‘Have you ever thought about dungarees . . . ?’ Pippa asked politely, before walking out. I had only survived a week longer before following suit, though I sensibly worked my notice. I’d have loved to have Pippa’s chutzpah, but I wasn’t quite as brave or bolshie as she was. I happened to believe that I needed a reference for where I was going, but Pippa didn’t give a stuff, and, to her credit, she was right. She’d got every bar job she’d applied for, and was in the middle of an Open University degree in healthcare.
We were so different, yet so alike. I couldn’t think of anything worse than going out to work at night, and I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than go back to school, but it made for the perfect set-up. I worked all day Monday to Saturday, with Wednesdays off, and she worked every evening at All Bar One in Covent Garden and studied during the day. We were never under each other’s feet, so it was always good to get together on a Sunday to catch up on what the week had thrown at us. It was invariably me that needed guidance and grounding, as most of life’s tribulations seemed to be water off a duck’s back for Pippa. She was much more happy-go-lucky than me, batting men into left field on a whim, and not one for kowtowing to the rules of the establishment. I’d have liked a little more of her abandonment, instead of being laden down with a crippling need to over-analyse every situation. But on the odd occasion I’d thrown caution to the wind, I’d invariably come unstuck, so maybe it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. It was wanting to be more like Pippa that had led me to act so out of character with Grant or Gerry – it had definitely started with a ‘G’ – at Beth’s twenty-first.
‘Why didn’t you stop me?’ I’d moaned the next day, as we lay on my bed watching Netflix, remembering him picking me up, my legs wrapped around his waist as he carried me outside. ‘It must have been so obvious. Everyone would have seen.’
‘That’s what’s so awesome,’ she’d said. ‘For once in your life, you didn’t care. You just did what you wanted to do, and didn’t give a fig about anyone else.’
That was the problem.
‘I’m never going out again,’ I’d groaned, burying my face in my hands, and right there and then, I’d meant it.
6
As much as I tried, I couldn’t keep Rebecca from nagging at my brain. I wanted to know who she was, and what had happened between them, but I was wary of opening a can of worms that I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted open. Adam also hadn’t seemed himself in the two weeks since we’d been to his mum’s, so I found myself still skirting around the whole ‘miss you every day’ conundrum, hoping that somehow, we’d stumble upon a way to talk about it.
My first chance came as Adam and I dressed the Christmas tree in my flat. He was worried that he was taking the job away from Pippa, but she didn’t have the patience for such a fiddly chore. I’d done it by myself three years running, mostly whilst she sat watching, throwing Maltesers up in the air and catching them in her mouth. She was always grateful though, and repaid me for my efforts with a bottle of Advocaat. It had become something of a tradition, though why she did it, neither of us was quite sure.
‘There must be a very good reason why we don’t drink this stuff all year round,’ I’d said to her last Christmas. We were three snowballs in, neither of us bothering with the cocktail cherry anymore.
‘I know,’ she’d agreed. ‘But it sits there, ever hopeful on its Christmas shelf in the supermarket, all optimistic, pleading with passing shoppers, “Please buy me, I’m only here for a short time. You know you’ll regret it if you don’t.”’
I’d laughed and chimed in. ‘“What if someone pops round, unannounced over the festive season, asking for an eggnog? How will you cope if you haven’t got me?”’
It was such a time-honoured tradition, yet we’d not once had a visitor requesting an Advocaat and lemonade. Not even when neighbours popped round to my parents’ house throughout my childhood. Not in nearly thirty years. Not ever.
Still, there was nothing like it to get me in the Christmas mood, and I fetched it from the back of the kitchen cupboard and swilled the congealed yellow concoction around in the bottle.
‘Can I tempt you?’ I asked Adam – well, his bum, seemingly the only part of him that wasn’t under the tree – as he fiddled with the extension lead.
‘I’m assuming that’s last year’s offering?’ he said, extricating himself from the branches and looking up.
I nodded apologetically. ‘But it never goes off.’
‘I’m all right, thanks.’ He grimaced. ‘Here, what do you think?’
We stood back, admiring our workmanship. ‘Now to see if we should have tested the lights before we put them on,’ he said.
Miraculously, for the first time in years, they worked straight away, and we slumped back onto the sofa, relieved and proud.
I brought my leg up underneath me, and turned to look at him. He was grinning from ear to ear, such a difference from the serious face of the last couple of weeks. ‘I’m fine,’ was all he’d ever said whenever I’d asked why he was so quiet.
‘How’s work?’ I asked now, as I watched the dubious-looking mixture curdle in my glass.
‘Better.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve finally got my head above water this week.’
So, it was work that had been playing on his mind. All the ‘what-ifs’ that had been whirring in my brain were silenced. What if he didn’t want to be with me anymore? What if he’d met someone else? What if he was trying to find a way to tell me? I exhaled slowly, content now I knew that his job was the problem. We could work with that.
‘How come? What was holding you under?’ I asked.
He blew out his cheeks. ‘The account I’m working on has become bigger than any of us had anticipated. I thought I had it covered and was managing to get on top of it, but then we stumbled upon a problem.’
‘What was that?’ I asked, my brow furrowed.
‘Just an IT glitch; something that I can deal with. But it was going to take a lot longer than we’d allowed for.’
‘So, what’s changed?’
‘The powers that be have finally seen sense and brought someone else in on the desk. It’s made a real difference, thank God.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Do you get on with him?’
‘It’s a woman, actually,’ there was the slightest of pauses, ‘and yeah, she’s actually okay.’
Two ‘actually’s in the same sentence? He was normally so eloquent. I willed my smile to remain unchanged, to not even flicker against the muscles pulling it tight.
‘Cool,’ I said, as casually as I could. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Rebecca,’ he said matter-of-factly. I waited for him to offer more, but what more of an answer could he give? Yet why did I think his reticence spoke volumes?
‘That’s funny.’ I didn’t know what else to say.
‘What is?’ he asked warily, as if already sensing what I was about to say, even when I wasn’t quite sure myself.
‘That her name’s Rebecca.’
He turned to look at me.
‘I assume it’s not your Rebecca?’ I gave a little laugh, to lighten the weight of the question.
He looked at me for a moment, his brow knitted, then shook his head slowly and looked away.
I didn’t know whether I wanted to know more about the Rebecca at work, or ‘his’ Rebecca. It was difficult to know which was more problematic.
‘That would have been weird, though, right?’ I went on. ‘Imagine an ex turning up at work. How would you feel?’
He rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. ‘That’s unlikely to happen.’
‘What’s she like then? This Rebecca?’ I decided I’d deal with the immediate threat first. ‘She’s obviously been a help to you.’
‘She’s good, yeah. She seems to know her stuff, so that saves me the bother of having to go through everything with her. She’s been in the company a while apparently, though I’ve no idea where they’ve been hiding her.’