Page 41 of Famous Last Words

‘Touché,’ Charlie says. ‘Non-fiction. Interesting, though.’ He tells her of various queries and research, and what he’s learnt.

‘Don’t you think that sometimes?’ he asks. ‘That no one will ever read it? That it’ll just sit on the shelves in Waterstones?’

She raises her glass to that in a silent toast. ‘All the time,’ she lies. But something is bubbling up inside. The real her. The one she buries.

Their waiter brings their food. Charlie slices into his tart, a clean cut. He has neat hands, and they eat in silence for a few seconds. There is something nice about sitting with somebody confident. Like you somehow belong in the world.

‘So good,’ Charlie says, gesturing to the food. ‘I need it. Ran ten before work today.’

‘You are a better human than me.’

‘No, I just need to be exercised. Like a horse.’

‘Yes?’ Cam says, ignoring the humour and trying to plumb deeper. She puts her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. Most of all, she enjoys, behind the confident veneer, Charlie’s sometimes vague hints at his own misery: she knows that he is divorced, but not much more. ‘Or? What?’ she says brightly.

‘Or,’ he says, expression amused, reaching for the pepper shaker, perhaps as a distraction, ‘I worry about stupid shit. And don’t sleep.’

‘Join the club,’ she says.

‘There’s always running,’ he says, ‘even though it’s awful.’

‘Worse than publishing parties?’

‘Close second.’

He scootches towards her slightly. He smells nice, a subtle, expensive aftershave. His knee touches hers.

Cam looks around her. The waitress moves past, carrying a strawberry milkshake and a steak and fries. Cam findsherself watching avidly. She doesn’t even know why, until she realizes: it is precisely the sort of thing Luke would order. He would never, ever have a cocktail and a goat’s cheese tart. Cam doesn’t know why this thought arrives in her mind, or why it feels so forceful, but that is sometimes how it is. She checks the time. It’s ten past seven, and she hadn’t yet thought of him today. It must be the first time it’s happened.

Thatthought hits her even harder.

No Luke, until 7.10 p.m.

But, now, she does think of him, and up, up, up goes the pressure in her head.

‘One second,’ she says to Charlie. His eyes dart to hers, confused, like a hurt animal’s. Cam tries to care, but momentarily can’t. She crosses the dimly lit restaurant and pushes open the pink stall door to the toilets. She sits on a green velvet armchair, alone, just for a few seconds.

God.

That steak.

And – just like that – everything she’s been pretending falls apart. Her extroversion with Charlie, keeping the conversation going, taking the piss out of publishing, wanting alcohol, to stay out all night. As if.

Funny how some people have a way of pulling a version out of you that isn’t reallyyou. She catches her eye in the mirror. Stupid haircut. It isn’t her.

On the green armchair, alone, Cam places both hands on her heart, closes her eyes, and allows herself to miss him, and the person she was before it all. Content to love herself, because he did. He did. Hedid.

She opens her eyes. The toilets’ walls are painted a mattcalamine pink, the insides lit with bare bulbs. And she’s alone, the way she wants it.

She stares down at her phone in her hands, not wanting to go back in there just yet. And then, for the second time in her life, unexpected news, although she doesn’t know it yet, shatters everything.

21

It’s a text, flashing up bright in her hands like a spotlight.

Today 19:16

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