“Pint of lager, please. Anything on draught. Harry?” She said.
“Same,” I grinned.
“You don’t have to impress me, Harry. You’ve spent a decade and a half doing that. Even my dad likes you. Just chill.”
We spent the evening talking about anything and everything that sprung to mind. What old acquaintances were up to, or funny things that had happened to us at school. I even carefully discussed my time at university, opting to leave out certain lifestyle choices. I’d been on hundreds of dates in the last few years with only one goal in mind, but this was different. I’d never had so much fun on a date with my clothes still on, and Kim was so different from all the other women I’d ever met. Regrettably, I’d barely got to know women before we started the physical side of a relationship, and I always thought we could be friends later. But with Kim, that was in reverse, and we had been friends for many years. Without even realising it, I had been laying the foundation for this to happen for over a decade, and it instantly felt right.
Six months went by in the blink of an eye. We laughed and joked, and we got to know each other on a much deeper level than just friendship. I could feel myself falling for her, and who would have thought, after all those years, we would finally end up together? For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I was ready to commit to a woman, and we’d started looking for little houses in Filey to move in together. We did debate moving away from there, but we loved our sleepy seaside town too much to leave it behind. I would have thought we would have run out of things to talk about, considering the length of time we knew each other, but it turned out that I’d barely scratched the surface.
Apart from work, we spent every waking second together. Every weekend, we would walk up and down Filey Beach, debating what breed of dog we would get when we had a house. We shared our hopes and dreams with each other, and all our wants and desires aligned perfectly. Kim was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and sharing the transition into fully-fledged adulthood with her was amazing. It was a totally distinct experience from my other relationships. I felt like we were on a long journey, exploring what our lives could be together.
I got a job at a little office above the butchers on the high street. They offered financial services to the residents of Filey. It wasn’t the busiest job or even the highest paying, but I was finally using my degree in finance. The job mostly consisted of giving pension advice to retirees, but I still loved every minute of it. Kim worked at a local café, but she had dreams of opening her own one day. And I’d be there, right beside her, to help her do it.
We even spoke about children, and our thoughts on that perfectly aligned, too. We decided on two children, a boy and a girl. The boy definitely had to be first, so the girl had an older brother to intimidate any bullies away. Everything was going even better than my wildest expectations, but I still hadn’t introduced her to my family just yet. I wanted to keep those two worlds apart. They knew of her from school, of course, but I hadn’t told them we’d started a committed relationship. It was the only sticking point between us, to be honest. Kim was getting a bit impatient and kept asking me when I was planning to introduce her to them, but she didn’t know them like I did. Dad had way too much on his plate, and my mother would just drive her away if she thought it was possible.
I’d just finished work on the evening of my birthday. I had planned to meet Kim at the very same Italian restaurant where we had enjoyed our first date. We were trying to start a new tradition; every birthday and anniversary, we would make an effort to go back to that same restaurant. The tradition, however, was broken on the first hurdle. I’d definitely say it was my most memorable birthday; I was about halfway down the promenade to meet Kim before my phone started ringing.
“Love, I’m so sorry. It’s your father. You need to come home,” my mother said.
The most vivid memory I had of that night was the phone call, and the rest was faded, clouded by confusion, rage, and plain disbelief. I remember turning around on my way to the restaurant and running in the opposite direction back to my childhood home to find my mother standing outside chain-smoking, with a blank expression on her face. I ran over to hug and comfort her, but she barely noticed I was even there because she was that numb.
Massive coronary event. That’s what the doctors described it as. I remember thinking the term didn’t do it justice. Dad died an hour after complaining of chest pains, clutching his chest on the cold garage floor. He was alone. The ambulance arrived in good time, but he lost his life on the journey to Bridlington Hospital. There were so many things left unsaid between us and so many lessons I still had to learn. The first emotion I felt was denial, but it quickly gave way to anger. It was undirected at anyone at first, but the more I thought about it, there was only one person I could conceivably blame. No matter what the doctors wanted to call it, we all knew how he died; we just never spoke about it. He couldn’t go a single night without drinking a bottle of whiskey, mainly because of how my mother had treated him their entire marriage.
For as long as I could remember, she had spent most evenings making increasingly unbelievable excuses to go out when, in reality, we all knew she was down at the pub, trying it on with any man who gave her even a modicum of attention. Dad was deeply ashamed, but he summon the courage to step up and do something about it. She treated him like dirt, and everyone in town knew it. To most people, least of all me, it wasn’t a surprise that he had died the way he did. My mother and I hadn’t enjoyed the best relationship anyway, but after my Dad’s sudden passing, I couldn’t even stand to be near her most of the time. I blamed her bitterly for his death, and if she hadn’t acted the way she did for so many years, he would have still been with us. When I was a little older, I looked back at my childhood, and I didn’t approve of a lot of the decisions he made, but I knew he was just desperately trying to keep the family together.
Kim was understanding at first. I’d not only ignored her calls and messages that evening but for days after, too. She heard about my dad’s passing through a customer at the café. I couldn’t imagine how that would have made her feel, but I just couldn’t stand to tell her myself. She regularly sent me messages expressing how sorry she was and offering her shoulder to cry on, but I ignored them. I didn’t have the capacity to reply to her. I was so wrapped up in my dad’s death I couldn’t think about anything else. As the weeks passed, her messages became less and less frequent. I felt so guilty about not replying to them. We had this one-of-a-kind blossoming romance, and she didn’t deserve to be dragged into my pit of depression.
Filey was a small town, and it didn’t take long for me to start seeing Kim around with someone else. I didn’t blame her. Even given the circumstances, I knew that I’d treated her unfairly. She looked happy, and I didn’t want to ruin it for her. Kim and I could have made it, but once again, we were foiled by horrific timing. Subconsciously, I think I just forced anyone out of my life who could conceivably ask me how I was doing because, truthfully, I didn’t know how to answer the question.
The whole thing made me look at my own life closely. I thought I wanted to settle down and get married, even have a few children, but when I looked at my parents’ marriage, it made me change my mind. I reverted to my old ways, getting blind drunk and waking up next to some woman I barely knew. My best friend, Steve, was ecstatic; he had his old drinking buddy back, but he was totally ignorant of the void of depression I had been imprisoned in. We repeated the same behaviour, week in and week out, but the emotion-numbing effect started to lessen. We found ourselves drinking even more and started travelling beyond our beloved Filey to get our fix. I would get the train down to Manchester, drink the entire way there, end up in some club, and then wake up in a cheap hotel room. Or, if I was lucky, in a woman’s bed whose name I didn’t know.
I’d love to say it made me feel better, but made me feel worse more often than not. I kept telling myself if I just ignored my grief and numbed it with casual sex and alcohol, it would go away, but it didn’t. With each month I put my body and mind through this torture, I became immune to it. I was going through the motions, pretending to have the time of my life when, in reality, it was the darkest time I’d ever endured. It got to the point where we would get off the train in Manchester, and I’d barely feel tipsy. All I cared about was getting drunk enough to not have to face my own demons.
Once again, I found myself on the dancefloor in a nightclub in Manchester. Staring across the sweating throng of people at Steve at the other end of the room, making a futile attempt to take some woman home who was way out of his league. Witnessing Steve embarrassing himself to this extent kindled a moment of extreme lucidity within me. It was like gazing into a mirror. I was using alcohol and sex as a crutch, limping through life the same way Steve and my dad did. If I continued down this path, I would likely end up the same way he did. It largely happened without me even realising until it was too late.
It wasn’t a surprise that I’d behaved the way I did; both my parents had similar vices and never even attempted to hide them. My sister, Poppy, and I had spent most of our childhoods trying to be nothing like them, so it was so frustrating for me to stand on the exact same path of destruction as that of our parents. I couldn’t even blame them for it, particularly. Poppy had always been quirky, but she stayed on the straight and narrow; she was a few years younger than me but decades wiser. I knew what she would say if she found out how I’d been behaving the past few months, and that’s why I’d intentionally stayed out of touch. I hadn’t even asked her how she felt about Dad passing because I was so selfishly wrapped up in my own emotions.
I threw down the crutch. I had to get my life back on track, and Dad wouldn’t have wanted me to end up like him. I needed to show everyone, including myself, that I could make it through this and become stronger for it. The same feeling I had in my mid-twenties came back: the resolve to aspire to be something better than I was. In a single moment, I recalled every single drop of alcohol I’d numbed myself with. Every woman I’d slept with and not bothered to learn their name. I felt despicable. I’d been behaving like a twisted concoction of the worst parts of both my parents. I was already half drunk, and I just wanted to flush it all out of me and start afresh.
I meandered through the clambering hordes of people, up to the bar, and as the clubbers parted to let me pass, I spotted a woman standing at the bar on her own. She was standing on her tiptoes, leaning over the bar, trying to capture the barman’s attention. She didn’t look at all like the other clubbers; she had long, glossy chestnut hair, its curls delicately resting on her shoulders. Not the usual sweat-ridden recreational drug user that came ten a penny in a place like this. She was wearing an elegant but sexy black mini dress, barely covering her body as she continued to stretch over the bar and wave her arms furiously.
When I reached the bar, she turned to look at me and smiled alluringly. Her sage green eyes lit up as we held intense eye contact for a second. She was a little bit older than me and had this air of sophistication about her in the way she held herself and even the way she’d done her makeup. If I believed in any of that nonsense, I would have put it down to fate that we met just after my epiphany. Whilst our eyes were still locked, the barman finally came over to serve her, but I met his gaze first.
“Bottle of water, please,” I asked. He nodded in response.
“Unbelievable,” she uttered.
“What’s that?”
“Do you realise how long I have been waiting for you to just appear out of nowhere and ask for a bottle of water?”
“Sorry. I’m thirsty.”
“Buy me a drink, then?” She smiled.
I looked her up and down, and I loved what I saw. The temptation to continue my lecherous and laddish behaviour was strong, but I immediately snapped out of it and made myself promise it wouldn’t be like that with her. Maybe if I treated her with some respect and actually got to know her, it could amount to something more than a quick one-night stand.
“Sure. I’m Harry,” I smiled.
“Nice to meet you, Harry. I’m Amelia,” she said.
IV
THE HANGED MAN
AMELIA
And there it was. My instincts at the funeral were bang on. I knew there was more to Kim’s story than just being an old friend. An surprising pang of jealousy washed over me, as Harry had never even mentioned her name to me. I curiously found myself examining her closely and comparing myself to Kim. She was pretty, a lot prettier than I was. Kim was closer to Harry’s age, too, about five years younger than me, at least. Above all else, Harry had always told me he went for brunettes.
I did suffer from a great deal of paranoia in our marriage, primarily because I thought that Harry was such a good catch. My worst nightmare was someone snatching him from me, and I did have my moments when I couldn’t help it and I let those feelings escape. Harry was always very defensive, denying any wrongdoing, but the fact that he had omitted to tell me about Kim felt a little shady. I fully admit I would make a mountain out of a molehill on occasion, and I could understand why he chose not to tell me about her, but married couples were supposed to be completely open and honest with each other, right?
“When?” I asked bitterly.
“A while ago,” she said.
“Was it serious?”
