You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) Read online

  The word casino made me think of Rick, and Zé, and I wondered why she hadn’t been in touch. I’d texted her to say I was thinking of her, and had no reply, and assumed things were just too hectic. I resolved to call her as soon as I got home, or even drop round.

  Then Amanda said, “So who was the man I saw coming out of Zé Campbell’s house earlier? I only caught a glimpse but he looked vaguely familiar.”

  Shit, I thought, it must have been a police officer. Poor Zé – already people were gossiping about her, waiting for her downfall.

  “I think she mentioned she was having someone to stay,” I lied. “Juniper’s godfather? Rick’s cousin? Something like that.”

  “Hmmm,” Amanda said. “Anyway, good luck with the shopping. See you later.”

  “Bye,” I said. “And thanks so much again.”

  After being cooped up at home with two stir-crazy children and a bonkers kitten, the prospect of grocery shopping seemed like a blissful opportunity for me-time – the stay-at-home mother’s spa day, I thought, as I untethered a trolley from its fellows and pushed it into the vegetable aisle. I remembered the last time I’d come shopping here, how I’d imagined buying groceries for me and Felix. Now, I knew that would never happen, and to my surprise I felt relieved. I wasn’t shopping now for an imaginary Felix, nor for Jonathan, but just for me and my children. It was strangely liberating. Salad, fruit, cheese, bread, loo rolls, yoghurt, ice cream, fish fingers, a few random treats, and I was done. This would see us through until I got around to doing a proper online order, involving all the dull and heavy things like tinned tomatoes and dishwasher tablets.

  Even so, the carrier bags were not light. I felt my shoulder muscles protesting at the weight of them as I walked out into the street, and noticed it had started to rain again. I had no umbrella, and even if I had, I needed both arms to balance the bags, so it wouldn’t have helped.

  I thought about waiting for a bus to take me the one stop to home, or even calling a taxi, but then I thought how ridiculously feeble that would be. It was only a few hundred yards; only a bit of rain. So I walked on, but as I did so, the shower intensified to a downpour. My hair was soaked and dripping down my face; the legs of my jeans were sodden.

  Reluctantly, I gave up and huddled under a bus shelter with a group of similarly wet, disconsolate shoppers. We looked at one another with a mixture of fellow feeling and hostility – I knew the collective thinking was running along the lines of, ‘I’m wet, you’re wet, we’re all wet. We’re all in it together – but what if someone comes along who is also wet and needs this more than we do?’

  And, inevitably, it happened.

  A woman with a guide dog came down the street, pulling one of those wheely trolleys. She needed one hand for the dog and one for the trolley, and she was soaked through. The dog, of course, looked perfectly happy, trotting proudly along leading its mistress home.

  There was a sort of collective shuffle among the bus shelter’s occupants, like in a Tube carriage when a pregnant woman gets on. Everyone knows someone should get up and give up their place, but no one wants it to be them. No one meets anyone else’s eyes, especially not those of the person who needs a seat.

  Except this woman didn’t have eyes to meet – well, she did, obviously, but they were concealed behind dark glasses. I had a brief tussle with my conscience, but my conscience easily won. After all, I was wet anyway – how much wetter could I get? I headed back into the downpour and approached the woman and her dog.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “There’s a bus shelter just here, if you want to get out of the rain?”

  “Thank you, dear,” she said. “That’s very kind. Isn’t it the wettest August you’ve ever known?”

  “Dismal,” I agreed, steering her under the shelter, into the last corner of space. “There you go. I hope you get home safe, when it eventually stops raining.”

  And, my good deed for the day done, I hurried on towards the house.

  But before I got as far as the next corner, I felt a tap on my shoulder and a voice behind me said, “Carry your bags, madam?”

  I spun around. It was Felix. At first I thought I must be hallucinating – but no, it was unquestionably him, grinning at me from under his umbrella.

  “You’re in New York,” I said stupidly.

  “I came back,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it, when we’re somewhere dry.”

  “I live just round the corner,” I said. “But you know that, of course.”

  “I do,” he said. “Are you going to invite me back for a coffee?”

  Briefly, I wondered whether that would be the stupidest idea ever. Then I said, “Fancy a coffee?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” He took my shopping bags in one hand and my arm in the other and, huddled under his umbrella, we walked the rest of the way home.

  “I’ll make the coffee,” he said. “You get yourself dry.”

  Gratefully, I kicked off my soggy sneakers and headed upstairs. God, I was a sight. My mascara had washed off my eyelashes and spread itself down my face, my hair was drenched rats’ tails and my top had gone completely see-through, revealing my red bra. I dried off, changed my clothes and repaired my face, then hurried back to the kitchen.

  Felix handed me a mug of coffee and I rummaged in the carrier bags and found a packet of biscuits.

  “They’re only Jammie Dodgers,” I said apologetically. “For the children.”

  “My favourite,” he said, ripping open the pack.

  “So, are you going to tell me what you’re going here?” I said. “I thought the Dream run started last week.”

  “It did,” he said. “But I took a few days off. I’m flying back tomorrow, and I’ll be there for the rest of the summer, then I’m back in London, hopefully for the foreseeable future.”

  “Why?” I said. “I mean, why did you come back?”

  “For an audition.”

  The excitement he radiated told me the answer, but I asked the question anyway. “And you got the part?”

  “I did. I totally fucking nailed it. They love me.”

  “So they should.” His pleasure was infectious – I smiled at him over my coffee mug and he smiled back. “What is it?”

  “It’s a new BBC series, about the Wars of the Roses. Kind of Game of Thrones meets The Tudors. Big budget, lots of galloping horses and heaving bosoms – you know the kind of thing. It’s called A Crown of Thorns.”

  “Felix, that’s amazing,” I said. “They’re not making you play Richard III, are they? With a prosthetic hump?”

  “Guess again,” he said.

  “Whatisname – the middle one? The drunk who drowned in a barrel of wine?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “I’m Edward, the hot older brother who gets to shag all the girls. And the male lead, as it happens.”

  “That’s so brilliant,” I said. “Do you get to smoulder?”

  “Of course,” he said, and smouldered.

  I laughed. “Congratulations. It’s your big break, like you said was going to happen.”

  “Looks that way,” he said. “And even if nothing comes of it, they’re planning three seasons so it’ll keep me in lunches at Dmitri’s for a bit. And if it gets syndicated to the States – but that’s thinking too far ahead.”

  “But why are you here? Not just in London, but here, here?”

  “I came for the biscuits, obviously,” Felix said.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Okay, they’re an unexpected bonus. I’m staying down the road, with your friend Zélide.”

  “With Zé? Why?”

  “Her mate Anton told her I was auditioning, and she rang to wish me luck. She asked me where I was staying, but I hadn’t sorted anything yet, so she offered her spare bedroom. She’s having a bit of a rough time – I think she wanted company.”

  “She told me what happened with Rick,” I said.

  “And I wanted – I guess I wanted to see you again, Laura. To make sure yo
u were okay, after what happened in New York.”

  I said, “Jonathan found out about us. He’s moved out and I don’t know if he’s going to come back.”

  Felix said, “Oh God. I’m so sorry.”

  The joy had drained out of his face. He didn’t look triumphant at all, just shocked and concerned. I sniffed and felt a tear trickle down my cheek.

  “Sweetheart, don’t cry.” He jumped to his feet and wrapped his arms around me, holding me tight. There was nothing sexual in his embrace, and no desire in my response to it. I let him hold me while I wept, but all I could think was how much I wanted another pair of arms around me, another chest to press my face against – the embrace of the man I’d loved and trusted for ten years, whose trust I’d betrayed.

  “You really love him, don’t you?” Felix said.

  I nodded my head against his chest, smearing my newly applied eye make-up all over his T-shirt.

  “Then we’ll just have to get him back for you,” he said.

  Chapter 23

  November 2001: Curtain

  The first thing I said to my orthopaedic surgeon, when I’d emerged from the anaesthetic and she came to see how I was doing, was, “Will I be able to dance again?”

  To her eternal credit, she didn’t actually roll around on the floor pissing herself laughing. The NHS trains its daughters well.

  “Laura, that was a highly complex fracture,” she said gravely. “A compound one also, with damage not only to both the medial and lateral maleollus, but also to the surrounding ligaments and tendons, and the skin, of course. You have two screws and a plate in your ankle. I see a lot of professional athletes in my work – and I count dancers among them – and I know you have a better understanding than most people of how your body works.”

  I nodded. I was still pleasantly goofed out on painkillers. “So it’s bad, right?”

  “Athletes – and dancers – are, in my experience, highly motivated when it comes to their recovery,” Mrs Bhattacharyya went on. “Believe me, what you have ahead of you, for the next few weeks and months, will be highly challenging. How well you recover depends on how well you rise to those challenges.”

  “Yes, but…” I began, and then I stopped. I didn’t need to ask her anything more – her face, and the x-rays she’d shown me earlier, when she was explaining what had been done to me, told me everything I needed to know. I didn’t bother asking her whether I’d be able to run down a flight of stairs or whether the pain that throbbed through the cushion of morphine would ever go away, or even whether I’d always walk with a limp. My dancing career was over – that was all that mattered to me.

  I said, “Okay. Thank you,” and went back to sleep.

  I slept for most of the week I spent in hospital – it felt like I did, anyway. The physiotherapist’s twice-daily visits were a maddening interruption – more than the pain, I resented her focus on what seemed to me the trivial matter of achieving strength in the muscles surrounding my shattered joint, the minor detail of keeping early-onset arthritis at bay. I wasn’t going to be able to dance again, so as far as I was concerned I might as well use a wheelchair for the rest of my life, which I hoped would be short. I was in the grip of shock and depression, and it made me absolutely horrible to everyone.

  Sadie visited, bringing flowers, chocolates and heaps of glossy magazines. Her patience was phenomenal – when I snapped at her and asked what the fuck I wanted with chocolates when they’d only make me even fatter than I was going to get anyway, she calmly said, “Fine, I’ll have a couple then. They’re from this artisan place in the village and they’re lovely.”

  And so she sat on the chair next to me, eating chocolates and reading me bits of scurrilous gossip from Heat magazine, and not minding when I snapped back that I didn’t give a shit what colour Victoria Beckham’s hair was this week. She knew – and I knew – that her mere presence was as healing as even the strongest drugs.

  When Roddy came, he was twitchy and overly sympathetic at first, then his flood of concern dried up and I knew he’d come with not only a basket of slightly wrinkly grapes that were going an unappealing shade of beige around their stems, but also an agenda.

  “Listen, Laura,” he said, shifting from foot to foot, ignoring the plastic chair in which Sadie seemed able to sit tranquilly for hours. “I know you haven’t been taking Lawsonski’s calls, but…”

  “But what?” I said. My ankle was throbbing and I was very thirsty, but I wasn’t going to ask Roddy to pour me a glass of water. It was warm, anyway, and tasted stale. And it no longer made any difference to anyone, least of all me, if I stayed properly hydrated.

  “But he really wants to see you. He’s so sorry, now he knows everything. I tried to talk to him that night, babe, I did honestly. But Marius was with him in his dressing room, and then we got the five-minute call and…”

  “Tell him I never want to see him again,” I said. “Tell him if he comes here I’ll call security and get him thrown out. Tell him I hate him.”

  And I adjusted my pillows, closed my eyes and pretended to go to sleep.

  A couple of days after that, I went home with Sadie and Gareth, because there was nowhere else for me to go. I felt like the worst kind of imposition, with my crutches and my stultifying gloom and my bed in their dining room because I couldn’t manage the stairs yet, but I also felt safe, because Felix had never met my family and wouldn’t be able to come and find me there.

  Mel, however, had and could. I was in the conservatory, lying uncomfortably on a wicker sofa watching the lights flicker on and off on the Christmas tree, when I heard Gareth say cheerfully behind me, “Visitor for you, Laura.”

  Sadie would never have let Mel past the front door, but she was off coaching a Pony Club rally, and such nuances were lost on her husband. As far as he was concerned, guests were to be welcomed with open arms and given tea and scones. Even as I craned round to see who it was, Gareth was moving a table over and putting a laden tray down on it.

  “If there’s anything else you need, I’ll be in the field just over there, beyond the house,” Gareth said. “Or just ring my mobile, obviously.” He flushed, clearly not knowing how to cope with Mel, who looked like she’d arrived from an alien planet in her leather hotpants and cashmere poncho.

  “Thanks, Gareth,” I said, and he hurried away, relieved.

  “So,” Mel said, sinking down cross-legged on to the floor next to me. Already I envied her casual grace – and I had years of this ahead of me, years of seeing other women do stuff I’d once been able to do, and couldn’t any more. “Christ, that’s uncomfortable.” She stood effortlessly up again. “Want tea? Or one of these scone things?”

  “Just tea. Black, obviously,” I said, and I took a spiteful pleasure in seeing Mel blush as she remembered the last time she’d made me tea.

  She held her cup and mine awkwardly, not sure where to sit, until I moved my legs over to make space for her on my sofa, even though it hurt. She perched her perfect bum on the edge and looked at me sideways through her hair, putting the teacups down just too far away for me to reach.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened, Laura,” she said. “We all are. The whole company is, like, gutted for you. But you don’t need me to tell you that, of course – you must know already that your pain is our pain.”

  What the fuck was she on about? My pain was my own – I could feel it becoming more intense by the minute as she leaned her insubstantial weight against my foot. I tried to move away and that hurt even more, so much that I hissed involuntarily through my teeth.

  “Oh my God, what am I like?” Mel said, leaping up and almost tipping me over onto the floor. “Sorry, Laura. Look, now I’m up, I won’t sit down again. I expect you want to know why I came.”

  To gloat, I thought. But I said, “Oh yes, I’m avid to know.”

  Mel ignored my sarcasm and said, after a brief, dramatic pause, “I came to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, then,” I said. Pathetic, I know –
but my leg really, really hurt and I was really, really thirsty, and also I needed to wee and the sooner she buggered off the sooner I could ring Gareth on his mobile and ask him to help me back to bed. There was no fucking way I was asking Mel.

  Mel rummaged in her handbag and found a nail file, and scraped it up and down her thumb a bit. Then she cleared her throat and said, “I’m going to New York. I’ve been offered a job at NYCB.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, hating her.

  “And I’m getting married,” she said. That made me try to sit up, and, with a bit of hefting from my arms, I managed to.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  “Yes,” Mel said. She gave the little, subtle tilt of her head that she always did in moments of high emotion in her solos, which she thought was highly affecting and several of my colleagues had told me they found highly annoying, and she added, “To Marius. I know you’ll be so happy for us, Laura. He’s been offered a creative directorship there, and New York is such a wonderful, creatively challenging environment – I just can’t wait. We’re so in love.”

  I was too shocked to say anything for a minute. Then I managed to stammer, “But you… Since when?”

  Mel giggled. “We’ve been together a few months, actually. It was a secret love affair! Marius didn’t want people talking about me. He’s so wonderful, so considerate. He…”

  She burbled on, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking. Suddenly, so many things made sense. How defensive Mel had been whenever Marius was mentioned – she must have been harbouring a crush on him for ages. And then he’d promoted her, and slept with her, and she knew that everyone would say the two things were inextricably linked – which they probably were. So, to deflect attention from what she was doing, she’d started the rumour about him and me. I wondered if she knew what he’d done to me in my dressing room that night. I hoped she didn’t – but who knew? Mel was ambitious enough, and presumably still sufficiently in awe of her famous fiancé, to overlook a minor indiscretion like sexual assault.