You, Me and Other People

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015

Copyright © Fionnuala Kearney 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Images © Shutterstock.com

Fionnuala Kearney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007593972

Ebook Edition © 9780007593989 February 2015

Version 2015-03-25

Dedication

For Aidan. For always loving me the way you do …

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Two

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Part Three

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Epilogue

Q&A and Reading Group Questions

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

They say best men are moulded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad …

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Prologue

I should not be here. As sure as I know my name, my NHS number by heart and my daughter’s date and time of birth, I know I shouldn’t be here. Adam Hall … NC 100Z9T … The third of March 1994, 8.04 a.m., Meg Sarah-Louise Hall, born by caesarean delivery, firstborn child to my wife Beth and me. My head shakes of its own accord, my conscience nudging me, reminding me that I shouldn’t be here.

I drive by the house. There’s no parking, so I’m forced to keep going. On the passenger seat of my car, a gift sits boxed, wrapped. Today is someone else’s birthday. I spent time choosing this gift, wanting to get it right. It’s important to me, important that they know how I feel. I do a U-turn at the top of the narrow street, try again to get a nearby parking spot. About ten houses away, someone has pulled out, and I slip my car in their space.

Up ahead, there’s a party going on, the house marked by the telltale bunch of balloons on the pillar. I glance at the box. When I wrapped it earlier, I doubled over the Sellotape so that it’s unseen on the outside of the paper. Beth showed me how to do it one Christmas. ‘You have to hide it. Makes it so much neater,’ she’d said. She’s right. Hidden things are so much neater.

I open the window. Loud voices come from the house with the balloons. A woman passes by, a heavy-looking handbag slung high on her shoulder, a small package and a bottle of wine in her hands. I have no idea who she is, but she’s walking quickly, as if she’s late. Less than three feet from my car, just the width of a narrow footpath away, is a blooming jasmine plant. I inhale the heady scent, close my eyes, immediately cast back in time to my mother’s floral perfume. My left hand grips the handbrake as a childhood nursery rhyme she used to sing about Dick Whittington sounds in my head. Turn around. I glance at the gift. My bottom teeth chew my top lip. I shouldn’t be here.

I start the engine. I’ll get rid of the box and I won’t come back here. I promise myself I won’t return. I say it out loud, address myself in the rear-view mirror and speak the words slowly, like my life depends on it …

And, on the drive back, I look forward to the Sunday evening meal that awaits me. I’ll enter our home, kiss my wife. I’ll choose to have a shower to wash away my morning of madness. I’ll immerse myself in the life I love. I imagine it gift-wrapped, the outside wrapping seamless, double-sided sticky tape, or whatever it takes, to keep some of the inner content neat and tidy – hidden from the people I love.

Chapter One

‘My husband is a philanderer,’ I reply. She sits, her legs crossed, taking notes in her feint-lined legal pad. ‘That’s a four-syllable word for a cheating dickwit. How am I supposed to feel? He’s screwing a waitress …’ The last word tastes like Marmite on my tongue. In my head, I apologize to all the nice waitresses in the world. Aloud, I reveal how I really feel as my right hand clutches my upper left side. ‘I feel betrayed.’ I lower my voice. ‘And it hurts.’

Dr Caroline Gothenburg offers a sympathetic nodding motion. She has olive-coloured eyes, set in a wide face, flanked by titian curls; long, shapely legs encased in glossy tights – and I can’t help wondering if she has ever been betrayed in her shiny life. Lots of qualifications set in pencil-thin chrome frames adorn her wall. Bright as well as beautiful … I find myself focusing on her rather than me.

‘I’d like you to do me a timeline for the next session,’ she interrupts my thoughts. I feel crevices begin to stack one above the other on my forehead. I’m an intelligent woman. What the hell am I doing here? Glancing across her coffee table towards her neat, ordered frame, I swallow the panic creeping up my throat.

‘It will help me get to know you,’ she says. ‘Who is Beth? What makes Beth be Beth? I’d like to understand who you are, where you come from.’

A siren sounds in the distance, as if to warn me of an impending emergency.

‘Me too,’ I whisper.

In the car, my smart phone tells me I have three missed calls. One from Josh, my agent, and two from Adam. If my phone was really smart, it would delete Adam’s number. I’ve thought about it – but erasing him from my phone will not remove him from my brain. I switch on the Bluetooth, return Josh’s call and head to the nearest supermarket.

Twenty minutes later, I unload the contents of my wire basket and watch them move along a conveyor belt. Navel oranges, tuna, sweetcorn, trashy mags, a dodgy chicken wrap and two bottles of chilled sauvignon blanc.

‘Is Your Man a Love Cheat?’ screams a headline from one of the moving magazines. There are four, all with similar revelations, to reassure myself that I’m not alone, that there is in fact mass treachery in the world.

‘Points?’ a young girl with coffee skin and almond eyes asks from behind the till.

‘Points?’ I reply.

‘You got a points card?’ she says, stifling a yawn. I notice a tiny yin and yang tattoo on the back of her wrist.

I find I want to shout at Miss Points Yin-yang. I want to scream at her, tell her not to ask such a stupid question; ask her whether or not she noticed the vital subject matter of the magazines in my basket; tell her, if she didn’t, that she receives nil points for customer service today. I want to hurl a stream of nasty words at her – they’re already formed in my head. Then I remind myself she’s no older than Meg, my nineteen-year-old daughter, and as such, she should not yet know what betrayal tastes like. I breathe deeply – it really isn’t Miss Yin-yang’s fault that my husband is a shit …

So instead, I shake my head at her. No, I am all out of points. I am trembling all over by the time I’m back in the car. Silently, I count to a hundred, and push the facts that he has really left me and that I have just spent an hour in a therapist’s office to the back folds of my mind. I still my hands by sitting on them for a moment, then shake them out, start the ignition and point the car towards home.

Our home is a beautiful, three-floor, semi-detached Edwardian house in a sycamore-lined avenue in Surrey’s commuter belt. We bought it as a wreck fourteen years ago. Red-bricked, with original bay windows, inside we knocked walls down, built new ones – a bit like our marriage really, except today the house looks like something from Homes & Gardens and I, one half of our marriage, look like a ‘before’ picture in a plastic surgeon’s office.

As the gravel crunches under my wheels, I stare at the building I love, wonder if it will have to be sold, if I’ll end up in a tiny cottage-ette somewhere called nowhere. My hand massages my churning stomach and, not for the first time, the waitress flashes across my mind. She’s an incomplete image, blurred around the edges. I’m unaware if she has long or short hair, blonde or dark, curly or straight. Is she thirties or forties? Not twenties, please. I’d find that hard to take, not to mention how Meg would cope. The idea of her beloved father screwing someone who buys her clothes in Topshop would be too much.

A sudden image of them having sex ambushes me. Does she cry out like me? Does he hold her hair at the nape of her neck the same way he does mine? Silent tears fall. I have to stop this … I wipe them with my sleeve, staying a while to stare at Adam’s garden. Quite quickly, I come to one conclusion. He is not selling my home. He’ll have to take me out of here in a pine box.

Inside, I dump the shopping and head upstairs to my workspace in the loft. Flooded with natural light from three angled Velux windows, it is where, opposite my two large screens displaying notes and melodies, I sit to handwrite the requested timeline. Within a minute, six hastily written lines and I’m already a convent-educated, only surviving child of an eccentric mother and a drinking father. I continue, silently praying that Dr Gothenburg is good at her job, my hand scrawling my past onto the page. Very soon, I’m a child who loses her father to his love of alcohol, a wife whose husband has already notched up a previous one-night stand and a mother who feels guilty about wanting more than motherhood alone.

Staring at it, spaced over two sheets of paper, it’s not a spectacular life. Nor is it the stuff that keeps the Samaritans busy, but will it help Dr Gothenburg get to know me? Will the existence of a baby brother who died when he was three and I was six divulge something I’m not aware of? Does my ambition to succeed as a songwriter help frame me as a person? Josh assures me regularly I’m the next best thing to hit country pop. It’s me who’s not so sure. What I am sure about – what screams at me from the second page – is that my husband is a cheat. Considering he’s been offside at least twice, that makes him a serial cheat. It’s there in black and white for Dr Gothenburg to read. The words, confirming his failure, might as well be sticking out on stalks.

The mobile sounds and this time I laugh aloud at the sight of his number. He genuinely thinks that if he keeps calling, one day I’ll just stop being angry. Another part of me hopes he’s right, because this anger is eating me up from the inside out. I can feel it coil itself around my very being, munching away; as if a sound effect is required, my stomach grumbles loudly. I head back downstairs, passing the photo-lined walls on the way.

Rogues’ gallery … The fingers of my right hand hover above them, yearning to touch the baby shots of Meg, to tap into those younger grinning images of Adam and me. An old wedding shot, so full of hope and love. One of him taken at a barbecue next door – Adam posing like a catalogue model, his face looking at the camera, his chin tilted upwards; his long legs, tanned in Bermuda shorts, his dirty blond, close-cropped hair flashing in the summer sun. I take the stairs slowly, lost in years of memories. By the last step, I try to comprehend that if someone had asked me only weeks ago if we were happy, I’d have given them a rather smug, ‘Yes, of course.’ That’s how good a liar my husband is.

In the kitchen, I grab a wine glass and fill it to the rim with cold sauvignon. Rummaging through one of the shopping bags, I remove the chicken wrap and chew it slowly, obediently listening to the voice in my head that tells me I have to eat. I don’t want to eat. I just want to drink. Taking a large swallow of wine, I feel the alcohol slide down, immediately hitting the spot it needs to.

Late-afternoon September sun slices through the bi-fold doors that back onto the rear garden. I walk in and out of its shadows, chicken wrap in one hand and glass in the other. One mouthful of food for each gulp of wine … In between, I hum the words of a song I wrote yesterday and feel the faint curve of a smile on my face. Thesaurus had obliged with a rhyme for bastard. ‘Dastard’ – a sneaky malicious coward. Adam the ‘dastard’. The grin on my face makes it even harder to chew.

Needing to immerse myself in work, I start back upstairs, only to turn around and sit, motionless, on the fourth step. I stare into the living room opposite, unable to move. The cognitive part of my brain has switched off. My legs refuse to stand, my hands seem glued to my knees. Assailed by snapshot memories of places we’ve been, songs we’ve sung, moments we’ve shared, I’m numb with the fear of starting again. Where do I begin? If I just breathe in and out, will time just pass? I nod. Yes, that’s what will happen. I just have to wait this out and suddenly it will be next month and this new beginning will already have happened without me even having to register it.

I only stir when darkness surrounds me. I step downstairs, switch on a light and carry the bottle of wine from the fridge to the living room. Thirty minutes later, I’m watching Adam’s oversized, penile-extension plasma screen when the landline rings.

‘You’re fired!’ Lord Alan Sugar fills the screen as he points an index finger at some underperforming female.

‘Yeah, mate, I know how you feel,’ I sympathize. ‘Beth, you’re fired!’ I point my glass at Lord Sugar’s evictee and pick up the phone, sure that it will be Meg at this hour.

‘Meg?’

‘Beth, it’s me …’

It’s not Meg, my precious girl. It’s him, the bastard that provided half of her DNA, the dastard who, as soon as I hear his voice, I miss with every fibre of my being. My heart pulses loudly behind my ribcage.

‘How are you?’ he asks. ‘Beth, don’t hang up. Please, we need to talk?’

‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

He is silent.

‘Are you with her?’ I ask.

He remains guiltily silent.

‘Do you know you’re a dastard?’ The wine speaks.

He sighs. ‘Yes, you’ve told me many times.’

‘No, I’ve told you many times you’re a “bastard”, now I’m telling you you’re a “dastard” too.’ No reply.

I can hear kitchen sounds in the background, like a dishwasher being unloaded. I picture the scene. How domestic. How very Jamie and Nigella. He speaks in a hushed voice, as if he doesn’t want to be heard on the phone.

‘Oh just fuck off, Adam.’ I slam the phone down. I look at the bottle and my father’s genes beckon.

Chapter Two

I stare at the small screen. Call ended. She hung up on me. Again … And she swore at me. Beth knows how much I hate her potty mouth. Two weeks since I left and she still won’t talk without swearing.

Through the open door to the kitchen, I see Emma bend down to reach the lower shelf of the dishwasher. Clad in a figure-hugging black dress, the sight makes my head reel; images of Emma naked, Beth naked, cloud my fuzzy brain. I breathe deeply, filling my anxious lungs as quietly as I can.

‘I know you’re staring.’ Emma looks over her left shoulder and catches my eye. In one swift movement, she crosses her hands, grabs the hem of her dress and pulls it over her head. She’s wearing stockings. No knickers, just hold-ups, a tiny bra, and I feel immediate stirrings as she walks towards me. Some instinct tells me to back away from her, raise my palms in the air, say, ‘No, Emma, no,’ but it’s way too late for that. If I’d been a better man, I’d have said that months ago. So, I let my more primal instincts rule, the ones that make me want to take her here on her white Amtico kitchen floor. Before I know it, she’s on her knees, unzipping me. I squeeze my eyes shut. With one hand, I steady myself on the doorway, with the other I hold her head, just at the nape of her neck, my fingers lacing her long blonde hair.

I knew I was in trouble the moment I met her. It had started out a simple evening with a group from work in the restaurant where she works. She flirted with me. Private winks, smiles. At first I thought I was imagining it, until Matt, my business partner, cornered me outside the loo.

‘Don’t do it, mate,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Don’t go there. You’re so flattered some blonde totty fancies you, you’ve been twirling your wedding ring under the table all night.’

‘I have not.’

‘Don’t be such a tosser, Adam. You and Beth have a good thing.’

But by the time I shared a taxi home with Emma, my ring was in my pocket, my choice made. I thought of Beth, my gorgeous, loyal, talented wife; the woman who made me laugh at least once a day; the woman I loved, the woman I would have died for, still would. I did think of her, but only briefly.

Emma was the most forward woman I’d ever met, launching herself on me in the back of the taxi, cupping my balls with long manicured fingers. I was weak, powerless. And months later, I’m still a weak forty-three-year-old man who has hurt his wife so much he doesn’t know how to fix it, so chooses to ignore it and indulge in copious amounts of fantastic, life-affirming sex with a new and younger woman.

I leave the office early, exit the underground car park to a beautiful September evening, the sun still quite high in the sky. Just across the river to my right, I see the shape of the London Eye, its capsules laden with carefree tourists. It’s Friday and normally I’d be heading across the river and down the A3 towards home, after staying the week in town. Eight months ago, Beth and I decided to ‘borrow’ my brother Ben’s flat while he’s abroad for a year. Both parties have a good deal. We pay a lot less than market rent, covering his mortgage, and he knows his tenants. The plan was we’d stay there during the week, cut out the commute for me, and Beth could enjoy London and write her songs. A new environment, new inspirations – that was the plan.

I turn the car east towards the highway, heading to Docklands, to the one-bedroom flat near the river, intent on staying in this evening. Tonight’s plan is for an Emma-free zone; give myself some head-space with a takeaway and Sky Plus footie on the telly. Why then do I keep driving east along the A13, towards the M25, taking a long route towards the house I used to call home?

I call ahead on the hands-free. She’ll kill me if I just turn up. I can imagine dying on the spot in the power of her penetrating stare. But I feel the need to see her, to try and explain. I have no words, just the will to try, because I can’t bear her hating me. The phone rings out and I hear her voice.

‘You have reached Adam and Beth Hall. Sorry we can’t get to the phone – leave a message. We’ll get back to you.’

Only she hasn’t got back to me yet. I dial another number, hoping the other person I’ve hurt is still talking to me.

‘Hey, Dad,’ she says, picking up on the third ring.

‘Hey, Meg.’ I resist using my pet name of Pumpkin for her. ‘You all right?’ I can hear my heartbeat.

‘As all right as I possibly can be with an arsehole for a father …’

I sigh – an audible, slow sigh. ‘I deserve that. I’m sorry.’

‘You do and somehow sorry doesn’t quite cut it. Are you still with her?’

Straight for the jugular – she may have my eyes, my long legs and the hair colour that Beth calls conker, directly from my gene pool, but when it comes down to it, Meg is Beth’s daughter. She doesn’t believe in wasting words.

So I respond in the same vein. ‘Yes.’

‘Right … Why did you call?’

‘You’re my daughter, Meg. I’d like to see you. Please?’

‘And what? Introduce me to your bitch totty so we can play dysfunctional families?’

I flinch at her words. And blame Beth. My daughter has a potty mouth too.

‘I—’

‘Look, Dad. It’s too soon. Too raw. You’re not the man I thought you were. The man I respected.’ I can imagine her shaking her head as she continues. ‘You’re just not that man.’

I bite my lower lip, feel it tremble. She’s right. I’m not that man, but then, I never have been. ‘I’m sorry,’ I offer lamely.