Page 61 of The Girl You Left Behind
“It was in a bin, if you’re interested. With two others. Outside University College Library. The caretaker found them and handed them all in. I’m afraid your cards and your phone are gone.... The good news is that the cash was still there.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Amazing. Two hundred pounds. I checked it.”
Relief floods her, like a warm bath. “Really? They left the cash? I don’t understand.”
“Nor me. I can only think it fell out of your purse as they opened it.”
She takes her bag and rummages through it. Two hundred pounds is floating around in the bottom, along with her hairbrush, the paperback she’d been reading that morning, and a stray lipstick.
“Never heard of that happening before. Still, it’ll help, eh? One less thing to worry about.”
He is smiling. Not a sympathetic oh-you-poor-drunken-woman-who-made-a-pass-at-me kind of smile, but the smile of someone who is just really pleased about something.
She finds she is smiling back. “This is just... amazing.”
“So do I get my four-pound reward?” She blinks at him. “Mo told me. Joke. Really.” He laughs. “But...” He studies his feet for a moment. “Liv—would you like to go out some time?” When she doesn’t respond immediately, he adds, “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. We could not get drunk. And not go to a gay bar. We could even just walk around holding our own door keys and not letting our bags get stolen.”
“Okay,” she says slowly, and finds she is smiling again. “I’d like that.”
•••
Paul McCafferty whistles to himself the whole way down in the noisy, juddering lift. When he gets to the bottom he takes the ATM receipt from his pocket, crumples it into a little ball, and throws it into the nearest bin.
16
They go out four times. The first time they have a pizza, and she sticks to mineral water until she’s sure he doesn’t really think she’s a drunk, at which point she allows herself one gin and tonic. It’s the most delicious gin and tonic she has ever had. He walks her back to her house and looks like he’s about to leave, then after a slightly awkward moment he kisses her cheek, and they both laugh, as if they know this is all a bit embarrassing. Without thinking, she leans forward and kisses him properly, a short one, but with intent. One that suggests something of herself. It leaves her a bit breathless. He walks into the lift backward and is still grinning as the doors close on him.
She likes him.
The second time they go to see a live band his brother recommended, and it’s awful. After twenty minutes, she realizes, with some relief, that he thinks it’s awful, too, and when he says does she want to leave, they find themselves holding hands so they don’t lose each other as they fight their way out through the crowded bar. Somehow they don’t let go until they reach his flat. There they talk about their childhoods and bands they like and types of dogs and the horror of zucchinis, then kiss on the sofa until her legs go a bit weak. Her chin stays bright pink for two whole days afterward.
A couple of days after this, he rings her at lunchtime to say he happens to be passing a nearby café and does she fancy a quick coffee? “Were you really passing by?” she says, after they have stretched their coffee and cake as far as his lunch hour can reasonably allow.
“Sure,” he says, and then, to her delight, his ears go pink. He sees her looking and reaches a hand up to his left lobe. “Ah. Man. I’m a really bad liar.”
The fourth time they go to a restaurant. Her father calls just before pudding arrives to say that Caroline has left him again. He wails so loudly down the telephone that Paul actually flinches at the other side of the table. “I have to go,” she says, and declines his offer of help. She is not ready for the two men to meet, especially where the possibility exists that her father may not be wearing trousers.
When she arrives at his house half an hour later, Caroline is already home.
“I forgot it was her night for life drawing,” he says sheepishly.
Paul does not attempt to push things further. She wonders briefly if she talks too much about David; whether somehow she has made herself off-limits. But then she thinks it might just be him being gentlemanly. Other times she thinks, almost indignantly, that David is part of who she is, and if Paul wants to be with her, well, he’ll have to accept that. She has several imaginary conversations with him and two imaginary arguments.
She wakes up thinking about him, about the way he leans forward when he listens, as if determined not to miss a single thing she says, the way his hair has grayed prematurely at the temples, his blue, blue eyes. She has forgotten what it’s like to wake up thinking about someone, to want to be physically close to him, to feel a little giddy at the remembered scent of their skin. Sometimes he sends her a text message in the middle of the day, and she hears it spoken in an American accent.
She finds it hard to tally Paul McCafferty with Mo’s assertions about men: sleazy, chancing, self-serving, porn-obsessed slackers. He is quietly straightforward, a seemingly open book. It was why climbing the ranks of his specialist unit in the NYPD didn’t suit him, he says. “All the blacks and whites get pretty gray the higher up you get.” He now works for a company that searches for stolen valuables. The way he declines to say too much about it suggests an inbuilt discretion. The only time he looks even remotely uncertain, his speech becoming hesitant, is when discussing his son. “It’s crap, divorce,” he says. “We all tell ourselves the kids are fine, that it’s better this way than two unhappy people shouting at each other, but we never dare ask them the truth.”
“The truth?”
“What they want. Because we know the answer. And it would break our hearts.” He had gazed off into the middle distance, and then, seconds later, recovered his smile. “Still, Jake is good. He’s really good. Better than we both deserve.”
She likes his Americanness, the way it makes him slightly alien and completely removed from David. He has an innate sense of courtesy, the kind of man who will instinctively open a door for a woman, not because he’s making some kind of chivalrous gesture but because it wouldn’t occur to him not to open the door if someone needed to go through it. He carries a kind of subtle authority: People actually move out of the way when he walks along the street. He does not seem to be aware of this.
“Oh, my God, you’ve got it so bad,” says Mo.
“What? I’m just saying. It’s nice to spend time with someone who seems...”
