Lindsey Kelk - We Were On a Break

Oh.

Yeah.

I stretched out the crick in my neck and squinted at the devastation in my living room, suitcase dumped open by the door, jumper thrown across the floor, duty free bottle of whiskey left open, knocked over by a flying shoe and emptied out onto my rug.

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing you want to tell me, little brother?’ he asked. ‘Nothing you’d like to share before I see it plastered all over social media?’

‘Nope.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

I stretched as far as I could without getting up and dug around in the suitcase for the little square box I’d been carrying around for three months. It wasn’t there.

‘You didn’t do it?’

‘I really don’t want to talk about it,’ I assured him, panic rising. Where was the ring? ‘What do you want?’

‘Whatever you say, dude,’ he replied, letting go far more easily than I had anticipated. ‘Dad needs a lift to the supermarket and I can’t take him. Can you pick him up?’

‘I just got off a plane.’ I lay back down, head spinning from my ill-advised three a.m. nightcap and felt something digging into my hip. It was the ring box, nestling in between the sofa cushions. ‘Why can’t you take him?’

‘Because I’ve got a job, Adam, and I’m on my way into the office. You can’t tell I’m in the car at all, can you? I got this new Bluetooth hook up for the Jag and it’s so clear I—’

‘Can’t you take the day off?’ I interrupted, picking up the ring box and letting the sharp corners dig into my palm. ‘I thought you were your own boss.’

‘No such thing as a day off when you run your own company,’ he scoffed. ‘I’ve barely had a minute to myself in the last month. Honestly, I’m out for a morning and my number two doesn’t know whether to shit or wind his watch. I’ve employed idiots, Adam, it’s a miracle we’re even still going, let alone doing so well. I’ve got to go in today, we’re pitching for this—’

‘I’ll take him,’ I said quickly. I didn’t have the stomach for another Chris Floyd lecture on how Very Important he was. ‘I’ll be there in an hour; let me have a shower and I’ll go over.’

‘OK, I’ll let him know,’ Chris replied cheerfully. ‘So, what went wrong? Did you not have a good time? Cass is dying to hear all about it.’

‘Yeah, something like that,’ I said, rubbing my temples. ‘I’d better go.’

‘Well, I hope you’re planning to be more talkative tomorrow night. You’re both still coming round for dinner, aren’t you?’

‘Uh, I don’t know,’ I said, sitting up and faking a cough. I’d forgotten, I always forgot. Liv managed our social calendar. I was in charge of making sure she ate solid food and she was in charge of making sure I entered the outside world. It had been a good system until now. ‘I’ve not been feeling brilliant. I don’t want to come if I’ve got a cold. You know, the baby.’

‘Oh yeah,’ he replied. ‘I suppose not. You pick it up on holiday?’

‘On the plane, I think,’ I went for another cough, trying to get a bit more of a hack into it and putting Chris on speaker while I checked my emails and messages. ‘Been feeling shit all night.’

At least that part wasn’t a lie.

‘Well, let me know, twatfink,’ Chris said. ‘Cass was going to cook some ridiculously complicated Chinese thing that takes ten years to make. If you’re not going to come, for fuck’s sake text me tonight or I’ll never hear the end of it.’

‘Tell her we’d be just as happy with a takeaway,’ I replied, scanning one of half a dozen emails from Pablo the restaurant manager who seemed dead set on screwing me out of all my money for the non-event of a proposal. How could not showing up and eating dinner be costing me more money than actually going to the restaurant? I definitely hadn’t told him to organize a firework display. Had I? ‘I’ll bring a pizza or something, the woman just had a baby.’

‘Yeah, but you know how she is,’ he said with half a sigh. ‘She wants to do something nice and, you know, I thought we’d be celebrating.’

I did know how she was, and I thought we’d be celebrating too. The ring box was not supposed to be in my hand right now, or at least the contents weren’t. Actually, I wasn’t sure where the box went once the ring was on her finger. Did she keep the box? Did I? Did we throw it in the sea in a glorious celebration of love and the giddy assumption that it would never, ever come off her hand ever again?

‘Don’t let her mess about cooking.’ I stuck my left big toe into the ankle of my left sock, wriggling it down over my heel. ‘I’ll text you later, but right now I feel like shite. I really don’t think we’ll be coming over.’

‘OK, let me know, I’ve got to go, almost at work.’

‘Yeah, I get it,’ I said, tackling the second sock, so much easier now the first one was off. ‘I’m honoured you found the time to call to ask me to do you a favour in the first place.’

‘You should be,’ he said. ‘Now go and get Dad before he eats one of the dogs. Love to Liv.’

Kicking my socks across the wooden floor, I let my phone slip between the sofa cushions and held the ring box in the palm of my hand. Such an inconspicuous little thing. For something so small, it felt very heavy.

‘Adam, what did you do?’ I wondered aloud while Jim Beam tap-danced on my temples. My mouth was dry and my eyes were sore and every part of me ached. ‘What did you do?’

It was all a bit of a blur and for that I was thankful. I remembered losing it on the plane, driving home in silence and then an argument at her front door although exactly what had been said was a mystery. And after that … nothing. I couldn’t hold my ale at the best of times but Jim Beam and jet lag were an evil combination and I knew I wasn’t in a rush to call her for the details.

Very carefully, I stood up and placed the ring box carefully inside a tall ceramic vase on the mantelpiece. Somewhere it couldn’t escape, somewhere I couldn’t see it.

Stretching, I picked up the almost-empty whiskey bottle and set it on the coffee table, gagging at the stench of booze coming from the rug. I was a mess.

‘Shower first, Dad second,’ I told my greyish-green reflection. ‘Grovel to Liv third.’

I had a feeling the last one could take a while.

‘You’re shitting me?’

‘I shit you not.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Because I’d make this up? Can you hand me the thermometer?’

David, my nurse and work-husband, picked up the requested instrument without taking his narrowed brown eyes off me. Bruiser, a French bulldog who couldn’t stop passing foul gas, kept his huge green eyes on the thermometer.

I really hadn’t slept after Adam dropped me off and, instead, I tossed and turned for a couple of hours before changing out of my pyjamas and into my scrubs. I’d done the rounds, checked on our overnight patients and called all their owners before David even got to work. As far as I could tell, nothing majorly dramatic had happened while I was away, other than my dad being called out to tend to an epileptic guinea pig in the middle of the night a week last Friday.

‘Adam didn’t propose?’ David wrapped his rubber-gloved hands around the unwilling pup. ‘Hold still, Bruiser, it’ll all be over in a minute.’

‘That’s what he says to all the boys,’ I whispered to Bruiser as I lubed up the probe.

‘Honestly, I’m not telling you anything ever again,’ he replied with an affected toss of his head. ‘It was one time and I didn’t care for it one bit. I went to public school, Liv – everyone was doing it.’

Even when I was sleep-deprived, jet-lagged and desperately trying to convince myself nothing was wrong, David could still make me smile.