We Were On a Break

  3

  ‘Morning, Nutsack.’

  There was nothing like waking up to a phone call from my brother to ruin a perfectly good Tuesday before it had even begun.

  ‘You there or did the kidnappers answer your phone?’ he said when I didn’t reply. He laughed at his own joke, still waiting for a response. ‘If this is the kidnappers, we don’t want him back. Do what you’ve got to do.’

  ‘Very funny, Chris.’ I yawned loudly, grinding my fists into my eyes. Why was I asleep on the settee? Why was I still wearing my coat? Why did I have a horrible feeling that I’d ruined my life?

  Oh.

  Yeah.

  I stretched out the crick in my neck and squinted at the devastation in my living room, suitcase dumped open by the door, jumper thrown across the floor, duty free bottle of whiskey left open, knocked over by a flying shoe and emptied out onto my rug.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing you want to tell me, little brother?’ he asked. ‘Nothing you’d like to share before I see it plastered all over social media?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  I stretched as far as I could without getting up and dug around in the suitcase for the little square box I’d been carrying around for three months. It wasn’t there.

  ‘You didn’t do it?’

  ‘I really don’t want to talk about it,’ I assured him, panic rising. Where was the ring? ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Whatever you say, dude,’ he replied, letting go far more easily than I had anticipated. ‘Dad needs a lift to the supermarket and I can’t take him. Can you pick him up?’

  ‘I just got off a plane.’ I lay back down, head spinning from my ill-advised three a.m. nightcap and felt something digging into my hip. It was the ring box, nestling in between the sofa cushions. ‘Why can’t you take him?’

  ‘Because I’ve got a job, Adam, and I’m on my way into the office. You can’t tell I’m in the car at all, can you? I got this new Bluetooth hook up for the Jag and it’s so clear I—’

  ‘Can’t you take the day off?’ I interrupted, picking up the ring box and letting the sharp corners dig into my palm. ‘I thought you were your own boss.’

  ‘No such thing as a day off when you run your own company,’ he scoffed. ‘I’ve barely had a minute to myself in the last month. Honestly, I’m out for a morning and my number two doesn’t know whether to shit or wind his watch. I’ve employed idiots, Adam, it’s a miracle we’re even still going, let alone doing so well. I’ve got to go in today, we’re pitching for this—’

  ‘I’ll take him,’ I said quickly. I didn’t have the stomach for another Chris Floyd lecture on how Very Important he was. ‘I’ll be there in an hour; let me have a shower and I’ll go over.’

  ‘OK, I’ll let him know,’ Chris replied cheerfully. ‘So, what went wrong? Did you not have a good time? Cass is dying to hear all about it.’

  ‘Yeah, something like that,’ I said, rubbing my temples. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re planning to be more talkative tomorrow night. You’re both still coming round for dinner, aren’t you?’

  ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ I said, sitting up and faking a cough. I’d forgotten, I always forgot. Liv managed our social calendar. I was in charge of making sure she ate solid food and she was in charge of making sure I entered the outside world. It had been a good system until now. ‘I’ve not been feeling brilliant. I don’t want to come if I’ve got a cold. You know, the baby.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he replied. ‘I suppose not. You pick it up on holiday?’

  ‘On the plane, I think,’ I went for another cough, trying to get a bit more of a hack into it and putting Chris on speaker while I checked my emails and messages. ‘Been feeling shit all night.’

  At least that part wasn’t a lie.

  ‘Well, let me know, twatfink,’ Chris said. ‘Cass was going to cook some ridiculously complicated Chinese thing that takes ten years to make. If you’re not going to come, for fuck’s sake text me tonight or I’ll never hear the end of it.’

  ‘Tell her we’d be just as happy with a takeaway,’ I replied, scanning one of half a dozen emails from Pablo the restaurant manager who seemed dead set on screwing me out of all my money for the non-event of a proposal. How could not showing up and eating dinner be costing me more money than actually going to the restaurant? I definitely hadn’t told him to organize a firework display. Had I? ‘I’ll bring a pizza or something, the woman just had a baby.’

  ‘Yeah, but you know how she is,’ he said with half a sigh. ‘She wants to do something nice and, you know, I thought we’d be celebrating.’

  I did know how she was, and I thought we’d be celebrating too. The ring box was not supposed to be in my hand right now, or at least the contents weren’t. Actually, I wasn’t sure where the box went once the ring was on her finger. Did she keep the box? Did I? Did we throw it in the sea in a glorious celebration of love and the giddy assumption that it would never, ever come off her hand ever again?

  ‘Don’t let her mess about cooking.’ I stuck my left big toe into the ankle of my left sock, wriggling it down over my heel. ‘I’ll text you later, but right now I feel like shite. I really don’t think we’ll be coming over.’

  ‘OK, let me know, I’ve got to go, almost at work.’

  ‘Yeah, I get it,’ I said, tackling the second sock, so much easier now the first one was off. ‘I’m honoured you found the time to call to ask me to do you a favour in the first place.’

  ‘You should be,’ he said. ‘Now go and get Dad before he eats one of the dogs. Love to Liv.’

  Kicking my socks across the wooden floor, I let my phone slip between the sofa cushions and held the ring box in the palm of my hand. Such an inconspicuous little thing. For something so small, it felt very heavy.

  ‘Adam, what did you do?’ I wondered aloud while Jim Beam tap-danced on my temples. My mouth was dry and my eyes were sore and every part of me ached. ‘What did you do?’

  It was all a bit of a blur and for that I was thankful. I remembered losing it on the plane, driving home in silence and then an argument at her front door although exactly what had been said was a mystery. And after that … nothing. I couldn’t hold my ale at the best of times but Jim Beam and jet lag were an evil combination and I knew I wasn’t in a rush to call her for the details.

  Very carefully, I stood up and placed the ring box carefully inside a tall ceramic vase on the mantelpiece. Somewhere it couldn’t escape, somewhere I couldn’t see it.

  Stretching, I picked up the almost-empty whiskey bottle and set it on the coffee table, gagging at the stench of booze coming from the rug. I was a mess.

  ‘Shower first, Dad second,’ I told my greyish-green reflection. ‘Grovel to Liv third.’

  I had a feeling the last one could take a while.

  ‘You’re shitting me?’

  ‘I shit you not.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Because I’d make this up? Can you hand me the thermometer?’

  David, my nurse and work-husband, picked up the requested instrument without taking his narrowed brown eyes off me. Bruiser, a French bulldog who couldn’t stop passing foul gas, kept his huge green eyes on the thermometer.

  I really hadn’t slept after Adam dropped me off and, instead, I tossed and turned for a couple of hours before changing out of my pyjamas and into my scrubs. I’d done the rounds, checked on our overnight patients and called all their owners before David even got to work. As far as I could tell, nothing majorly dramatic had happened while I was away, other than my dad being called out to tend to an epileptic guinea pig in the middle of the night a week last Friday.

  ‘Adam didn’t propose?’ David wrapped his rubber-gloved hands around the unwilling pup. ‘Hold still, Bruiser, it’ll all be over in a minute.’

  ‘That’s what he says to all the boys,’ I whispered to Bruiser as I lubed up th
e probe.

  ‘Honestly, I’m not telling you anything ever again,’ he replied with an affected toss of his head. ‘It was one time and I didn’t care for it one bit. I went to public school, Liv – everyone was doing it.’

  Even when I was sleep-deprived, jet-lagged and desperately trying to convince myself nothing was wrong, David could still make me smile.

  ‘Don’t change the subject. What the cocking hell happened?’

  ‘Not only did Adam not propose,’ I said, watching the numbers jump around on the little digital monitor while Bruiser the Farting Dog made a horrible high-pitched noise I had not missed in the slightest. ‘He went completely mental on the last evening, we had this really weird fight on the plane, then he dropped me off at mine at three o’clock this morning and announced he needed a break.’

  He lowered his chin and raised an eyebrow. ‘A break?’

  ‘Temperature’s normal,’ I nodded. ‘A break. Isn’t that weird?’

  ‘Let me get this straight …’ David gave Bruiser a well-earned scratch behind the ear before turning his full attentions to me. ‘You went all the way to Mexico to get engaged and instead you came home dumped?’

  I looked up sharply to see a confused look on my friend’s face.

  ‘He didn’t dump me, he said he needed a break,’ I said, nudging my wonky blonde topknot with my wrist. ‘That’s not what I said.’

  ‘OK, then what happened to the proposal?’ He swabbed Bruiser’s behind before carefully carrying him back into the blanket-lined cage behind him. ‘I thought this was a done deal? I missed out on so many pastry-eating opportunities so you could look skinny in the engagement pictures.’

  ‘And for that I apologize,’ I said, peeling off my latex gloves. ‘I have no explanation. Maybe he never was going to propose. It’s nearly three months since Cass told me about the ring. The ring I’m not even supposed to know about, remember?’

  ‘You mean, maybe he bought the ring then realized he didn’t want to marry you but he didn’t want to break up with you before the holiday because he’d already paid for it, so he waited for you to get back?’

  Both Bruiser and I gasped in unison.

  ‘You are a very mean man,’ I told him as the idea squirrelled itself away into my brain. What had been said could never be unsaid. ‘This is why you haven’t got a girlfriend.’

  David, resplendent in Dalmatian print scrubs he had ordered in from the States, stared at me from across the room. ‘I haven’t got a girlfriend because I’m too awesome for one woman,’ he assured me. ‘And because Abi still won’t put out.’

  ‘Abi will never put out for you,’ I tossed my gloves into the bin but felt nothing as they swished into the basket the first time. Things were really bad. ‘And Adam did not break up with me. We had an argument, he needed a good night’s sleep. That’s all that happened.’

  He fixed me with a sympathetic smile.

  ‘As a man and as your friend,’ he replied. ‘It’s my duty to tell you you’re being really stupid right now.’

  A wave of jet lag and nausea washed over me. I probably should have eaten something other than half a packet of Jammy Dodgers before coming down to work.

  ‘And you’re being really unpleasant,’ I said. ‘You’re not getting your present now. Shut up.’

  ‘I’m only trying to help,’ he said, shrugging as though I was the one who was being unreasonable. ‘I mean, you’re not engaged, are you?’

  I turned on the cold tap and held my hands under the water, trying to wake myself up. He had said he was tired and that we’d talk later and that he needed a break from us. Did he really mean he wanted to break up?

  I turned off the tap slowly, waiting for another, more rational explanation to present itself.

  ‘You really think he’s dumped me?’ I asked, the prospect hitting me like a sound slap. ‘He meant a break-up break?’

  ‘This is going to come as something of a shock given that I constantly anticipate your every need,’ David replied, ‘but I’m not actually a mind reader. I don’t know what he’s thinking, Liv, any more than you do. I thought this proposal was a done deal; I was just waiting for you to ask me to be your bridesdude.’

  ‘So did I,’ I replied, still reeling from the possibility I might have been dumped without even realizing it. ‘But just so you know, I wasn’t planning on bridesdudes.’

  ‘You’re so cruel,’ David said as I flipped blindly through Bruiser’s chart to cover my hot face. ‘To be honest, Liv, I’d blame Cass for this whole thing. If she hadn’t told you about the ring, you wouldn’t have been so stressed before you went away.’

  ‘She knows I hate surprises,’ I couldn’t help defend Cass but in my heart of hearts, I agreed with him. My relaxing holiday had been ruined before it had started. ‘It’s stupid, I wasn’t even thinking about getting engaged until this all kicked off. Oh god, David, did he dump me?’

  He looked up at the buzzing fluorescent light in the ceiling that Dad was supposed to get fixed while I was away and shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know, Livvy,’ he said. ‘Men can be shits. Last time I had to break up with a girl, I asked my neighbour to answer my phone and shout at her in Japanese until she stopped calling. Have you tried to call him this morning?’

  ‘No?’ I replied, still stunned. ‘When he said he’d talk to me later, I assumed I would talk to him later. I didn’t know I’d been bloody dumped, did I?’

  ‘So you took one part of his conversation literally but not the other?’ He bent over, nose to nose with Bruiser. ‘Women.’

  Bruiser growled in agreement. Then farted.

  ‘Not women, Adam,’ I corrected as David reeled backwards into the sink. He really was noxious, the poor pup. ‘He’s the one who’s being a knob. Who would dump their girlfriend like that? You need to be clear about those kinds of things, you need to be specific. There is no room for ambiguity in a dumping!’

  I grabbed hold of the stainless steel examination table and replayed the entire incident. Had he said break-up and not break? Had I misheard? It was possible; I was so tired. But why? Why would he do that? All the stress and hurt and uncertainty bubbled back up inside me. Bruiser gave a quiet growl and licked my hand. Even the flatulent dog felt sorry for me.

  ‘Liv.’ Fanning the air in front of his face, David leaned against the back door and crossed his black-and-white spotted arms in front of him. ‘Pick up the bloody phone. You won’t know what’s going on until you talk to him.’

  Stupid David and his stupid common sense.

  ‘I’ll do it after my next appointment,’ I said, stretching my naked fingers out wide and pressing into the cold metal of the table. I was not going to lose it at work, I just wasn’t. ‘It’s Zoe Gustar isn’t it? I could do with some pug time.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked with a furrowed brow. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sure you’re right and this is just a big misunderstanding.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, my hands shaking. ‘Really, I’m fine.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Zoe and the pug,’ he said, snatching up the clipboard from the table. ‘Go and call him now. You’re not going to be good for anything until you do.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, nodding as I opened the door that led to the back passages of the surgery, taking the used instruments with me. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘You’ll figure this out,’ David said, patting me on the topknot as I went. ‘And I’m glad to have you back.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed with enthusiasm I did not feel as I closed the exam room door behind me. ‘Me too.’

  There really was nothing like sticking a thermometer up a dog’s arse then finding out you’d been stealth-dumped to let you know your holiday was over.

  4

  ‘And apparently that will blow up a microwave.’

  Dad pulled two boxes of cereal from the shelf and held them both at arm’s length, considering the packaging over the top of his glasses.

  ‘I don’t un
derstand why you were trying to microwave yoghurt in the first place,’ I said, taking the Frosties out of his hand and putting them right back on the shelf. ‘How bored were you?’

  ‘Have you ever cooked yoghurt? Maybe it’s delicious.’ He handed me the Coco Pops without a fight and resignedly replaced them with a box of muesli. ‘I thought it might be a bit like Ready Brek.’

  I looked at his all organic, sugar-free selections and tossed the box of Coco Pops back in the trolley. ‘Make sure they’re gone before Mum gets home.’

  ‘Oh, they will be,’ he said, leaning heavily on the trolley, his walking stick wedged in his shopping bag and resting up against his shoulder like a flagpole missing its flag. ‘Maybe you and Chris can come round tonight and help me finish them. Or we could even order a pizza. It’s bin day tomorrow, your mother would never know.’

  ‘Pizza?’ I asked in a doubtful tone. ‘I thought you weren’t allowed dairy or gluten any more?’

  ‘Or meat,’ he added. ‘Let’s get a pepperoni pizza.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can do tonight,’ I said, walking ahead. ‘I’ve got some stuff on.’

  ‘Oh. OK,’ he shuffled forward, a martyred smile on his face. ‘Your mum’ll be back tomorrow night. Would have been nice to have a boys’ night but, of course, I know you two are very busy.’

  I picked up a packet of Weetabix. We were all out and I knew Liv would want to get back on her healthy eating kick now we were back from holidays. Right after she’d given me the kicking I was almost certain I deserved.

  ‘Has she had a good time?’ I asked, also remembering I had told Liv I wanted to take a break at three o’clock in the morning and I put the Weetabix back, swallowing down the dark feeling in the pit of my stomach. ‘It was a yoga retreat, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yoga retreat and a sugar detox,’ he corrected, turning a corner and staring wistfully at a packet of chocolate Hobnobs. ‘And something to do with mindfulness.’