a cigarette and coffee break at eleven, even though you don’t smoke but think it’s unfair that smokers receive extra breaks. You take an hour lunch break at one p.m. You sit alone, you do the crossword. You are always late back to your desk. It takes you until two thirty to begin work again but for the afternoon you are diligent and complete your work. You finish at six p.m.’
‘Why are you telling me things that I already know?’ I spoke like I didn’t care but in truth it was disturbing to listen to. It was disturbing to know that all the little things I did in secret were being noted by somebody, and being logged in a computer for some stressed-out office nerd to read like I was some sort of solitaire game.
‘You go to the gym every day after work. You’re supposed to jog for twenty minutes but always stop at seventeen, you work out for thirty minutes more. You sometimes meet friends for dinner, you would always rather be at home, you always leave early. You go to bed, you do the crossword. You get up at seven a.m.’
He left a silence.
‘You see a theme emerging?’
‘I’m prone to solving crosswords? So what? What’s your point?’
He sat back then, studied me again with his tired unblinking eyes.
‘No. What’s yours?’
I swallowed a large dry lump that had formed in my throat. ‘Well, that’s very profound.’
‘Not really. It’s just a question. Okay, why don’t I speak in a way that you understand. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to leave here in thirty minutes, exactly on time at the end of our meeting, then you’re going to try to forget everything we’ve talked about. You will succeed. I will be reduced to an annoying frustrating little man who made you waste a few hours of your Sunday and you’ll go back to living your life exactly the way you were.’
He stopped. I waited for more, but there wasn’t anything. I was confused. He couldn’t possibly believe that. Then I got it. ‘That’s a lie.’
‘It’s not a lie if the outcome is exactly the same.’
I didn’t want to ask but I had to. ‘And what’s the outcome?’
‘You’ll be as alone and as bored and as unhappy as you were before you met me, but this time it will be worse because this time you’ll know it. You’ll know it every second of every day.’
And on that note, I grabbed my bag and left. With exactly thirty minutes to go, just like he’d said.
CHAPTER SIX
Silchesters don’t cry. It was what my father had told me when I was five years old and I’d fallen off my bike after taking the stabilisers off for the first time. He had been beside me, guiding me along the driveway of our home, though he was further away than I’d have liked but I didn’t want to tell him that because I knew he would be disappointed. Even at five I knew that. I didn’t hurt myself, I was more in shock over the feel of the hard tarmac as my knee slammed down on it and as the bicycle got crushed between my legs. I’d held out my arms to him for help but in the end I got to my feet by myself under his instructions. I still remember his voice. Move the bike away from your leg. Now stand up, don’t make that noise, Lucy, stand up. I’d stood up, hunched as though my leg needed amputation, until I was told to stand up straight. I’d wanted a hug but I didn’t say so, knew that asking for and wanting one would be wrong in his eyes, but knowing in my heart that it wasn’t. It was just the way he was and that’s what I always understood. Even at five years old. Apart from the time Blake left me and when Life reminded me about it, I rarely cried and rarely felt the need to.
In the end it had all ended so quickly. We were together for five years, we had a sociable, fun, busy life together. We had talked about marriage and all of those things and while we weren’t remotely ready to do any of them yet, the understanding was that we would eventually. To each other. When we grew up. But in the process of growing up, I lost him. Somewhere along the way. Not over one day, it happened gradually, he disappeared a little more and more every day. Not his presence, we were always together but I felt like he was going somewhere, even when we were in the same room. Then he sat me down and we had the chat. And that was it. Well, the chat came after an important conversation.
He’d just signed the deal to do his new travel show at that time so he’d started travelling on his own, I suppose it was kind of practice, or that’s what I thought it had been at the time but maybe it was something more. Maybe he was searching for something he just couldn’t find in our converted bread-factory apartment. Sometimes now I think he was seeing somebody else but I have absolutely no reason other than paranoia to back that up. He had been on a trip to Finland and when he returned you’d swear he’d just walked on the moon or had a religious experience. He wouldn’t stop talking about the calm, the quiet, the peace, how much he was at one with whatever the hell else could survive in minus forty degrees. He kept telling me how I had no idea, I couldn’t possibly understand what he was talking about. I told him I could understand. I understood the calmness, the clarity, the contentment in life when you have that perfect moment. Yes I did, I understood. I didn’t use the same words when he was describing it, my eyes didn’t light up to a pure icy blue as if I was seeing the gates of heaven, but yes I understood those feelings.
‘Lucy, you don’t understand, believe me you do not understand.’
‘What do you mean, “you” do not understand? What’s so different about me to other people that I couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to have a moment of fucking contentment? You don’t have to go to Kathmandu to find inner peace, you know, some of us have it right here in the city. In a bubble bath. With a book. And a glass of wine.’
And then followed the chat. Not immediately after, it may have been a few days, it may have been a few weeks. But whatever it was, it was afterwards. It had given me enough time to digest that he felt I was a different type of person from him, one who didn’t understand the depths of him. I had never felt that before. I had always known we were different, but I didn’t know that he knew that. It sounds like a small detail but actually when really thought about, it became everything. When I travelled, I travelled to see new places; when he travelled, he travelled to find new parts of himself. I guess when you’re trying to find all the parts of yourself, it’s difficult to be with someone who’s already fully intact.
Then here’s where we did a stupid thing, and he walked me into a scenario that I wish I could change every day of my life. Obviously, I was upset. I was very upset, I was so upset I turned to religion – the Silchester religion of worrying about what People would think. He told me that if it made me feel any better we could tell people that I left him. Now, in my current reasonable-ish state I don’t know why I would have agreed to that. But I did. It helped me after the break-up, it gave me a strength that I needed while having those conversations with friends and family so I could say, ‘It just wasn’t working, I had to leave him.’ Because when I said that, there were fewer questions. If I’d told them he left me, there would be endless amounts of pity, of trying to figure it all out on my behalf, what I did wrong, how was it my fault, then them being afraid to talk about it when they met him or saw him with a new girlfriend. My dumping him was to make everything easier. Only it wasn’t easier because he had left me and I had to listen to every little thing about him and pretend it didn’t hurt, and then see him on his TV show and pretend it didn’t hurt and whenever I got angry at him I had to listen to how I had no reason to be angry and how hurt he might be, the poor thing, and I was trapped in this big fat lie.
Because I ended up carrying around this big secret that nobody knew about, this big ball of hurt that had turned to anger, which often turned to pity, then loneliness because I never had those necessary conversations to help me get over it properly, I felt alone in my secret reality. So in the initial stages I carried that hurt and anger and pity