On the third night, though, things started to go wrong. We were out for dinner, and he seemed brighter than usual. More animated. He was talking too quickly, his hands were waving with every word, he was laughing at things that weren’t funny, he was treating the waiting staff like they were long-lost friends.
I suppose part of me knew what was going on. Part of me spotted the signs, and understood that the previous days had been an illusion. We’d both been play-acting. None of it was real – we’d never live happily ever after. We’d never move to a new life by the sea. We’d never have a baby together.
But I ignored that part of me – I just wasn’t ready to give up. I wasn’t ready to abandon him, and us, and our future. I wanted to cling onto that hope for a few more hours, to give the seeds a chance to grow. He was so beautiful, Seb – dark like his mother, but with the vivid hazel eyes of his father. He was like a sculpture, all hard planes and angles. I wanted to hang on to the fiction for a while longer.
That’s why I got into the car with him. That’s why I let him drive. That’s why we ended up crashing straight into the back of a parked van as we drove to the guest house.
Nobody was hurt, thank God – I’d never have forgiven myself if they had been. The van was empty, and we had our seat belts on, and all we suffered was a few bumps and scrapes and in his case a couple of broken ribs and a concussion.
His injuries didn’t stop him jumping out of the car as soon as we regained our senses, though, yelling at me to get into the driver’s seat before anybody came. We could see the lights coming on in the houses nearby, and the sounds of doors opening and people calling out to us, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the police were called.
And if the police were called, and he was caught driving, he’d be in a world of hurt. They’d find the cocaine in his system, and he’d be arrested.
Maybe I was an idiot, but I agreed – I pretended I’d been the one driving. My breath was clear, my blood was clean. Everything else about me, though, felt dirty – soiled and used and squalid. I sat beside him in the ambulance that had been called, holding his hand and telling him he’d be okay, but all the time I was on the edge of a meltdown.
I called his mum, and his parents drove straight down to meet us there. By the time they arrived, he was enjoying a morphine buzz, I’d been questioned by the police, and his mother and father were furious. With me.
From their perspective, I’d been my usual crazy self – crashed a car while carrying their precious son in the passenger seat. I suppose that was the last straw – getting blamed in his mother’s rapid-fire Catalan, the words pinging towards me like bullets, his dad laying one hand on her shoulder to try and calm her down.
I can’t blame them for thinking the worst. I’d not exactly been the model wife, and I’m guessing they were as disappointed as I was – like me, they’d seen this trip as some kind of fresh start. Now, in their eyes, I’d messed it all up, and almost killed Seb in the process.
I didn’t have the energy to argue, or defend myself, or tell them what had really happened. My own self-esteem was in the toilet by that stage in my life anyway – I’d wasted years, made so many mistakes, let Seb reach this stage of self-destruction. I hated myself, and I was past caring whether they hated me too. There was plenty of room in that lifeboat.
So I let them rant and rave and take out all their anxieties and fears on me – it seemed easier than stopping them. I also knew that it might be the last kind thing I could do for them – because there was no way I could stick around and carry on living this life. There was no way I could get straight if I was around him, and no way I could trust him any more.
I stayed for the rest of the night, to make sure he was definitely all right and there wouldn’t be any complications, and then I left. I didn’t tell any of them – I just went to the police station to make sure it was okay and then got the first train back to the city.
I packed my bags, such as they were, and decided to leave. It’s not like a minor crash into the back of a van was going to result in Interpol being alerted, and I’d given the police my details – the insurance would cover the damage. To the van at least.
The damage to me was a bit more serious. I sat there in our flat, and saw it for what it was – nothing more than a squat. The cheap art posters tacked to the wall that I’d once thought were bohemian and charming now looked yellow and faded. The unmade bed we’d shared looked like a rat’s nest. The empty bottles from Seb’s last party with his pals were littering the room, making the whole place smell like tequila.
Everything I cared about fitted into my backpack – the same backpack I’d left England with all those years earlier. Over a decade of travelling and living; so many different countries, so many different friends and jobs and even a marriage – and I could still cram everything I needed into a backpack.
I left on the next flight to London, and that was the beginning of what I like to think of as my new life. I barely spoke on that flight, and I desperately wanted to buy every single one of those little bottles of booze the ladies with the trolleys wheel around. But I didn’t, which is maybe what saved me – I wasn’t an alcoholic in the physical sense, but I was addicted to using it as a crutch. If I’d turned to it then, I might never have stopped.
‘And what happened when you got back to the UK?’ Finn asks, his voice a whisper, barely heard over the clamour of all these memories.
‘I bummed around for a bit. Stayed on sofas, worked crappy jobs. Eventually got my shit together enough to decide to go back to college.’
‘And you never saw him again, after that?’
‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘Although I briefly spoke to his dad, a few months later, to make sure he was alive and all right. His dad was quite English about it all, didn’t scream or shout or anything – I suspect he knew the truth, and didn’t want to push me into telling him more than he wanted to know.
‘Once I was studying, things changed – life calmed down. I had something to do, and a reason for doing it, and I started to live again. I knew I’d got enough balance to go on a night out, to go and see a band, to have a few glasses of wine – I started to trust myself again, I suppose.’
‘What about now? Do you trust yourself now?’
‘Up to a point,’ I say, looking up to meet his eyes. ‘If we’re doing this whole honesty thing, I trust myself up to a point. I’m happy here. I’m happy with you. I’m happy I can have a drink and a laugh and for it to enhance my life rather than rule it. But … well, I’m probably never going to be entirely normal, Finn.’
He leans down to kiss me softly, and replies: ‘I think we’ve had this conversation before, Miss Moneypenny. I never signed on for normal. I signed on for you, in all your crazy glory.’
I’m driving around Budbury and its beautiful surroundings in my little white van. It has a sign for the Budbury Pharmacy on the side, and I always feel a bit like Postman Pat when I do my rounds. I even asked Katie if I could borrow her cat Tinkerbell, but she put me off by reminding me that he was ginger, not black and white.
Despite the lack of a loyal and resourceful feline companion, I always enjoy doing this. It started small, dropping off a few prescriptions, but it’s expanded a lot. I think it was the thing with Edie last year that made me step things up.
When