The Dilemma(23)

‘That’s awful,’ I say, appalled.

‘Don’t.’ Jess gives a shiver. ‘I can’t bear it.’

My mobile is lying on the table face up and I turn it over.

‘I’m not looking at my phone for the rest of the day,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t seem right that I’m celebrating when other people are grieving.’

‘There’s always someone grieving somewhere in the world,’ Kirin says.

‘I know. But a plane crash – it’s just heartbreaking.’

‘Are people from your work coming to your party?’ Jess asks, and I know she wants to change the subject because I’m sure I told her they were.

‘Yes, all of them, I think.’

‘Wow,’ Kirin says.

‘I didn’t think everyone would come, but they are.’

‘It’s that thing, though, isn’t it?’ Kirin says. ‘You start off with friends and family and then you want to invite neighbours and the people you work with and the list keeps getting longer. It was like that for our wedding and we ended up having two hundred guests, a ridiculous amount.’

‘The best thing about tonight,’ I say, ‘is that, unlike at weddings, there’s nobody I’ve invited that I don’t want to be there.’ Except for one person, I think silently, one person who has the potential to spoil the whole evening for me. But only if I let them.

I turn my face to the sun. Before I made them ashamed of me, my parents took me to some lovely hotels, but none as luxurious as this one. Back then, I didn’t realise how fortunate I was to have parents who were comfortably off, and I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn’t become pregnant, if I’d gone on to do what my parents had planned for me. They’d wanted me to study medicine, something I’d have been happy to go along with, so I’d be a doctor by now, possibly married to another doctor, maybe with more children and a holiday home somewhere abroad. An existence – because, with my parents heavily involved in my life, which they would have been, it would have been only that, an existence. I can’t imagine it would have been as happy as the life I live now, not with the imposed ritual of weekly lunches after church, and Christmases spent in their plumped-up-cushioned house, with its rules and regulations, no elbows on the table, no feet on the chairs, no lazing in bed past nine o’clock, no slouching or watching anything other than BBC2. I had a lucky escape, I realise, we had a lucky escape. If my parents had accepted Adam and Josh, we’d have been forever in their debt, bound to them by suffocating duty and obligation.

‘It’s a shame Marnie can’t be there tonight,’ Jess says sympathetically. ‘Cleo is going to miss her. They’ve been talking about your party ever since they were little, trying to imagine being nineteen.’

‘And designing the dresses they’d wear,’ I say, smiling at the memory. ‘I used to do it too. I’d think, “On the day of my party Josh will be twenty-two and Marnie will be nineteen”, and I couldn’t imagine what they would look like, or how they would be. They were two unknown quantities, but they were always going to be there, present at my party.’ And I realise that in all my imaginings about my party over the years, it never occurred to me that Marnie wouldn’t be with us. Or that I wouldn’t want her there.

‘Cleo doesn’t mind coming?’ I ask Jess. ‘Without Marnie?’

‘Don’t worry, she wouldn’t miss it for the world.’ She looks over at me. ‘Talking of Marnie, Cleo wants to throw a surprise party for her, the weekend after she gets back, and invite all their friends. She asked me to ask you if that would be alright.’

My throat tightens. ‘That’s lovely of her.’

‘It would be the first weekend in July. You haven’t got anything planned, have you?’

‘No,’ I say, because I’ve only got as far as thinking about the day Marnie arrives. My mind can’t go any further than that, not yet. The repercussions of her return are so enormous that I can’t see past it.

‘We’re free too,’ Kirin says. ‘Gosh, another party to look forward to, amazing!’

‘I don’t think we’ll be invited,’ I say, laughing.

‘Then you can all come to me and we’ll have our own party!’

I smile across at Kirin, but the knowledge that it isn’t going to happen fills me with a desperate sadness. And what about all the other things the six of us used to do together? What about the Christmases? I need my Christmases to be filled with people, and love and laughter, because it’s at Christmas that I feel my parents’ rejection the most, something I’ve never understood as I’ve had more fun with Adam’s family than I ever had celebrating Christmas alone with my parents. Yet as soon as I open my eyes on Christmas morning, a great big hole opens up inside me that not even Adam, Josh, Marnie and every single friend we have can quite fill.

Rejection was something I had to get used to, during those first years with Adam. He abandoned me so many times that it’s a miracle we made it through. It’s still with me, although I’d never tell him that. He’s tried so hard to make up for it that he’d be devastated if he knew how much it still affects me. It creeps up on me in the dark of the night, and resentment gnaws away inside me, at what he made me go through.