Don’t You Forget About Me(46)
He’s asking me if we did it? I can feel my heart plummeting through my gut, through the floor, into the sewers beneath the city. Surely, surely not. He can’t even remember if we did it? That’s some score card. That’s some lack of meaning I had. Rav says I’m modest? So I’ve a lot to be modest about.
I say nothing at first. I can’t even force my facial muscles to mime polite reciprocation. I’m wearing the misery like a mask.
‘We hardly spoke, I think,’ I say eventually, thickly.
‘Ah!’ Lucas says, with an evident ‘phew’, his shoulders dropping half an inch. ‘I wasn’t sure … Youth, eh? Hah.’
Lucas looks at me in awkward hopefulness. I turn away.
‘Night.’
On the journey to Crookes, silent tears that I’m not even able to staunch until I’m home flood down my cheeks.
No doubt Fay would say it’s positive I can cry. Fay didn’t find out the love of her life forgot her.
‘You don’t know he’s the love of your life,’ she’d said, with a benevolent smile. ‘You’re how old? Lots of time.’
‘Cathy and Heathcliff knew in Wuthering Heights, and they were kids. I mean, I know that’s slightly dodgy.’
‘And look how that ended,’ Fay said. ‘With them dead.’
‘That’s the outcome in general,’ I said, and Fay noticed our hour was up.
19
Anyway, at least now I know the answer for sure.
I hug my bare knees in a hot bath, a washing line of Karen’s stout underwear strung above me like bunting, melancholy coating me like tar. It’s the morning after and I still feel like I’ve been turned inside out.
Not to be crude, but someone who doesn’t even remember whether he ever fitted a key part of his anatomy into a vital part of my anatomy in the act of physical intimacy – which by the way, would’ve been my first time, Lucas McCarthy – very clearly isn’t the love of my life.
Unless he’s feigning forgetfulness of course, and he does know who I am. Which is barely an improvement – so The One is supposed to be someone who shudders at the thought of discussing the fact we were once close? That guy’s no Rudolph Valentino either.
I don’t know why I find this so difficult to accept. I’ve had twelve years to get used to the idea that I’m unimportant to Lucas McCarthy.
No, that’s not true, I do know why. It’s because he’s never been inside my body, but he’s been inside my head.
And this pain is not because he’s now so obviously wantable. I’m not that shallow. It’s not due to the way, when his face breaks into a smile, it can apparently still crack my heart open. No. I fell for him when he was a skinny nerd in a Cure t-shirt, overlooked, wan and shy. I liked his early work.
I’m finding my irrelevance hard to accept because there’s nothing I’ve ever trusted more in my life than that first flush of how I felt about him. It was pure heady instinct, I never had to question it for a second.
But if Lucas didn’t feel it too, if I could be so utterly wrong about his reciprocation, I can never trust my judgement again. If that wasn’t two people falling in love, then what the hell is?
I lie back and stare at my red-varnished toenails, protruding in the foam.
This is the final contributing factor to my existential bleakness that is my turning thirty. In my twenties, I used to think I was a caterpillar, and I was going to pupate into a butterfly. The girl in the pink coat with the melted make-up, the roots that needed doing, holding a bag of chips and batter bits on the night bus after a brutalising shift, being asked if her boobs were fake in Rogues – she was not who I was going to be. She was an amazing origins story.
Sooner or later, superhero Georgina Horspool was going to burst forth, fulfilling all her glorious potential.
But now I am slowly letting go of that hope. Like that baleful line in obituaries at the start of the paragraph outlining where it all went wrong. ‘Sadly, it was not to be …’
Lucas’s reappearance makes that brutally clear. He is something else. I am still right here.
I point my toes, hold my leg out of the water and drag a razor up my calves, turning them this way and that to check I haven’t left a raccoon-stripe of hair.
As a serial monogamist whose relationships have generally puttered out rather than exploded, I’ve only ever taken a detached interest in Clem’s dating advice. Now, heaving myself out of the water, I remember her inspirational protocol after a blow to the feelings.
‘Liking yourself is a radical act,’ Clem had instructed Jo and myself. ‘Never more so than when you’ve had a crap time from a man.’
So when you get turned down for a second date, when you find out you were one of seven options, when your texts have the Read receipt, when the WhatsApp shows two blue ticks and your Facebook messages say SEEN – Clem says do the opposite of wallowing.
She prescribes: spend an entire day treating yourself as you’d wish to be treated. Take yourself for margaritas, see a film you fancy, have a long walk. Buy something frivolous which brings you joy, order a takeaway. Get sheets with high thread count and lie like a starfish on them, naked.
‘It’s like aggressive hygge. Celebrate how great you are and what a nice time you have by yourself. Refuse to partake in the self-loathing we’re virtually commanded to, in this sick society.’