The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Four
How did she get here?
The question rings in Fia’s ears long after Benjamin hightails it out of her office. Of course, she knows that so far as his induction exercise was concerned, he’d been supposed to enquire in a purely professional sense. What dominates her thoughts, now, though … that’s undeniably of a much more personal nature.
The truth is that, most of the time, in life, human beings behave predictably. Not always perfectly, not without a few false starts or wrong turns or long ways around – but there is, generally, some sense of a natural evolution, of one thing leading logically to another.
Other times, more rarely, people do things that don’t make any sense, things for which there is simply no explanation. If they happened on a television drama, fans would take to Twitter and criticize the writing. That was just so out of character, they’d say. It stretches credibility – it’s a bolt from the blue. I don’t buy it.
Getting married to Benjamin Lowry was, for Fia Callaghan, one of those things.
She is analytical by nature, though. She cannot help but try to come up with some sort of rationalization.
First of all, they were in Las Vegas.
Looking back on the whole thing, Fia actually blames the city of Las Vegas for most of it.
After all, before that summer, her life had been proceeding very normally. At the very least, no legally binding commitments had worked their way into the mix.
Having freshly completed her final year of university, Fia spent most of the summer in question working as a camp counsellor. Quite how she’d even landed the position was unclear to her – certainly, she hadn’t needed to demonstrate any particular talent or experience with children. One single form, filled out at a careers fair with the free pen provided, and the rest seemed to do itself. Before she knew it, she was jetting out of Dublin airport and heading to north-west Oregon, a place to which she had never previously given one single moment’s thought in her life.
Camp Birchwood turned out to be all tall trees and wide lakes, the nearest town an hour’s drive away. In other words, it was a make your own fun sort of situation. And Benjamin Lowry certainly liked to make his own fun. Hailing from somewhere in North Carolina, he’d travelled all the way across the country to arrive in Oregon, but no one would have guessed it. Within thirty minutes, Benjamin’s laugh was ringing out constantly across Camp Birchwood; his name seemed to be on everyone’s lips, as though he had never lived a day anywhere else.
Although he was only very slightly younger than her and employed in an identical role, it soon became clear to Fia that working alongside Benjamin was like having another child in tow – another person all too ready to play a prank, pick a fight, ask her why seven times.
‘I say let’s just wing it,’ he was known to proclaim at regular intervals. Or, sometimes, ‘It’ll all work itself out.’ Or, quite often, as the weeks wore on, ‘I swear to fucking Christ, Fia, if you say one more word …’
It was quite a remarkable feat, really, that whatever Benjamin Lowry’s opinion over the course of summer 2015, Fia tended to have the very opposite view. And neither of them were shy about expressing themselves. At times, Benjamin seemed, in fact, to almost enjoy swearing that what Fia called black was truly white. For her own part, Fia certainly didn’t seek out this antagonism; she hadn’t experienced anything like it with classmates or colleagues past. She really wasn’t, in her own view, a particularly confrontational sort of person. But there was just something about Benjamin. Their relationship seemed to come with frustration, with a kind of tension, built into it.
That Benjamin was very evidently a rich-boy hadn’t helped matters. Fia had an instinctive, dearly held dislike of rich-boys. More so even than dislike, it was a matter of distrust. She didn’t trust Benjamin’s rich-boy hair or his rich-boy sporting abilities, his rich-boy enthusiasm and joviality. Everyone else might have eaten it up (everyone else absolutely did eat it up), but not her. She could see that he was fundamentally cocky, careless, insincere. Meanwhile, she couldn’t have ventured to guess at her own core deficiencies – but, whatever they were, Benjamin Lowry seemed uniquely placed to perceive them.
All in all, it made for an interesting summer, to say the least. The situation was unbelievably aggravating, at times confusing, but inherently temporary, of course – and certainly never boring.
By mid-August, the children were dispatched back to their parents, and Camp Birchwood’s dozen or so counsellors arranged a long weekend away to mark the end of their time together. The summer had flown past; soon, Fia would be back in Dublin, taking her first steps into the legal profession. The Vegas weekend was a last blowout before everyone returned to their respective lives, and in hindsight, this – the very theme of the trip – was perhaps never going to make for top-class decision-making from anyone involved.
Immediately upon arrival, Las Vegas seemed weird to Fia. There were escalators and moving walkways dotted along the Strip for maximum convenience – yes, right there on the street, in the open air. Slap bang in the middle of all the action, hordes of tourists were queuing excitedly to climb a replica of the Eiffel Tower. Per a wholehearted recommendation from their hotel concierge, the gang from Camp Birchwood spent an entire afternoon cruising the elaborate ‘Venice canals’ – which, in fact, were housed inside a shopping mall, complete with imitation gondolas and a painted blue sky above them.
Afterwards, as their little group wandered the streets, taking in the sights and sounds of the place, even the mountains in the distance somehow looked to Fia like they must be part of a film set. Everywhere, people were drinking, and everywhere, people were dressed in all manner of costumes – some for what seemed like professional reasons and some for what seemed like no reason at all. It was all very kitschy, very carnivalesque. The normal rules of life simply did not seem to apply here.
In short, even stone cold sober, there was an overwhelming sense of the surreal.
And, on the night it all went down, Fia was so, so far from stone cold sober.
Vast quantities of alcohol were consumed by her, by Benjamin, and by everyone else besides. This was not, at least on her end, because she was masking a secret pain, or because she needed the sambuca in order to feel confident, or because she was in some masochistic way intent on self-sabotage. It was because she was 22 years old and, for the first time in ten weeks, there were no American children for whom she was directly responsible. Presented with the chance to let loose in a way she hadn’t felt able to all summer, Fia was inclined to take it.
Furthermore, the drinks were free. That was a critical point, actually. All the casinos, in an effort to retain custom and encourage gambling, gave out endless drinks to college kids for free. The most cursory glance at their IDs (some of which were not even especially good fakes) was all it seemed to take.
Hours passed, that night, in a blur of neon lights and palm trees, games machines and card tables. At some point, a very sweet Texan named Brittany was seized with the sudden impulse to get a tattoo. Things everyone had previously known about Brittany included that she was studying to become a diabetes nurse, and that she was wholeheartedly convinced she would ultimately give birth to triplets, or at least twins, because they ran in her family – probably, she thought, this would happen within the next five years; she wanted to be a young mother. It was with some surprise, then, that Fia watched as the words Yaaas Queen were printed in bold black ink on this girl’s upper arm. But nonetheless, Fia whooped and hollered her support right alongside the rest of the gang.
She can remember, after that, standing in a huddle on the Strip, everyone rowdy and buzzed. The night air was dry and thick, as though heat were being pumped out by some unseen generator. Fia would not have been a bit surprised to find that it was. More fakery.
‘Oh my God, you guys!’ a slurred voice offered then. ‘You know what we should do? For real …? Someone should get married!’
Much surrounding giddiness ensued, with the general consensus being that, yes, this was an excellent idea. It made only good sense. When in Rome, and so on.
‘It should be you guys!’ someone else piped up, pointing at Fia and Benjamin.
‘Oh my God, can you imagine?! They’d kill each other!’
‘I don’t know! You guys already argue like an old married couple sometimes!’
Through all this laughter and noise, Fia glanced across at Benjamin.
‘Nah,’ he said quietly, and even in his drunken state, he managed – with the quick rise of his eyebrows, the focus of his stare – to achieve what must surely have been the desired effect. ‘Far too sensible, aren’t you, Irish?’
She looked right back at him, undaunted. ‘Let’s just say I’m not sure you’re husband material, Benjamin.’
That was all it took, thankfully, for the idea to be dropped – exchanged, instead, for more drinking, more dancing, more spectacle and silliness into the wee hours. It must have been nearly 3 a.m. by the time Fia was standing at that craps table, watching as some stranger rolled the dice. She was hammered by then, well and truly, and glad of a solid surface to lean against, when a familiar voice emerged from behind her.
‘To think, we could be man and wife already,’ Benjamin said, low and scratchy, the words murmured right into her ear.
He lingered there for a moment, and she could feel his breath against her skin, could smell the mixture of alcohol and something else. The sensation sent a peculiar shiver through her.
Following his gaze, Fia looked over to the very far end of the casino. She could make out the words WEDDING CHAPEL written above an archway. She snorted out a laugh, twisting herself around just enough to see him properly.
‘Oh yeah, right,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have done it.’
‘You wouldn’t have done it,’ he countered, his face inches from hers.
More so than anything that came before or afterwards, it was the one moment of the whole cursed night that – even years later – Fia would remember with shocking clarity: she and Benjamin Lowry looking at one another as if that crowded casino were some sort of hunting ground and they were the only two creatures there – as if they had been trying for the entire summer to outrun each other and still had no clear consensus as to who was the pursuer and who was the prey.
It was a moment, between the pair of them, of utter madness. Not of frenzy, but of madness nonetheless.
Almost a decade later, Fia sits in the office of her fancy New York law firm, allegedly all grown up now. And still, her memories after that point are patchy – they come back only in fragments, like flashes from a nightmare. What she can seem to access, more so than any verb or adjective, is a sensation. The feeling of knowing that Benjamin Lowry expected her to back out of this thing and knowing that she absolutely wasn’t going to – knowing that in fact he’d bethe one to back out, even though, somehow, he hadn’t, not yet …
She remembers that same, overwhelming sense of the surreal – the utterly laughable and ludicrous – that she’d felt everywhere else in Las Vegas. They were in a room dressed up to look like a sort of church, but it wasn’t one really. The officiant was playing at being Dolly Parton, and Fia was playacting too. This was all a lark, the last in a long line of times she and Benjamin had fought to get the last word.
Fia remembers all of that, and then she remembers realizing, in a hazy sort of way, that the whole thing was – maybe – over? At that point in her life, she had never attended a wedding ceremony that had lasted any less than ninety minutes at a bare minimum. Without all the hymns and the readings and the other God bits, though, it turned out that Dolly Parton could really crack on with things.