Jenna sat back, crossed her arms and her legs. She was aware that the therapist would read this as a defensive gesture. And he would be right, but she was already regretting being quite so open.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I really don’t want to talk about that.’ She pulled her baseball cap from her head and hooked it over her knee. It fell off, and feeling her face redden she bent forward to pick it up.
Luke just sat there. Watching. His head cocked to the side.
She rushed to fill the silence.
‘I mean. It was horrible, you know, but it has nothing to do with what’s happening now. Really.’ Without thinking about what she was doing she uncrossed her legs and then recrossed them the other way. ‘And besides, we’d finished. I chucked him actually. The relationship just wasn’t working anymore.’
But at the start there was something wildly exciting about him. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but the minute, no, the second she saw him she was fascinated by him.
She was volunteering at a Christmas dinner for homeless people at her local church. He was picking up an old friend, she later found out, but when he saw her he pretended he was also one of the volunteers.
A dusting of beard, blond hair slicked back, his gaze bright with what she judged to be a street-wise intelligence. ‘Come here often?’ he asked, the glint in his eye sprinkling his opening gambit with a suitable amount of irony.
She couldn’t help but laugh, and he stood beside her, picked up a serving spoon and began to dole out the roast potatoes. As they served the men and women in the queue their conversation adopted an easy rhythm, ranging from all the things they loved and hated about the time of year, favourite movies, and, strangely, the stand-up comics that irritated them.
By the time he’d finished pouring cream over the Christmas puddings she was handing out, she suspected she was in love.
He was the first mature man to pay her any attention; previous boyfriends were just little boys by comparison. And he was everything her father wasn’t. Dad was an accountant, overweight, rarely seen without a perfectly knotted tie and never heard using what he called ‘inappropriate language’. This guy was as lean as an elite marathon runner, wore faded jeans and T-shirt, and peppered his sentences with ‘fuck’.
Years later she would mock herself for the attraction. They say the path to hell is paved with good intentions, she’d told a friend. I’m thinking those intentions are mostly from women who want to change their man.
There was nothing he did that day, or on most of their subsequent days together, that suggested he was a bad boy, but there was an edge to him, a suggestion that he didn’t much care what people thought of him. It was a world away from the ‘mind your Ps and Qs’ drill she’d heard almost every day growing up with her parents, and she therefore found it deeply attractive.
She was brought up to be a middle-class nice girl, always ready to smile, ready to acquiesce, never to make a fuss, and she was deeply tired of it. This was her chance to rebel. He was her chance to earn a disapproving word from her parents. To show them she was her own woman, not their little girl. And she grabbed it with both hands.
Her mind drifted to the end days. He became exhausting. Loud, with enough energy for six people. Then quiet and withdrawn for days. And utterly dependant on her for his happiness, or so it felt. She remembered that last day they were together. His eyes empty in the moment before he saw her, then, when he was aware she was there, he lit up as if he’d received a charge of energy. It was suffocating. It felt like he was relying on her presence to keep him together.
‘I can’t be without you,’ he said, slumped back into the sofa.
‘But we’ve been together less than a year.’
‘Eleven months, one week and three days,’ he said with a little flare of triumph in his eyes. ‘Which is a guess.’ His smile was straining with hope that his little joke landed well in her mind. ‘Some people get married after knowing each other for a day.’ He was pulling at her hand, his eyes beseeching.
She reared back at the word ‘married’.
‘It’s too much,’ she said, every inch of her wanting to be far from him. ‘You’re too much.’ As she spoke, her eyes flashed to the bin in the corner of the kitchen, where she’d thrown the used pregnancy test. Its little blue lines like neon in her brain.
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ He was back on his feet, and it looked like the clench of his fists was lengthening his arms. Not for a moment did she feel threatened by him; her worry was that he would harm himself. Slam his knuckles into a wall, or a window or something. Or worse, take it out on someone else. When they’d first got together she’d heard the talk about his capacity for violence, but when he turned out to be a sweet, vulnerable guy, she was sure those rumours must be about a different person. There was no way the guy who cuddled up to her, the guy who cried at soppy adverts, was the one these people were talking about. It was ridiculous.
‘I’m not what you need. Can’t you see that?’ She hadn’t told him about the baby yet and was dreading having to do so.
‘Everyone else has fucked off. You can’t leave me too,’ he shouted. Who the everyone else were he never actually said. He rarely mentioned family, saying he missed his little brother but couldn’t take the shit he’d get from his parents if he went to see the wee fella. He did once talk about a guy. His oldest friend. They’d had a massive falling out, and it was clear that whenever he was down, which was often, this still bothered him greatly. But when she pressed him on it, he clammed up, as he did about every other part of his life.
‘We used to be out all the time. You were the life and soul of every party, but now we’re here every night…’ She looked round his living room. The vanilla-coloured woodchip on the walls, the three-bar electric fire from another era, the curtainless windows. ‘…While you drink vodka and smoke hash.’
‘But nothing else matters. Just me and you, babe.’ His eyes searched hers for agreement. ‘We’ve been good together, yeah?’
‘Yeah. But…’ The ‘yeah’ referred to the early months of their time together. He was her first real boyfriend. He seemed so worldly and solid. And he took her places for posh meals and weekends away. The trip to London to see Beyoncé in concert was a real highlight. It was continuous excitement, and she’d felt so, so lucky. Chosen, almost. And it was a huge difference to the world she inhabited before.
‘Me and you. Against all the bastards out there.’
‘That’s the problem though, eh?’ she tried to argue. ‘Your “them and us” way of thinking. You haven’t even had me over to meet your family. That’s just weird.’
‘You know how I feel about my family.’ His face darkened.
‘I don’t. Not really. You barely talk about them.’
The therapist shifted in his seat, pulling her from the quicksand of her memory.
‘We had a massive falling out.’ She cleared her throat, the remembered guilt gnawing at her vocal chords. ‘I did what I had to do. There was no real choice. He was…’ She thrust out her chin and chased emotion through her mind, searching for the right word. ‘Damaged. Seems horrible to write anyone off, but I always had the sense he would die young, you know?’
She sipped from her water, suddenly aware of how dry her mouth was.
‘I was twenty-one when I met him. You think you know everything at that age, don’t you? But I knew nothing.’ Her laugh was self-mocking. ‘Young and daft. Attracted to certain men for all the wrong reasons.’
Silence followed. Jenna sought a way to change the subject. She looked at the clock on the wall. There were fifteen minutes left? Heat was building in her chest and neck. She pulled at her top. God, she just wanted to leave. She shouldn’t have come.
‘And you’re probably thinking that’s why I’m so bothered about being there for Mum? That I wasn’t there for my old boyfriend?’
‘You think it’s some sort of displacement?’
‘I’m not saying I think that. I’m saying you’ll think…’ Aware she sounded short, she got to her feet. ‘Sorry, I need to go.’ Her fingers were tingling. It was too hot in here. Her lungs were scratchy, she couldn’t breathe. ‘I’ll go onto your website and book another…’
Seconds later she was out of the door and walking back up the garden path, her past like an anchor behind her, the weight of it gouging into the earth. Her thighs trembling with the effort of pulling. It was so much a part of her she no longer registered exactly how much work it took.