Maddy is feeling in a decidedly better headspace when she gets back to her apartment block. She feels silly doing it, but she checks her hair and puts on another slick of lip gloss before Matteo opens his door.
‘How did you get on?’ he asks, taking Luna’s lead.
Maddy has been planning on recounting what a nightmare Luna has been, but she can see that he’s so grateful that she doesn’t want to make a fuss. Behind him, she sees a glimpse of his apartment. Unlike her drab living accommodation, she sees that his is cluttered with low furniture and retro lamps. She sees a record player and a stack of records leaning up against it. It’s decidedly male. A bachelor pad, she concludes. She can’t see any female shoes in the stack of trainers and boots below the hooks full of coats behind him.
‘It was lovely being on the beach. I got talking to some sea swimmers.’
‘Oh, yes, I see them all the time. My colleague has a vendetta against those funny coats they wear. He thinks we’re being taken over by mad people. Especially the camouflage ones. He and his friend play a drinking game where they have to drink every time they spot someone wearing one.’
‘That’s perhaps a little mean. I wouldn’t say the women I met were mad, just brave. Swimming in this weather …?’ She rubs her arms as if just the thought makes her cold.
Even so, she’s surprised that she feels defensive that there are men taking the piss out of the swimmers on the beach. She can still taste the hot mince pie, but something stronger has stayed with her – that, for just a few minutes, she felt part of a little gang. Perhaps it’s just that having been so starved of company over the past few days, she enjoyed this social interaction much more than she normally would. She’s not met a group of random strangers – well, not in actual real life, that is, for as long as she can remember. She’s surprised by how easy it was to talk to them and how they gave off this earthy, happy energy. She remembers the friendly woman with grey hair saying how amazing she felt. The old one with the white hair and funny accent was quite a character, too.
‘Yes, well, my colleague is … well, shall we say … someone who is never going to get a girlfriend,’ he clarifies and she smiles, glad that he’s distinguished himself from them. ‘I would ask you in …’
‘But it’s against the rules. I know.’ She smiles.
‘You know, if you go on your balcony, I could go on mine? That way we could each be in our apartments and talk.’
‘Oh!’ Maddy is surprised. ‘You mean now?’
‘Or later?’
‘Later?’
‘For new year.’
‘Oh.’
‘Shall we say a quarter to twelve on the balcony?’ he asks.
She wants to tell him that she had been planning on putting her earplugs in and eye mask on and taking a sleeping pill. That she really has nothing to celebrate, but something stops her. She doesn’t want him to think that she’s no fun. Besides, she’s intrigued to find out more about him. And if he’s on his own balcony, then it’s hardly a date. Is it?
The second she’s inside her apartment, Maddy immediately regrets agreeing to the rendezvous. Why is she even thinking about talking to another man, when her head is in such a mess? She has no idea how to behave, or how to strike up a friendship with a member of the opposite sex. She doesn’t have male friends. Ironically, Trent was always too jealous for her to hang out with any single men. Or even married ones, for that matter. So the fact she’s seeing Matteo later fills her with a sense of guilt. Which is ridiculous.
Why shouldn’t she have a drink with Matteo? The fact that Trent would be jealous of someone younger and with much better hair than him makes it feel even more illicit.
But, at the same time, paradoxically, the one person she wants to tell about her new neighbour is Trent. After all the years they’ve shared, being cast adrift from him is deeply confusing. She thought it would be easy to let go, but the white-hot anger has morphed into another more difficult to pin down emotion. It feels like grief. She misses the safe haven of her marriage. She misses her home. And she has nobody to comfort her. She can’t turn to Trent or Lisa. The idea that Matteo is even vaguely interested in talking to her is more comforting than it ought to be.
She pours a large glass of white wine and reminds herself that Trent is probably spending tonight with Helen and bile rises in her stomach. This flick-flacking of emotion is like being constantly seasick and she wonders when it’s going to stop. She longs for peace.
To distract herself, she trawls through her phone, seeing that Elise, one of Jamie’s former best friends, has just got engaged. Right at the stroke of New Year – in Hong Kong.
Maddy already knows from her posts that Elise is living in a fabulous apartment. She posted about being stuck when Corona first struck, but now she’s out and about and seeing her smiling face in a restaurant, the tables crowded with cocktail glasses, balloons and streamers, Maddy is struck by how grown up she looks … how together. So different to the scrawny tomboy of a girl who left with Jamie for their year off after school.
She worried at the time that Elise and Jamie might get it together romantically in Thailand, although Trent was more of the view that Jamie might come home with a Thai bride. Not that there was anything wrong with Elise, but Maddy secretly had an altogether different scenario for her golden boy. With his A levels in the bag and three unconditional offers from his university choices, including the coveted place at Oxford, she knew that the right girl would be waiting for him once he followed his path and she told him as much. All he needed to do was to stay safe and have fun.
When she drove them to the airport, she was confident that, with enough money in his pocket and with sensible Elise by his side, Jamie would have the time of his life.
She’ll never know what really happened that night in Thailand at the full moon party. She only knows from Elise that Jamie had got in with some bad boys at one of the hostels and gone on an all-night bender, followed by another. He always was competitive and was absolutely at his worst at that age.
Maddy will always remember the tearful call Elise made at three in the morning, telling her that Jamie was in serious trouble and that she didn’t know what to do.
Maddy flew out to Thailand herself the next day and, after a fraught eighteen-hour dash, found Jamie cowering in a hospital bed. She was horrified at the sight of him, tanned, yet gaunt, his eyes wild as he tugged the sheet up around him, his feet up, as if there was a monster at the end of the bed. He hardly recognised her.
She’ll never know what cracked his brain, but it must have been some kind of bad acid trip. The Thai doctors didn’t know or seem to care. Perhaps they’d seen it all before. The police were equally unhelpful.
It’s still a blur – that horrible week in Thailand and the dreadful trip home. She thought Jamie would snap out of his paranoia once he came down, but he didn’t and, soon, she and Trent were at their wits end. She’d never had to deal with any kind of mental health issue before and when their GP suggested a residential stay in a psychiatric hospital after evaluating Jamie, they reluctantly agreed.
It took six months to get even a glimmer of the old Jamie back, but by then his friends had moved on. He deferred his uni place, then let the whole thing drop. He stayed at home in his room, insisting that smoking weed was the only thing that was keeping him straight. He slept every day until late afternoon and Maddy didn’t know what was worse: Trent’s fury at their son sleeping, or the resentful atmosphere Jamie created once he got up.
She writes a congratulatory message to Elise, then deletes it. Elise won’t want to be reminded of Maddy – and by association, Jamie.
Where’s Jamie now? she wonders. Is he having flashbacks to that horrible New Year that everything changed too? She wishes she could go back. She wishes she’d never let him go.
At a quarter to midnight, Maddy yearns for the oblivion of sleep, but she feels she can’t deal with the social embarrassment of ditching Matteo when he lives right next door. She spritzes her face, arranges the neck of her cashmere roll-neck and then goes to the spare room and fiddles with door.
Matteo is waiting on his balcony, the apartment behind him lit up. He’s wearing a nice jumper and a green moleskin jacket that complements his eyes. There’s some lovely Spanish guitar music playing. There’s a little table and he’s lit some candles in coloured jars, but he appears to be alone.
‘There you are. Here. Have a chair.’ He passes over a flimsy wooden and metal chair. She has no choice but to grab it and unfold it. ‘Oh, and take a candle,’ he adds, handing her a jam jar. He goes back inside and she surreptitiously snaps a picture of the candle and puts a filter on it. She’ll save it for later and try to think of a good caption. Perhaps something about the poor people who died of Covid? Not that she was affected personally, but it’ll make her sound like she’s a caring person. But even as she thinks this, she hates herself for being so shallow. She feels a wave of resentment towards Manpreet and her followers and for having to feed her site with this constant show of giving a shit.
‘And this,’ he adds, coming back with a bottle and two glasses. He’s made quite an effort, she realises. ‘It’s new year and I’m going early. And it’s the least I can do to thank you for taking Luna out. She’s been so much calmer this afternoon.’
He reaches over the balcony and gives her a glass of fizz with a smile. ‘My ex insisted on getting a puppy in lockdown, but she’s online all the time and it was impossible for her to work, so I’ve got Luna.’
So he is single. Single, and decent enough to help out his ex.
She raises a glass and takes a sip, then appraises the glass. ‘Wow, that’s delicious.’
‘It’s only Cava,’ he explains. ‘From my home town.’
He seems pleased that she likes it. The way he says ‘home town’ makes him seem exiled. She’s not that familiar with Spain, but she imagines him with a straw hat on, tall crystal glasses and a summer lunch laid out among the vines.
‘We’ll have a good view of the fireworks on the beach from here.’
‘Fireworks? I thought it was lockdown?’
‘There’ll be fireworks,’ he says. ‘There always are by the sea. It’ll be fun.’
They both sit and, with the candlelight and the music, it feels very European – like she could be on holiday. Except for the temperature. She lets the bubbles fizz over her tongue. Trent is a snob about champagne. She has a momentary panic that Trent might have forgotten to get the bottles from the boxes in the garage at home to chill them in the wine fridge. But then she remembers. She’s not going to be drinking Perrier-Jouët with him. Helen is. She hopes she chokes on it.
‘So where is home?’ she asks Matteo. He describes a hilltop town inland from Barcelona and his troubles getting back there in lockdown. He tells her about how he met his ex, Shauna, when she was on holiday in Barcelona and he had a student job as a city tour guide.
‘I followed her to England.’ He smiles bashfully at how romantic he’d been. ‘I wanted to transfer my studies to carry on studying to be a teacher.’
‘You wanted to be a teacher?’
‘I still do. But I had to get a job. I had to be a grown-up.’
It’s funny how far people go, then get scuppered by events, she thinks. When Jamie was young, she thought that if she gave him the best education, she’d propel him into his future, with enough backing and momentum to carry him to the stars. But it didn’t happen that way.
‘One day, I still dream I’ll build my own house on the patch of land at the edge of my village. It’s got a view of the mountains to die for.’
‘It sounds lovely,’ she says. ‘And Shauna?’
‘We weren’t as compatible as we thought,’ he said. ‘The lockdown proved that we are just too different. I loved her – and in a way I still do – but we wound each other up too much. Being together twenty-four-seven was the making of some people, but it broke us.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He shrugs. ‘It was a scary time. She was very, very anxious about Covid. Debilitatingly so.’
‘You won’t get back together?’ she asks.
‘No. No,’ he says and shrugs sadly. ‘No. It’s finished.’
Maddy wonders if the girl, Shauna, regrets letting him go.
‘What about you, Maddy?’ he asks. She likes the way he says her name. She likes the way he looks at her. As if he’s genuinely interested. She realises that she can’t remember the last time Trent has looked at her with anything other than defensiveness, or disinterest.
She fiddles with the stem of the glass. ‘Oh, you don’t want to know. It’s a long story.’
‘We have all night.’
She laughs and looks at him and she can see that he means it. So she describes the scene on Christmas Day and how she’s left Trent. Saying it out loud feel liberating. All the confusion she felt earlier disappears, as she looks at Matteo’s face. Trent’s affair with Helen is despicable. Unforgiveable.
‘Ouch,’ he says, his thick eyebrows crinkling together. ‘That sounds painful.’
She nods, feeling unbidden tears stinging her nose. She swallows them down.
‘Thank you,’ she says.
‘To better times,’ he says, leaning across the balcony and clinking glasses with her. She feels a tear fall as the fireworks on the beach start. She laughs at the stupidity of her emotion. It’s embarrassing to cry in front of him.
‘Trent is a fool,’ Matteo says.
She nods and smiles. Someone at last. On her side.