I can sense that he doesn’t want to talk about it. That he wants me to leave. But I can’t. ‘What did she say? In her text? If you don’t mind me asking.’
‘Not much.’ He reaches into the side of the sofa and Milly starts to her feet as a small, black, plastic object whizzes through the air and lands on the sofa beside me. Liam’s phone. I look at him, to check it’s okay for me to go through it. He nods then looks back at his guitar.
Charlotte the open message is titled. I read it then look at Liam in surprise.
‘That’s it?’
He nods.
I look back at the text message:
It’s over between us Liam. If you love me you’ll never contact me again.
‘Did you ask why?’
Liam doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the carpet, tapping his foot repeatedly.
‘Liam?’
‘What?’ He doesn’t look up.
‘Did you contact her?’
‘Of course I did.’ He moves as though he’s about to put his guitar on the ground then changes his mind. He hugs it to his chest instead, the side of his cheek pressed against the fret board. ‘You don’t get a text message dumping you out of the blue like that and not ring up to ask what the fuck’s going on, do you? Not if you still love the person.’
Milly snuffles at my feet.
‘What did Charlotte say?’
‘She didn’t.’ Liam looks at me blankly, like the fight has gone out of him. ‘She wouldn’t answer her phone. I texted her loads, but she didn’t text back. Not once.’ He shakes his head. ‘I know she’s your daughter but I didn’t deserve that, Mrs Jackson. I didn’t deserve to get dumped by text with no explanation and then get ignored like I didn’t even fucking exist.’
I’m torn. Part of me wants to cross the divide between us and wrap Liam in my arms and take away the hurt. The other part wants to ask if they argued, if he did anything to warrant Charlotte ending the relationship in such a brutal way. I decide to do neither. He looks close to tears and I don’t want to upset him more than I already have. Not if I want him to talk to me again. I stand up and pull on Milly’s lead so she rises too.
‘I’m sorry, Liam,’ I say. ‘I had no idea about any of that. Charlotte didn’t breathe a word.’
He sighs heavily, then crosses his arms and looks away. Conversation over.
It’s only when I’m halfway home that I realize I didn’t bring up the one subject I’d traipsed all the way over to White Street to discuss. Sex. There’s no way I can turn back and knock on the door again, not with Liam the way he was when I left. I don’t know what drove Charlotte to do what she did but I can’t help but feel that it was cruel, even for a teenager. But maybe Liam had done something to deserve it? Sometimes you have to escape from a relationship as stealthily and quietly as you can.
‘Here we are, Milly,’ I say as I fit the key in the lock, turn it and twist the handle of the porch door. ‘Home again. Home ag—’
My voice catches in my throat. There’s a postcard, picture side up, on the mat. I start to shake as I reach down to pick it up.
‘Stop it, Sue,’ I tell myself. ‘Stop overreacting, it’s just a postcard,’ but as I turn it over in my hands and look at the other side my ears start to ring. My vision clouds and I grab the doorframe, blinking hard to try and dispel the white spots that have appeared before my eyes but I know it’s too late. I’m going to faint.
Nearly two weeks since James told me he loved me and I still haven’t been to his place. All I know is that he lives in a three-bedroom terraced house near Wood Green. Hels is worried. According to her, you don’t date a man for six weeks without seeing his place unless he’s got something to hide. I told her that I wasn’t bothered – that going to hotels was exciting and staying at mine was convenient, but she knew I was bullshitting. You can’t be friends with someone since you were ten and lie to their face and get away with it.
‘Has it occurred to you that he might be married?’ she asked me over lunch the other day.
I told her it had, but there was no mark on the third finger of James’s left hand and he hadn’t slipped, not even once, and mentioned a wife or children. He hadn’t even mentioned an ex-girlfriend. I’d told him all about Nathan. I’d even told him about Rupert and the fact we’d had a drunken shag at uni, long before I introduced him to Hels and they got it together but he’d never so much as mentioned another woman’s name. Helen thought that was odd – that his silence meant he was obviously hiding something. I argued that some people are private and prefer to keep the past buried.
‘What then?’ she said. ‘Ex-con? Prisoner on the run?’ We both laughed. ‘Maybe he still lives with his mum and dad?’
I stopped laughing. That wasn’t such a ridiculous suggestion. James did keep running off from my place at the most bizarre hours, claiming he had ‘things to do’ and ‘stuff to sort’ and, no matter how much I interrogated him, he refused to expand on his vagaries, saying instead that what he had to do was ‘dull’ and I ‘really wouldn’t be interested’.
‘Definitely married,’ Hels said when I told her that. ‘Why else would he suddenly rush off and not tell you where he’s going?’
Before she went back to work she made me swear that I’d stop ‘fannying around’ and demand that James take me to his place or I’d end the relationship. I wasn’t sure about throwing ultimatums around but I promised her I’d bring up the subject when I meet him for dinner tomorrow.
I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocuous reason why he hasn’t invited me back to his place. So why do I feel so sick?
I come to on the floor of the porch. One of my cheeks is pressed against cold tile, the other is strangely damp. I glance up to see Milly standing above me, her big, brown eyes fixed on the empty dog bowl in the corner of the porch, her tongue dripping with drool. She senses me looking at her and smiles down at me before enthusiastically licking my cheek.
‘Hello Milly Moo.’ I sit up slowly, gingerly checking my body for injuries. Nothing appears to be broken, though by the way my left temple aches, I think I’m in for a pretty impressive bruise. For a split second I assume I tripped and fell but then I spot the postcard on the floor beside me and it all comes flooding back again. The image on the front shows James Stewart sitting on a step smiling a goofy smile whilst, behind him, a shadow of an enormous rabbit is projected on the wall. It’s an image from the film Harvey. The postcard could so easily be innocuous – a simple hello from one friend to another – only there’s no chatty text on the other side of this postcard, there isn’t even an addressee. There’s just a stamp, postmarked Brighton and an address, my address.
This isn’t someone forgetting to write a postcard and slipping it into the postbox with a handful of letters by mistake. That’s the explanation Brian would come up with if I told him about it. He’d give me a look, the look, the one that says ‘you’re going to have another episode, aren’t you?’ and then he’d throw it in the bin and tell me that