I crawled into bed, still in my sundress, and got under the covers. There was
no time for a shower. I didn’t care if my face felt a little bit sunburned. I
didn’t care if I woke up with panda eyes. Why had no one worked out that
jetlag and messy-stressy boy nonsense was the cure for OCD? Wrapping
myself up in the duvet, I couldn’t even find the energy to flick off the light
switch. By the time I’d rolled myself up against the seasonably warm
weather, I was right in the middle of the bed. Fuck it, Emelie was just going
to have to roll me over when she got in. As soon as I was down, I turned
into lead, and like lead I sank into a deep sleep the second I closed my eyes.
It was daylight again when I opened them.
‘Morning.’ Matthew was stretched out on the chaise lounge, reading a
French magazine. Matthew didn’t speak French. ‘You were sock on when
we got in last night.’
‘I was knackered,’ I said quietly, so as not to wake Emelie. ‘We walked
around all day. What time is it?’
‘Ten-ish?’ Matthew replied. ‘I thought you were never going to wake up.
Give sleeping beauty a tap; the car’s booked for eleven thirty and I have to
eat something before my stomach lining starts digesting itself.’
‘Car?’ Getting up was an epic struggle. My limbs felt as though they’d
been chopped off and replaced with sausages. Nothing seemed to work.
‘Em was telling me about that bungee-ball thing at Niagara Falls.’ He
stood up and hauled me out of bed. ‘So I looked into it. We’re going.’
‘We are?’ I looked down at my crumpled dress and up at Matthew’s
shocked expression. ‘I slept in my clothes.’ I explained.
‘So I see.’ He held my shoulders and walked me over to the shower.
‘Good date?’
‘Feels like a car conversation,’ I pulled at the zip on my dress and
wrapped a towel around me to avoid burning Matthew’s retinas with my
boobs.
‘That bad?’ He turned on the water, testing the temperature with his
hand. ‘Are you OK?’
I picked up my special redhead shampoo, ready to wash some sense back
into my hair.
‘Let’s just say I’ve picked the right day to jump off the top of a tall
building.’
‘Road triiiip!’ Emelie yelled, throwing a plastic bag full of treats across the
back seat and then distributing huge Starbucks cups to Matthew and me in
the front seat. He’d taken driving dibs and I was playing navigator, which
left Em in charge of entertainment although, as far as I could tell, my role
was mostly holding the iPhone where Matthew could keep his eye on the
TomTom app while Em stretched out on the back seat and ate crisps. I’d
definitely drawn the short straw.
Much to Em’s delight, Matthew was doing his best to rev the engine of
the Mini Cooper when my phone switched out of its map mode and flashed
up with a private number.
‘It’s probably Ethan,’ I said, opening the car door and hopping out onto
the pavement. ‘Give me a minute.’
‘You’ve got one minute,’ Em shouted through the window. ‘Road triiiip!’
‘Hello?’ There really was no good reason not to see him, other than I’d
already made plans to jump from a great height with a bit of elastic tied
around my ankles. It wasn’t as if he was going to propose. Probably. He had
talked an awful lot about his friends’ babies. If ever there were a marrying
kind, it was him. And I supposed – until a week ago – me. Stupid bloody
timing.
‘So, I read your letter.’
Simon never bothered with hello. It was one of his less pleasant habits.
Like clipping his toenails in the living room, eating Marmite sandwiches
before bed and keeping his hands down his pants during Match of the Day.
Actually, during any TV show after eight p.m. And these were the things of
which I needed to keep reminding myself.
‘Why are you reading my letters?’ I was more than a little bit confused.
‘And why you didn’t your number come up? Have you changed your
number?’
‘You changed the locks without telling me,’ he replied. ‘It seemed fair.’
‘You left.’ I found a bus shelter and sat down. Pacing wasn’t going to
help my blood pressure. I nodded good morning at the two old ladies
waiting beside me. They nodded back. Lovely people. ‘Why are you
reading my post?’
‘I’m not reading your post.’ He sounded pissed off. ‘I’m reading the
letter you wrote, addressed to me. The one in which you repeatedly refer to
me as a cockweasel.’
It took me a minute but I got there eventually. The letter. The letter I put
on the coffee table. That Matthew must have picked up when he went to get
Simon’s mail. Cockweasels.
‘Oh.’ It was a good job I was already sitting down although, really, lying
down might have been better. ‘That letter.’
‘That letter,’ he replied. ‘Matthew said you were going to Canada?’
I looked around at the two old ladies in the bus stop, the cars driving over
tramlines on the wrong side of the road and the funky black and white
stripy building opposite.
‘I’m in Canada,’ I confirmed. ‘Toronto.’
‘For work?’ He was starting to sound slightly less pissed off and slightly
more curious.
‘Nope.’ Why give him any more details than he deserved?
‘Fine. Look, this is costing me a fortune so I’m just going to say it,’ he
said after a moment’s pause. ‘That letter really fucked me off.’
‘Imagine that,’ I replied. If he started giving me shit, I could just hang up
again. What was he going to do: come to Canada to shout at me in person?
‘Yeah. It wasn’t very nice to read but, after I read it, I thought … You
were right. There were parts of it that made me feel like shit. I can’t really
blame you. You’re right about everything.’
Well, this was a turn-up for the books.
‘What I did was shit and cowardly and you didn’t deserve it.’
I leaned back against the wall of the bus shelter. Really?
He took a deep breath and I could have sworn I heard a heavy sniff.
‘Rachel, I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t ask and I know you should say no, I
know you’re going to say no but, god, I really want to see you.’
I stared across the street as a tram rattled by. Trams. Canada was funny.
‘Rachel, are you there? You know I can’t tell if you’re answering me in
your head when we’re on the phone.’
‘I’m listening,’ I replied. ‘You want to see me.’
‘I know I’m an idiot cockweasel who doesn’t deserve it but I want to
come home,’ he said quickly, tacking a nervous laugh on the end for good
measure. ‘I’ve been sitting here looking at my phone, reading that letter all
day. It’s taken me until now to get the guts up to call you.’
What was I supposed to say? What was I supposed to do? I nibbled on
the corner of my thumbnail.
‘OK, I’ll just keep talking and you don’t hang up, deal?’
In five years, I’d only seen Simon cry twice. Once when his granddad
died and again when Chelsea won the double, but it sounded as if he was
having a go at hitting the triple himself.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking, changing jobs, meeting new people,
coming up to thirty, whatever,’ he went on. ‘I convinced myself I was
missing out on something. It was like, I looked at you and started seeing a
mortgage and pension plans and university fees and weekly trips to the
supermarket and just being old. I stopped seeing you. But I was wrong.’
I was a weekly trip to the supermarket? I stopped biting my nail. He
looked at me and saw pension plans?
‘I’ve had a bit of time to think about it and I was wrong. I can admit that
now. I was a cockweasel but now I want to come home. I love you.’
‘You do?’
‘I do.’
‘Even though I’m boring?’
‘Even though you’re boring,’ Simon tried to laugh. ‘But boring’s not that
bad when you think about it, is it? I really miss you, Rach.’
I breathed in and then breathed out. I was calm. I was totally, totally
calm. I was not about to hulk out on Queen Street West.
‘But what if I don’t want that any more?’ I asked. We were this close to
Rachel go smash-smash. ‘What if I’m different?’
‘You’re still Rachel,’ he replied. Someone was getting annoyed that I
hadn’t rolled over like a dead dog. ‘Look, when are you back? Shall I pick
you up at the airport? I’ll make dinner and we can sort everything out.’
I puffed out my cheeks and looked back at the car. Em was hanging out
of the window making ‘wrap it up’ hand gestures in between scoffing
handfuls of Ruffles. I gave her a wave and a two-minute sign. Or at least I
thought it was a two minutes sign. I might have actually flashed her a V.
‘Rach?’ Simon’s voice on the other end of the line.
‘No.’ My voice. My word.
‘No I shouldn’t pick you up?’
‘No to all of it.’ I stood up and started pacing. Threat of stroke be
damned. ‘No, you can’t pick me up. No, you can’t pretend none of this
happened. No, you can’t come home. It’s not your home any more.’
Saying it made it true. I’d done too much in the last ten days to just go
back. Of course it would be easier to write it off as an extended mad halfhour,
but since when was anything worth doing easy? I wasn’t in love with
Simon any more. I hadn’t been in love with Simon for a long time. I was in
love with not being on my own, with having someone there at the end of the
day and now I knew I didn’t need that. My heart wasn’t broken over him; it
was breaking for the things I had wanted from him. And I didn’t want them
any more.
‘Rachel?’
‘You are a coward. And a cockweasel.’ I winced and mouthed an apology
at the old ladies. One of them shook her head, the other smiled. ‘What if I’d
come home three months ago and said, all right Simon, I reckon I might
want to shag about for a bit but once I’m bored of sleeping on my mate’s
settee, I’ll come back. It’ll be on my terms and I’ll call you up and insult
you first, though. Does that sound OK? What exactly would you have
said?’
‘Rach—’
‘I’ll call you when I’m back and I’ve decided what I want to do with the
flat. I have to go now, I’m about to throw myself off a bridge or something.’
I pressed end and called Simon a very bad word in a very loud voice. The
old ladies sitting beside me in the bus shelter looked somewhat startled.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I covered my mouth with my hand and apologized again. ‘I
forgot where I was for a minute.’
‘Don’t worry,’ one in a fetching orange mac replied. ‘We’ve come across
more than one cockweasel in our time, we just never used that name for
them.’
‘Do you remember Donald Tyler?’ the other chuckled as the bus pulled
up. ‘Now he was a real cockweasel.’
I wiped away the beginnings of tears, pleased that they had never made it
all the way out, and smiled at the two ladies as they boarded the bus. Forty
years from now, that would be me and Emelie. Matthew would doubtlessly
be too busy cruising around Miami in his toy boy’s convertible. Scratching
my tickly nose, I walked back to the car and jumped back in.
‘What’s up?’ Matthew took one look at my face and pulled me into a
hug. ‘You all right?’
‘It was Simon,’ I mumbled to the wet patch my tears had started on his Tshirt.
‘He wants to come home.’
‘Oh my god.’ Em launched herself and the Ruffles through the gap in
between the seats to get in on the hug action. ‘What did you say?’
‘I told him no.’ First order of business, I took the Ruffles and dropped
them in the foot-well. I was going to be needing them soon enough. ‘I don’t
want him back. It’s not his home any more, he left.’
‘Amazing.’ Matthew untangled himself from the hug and held his hand
up for a high-five. ‘Good. You’re better off without him.’
‘You’re totally owning this single thing,’ Em agreed. ‘Men of the world
watch out.’
‘Hmm, yeah.’ I rested my head on her arm. ‘Rachel Summers,
international heartbreaker.’
That title might have more credibility if I could stop thinking about one
very specific heart I’d at least bruised recently. And it did not feel good.
‘You still need to fill us in on that story,’ Matthew reminded me once
he’d wrangled Emelie back into her seat and convinced her to fasten her
seatbelt. ‘Do you want to rain-check on this? We could do it tomorrow?’
The last couple of days had been tiring and confusing. The jetlag had put
Redhead Rachel right off her game and, basically, I needed to be back on it.
Which meant only one thing. I buckled my seatbelt, took my to-do list out
of my handbag and waved it at Matthew. ‘If I’m ever going to do this, it’s
going to be today.’
‘Yes ma’am,’ he nodded, turning the key in the ignition. ‘Niagara Falls it
is then.’
‘Whooo!’ Em bellowed out of the window again. ‘Road triiip!’
‘Yeah, Em,’ Matthew spoke into the rear-view mirror. ‘That’s going to
get really tired, really quickly.’
‘WHOO.’ She leaned forward and repeated herself, twice as loud, right
in his face. ‘ROAD TRIP.’
‘Shall we just get going?’ I suggested, tucking the manky-looking napkin
away. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I didn’t survive the bungee
jump. A broken neck had to be better than four hours in a car with these
two.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was expecting from Niagara Falls but Alton
Towers meets Blackpool Illuminations dropped in the middle of a National
Trust park really wasn’t it. The place was terrifyingly tacky, the complete
opposite of tasteful and modern Toronto. It took twenty minutes to crawl
through the neon signs, past the waxwork museum, the bowling alley,
funfair and four different Starbucks before we were waved off into a car
park. And by car park, I mean great big gravelly field. Em bounded out
from the back seat like an over-enthusiastic puppy as soon as the car had
rolled to a halt.
‘Come on, it’s this way,’ she yelled, bouncing up and down, face turned
up to the sun. Anyone would think we kept her in a box in the cellar. ‘I
can’t wait for you to see it.’
Matthew unfolded his giant frame from the tiny car with slightly more
dignity and stretched. Vanity was pain. Hiring the coolest car in the garage
wasn’t always a good idea if you were technically a giant.
‘Come on.’ He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and we followed
Em and the hordes of other visitors across the car park. ‘It’s going to be
fine.’
The en-route Ethan discussion had been relatively brief. Still shaken by
SimonGate, I couldn’t really sit there and make excuses as to why I’d spent
a wonderful day with a wonderful man and felt nothing. Em was clearly
wearing her hopeless romantic hat and blamed everything from nerves and
jetlag through to the jeans he was wearing and the far too early introduction
of her beloved poutine. If nothing else, I had discovered her secret shame of
adding melted cheese slices to chip-shop chips and gravy when no one was
looking. Matthew, on the other hand, was much more fatalistic. Ethan
wasn’t the one. It was a fun crush, long-distance things often were, he told
me, but when it came down to it the chemistry wasn’t there.
‘It’s not your fault,’ he’d told me as we cruised along the highway
listening to Bryan Adams. When in Rome. ‘You’re not going to fall
hopelessly in love tomorrow. If Ethan was some bloke you’d got off with in
a bar one night, it wouldn’t matter that you didn’t want to marry him within
fifteen minutes of meeting him. And maybe if he lived in London you
wouldn’t be putting so much pressure on it.’
‘I suppose so.’ I stared at the Facebook message I’d sent and tried not to
feel like a shit.
Hey Ethan,
Thanks so much for yesterday, I had a really great time. Toronto
is amazing. It was so, so great to catch up but I’m going to have
to pass on today. Unexpected work stuff. Let’s stay in touch and if
you ever come back through London, you have to give me a
shout.
Love,
Rachel
It really wasn’t worthy of him; he was such a great guy and I had a feeling
that this was what was commonly known as the short shrift, but what was I
supposed to do? It wasn’t as if we were engaged. We hung out once. He
kissed me once. We both knew I was leaving in forty-eight hours. And I
told myself that over and over until I’d managed to almost completely bury
the fact that I felt awful for leading him on. He hadn’t replied yet. I decided
to believe this was because he and Sadie were hiking somewhere without a
phone network and not just because he was busy making a redheaded
voodoo doll. It wasn’t as though he needed to curse me: I was en route to
giving myself a fatal heart attack anyway. Number nine, bungee jump.
‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ Matthew had promised. ‘Sooner or later
you’re going to find someone who knocks you right off your feet. Someone
who makes you feel alive. Someone who kisses you and makes your knees
weak. Relationships are complicated enough as it is. It’s not worth settling
for anything less.’
‘Fact,’ Em had agreed. ‘And nothing feels more amazing than meeting
someone who drives you crazy. You need a little passion in your life, Ray
Ray. Toe-curling, lip-bruising passion.’
At that point I wasn’t sure what was scarier. The thought of the bungee
jump, settling for less, or that the only person to have made me feel that
way in my entire life was Dan Fraser, seventy-two hours ago when he
knocked me right off my feet and onto my back.
Since my eyes had been scarred by the hideous tourist-trap extravaganza
on the way into the falls, and my mind was full of nonsense, I was
completely unprepared for the ridiculous level of natural beauty that lay in
front of me when we finally caught up with Emelie. With every step, the
rush of water got louder and louder, the view more and more spectacular. It
was absolutely breathtaking. Hopping up to sit on a low stone wall, I
ignored the growing lemming tendency that told me I was awfully high up,
and snapped a million photos; but not a single picture would ever be able to
replicate how I felt at that second. I looked over my shoulder at the neon
monstrosities behind us and then back at the falls. No wonder the shops
were fighting so hard for my attention, but it wasn’t even really a
competition. Unless you were wearing a bum bag and your name was Billy
Bob. The falls were immense. Epic. More impressive than the wonder room
at Selfridges. Almost as thrilling as the first time I saw my red hair. I had
forgotten that there were things in nature that could stun me into silence,
things that had been here for centuries, things other than Sky Plus. As soon
as I’d regained my composure, true child of the twenty-first century that I
was, I took a picture on my phone and texted it to my mum. She would
have loved it. In fact, she would love it. I made a mental note to come back
with her sometime soon.
‘It’s amazing,’ Matthew said after a few minutes of quiet. ‘Sure you don’t
want to find a barrel and go over the top? I’ll totally accept that as an
alternative to the bungee jump.’
Oh yeah. I wasn’t here to be stunned into silence by nature. I was here to
lock myself in a giant hamster ball and get volleyed a billion feet into the
air and back down again to my splattery death. There really hadn’t been any
point in sending Ethan that email. I could have just died quietly and let him
live on in blissful ignorance.
‘I’m going to pass.’ I peered over the edge into the rush of white water
where the falls crashed into the river. Vapour rose up to mist my face
lightly, numbing the sick feeling in my stomach. It was strange to feel
something so delicate coming from something so powerful. And yet still,
sitting here in front of Niagara Falls with my two best friends, in a foreign
country, with red hair, a tattoo and very nearly a criminal record, all I could
think about was Dan. There really was only one course of action. But there
weren’t any barrels handy.
‘Right.’ Back to the falls, I jumped off the wall and dusted down my arse.
‘Where’s this bungee ball?’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ I closed my eyes as I felt the straps of a very intimate
harness being tightened around my denim cut-offs. ‘Do I really have to do
this?’
Of all the items on my to-do list, this was the one that was bothering me
the most. Get a tattoo, fine. Break the law? There were a million ways to do
that without actually getting into trouble on a daily basis. I would rather
sign something that said my head would explode if I didn’t go running
every day for the next ten years than give the bungee-ball operator, who
incidentally didn’t look qualified to be operating a ping-pong ball, a
thumbs-up. My fear of heights had never been that debilitating because I’d
made a point of never having to deal with heights. Really, when in life did
you have to be up high? Simon changed all the light bulbs, I stayed on the
bottom deck of the bus and I never went upstairs in Urban Outfitters. Easy.
This was not something I’d ever worried about. I didn’t like heights. I
didn’t like confined spaces. I didn’t like teenagers in charge of machinery
that could kill me. Really, it was like my three biggest phobias had come
together. Basically, the only thing that could have made this a more
terrifying experience would have been if they’d strapped a tarantula to my
face.
I’d made Em, Matthew and their giant ice creams stay at the bottom of
the platform, supposedly to take photos, but really it was just so there would
be as few witnesses to my nervous breakdown as possible. Plus, their
morbid fascination with watching me go to my death had put a fever in their
eyes that I did not like seeing. Matthew in particular was enjoying this
altogether too much. The pinging catapult and crashing noises he’d been
making for the very, very long forty minutes we’d spent waiting in the
queue had not helped. By the time I was strapped in, every part of me was
dripping in sweat and I was fairly certain I was hyperventilating.
‘So, I’m like, gonna set the ride and then I’ll like totally signal to you and
then,’ the kid in charge of a dubious-looking control desk wiped his nose
with the back of his hand and looked to the skies to like totally remind him
of his lines. ‘Slingshot passengers are propelled over one hundred metres
into the skies above Niagara Falls at speeds of up to one hundred and sixty
kilometres per hour.’
He coughed. Spat something onto the floor and started up again.
Oh my god, I was actually going to die.
‘You should not ride the slingshot if you are pregnant, have a heart
condition or, uh, there’s some other stuff,’ he shrugged. ‘You’re like, not
knocked up though, right?’
‘Really not, just mentally unstable,’ I replied through a bright smile. I
just had to get it over with. Like ripping off a plaster. A deadly plaster that
would come loose of the mechanical arms and hurl me over the falls to a
watery grave. Any second now. ‘Can we please just do this?’
‘Yeah, uh, I think that’s OK. We’ve definitely had people who have been
mentally retarded before.’ He shuffled back to the controls. ‘Although I’m
not supposed to say retarded when I’m working the ride.’
I really wished he would stop calling it a ride. Ride suggested it was
going to be fun. You rode donkeys on the beach. You rode a rollercoaster.
This was me strapping myself into a giant metal death machine, operated by
the son of Mr Bean. There wasn’t even a prize for completing everything on
the to-do list. Just that sweet, sweet sense of completion, I told myself. That
was a prize. Unless I died and then all I would have to show for my
endeavours would be a visit to the police station, cramp, and a manky,
scribbled-on napkin. If I hadn’t started this nonsense, I wouldn’t be here
now. If we hadn’t made that list, I wouldn’t be trying to work out why I
couldn’t stop wondering where Dan was, what he was doing and with
whom. It wouldn’t bother me that he hadn’t tried to get in touch with me. It
wouldn’t bother me that – wait? Was that the signal? I tried to lean forward
against the harness to get a better look at Bean Jr, but no, he was too busy
hunched over the controls with half a taco hanging out of his mouth.
Grabbing onto the harness, I braced myself and prepared for my
imminent demise. I imagined if Elvis had been given the choice between
checking out on the shitter or in front of one of the natural wonders of the
world, he, well, he probably would have chosen the shitter. Besides, there
was a weight limit on this thing. But there were worse ways to go than with
an amazing view of Niagara Falls; it was sort of wonderful. I could see both
waterfalls from here: rushing white water, vibrant green trees, electric blue
sky. Such pretty colours. Such a shame that, as soon as I turned around, all I
could see was the screaming neon Bowlerama sign. I supposed it had its
own charm, just … not really. Canada was underneath my feet, or at least
underneath the capsule and, right there, just across the water, was America.
To be honest, I was more shocked that the tack-fest was on the Canadian
side than that it existed. The US side of the falls seemed incredibly
dignified by comparison and I was at least glad I’d got to see something so
beautiful before I died. Because I was utterly convinced I was about to die.
I heard the click before I felt anything. Half a heartbeat later I was being
thrown into the sky, the waterfall millions of miles below me. Or at least
one hundred metres away. It was bizarre; I couldn’t feel anything, physical
or otherwise. All I knew was that my stomach and Niagara Falls was
somewhere below me and, any second now, this glorious soaring sensation
was going to be replaced with a terrifying plummet to my untimely death.
But now. And to think, under any other circumstances, I loved being right.
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