Pretending, page 32
Our drama cannot stop the tidal wave of wedding convention, however, and we walk stiffly to the handmade sign explaining where we’re sitting. All the tables are named after trips Chrissy and Mark have taken together. We’ve been allocated “Aussie”—decorated with photos of the couple’s trip there last year. As we approach in tense silence, I see Chrissy’s put us with her lawyer lot and I overestimated how drunk they all were at the hen because—
“April! How are you?” Janet asks, standing up to say hello like we’re the best of friends.
April April April April. I watch as the word hits Joshua like a bullet. I want to reach out and shield him, but he takes the hit, sitting down like nothing has happened, though he’s gone paler than fresh snow, and pouring himself a giant glass of wine.
“This is my husband, Jonathan.”
“Hi, this is my, er, boyfriend, Joshua.”
We all shake hands over the table decorated with the standard two bottles of white and two bottles of red. Joshua and I lie trapped in the strict social conditioning of appropriate wedding behavior. I reach for a bottle of wine and he doesn’t help pass it to me, just pours his own glass down his gullet with shaking hands. I pour myself a generous glug.
“Hi, nice to meet you. How do you know the couple? Where have you come from?”
I tell everyone my name is April as we all reintroduce ourselves, and I watch as each time makes Josh flinch. I wonder how long he’ll make it through the meal. It’s insane he’s even sitting down and eaten his bread roll. Every time I introduce Joshua as my boyfriend, my heart stings, knowing this will be the last time I get to say that—which seems all the more painful considering this is really the first time I’ve ever been able to introduce him as my boyfriend. Joshua has already drained his glass and, not looking at me, he picks up the bottle of red and pours himself more.
I try to catch his eye again but he’s determined to devour a second bread roll and we get lost in pointless small talk until the starters arrive, comparing who lives where in London.
“Oh, Greenwich? Lovely.”
“Herne Hill. Oh that’s just lovely.”
“Hampstead? How lovely.”
A line of teenage waiters appear, presenting each of us with a tiny plate of food that is more artfully splattered “jus” than food. The table quietens as the hungry lawyers and their partners tuck into their starters, giving us the chance to implode.
“I still really don’t get the Gretel thing,” Joshua whispers over his plate of mozzarella and tomato salad. “Look, I have to admit, I’m freaking out a bit.”
“The thing is,” I tell him, spearing a baby tomato onto my fork and speaking pretty rationally considering everything. “As I said, my name has never been Gretel.”
“I don’t understand. I thought maybe April might just be a nickname or something...?”
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “It’s not that. I straight up lied about my name.”
“But...”
“I didn’t want you to know my real name, so I said I was called Gretel.”
There isn’t one single part of Joshua’s face that isn’t utterly horrified. I can’t stand that I’ve made someone hurt this much. The guilt arrives like a wrecking ball. I caused this. I made this person feel this awful. Me. April.
“Why?” he asks, shaking his head.
“I told you it was Gretel and then, once I’d done it, I didn’t know how to undo it. And I got to know you and we kept seeing each other, and then it all got out of hand.”
“But why the hell would you lie about something like that to begin with? I mean...” He shakes his head faster, unable to complete the sentence. “You know what. No. I don’t care.” His chair is scraped back. His body is leaving it. “Excuse me,” Joshua says to the table. “I need a moment.” He rushes off so quickly that the decorative basil leaf wafts off his plate and onto the floor.
He crashes into a waiter collecting empty plates. I watch the back of his head weave through the tables and feel white-hot pain pulsate throughout my body at the sight of him leaving. Can I follow? Do I follow? How do I make this better? Will he come back? But the entire table is watching so, despite my inner unraveling, I smile at everyone around me like he’s just popped out.
Janet gives me a thumbs-up. “He seems nice,” she says, the ball of cherry tomato in her cheek like a hamster. “How long have you been going out?”
“Only officially for a few weeks,” I reply, thinking it’s funny how capable you can be of behaving normally when your life is so not in a normal place.
Jonathan leans over, teeth already stained with red wine. He waggles his finger at me drunkenly. “Ooo, very new. Don’t freak him out by trying to catch the bouquet later.” He laughs and winks, like he’s just given me the best piece of life advice in the universe.
Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t be too much. Don’t be too little. Don’t scare him off. Don’t make him feel like you don’t care. Don’t be too slutty. Don’t be too prudish. Don’t be too insecure. Don’t be too self-contained. Don’t be too fat. Don’t be too thin. Don’t be you. Never be you. You don’t want to die alone so don’t be fucking you.
I look around at the sea of circular tables, dotted with couples. All holding membership cards to the club I long to inhabit. The Belonging Club. The antidote to loneliness. The safety net of someone essentially nodding at me and saying, “Yeah, you’ll do.” That’s all I’ve ever wanted. To be sitting alongside someone at a table covered with white linen, feeling slightly bored by the story they’re telling the person on their right because I’ve heard it a thousand times before. All my life, I’ve wanted to be loved. I wanted to have someone pick me as their specialist. I wanted to feel safe in my being-lovedness. For someone to not be put off by the parts of me that were hard but that I couldn’t help. But I never got the chance.
And so I wanted to be powerful, instead; to finally have the ball in my court. I wanted others to hurt the way I’ve been hurt. I wanted to have just one moment of feeling like I’ve won.
But it turns out I don’t have it in me. I could’ve destroyed Joshua today. I could’ve laughed at him and his hope and his misguided faith. I could’ve reveled in the crackle of power that comes with holding someone’s heart in your palm. I could’ve hurt him and humiliated him like so many have hurt and humiliated me. But, even with everything I’ve been through, I don’t have it in me.
I’ve hurt too much to hurt others.
I like that I’m not Gretel.
I like that I’m me.
And I like that, despite everything, no matter how hard I’ve tried these last few months, I’ve found it impossible to run away from myself.
In fact, I love that.
“Excuse me,” I say to the table full of couples who think I belong now. I get up from my tastefully decorated chair. “I need the bathroom.”
I dash in the direction Josh went, grinning like nothing is wrong when everything is. I don’t know what I’m going to say when I find him, but I need to find him. I dart around waiting staff who are refilling glasses and scooping up empty plates ready for the pork or chicken or goat cheese tartlet main course. Chrissy’s laughing at the top table, her meal untouched, sharing a joke with her mum. I know I should stay and eat and pretend life is great for her, but the urge to find Joshua is too much. I feel ill at what I’ve done, the look on his face, at what I need to explain.
He’s not in the hallway. He’s not in the conservatory. He’s not in the entrance hall where we left our wet umbrellas. My heart feels like it’s rehearsing for a full-on attack and I’m shivering even though it’s not that cold as I pace the stately home, dodging the glances of stressed staff. I wait outside the toilets for a while, listening to more well-mannered laughter from the dining room, but he doesn’t come out.
He’s left, I realize. He has gone. And I can’t even blame him.
The loss is more intolerable than I imagined. I head back into the empty conservatory and wilt into a chair, feeling tears itch my eyes, as the echoes of wedding thud down the hallway. I sniff and wipe my nose with the back of my hand. I sniff again. The rain beats against the glass in pitter-patters. I remember Josh coming to my house in the rain. I remember him saying sorry. I remember feeling in my guts that he meant it. I don’t remember ever feeling like that when a man has apologized to me before. I close my eyes. They’re wet when I open them. I look up at the glass ceiling, the dollops of gray rain hitting it. I wonder whether or not I should try to call him; if there’s any point. Another shriek of laughter ripples from the wedding and I turn my face out toward the rain-smudged view. The stately grounds are hiding in the deep gray mist of the storm. I can just about make out a patio, a gravel walkway lined with topiary hedges and sodden benches. And, on one of them, I see the huddled figure of Joshua.
Without forethought, I’m outside, soaked instantly. It’s so much quieter out here, just the steady pounding of raindrops in puddles. I run over the gravel, arms crossed, and come to a stop at the bench he’s sitting on, head in his hands. My heartbeat cranks up the amp. He looks broken, his body physically bent over on himself, hands shaking. I feel a twist of pain in my ribs as I examine what I’ve caused. The privilege of guilt...
“Joshua?” I say. His wet and sad body doesn’t answer me. “I thought you’d gone...”
He straightens, and pulls the sopping lapels of his jacket across his chest. He doesn’t reply.
“What are you doing out here?” I ask. Every part of me wants to touch him but I know I’ll be swatted off. I’ve lost the right to brush his skin. It’s been left on the table, alongside the packets of sugared almonds. “You’re soaking.”
More silence. I think he may stand and stalk off. He didn’t ask to be followed. I don’t dare sit. I don’t dare break the silence again. And, finally, through gritted teeth, he talks. “I’ve been sitting here,” Joshua tells me, his voice hardly a murmur, “in the fucking rain, trying to work out why I keep getting myself into these situations.”
“What situations?” I ask delicately.
He sinks his head back into his shaking palms and I see his eyes are watering before they’re hidden again. “Throwing myself headfirst into relationships with women who lie.”
I freeze. I was not expecting that reply.
“What’s wrong with me?” Josh asks himself, rain spilling into his collar. “Why am I always here? Who the hell even are you? My friends warned me, they told me I was going too fast again, they said I needed to take it slower this time. But, did I listen? No, I never listen.” He massages his face with his balled hands. I reach out a hand to comfort him but I pause it in midair, tuck it back into the pocket of my dress. I don’t know which words to use. There’s no script to follow, no advice from Google or self-help books. “There must be something seriously wrong with me,” he says, again, more to himself than to me. “What the actual hell is the matter with me? Why do I always get it so wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” I say to the top of his head, my voice cracking. “It was one lie, and it got out of hand.”
“I just don’t understand why you’d lie about your name. I mean, what the hell?” He keeps shaking his head. “Why would you do that? And you met all my friends and lied to them too? Why would anyone do that?”
I blink up to the sky, and let the rain merge with my tears. “Because I’m bloody terrified,” I admit. “I have had some really bad experiences and I lied about my name to protect myself and it was a total and complete fuck-up.”
The honesty causes him to look up. We lock eyes, and my heart surges with pain again. I shake my head sadly. “I’m really fucked-up, Joshua.” My voice chokes out the words in barks. “I don’t want to go to Africa either. I only said that because it was a first date and I was trying to impress you.”
He barks out a harsh laugh. “Anything else?”
“I don’t trust men not to hurt me, so, when I met you, I hid loads of stuff to try and protect myself.”
His mouth falls open. “I’ve never done anything to hurt you!”
“No. Not yet. But you will. Anyway, you’re about to break up with me, aren’t you? That’s going to hurt.” It will, more than I care to admit. Somehow I’ve fallen, once again, into the default setting of me getting my heart broken. I was stupid to think this would ever end on my terms. Nothing to do with hearts are ever defined by my terms. But at least I still have one, at least it’s still functioning, still feels. It hasn’t gone cold like it could have. I’m proud of that, even though I’m ashamed of the lies I’ve been telling him and myself. Even though losing him is going to hurt so much.
“Break up with who? Do you have any idea how much I’m freaking out right now?” He throws his hands up in the air. “I’m at a wedding, with someone who I thought was my girlfriend, and now I realize I don’t even know her real name!”
“I told you, it’s April,” I say as another tear falls.
I look out at the gray bleakness of the wedding venue—something that I’m not sure I’ll ever have in my life. Then I look down at the man refusing to look at me, and I realize I’m in one of those rare moments in life where you can say whatever the hell you like, and it doesn’t matter, because your life has already burned down. I literally have nothing to lose.
“Joshua,” I start. I perch next to him on the bench, the water seeping up my skirt and through it. He stills, to let me know he’s listening. “Look, I said I was called Gretel on our first date to protect myself. And, yes, I was pretending to be the very best person in the world, and then you liked me and I got worried that you only liked me because I’d been hiding parts of myself. Yes, lying about my name is weird and that enough is a good reason for you to end this. You must think I’m crazy. I think I’m crazy...” I almost laugh, and then shake my head, my wet hair sticking to my face. “But, while I’ve been figuring out what the hell to tell you and how to come back from this, I’ve realized that, actually, my name’s the only real lie I’ve told you. The rest of it has just been me hiding things from you. And, the thing is, you were always going to end it anyway when you found out how much I have going on. Because, you think I’m easy-going and carefree and laissez-faire, but I’m not like that. I can be those things sometimes, but a lot of the time I’m not. I’m neurotic and skittish and exhausting and hard work and so many other unsexy things... I’ve not been lying but I have been hiding the bits you won’t like.”
Joshua keeps shaking his head. He’s not running away but he’s definitely shaking his head a lot.
“Gretel... I mean April. Shit! Literally none of what you’ve said makes any sense.”
“What do you mean?”
He lets out an angry sigh and throws his hands up. “The bits I won’t like? Like? How do you know what I like and don’t like?”
“Because you’re a man! And you all want women to follow the rules. Like how you didn’t like your ex-girlfriend because she wanted to get married...”
“What?” He’s looking at me in stunned disbelief. “I didn’t want to marry my ex because she fucking cheated on me! And when I took her back, she kept pestering me to marry her as a way of proving I trusted her again. But then I found out she’d started sleeping with him again.”
“What?”
“Yeah! What? You thought I dumped her because she wanted to get married?” My silence answers that. “Well, it’s nice to know what you think of me.”
“Come on!” I hold my arms out. “What was I supposed to think when you said that? Men always...”
“Always what? You don’t know. You can’t assume.”
“Are you really going to say ‘not all men’ at me?”
“Yes! Because it’s fucking true.”
I’m crying furiously now. Wipe wipe wipe my face. Out it all comes. He won’t come near me now he’s seen all this. “You wouldn’t think they were so great and harmless if you had to do my shifts.”
“I thought you’d stopped that role? Why?”
“Stop it!”
“Stop what? Upsetting you? I’m upset too! I only just found out your actual name.” Joshua twists toward me, looks at my tears. He doesn’t seem repulsed by them, which is new. He still looks angry though. He lowers his voice again and I can hardly hear him over the rain. I shiver as I listen, digesting the story he just told me. About his ex. Realigning it with the assumptions I’ve made, wondering how many more I might’ve made about who hurt who... “Look,” he says. “As this is the surrealist thing that’s ever happened to me and I have no idea what’s going on, I may as well be honest too. I know I’ve been pushing things forward, but, I’ve... There have been moments with you when I have felt really...not good.”
Huh? I jolt in shock. But what about Gretel? Surely he’s head over heels for her?
He holds up his hands. “I mean, I obviously like you. I’ve not been leading you on. I don’t do that. I like you, that’s why I’ve carried on seeing you, but Gre—I mean, April. Fucking hell. You are hard to get to know. There are times when it’s great! Like when you sang that song in the Irish accent, or the night of the curry and how you spoke and told me about your job and everything. There are moments where I feel like ‘Wow, this girl is cool and interesting and clearly really thinks about things,’ but then there’s been a lot of...aloofness? Falseness? Like I never know where I stand. Like you’re cagey about meeting me. Holding me at a distance like it’s a test. It’s weird that you brought up Africa, cos that’s not one of the things I like about you. In fact, I’ve never really thought about that. I like the bits that feel genuine. And now your name isn’t even Gretel and I don’t know what the hell to think anymore. That I need to go to therapy or something, as I seem to only be attracted to girls who lie.”
