A Wedding at the Comfort Food Cafe. Debbie Johnson
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Now we’ve planned that out, how about you tell your very own 007 what’s bothering you? You sounded really off on the phone.’
‘Ah,’ I say, taking a deep breath and preparing to bare all. ‘That’s because I asked Tom to help me start divorce proceedings. Hopefully, I’ll soon be a single woman again. Well, not a married woman with a boyfriend, anyway. So, not single, but half as much more single again …’
He stays silent when I say this, possibly waiting until I run out of steam, and I try not to freak out and over-react. It’s a big thing, and I know the way Finn works – he’ll process it before he speaks. He’s the anti-me.
I feel his arms tighten around me, and he says: ‘That’s good. I’m pleased. Not just for me, but … for you. It seems like something you should do. You can’t leave the past behind if you’re still legally married to it.’
‘That’s exactly right. Plus, then you can start shopping for diamonds for me … kidding!’
‘I know you’re kidding. I wouldn’t get diamonds anyway. I’d get something unusual, like an emerald. If I was, in fact, planning on getting you anything at all.’
We’re both feeling our way through this, keeping it light, both making the effort not to put a foot wrong. I kind of preferred it when we were snuggling and staring at the stars, but I had to tell him. It was stupid of me to hide the fact that I was married from him in the first place – and it’d be even stupider to hide the fact that I’m now in the process of becoming unmarried.
‘I’m glad you told me,’ he says, kissing the top of my head. ‘Are you ready to tell me about him? About what happened? Because I’m not thick, Auburn – you go pale and shaky every time the subject comes up, so I can see it still affects you. Maybe it’d be good to talk about it.’
I’m not all together sure he’s right. I’ve survived perfectly well without talking about it for years now. Or … okay, not well. Kind of unwell, in many ways. It’s only this last year that I’ve started to feel okay again – thanks to Finn, and Willow, and the Budbury crew. Even though the reason for me coming home was a sad one, turns out it’s had some pretty good side effects.
‘I’ll try,’ I say, deciding that he is right after all. As usual. ‘But I might get lost halfway through, okay?’
‘Okay,’ he replies firmly. ‘Whatever you want. No pressure.’
‘Okay,’ I repeat, feeling him wrap one of his legs over me. ‘Well … I met Seb in a bar, which is not an unusual thing, I suppose. I mean, lots of people meet their partners in a bar, don’t they? But the difference with us was that we never left the bar. That bar, or other bars, or nightclubs, or parties. We were … wild. It felt like fun at the time – until it didn’t. Until I realised that all we did was drink, or go mad, or sleep. Literally everything we did together involved some kind of booze or stimulant, or a hangover. There was no in between. No normal.’
‘Right. I’ve had flings like that. Where once the adrenaline wears off, there’s not much left.’
‘You whack-a-moled the nail on the head there. Except this wasn’t a fling – I was married to him, and living with him, and we were really, really bad for each other. I mean, I think living like that even on your own would be bad. But if you had an other half who saw that, and helped you rein it in, or occasionally suggested going to the cinema instead of a rave, maybe it would level out. But with us, there was no levelling out – we were living 100 per cent switched on, all the time.’
‘So when did that start being a problem?’ he asks, gently. ‘Because I assume it did.’
My mind is time-travelling me back to a time and a place I don’t want to go to: to Barcelona, all those years ago. To the time when I found out he was doing more than ecstasy and cocaine, and had started on heroin. To the time he locked me out of the flat for two days because he had friends around and forgot I existed. To the time his mother called me, saying he’d been taken to hospital with a suspected overdose. To the time – times, plural – he promised to clean up his act, always so convincing, but never managed.
To all the highs and lows and big losses and tiny paper cuts of disappointment, and the slow, dripping erosion of respect – for him, and for myself.
‘Well, it was a lot of things,’ I tell Finn. ‘Lots and lots of things that happened. Bad things. He needed someone who wasn’t me in his life – someone more mature, less insane. Someone who could have helped him with his problems. But I was a borderline basket case myself – I was never as into drugs as he was, but let’s say I never went anywhere without an emergency hip flask of vodka, just in case.
‘I don’t blame him entirely. He was basically a nice guy with a lot of demons. He needed me to be his exorcist, and I was too busy trying to stop my own head from spinning around. So, things got worse and worse and worse … complete recklessness, punctuated by these cycles of attempts to live well. Except in our case, living well meant drinking our vodka with orange juice instead of straight. His parents hated me because they thought I was dragging him down … and maybe I was. Maybe he needed another mother, not a wife. He certainly didn’t need me. I did him no good at all.’
I pause for a breather, and realise that I’m crying. Crying real tears of wetness, which is something I rarely do.
‘I don’t know why I’m crying!’ I say, frustrated with myself. ‘It was years ago, and it’s all over now!’
Finn wipes away the tears, and replies: ‘Because it’s emotional. Because it still makes you feel sad, no matter how long ago it was. There’s no sell-by date on sadness.’
It sounds so simple when he says it – and maybe it is. Maybe I should allow myself to be sad. For me, for Seb, for everything that happened.
‘No, there isn’t. And it does make me sad. It’s why I pretended it never happened, I’m such a coward. So, anyway … we were trapped in this spiral for ages. Then, I don’t know why, I started to notice that I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy with my life, with my husband, with the whole messy thing. I’ve always liked messy – but this was too much, even for me. So I started to try and control myself a bit. Now, this isn’t a Hollywood movie, so it’s not like I went along to AA and met some inspirational bloke who would’ve been played by Tom Hanks in the film or anything. I just … cut down on the drinking.
‘Of course, the less drunk I was, the more messy things looked. It’s like when you’re the designated driver on a night out. By the end of it, it’s quite funny watching all the drunk people repeating themselves and slurring their words and trying to pretend they’re sober.’
‘Oh yes. I know it well. And it is funny – every now and then.’
‘Right. Every now and then. Except this was all the time. Twenty-four hours a day. And the less I joined in with our usual games, the more annoyed he got – I think maybe I wasn’t as much fun, but also it was a bit like holding up a mirror to him. He didn’t like what he saw, and it made him feel bad about himself, and feeling bad about himself made him drink more and do more drugs and look for even more ways to escape.’
‘So you recovering made him worse?’
‘Yep – really healthy relationship, wasn’t it? And then …’
I pause, not wanting to carry on – but compelled to. Not only because he wants to know, but because I need to get some of this out of my system. Maybe it’s been silently poisoning me for all these years, strangling me from the inside out.
So I breathe deep, and I tell him, in fits and starts and snuffles. Eventually, I get to the part where things crashed out of control. I tell him about the weekend that everything changed for good.
I’d managed to persuade Seb, with the help of his mother, to come away with me. To get out of the city, away from his so-called friends and his easy supplies and his barfly life. To come with me down to the coast, to spend some time together. Together, without the ever-present third