Hello stranger, p.1
Hello, Stranger, page 1
Rachel Marks
* * *
HELLO, STRANGER
Contents
The Day of the Break-Up LUCY
JAMIE
Before LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
The Day of the Break-Up JAMIE
Before LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
The Day of the Break-Up LUCY
Before LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
The Day of the Break-Up JAMIE
Before LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
The Day of the Break-Up LUCY
Before LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
The Day of the Break-Up JAMIE
Before LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
The Day of the Break-Up LUCY
Before LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
The Day of the Break-Up JAMIE
Before LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
The Day of the Break-Up LUCY
Before LUCY
JAMIE
After LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
LUCY
JAMIE
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Rachel Marks studied English at Exeter University before becoming a primary school teacher. Despite always loving to write, it wasn’t until she gained a place on the 2016 Curtis Brown Creative online novel-writing course that she started to believe it could be anything more than a much-loved hobby. She lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and their three children. Hello, Stranger is her third novel.
To Carl, for being my rock, and
Coco, my miracle in so many ways.
THE DAY OF THE BREAK-UP
Lucy
‘You know this has to happen, don’t you? That there’s no alternative.’
We are lying in bed eating croissants, sharing the same tray – leaning towards each other so as not to spill crumbs on the quilt – our foreheads nearly touching, and in many ways it feels just like any other Sunday morning. Radio 2 is blaring out from the kitchen – we spend our lives with Jamie turning it off and me turning it back on – him enjoying the silence and me needing background noise. He has covered my croissant in Nutella, just how I like it, neither too little nor too much, and drowned his in jam so that it constantly spills out the sides and runs down his fingers. Normally, once he’s finished, I’ll grab his hands playfully and start to lick the jam off and he’ll try to push me away with his legs, until we inevitably end up back under the covers.
But I don’t think that will happen today. Because today I am leaving our relationship, the best relationship I’ve ever had in my life, knowing that it will be the relationship I will compare all others against. That one day I will walk down the aisle and there will be another man standing at the end waiting for me and amidst the joy I will feel a flutter catch in my chest as I picture Jamie at the altar and wonder what if?
‘There’s not no alternative. The alternative is that we don’t split up.’
We’re talking about it in the way we might discuss a story in the paper or on the evening news, both starting by calmly presenting our argument, using well-thought-out examples to back ourselves up, listening to each other’s point of view whilst knowing we are never going to agree. I’m a complete nightmare for backing down – we both know that – and he loves me anyway for which I love him immensely. I know that this conversation will probably go the same way as all our others do – with me storming off in frustration that he won’t accept that I’m right and then, when he needs space, me following him around not understanding why he can’t just see my side. But at the moment all is reasonable and calm.
‘So we don’t split up and you spend your life regretting it, resenting me …’ I can hear the emotion filtering its way into my voice and take a deep breath, trying to remain measured so that he knows that I’m not just jumping on some spur-of-the-moment worry and blowing it out of proportion. That I’ve thought this through for the past two months or so – well, in many ways, since the moment I met him and realized how amazing he was. I’ve tried it every which way in my head, listed all possibilities, all outcomes, and I know that there is no other option.
‘If I’m making the decision then I’d never resent you. That wouldn’t be fair.’
I push the tray on to his lap and stand up, putting on the joggers and T-shirt that I left on the floor beside the bed when I took them off last night. He hates that I scatter my clothes around the bedroom floor, spending his life picking them up and dumping them in one huge pile, as if that’s somehow making the room tidy.
‘You wouldn’t do it on purpose. Resentment isn’t something you choose, or something that you can choose not to feel. It creeps up on you slowly and eats into you until it eats the love too.’
‘Like a monster? Or a moth?’ A hint of a smile creeps across Jamie’s lips and I know exactly what he’s doing – trying to remind me of all the wonderful things about him so that I change my mind and stay. But I don’t need reminding. And I can’t allow myself to soften.
‘You’re not taking me seriously.’
His face falls suddenly. ‘I am. I just don’t want you to be right on this occasion.’
I want to sit back on the bed, to take his face in my hands and kiss him.
‘What if I promise to let you be right about everything else for the rest of our lives and you just let me have this one thing?’ he continues, looking up at me with his big brown eyes, his hair a beautiful mess, as it always is after he’s woken up, and I wish I could let him be right about this. I wish with all my heart that he was right, but I know that if I climb back into that bed with him and pretend that everything is going to be OK, it’s going to ruin both our lives.
‘I’m going to move in with Amy for a bit. You keep the house for now and, when you’re ready, I’ll help you to sell it.’
‘Lucy.’
‘It’s for the best.’
‘So why does it feel like the worst day of my life?’
He looks so sad and I wish that he’d just shout at me, storm off into his man cave (the bathroom) and slam the door. Why does he have to be so bloody adorable? How am I supposed to leave him when he’s like this? I try to think of something I can say to provoke him. But at the same time, deep down I know this isn’t just another argument. There will be no make-up sex. And I don’t want our last ‘moment’ to be us screaming at each other.
‘It’s going to be OK. I know it is.’
I say it as much for myself as for him. Because the longer I stand here, the less sure I am that it’s true.
Jamie
As Lucy stands there telling me that we can’t be together, talking about moving out and selling the house as if we’re discussing our weekend plans, it occurs to me that she is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen or will ever see in my entire life. Her light blonde hair has the perfect amount of kink; her big blue eyes are so full of raw emotion, whatever emotion it is that she happens to be feeling – rage, sorrow, concern, excitement – her eyes are always brimming with it. She can never disguise it – well, not to me anyway. She is the type of person who feels passionate about everything – a woman being depicted chauvinistically in a perfume advert; the fact that next door’s cat should be trained not to shit in our garden; the man who should’ve stood up for the pregnant woman on the bus. My mum once said, ‘Doesn’t it get annoying sometimes, having to be the water to her fire?’ And yes, sometimes when her intolerance for injustice is directed towards me, when I am the one supposedly at fault, it makes me want to punch a wall or run to the end of the garden and scream because she is so infuriatingly stubborn and will never ever see my point of view. But at the same time, in my eyes she is never more beautiful than when she’s taking on the world, trying to right it one tiny injustice at a time.
‘It’s going to feel shit for a while,’ she continues. ‘For a long while, I expect. But one day you’ll meet someone else who is perfect for you in every way, and I want you to pick up the phone and call me and say “thank you”.’
She smiles now, just a tiny one, but it’s the first she’s given me since this conversation began and I want to jump on it, to water it and help it grow.
‘What if I sink into a pit of despair, get a drug habit, lose my job, become homeless, don’t even have a phone to call you with, what then?’
For a moment I think she’s going to sit down beside me, and my heart starts to race because I know that if she does, I’ll be able to convince her to stay. That we’ll end up back in bed, making love until we ache. But as she starts packing things into a bag, I realize that I’ve actually done the opposite, that my being nice has convinced her even more that she’s doing the right thing. Perhaps I should just start screaming at her.
‘I’ll come and get more of my stuff in the week whilst you’re at work.’
‘You don’t have to avoid me, you know?’
She shakes her head and I’m scared she’s about to start crying. ‘I do.’
I know exactly wha t she means, that seeing each other and not being together would be too hard. But the thought of not seeing her, of days waking up to an empty bed – the bed we shared – of eating breakfast and not fighting over the milk, of going to work without her silly messages to get me through the day, of coming home and not tripping over the shoes that she always leaves on the mat despite the fact we have a shoe rack right beside the door, of not arguing over what to watch on the television, of the day ending, and the next one starting, the cycle complete and her not being there for any of it, it feels impossible.
‘OK. Well, just hold on to your key. In case you forget anything.’
She continues packing and I force myself to get up and into the shower. I don’t think I can bear to watch her gathering up her things, stuffing them into bags in that haphazard way she always does.
The water is cleansing, the gentle rhythm of it falling on to my head, my shoulders. It was the same when Dad died, and when Thomas died … It was the little things that got me through – the fact you still had to brush your teeth, to eat, to shit – and the way that if you just kept doing them the hours passed and life continued. I wash my hair. I’m lucky – aged thirty-three and it’s still thick, dark, but then Dad’s was at forty-six when he died. That was the other thing – trying to be grateful for the little things, to find tiny amounts of joy where I could.
I finish washing and dry myself with a towel, putting it neatly on the radiator in case Lucy wants to use it later. But then I realize she won’t be here later and that thought alone makes me want to curl up into a ball on the bathroom floor. I can still hear her through the en-suite door, shutting drawers and zipping bags. I brush my teeth and go back into the bedroom to get some boxers out of the drawer.
It should be vaguely comical, me walking around the bedroom naked with my todger swinging from side to side (or jiggling might be a better word – I’m not that well-endowed) or if not comical then awkward, but it just feels normal. And that makes me feel even more sad.
I get dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and then take our tray down to the kitchen, where I wash up our breakfast stuff along with the mugs from last night’s hot chocolate, the moment the dreaded conversation began. Well, it began a long time ago really. Lucy leaving is not a surprise, but it still feels like my body is going through the process of shock. I never actually thought she’d do it. I thought we’d just continue having some form of this conversation for the next ten years until one of us miraculously had a change of heart.
I don’t empty the dishwasher even though it’s full (Lucy’s job), but I do take out the bins (my job) and put on the kettle for a second coffee, automatically calling up to Lucy to ask if she wants one.
‘No, it’s OK. I’ll have one at Amy’s,’ she shouts down.
Amy is Lucy’s sister. They’re polar opposites but best friends. Amy manages the lives of her husband and two young children with the efficiency of an army sergeant (rather than a painting or a photograph, they have the family rota as the focal point of their kitchen wall), so the fact that she’s agreed to Lucy coming, like a whirlwind, into her ordered home shows just how desperate Lucy must be to get away from me.
As I’m drying up the things on the draining board and putting them into the cupboard, I hear Lucy’s footsteps on the stairs. They’re always heavy, despite the fact she’s so slim. I wonder if she’s going to try to just sneak out without saying goodbye, and if she does whether I’m going to let her. Putting down the tea-towel, I listen carefully, imagining her grabbing her coat off the rack and putting on her trainers – silver, muddy. And then suddenly she’s standing at the kitchen door and I’m staring at her like an idiot.
Neither of us speaks and I try to think of something brilliant to say, a beautiful parting speech, a line she will remember for the rest of her life, but instead I just say, ‘How did we get from croissants to this?’, and actually it’s more poignant than I mean it to be because I was talking about this morning, but in fact for our first date, we met for breakfast and she was surprised that I ordered a croissant instead of a full English ‘like all other blokes’. At the time, I’d wondered if it made her see me as less ‘manly’ and if so, whether that was off-putting to her, but she agreed to a second date so, either way, it clearly wasn’t a deal-breaker.
I wonder if I should ask her now what she thought that day. It suddenly feels like there are so many questions I should’ve asked her over the past year – like when one of your grandparents is on their death bed and you feel this panicked rush to find out who they were when they were younger, what they liked to do at school, how many times they’d been in love, how they decided on their career. All these questions that just didn’t seem important when they were still very much alive.
Lucy doesn’t respond – just gives me a sort of half-smile, but a smile that has absolutely no joy in it. An ironic smile, in fact, because it’s full of deep and utter sadness. And then she comes over and gives me a hug and a tiny kiss on the cheek and I never want to let her go, but I know I have to. Because the absolute tragedy of all this is that she might be right.
We release each other and she goes back through the lounge towards the hallway, me following, and I suddenly notice her goldfish staring out forlornly from its bowl (the one I’ve always argued is too small but Lucy insists is ‘just right’), wondering why it’s being abandoned. Well, it’s probably not wondering that – I suspect I’m projecting – but that’s how it appears to me.
‘What about Sharky?’
Lucy looks over at her fish. ‘You keep him. He likes it here.’
I should probably argue that I never really wanted a pet, particularly one as useless as a goldfish, but stupidly I find a sort of comfort in Lucy leaving a tiny part of herself here so I say, ‘OK.’
When we reach the hallway, Lucy picks up four rucksacks full of her stuff, shoving one on each shoulder and then picking up the other two in her hands.
‘Let me help you.’ I go to reach for a bag but she shakes her head and moves away.
‘I need to just go.’
I nod slowly. And then the really, really shit bit is when she leaves, actually walks out of the door, the door we argued over which colour to paint for several days after moving in. She wanted some radical bright shade and I thought it had to fit in with the others along the row. We compromised with a sort of beachy blue, despite the fact we live nowhere near the sea. And then I’m left on my own, in a house that’s far too big for just me and with a blank day where my only plan was to spend it with Lucy.
I go back upstairs to torture myself with an empty bedroom, a wardrobe devoid of her things, and that’s when I spot it, sparkling on the bedside table like an abandoned glitter ball. The ring I spent so many hours agonizing over. And it hits me that she’s never coming back.
BEFORE
Lucy
I’m up at 9 a.m. on a Saturday, which is unheard of. I normally spend the first few hours of the day lounging in bed, looking at stuff on my phone, reading a bit, maybe drifting back off for another twenty minutes. But today I have a date. With someone called Jamie. He’s a friend of a friend of a friend – we met briefly on a night out. He gave me his number, and we’ve been messaging back and forth for a few weeks. Just silly stuff – lamenting how bored we are at work, being British and musing on the weather, exchanging witty comments about current news stories.
When he first suggested breakfast for our first date, I really wasn’t sure. I am not a morning person. At all. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got split personality disorder – I’m one person when I wake up and a totally different person once it gets past twelve o’clock. I also worried he was trying to be a bit quirky – one of those blokes who is always trying to be ‘off the wall’ to disguise the fact that really he’s a vacuous shell with nothing inside. But then he said it was so that if he liked me, we could continue the date into the day, and if he didn’t like me he still had time to fit in another date before bedtime, and I liked that he was laying his cards out on the table, albeit disguised with humour. And besides, there’s less pressure to a morning date, less formality than, say, dinner. In the evening there is always the inevitable question of whether or not you’ll end up going home together, which always mars the rest of the evening for me because I never sleep with someone on a first date. Well, not any more, anyway. And it always pisses me off to watch a man try to pretend he’s OK with that – that he doesn’t want to come home with me either – when clearly that’s all he’s been thinking about since the moment he left home wearing his ‘lucky pants’.
