Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis

Chapter Thirteen

‘Oh, Elle, I can’t actually believe he was at the hospital.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean, out of all of the bloody places you could both be and at the same time.’

‘I know!’

‘What do you think this means?’ Charlie says without so much as a glance over her shoulder, and I know she isn’t addressing me. She’s addressing Theo, who is refilling a big container of glistening stuffed olives behind the glass deli counter I lean against, Petal snuffling on his chest in a black sling with silver loops at one shoulder, like a toga.

‘I think it means a lot,’ says Theo calmly. ‘They’re on the same plane. They have the same energy. They’re in complete alignment. They’re being pushed together, like magnets.’

I laugh, my hands around a mug of herbal tea Theo made me, and one that seems to be floating with what looks like bits of garden waste I dare not enquire about. ‘I don’t know about that––’

‘Oh come on,’ says Charlie. ‘Don’t give me that, Noelle Butterby, you know it means something.’ Charlie crunches an organic sourdough crouton then stares at me, eyes crinkling at the corners, as if staring into my very soul. ‘You’re marrying this man.’

I laugh again, louder this time. ‘Ah, well, see, I’m very sorry to report to you both that I don’t think that’s going to happen.’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘He threw my number away,’ I say, tossing the words into the middle of the room like a bomb. ‘Yuuuup. That’s right, my friends. Like balled-up bog roll he’d wiped his arse on.’

Charlie stops chewing then, a rainbow of salad speared on her fork. ‘What?’

‘I gave him my number at the hospital. On a leaflet. I wrote it down. And he chucked it away.’

‘How do you even know that?’

‘Found it. Screwed up, chucked on a bench.’

Charlie freezes, her brow creasing beneath her blunt fringe. Her earrings, two plastic slices of lime, swing beside her rosy cheeks. She turns and looks at Theo, as if for the answer to the conundrum, but he says nothing.

‘Ah,’ I say, stealing a crouton. ‘Still think I’m marrying him now?’ I crunch it between my teeth.

It’s been a week since the hospital and it already feels like it didn’t happen – like it was something I imagined, like a weird, tired, delirious three a.m. fever dream. Mum going in an ambulance. That coffee I had with Ed in my ridiculous Moomin pyjama top. Seeing Sam – actually seeing him – in the middle of the night in a place the pair of us probably least expected. My number on a leaflet, screwed up and chucked on a hospital bench.

‘But why would he throw it away?’ asks Charlie. ‘Like – why? I don’t get it.’

‘Fear,’ says Theo, sliding the glass deli counter’s door closed. ‘Most adverse reactions to things are because of fear.’

‘Or a girlfriend?’ I offer. ‘A wife?’

‘Oh, who cares about that?’

‘Him, Charlie. Maybe he’s, you know, a decent person.’

‘But you – you got on so well, Noelle,’ Charlie groans, lagging behind us on the conversation trail. ‘You could just be friends. You didn’t give him your number and proposition him for God’s sake.’ Charlie looks at me. ‘Did you?’

‘No.’I laugh.

‘Well, I know you, and sometimes you say batshit things, especially when you’re tired. Or drunk.’

‘Or nervous,’ adds Theo.

‘Well, I didn’t. I just said we should stay in touch.’

‘Well, there you go.’ Charlie straightens like she’s solved it, like that’s that and the leaflet is now safely out of the bin, folded neatly, and in Sam’s back pocket where it should be. ‘Staying in touch so mild-sounding. So benign and friendly.’ She looks at Theo as if he’s an oracle and not a Greek deli owner. ‘What’s he got to be afraid of?’

‘Well, a number of things,’ says Theo measuredly.

‘Maybe he got the vibe,’ I say. ‘That I was sort of checking out his nice jaw, and his broad shoulders and imagining just a bit what he might look like up a mountain in nothing but bear skins …’

Theo shakes his head. ‘Nah, we don’t pick up on things like that,’ he says, a hand resting on Petal’s little curved back. ‘No, I think it’s fear. It feels like fear, sounds like fear …’

‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.’ I shrug. ‘Plus, it wasn’t all bad, I––’ And I stop the second I feel the words working their way up my throat. I want to tell them about Ed, of course I do. I tell them everything. But I haven’t told anyone, yet, that I’ve seen him, because I know they won’t approve. Mum might, she always loved him. But everyone else in my life has filed him under various permanent labels, including ‘spineless, dirty little dweeb’ (Charlie) and ‘Knob-Ed’ (Dilly) and ‘Stupid, Little Cretin. Am I allowed to say cretin?’ (Ian). There’s some sort of law, isn’t there, that when you break up with someone, they’re forever remembered and defined by their behaviour when you broke up, and anything after. Everything they did before that is null and void. Even the happy memories. Even all the love you gave each other. Means sod all if they walk out on you during what was supposed to be a very adult, grown-up goodbye in Pizza Hut and leave you crying into a bowl of ice cream you piled with an embarrassing amount of jelly tots from the ice-cream factory. That’s how it really ended. No tear-filled farewell at the airport, no sobbing in his bed, wrapped in his old hoodie. Just a ‘let’s meet for pizza and say goodbye’ lunch that turned into a ‘go fuck yourself’ lunch when Mum called my phone three times in a row, when Ed sighed, and when I thought he was having a dig about his move without me when he ordered a ‘barbecue Americano’ pizza. He walked out. I ate too much. I vomited when I got home. Not quite the heart-breaking, romance movie goodbye I’d imagined us having after twelve years together.

‘It was just nice to have someone there,’ I say to Charlie and Theo instead, ‘even if it was fleeting.’ Petal starts to cry, tiny hiccupping mews. Theo shushes her through his bristly beard, kisses the top of her head.

‘I reckon he’ll be back,’ he says, swaying, his hand circling Petal’s back. ‘I reckon there’ll be more. Things happen in threes. And destiny …’

‘Destiny,’ I say with a laugh, although I’m not sure the laugh was real enough to convince anyone, because destiny is exactly what I was thinking about when I saw Sam push through those double doors. Those stars beneath my skin. That something I sensed. And then I felt like an idiot when I saw that leaflet balled up. A stupid, gullible, stars-in-her-eyes twat.

‘Destiny can’t be deterred,’ finishes Theo.

‘Exactly,’ says Charlie with a quick smile as she straightens, snapping her bento box closed. ‘Anyway. I need to go.’

‘Already?’ says Theo, over the growing sound of Petal’s crying.

‘I’m packed out with appointments, Boo.’ Charlie whisks her beige chunky-knit cardigan on. ‘Got one in five minutes. Bloke coming for the outline of a back tattoo and then another in for a sleeve. Proper intricate and pain-in-the-arse.’

‘Oh. I thought you said …’ starts Theo. ‘Never mind.’ And I can’t help but notice something in Theo’s eyes as he looks down at Petal’s fluffy little head. Disappointment, maybe. A glimmer of worry.

‘I’ll be home at five,’ says Charlie to Theo, but pressing her cool, powdery cheek to mine.

‘Bye, Elle. Text you later about the cinema.’ And she’s gone, the bell above the shop door jangling, the posters stuck to the glass of the door curling at the edges from the breeze.

Theo looks at me sadly, and there’s silence for a moment.

‘I’d better go. Mum wants me to take a trip into town, go to the market for some stuff. And I want to get some hydrangeas. Saw this amazing arrangement on Instagram and I want to try it out.’

‘I like your amazing arrangements on Instagram. I loved the daffodil one you put up a couple of weeks back. Beautiful.’

I smile. ‘Thanks, Theo. You two are always my first likes.’

‘Your biggest fans,’ he says, proudly, with a nod. ‘And I told you about Mum’s coffee kiosk in the station, didn’t I? That it’s available. Up for rent. I said to Char … Could be a flower stall.’

I look at him. ‘I wish, Theo.’

‘Ask the universe and you’ll receive.’ He grins, then he pulls his lips into a grimace, like he’s gearing himself up to say something. ‘Noelle,’ he says, ‘does er – does Charlie seem OK to you?’

‘Erm.’ I hesitate, glance at the invisible trail Charlie made beside me when she left. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I think so. Why?’

Petal groans on his chest, little fists breaking free from the sling, skimming Theo’s beard. ‘She just – I dunno, I can’t help but think there’s something going on. She doesn’t seem herself at home. We don’t … talk, like we used to. I mean, I try but she just says she’s fine. But – oh, I don’t know. I just wonder if there’s something she isn’t telling me.’

‘Really?’

Theo gives an almost shameful shrug and I remember for a moment, how happy Charlie was when they first met, and how she described him after their first date. ‘He’s so calm and gentle, Noelle,’ she said. ‘He reminds me of like – Jesus or something. Or like Ben Affleck if Ben Affleck was Greek and converted to Buddhism or something. You know?’

‘She’s always rushing off, rushing out,’ Theo carries on. ‘And she said today she didn’t have a lot on, but you saw her. She dashed out of here all of a sudden like there was a bloody fire. I worry there’s something she isn’t telling me. I feel that’s what it is.’

‘Maybe it’s tiredness. For you both,’ I say, carefully, but Charlie from a few weeks ago, outside her shop, blinks into my mind. ‘Am I still her? Am I still Charlie Wilde?’

‘I don’t know too much about babies,’ I carry on, ‘but you have a newborn, Theo. Everything is so new and everything’s changed, and – well, you wouldn’t be the first husband in the world who felt disconnected from his wife two months after they’ve had their first baby. Right?’

Theo hesitates, then gives a stiff nod. ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘Maybe it is tiredness. Tiredness makes you paranoid, doesn’t it? A bit distant?’

‘Definitely,’ I say. ‘Plus, sleep deprivation is used as a torture tactic. If that helps.’

Theo laughs, his bushy eyebrows meeting in the middle. ‘It does, Noelle. Very weirdly it does.’

I walk to my car, and half-expect (and half-hope) to see Ed as I pass the train station on my way to the car, and can’t help but let my mind wander. Say if we did just need the break? It doesn’t exactly sound unrealistic, does it, to say, ‘My boyfriend went and worked abroad for two years and we broke up, but when he came back, we realised how much we missed each other and that was it. The rest, as they say, is history!’ Cue: cheesy Hello!-magazine-style photo of Ed and me, laughing in a sunlit apple orchard, me in one of those floppy summer hats. No. No, come on, it was just once. One coffee. One twenty-minute coffee. But after seeing him at the hospital, I can hardly believe I was so nervous to see him. It was – nice. Like putting on an old comfortable cardigan, or something. Something you lost that fit perfectly, that you then find again, and it fits just the same, wraps perfectly around you, and you wonder why you’ve left it so long. The thought of Sam niggles at me though every single time I think of the hospital, and it twists in my chest. Embarrassment, I think. Total bloody cringe. Why did he throw my number away? And why did I have to go and be all ‘Ha, ha, let’s do a Steve and Candice who wrote to each other! And then fell in love! And then got engaged! Who me? No, I’m not intense at all, Sam, not intense in the slightest!’

I get to my car, slot the key in the door. It jams. Last time this happened, Sam wriggled it, unlocked it for me on the frozen road, gave me that small smile … then – I freeze, my hand full of keys. Is that … it is. I can see her on the other side of the street. Charlie. In her car, driving in the complete opposite direction, away from the tattoo studio she so desperately needed to get to five minutes ago.