And there I was, back where I had been just a week before, parking in front of Liv’s place to pick Holly up for the weekend. It felt like it had been years.
Olivia was wearing a discreet caramel-colored number instead of last week’s discreet little black dress, but the message was the same: Dermo the Pseudo-Pedo was on his way, and he was in with a chance. This time, though, instead of barricading the door, she opened it wide and drew me quickly into the kitchen. Back when we were married, I used to dread Liv’s “We need to talk” signals, but at this stage I actually welcomed them. They beat her “I’ve got nothing to say to you” routine, hands down.
I said, “Holly not ready, no?”
“She’s in the bath. It was bring-a-friend day at Sarah’s hip-hop class; she just got home, all sweaty. She’ll be a few minutes.”
“How’s she doing?”
Olivia sighed, ran a hand lightly over her immaculate hairdo. “I think she’s all right. As all right as we could expect, anyway. She had a nightmare last night, and she’s been quiet, but she doesn’t seem . . . I don’t know. She loved the hip-hop class.”
I said, “Is she eating?” When I moved out, Holly went on hunger strike for a while.
“Yes. But she’s not five any more; she’s not always as obvious about her feelings, these days. That doesn’t mean they’re not there. Would you try talking to her? Maybe you can get a better sense of how she’s coping.”
“So she’s keeping stuff to herself,” I said, nowhere near as nastily as I could have. “I wonder where she got that idea.”
The corners of Olivia’s lips tightened up. “I made a mistake. A bad one. I’ve admitted that, and apologized for it, and I’m doing my utmost to fix the damage. Believe me: there’s nothing you can say that would make me feel any worse about hurting her.”
I pulled out one of the bar stools and parked my arse heavily—not to piss Olivia off, this time, just because I was wrecked enough that even a two-minute sit-down in a room that smelled of toast and strawberry jam felt like a big treat. “People hurt each other. That’s how it works. At least you were trying to do something good. Not everyone can say that much.”
The tightness had spread down to Liv’s shoulders. She said, “People don’t necessarily hurt each other.”
“Yes, Liv, they do. Parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, you name it. The closer you get, the more damage you do.”
“Well, sometimes, yes. Of course. But talking like it’s some unavoidable law of nature—That’s a cop-out, Frank, and you know it.”
“Let me pour you a nice cold refreshing glass of reality. Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other’s heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.”
“Sometimes,” Olivia said coldly, “I really wish you could hear yourself. You sound like a teenager, do you realize that? A self-pitying teenager with too many Morrissey albums.”
It was an exit line, her hand was on the door handle, and I didn’t want her walking out. I wanted her to stay in the warm kitchen and bicker with me. I said, “I’m only speaking from experience here. Maybe there are people out there who never do anything more destructive than make each other cups of hot cocoa with marshmallows, but I’ve never personally encountered them. If you have, by all means enlighten me. I’ve got an open mind. Name one relationship you’ve seen, just one, that didn’t do damage.”
I may not be able to make Olivia do anything else I want, but I’ve always been wonderful at making her argue. She let go of the door handle, leaned back against the wall and folded her arms. “All right,” she said. “Fine. This girl Rose. Tell me: how did she ever hurt you? Not the person who killed her. She herself. Rose.”
And the other half of me and Liv is that, in the end, I always bite off more than I can chew. I said, “I think I’ve had more than enough talk about Rose Daly for one week, if that’s OK with you.”
Liv said, “She didn’t leave you, Frank. It never happened. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to come to terms with that.”
“Let me guess. Jackie and her big mouth?”
“I didn’t need Jackie to tell me that some woman had hurt you, or at least that you believed she had. I’ve known that practically ever since we met.”
“I hate to burst your bubble here, Liv, but your telepathy skills aren’t at their finest today. Better luck next time.”
“And I didn’t need telepathy, either. Ask any woman you’ve ever had a relationship with: I guarantee she knew she was second best. A placeholder, till the one you actually wanted came home.”
She started to say something else, but then she bit it back. Her eyes were apprehensive, almost stunned, like she had just realized how deep the water was around here.
I said, “Go ahead and get it off your chest. You’ve started, you might as well finish.”
After a moment Liv made a tiny movement like a shrug. “All right. That was one of the reasons why I asked you to move out.”
I laughed out loud. “Oh. Right. OK, then. So all those endless bloody fights about work and me not being around enough, those were what, a diversion? Just to keep me guessing?”
“You know that’s not what I said. And you know perfectly well that I had every reason to be sick to death of never being sure whether ‘See you at eight’ meant tonight or next Tuesday, or of asking you what you did today and being told ‘Work,’ or—”
“All I know is that I should’ve got it written into the settlement that I never needed to have this conversation again. And what Rose Daly has to do with anything—”
Olivia was keeping her voice even, but the undercurrent was powerful enough that it could have thrown me off my bar stool. “She had plenty to do with it. I always knew all the rest of it was tied up with the fact that I wasn’t this other woman, whoever she was. If she had rung you at three in the morning to see why you weren’t home, you would have picked up the bloody phone. Or, more likely, you would have been home to begin with.”
“If Rosie had rung me at three in the morning, I’d have made millions from my hotline to the afterlife and moved to Barbados.”
“You know exactly what I mean. You would never, ever have treated her the way you treated me. Sometimes, Frank, sometimes it felt like you were shutting me out specifically to punish me for whatever she had done, or just for not being her. Trying to make me leave you, so that when she came back, she wouldn’t find someone else in her place. That’s what it felt like.”
I said, “I’m going to try this one more time: you dumped me because you wanted to. I’m not saying it came as a huge surprise, and I’m not even saying I didn’t deserve it. But I am saying that Rose Daly, especially given the fact that you didn’t know she had ever existed, had sweet fuck-all to do with it.”
“Yes she did, Frank. Yes she did. You went into our marriage taking it for granted, beyond any doubt, that it wasn’t going to last. It took me a long time to realize that. But once I worked it out, there didn’t seem to be much point any more.”
She looked so lovely, and so tired. Her skin was starting to turn worn and fragile, and the sickly kitchen light picked out crow’s-feet around her eyes. I thought of Rosie, round and firm and bloomed like ripe peaches, and how she never got the chance to be any other kind of lovely except perfect. I hoped Dermot realized just how beautiful Olivia’s wrinkles were.
All I had wanted was a cozy little spat with her. Somewhere on the horizon, building momentum, was a fight that would make the worst Olivia and I had ever done to each other vanish into a little puff of harmless fluffy nothing. Every particle of anger I could generate was being sucked away into that huge vortex; I couldn’t take the thought of a full-on deep and meaningful fight with Liv. “Look,” I said. “Let me go up and get Holly. If we stay here, I’m just going to keep being a narky bastard until this turns into a massive row and I put you in a bad mood and ruin your date. I already did that last week; I don’t want to get predictable.”
Olivia laughed, a startled, explosive breath. “Surprise,” I said. “I’m not a complete prick.”
“I know that. I never thought you were.” I shot her a skeptical eyebrow and started hauling myself off the bar stool, but she stopped me. “I’ll get her. She won’t want you knocking while she’s in the bath.”
“What? Since when?”
A tiny smile, half rueful, moved across Olivia’s lips. “She’s growing up, Frank. She won’t even let me into the bathroom till she has her clothes on; a few weeks ago I opened the door to get something, and she let out a yell like a banshee and then gave me a furious lecture on people needing privacy. If you go anywhere near her, I guarantee she’ll read you the riot act.”
“My God,” I said. I remembered Holly two years old and leaping on me straight from her bath, naked as the day she was born, showering water everywhere and giggling like a mad thing when I tickled her delicate ribs. “Go up and get her quick, before she grows armpit hair or something.”
Liv almost laughed again. I used to make her laugh all the time; these days, twice in one night would have been some kind of record. “I’ll only be a moment.”
“Take your time. I’ve got nowhere better to be.”
On her way out of the kitchen she said, almost reluctantly, “The coffee machine’s on, if you need a cup. You look tired.”
And she pulled the door shut behind her, with a firm little click that told me to stay put, just in case Dermo arrived and I decided to meet him at the front door in my boxers. I detached myself from the stool and made myself a double espresso. I was well aware that Liv had all kinds of interesting points, several of them important and a couple of them deeply ironic. All of them could wait until I had figured out what in the dark vicious world to do about Shay, and then done it.
Upstairs I could hear bathtub water draining and Holly chattering away, with the occasional comment from Olivia. I wanted, so suddenly and hard it almost knocked me over, to run up there and wrap my arms around the pair of them, tumble the whole three of us into Liv’s and my double bed the way I used to on Sunday afternoons, stay there shushing and laughing while Dermo rang the doorbell and worked himself into a chinless huff and Audi’d off into the sunset, order avalanches of takeaway food and stay there all weekend and deep into next week. For a second I almost lost my mind and gave it a try.