Chapter 8

Imust have dozed off. Disorientated, I wake as the coach slows to a stop, the engine still running. Feeling stiff, I twist my neck, conscious of Lydia's soft breathing, her head resting on my chest. She must be asleep.

I wriggle carefully so as not to wake her, stretching a little, my muscles protesting at the stiffness holding my legs to ransom.

‘What time is it?' Her voice sounds loud in the dark belly of the coach and I feel bad that I must have disturbed her. I also miss the warmth of her body as she moves away.

‘It's five to one.' I do a quick mental calculation. The coach has been travelling for an hour and fifty minutes. Say an average of thirty miles an hour at a very cautious estimate which means we must have travelled sixty miles. Well out of reach of drones. I heave a silent sigh of relief.

‘So we must be a good way from where we started,' she says, with that ever present spark of positivity in her voice.

‘Yeah, though we're stuck in traffic now.' Every now and then the coach lurches forward for a few seconds and then stops again. Somewhere around us, there's a vehicle with very screechy brakes that squeal a few seconds ahead of us each time we stop. It doesn't take long for the sound to get irritating. I tune it out and think about how I'm going to make my film. I've already got the opening scene in my head. I'm going to go in close on the lead actor to show his emotions. His wife is leaving him. I've got no idea how that feels. I've never done commitment in my life. My last girlfriend, Natalie, accused me of being emotionally unavailable. What the fuck does that even mean? I was always clear with her from the outset. We were exclusive. For me, that was enough. Realising I'm straying into stuff I don't want to think about, I stop and go back to figuring out camera angles.

Another half hour passes of the interminable stop, start. The oily diesel fumes intensify to the point where I can almost taste them in my mouth and my jaw tightens along with the slow roil in my stomach. I take a couple of deep breaths but they really don't help the queasiness that has taken hold.

Beside me Lydia starts wriggling. Why can't she just keep still?

‘What's wrong?' I snap. I hate feeling weak like this.

‘I want something out of my rucksack. Do you think you could put the torch light on again?'

For Christ's sake. ‘I'm trying to keep the battery going as long as possible,' I say, but I turn on the light anyway and the tiny glow lights up the blackness. Lydia shuffles over to where the rucksacks are. I can see the dayglo orange straps of my pack and watch as she rummages in her bag. There's a heavy thunk as she drops something. What is she doing?

‘Aha!' she says but the light is too dim to see what she's retrieved. I hope it's worth it. My stomach rolls again. I'm not going to be sick. Mind over matter.

She sits down next to me again.

‘Would you like a mint?' she asks as if we're in the cinema on a date or something. ‘Take away the taste of the diesel. And I've got some water. It's probably a bit warm but better than nothing.'

‘Thanks.'

She hands the pack over and my fingers close over hers. They're freezing.

‘You're cold.'

‘Just a bit. My bum's the worst.'

I know the feeling. ‘Do you want a fleece? I've got a spare in my rucksack,' I offer.

‘Thanks but I've got one.' I smile a little in the darkness. She's certainly independent. I think of Natalie again. She always expected me to do gentlemanly things for her – no doubt she'd have insisted I strip off and hand over my jumper.

I hear the rattle of pans as Lydia fights her way into her rucksack again. What does she have in there? We need to ditch some of her load. I can't carry her on this trip.

‘Here,' she says and I feel a lightweight sleeping bag dumped on my lap. ‘We can sit on this, insulate our arses.'

‘Good call.'

‘I am so glad I was born in the age of electricity,' Lydia says. ‘Getting dressed in the dark with all those buttons must have been a nightmare.'

I burst out laughing. It's so typical of her. I barely know the woman but she's consistent.

‘What's wrong with that?' she asks.

‘Nothing. It's you. You always manage to find a positive. Most people I know would have complained.'

‘You haven't,' she points out.

‘True.'

‘Wow, something we have in common. We're both stoics.'

‘Who knew?' I say.

‘Anyway, there's no point complaining about something I can't do anything about.' I can feel her shrugging her shoulders. ‘What's the point. You just have to get on with it.'

‘Not everyone thinks like that. Some are big on complaining.' I think of Natalie, who was always telling me I wasn't doing things right. My parents are the same.

‘Are you speaking from experience?' Of course Lydia is straight in there with the questions. Normally I wouldn't answer but what the hell, we're buried in the bowels of a bus, nothing's normal.

‘I was thinking of my mother … and my ex-girlfriend. But mainly my mother. She complains a lot. I'm late. I'm early. I'm not wearing the right suit?—'

‘Don't tell me she doesn't love your Brioni suit?'

I laugh. ‘In the right circumstances, yes, but if I turn up to Sunday lunch in the wrong sort of trousers?—'

‘No!' says Lydia with mock horror. ‘There are wrong sorts of trousers? Why didn't I know this?'

When she says it like that, I realise how ridiculous it is. ‘My mother notices that sort of thing. Apparently it's disrespectful not to be correctly attired when someone has invited you to lunch.' I pause and add, ‘She just has high standards.'

And suddenly I'm defending my mum and I've no idea why. It's bugged me for most of my life that she and my dad have this perverse snobbery and narrow, self-defined expectation of how you should behave.

‘So what sort of trousers are wrong for Sunday lunch? Not that I'm expecting an invite.'

‘You know…'

‘No, I don't know. I have no idea.'

‘If its lunch in the garden then chinos might be acceptable but not shorts. Not at lunch.'

‘Right and if lunch is in the house?'

‘If it's in the dining room, then trousers with a shirt.'

‘With a shirt. You don't go topless then? Or is that if you eat in the kitchen?'

I laugh out loud. Her teasing makes me forget the fuss that Mum and Dad can make if you don't do things the way they should be done. They're really good at laying on the emotional blackmail.

‘We never eat in the kitchen. Always the dining room.' I put on a slightly snotty scandalised tone, the sort my mother would use. I wait for Lydia to take the piss. Our short acquaintance is enough for me to know that she is not one to hold back. To my surprise though, she doesn't say a word. The silence makes me think that she's digesting this fact and I wonder what she's thinking.

‘You said your ex-girlfriend complained a lot. Is that why she's an ex?'

‘No,' I say, surprised by the change in direction of the conversation. ‘I'm used to complaints. I'm good at ignoring them.' Which is a lie. I'm just good at avoiding them and working out which ones I can put up with.

‘How long were you with her?'

Shit. Easy question. Difficult answer. I shift a little, conscious that my bum is a bit numb. I do a quick count. How do I sum it up? The time we dated, or do I include the last part where we were just friends but benefits crept in?

‘Are you counting on your fingers?'

It might have been nine months if I count the booty calls – which she made too, to be fair. I go with ‘Seven or eight months.'

‘Seven or eight. You're not sure?'

Now I shift uncomfortably and it's nothing to do with the numbness in my backside. ‘I thought it was over, but she didn't get the memo.'

‘You sent her a memo?' Lydia sounds half amused and half appalled. ‘I've heard of break-ups by text but not by memo.'

‘No, of course I didn't.' There's another one of those guilty pauses. ‘I might have given her mixed messages.'

Lydia's straight onto it. ‘Let me guess, the classic "I don't want to see you anymore but I'm happy to keep having sex with you"?'

How does she know? But it was mutual … or so I thought. I found out later I was very wrong about that.

‘I didn't lead her on. I made it clear. But she…' Am I really going to say this out loud? ‘She said I was emotionally unavailable.' I can't believe I just admitted that. It's been going round and round in my head for weeks. I guess a female perspective on it might be useful. God knows my mates, Griff and Rob, have no insight. They just take the piss and use the phrase on every possible occasion.

‘Hmm, is that what emotionally unavailable means? Making it clear in word but not in action?'

I'm not sure what she means. It's like I'm high up on the trapeze without a safety net.

‘Although to be fair,' she continues, ‘you're good at making things very clear.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?' I ask even though I probably shouldn't.

‘You're very good at switching off your emotions. I've seen you do it. The portcullis comes down. Your eyes go blank.'

‘When have I done that?' I try to say it casually, but it comes out defensive because I know I do it… Shit. I've walked right into no man's land. The thing that we've both been skirting around since the day we met in Barcelona.

‘You don't remember?'

‘Don't know what you're talking about.' Or rather, I know exactly what she's talking about and I don't want to go there. It will involve peeking under the covers to see what's really there. I want to ignore what happened.

‘Tom! Get real. You know exactly what I'm talking about. We had sex. A ton of it.'

In the dark I wince. Sex in the bedroom. Sex in the bathroom. The kitchen. Even the hall. The recollection of the pure heaven of sliding into her the very first time, that absolute sensation of relief, of being whole, stiffens my cock.

‘You do remember that?'

‘Yes.' The word is sullen and clipped but how can I not remember it? Those two nights are embedded in my memory like ferocious ticks clinging on for dear life. I don't want to remember how easy she was to be with. How undemanding. It was just sex. Good sex. That's all. If I tell myself often enough it will be true.

‘Just yes?' she queries and I get the impression she's fed up with having to prod and poke for every response, but I don't owe her anything. I never lied to her that weekend. We never made promises and neither of us so much as indicated that there'd ever be a repeat performance.

‘What do you want me to say? I'm not going to apologise. We both had a good time, you didn't complain?—'

Of course, once again I walk right into that one as she can't resist chipping in. ‘I don't complain, remember?'

Now I'm getting pissed off. What does she want from me? It was a two-night stand.

‘Unless you're one hell of an actress, you had a pretty good time. I particularly remember one point when I had my head between your thighs…' Okay, low blow, but she's making me feel annoyed and guilty and defensive and … I just want her to stop talking about it.

‘You don't need to embarrass me.' As soon as she says that, I feel like a shit. Because that's one thing she shouldn't be. The sex was amazing, unconstrained, natural. I want to reassure her.

‘Why would you be embarrassed? Like I said, we had a good time.'

‘Yeah,' she agrees but she's still pushing. ‘We had good sex and then you shut down. Closed yourself off.'

Of course I fucking did. I was terrified. There, I've admitted it … to myself, at any road. I was absolutely fucking terrified of the way I felt. That connection … Christ, listen to me. Connection? Whatever it was scared the shit out of me. Things like that don't really exist. It's a con. One-sided for sure. It ties you to people and you lose the control. That Sunday night was like standing on a precipice – one foot wrong and I'd be straight over to an uncertain … what, I didn't know, but I wasn't going to risk it. There'd be conditions, she'd want something from me and I'd be putting myself out on the line.

I push those thoughts back in the box marked ‘never to be looked at again' and man up again.

‘It was a one-night stand. Hell, I didn't even remember your surname until Barcelona. I thought you knew the rules. It was Sunday night. A school night. Time to go home.' I say it so matter-of-factly, I almost believe it.