Page 106 of For Real

“Toby. For fuck’s sake, I’ve only had two relationships. It shouldn’t be hard to keep up.”

“Sorry.” But Grace was laughing.

And then, so was I, though it hurt a bit, this helpless, sharp-edged mirth that had to cut its way through tears.

She stayed until close to midnight and then left, and I was alone again, without Robert, which didn’t matter, and without Toby, which did.

I was grateful for work the next day because it gave me focus, but it was surprisingly difficult to put Toby’s absence from my mind, and took far more energy than I would have expected. Perhaps I needed a holiday—a feeling-sorry-for-myself holiday. Pathetic. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken annual leave, and I was tired and sad and unfairly angry with Toby for doing this to me. I told myself I’d been resigned to my compromises, but he’d promised me everything, throwing love around like Smarties, and I’d believed him. Then he’d dropped me, just like Robert. And just like Robert, he’d run.

It was wrong to make comparisons, wrong to feel this hurt and empty, but I did. I did.

I kept imagining the alert, the swoosh of doors and the clatter of footsteps, and the body, the far-too-familiar body, being whisked past me to the operating theatre. It was ridiculous, of course. Nothing so dramatic had likely taken place, and even if it had, there was no guarantee it would be my hospital or my shift.

I would simply never know where Toby’s life would take him. Had already taken him.

I was so miserable, I began to worry about my performance, and that was something I couldn’t afford, so I booked two weeks off. One of my colleagues actually said, “Good for you.” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the time. Going away seemed both painful and pointless without Toby. But I had to do something.

Get through this somehow.

Surely it had been worse after Robert. But the strangest thing was I couldn’t remember that pain at all.

* * *

On Friday night—twelve days since I saw him last, not that I was counting, except that I was—I came home and found him in a black suit, sitting on my doorstep. And just like that, all the anger, all the fear, all the misery washed away, leaving me perfectly cold. Safely indifferent.

I regarded him a moment. “Hello.”

He didn’t look up. “Hey.”

“I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again.” I was actually pleased—darkly pleased—to sound so calm.

“Why? Because I didn’t show up once? Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction?”

“Well, what was I supposed to think?”

There was a long silence. It was an odd moment. He was right there, in front of my house, but he seemed far away, sullen and young, an unlikely cause of all that hurt. Perhaps I’d gone a little mad, investing so much in whatever it was I’d thought we’d had. A relationship? With a teenager?

“My granddad died,” he said.

Oh fuck. The worst of it was that my immediate reaction was a brief flare of resentment, as if he had somehow engineered the whole situation to make me react to his absence and then render my reactions—my distress, my annoyance, my sense of betrayal—invalid. It was as if he had deliberately set out to make me look foolish. Which he hadn’t, of course he hadn’t. It was simply that his pain had left no room for mine, and he hadn’t even thought to let me know.

“Funeral today,” he went on. “He missed the snowdrops. He’s supposed to come with me. That’s what we do. Every year.”

“I’m so sorry.” I tried to push everything aside except concern. “Do you want to come in?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I really wanted to see you. It’s all I’ve been thinking about all day, but now I just feel weird about it.”

“I missed you too.” It seemed a safe enough thing to say. It didn’t remotely cover the mess he’d left me in, but it wasn’t a lie either. I reached down and gave his shoulder an awkward squeeze, but he flinched away from me. “Toby?”

“I didn’t miss you. I wanted you to be there.” At last, he looked up, his eyes dark-shadowed, almost bruised. He was very pale, and his acne had flared up, blurring his jaw, his brow, the top edges of his cheeks with red and white stars. “Don’t you get it, Laurie? I wanted you to be with me, but here I am as usual, sitting on your doorstep, waiting for the corner of your life I’m allowed.”

On a rational level, I knew it was grief that made him speak like that to me, but the sheer unfairness of it struck at my good intentions like a pickaxe. “For fuck’s sake,” I snapped, “if you’d bothered to tell me or ask me, I would have been there.” Then I gasped and covered my mouth. That hadn’t been what I’d meant to say at all.

“Wow, yeah, okay.” Toby wrapped his arms round his knees, pulling himself into an impossible ball. “How the fuck was I supposed to tell you, Laurie? Get myself shot in the hope you were the one in the helicopter?”

My whole body went cold. My worst fear, flung at me by a grieving child: arriving on some scene of terrible destruction to find, not a problem to be solved, but the body of someone I loved. “Toby, don’t even joke—”

“It’s not a joke. I literally have no way to contact you. You’ve never got round to giving me any. Because it’s always on your terms. Everything is always on your terms.”

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