‘Why are you reading my letters?’ I was more than a little bit confused. ‘And why you didn’t your number come up? Have you changed your number?’
‘You changed the locks without telling me,’ he replied. ‘It seemed fair.’
‘You left.’ I found a bus shelter and sat down. Pacing wasn’t going to help my blood pressure. I nodded good morning at the two old ladies waiting beside me. They nodded back. Lovely people. ‘Why are you reading my post?’
‘I’m not reading your post.’ He sounded pissed off. ‘I’m reading the letter you wrote, addressed to me. The one in which you repeatedly refer to me as a cockweasel.’
It took me a minute but I got there eventually. The letter. The letter I put on the coffee table. That Matthew must have picked up when he went to get Simon’s mail. Cockweasels.
‘Oh.’ It was a good job I was already sitting down although, really, lying down might have been better. ‘That letter.’
‘That letter,’ he replied. ‘Matthew said you were going to Canada?’
I looked around at the two old ladies in the bus stop, the cars driving over tramlines on the wrong side of the road and the funky black and white stripy building opposite.
‘I’m in Canada,’ I confirmed. ‘Toronto.’
‘For work?’ He was starting to sound slightly less pissed off and slightly more curious.
‘Nope.’ Why give him any more details than he deserved?
‘Fine. Look, this is costing me a fortune so I’m just going to say it,’ he said after a moment’s pause. ‘That letter really fucked me off.’
‘Imagine that,’ I replied. If he started giving me shit, I could just hang up again. What was he going to do: come to Canada to shout at me in person?
‘Yeah. It wasn’t very nice to read but, after I read it, I thought … You were right. There were parts of it that made me feel like shit. I can’t really blame you. You’re right about everything.’
Well, this was a turn-up for the books.
‘What I did was shit and cowardly and you didn’t deserve it.’
I leaned back against the wall of the bus shelter. Really?
He took a deep breath and I could have sworn I heard a heavy sniff. ‘Rachel, I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t ask and I know you should say no, I know you’re going to say no but, god, I really want to see you.’
I stared across the street as a tram rattled by. Trams. Canada was funny.
‘Rachel, are you there? You know I can’t tell if you’re answering me in your head when we’re on the phone.’
‘I’m listening,’ I replied. ‘You want to see me.’
‘I know I’m an idiot cockweasel who doesn’t deserve it but I want to come home,’ he said quickly, tacking a nervous laugh on the end for good measure. ‘I’ve been sitting here looking at my phone, reading that letter all day. It’s taken me until now to get the guts up to call you.’
What was I supposed to say? What was I supposed to do? I nibbled on the corner of my thumbnail.
‘OK, I’ll just keep talking and you don’t hang up, deal?’
In five years, I’d only seen Simon cry twice. Once when his granddad died and again when Chelsea won the double, but it sounded as if he was having a go at hitting the triple himself.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking, changing jobs, meeting new people, coming up to thirty, whatever,’ he went on. ‘I convinced myself I was missing out on something. It was like, I looked at you and started seeing a mortgage and pension plans and university fees and weekly trips to the supermarket and just being old. I stopped seeing you. But I was wrong.’
I was a weekly trip to the supermarket? I stopped biting my nail. He looked at me and saw pension plans?
‘I’ve had a bit of time to think about it and I was wrong. I can admit that now. I was a cockweasel but now I want to come home. I love you.’
‘You do?’
‘I do.’
‘Even though I’m boring?’
‘Even though you’re boring,’ Simon tried to laugh. ‘But boring’s not that bad when you think about it, is it? I really miss you, Rach.’
I breathed in and then breathed out. I was calm. I was totally, totally calm. I was not about to hulk out on Queen Street West.
‘But what if I don’t want that any more?’ I asked. We were this close to Rachel go smash-smash. ‘What if I’m different?’
‘You’re still Rachel,’ he replied. Someone was getting annoyed that I hadn’t rolled over like a dead dog. ‘Look, when are you back? Shall I pick you up at the airport? I’ll make dinner and we can sort everything out.’
I puffed out my cheeks and looked back at the car. Em was hanging out of the window making ‘wrap it up’ hand gestures in between scoffing handfuls of Ruffles. I gave her a wave and a two-minute sign. Or at least I thought it was a two minutes sign. I might have actually flashed her a V.
‘Rach?’ Simon’s voice on the other end of the line.
‘No.’ My voice. My word.
‘No I shouldn’t pick you up?’
‘No to all of it.’ I stood up and started pacing. Threat of stroke be damned. ‘No, you can’t pick me up. No, you can’t pretend none of this happened. No, you can’t come home. It’s not your home any more.’
Saying it made it true. I’d done too much in the last ten days to just go back. Of course it would be easier to write it off as an extended mad half-hour, but since when was anything worth doing easy? I wasn’t in love with Simon any more. I hadn’t been in love with Simon for a long time. I was in love with not being on my own, with having someone there at the end of the day and now I knew I didn’t need that. My heart wasn’t broken over him; it was breaking for the things I had wanted from him. And I didn’t want them any more.
‘Rachel?’
‘You are a coward. And a cockweasel.’ I winced and mouthed an apology at the old ladies. One of them shook her head, the other smiled. ‘What if I’d come home three months ago and said, all right Simon, I reckon I might want to shag about for a bit but once I’m bored of sleeping on my mate’s settee, I’ll come back. It’ll be on my terms and I’ll call you up and insult you first, though. Does that sound OK? What exactly would you have said?’
‘Rach—’
‘I’ll call you when I’m back and I’ve decided what I want to do with the flat. I have to go now, I’m about to throw myself off a bridge or something.’
I pressed end and called Simon a very bad word in a very loud voice. The old ladies sitting beside me in the bus shelter looked somewhat startled.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I covered my mouth with my hand and apologized again. ‘I forgot where I was for a minute.’
‘Don’t worry,’ one in a fetching orange mac replied. ‘We’ve come across more than one cockweasel in our time, we just never used that name for them.’
‘Do you remember Donald Tyler?’ the other chuckled as the bus pulled up. ‘Now he was a real cockweasel.’
I wiped away the beginnings of tears, pleased that they had never made it all the way out, and smiled at the two ladies as they boarded the bus. Forty years from now, that would be me and Emelie. Matthew would doubtlessly be too busy cruising around Miami in his toy boy’s convertible. Scratching my tickly nose, I walked back to the car and jumped back in.
‘What’s up?’ Matthew took one look at my face and pulled me into a hug. ‘You all right?’
‘It was Simon,’ I mumbled to the wet patch my tears had started on his T-shirt. ‘He wants to come home.’
‘Oh my god.’ Em launched herself and the Ruffles through the gap in between the seats to get in on the hug action. ‘What did you say?’
‘I told him no.’ First order of business, I took the Ruffles and dropped them in the foot-well. I was going to be needing them soon enough. ‘I don’t want him back. It’s not his home any more, he left.’
‘Amazing.’ Matthew untangled himself from the hug and held his hand up for a high-five. ‘Good. You’re better off without him
.’
‘You’re totally owning this single thing,’ Em agreed. ‘Men of the world watch out.’
‘Hmm, yeah.’ I rested my head on her arm. ‘Rachel Summers, international heartbreaker.’
That title might have more credibility if I could stop thinking about one very specific heart I’d at least bruised recently. And it did not feel good.
‘You still need to fill us in on that story,’ Matthew reminded me once he’d wrangled Emelie back into her seat and convinced her to fasten her seatbelt. ‘Do you want to rain-check on this? We could do it tomorrow?’
The last couple of days had been tiring and confusing. The jetlag had put Redhead Rachel right off her game and, basically, I needed to be back on it. Which meant only one thing. I buckled my seatbelt, took my to-do list out of my handbag and waved it at Matthew. ‘If I’m ever going to do this, it’s going to be today.’
‘Yes ma’am,’ he nodded, turning the key in the ignition. ‘Niagara Falls it is then.’
‘Whooo!’ Em bellowed out of the window again. ‘Road triiip!’
‘Yeah, Em,’ Matthew spoke into the rear-view mirror. ‘That’s going to get really tired, really quickly.’
‘WHOO.’ She leaned forward and repeated herself, twice as loud, right in his face. ‘ROAD TRIP.’
‘Shall we just get going?’ I suggested, tucking the manky-looking napkin away. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I didn’t survive the bungee jump. A broken neck had to be better than four hours in a car with these two.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was expecting from Niagara Falls but Alton Towers meets Blackpool Illuminations dropped in the middle of a National Trust park really wasn’t it. The place was terrifyingly tacky, the complete opposite of tasteful and modern Toronto. It took twenty minutes to crawl through the neon signs, past the waxwork museum, the bowling alley, funfair and four different Starbucks before we were waved off into a car park. And by car park, I mean great big gravelly field. Em bounded out from the back seat like an over-enthusiastic puppy as soon as the car had rolled to a halt.
‘Come on, it’s this way,’ she yelled, bouncing up and down, face turned up to the sun. Anyone would think we kept her in a box in the cellar. ‘I can’t wait for you to see it.’
Matthew unfolded his giant frame from the tiny car with slightly more dignity and stretched. Vanity was pain. Hiring the coolest car in the garage wasn’t always a good idea if you were technically a giant.
‘Come on.’ He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and we followed Em and the hordes of other visitors across the car park. ‘It’s going to be fine.’
The en-route Ethan discussion had been relatively brief. Still shaken by SimonGate, I couldn’t really sit there and make excuses as to why I’d spent a wonderful day with a wonderful man and felt nothing. Em was clearly wearing her hopeless romantic hat and blamed everything from nerves and jetlag through to the jeans he was wearing and the far too early introduction of her beloved poutine. If nothing else, I had discovered her secret shame of adding melted cheese slices to chip-shop chips and gravy when no one was looking. Matthew, on the other hand, was much more fatalistic. Ethan wasn’t the one. It was a fun crush, long-distance things often were, he told me, but when it came down to it the chemistry wasn’t there.
‘It’s not your fault,’ he’d told me as we cruised along the highway listening to Bryan Adams. When in Rome. ‘You’re not going to fall hopelessly in love tomorrow. If Ethan was some bloke you’d got off with in a bar one night, it wouldn’t matter that you didn’t want to marry him within fifteen minutes of meeting him. And maybe if he lived in London you wouldn’t be putting so much pressure on it.’
‘I suppose so.’ I stared at the Facebook message I’d sent and tried not to feel like a shit.
Hey Ethan,
Thanks so much for yesterday, I had a really great time. Toronto is amazing. It was so, so great to catch up but I’m going to have to pass on today. Unexpected work stuff. Let’s stay in touch and if you ever come back through London, you have to give me a shout.
Love,
Rachel
It really wasn’t worthy of him; he was such a great guy and I had a feeling that this was what was commonly known as the short shrift, but what was I supposed to do? It wasn’t as if we were engaged. We hung out once. He kissed me once. We both knew I was leaving in forty-eight hours. And I told myself that over and over until I’d managed to almost completely bury the fact that I felt awful for leading him on. He hadn’t replied yet. I decided to believe this was because he and Sadie were hiking somewhere without a phone network and not just because he was busy making a redheaded voodoo doll. It wasn’t as though he needed to curse me: I was en route to giving myself a fatal heart attack anyway. Number nine, bungee jump.
‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ Matthew had promised. ‘Sooner or later you’re going to find someone who knocks you right off your feet. Someone who makes you feel alive. Someone who kisses you and makes your knees weak. Relationships are complicated enough as it is. It’s not worth settling for anything less.’
‘Fact,’ Em had agreed. ‘And nothing feels more amazing than meeting someone who drives you crazy. You need a little passion in your life, Ray Ray. Toe-curling, lip-bruising passion.’
At that point I wasn’t sure what was scarier. The thought of the bungee jump, settling for less, or that the only person to have made me feel that way in my entire life was Dan Fraser, seventy-two hours ago when he knocked me right off my feet and onto my back.
Since my eyes had been scarred by the hideous tourist-trap extravaganza on the way into the falls, and my mind was full of nonsense, I was completely unprepared for the ridiculous level of natural beauty that lay in front of me when we finally caught up with Emelie. With every step, the rush of water got louder and louder, the view more and more spectacular. It was absolutely breathtaking. Hopping up to sit on a low stone wall, I ignored the growing lemming tendency that told me I was awfully high up, and snapped a million photos; but not a single picture would ever be able to replicate how I felt at that second. I looked over my shoulder at the neon monstrosities behind us and then back at the falls. No wonder the shops were fighting so hard for my attention, but it wasn’t even really a competition. Unless you were wearing a bum bag and your name was Billy Bob. The falls were immense. Epic. More impressive than the wonder room at Selfridges. Almost as thrilling as the first time I saw my red hair. I had forgotten that there were things in nature that could stun me into silence, things that had been here for centuries, things other than Sky Plus. As soon as I’d regained my composure, true child of the twenty-first century that I was, I took a picture on my phone and texted it to my mum. She would have loved it. In fact, she would love it. I made a mental note to come back with her sometime soon.
‘It’s amazing,’ Matthew said after a few minutes of quiet. ‘Sure you don’t want to find a barrel and go over the top? I’ll totally accept that as an alternative to the bungee jump.’
Oh yeah. I wasn’t here to be stunned into silence by nature. I was here to lock myself in a giant hamster ball and get volleyed a billion feet into the air and back down again to my splattery death. There really hadn’t been any point in sending Ethan that email. I could have just died quietly and let him live on in blissful ignorance.
‘I’m going to pass.’ I peered over the edge into the rush of white water where the falls crashed into the river. Vapour rose up to mist my face lightly, numbing the sick feeling in my stomach. It was strange to feel something so delicate coming from something so powerful. And yet still, sitting here in front of Niagara Falls with my two best friends, in a foreign country, with red hair, a tattoo and very nearly a criminal record, all I could think about was Dan. There really was only one course of action. But there weren’t any barrels handy.
‘Right.’ Back to the falls, I jumped off the wall and dusted down my arse. ‘Where’s this bungee ball?’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ I closed my eyes
as I felt the straps of a very intimate harness being tightened around my denim cut-offs. ‘Do I really have to do this?’
Of all the items on my to-do list, this was the one that was bothering me the most. Get a tattoo, fine. Break the law? There were a million ways to do that without actually getting into trouble on a daily basis. I would rather sign something that said my head would explode if I didn’t go running every day for the next ten years than give the bungee-ball operator, who incidentally didn’t look qualified to be operating a ping-pong ball, a thumbs-up. My fear of heights had never been that debilitating because I’d made a point of never having to deal with heights. Really, when in life did you have to be up high? Simon changed all the light bulbs, I stayed on the bottom deck of the bus and I never went upstairs in Urban Outfitters. Easy. This was not something I’d ever worried about. I didn’t like heights. I didn’t like confined spaces. I didn’t like teenagers in charge of machinery that could kill me. Really, it was like my three biggest phobias had come together. Basically, the only thing that could have made this a more terrifying experience would have been if they’d strapped a tarantula to my face.
I’d made Em, Matthew and their giant ice creams stay at the bottom of the platform, supposedly to take photos, but really it was just so there would be as few witnesses to my nervous breakdown as possible. Plus, their morbid fascination with watching me go to my death had put a fever in their eyes that I did not like seeing. Matthew in particular was enjoying this altogether too much. The pinging catapult and crashing noises he’d been making for the very, very long forty minutes we’d spent waiting in the queue had not helped. By the time I was strapped in, every part of me was dripping in sweat and I was fairly certain I was hyperventilating.