‘When did he say he’d see you?’ the woman said, handing Edie’s driving licence back to her in disgust.
‘Just to be here at ten.’
‘Alright, wait here.’
The woman turned on her heel and left Edie feeling like turning up at the appointed place and time had been the most presumptuous thing she could’ve done.
After ten minutes, the irascible woman with a walkie-talkie trudged back to Edie.
‘Elliot can’t see you today, sorry.’
‘Oh. Can I—’
‘That’s it. Sorry.’
‘OK …’ Edie tried to say more but the woman had already turned. She hit the taxi number on her mobile and tried not to feel stupid, as people milling nearby glanced at her.
Usually, Edie would be very pleased to find herself with what amounted to a paid day off. Time tooling around by herself felt a lot less appealing now she had huge anxieties and a guilty conscience, with no online rabbit hole to tumble into, either. She wanted to be busy-busy-busy to avoid all the bad thoughts.
Also, while she appreciated he was an important man, she suspected she’d had her first taste of the behaviour that caused the previous biographer to exit stage left from the Elliot Owen Story. Edie had a very nasty feeling she was going to fare no better, and be what Boddywinkle was to Ninbert.
Edie finally had a reply from Jack. Six days after he’d unpinned a grenade and lobbed it into the middle of several lives at once, then scattered before the smoke had cleared.
She was getting ready for what could be grandly called ‘an evening out’, applying her make-up, peering into the old milky mirror of her youth with the plastic red frame, rummaging around in a cosmetics basket that had a topsoil of shattered kohl pencils and lidless grey eye shadows.
The name that used to give her such a sting of excitement appeared on her phone screen. Now it just stung. Involuntarily, Edie recalled how his lips felt on hers before she pulled away. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about that until now.
Hi you. So. Sorry about everything. Hear you’re up north for now? Take care. Jx
That was it?!
Trembling slightly, Edie hammered out three different replies of varying sarcastic rage, and deleted each of them in turn. This man had dabbled with her heart like it was a finger- painting kit and he never ever took responsibility for the consequences of his actions.
But if she got too emotional, he could simply drop the conversation. How did Jack always manage to shield himself from feedback? Actually, he couldn’t, not without her help. She needed to breathe deeply and be smart, here.
Hi yourself. ‘What were you thinking’ might be a cliché but, what were you thinking?
Near-insta ping back.
I wasn’t, clearly. I know you weren’t either. Apologies for inviting you to a wedding that had an ‘aftermath’ in place of a ‘reception’. Man alive. Jx
And this was how Jack’s wiles had sent her slowly mad. Within seconds of receiving this ostensibly self-deprecating reply, Edie realised he’d apologised, but neatly stopped her screen-grabbing the conversation and using it as proof of his guilt. To her, it worked as Jack’s usual easy charm: ‘I assume nothing from your momentary reciprocation’. To anyone else, it read as if they were equally to blame.
She had to find a direct question to ask that he couldn’t wriggle out of. She steeled herself and typed:
But why decide to kiss me?!
‘Edie! Time to get going?’ her dad called from downstairs. He’d volunteered to drive them to their dinner. Edie had thought the best way to get her dad and Meg out was to promise to pay but let them choose the restaurant. Which meant, Meg choosing.
As they crushed into the back of her dad’s old Volvo, footwells lined with old newspapers, Edie wondered why her dad burning a fossil fuel was OK with Meg, but taxi drivers doing it was not.
Meg also gave them a long explanation about rewarding venues that offered solid vegan options, to justify picking Annie’s Burger Shack. Edie suspected the ethical reasoning boiled down to Meg fancying a burger. She was just relieved that Meg hadn’t found some café full of nubbly seed-filled discs of tempeh and hemp burgers that looked like something you’d leave on a bird feeder table.
It took a lot longer to get a response from Jack this time and given the starkness of her question, Edie wasn’t surprised. Evade THAT, motherfucker. She tried not to twitch her phone out of her pocket every sixteen seconds as they rumbled towards the city centre, to see if Jack had replied.
By the time they were seated at Annie’s, had the menus and ordered drinks, bingo, a reply finally limped in. Edie had started to grind her teeth that he’d simply ignore her.
I was drunk and all over the place & I thought we had a special connection. Events overtook me with the wedding, I didn’t have my head straight. Honestly, E.T., I can’t say sorry enough. You don’t deserve any of this.
Nicely played. ‘I thought we had a special connection.’ The nickname. Once again, nothing that could be easily passed on, without people who’d already made up their minds taking it as tacit confirmation that Edie was pursuing Jack. But was she reading too much into it? Did Jack realise he was safety- proofing it? Edie wondered if she was paranoid. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you.
She asked herself whether she should care what those people thought. She did, though. She couldn’t help it. Could she ask ano—
‘Ahem,’ her dad coughed, and nodded towards her phone, as Edie listlessly fiddled, eyes straying to it for the umpteenth time. ‘Something interesting?’
‘Hah no!’ Edie turned her phone over, with some effort, screen facing down. She wasn’t going to discuss Boy Trouble with her baffled father and hostile sister, and especially not when the story hinged on her own awful transgression. And Edie badly needed a space where everything was business as usual, even if that meant, ‘still not great’. ‘It’s nice in here,’ she said, with polite-fake enthusiasm.
Annie’s was in a grand, high-ceilinged old lace warehouse in the Lace Market, quite a glamorous room for fast food, filled with the clatter of shoes on stripped wood and the burble of background music vibrating on wrought-iron fittings. As Edie glanced round the table, her dad in a faded cable- knit jumper, Meg in her denim dungarees, she realised how long it was since the three of them had been anywhere together.
On her birthdays, she usually took them to the local pub and vigorously batted away her dad’s offers of meals, pretending she didn’t want the fuss, knowing he wasn’t well off enough and it would be too awkward for Edie to stand the bill on that occasion.
Three bottles of beer arrived and Edie felt the pressure, despite her low mood, to jolly it all along. She had suggested they go out, after all.
‘Good choice, Meg,’ she said, making them clink glasses, cheers.
Meg looked at her impassively, obviously figuring out what stripe of bullshit this was. Edie considered her enthusiasm might contaminate Annie’s, so quickly added: ‘Do you, er, come here often?’ She laughed at herself.
‘No, I can’t afford it. I’ve been once, when the home did a day out.’
Meg worked for three days a week at a holiday care home for the elderly, ill and extremely infirm. It was a noble and decent thing to do, but Meg thought her three-day-a-week work for very little money conferred