demon to work her tongue. ‘I know. We’ve been open with each other about all that.’

‘Good. He’s a special man. But despite what he says… what he wants… if you find out it’s not what you want, get out. Before it’s forever.’

The loose-bound first edition hung up, the only time they’d speak without his careful curation.

Lesley would be fine. She would remarry, an electrician. Bill. Boring and dependable with grown-up children. They’d adopt. Two little girls. Sisters. Adorable. She’d love and cultivate them like her own, and Lesley would be happy enough and line her house with photographs, becoming very fond of Bill, and only occasionally, when the nest emptied, fantasising about having it all with her childhood sweetheart while she sat in her corner of their bespoke conservatory and had a little cry.

*

They honeymooned in Sorrento, spending long, blameless days tanning on the jetties or slipping into the Med with swim-up bars carved into the cliffs, the hulking tumour of Vesuvius casting its hollow shadow far faraway on the glittering bay.

Cass strained to capture snapshots of the immaculate marble hotel room. The fluffy white towels, rearranged into stiff swans. Sleeping and screwing the morning sun and head-throbbing night-before-and-night-before limoncello away. Wandering in the lush lemon groves, the leaves of the fat fruit fluttering in the rare sating breeze.

On the quayside, they ate the fresh catch, full of seabass and each other under crisscrossing fairy lights, posing for selfies as they stared into their imagined futures and sniggered at the hack baritone vibrato laid on for the tourists by some curly-chested troubadour.

They picked the fine bones clean, the clipped tide shushing.

Cass watched a cat traverse the sea wall, slinking under tables and through the longing fingers of groping diners to a pastel apartment. A bucket waited, and it hopped gratefully inside. A walnut woman pulled her shiny black beloved skyward by a plaited rope to a window box, where it sprung into her wasting arms.

Rob watched two little girls dance barefoot in cotton dresses. He hid his chin with a napkin so she wouldn’t see it crumple.

Photo credit: Amanda Slater