Mhairi McFarlane - You Had Me At Hello

‘Did you nick my towels after all?’ I mumble, sleepily.

‘Are you drunk?’

‘No! Been asleep.’ I rub an eye with the heel of my hand. ‘Although that sounds an interesting idea.’

‘I wanted to see how my policy of leaving you in splendid isolation was going. I’ve started to feel guilty, which is downright inconvenient.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I laid down the law that we should give you tonight on your own.’

‘Cheers!’ I splutter, incandescently annoyed for a quarter of a second.

‘If we came round tonight and got drunk, you’d have hungover Sunday night blues on your first night alone in the flat. This way, it gets it out of the way.’

‘Or it’d bundle all the bad things together,’ I grumble.

‘Is that how you feel? I can come round now if so.’

I look around at the strange and new surroundings. Rupa’s got some sort of fairylight addiction: strings of red roses, the stamens replaced by pinprick bulbs, those snakes of clear tubing with a disco pulse throbbing along them. Even through the grey filter of my misery, I concede it looks rather beautiful. And, as ever, Caroline’s tough love is a good thing.

‘Ah, I’ll cope.’

‘Go and get yourself a bottle of wine, order a takeaway, and I’ll come round tomorrow.’

After I hang up, I discover I’m not hungry, but I do recall spying a bottle of Bombay Sapphire on Rupa’s shelf. I swipe it and tell myself I’ll replace it twice over before I leave. I don’t have any tonic so it has to make a rapper’s delight of gin and juice with a carton of Tropicana. As I switch the television on and let a medical drama wash over me, another worry surfaces. One I hadn’t wanted to admit to having. It’s just, Ben hasn’t called. And I’ve started to think he’s not going to.

I shouldn’t be thinking about it. It’s positively distasteful, he’s a married man, not a potential date. Only: if he never calls, it’s going to say such an awful lot. It would be an extremely eloquent silence.

Half an hour of you was enough. In fact, it was too much, but I grinned and bore it. The past is the past and you’re the only one living in it. See you again, on the tenth anniversary of never. And by the way, that haircut makes you look like Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code .

In my heart of hearts, I know that’s my guilty paranoia talking, not Ben. Ben is the person who irrationally apologised for so much as mentioning his wedding when I told him about my ex-engaged status. So why is it, when I examine every exchange between us so many times, perspective collapses? I can’t help but think about the killer detail – he took my number, but he never volunteered his, did he?

He was the one saying it’d be great to go out , reassures the angel on my shoulder.

That’s the kind of thing you say to be nice during the social disentanglement process and don’t necessarily make good on , counters the devil.

Oh God, he’s never going to call and I’m going to see Ben and his Olivia of Troy examining high thread count linen in John Lewis and fall backwards over someone in a wheelchair in my haste to escape.

As the patient on TV goes into something called ‘VF’ and the crash team swing into action, I settle on a theory that suits both my fatalism and my knowledge of Ben’s character. He did mean everything he said about it being nice to get together. He asked for my number in good faith, he probably believed he’d use it. Then he thought it through, debated how to describe me to his wife. That consideration alone could make him reassess whether it was a good idea. I can imagine a few memories that might’ve helped him come to a conclusion. And at that moment, he scrolled down to my name in his phone, felt a pang of regret. Then found his resolve, hit delete, and continued with his charmed, Rachel-less life.

Half an hour later, my phone starts flashing with a call. Mum, I think. I prepare myself to be falsely positive for five minutes. I check the caller display: unrecognised number.

‘Hi, Rachel?’

I recognise the warm male voice instantly. I go from someone half asleep at six in the evening to the most awake person in the whole of Manchester. He called! He doesn’t hate me! He didn’t lie! Adrenaline shot with endorphin chaser.

‘Hi!’

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine!’

‘It’s Ben.’

‘Hello, Ben!’ I say this in a voice that people usually reserve for ‘Hello, Cleveland!’

‘Are you sure you’re OK? You sound a bit odd.’

‘I am, I was – I was …’ Christ, I don’t want to admit I’ve been asleep this afternoon, like an eighty-two year old ‘… having a lie down.’

‘Ah. Right. I see.’ Ben sounds embarrassed and I sense he thinks I mean some sort of afternoon singleton lie down, with company. ‘I’ll call back.’

‘No!’ I virtually shout. ‘Honestly. I’m fine. How are you? It’s weird you called now, I was just thinking about you.’

Mouth, open. Foot: placed inside.

‘All good things I hope,’ Ben says, awkwardly.

‘Of course!’ I squeal, with the ongoing note of hysteria.

‘Uhm, I wanted to see if you wanted to meet my colleague after work one night next week to discuss this story?’

‘Yes, that’d be great.’

‘Thursday? I’ll come along, if that’s OK?’

‘Totally fine.’ Totally, amazingly, wonderfully fine.

‘He’s all right, Simon, but he’s a bit full of himself. Don’t let him take any liberties if he starts up about the evils of the press.’

‘I’m sure I can give as good as I get.’

‘So am I,’ Ben laughs. ‘Right, I’ll email a time and a place at the start of the week.’

‘Great.’

‘Have a nice weekend. I’ll let you get back to your lie down.’

‘I’m standing up now, think I’ll stay that way.’

‘Whatever works best.’

We say a stilted goodbye and ring off, with me on a strange, pain-free, woozy high. Onscreen, the patient’s heartbeat has returned.

I should be listening to the details of when, on or about the 26th of August last year, Michael Tallack of Verne Drive, Levenshulme, obtained monies by deception by strapping on his brother’s leg iron and claiming spurious disability benefits.

Instead, mentally, I’m far, far away and long, long ago: part of a group watching a fireworks display at Platt Fields Park in the autumn of my first year of university. I ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ as each explosion bloomed and faded into spiders of glittering dust. I turned to Ben to say something and saw he was watching me instead of the night sky. It was an intent look and gave me a sensation similar to when you think a fairground ride has come to a stop and it hasn’t, quite.

‘Uh …’ I stumbled over the words that were previously on the tip of my tongue, ‘I’m cold.’

‘In those?’ Ben asked, sceptically, pointing at my gloves. They were Fair Isle, multi-coloured. Admittedly, the size of hot water bottle covers.

‘They’re nice!’

‘If you’re seven.’

‘Aren’t you cold?’ I asked him.

‘Not really,’ Ben said. ‘Hadn’t noticed.’

His eyes sparkled. In the freezing atmosphere, I felt heat rise to the surface of my skin. I breathed deeply and clapped my mittens together.

A girl joined us, winding her arm through Ben’s in familiarity. I angled my body away from them and when I turned back to say something, they’d slipped away. I found myself craning my neck to try to spot them in the crowd. I felt ever so slightly abandoned. Which was ridiculous, and clearly a sign of how much I was missing Rhys.

‘All rise,’ barks the court clerk, snapping me back to the here and now.