No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [91]
She found a quiet corner booth and hid there drinking while she picked at a plateful of cottage pie and salad. It was when she got up to go to the Ladies that she saw Ivan and Sam. However, she felt sure they didn’t see her. She washed her face with cold water and cursed herself for leaving her coat in her seat. She hadn’t paid either so she couldn’t leave. She knew she could return to her table without them noticing her but she couldn’t risk attracting the attention of the barman – and she’d been waiting for him to approach her for a while. She needed another drink. Damn it. She emerged from the Ladies and gingerly made her way back to her seat.
The men had their backs to her and were deep in conversation. She wished she was a fly on the wall – but of course she didn’t need to overhear what Sam was saying. He was probably tearing her apart and Ivan had been nodding so he was probably agreeing. Bastards. She could hear them laughing. At me? Of course. She heard them get up so she pressed herself into her seat and they passed her without spotting her. Thank God, she thought, and ordered another drink.
Much later, when the same taxi man who had dropped her off had collected her and helped her inside, she flipped open her laptop and opened her document to add Ivan’s name to the list of reasons she was finding for being a drunk.
Ivan
He’s a backstabbing bastard.
She woke some time in the afternoon a week after the article had been published. Her head hurt, her breath stank and she was so dehydrated that her skin was flaking. She decided to clean up. Enough was enough. She couldn’t go on as she had been. She accepted that she didn’t want to. She even considered getting help. She poured the last of the booze stash down the drain. She showered and made herself some toast, which she barely nibbled. She opened her laptop and looked through her emails. All were work-related, even though her colleagues were well aware that she was on holiday. She opened up the document that blamed everyone and everything for her problems.
“Stupid girl,” she heard herself say. She missed Mary and Ivan, but mostly she missed Adam. She watched an afternoon movie, but by seven she was pacing the floor with her head in her hands, her body screaming.
While Penny spent a week drinking, Mary was catching up on sleep and work. Sam played guitar, took long walks, ate late suppers in restaurants now busy with tourists. He had read, listened to music and once he’d even sat in the large empty church, soaking up the silence and contemplating his own Catholic upbringing. His mother was of Irish-Catholic descent, his father Irish-Polish Catholic. His mother had gone to a Catholic girls’ school and his father had been taught by the Christian Brothers. They had met at a Catholic dance, aged seventeen and eighteen respectively. They were married at twenty-two and -three in a big traditional Catholic wedding. He had been baptized, he’d made his First Communion and was confirmed. For his first fifteen years he had sat in one of God’s many houses on Sunday after Sunday and yet, aside from stillness, churches and Catholicism had nothing to offer him.
He looked around him at stone and tile, stained glass and candles. He could smell incense and hear the whispered prayer of a nun. He left unsurprised that, for him, it still held nothing. The nightmares had returned and no amount of guitar-playing, late suppers or even religion would make them go away.
Mid-week he’d met Ivan for a pint in a small bar a few miles outside town. Ivan had only an hour to spare as the kids had come home with him and he didn’t like leaving them with a frazzled Sienna. He filled Sam in on how his ex-wife was coping and when she would be released from hospital. They discussed her indecision as to whether or not to press charges against her boyfriend and, more importantly, whether or not she would come home. Ivan was adamant that the bastard who had broken her deserved everything he got, but he was afraid she would go back to him.
Halfway