Girl Unknown(83)

‘Maybe now isn’t the best time to decide on anything official,’ I said, hoping to derail this line of conversation.

Chris ignored me. ‘I thought it would be good to have a date nailed down.’

Zo? was clearly uncomfortable with the term. ‘We’re not nailing anything down,’ she said, quietly insistent.

‘Why not? Isn’t that what we agreed? We’d tell Susannah, then have a party.’

‘You told Susannah?’

‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’

‘I thought you were going to wait until we got home. You said you wanted to tell her to her face.’

‘Well, I changed my mind.’

‘How did she take it?’ Caroline asked.

Chris coughed. ‘The main thing is she knows.’

Zo? had leaned forward, her face partially covered by her hands. Her defiance was replaced by shock, the blood draining from her face. ‘Chris?’ she said slowly.

‘And the good news is,’ he went on, ignoring the warning tone in her voice, ‘she’s agreed to fast-track the divorce!’ He beamed at the rest of us as if expecting congratulations.

‘Fast-track? There’s no such thing in Ireland,’ Caroline said.

Chris smiled. ‘She’s not going to contest it.’

The waitress arrived and left the bill in the middle of the table.

‘I’m sorry,’ Zo? said.

‘Here.’ Chris took a credit card from his wallet and tossed it on to the bill. ‘This is on me.’

Caroline and I protested but he wouldn’t hear of us chipping in. All the time he was punching in the numbers and smiling up at the waitress, Zo? sat there, patiently biding her time. What was coming was obvious. He was only putting off the inevitable.

‘Chris,’ Zo? said again, trying to hold his attention.

‘Shall we go back to the house?’ he asked, with forced brightness.

‘I can’t do this,’ she told him.

‘Or shall we go somewhere for a digestif?’

More insistent now, she said: ‘I can’t.’

Chris’s smile faltered.

I felt Holly shift beside me. All this time, I had been waiting for her to pull the pin on her little grenade. I had not expected the detonation to come from Zo?.

At the next table, the guy stood up, this time openly gesturing to her to join him outside. Chris, seeing this, swung around in his seat and snapped: ‘She’s not going outside for another cigarette, so why don’t you just fuck off?’

The dude raised his palms and told Chris to chill out in heavily accented English. Evidently, his ardour for Zo? did not extend to violence. He laughed and backed away, his friends teasing as he rejoined them, all shrugs and smirks.

‘How dare you?’ Zo? hissed across the table. Her eyes were lit up – I had never seen her so enraged.

‘You’re my fiancée,’ he snapped. ‘I will not be humiliated by your flirting with some tosser!’

She was on her feet, twisting the ring on her finger. As soon as he realized what she was doing, he was backing down. ‘Now, come on, Zo?, just wait a minute.’

She threw the ring on to the table. It bounced off a saucer, landing on the salver that held the bill. ‘You have no claim on me now,’ she said. Her eyes flashed around the table at the rest of us. ‘None of you do!’

She ran from the restaurant, Chris following an instant later.

‘Fuck,’ Robbie said, exhaling the word, as if he’d been holding his breath.

‘What should we do?’ Holly asked.

‘Leave them to it,’ Caroline advised. That feeling was back with me – the same feeling that had lingered all day, accompanying the pressure in my head: the sense of something about to happen, something bad.

I told Caroline to bring the kids, while I went after the others alone.

What to say of what happened next? When I look back on it now, in hindsight, it’s from behind the shelter of raised hands, as if I can’t bear to look at it directly. I hurried after them along the street, watching as he dragged her by the wrist, tugging at her fiercely whenever she fell back, their sparring voices like daubs of paint in the night. To a stranger, he might have appeared to be a father dragging his recalcitrant teenager home, not her jilted fiancé. Anger made her cruel and she lashed out verbally, calling him a washed-up, middle-aged man, a pervert, a predator. I followed them without any fully formed notion of how to intervene or whether I even should. It was not until they reached the gate and I saw him slap her – a quick little swat at her mouth to stop the foulness pouring out of it – that I shouted: ‘Hey!’

It’s a strange thing, living in a world that presents you with violence every day – violence filtered through the screen of your TV or the medium of your newspaper. Film violence, video games – it’s there in the cartoons we show our kids. You’d think we’d be inured to it. But when confronted with it in the flesh, as I was that night, it seemed to rise up as something not frightening but absurd – absurd in how easily it happened, that slap, the sound of it impacting on my own mouth. The simplicity of it and yet how it changed everything. Just like the blow I received a few seconds later when I pushed up against him – all the reason had gone out of him, leaving the blunt instrument of his fist. I didn’t even raise a hand in self-defence. I was kind of amazed by it. I think that was the last lucid thought I had before the night unspooled around me. The thought of how easy it was to raise one’s fist to a man’s face and in so doing take a pop at your own pain.