Don’t You Forget About Me(73)

Lucas hands me a glass and sits down opposite in a wicker (ha) chair, placing his whisky on the table between us.

‘I wanted to explain about earlier. The phone call I was having when you came in.’ He pauses. ‘Saying you don’t care about your late wife is quite unusual. Dev says he told you about her?’ Lucas rolls his eyes, but smiles, and I nod, self-conscious.

‘Lucas,’ I say, raising my voice slightly to ‘prim’, ‘you honestly don’t have to. It’s none of my business. I’d rather not pry.’

‘I want to explain,’ he says.

He swigs from his drink and I do alike, rather than offer any reply. On the one hand, what I heard was ugly; on the other, why explain himself, if he is a wrong un?

Maybe part of the brooding bad boy psyche. He needs to control his image.

‘I was talking to a friend of mine in Dublin … A former friend of mine. Owen. He was having an affair with Niamh right before she died.’

I open my mouth and close it again, and gulp. ‘Oh.’

I’d made the rules: Niamh was tragic, and devoted. Not unfaithful. Oh.

‘I found out a few weeks before Niamh got her diagnosis, but it had been going on months before that. She was having loads of nights out with girlfriends and I got suspicious and turned up at the bar she was out at, and caught her with her face locked onto Owen.’

‘Oh, God.’

He leans back.

‘We were in trouble anyway. We got married too young, for the wrong reasons – her family wouldn’t have us living in sin. It was never right. There wasn’t a friendship there, which is what it always has to be underneath, right?’

I clear my throat and nod.

‘… I could say more, but don’t speak ill and all that. The point is, I knew we were over, before Owen. It was confirmation. Could’ve done without knowing the other man quite so well, but there we go.’

I nod as if I understand, except I don’t really understand. I feel glad of the heat and tingle of alcohol in my stomach.

‘And then she found out she was ill?’

‘Yeah. We’d agreed she was moving out. Then she went for a routine check-up after having these headaches and was told there was no hope. It was an aggressive cancer, and it was inoperable.’

Lucas’s voice has grown thick and I merely take in this information, knowing I will lie awake for an hour when I go to bed tonight, trying to figure out how it must’ve felt. She left you and now she’s leaving you.

‘They gave her six weeks. She made eight. I told her, just go and be with Owen and we’ll work out the rest.’

‘That’s incredibly heroic,’ I say to Lucas, then in case he thinks I’m being flip: ‘I mean that. Incredible of you.’

‘It sounds like that, doesn’t it?’ Lucas says. ‘Funnily enough, it wasn’t heroic of me, at all. When she told me she was terminal, she said it didn’t change anything between us and I was relieved, because it didn’t. I was devastated for her but it’s not as if a tumour could make us love each other again, or undo the hurt. I would’ve been in a far bigger mess if she’d said: sorry we’re estranged and I was shagging one of your best mates but can we be husband and wife again for as long as I’ve got? I wouldn’t have known how to do that.’

I nod, as if I understand.

‘But, she also wanted it kept secret. She knew a lot of family and friends would judge her for the affair with Owen. We had to go through it all presenting a united front.’

‘Literally no one knew you’d separated?’

‘No one. I told Devlin after the funeral. He and Mo had already announced they were calling their daughter after Niamh and he was committed. And you know,’ Lucas rubs his eyes and smiles. ‘It’s still a nice name, and they liked her.’

He sounds more Irish than he usually does, in tiredness.

‘As to why I’m having frank exchanges of opinion. Niamh took Keith to Owen’s when she was sick. I could hardly say no. When Niamh died, Owen refused to give him back. Said it had been her dying wish that Owen keep him and I said, well, he wasn’t hers to gift. You can imagine Owen’s in a lot of pain and not seeing things straight, at the moment.’

‘Oh? Wow that’s … but Keith’s yours?’

‘Oh yeah. He was never Niamh’s dog, I got him as a puppy. So. Here’s where it turns into a Shane Meadows film plot. Devlin and I had to jail break Keith from Owen’s, and kidnap him. Dev tricked some guy we knew who was doing work on his flat to give us a spare key, and we staked it out, and burst in when he’d gone out, took Keith.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. Not long after, I’ve come to do this work in Sheffield so Keith and I are safely at a distance from Owen’s wrath. And he’s … vociferous, I think is the word.’

‘Doesn’t he feel any shame for having slept with your wife and borrowed your dog and tried to keep him?’

Lucas takes a large slug of whisky. ‘Quite the opposite. He has decided he at last freed Niamh from a tormented marriage, only to lose her, and he’s the victim in this. And I know where he’s coming from because he did love her so he must be hurting too. But he said …’

Lucas pauses. I can see him bracing himself: ‘He said that maybe our fighting gave her stress that caused the cancer. I don’t believe for a single moment that Niamh and I screaming the odds, killed her. But what a thing to hear. I bullied her into an early grave.’