Seemingly having lost the power of speech as well as the use of my legs, I stayed exactly where I was, waving my arms, opening and closing my mouth and staring at Charlie with all the grace of a dying goldfish.
‘Christ on a bike!’
As usual, Amy nailed the situation fairly succinctly.
Once the smell of blood was out of the water, Al’s guests made a silent, collective decision to raise their volume back up to ‘excitable chatter’. From nowhere, the orchestra began to play again and the waiters were suddenly everywhere, a bottle of champagne in each hand. Clever waiters.
But Charlie was still stood in the doorway and while he didn’t look angry as such, given that the girl he had just declared his love to was securely in the arms of another man, he certainly looked confused.
‘Tess?’ Amy nudged me with her hip. ‘Have you had a stroke or something?’
‘What would that feel like,’ I asked, eyes still fixed firmly on the doorway. ‘Because I might be having one right now.’
‘Shit, is it getting worse?’ Nick moved in front of me, his nose touching my nose. ‘Can you see? Can you taste pennies?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ I pushed him away as gently as possible, needing to put at least a couple of feet between us. I couldn’t taste pennies but I was definitely about to taste vom. What was he doing here? Why wasn’t he moving? ‘I have to go and—’
‘What?’ Nick remained completely oblivious while Amy kept guard, practically bouncing up and down on the spot. ‘I think you’ve got a concussion, I’m taking you to bed.’
I looked at Nick’s face, making an effort to memorize everything about it, every last detail. Not just his eyes that looked so blue in this light or his full lips and firm jaw but everything. I logged his dark blond eyebrows with a couple of unruly grey strays that I knew he would pluck later and pretend that he hadn’t. The way he had more lines around his left eye than his right because he slept on that side. The very faint tan line on his cheeks where he’d caught the sun while wearing his sunglasses and the tiny, almost invisible spot of stubble that he had missed when he was shaving before the party.
When people talked about a horrible feeling, they usually described it in the pit of their stomach. This one was everywhere. My toes ached with it and my fingertips tingled as though anything I touched would explode. Worst of all, my insides felt completely empty. Whatever was going to happen, it was as though someone had hollowed me out in preparation. Whether it was to protect me or make room for what was coming, I didn’t know. With Nick’s face completely committed to memory, I moved away from him, turning towards Charlie.
‘I was going to say surprise, but bugger me!’ Charlie smiled brightly at Amy and me as he walked over but I could see there were questions on his face. ‘You don’t half know how to upstage a romantic gesture.’
‘It’s you!’ Amy prised herself out of her new Italian friend’s arms and launched herself on Charlie, smothering his face in kisses. ‘You’re here! I’m so happy. Tess hurt her head and has to go to her room right away but why don’t we have a drink and wow, you look amazing and tell me all about your flight, I can’t believe you came, you’re the best!’
‘Get off, you mental.’ He batted her away like an overenthusiastic puppy. ‘What do you mean, Tess hurt her head. Are you all right? What happened? Really, what happened? I walked in and I thought you were sacrificing a goat or something.’
‘A lot of drama over nothing,’ I said, fussing his hands away from my face. This was so awful I was starting to understand how people found the strength to fall on their own swords. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Amy? I have to sort some stuff out here …’ I waved my camera at him for effect. ‘I’ll be over in two minutes.’
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’ Nick asked, placing a hand on my bare shoulder.
‘No?’ I only meant to think it but somehow, the word snuck out my mouth.
‘Then I’ll do the honours.’ He took Charlie’s hand in his and shook it to within an inch of its life. ‘Nick Miller, good to meet you.’
‘Charlie Wilder,’ Charlie replied, looking at me as he spoke.
Even though Charlie was a good half a foot taller than Nick, he was at such a clear disadvantage he might as well have crawled in on his hands and knees.
‘Charlie, is it?’
If Nick knew who he was, he wasn’t giving anything away. He kept on pumping Charlie’s hand as though it might come off if he shook it hard enough.
‘Sorry I’m a bit underdressed.’ Charlie’s voice bounced as he spoke, his hand still stuck in Nick’s handshake vice. ‘I didn’t know I was crashing the royal wedding. Tess, what happened to your eye?’
‘Accidental slapping,’ I said, as Nick finally let go of Charlie’s hand although his grip on my shoulder remained very firm. ‘Do you want to go and get changed? Amy could take you to get changed.’
‘I don’t think there’s a lot of point.’ He looked down at his jeans, shoes and shirt. ‘I haven’t got a penguin suit in my bag anyway.’
‘Well, this party is black tie only,’ Amy announced, stretching up to make the most of all of her five feet and nothing inches to grab his shoulders and try to drive him out of the room. ‘So you’ll have to wait outside until we’re done.’
‘How do you know Tess and Amy?’ Nick asked loudly, stopping Amy in her wonderful tracks.
‘How did you know we’d be here?’ Amy interrupted Charlie’s answer. ‘Not that we aren’t both very happy to see you.’ She glued herself to his arm again and smiled brightly at Nick. ‘I’m so happy to see him. I so love this lunk.’
‘Since when do you love me? Are you on drugs?’ Charlie peered down at Amy, a foot and a half below him. ‘Don’t you remember what happened at that party with the meow-meow?’
‘I thought it was a joke,’ Amy retaliated, kicking him in the shin. ‘What sort of name for drugs is meow-meow? And it’s not funny, I could have died.’
‘So you’re Charlie?’ Nick said. ‘Charlie Charlie?’
‘You haven’t told us how you found us,’ Amy wailed, jumping in front of Nick. ‘How did you know where we were?’
‘Your friend Paige said you were staying here when she dropped off the pitch stuff,’ Charlie explained, still trying to free himself of a limpet-like Amy. ‘It all looks amazing, by the way. I thought I’d surprise you.’
‘But you hate flying,’ I said quietly, wondering whether or not Artie might like to pop back and knock me completely unconscious. Nick’s hold on my shoulder was getting tighter by the second and I was a bit scared he was actually trying to do the Vulcan death grip. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Flew in from Portugal, took a train and then a taxi, all with the help of my friend Jack Daniels and a big dose of man-the-fuck-up,’ Charlie gave me the same self-deprecating lopsided grin he’d been throwing my way for ten long years. ‘And I don’t even get a hug?’
‘This is your friend, Charlie?’ Nick said to me, everything falling into place for him, the floor falling away from under my feet. ‘The one who shagged your flatmate? And then you?’
‘I might have had one too many whiskies on the plane, but that’s a bit out of order,’ Charlie said awkwardly as my eyes widened so far I worried they might fall out. ‘I’m not being funny, mate, but should I know you? Are you the gay fella that runs the show?’
‘Nick Miller,’ Nick replied. ‘I’m a journalist. I met Tess in Hawaii.’
‘Oh man, I’m so jealous.’ Charlie ran a hand through his shaggy, copper hair, just like he always did when he was uncomfortable. ‘Tess said it was amazing.’
‘Did she?’ Nick asked, looking at me. ‘And what else did she tell you about Hawaii?’
I could feel each individual fingertip pressing into my collarbone and it was really, really starting to hurt. But what could I say? How could I get them apart? I’d done a good thing today – why was the universe paying me back by being such a complete and utter fuck-knuckle?
‘Not much, to be honest.’ Charlie’s smile began to falter. ‘We didn’t get that much time to talk before she left for Milan. Tess, is everything all right?’
He might not be the most perceptive man in the world but he knew when something wasn’t right and between my deer-in-headlights saucer eyes, Amy’s refusal to let go of his right arm and Nick’s impressive passive-aggressive questioning, Charlie would have had to be hit over the head with seventeen saucepans on his way here not to realize something was going on.
‘Yeah, Tess.’ Nick’s voice was sour. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Shots!’ Amy shouted. ‘We all need a shot! Charlie, why don’t you come with me to the bar.’
‘Tess …’ Charlie’s eyes flickered over to Nick and his jaw set into something far away from the smile he had shown up with. ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Nick,’ I said weakly, waving at him like he was a prize on a bad game show.
‘Is something going on?’ he asked. ‘With you two?’
‘Is something going on with you two?’ Nick asked Charlie.
‘Oh God,’ I whispered at my shoes, desperately trying to come up with a way out of this situation. Did that ‘no place like home’ thing really work? Even if it did, I didn’t actually have a home, so there was no point trying that one.
‘What’s going on?’ Charlie ripped his arm away from Amy but stopped a couple of feet short of me. Nick didn’t budge an inch. ‘Is this why you were weird when you got back to London?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked. My fight or flight decision had apparently been made. ‘Just because I didn’t fall at your feet the second I got off the plane doesn’t mean I was being weird. It meant I had a lot to think about.’
‘I’m not saying you didn’t but you’ve got to admit it was a bit weird.’ Charlie was getting annoyed. I recognized it and I didn’t like it. ‘One minute you’re all over me, the next you’re kicking me out, then you’re all over me again and then you run off to Milan. I think that counts as weird, doesn’t it?’
‘You told me to go to Milan,’ I reminded him. ‘You gave me the bloody camera. You said, go to Milan, have a nice time.’
‘I didn’t mean have this nice a time.’ He pointed at Nick. ‘What exactly has been going on?’
‘Charlie, you need to calm down, we’re in somebody else’s house,’ Amy said. ‘Don’t be rude.’
But if ever there was a case of trying to shut the gate after the horse had bolted, this was it. We were the third and final act in a comedy of errors and the crowd couldn’t get enough: first the love story of Kekipi and Domenico; then the tragedy of Artie and Al; and now us, the play within a play.
‘Can we talk about this upstairs?’ I asked Charlie.
‘Him or me?’ Nick asked. ‘Or should Amy fill me in on whatever parts you clearly didn’t think I needed to know? Save you some time?’
‘Nick, please don’t!’ I tried to cover his hand with mine but it was gone. My shoulder went cold as he let me go and I looked down to see four white fingerprints, like petals, turning ruby red as the blood rushed back into my skin.
‘OK, it’s OK …’ I pushed my hair out of my face, thinking as fast as I could. ‘Charlie, I told you I needed time to think. I told you we would talk when I got back from Milan. Nick, we can talk about this later. There are some things we haven’t got round to talking about yet but they’re things I didn’t think were important.’
‘You didn’t think I was important?’ Charlie asked. ‘You’re moving in with me!’
‘I never told you I would move in with you,’ I said, trying not to shout. ‘I said I needed time to think about it.’
‘And you don’t think that’s something you might have mentioned?’ Nick asked. ‘That between leaving Hawaii and arriving in Milan, you moved in with another man?’
‘I didn’t move in with him!’ I was no longer trying not to shout. ‘Is no one actually listening to me?’
‘She didn’t move in with him,’ Amy said, coming to my defence. ‘He asked her to but she didn’t. And when he told her he loved her, she didn’t say it back. She gave him a double thumbs up. She’s totally in the clear.’
I stared at Amy and my jaw dropped.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘I’m trying to help?’
‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ Charlie raked his hair back again and shook his head at no one. ‘I’m not doing this.’
‘Charlie, wait!’ I threw my arms up but my feet didn’t make a move to follow him. Instead I watched him stalk back through the crowd and out of the door. ‘Amy?’
‘On it.’
She took off her heels and pelted across the floor, weaving through the partygoers and chasing after our friend.
‘Nick,’ I turned around to face my love but instead, someone else had taken his place, someone cold and hard and entirely strange to me. ‘Nick, it’s not what you think,’ I said. ‘He did ask me to move in with him and he did tell me he loved me but I told him I needed time to think about everything. That’s all that happened.’
‘But you didn’t say you wouldn’t move in with him, did you?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t tell him about me.’
‘At that point, I didn’t think there was anything to tell.’ I reached for his hand, his arm, anything, but he pulled away entirely. ‘I’d been calling you and leaving messages and you weren’t replying to anything. I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again.’
‘Handy to have a replacement waiting for you, isn’t it?’ he asked, his face folding into a sneer that was incredibly unflattering and utterly heartbreaking. ‘We should both feel so special.’
‘I love you.’ I tasted the tears that were steadily streaming from my swollen eye as I spoke, pressing my desperate hands to my chest but my camera was in the way. ‘And I know it’s crazy and unexpected but I do love you. But I thought you were gone and he was there. I’m not proud of myself but I thought if it wasn’t going to happen with you, maybe it could work with him.’
He looked away sharply, his eyes turning grey as the light changed.
‘But it can’t,’ I told him. ‘I know that now and that’s why I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry.’
‘All of this just proves me right,’ he muttered, not really to me, not really to anyone. ‘All of it.’
‘Nick, I love you!’ I tried to make every word, every syllable matter. To pack simple words I said a thousand times a day full of more meaning than there was in the world, but it felt used and cheap. There wasn’t a word good enough for him, powerful enough to make him listen.
So I punched him in the stomach as hard as I could.
‘Ow!’ He turned his eyes back to me, clutching his gut. ‘That’s supposed to convince me you love me?’
‘Yes! That’s how much I love you. I love you so much I want to punch you in the stomach!’ I yelled, really quite pleased with myself. ‘I want to kick you in the shins and knock you out with how much I love you. I love your feet and your bones and your hair and your stupid motorbike and your stupid roll-ups that you don’t even really want to smoke anyway.’
I paused to see if he would stay. He did.
‘I love how you always roll up the sleeves of your shirt. I love that you are so passionate about what you do. I love when you make rubbish jokes that no one laughs at but you. I love that you like spicy food because I like spicy food too. I love how warm you are all time and that you don’t pull away in the night even though my feet are always really cold. I love the fact that you make me feel like I’m not broken, that maybe I’m just missing a part and you’re that part so with you I can be fixed. I don’t know what your favourite film is or what the first record you ever bought was but I do know you and that’s why I love you.’
I stepped out of my high heels and pressed my hands against his chest.
‘I’ll find all the other stuff out along the way,’ I said. ‘But I know all the important things already.’
‘Oh, for the love of God, kiss her!’ Kekipi shouted from nowhere. I had completely forgotten anyone else was in the room. ‘If you don’t, I will.’
Nick leaned down and touched his lips to mine, one hand holding my waist, the other carefully cupping my injured face. Somewhere a million miles away, I could hear glasses clinking together and distant bravos but they really didn’t matter.
‘Fuck it, I love you too,’ Nick said as he broke away. ‘But just so we’re clear, my jokes are never terrible.’
‘I’ll learn to live with them.’ I let him wipe away a smudgy black tear, avoiding my newly throbbing black eye. ‘I should go and talk to Charlie.’
‘What?’ Nick looked confused. ‘He’s gone. You’re not going after him?’
‘I’ve got to,’ I said, looking to Kekipi for support that I clearly was not getting. ‘I wasn’t fair to him and I need to explain. He’s been one of my best friends forever, I feel shitty.’
‘I don’t understand why you have to go running after him,’ he replied, clearly having decided to be stubborn about this. ‘Call him tomorrow, it’ll be fine.’
‘Would you answer the phone to me?’ I asked. ‘After all that?’
‘Seriously, Tess, don’t go,’ he said, an edge of warning in his voice. ‘I don’t want you to.’
‘Nick, I’ve got to,’ I said, adamant. I knew in my gut I wouldn’t be able to settle until I’d sorted things out. I wasn’t someone who could live with ambiguity or bad feeling, especially when someone was so important to me and especially when it was all my fault. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’
‘Why are you going after him, though?’ he asked. ‘I really don’t get it. What do you think you can say that will make him forgive you?’
‘I don’t know …’ I attempted to explain as clearly and concisely as possible but I had already used up an awful lot of words for one day and my poor brain was very tired. ‘But he’s my friend. I have to make things right. This is no different to how it would be if it were Amy.’
‘Except you never shagged Amy,’ he argued. ‘Unless you did but you didn’t think I needed to know about that, either.’
‘I’ve never had sex with Amy, no matter what my mum’s next-door neighbour might tell you in the future,’ I replied. ‘And you need to get over this dick-swinging contest right now because I’m going to apologize to him and then I’m coming back here and then you’re not getting rid of me ever again.’
‘It’s not a dick-swinging contest,’ he blustered, hands on his hips in an impressively masculine little teapot stance. ‘Not that there would be a contest anyway, but, whatever. I’m telling you, I don’t want you to go.’
‘And I’m telling you, I’m going,’ I said, picking my shoes up from the floor and throwing him the frowning of a lifetime. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’
I headed for the door, Kekipi close behind me.
‘Are you sure you want to go?’ he asked, taking my camera from me as I scrambled along the floor in my too long skirt. ‘He does not look happy.’
‘He is being an arsehole.’ We dived into the first black SUV waiting outside the palazzo, Kekipi taking the keys from the driver and presumably explaining in very short Italian that he would drive. ‘I told him I loved him – what more does he want?’
‘He’s a man,’ Kekipi said. ‘What he doesn’t want is you running out on him for another man. Can you see how he might take that the wrong way?’
‘But everything I said?’ I replied, checking my eye in the visor mirror. Nothing said sexy like a swollen-shut eye. ‘It’ll be OK.’
‘I refer you to my last answer,’ he said, gunning the engine. ‘He’s a man. It might not be.’
I pawed through my little black clutch bag, checked my phone and found a text from Amy, telling me Charlie had got a taxi to the train station. Typical Charlie. He would spend five hundred quid on computer games without blinking but spend a hundred euros on a taxi to the airport when he could get the train for twenty? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.
‘All I have to do is find the train that’s going to the airport and stop him,’ I reasoned, tapping my hands on my lap as we drove, ignoring that fact that we were going well over the speed limit of any country, whatever it might be in Italy. ‘Can’t be that hard, can it?’
‘The station is biggish,’ Kekipi said, pinching his face together. ‘But I have faith in you.’
‘You said it was biggish.’
I leaned out of the car window, craning my neck to look at the train station as Kekipi pulled up out front.
‘It’s fucking enormous,’ I pointed out, my stomach dropping through the floor. ‘It’s the biggest train station in the world. Bloody hell!’
‘It’s not the biggest train station in the world,’ Kekipi sniffed. ‘I bet it’s not even in the top three. I’ll google it.’
‘Word of advice,’ I said, hitching up my skirts and leaping out of the SUV. ‘Don’t be afraid to exaggerate. Hyperbole would have been appropriate here.’
‘Don’t take your temper out on me.’ He was busy staring at his phone, safely behind the steering wheel. ‘I’ll wait here. Call me if you need me.’
‘It’s going to take me half an hour to get inside,’ I chuntered, trying a hybrid skip and jog in bare feet along the pavement.
I wasn’t exaggerating. The train station was truly enormous. The massive winged horses hanging over the entrance made me feel like a flea and suddenly my hopes of conveniently running into Charlie at the ticket booth were dying by the second. Broken phone in sweaty hand, I darted inside, dodging people in their suits and ties, looking for their trains home, and dialled Amy. Maybe she had already found him. Maybe she had him tied to a chair in McDonald’s and they were just waiting for me with a McFlurry. Mmm … McFlurry.
‘It’s me,’ I shouted when she picked up. ‘Where are you?’
‘Underneath the departures board near the café.’ I could barely hear for chiming bing bongs and loudspeaker announcements. ‘He’s raging, Tess. I followed his taxi but I lost him as soon as he got out. How massive is this place? It’s amazing.’
‘It’s an architectural bloody wonder,’ I shouted down the line. ‘I’m coming to find you. You don’t know what train he’s on?’
‘There are two going to the airport in the next ten minutes, platform three and platform fourteen,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know which he’s on. Got to be one of them though.’
I searched for the nearest platforms, stalking through the crowds, phone in one hand and as much of my dress as I could handle in the other. ‘I’m nearest number three, can you go to fourteen?’
‘And tell him what?’ she asked. ‘It might be better to let him go, let him simmer down a bit.’
‘No, I need to explain,’ I said, picking up speed as I raced towards the platform. ‘He’s got to let me explain.’
‘I’ll call you if I find him first,’ she replied, hanging up.
I knew she was right. There was nothing I could say to Charlie right now that would make him feel better about flying across Europe to surprise me, only to be turned away for another man. What I was doing was selfish – I wanted to make myself feel better as much as I wanted to mend fences with him but it couldn’t hurt to try, could it? If he saw that I had come after him, searched for him just to say sorry, wouldn’t that make things better in the long run? I had spent a lifetime turning the other cheek and perhaps it didn’t make me a very nice person, but when someone screwed me over it did tend to take the edge off things to know they at least felt shitty about it. I was only human.
Platform three was a million miles further away from the main concourse than by rights it should have been and by the time I reached the actual train, huffing and puffing, I was running out of time. I scrambled along the outside of the carriages, jumping up every few seats to get a better look inside. Charlie liked to sit in a window seat so he could watch the world go by, and because he got really anxious about travelling. And if he were by the window he would be the first to spot any erupting volcanoes or incoming zombie hordes. Charlie was quite certain about the inevitability of zombies. Charlie had watched far too much Walking Dead.
Finally, in the very last carriage, three seats from the front of the train, there he was. It was only when I stopped running that I felt something sharp in the bottom of my foot. But whatever it was, it would wait. Deep down, I hadn’t really expected to find him. I had half-hoped that Amy might and that she would be able to talk some sense into him before I had to give it a shot. He sat staring blankly at the empty seat in front of him, lifeless and defeated. A wave of something hot and horrible washed over me. I realized that I wanted Amy to find him because I didn’t really want to see him. I only wanted to be able to say I had tried.
But there he was, my needle in a haystack. I tapped on the window, as gently as I could and pressed my palm against the glass. If Charlie was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it and if he was happy to see me, it was even less obvious. I’d seen this look on him before but whenever he was upset in the past, I’d found him heartbroken and I left him happy. I was the one who cheered him up. This time, it was all my fault that he was unhappy.
‘Charlie?’ I said, not really loud enough for him to hear but he could see me.
He raised an eyebrow, waiting for the rest and I chewed on my bottom lip, waiting for divine inspiration to strike. Of all the words in the English language, which ones would make him forgive me and be my best friend again? He turned to look at me for a second, his brown eyes and coppery hair a mirror of mine, but where I looked sad and desperate, Charlie looked finished. He sniffed and wiped his face with the back of his hand, looking down on me from his high up train seat. And then, just as the train sounded its horn to announce that it was on its way, he pulled down the blind at his window. He was gone before he was even gone.
I stood on the platform in my absurdly beautiful pink dress, hair everywhere and make-up far from where I had originally applied it, as Charlie’s train pulled out of the station.
‘Did you find him?’ An out-of-breath Amy staggered up beside me, bracing her hands against her knees while I watched the train vanish into the distance. ‘Was he on there?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, tucking her left boob back inside her dress. ‘He was.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘At least you tried,’ she said, sliding her hand into mine. ‘At least that counts for something.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, not really agreeing with her. I looked down at the floor and saw a trail of blood behind us. ‘Amy, are you bleeding?’
‘No,’ she said, turning up the soles of her feet. ‘Are you?’
‘Apparently so,’ I said, paling at the sight of a half-inch gash on the bottom of my left foot. ‘Ow!’
‘Let’s get you back to the car.’ Amy pulled me down the platform while I limped along beside her. ‘It’ll be all right.’
I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Charlie or my foot but as the next train arrived and travellers spilled off the train, making a wide circle around the two incredibly overdressed, sad-looking girls, I really hoped she was right.