Page 30 of You Belong With Me

This was the first time Edie had ever heard Meg chiding someone about modesty and etiquette.

‘Meg, shhh.’

‘I wasn’t – I had joggers on. I must have taken them off,’ Declan said, the full misery of his situation descending upon him. ‘I’ve not done any sleepwalking since I was nine or ten.’

‘Probably giving your head a bump shook it loose,’ Edie said.

‘Were you nude then, too?’ Meg asked, unable to let go of her indignance this fast.

Edie shushed her.

‘I think I was, but …’

The unfinished sentence was that there had been less of him to go on tour.

‘We’ll leave you to get to bed,’ Edie said, hurriedly motioning at Meg to set the knife down and follow her – fleeing the scene before Declan had to despondently trudge back up the stairs, realising he didn’t need to cup his junk without his onlookers. Edie was not a physically confident person herself, and every time she put herself in Declan’s non-existent shoes, she flinched.

As she lay with her duvet up to her neck, she felt like she could hear his thoughts. It was as if they were psychically communicating.

There was the sound of something being pulled across carpet, and she realised he was putting a chest of drawers in front of the door to stop himself repeating the expedition.

Edie tried to think what she’d say in the morning to make this better. Her job waschoosingwords designed to elicit a certain response or feeling, after all.

The trouble with humour here was: it was too close to ridiculing the person’s body. She could try for perspective?

Look, it’s not a consultant telling you whether it’s treatable, it’s not charged with three counts of murder, it’s not messing up your slot at the Super Bowl. It’s just a colleague having more information about your anatomy than you intended. Information that she’ll have forgotten in a week’s time.

Yeah, that was straight up untrue.

15

Edie went downstairs the next morning to find Declan gone. They’d bonded so brilliantly in A&E. What a development. Even though Edie hadn’t done the exposing thing, she felt almost as embarrassed as he did.

Her phone had received his farewell.

MORNING. WELL THEN. Oh fuck. Infinity oh fuck. So, Edie, I thought I’d make myself scarce this morning, because holy fucking SHIT. Right now it’s 8 a.m. and I don’t know whether to open a bottle or a vein, tbh. You take care of me, let me stay at your house, and that was your reward. I am dying here. I can’t apologise enough. I keep thinking what you and your sister must’ve thought I was up to, and dying all over again. D

Edie sent a lengthy, supportive, and carefully worded reply, insisting he had absolutely nothing to apologise for and she only hoped he was all right. She knew that however emphatic her words: 1. Declan would probably need months if not years to get over the horror, and 2. Their next greeting would redefine uncomfortable.

She was inordinately grateful for the mini-break to take her mind off it.

January was the most dreich of months, and with Nick and Hannah, Edie made a plan to cheer it up with a long weekend in the countryside: renting a cottage with a woodburning stove, doing long walks, reading books in nooks, cooking hearty things that required oven-braising while the chefs got gradually less coherent imbibing red wine.

‘Also, let’s not be those people who get partners and start doing everything in pairs,’ Hannah had said on their WhatsApp group, Muffin Wallopers.

‘You weren’t really like that when you were with Pete, to be fair,’ Edie said, once they were en route, with Hannah at the wheel. ‘You were just in Edinburgh.’

Hannah had spent a long time with dependable, solid, nice Pete, before realising she was utterly miserable, having a one-night stand with Chloe, her now-girlfriend, and leaving him. Practically and logistically, the upheaval was over. Edie could tell that emotionally and psychologically, it was a work in progress. Hannah was dry as a bone and sharp as a scalpel; it would be possible to miss that she felt things deeply and was waterlogged with guilt.

‘Iwaslike that with Alice,’ said Nick, of his malign ex-wife. ‘I think Hannah means now we are all actually happy.’

She told them of Declan’s nude walkabout: she felt unkind, using him for material, and did so without mockery or sensationalism.

Both Nick and Hannah shrieked and groaned and hissed through their teeth and agreed it was a mentally scarring experience for everyone, but principally for Declan.

‘Fair play to the bloke if he turns up at work next week. I think I’d ask the Home Office for a new identity,’ Nick said. ‘Unless I had the body of a Greek God and boasted one like a pipe of Pringles with a bull’s heart atop it. Did he?’

‘Can neither confirm nor deny,’ Edie said, squirming a little. She wasn’t blind: that was a reasonably spectacular body, if you liked that sort of thing. Her interests were engaged elsewhere, and any dwelling upon it made her a voyeur.

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