Page 44 of The Key to My Heart

‘Not always,’ Tom sips. ‘You see …’ he points over the trellis, to a squat block of flats, old brick, square sixties windows, wide brick-built balconies, ‘that building there. The flat roof. First flat I ever lived in. With my fiancée.’

He says those last words, like he already knows it’ll make my ears prick up.

‘You had afiancée,’ I repeat.

He gives a deep nod. ‘Oh, yeah, Natalie Fincher. Eight years ago now. I even got down on one knee. Very basic. Very conventional and institutionalised.’

I laugh. ‘Did you have it written on a dessert in chocolate sauce?Marry me?’

‘No, but there may have been rose petals.Argh.I know. I sicken myself.’ He laughs, nibbles his lip, embarrassedly. ‘Anyway. We moved in. Got engaged. And that flat – it felt like the start of my life. Or something. Everything I was gonna have that was … nothing like what I’d known. My parents, mainly.’

‘What’s … what’s wrong with your parents?’

Tom wrinkles his nose, taps a finger on the wooden table. ‘My mum’s amazing, but she’s spent the last twenty or so years of her life being slowly whittled down by my dad.’

‘Don,’ I say, ‘I mean, she never says much, but the things shedoessay about him sometimes—’

‘Mm. I really don’t know why she stays, Natalie.’

‘Really?That bad?’

Tom raises his dark eyebrows, and sighs. ‘Yup. I think they’re together through habit, or … stagnation? He’s had—Jesus, I don’t know, four affairs? That we know of …’

‘Oh my God. Are you serious?’

Tom nods, gives a sad, lazy shrug. ‘It’s just how it’s always been. Since I was about – I don’t know. Eight, maybe?’

‘Fuck. And Shauna, she’s so …’

‘I know.’ Tom shifts closer, rests a tanned, muscular forearm on the table. ‘Anyway. I moved out of there, couldn’t wait to be honest, to be away from it, and me and Lou, my fiancée, we found this place. And … I waspumped. And, for about six months, we played out this perfect little scene, you know? We set a date, we decorated, we did the whole straight-off-the-shelf, grown-up couple thing and then – she just broke it off.’

‘Out of nowhere?’ I realise, sitting here with him, that we’ve never spoken about Tom’s love life, in any way. (Besides the fact he’s single and his friends set him up with someone at Avocado Clash who kept gazing lovingly at his crotch.) And someone leaving him, having an engagement broken off? It isn’t quite what I would’ve guessed for Tom.

‘Ah.’ He gives a sardonic smile. ‘For me it was out of nowhere, yeah. But – three weeks later, she had moved in with some guy she worked with, and it turned out it’d started while we were together, so …’

‘Ouch,’ I say.

‘Yup.I was …’ He blows out a long sigh, his dark hair bristling in its breeze. ‘Wrecked. Like … blindsided.’

‘God. I bet. That’s … hard.’

Tom nods. ‘Yeah, it was. I mean, it was a long time ago now. Plus, we’d have never worked in reality. She was prickly. Once ignored me for a week because I took the piss out of Cliff Richard.’

‘To his face?’

Tom laughs. ‘I’m not that rock ’n’ roll, Natalie. No, it was on TV. And she was obsessed with him.’

‘Was she an old-age pensioner?’

Tom laughs again, surprised, and so do I, and I love the sound it makes, both of our laughter together, up here on this weird, decorated roof in this weird old man pub. ‘No, strangely,’ he says. ‘Two years younger than me, actually …’

‘Fucking hell.’

‘I know,’ grins Tom. ‘Bit of a red flag, eh? Anyway. The reason I’m banging on about this is, months later, I was still rattling about in the flat, and I didn’t know at the time why I found it so hard to move out. But I think that flat sort of represented something that I wasn’t ready to let go of. I knew once I moved out, that’d be it. Definitely over. Definitely cheated on. Definitely a jilted knob with rose petals.’ He meets my eyes and smiles slowly. ‘But the truth is, flat or no flat – you can’t go back. Ever.’

‘At all?’

A gust of smoke appears behind Tom, as the woman at the next table lights up a cigarette.

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